Book 1 of Rebirth of the Technomage Saga: Earth's Awakening

Location:Ferrow’s Rest — old Branch Seven catchment, four days east of Millford

Date/Time:TC1856.09.08 – TC1856.09.11

The flag came in from the eight, the fourth name visited, and the practitioner who wrote it up was so careful in his phrasing that Raven understood before she finished the page that the man had been frightened of being wrong.

Subject declined the second run. Permitted the first only after considerable persuasion and made his objection to the procedure clear. First run strong at seven minutes — the strongest reading I have taken or seen recorded. I did not press for a second because I judged that pressing would end the conversation permanently and I did not want to be the person who ended it. Subject’s name is Emrys Dunmore. He is the sexton at Ferrow’s Rest. I recommend somebody senior, and I recommend they not send me.

Raven read it twice. Then she looked up Ferrow’s Rest, and found it on the old Branch Seven catchment maps, and stopped reading for a while.

"You know the place," Thorne said.

"I know the decision."

***

It took two days to fly and a morning to walk in from where she set the blade down, because arriving overhead in a settlement like this one would have been a statement, and she had decided somewhere over the second range against making any statements.

Ferrow’s Rest had been eleven hundred people when the water went off. Raven counted forty-three between the outermost house and the square.

The corruption had gone through here the way it went everywhere in the ley-consumption zone: not fast, not dramatic, no bodies in the street. The fields had come up thin two seasons running and then come up wrong, and the water had stayed clear and stopped being good, and people had gotten tired. That was the first sign and always had been. Chronic fatigue that no rest fixed. Then the spiritual sensitivity going flat in anyone who’d had any. Then the meridian pain, which had no treatment that worked in a village four days from a branch, only treatments that made the last part quieter.

The houses were mostly standing. That was the thing about this kind of dying. It left the buildings.

She passed a bakery with its shutters open and its ovens cold, and a price board still chalked up from whenever the last bread had been. A pen with the gate wired back and nothing in it. A rope swing in a yard, and the rope was new — somebody had replaced it recently, this year, which meant that at some point in all of this a person had stood in that yard and decided a swing was still worth having.

Two of the forty-three watched her come up the street. Neither called out. One, an old man on a step, lifted his chin very slightly as she passed, the greeting of somebody who has stopped spending energy he doesn’t have to spend.

She found the graveyard before she found him, because the graveyard was the first thing anyone would find. It sat on the slope east of the village where the ground was worst — shale and clay and a spring line running through it that made the whole slope a bad place to dig and a worse place to keep anything buried.

It was immaculate.

Raven stood at the gate for a long moment and did not go in.

She had seen a great many graveyards, across a number of lives she did not discuss, and she knew what a slope like that did to graves. It heaved them in the frost. It slumped them in the wet. Six months in, a bad slope gave you a field of shallow depressions where the fill had settled, and every one of them said the same thing to anyone walking past, which was we could not even manage this for you.

There were perhaps four hundred graves cut into it.

Not one of them had settled. Not by a finger’s width. The turf lay flat and true across every single one, and the rows ran straight down a hillside that had no business permitting straight rows, and the whole thing sat on the bad ground as level as a table.

She was still at the wall when he came up the path with a spade over his shoulder.

***

Emrys Dunmore was somewhere in his fifties, built like a man who had done one job for thirty years, with forearms out of proportion to the rest of him and a face that had stopped expecting things. He looked at her for about four seconds.

"You’ll be the one they were going to send," he said.

"Yes."

"Thought they’d send someone bigger."

"I get that a lot."

He set the spade against the wall, not hurriedly. "You’ve been looking at my ground."

"I have."

"And?"

There were several answers. Raven gave the true one.

"It’s the best work I’ve ever seen done on a slope that bad," she said. "And I don’t think you did all of it."

Something moved through his face and was gone.

"Come and have tea, then," he said. "I’m not standing in a gateway for this."

***

His house was two rooms and very clean. He made tea the way people make tea when they have made it ten thousand times, and he put the cup in front of her, and he sat down across the table and folded his hands.

"Say it plain," he said. "Your man with the paste didn’t. He went round it three times, and I still don’t know what he thought I was."

So Raven said it plain. What a Pillar Soul was, in the terms he could use: a person the world had put a hand on, whose presence held a piece of it steady. That there were two confirmed and they needed more. That the thing under the ground was building something, and that reaching it needed people like him, and that without enough of them there was a version of the next few years she was not going to describe at his own table.

She left the part about what it would cost him unsoftened. She had settled that on the road too.

He listened all the way through without moving. When she was done, he sat turning his cup a quarter turn at a time.

"The graves," he said.

"Yes."

