When a road-weaver cultivates to the summit, this is the attainment: the Web-Weaving Immortal.
The young ones weave the roads of one cave, one mountain. At my degree, one holds the net — for the silk-roads our clan has strung through the world's hidden places these three hundred years long ago outgrew the Nine-Bend Caverns: the fugitive-path over White-Bone Ridge; the valley-mouth of Elder Antelope in Cart-Slow; the waterside relays of the Womanland; the under-sand line at the Flowing Sands crossing… Segment by segment, all of it now joined by master-threads.
In the hidden places of the world hangs a net that saves people. Its heart rests in my palm.
And the silk-roads carry more than travellers. They carry word.
Silk transmits tremor faster than any bird flies. The road-keepers at every station speak by plucked cipher: one long, two short — safe; three urgent shakes — pursuers; a circle drawn on the silk-face — send healers. Three hundred years of life-saving messages past counting. The Bureau's own files record: the speed of yao communications — inexplicable.
Inexplicable is exactly right. They watch the post-roads, the pigeons, the beacon-fires. Who ever stoops to examine a strand of spider-silk?
I set the net's law in three lines: words on the net save and never harm; each keeper knows their own segment and never the whole; and the full map lives in my belly alone — at my death it dissolves with me, the net falls back into segments, and no one carries off the whole.
Why so severe? Because I know what this net becomes in evil hands: a net that knows where every fugitive in the world is hiding.
These three years, the thing that covets it has come.
First the stations were probed in sequence: something unseeable walking the threads, the keepers touching that ice-cold stamped grain — the thing the young one described, that leaves its mark without trembling the silk. They were reading our net, segment by segment, like a ledger lying open.
I severed seven master-threads at once and broke the net into islands. Better a scattered net than a captured one.
Then, last month, it happened.
A severed master-thread — severed, understand; both ends hanging in air; physically incapable of carrying any tremor — shook in the deep of night. By itself.
And not with noise. With knot-speech. Passage after passage, tied onto the silk, in perfect order.
But the knotting hand was no hand of any living station. It was the ancestral knots — Web-Coil Cave's oldest cipher, the craft of the seven great-aunts' generation, lost when they fell three hundred years ago. Half a tattered manual survives in the clan; I gnawed through it in my youth; and so, alone among the living, I could read it.
Knot by knot against the manual, three nights of deciphering — and the message kept me sitting in the silk-house until dawn:
"The net is broken in seven places. Mend it swiftly. The ones coming from the east may be trusted. We bequeath you the Thirteen Knots of Heaven-Silk. Remember: those who weave roads must, in the end, weave one into heaven."
And after it, thirteen knot-forms I had never seen, demonstrated one by one, patient as a primer.
Who? The seven great-aunts are three hundred years dead and scattered. Who else knows the ancestral knots? Who knew I had severed exactly seven threads? Who is teaching me the lost summit of my own craft?
"Those who weave roads must, in the end, weave one into heaven" — the old line stands on the manual's flyleaf; every generation of road-weavers has read it as a figure of speech.
Whoever taught me the Thirteen Knots does not read it as a figure of speech.
Can silk truly be woven into heaven? For whom to walk? And from where does it ascend — Grandmother Wind's whisper-crack? Some "beam" of the tribulation-cloud canopy?
I drilled the Thirteen Knots for a month. At the ninth knot, the silk at my fingertips suddenly went weightless — and for that instant, the far end of the thread seemed to catch hold of somewhere impossibly high, impossibly far, and impossibly familiar.
I have not dared drill further. The last four knots I am saving, to be learned at the place where they must be used.
So I entrusted the net to its stations and travel west alone — the map in my belly, the master-thread in my palm, and the heaven-silk drilled to its ninth knot.
The boy asked what I go west to do. I told him: the road-weavers have woven the earth's roads for three hundred years.
This journey is for the final line of the ancestral instruction —
to learn how a road is woven into heaven.