A Mist of Grit and Splinters

by Graydon Saunders

Year of Peace 543, Thermidor, Ninth Day (Summer)

  Duckling

  Meek got bounced off a wall. The inside of the outer wall of a fort Thorn had built ourselves means a ceramic wall two-and-a-half metres thick. The demon struck them backhand; Meek didn’t get any claw holes through them. Which is all the good news; Meek looks bad and Slice looks shocked.

  Meek has about stopped cursing — no sound, and not much lip movement, but there’s this faint smell of rot — the taste of their every-two-hours dose of don’t-fall-apart, and the medic who brought it is looking undecided between trying to reassure Meek and trying to throw Slice out.

  “Hey Meek,” Slice says. “You look rough.”

  Meek says “Been working,” with available force. Hardly sounds like Meek. Hardly sounds like words. Can only just talk, neither lung directly damaged but busted ribs on both sides and bruising in the lungs.

  Meek’s got a serious neck brace on, so the regrowing right ear don’t get bumped. Claw wounds all sewn up, which is tough with wide pressure cuts. Gotta stitch wider to line everything back up. Both ankles in casts, big brace for the left hip, and a promise the pin comes out of their left cheekbone soon. Don’t-fall-apart smells ugly, and Meek curses and curses after, every time, because it tastes just like it smells. The smaller cuts haven’t left scars and the bruises never got to that green stage and Meek can breathe without locking up from the pain, which the initial state of Meek’s ribs would have precluded. Don’t-fall-apart heals from your bones out; it aches the whole time, as a frank medic’ll admit.

  “They giving you draught?” Slice sounds doubtful.

  Halt’s draught, Slice means. The medic figures this out and says “Shape of Peace, NO!” as though Slice has to be dangerously wit-wobbled to even ask the question.

  “Draught’s quicker,” Meek hisses. “This stuff, no dreams.”

  Slice nods, a little grimly. Draught works but I wouldn’t say it was good for you.

  “How’s the prognosis?” The medic looks a bit scandalized, but hey. Shoulder-companion, for real and true. Retired reserve don’t have power of change over that.

  Meek can’t shrug. “Fine someday.”

  “Sergeant-Major Meek will be fit to return to their duties in six or eight décades,” the medic says. Even a weeding team would think it appropriate to retire after your second encounter with demons. Especially after a demon slams you into a fortification. Demon encounters ain’t generally physical. It’s there in the medic’s voice.

  “How you doing, Slice?” takes Meek a second try to get enough air to hiss four words, and Slice holds up both hands.

  “Ain’t fit for a potter. No knack.” Slice has been doing pottery stuff in a collective with some more distant cousins since the March. “Relaxing, but — ” and Slice stops. I nod, you can tell Meek wants to.

  “Doesn’t take much thinking, shouldn’t be much thinking, it’s all clay and pressure. Helped.” Slice looks a bit embarrassed. “Been talking to an optics manufacturing collective, they might be willing to train a lens-grinder.”

  Simple, quiet, repetitive, and useful. Second-half sort of job. Better than those who’ve seen too many demons usually do.

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Slice nods. Slice is doing better than they have been.

  “What kind of plan you got? Or is it Captain Slow’s got?”

  “Captain Slow’s got. I get to read about logistics. Slow’s out. Soon as Meek gets out, I get reappointed and we start requesting recruits.”

  Slice had expressed sympathy. I had caught the medic’s eye and Meek’s and got Slice headed out. Get Slice someplace quiet, get some food and two litres of beer into them. Get them back on the barge and they can stop pretending talking to people isn’t hard work.

  It wasn’t, before, but Slice ain’t yet got over being dead a couple hours. The fighting weren’t delightful and having a leg and an arm that didn’t work from being spine-stuck was no kind of good, but having the thing from the spines wake up and rip your life out of a sudden was too much for Slice. Slice’s imagination has got loose on them since.

