Chương 60: Chapter 59: Something Missing

Daphne was inside my car before I was. Her bag was in the back. Her notebook was already open on her knee. Pencil behind her ear. Like the drive out was a formality she'd already filled out. Ella was gone. She had left with her laptop in the morning. She had gate stuff to do. Bill was in the yard behind the house, cross-legged on the flat stone, drawing. No teacher this morning. He raised one hand without looking up, and I raised mine back. Yato watched us go from the porch railing, tail over his paws.

The road was clear and the car ran chatty and warm. Daphne watched the road for the first hour and the forest for the second, asking questions here and there. She went quiet when we walked in. It lasted about a street. We had parked outside the city, I had started doing that last year, not because I had to, but simply because I enjoyed the walk to the castle.

"All these houses everywhere... It's beautiful, this city is beautiful."

"Ella's got good tastes right!?" I answered proudly.

"I've seen Ella in the books of the study, did she really build all this?"

"It's possible she just gave orders to her people. But knowing Ella... it's very likely she did a good chunk herself." When we entered the castle, Daphne quickly realised: "There are no doors."

"Curious right?"

"Is it the same everywhere?"

"There's a couple doors here and there. Servants' wing, the castle's main door, and the private study for confidential matters."

"Why do only servants get doors?"

"I've wondered that too. It seems royals aren't fans of assassins so they removed all doors, I heard it was the same way back home." The report room was past the second landing, where the castle stopped pretending to be a fortress and started being a civil office. I'd spent most of a year in it, back during the long wait. My old stacks were still on the end desk. The sweepers had worked around them for months without moving a page. Desk-niches in the walls. Shelves floor to ceiling. And the books.

Hundreds of them, all the same make. Pale smooth bindings. Thin strong pages. Daphne stopped in the middle of the room and turned all the way around. Twice.

"Oh," she said.

"Oh, this is a problem."

"What?"

"This is a corpus." She did a circle with the pencil — the shelves, the desks, the walls.

"This is years. I'm going to need more pencils." We started at the beginning. I knew where the beginning was; I'd made it my business to know. The first reports were boring. That was the point. It still took the rest of the morning. One dispatch per spread. A page and a half, the same every time. Who was sent. Where. Whether they came back. She dated the shelf first. Handwriting changes, she said. A new official every so often. The letters would go careful for a while after each change, then loosen again.

By the third shelf she was reading the hands faster than I was reading the words. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. I read. She took the structure apart. The opening that never changed. The findings in the middle. And the section at the end, where the official hand got short. Instruments disagreeing with each other. Loadstone drift. Measures that would not repeat. They asked for better instruments.

"Asked whom?"

"The requisitions are signed by nobody important." She wrote that down. A sweeper went by the doorway twice. By the second time she'd stopped caring about it. They were in the village where we lived, after all. Almost business as usual. The spines changed on the third shelf. The labels got shorter — two strokes, three strokes, a mark. Daphne stood in front of that shelf with her hands on her hips.

"Numbers," she said.

"Shorter labels are always numbers." She couldn't read them. She didn't need to. She still had me translate each number into her notes and explain the base-five system they used.

"There are a lot of shelves," I said. She had me go back to the first volume, the one with names in it. I read the last line of a report four times, in four different ones, and on the fourth time she held up a hand.

"That word."

"Which one?"

"You've said it in every report. The last line, every time. The one about the team that was there the season before." She waited.

"What is it?"

"Went," I said.

"It means went."

"Not died."

"It's not died."

"Do you have a word for died?"

"I have a word for died."

"Where is it?"

"It's not in most of the reports," I said.

"Any of them?"

"I can find it in a battle report if you want." I'd translated that line for a year and never once heard it. I knew it wasn't anywhere in the management reports. She looked at the shelves for a long moment. Then she wrote one word in her notebook and underlined it, once.

"Show me went again," she said.

"Slowly."

"Went where?" she said, finally. Not really to me.

"It doesn't say. That's the main mystery I've been trying to solve since I first stepped into the village's study."

"It doesn't say." She looked down the row of open books.

"Does the word usually take a where? In the language. When it's people."

"When it's people, it does."

"Then the scribes kept a grammar with a hole in it." She closed her notebook.

"And nobody ever filled the hole. Either they didn't know where."

"Or they weren't allowed to write it."

"Or it's accurate," she said, "and a whole survey department watched people go somewhere for generations and never once found out where." She packed her notes away.

"I don't know yet," she said, and it was the most serious I'd heard her say it. We put the books back the way we'd found them. All but one — the first of the numbered volumes, the one where the names ran out. I put it in the bag with her notes. She looked at it. Then at me.

"For Ella," I said.

"Ah," she said. We drove home under the second sun. Daphne read her notes out loud for half the ride. Somewhere in the middle she stopped. The kitchen was full when we came in. Ella, Andrej, and Julien stood around the table. The old laptop sat open in the middle of it, next to a small stone with a fine new circle engraved on it. Bill was at the end with his coffee, watching the engineers the way people watch a stream. Daphne took in the whole table for exactly one second and left for the bathhouse.

"How was the castle?" Ella said. And then, before I could answer: "Show him." Andrej turned the laptop toward me.

"This morning we gave it three numbers," Andrej said.

"Known sectors. I picked them. I know where they live. Then we ran the circle."

"And?"

"It read the disk," Ella said.

"The right sectors?"

"Yes," Ella said. But that wasn't the whole answer. Andrej did something small with his mouth that was almost a smile.

"We asked it for three sectors. It read the whole drive. Every domain, every polarity. The numbers are in there." He nodded at the stone.

"With everything else on the disk." Ella held it up. It didn't look like anything — a small core, the new circle still clean on it. It didn't glow. It just sat there being full.

"It reads what is there," she said.

"Direction. Strength. Magnetism, you call it." She set it back down next to the laptop.

"The problem is your ones and zeros. The magic doesn't think in binary. My algorithm accounts for that, of course, but when the calculation is finished, the computer still expects everything in base two. It can't do otherwise." Julien hadn't said anything yet. His head was tipped toward the laptop, listening. That was how he looked at machines.

"Binaries," Andrej said, to the table.

"We wrote the numbers the way computers write numbers. The circle read magnetism. It doesn't know what a one is. We do. That gap is the project now."

"A big gap?" Bill said.

"It's a gap," Andrej said.

"We'll aim the read. Tomorrow." Ella turned the stone with one finger.

"Tomorrow," she said. Then she looked at me again.

"How was the castle?" We talked about the day with everyone. The farmers joined us soon after, and the conversation wandered from the castle to the computer and back again. There was fish on the stove. I made plates. Yato came in from the hallway. Just in time for dinner.