Chapter 4 — Twice in Nine Hundred

WELSH — The Novel (Coda's Perspective)

— Lantern Row to the Eastern Wall, morning —

I went the long way to school, which is not a thing I do.

Everybody did. The whole street did. You could tell by how slow the crowd was moving — people who'd normally cut down to the market were going east instead, past the tanners', and standing in a loose ring two streets from the wall to watch.

They were fixing the hole.

I'd never seen mages work. Not real ones, not more than one at a time. Venn makes a stone warm in a cold room and that's the biggest magic I'd ever watched, and I thought I understood the shape of it.

There were eleven of them on the breach.

Order Convocate, by the cuffs — grey coats with the geometric bands on the sleeve, the kind Venn wears a plainer version of. They stood in a line with their backs to us and their hands out, and they weren't doing anything I could see, and the wall was rebuilding itself.

Not fast. That's what nobody tells you. It was slow, slower than masons would have been for the first course, and then you realized what you were watching — the stones going back up weren't new stones. They were the same stones. The broken ones. Lifting out of the rubble and up through the air in no particular hurry, turning as they went, finding the place they'd been split from and closing on it. The cracks went shut like water finding a level.

Coda: They're not building it.

Coda: They're reminding it.

An old man beside me said it was a shame about the dust and nobody agreed with him, because everyone was watching a wall remember being a wall.

I stayed longer than I should have. I want to write that down honestly. The day before, a thing had come up out of the ground two streets from my house and a woman had cut it apart with a sword, and this morning I was late for school because I couldn't stop watching stone climb.

Coda: This is the most beautiful thing I've seen that wasn't in a dream.

At the foot of the breach somebody had swept the pale sand into a long low heap and roped it off. Nobody was fixing that. Nobody was touching it at all.

— Edren's Classroom, first hour —

Edren didn't say anything about me being late. He didn't say anything about the wall either, which I thought was strange until I realized what was already on the board.

Seven circles. Chalk. Evenly spaced, edge to edge, in a ring.

I'd seen that ring before. In the book on the ledge, two days ago — drawn in the margin beside the line about the Paths arriving.

Edren: "Yesterday you watched a Warden cut a forgetting out of the ground. Today we go further back than that. Sit."

He put his knuckle against the first circle.

Edren: "At the start of the world there were seven."

Elan: "Seven what?"

Edren: "That's the question, isn't it."

He waited, the way he does, to see if anyone would fill the silence with something stupid. Nobody did. The room was still thinking about a wall closing itself.

Edren: "Not seven gods. The temples will tell you gods and the temples are guessing. Not seven kings — there was nothing to be king of. Seven somethings, present at the beginning, and everything that has happened since has happened downhill from them."

Sable: "What were their names?"

Edren: "We don't know."

Sable: "Nobody wrote them down?"

Edren: "Somebody must have. We don't have it." He tapped the board twice. "Understand what I'm telling you. This isn't a mystery I'm being coy about. This is the oldest hole in the record. We have the founding of the Convocate and we have tax rolls from cities that are under sand now — and we do not have seven names. There is no scholar alive who can give them to you. There are people who will sell them to you."

Wick: "Were they people?"

Edren: "Ask me something easier."

Wick: "Were they here?"

Edren stopped, chalk halfway to the board, and gave Wick the look. The long one.

Edren: "The oldest text we have says they arrived. It does not say from where. It does not say they left."

He turned back to the board. And then he did something I'd never seen him do in all the years I've sat in his room, which is that he hesitated.

He put the chalk against the seventh circle and drew a short line away from it. Out of the ring. Off toward the edge of the board, where there was nothing.

Edren: "Six of them stayed."

The room didn't understand. You could feel it not understanding.

Elan: "Stayed where?"

Edren: "Wherever they were. In whatever sense a thing like that stays anywhere — don't ask me, I've told you I don't know what they were. Six of them remained in the arrangement they arrived in." The chalk tapped the little line going nowhere. "One walked away."

Sable: "Walked away from what?"

Edren: "From the other six."

Sable: "And went where?"

Edren: "Nobody knows."

Sable: "Why?"

Edren: "Nobody knows that either, and I'll tell you now that this is the part people find hardest, because it's the part every scholar in four hundred years has tried to fill in and every one of them has filled it in with themselves."

He set the chalk down on the tray.

Edren: "There are as many answers as there are people who want one. The temples say pride. The Convocate says a disagreement over what the world was for. There's a school in the eastern cities that argues it was grief, and a very persistent pamphlet that says the other six drove it out. My own view, for what a teacher's view is worth, is that it was something much smaller and much worse than any of those, because that's how it usually goes with people who stop speaking to each other. But that's a guess dressed in a coat."