  Slice ain’t alone. We got not half the spine-stuck back for lasting. The thing from the spines didn’t damage anybody’s flesh when it woke, so the medics could get everybody’s torn-out spirits back in after the thing was destroyed. Never happened to me, but being dead for a bit seems to be worse than demons or Halt’s draught or too many Reems infantry and spine beasts.

  Meek did get spine-stuck. Meek’s been just as dead as Slice was. Meek’s working on demon-scars. Meek is mostly mad they can’t get out of bed and back to work. Which is fine if it’s real; Slow says it’s real. Slow ought to know.

  No sign Slow’s wrong about Meek. Two décades later, Meek’s mobile enough to get plunked in a tub with the water just above body temperature. It obviously helps. A décade after that Meek can start doing exercises in the water. They’re supposed to be gentle exercises. I get hauled in because I supposedly have a warrant of authority and commission, unlike anybody else in a hundred kilometres, and Meek ought thereby listen to me.

  On any given occasion, Meek might listen to Slow. Meek’s precisely deferential. Meek ain’t subordinate. I explain to Meek that Meek will follow the medics’ schedule or I will go get Fire if I have to walk up to the Round House and throw rocks at the ward. Meek tells me I’m evil. Meek follows the schedule.

  D-Day Minus 1426

  Year of Peace 543, Thermidor, Seventeenth Day (Summer)

  The second collective assigned space in the Creeks armoury makes boot-cinches.

  The prototypes and the exemplars and the initial production were done before there was an armoury; unlike the majority of the collectives occupying the armoury in the Line-gesith’s service, this collective moved in with its productive capacity sufficient to the task before it.

  The space is long and wide enough and high-ceilinged and the lights will provide the more sorcerously-skilled years of reliable conversation. This collective did not make its own focuses; they notice that the light is pleasant, strong, and even, and not that the light bindings are impossible. All their focuses fit on a hand-cart; they have that, a certain minimum of establishing paperwork, and little else.

  The tradition of standing in a line on a new shop floor and everyone setting a marble or a bearing down at once, that they can do. The floor is flat; nothing rolls. It’s not polished, it doesn’t feel any smoother than sawn wood, but it’s wholly flat.

  The armoury is in the keeping of the Line, though few of the people in it are in or of the Line. One of the Line personnel is Tankard, with an appointment no more specific than quartermaster. The boot-cinch collective are all Regular Threes, most recently from the Upper First Valley, and none of them are taller than one hundred and seventy-five centimetres. It’s disconcerting to clasp wrists with someone who could casually crush your head in either hand. No one admits it, as is the custom of the Commonweal, and paperwork happens.

  The next day brings a barge-load of ingots to the armoury, only three of them steel. There’s an ingot-slicing collective arriving by the same barge, come to work at the armoury on a Line contract. There’s an independent, Stick, arrived by other means. Stick is an under-median considerable talent, an energy-director and stuff-wreaker, volunteering to be on their service years early as the Galdor-gesith strives to even things out again after the prolonged emergency of the Second Commonweal’s founding.

  The Independent Stick has chalk, a large open working space in a tower adjacent to the barge turning pool, and a disconcerting tendency to giggle. The first five things Stick makes are three sizes of barrel-cradle; all the towers in the armoury have kitchens, and none of the kitchens came equipped beyond sinks and ovens. The second set are the boot-cinch collective’s list of requests. There are cordwainers everywhere in the Four Provinces, but the Line will have to send them boot cinches to have those applied to the next boot issue.

  A half-tonne slice of steel ingot arrives quietl
y in Stick’s working space. They need the steel, chalk, themselves, and a complete dimensioned drawing. The drawing has to be an original, not a copy, or the working won’t. Each repetition of the working consumes a drawing.

  In more regular times, in the one Commonweal, this was seen as an opportunity for apprentices; there have been several drafting collectives where the custom had been to have Stick make the drafting table for the apprentice from the apprentice’s own drawing. The drawing would go away in the post and the table would come back in a crate.