"I always thought I was good at it." There was no self-pity in it, which made it worse. "Thirty-one years. My father dug that slope before me and his graves slumped like everyone else’s, and I always reckoned I’d worked out the trick of it. Drainage. Packing. The way you cut the sod so it knits back." He looked at his own hands on the table. "And you’re telling me it was the earth doing it. Not me."

"I’m telling you the ground listens to you," Raven said. "I don’t know whether that’s the same thing. Nobody does. Maren Harren grew things for fifty years and thought she had a good hand for it, and she still has a good hand for it, and both of those are true at once."

"That’s a kind answer."

"It’s the honest one. If I had a kinder one I’d have used it."

Emrys nodded slowly. He drank some of his tea, and set it down, and looked at the table rather than at her.

"What would it be, then," he said. "If a man agreed. What’s the shape of it, day to day?"

Raven had promised herself the plain version on the walk in, so she gave him that.

"As far as I understand it — and I’ll come back to how far that is — you’d come to Seven Peaks for a season. Not for good. You’d sit in a stone room four hundred meters underground with a nine-year-old boy and a woman of seventy-one, and you’d try to feel something that has no shape, and most days you’d fail and not know why. Then, when you could do it on purpose instead of by accident, you’d come home." She kept going. "It costs. Maren Harren’s knee is worse than it was. The boy came back from the last one bleeding from the nose. I’d not promise you it’s safe, because I have no idea whether it is, and the person who’d have to tell you what the risks were is the same person who needs you to accept them."

"A season."

"Perhaps two. Nobody has done this before, so anyone who gives you a number is guessing, including me."

He was quiet.

"That’s the part," he said at last. "That’s the actual part, if you want to know it. Not the risk. There’s eleven people up on that slope with no stone cut yet, because I do the cutting in the winter when the ground’s too hard to open. A season away is the season they don’t get them." He turned the cup. "You’ll think that’s a small thing set against what you’re describing."

"No," Raven said.

"No?"

"I’ve watched a lot of people decide what they’d walk away from. Anyone who goes easily is almost never the one you want." She met his eyes. "It’s not a small thing. It’s just smaller than the other thing. Those aren’t the same, and I’d not insult you by pretending the second cancels the first."

"You said you’d come back to it," Emrys said. "How far you understand it."

Raven turned her own cup once, which she noticed herself doing and stopped.

"Not far," she said. "The whole of what anyone knows about this fits in a short conversation, and most of it is four months old. Two people have ever done it; they did it in the same room because that’s where they happened to be standing, and it worked. That’s the entire basis for me sitting at your table telling you where you’d have to sit." She set the cup down. "It might be that they have to be together. It might be that they simply were. I’ve been building on the first one because it’s what we’ve seen, and I’d be a fool to tell you the difference doesn’t matter to you specifically."

"Then find out."

"I intend to. It won’t be quick, and I won’t dangle it in front of you as a reason to say yes to something I can’t yet describe."

He got to it in his own time, which was another forty minutes, and Raven let him, because she had come four days and needed nothing more than for him to say the whole of it.

"The branch went to Millford," he said.

"It did."

"Four hundred and six," Emrys said. "That’s what’s on the slope. All of it since the water went off, and I dug every one, and I know all the names because I cut all the names. Thirty-one were children. I’d want you to have the number rather than the word."

"Thank you."

"So." He turned the cup. "Millford."

"In the spring. They came, and they told us the junction was going, and the branch was moving with it, and if we could travel we should travel, and there’d be help at Millford for them as got there." He looked up. "That was true, by the way. There was help at Millford. I’ve had letters. They did what they said."

"But."

"But Millford’s four days by cart, and about a third of this village couldn’t sit up in a cart by then, and you don’t move a person with meridian pain four days over bad road. You just don’t. So the ones who could go went, and the ones who couldn’t stayed, and I stayed, because someone had to and I was the one with the spade." His voice stayed level. "Eleven hundred people, before. You’ll have counted on your way in."

"Forty-three."

He nodded. "So here’s my question, and it’s not a trick, and I’d like a straight answer because you’ve given me straight ones so far. Who decided the branch went to Millford?"

"Seven Peaks did. The recommendation came up from the branch coordinator, and the decision was ratified by my council, and it carries my name."

"Why Millford?"

"Because Millford covered three thousand people and Ferrow’s Rest covered eleven hundred, and we did not have the healers or the transport to hold both, and we chose the larger number." Raven kept her eyes on his. "That’s the whole reasoning. There isn’t a better version of it that I’ve been saving."

"No," Emrys said. "I didn’t think there would be."

He got up and refilled the pot, and stood with his back to her at the stove for a moment, and then came and sat back down.