Wick: "Something went wrong between them."

Edren: "Something went wrong between them. That's as far as the record goes and further than most will admit."

Elan: "So there's only six?"

Edren: "No. That's exactly what I want you to hold on to, so listen." He put his knuckle back on the ring, all of it, the whole circle. "There are seven seats. There have always been seven seats. There are seven right now — occupied or empty, it doesn't matter, the shape of it is seven. The walking-away didn't remove a seat."

Sable, writing very fast:

Sable: "Then what did it remove?"

Edren: "Ah."

He looked at the little chalk line going off the edge of the ring toward nothing.

Edren: "That's the question I'd want, if I were fifteen and clever."

He didn't answer it. He picked the chalk back up and went around the ring naming colours, and I sat there with my hands flat on my desk looking at a short white line pointing off the edge of a board.

Coda: Six stayed. One walked.

Coda: And the seat's still there.

Coda: So what's sitting in it?

Coda: Then where are they?

I had my hand halfway up before I knew it was moving. I put it down. I don't know what I'd have asked. Something I'd read in a book I'd found on a shelf, in a house where nobody talks about the Paths, in a hand that pressed too hard.

Edren went around the ring, circle by circle, and named the things we do have — the colours, which everyone knows, and the seats, which everyone half-knows, and the fragments. Gold, the one at the centre. Red, the one that takes the blow. White, the one that weighs. And so on around, and the further round he went the thinner it got, until the last two were barely more than a colour.

Edren: "Seven seats. Occupied or empty, always exactly seven. That's the only law about them anyone agrees on."

Somebody at the back — not Wick — asked whether the one that walked away was a colour we'd been given.

Edren: "You'd like me to say no, so it'd be tidy." He shrugged. "It's one of the seven. Which one is not written down. You may assume every faction in this city has a favourite answer and that the answer always happens to embarrass their rivals."

Elan: "Who's in them now?"

Edren: "Nobody knows that either."

Elan: "Somebody must —"

Edren: "Elan. If you knew who held Gold, what would you do with the knowing?"

Elan opened his mouth. Thought about it. Closed it.

Edren: "That's why nobody knows. That's why anyone who did know would be a fool to say so." He set the chalk down and dusted his hands. "Magister Venn has the second hour. She'll tell you what any of this has to do with you. I'd listen to that part."

— The Corridor, between lessons —

Elan was still on it in the corridor.

Elan: "Seven people, walking around right now, and nobody knows."

Sable: "Seven seats. He didn't say people."

Elan: "What else sits in a seat?"

Sable: "That's the point. Nobody knows."

Wick: "He said they arrived."

Elan: "So?"

Wick: "So they came from somewhere. And if they came from somewhere, somebody saw them come."

Nobody had an answer for that. Wick does that and then eats an apple about it.

I wasn't in the conversation. I was thinking about the stones turning in the air and finding where they'd broken, and how nobody had to tell them.

— Venn's Spell-Practice Room, second hour —

The slabs were gone.

That was the first thing. Every desk in Venn's room has a cold stone on it and today there wasn't one in the building, and in place of each stone there was a single square of paper. Plain. Undyed. Slightly rough, the kind Father uses for wrapping, about the size of two hands.

And the Headmaster was standing at the back.

Oren Vey doesn't announce himself. He turns up at the back of a lesson maybe twice a year with his folio closed under his arm and stands there being tall and grey and courteous, and everyone sits up straighter and pretends not to. He's the only person in the school Edren is formal with.

He was there before we came in. He'd already been there a while.

Coda: Paper. And him.

Coda: So it's today, whatever it is.

Venn didn't mention him. She stood at the front with her hands folded and waited, and the shuffling stopped faster than usual.

Venn: "Instructor Edren has told you there were seven. Good. He'll have told you we don't know their names. Also good — he's honest, and honesty is rarer than names."

A couple of people laughed. She didn't.

Venn: "Now I'll tell you the part that concerns this room. You have all been drawing on them your whole lives."

That landed. Somebody's chair scraped.

Venn: "Every spell any of you has ever cast. Every warm stone in this room last week. You did not do that alone. When you make the Reach — when your memory goes out asking — you are reaching through something, and what you reach through is one of the seven."

Sable: "Through which one?"

Venn: "That is exactly today's question. Sit on it."

She came down off the front step and walked the aisle, and her hands were doing the thing they do when she's about to say something she's rehearsed.

