Fragment: A Salvager's Field Notes

Notebook pages recovered with their author, who objected to the Codex keeping them on the grounds that they were “shopping lists.” The order finds that shopping lists from the Unfinished Lands are worth keeping.

---

Day one out. Good vein — you can always tell First Rain ground before you crest the rise, because nothing grows on it and everything leans toward it. Old Marta used to say the droplets fell before they could be woven into anything, so every living thing nearby still thinks it’s owed a body. Superstition. Accurate superstition.

Ore sits in the ground like it’s embarrassed. You don’t swing at it, whatever the new hands think — you work around it with the flat tools and lift it whole, and it comes up warm. Nobody talks about the warm. First trip out, I asked the crew chief why the crystallised leavings of the making of the world should be warm, and she said “because you’re holding daylight from before your grandmother,” and went back to her tea, and I did not ask a follow-up question, and neither will you.

Notes for the tally: the escort stands facing out, always, even at meals. The woven don’t fidget. It’s the one thing I can’t get used to — a dozen soldiers around the dig, still as furniture, and then the hills whisper a little and every head turns together like reeds in one wind. The guardian with them — the tall one, water-made — says something low, and they settle. I asked her once what she says to them. She said: “I remind them what shape they are.”

Day two. Wind from the hem today. It had words in it. Didn’t listen. Listened a bit. It was saying the name of a river and the crew chief said it’s been saying that river for six years now, like a man patting his pockets for keys long gone, and that when it stops saying the river is when you pack the wagons — because it means the Fog’s finished with the river, and looking for the next thing to say.

Hauled out at three-quarter load. I know what the yield tables say. The yield tables were written inside a wall. Full wagons move slow, and out here, slow is a way of volunteering.

Home by the short seam. Field held. Font’s got two of ours — frayed, not lost, the wall did its work. Handing tally to the Vault clerk and going to sit inside the light for a while.

It’s good ground, the world. What’s left of it. Worth the walk.