  Here in the Second Commonweal, today, drafting paper is short, though the wreaking doesn’t care what the drawing has been made on. Stick has made imprecise things from charcoal sketches on flat rocks. Pencil graphite, drafting tools, drafting tables, and those entirely trained in their use aren’t sufficient to present need as the settlement of the Folded Hills proceeds and new machinery is required.

  In the armoury, the Independent Stick hasn’t noticed, because Tankard knew of all of those shortages last year. Stick’s is not the only working which consumes drawings. There’s a stack of drawings Stick has been given, and another waiting in Tankard’s ledger-room, and another still that’s growing as various persons in the armoury have time. The law will tolerate favour-exchange around producing dimensioned drawings in return for altering your queue position to receive shelves or tables or storage racks, especially among the members of a single notional thorpe, and especially when the policy is clearly stated. Common enterprise presumptively encompasses mutual aid.

  Five hundred kilogrammes of steel will become one rigid machinist’s work table one-metre-twenty-by-four, with edge guttering and eight hollow cylinder legs. The lower cross-bracing does not come with, but can support, a shelf.

  Stick will chalk the signs around wherever the slab of steel was put; precise position does not matter. The relative position of the drawing matters some, and Stick puts it where it needs to be and puts the rock they’ve been using since before they were an independent on it. Stick has done this working thousands of times; the next hour involves four colours of chalk, many symbols and swooping lines, and much quickness, but no hesitation or doubt.

  Stick puts their selection of chalk away, leaves, locking the door behind them, and then locking it again when they come back from washing their hands and face. Walking into the working will do most folk less good than walking into molten steel.

  The drawing gives plan, elevation, and view. The spell starts with view, and then you must cycle through the six possible sequences of plan, elevation, and view, six times. Each of the sequence orderings is different, and it isn’t neatly algorithmic, it must be memorized.

  The slab of steel shudders with the first declamation of correspondences concerning view, elevation, plan. That first declaration takes one hundred and seven seconds, as will each of the thirty-six declarations. The language is an obscure variant of one of the languages of the Empire of the Ants, and does strange things to final syllables and several vowels. Each half-line of the declamation corresponds to the steel being struck by the Power. The slab rings as a slab; each blow is loud and metronomically regular.

  By the sixth declamation of correspondences, the steel is visibly changing shape and the sound has become a clang, tangled in echoes. If you were stricken with folly and standing over the drawing, it would smell hot; not smoking, but too hot for anything that shouldn’t burn. At the end, there’s a coiling mass of smoke where the drawing was, rising halfway to the ceiling before its rise rolls over and coils down. There’s a worktable, precisely to the drawn dimensions and hot from hammering.

  The spell adds no heat to the steel, only force; the result ought to be work-hardened into brittle fragility. It is not, by imposition of the Power. You can’t make hollow legs or intermediate-thread screw jacks with a hammer; each of eight hollow legs have one anyway, smooth and precise and exact.

  The Independent Stick sweeps up, a process of gestures and singing, unlocks the door, and goes to lunch.

  Four days later, the boot-cinch team gets their two work tables and a paperwork table and a pair of paperwork shelves and six stands for focuses. Materials racks can come later; there’s room, and no harm, in stacking hundred-kilo aluminium ingots and slabbed cobalt alloy on the floor. They get all the furniture with pairs of levelling wedges for where the furniture lacks adjustable feet. They have to sign for the level; that belongs to the armoury. The non-marring hammer, an obstreperous mass of brass and steel, is not nearly as handy as its Creek makers think. The team with the hoist focus who brought the furniture and have stayed to help position it carefully present themselves as being in no kind of hurry. Tankard has had words to say about injuries, false economy, and doing things correctly the first time.

  The boot-cinch team needs a day to get everything level and aligned. Dead-level work tables are a preference; the focus-stands must be, and aligned just precisely so with respect to one another.