Venn: "Understand the difference between two words, because the rest of your education depends on it. To hold a Path is to be one of seven people in the world. Not one of seven in this room, or this city. Seven. You will almost certainly never meet one, and the odds that one is sitting in this room are the odds of being struck by the same lightning twice."

Elan: "So what do we have?"

Venn: "Aptitude."

She let the word sit.

Venn: "Every person born has a leaning. One of the seven that answers you more readily than the other six. It is not power. It does not make you anything. It is the door in the house that opens easiest when you knock."

Wick: "Knock how?"

Venn: "With words, mostly. The old forms — the incantations — aren't commands. They never were. They're addressed. You've all recited them without thinking about who you were reciting them to." She stopped by a desk. "It is closer to prayer than to a lever. A lever doesn't care who pulls it. A prayer is heard by something, and the something decides."

The room was very quiet.

Venn: "Now. Nobody panic about the word prayer. I am not the temple and I'm not asking you to believe anything. I'm telling you the mechanism. You remember, you address, and something answers — and today we find out which something has been answering each of you."

Venn: "Hands on the paper. Both."

I put both hands flat on mine. It was cool, and slightly rough, and about as unremarkable as a thing can be.

Venn: "Eyes closed. This is not the warmth trial. I don't want you to reach for anything. I don't want you to remember anything. You are not asking the paper for a thing."

Somebody asked what we were asking for, then.

Venn: "Nothing. You're not asking. You're looking — inward, not out. Close your eyes and see what's already in you. That's all. It's already there. It has been there since before you could talk. The paper just says it out loud."

Coda: Look inward and see what's there.

Coda: I've been doing that since the warmth trial and finding an empty room.

Venn: "Begin."

I closed my eyes.

I'd like to tell you what it felt like and I can't, because it didn't feel like anything at all. There was no Reach. No memory to send out. There was no asking. I sat with my hands flat on a square of paper and looked into the place where everyone else keeps a house and I found what I always find.

Open. No walls. Light coming in from a direction there isn't one.

And then, the way you notice a sound that's been going for a while — warmth under my palms.

Someone gasped. Then someone else. Then the whole room was noise.

I opened my eyes.

The room was full of colour.

Sable's paper was white. Bright, even, like frost on a window with the sun behind it — White, and she was sitting bolt upright staring at it with her pen forgotten on the desk. Two rows over, someone's was green and someone's was a deep sapphire blue. Elan's was red. Of course it was red. He had both fists in the air before he'd even looked at anyone, and Rook was going to hear about this by lunch.

A girl near the window had amber-yellow, bright as a lamp. The boy who'd asked about prayer had green.

Wick's was black.

Not dark. Black, the deep kind, with violet at the very edges, like looking down a well at night. Nobody else in the room had black and I watched Wick look at it for a second and then put his hand over it, casually, the way you'd cover a spill.

I have thought about that for a long time since. He covered it before he checked what anyone else had.

And mine was gold.

Not yellow. Not amber — I know amber, I live in it, my mother cooks in it. Gold. The paper under my hands was the colour of the last minute of a sunset, and it was deep, like looking down into it, and inside the light there were small points of brighter light that did not move the way reflections move.

The room went quiet in stages. That was the worst part. Not all at once — in a wave, desk by desk, as people turned.

Coda: Oh.

Coda: Everyone's looking at the paper.

Coda: And then everyone's looking at me.

I looked at Venn.

Magister Venn had gone the same still she'd gone in the yard when Wick spoke. Completely. One hand half-lifted and stopped. And her face — I'd seen Venn delighted a hundred times, she's delighted at least twice a lesson, and this was not that. This was the face you make when the answer to a question you asked casually turns out to be a serious one.

She crossed the room. She looked at my paper for maybe three seconds. She did not touch it.

Venn: "Hands off, please. Gently."

I lifted my hands. The gold faded out slow, like a coal going grey.

Venn: "Everyone, hands off. Look at your own paper, not your neighbour's. Write the colour down. Elan, put your arms down."

Elan: "But it's —"

Venn: "Down."

And from the back of the room, where he'd been standing the whole time without a word:

Oren: "Magister. If I may borrow the boy."

— The Headmaster's Study, immediately after —

I'd never been in it. It's up the stone stair in the old warehouse core, above the classroom, and the window looks east — which meant that when I came in the first thing I saw, past his shoulder, was the wall with the mages still on it and the stones still climbing.

Oren Vey shut the door and didn't sit down, so I didn't either.

Oren: "Do you know what happened downstairs?"

