The Testing Stone

Midsummer came to Sallow with the Marquis long gone back to his city and the Wellmouth's lift-cages running day and night, and Corwen Ashe stood in the Guild yard in the heat with his father's sword on his hip and called the window up one more time before the testing.

Level 18, still. He had not been back to the Deep floors since the twelfth. Maud had kept him on Shallow work for six weeks, and had not said why, and he had not asked, because he thought he knew. The Company had buried one of its own and the Company's leader did not intend to bury another for a hide.

He had spent the six weeks on the thing the Shallow floors could not give him. Levels were bought with blood. Tiers were bought with skill. A Journeyman became a Master not by killing enough rockhounds but by standing in front of the Guild's testing stone and a Master or better and showing that he could hold a floor alone, and in the first life Corwen had done that at twenty-five, after six more years of the Deep. He did not have six more years. He had eight, for everything, and six weeks of them were gone.

Tamsin came and stood beside him with her shield on her back. She had ground the Hollow Wyrm fang herself, in the evenings, on the bunkhouse step, and the whetstone that had come out of it sat in a leather case on Corwen's belt beside Greyhallow, and every morning he put the Masterwork steel to it and thought about her brother. Pell Rook had been dead for seven weeks. Corwen still turned, some mornings, to say something to the empty bunk. Tamsin, Pell's sister, had moved her blanket to the far end of the room so that she would not have to look at it.

"You'll pass," she said.

"You don't know that."

"I've seen you fight, Ashe. I saw you on twelve." She looked at the yard, at the testing stone, at the small crowd of delvers and Guild clerks gathering along the wall. "Who's the old man?"

Corwen looked where she was looking, and his heart turned over once, slowly.

The old man by the testing stone was thin and straight and white-haired, in a plain grey coat with a sword at his hip that had no ornament at all, and Captain Tallow in his crown-blue was bowing to him as if he were the Queen herself. Which, in a sense, he was. Grandmaster Harrow was the fifth tier of the Blade track, the only one in Vael, and the Queen's Blade, Her Majesty's sworn champion. He had come through Sallow once in the spring and gone away again. He had come back.

"That," Corwen said, "is the Grand."

"Grandmaster Harrow," said Tamsin automatically, and then, "Why?"

He did not know. In the first life the old man had not been in Sallow at midsummer 1160. In the first life Corwen Ashe had not stood for the fourth tier at nineteen, either. Things were moving that had not moved before, and he had moved them, and not all of it was Pell's death and not all of it was the Marquis's son, and he did not know what the rest of it was. Somewhere in the shadow beside a stair on the eleventh floor there was a man with no badge who had known the Calamity's name eight years early, and Corwen had looked for him on every Shallow floor for six weeks and had not found so much as a footprint. Who was he? What did he know, and how, and had he come back the way Corwen had come back, and if so from what?

Maud Ferris stepped out from the wall. She still led the Lantern Company. Nobody in Sallow would have thought of her any other way. "Ashe," she said. "You asked for the stone. The Guild's granted it. Go and earn it."

Corwen walked across the yard to the testing stone and drew Greyhallow.

The test for Master was simple to describe and nearly impossible to do. A Journeyman stood on the stone alone. Three Journeymen came at him together, from three sides, with live blades, and he held the stone for a count of a hundred without stepping off it and without being touched. A Master could hold a floor alone. That was the whole of it.

The three who came at him were Guild Blades, strangers, all of them older than he was and one of them Level 22. He let them come. He had held floors alone on the Deep for six years in a body that was not this one, and the body did not matter as much as he had feared; the hands remembered. He turned the first blade on Greyhallow's forte and stepped inside the second and let the third go past him by a finger's width, and the count went on, thirty, fifty, seventy, and the yard was so quiet that he could hear Tamsin breathing at the wall. At ninety the Level 22 Blade tried a low cut that would have taken a Journeyman's leg, and Corwen was not there, and the man's blade rang on the testing stone and the count reached a hundred and the Guild clerk said, in a voice that cracked, "Hold."

The three Blades stepped back and saluted. Corwen stood on the stone with his father's sword in his hand and the window opened in front of his eyes.

Master Blade. The fourth tier. He had been nineteen for three months. In the first life he had been twenty-five, and had wept on the stone, and had not understood why. He did not weep now. He looked at the window, and closed it, and sheathed Greyhallow, and stepped down.

Grandmaster Harrow was waiting at the foot of the stone.

Up close the Queen's Blade looked like what he was, an old man of seventy with a sword, and also like what Pell had not understood, which was the only living thing in Vael that had walked the Abyssal floors and come back up. He looked at Corwen for a long moment with eyes the colour of the Wellmouth stone.

"Journeyman at nineteen is ordinary," he said. "Master at nineteen on a grade-B talent is not. Two wyrms on the twelfth floor is not. A Warden who tells me the Deep is climbing is not." He put his head a little on one side. "And a boy who finds the seam behind a wyrm's jaw on his first Deep delve, as if he had found it fifty times before, is not ordinary at all. Where did you learn that cut, Master Ashe?"

Corwen opened his mouth, and the stone sat in it.

Grandmaster Harrow had died on the second day of the Calamity, holding the Wellmouth stair. Whatever Corwen might have said to him about the Deep, about 1168, about the Abyssal floors opening, the Hush had it, and would keep it, and the old man watched him fail to speak and something in the grey eyes changed.

"Ah," said the Grandmaster softly. "So that is how it is." He did not say anything more. He turned and walked away across the yard with Tallow bowing behind him, and at the gate he stopped, and looked back once, not at Corwen but at the black lip of the Wellmouth beyond the wall, and then he was gone.

Tamsin came across the flags and hit Corwen on the shoulder hard enough to hurt. "Master Blade," she said. "At nineteen. Pell would have been unbearable."

"He would."

"Teach me the turn."

"Tomorrow."

She went to find Maud. Corwen stood alone on the hot stone of the Guild yard with his father's sword on one hip and a dead boy's whetstone on the other, Master Blade, Level 19, and looked at the Wellmouth, and did the arithmetic again. Eight years less seven weeks. One tier left on the track and nobody to tell him how to climb it. A beast-tide rising from the Deep for a reason nobody knew. A stranger with no badge who knew the name of the end of the world. A sister he could not warn, and a Grandmaster he could not warn, and a silence in his throat that the dead had put there and that only the dead could take away.

He had died once with a wyrm's jaws around him. He found, standing in the sun, that he minded far less the idea of dying again than the idea of doing it uselessly, and that was, he supposed, a kind of progress.

The second bell rang down the shaft. Corwen Ashe went to find his Company.