"I want to be careful here," he said, "because I’ve had months to think about this and I’ve got it straight in my head and I’d hate to say it badly." He set the pot down. "I don’t think you did wrong. I’ve turned it over up there about four hundred times, and I keep coming out the same place. Three thousand’s more than eleven hundred. If I’d been the one holding the sheet, I’d have done what you did, and I’d have hated it, and I’d have done it."

"Then—"

"Let me finish, or I’ll lose it." He held up one hand. "You made a calculation. I was on the wrong side of it. That’s not a crime, that’s arithmetic, and I’ve made peace with arithmetic because there’s nothing else on offer." His hand came down. "And now you’ve come four days to my table, and you need me, and the arithmetic’s different — and you’d like me to believe the difference is principle."

Raven let it stand.

"It isn’t," Emrys said. "It’s need. You’d not have come back then. Nobody did. You came now because a man put paste on my wrist and it went strong at seven minutes, and if it hadn’t I’d have gone on digging up there until there was nobody left to dig for and you’d never have known this place was called Ferrow’s Rest."

"That’s true."

He blinked at her.

"All of it’s true," Raven said. "I’d correct you if any part of it were wrong, and there isn’t a part of it that’s wrong. I didn’t come when it was happening. I couldn’t have, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I could, because I’d have made the same choice about the branch either way. And you’re right that I’m here because I need something. Those things sit next to each other. I’m not going to pretend they don’t."

"Then you understand why I’m saying no."

"I understand it. Yes."

***

He walked her back down as far as the gate, which she had not expected.

"You’ll not work on me," he said. It was almost a question.

"No."

"Why not? You could. You’ve got the mouth for it, I can tell." There was no malice in it. "There’s people up that slope by the hundred, and you could stand at the gate and talk about the ones who’d be up there next if I say no, and you’d not even be lying."

"No, I wouldn’t be lying." Raven looked up at the rows running impossibly straight down the bad ground. "And you’d come. That’s the part people always leave out. If I did that properly, you’d come, and you’d work, and it would be because I put every grave on that slope in your mouth and used them. I’ve seen what people are like afterward, when they were moved that way." She turned back to him. "You’d be no good to me anyway. Not for this. Whatever this is, it isn’t the kind of thing a person can do while they’re being held by the collar. It’s — " She stopped, and found she meant it. "It’s more like listening than lifting. You can’t make someone listen."

Emrys Dunmore studied her a long moment.

"You’ll come back," he said.

"Someone will. Not to press you — the screen’s got a sixty-day protocol on unresolved names, and yours isn’t unresolved, so honestly you’ll probably just get a letter." Raven shouldered her pack. "If you change your mind, the Millford branch will send word same day. If you don’t, that’s the end of it. Nobody’s going to camp on your slope."

"And what do you do meanwhile?"

"Keep looking. There are eight more names from this week alone, and I’ve got people out on all of them." She held out her hand, which was a thing she did not often do. "Thank you for the tea, and for saying it straight. You could have shouted at me. Shouting would have been easier to walk away from."

He took the hand. His grip was exactly what thirty-one years of that slope would build.

"That’s why I didn’t," he said.

***

She flew home with nothing, and told the council she had nothing, without embellishment.

Taron heard her out and asked one question — whether he was genuine — and she said the strongest reading anybody had recorded, and Taron said a word that Raven let pass without comment.

That night she stood on the eastern terrace a long time.

Four hundred and six. Thirty-one of them children. A slope that would have heaved and slumped under any other man’s hands, holding flat and true for months because a sexton who thought he had worked out a trick with drainage had been walking it every day, and the earth had gone on doing what he needed without either of them ever knowing a conversation was happening.

He had said you made a calculation.

She had made it. She would make it again with the same numbers. Both of those were also true, and sat next to each other, and did not resolve.

Kairos came out at some point and said nothing at all, which was the correct thing, and then said, "You told him he’d be no good to you if he were coerced."

"I did."

"Is that true?"

Raven watched the dark in the east.

"I don’t know," she said. "It’s what I believe. Ask me again if we run out of names."

He let that sit. Then: "You also told him he would have to move."

"I told him that’s what I understood. He caught the difference and made me say it out loud, which was fair of him." She rubbed her thumb along the rail. "Two people in one room, once, and I’ve built four months of planning on it. He asked how far I actually understood this and the honest answer was not far, and it’s the first time saying that has cost me something."

"It is worth checking."

"It’s worth checking. Add it to the list, somewhere below your shape you won’t tell me about." She glanced sideways. "Which is now four days overdue, incidentally."

"Three," said Kairos, with dignity. "I have been counting."