Coda: "My paper went gold."

Oren: "Yes. Do you know what that means?"

Coda: "No, sir."

Oren: "Neither do I."

He said it flatly. Then he put his folio down on the desk and looked at me properly for the first time, and I understood that being looked at properly by Oren Vey is not comfortable.

Oren: "I have run this school for eleven years. Before that I taught for twenty. I have sat at the back of that room for the aptitude trial something like thirty times — thirty rooms, thirty classes, call it nine hundred children with their hands on nine hundred squares of paper." He paused. "I have seen gold twice. Once was today."

Coda: "And the other?"

Oren: "A girl, nineteen years ago. She's a clerk in the grain office now. She is a perfectly ordinary woman and nothing whatsoever has ever happened to her."

He let me have that. I think he meant it kindly. I think he also meant it as a fact he wasn't certain of.

Oren: "So here is what I can tell you honestly, which is less than you want. Aptitude is not holding. Your paper did not tell this room that you hold Gold. There are seven seats and one of them is Gold and the odds are overwhelming that it is occupied by someone in a palace or a grave or the Grey Expanse, and not by a fifteen-year-old who climbs in through a window."

Coda: "You know about the window."

Oren: "I know about the window."

He almost smiled. Not quite.

Oren: "What gold aptitude means is that when you knock, the door that opens easiest is that one. And that is rare enough that people who collect rare things would be interested to hear about it, which is why I asked Magister Venn to have the class write down colours and say nothing else. The Convocate receives our trial records at the end of term. Yours will say gold, because I do not falsify records. It will say it in one word, at the bottom of a list, and nobody has to say it in the street."

Coda: "Am I in trouble?"

Oren: "No. You're in possession of something, which is different and lasts longer."

Outside, a stone the size of a cart lifted off the rubble heap, turned once, and set itself into the wall.

Oren: "Ask me the thing you came in here wanting to ask."

I thought about it. There were about nine. I picked the one that had been sitting under my ribs since Venn said look inward.

Coda: "Magister Venn said to close my eyes and see what's inside me. Sir — there's nothing in there. I failed the warmth trial. I've failed it every time. When everyone else reaches for a memory I go looking and it's just — open. Empty. There's no house."

I hadn't said that out loud to anyone. Not Ma. Not Sable.

Oren Vey was quiet for a moment.

Oren: "You told Magister Venn you see it."

Coda: "She told you that?"

Oren: "She tells me everything that is strange. It's most of why I keep her."

He went to the window and looked at the wall for a while with his hands behind his back.

Oren: "I'm going to say something to you and you will not understand it, and I want you to not understand it accurately, so that in ten years you still have it whole."

Coda: "All right."

Oren: "Everything you need is already known to you. That is not encouragement. I am not that sort of man, and you have not earned encouragement, and it would be no use to you if you had. I mean it as a description. The answers are already yours. What you are missing is not the answer."

Coda: "Then what?"

Oren: "The memory of it."

The wall outside kept assembling itself out of its own broken pieces.

Oren: "Magister Venn will have told you magic is memory. She's right, and she's only right about half of it, and the half she teaches is the half that can be taught. Go to class. Don't discuss your paper in the yard. Come and see me if anything else happens that you can't explain to yourself."

Coda: "What counts as anything else?"

Oren: "You'll know. That's rather the difficulty."

He opened the door. I was most of the way through it when he spoke again.

Oren: "Coda. What colour was Wick's?"

I stopped.

Coda: "Black, sir."

A pause I could hear.

Oren: "Thank you. Go on."

— The Courtyard Steps, after —

Elan was telling everyone. Of course he was. He'd told the yard, he'd told two people from the year above, he was planning to tell Rook in a manner that involved standing on something.

Elan: "Red. Red. Coda, do you know what Rosse carries? Do you know —"

Sable: "We were there. We know what Rosse carries."

Elan: "It's the same door. She knocks on the same door I knock on."

Sable: "And so do about a fifth of the people in this city."

He wasn't listening and it didn't matter. I've never seen him happier. He'd found out that the thing he'd wanted since he was nine was at least pointed in his direction, and he was going to be unbearable about it for a week, and he'd earned it.

Sable had her paper folded in her lap. She hadn't said much about the white.

Sable: "White's the judgment one. Weights and measures. Deciding what's true." She turned the fold over. "It's very on the nose."

Wick: "It suits you."

Sable: "I know. That's the problem."

Nobody asked Wick about black. Elan didn't notice, and Sable did and didn't ask, which is a thing Sable does that people mistake for coldness. It isn't. She waits.

Then Elan turned to me and said the thing I'd been dreading for an hour.

Elan: "So what did Vey want?"

Coda: "He asked about my paper."

Elan: "And?"

Coda: "He said gold's rare. He said it doesn't mean anything."

That was true in the way I just see a garden was true. Every word of it had been said in that room.

Elan: "Rare how?"

Coda: "He's seen it twice in nine hundred."

Elan: "Twice in — Coda!" He hit me on the arm hard enough to move me. "That's not nothing. That's the opposite of nothing."

Coda: "It's a door that opens easy. It's not power."

Elan: "It's a rare door."

Sable: "What's Gold?"

She'd said it quietly, and not to Elan.

Coda: "Gold."

Sable: "I know what it's called. I mean what is it. Red takes a hit. White weighs things. What does Gold do?"

And I realized I didn't know. Edren hadn't said. Venn hadn't said. Vey had talked around it for ten minutes in a room with a closed door and hadn't said either.

Coda: "Nobody told me."

Sable looked at me, and then she wrote something in her notes and closed them.

— Home, evening —

I decided on the way home that I was going to tell them.

I'd decided about the pause and not told them. I'd decided about the dream and given them a garden. And I'd watched where that got me — three days of carrying a cold stone around and saying never mind, trick of the light to my friends. So on the walk down Lantern Row I worked out the sentence. We did an aptitude trial today and my paper went gold. Eleven words. I said it to myself past the tanners' and all the way to our door.

The shop smelled like the good soup. Father was at the table for once instead of the counter, book shut, and Ma was cutting bread, and the kitchen was doing its gold thing with the sun coming down the row.

Aldric: "There he is. Vey kept you."

I stopped in the doorway.

Coda: "How do you know that?"

Aldric: "Small city. Smaller school." He pulled the chair out with his foot. "Sit down, you're letting the heat out."

I sat down. Ma put bread in front of me. And the sentence was right there, eleven words, and my mother put her hand flat on the table next to my plate — not on me, just near me — and said:

Maren: "You had the aptitude trial."

Coda: "Yes."

Maren: "And?"

And I looked at her, and I looked at Father with his book shut on the table in front of him at the wrong time of day, and I understood two things at once.

The first was that they already knew. Not the colour, maybe. But that it had been today, and that Vey had kept me, and my father's book was closed.

The second was that they weren't surprised.

Coda: Say it. Eleven words. Say it and watch their faces and then you'll know.

Coda: — and then you'll know.

Coda: "Gold."

Neither of them moved.

That's what I'd been afraid of and I hadn't known it until it happened. Not shock. Not what? Not Ma dropping the knife, not Father taking his glasses off. They didn't move at all, the two of them, for about as long as it takes a stone to find where it broke.

Then my mother picked up the bread knife again and cut the next slice.

Maren: "All right."

Coda: "All right?"

Maren: "You expected something else?"

Coda: "I expected —" I didn't know. "Vey said he's seen it twice in nine hundred."

Aldric: "Vey's a careful man. That sounds like a careful number."

Coda: "Is it rare or isn't it?"

Aldric: "It's rare."

He said it the way you'd say the soup was hot. Then he got up, and went to the shelf by the stairs — not the shop shelves, the house ones, the ones that are just books that ended up there — and he stood in front of it with his hands behind his back for a moment the way Vey had stood at the window. And he didn't take anything down. He came back and sat.

Aldric: "Eat. It's getting cold."

I ate. They talked about the wall, and the Convocate mages, and whether the sand heap was going to be moved or left, and Ma said something about the Tolvane woman's leg and Father said something about a book he was never going to sell, and it was the most ordinary the two of them have ever been, and I have never once in my life felt so clearly that a conversation was being held above something.

Later, when the candles were on and Ma had gone up, Father was closing the shutters.

Coda: "Did yours ever go gold?"

Aldric: "No."

Coda: "What was it?"

He dropped the last bar into place and stood with his hand on it.

Aldric: "They didn't do the trial when I was at school. Different times."

Which is an answer. It just isn't the answer to what I asked.

Aldric: "Goodnight, Coda."

I sat on the ledge for a while before bed with the cold stone in my hands and my eyes shut, looking inward the way Venn said.

Open. No walls. Light from a direction there isn't one.

Coda: Everything I need is already known to me.

Coda: I'm just missing the memory of it.

Coda: So where do you go to remember something you never learned?

Below me the city breathed, and it was better than yesterday — shallow, but even. Two streets east the wall was nearly whole again. The sand was still roped off.

The stone didn't warm.