  The boot-cinch team has a drip metronome. This space has running water, which their last shop did not. The large bottle filled, the angled copper drum head slid under the tripod, and the valve turned starts a steady even ticking.

  Everyone stands in careful places, and then something invisible takes a bite out the top cobalt slab. The pile doesn’t wobble. The chunk of cobalt alloy becomes spherical, and the air moves away from its sudden molten brightness; no sense in allowing oxidization you don’t want. The metal is drawn fine to be woven into continuous loops, nineteen strands to the looped millimetre-thick cable. The cloud of loops hovers, an edged mist.

  The next bite of cobalt alloy becomes rods, and then tubes, and then those become textured and indented and jagged with the curved teeth of ratchets. The rods snap into disks in time with the steady tick-tick of the falling water, and go to join the cloud.

  The back-plates and the draw-plates are next. Only the dials, the part you touch to turn the boot-reel to adjust it, are aluminium. Grey, as the Line requires, and not any of the rainbow of possibility present in aluminium. The dials go on the spools with a ripple of stretched-metal pinging, press-fits as a long and single-noted xylophone. Boot-cinch by boot-cinch, today’s work slides itself over wooden dowels laid across the work-table shelf supports. It isn’t packing for travel but it does keep the cables from tangling.

  Someone turns the metronome off. Everyone drinks water. There are weary faces; it still works better if they work through lunch, stop early, and wash before dinner. Fifteen kilograms of metal are a thousand finished boot-cinches, and there will be a thousand tomorrow and the day after. Twenty-five thousand a month, steadily.

  The whole team is happy. There are fourteen of them, and they’re going to be remembered for getting everyone better boots for less effort.

  D-Day Minus 1342

  Year of Peace 543, Brumaire, Eleventh Day (Fall)

  Duckling

  Meek gets turned loose from the hospital after six décades, pretty much right on the doctor’s prediction. It’s about when I get done with the logistics reading and send the big packet of worked exercises back to Slow. Slow’s been under official medical supervision and stuck at the armoury the whole time.

  Meek’s not done with the medics, but can go sleep in barracks and stop taking don’t-fall-apart. Walking back and forth is likely to help, everything’s moving the way it ought, but Meek’s in no kind of shape. Meek was much more worried about their hip than their ankles, the busted ankles were simple breaks. You stay off them long enough but not too long and flex your toes and rotate your feet with delicacy every time you think of it, you should heal fine. The hip was comprehensively crushed, enough so that Meek would have likely died even fifty years ago. Would have lost the leg if they’d lived.

  Barring a lot of time from an independent, and there weren’t any in the Creeks then. People have started making jokes about it; it’s been eight years if we count from Halt showing up to be a Staff Thaumaturgist. People from over in the Hills or who travelled in the First Commonweal say we
’re not getting the usual experience of having independents around, the old version’s more withdrawn.

  Some of them go on to say “less concentrated”, because having a whole table full in a refectory can be unsettling. I get it as a feeling of something a bit too hot on the stove, folks with a trained talent say it can be like a nose full of pure alcohol if you forget yourself and pay close attention.

  In Westcreek Town, there’s three general factions. The one that feels safer is about a fifth; the one that is determined to do the correct, polite thing is about two-fifths, down from nearly four, and two-fifths feel like it might be better if the independents lived somewhere else, not necessarily very far away, but somewhere the sort of trouble that seems to find them wouldn’t happen as near to other people. It hasn’t been anything like enough time for people to relax about the events on the Hills High Road. The feels-safer fifth point out that ‘perish in flames’ was, in its way, a desirable thing, evidence of a capacity for an immediate capable response.

  Not a response the Line could have made, not without a long march over mountains, which is near enough the same as not at all.

  “You think too much, Signaller,” Meek says. Meek’s hurting, five kilometres is a real walk all of a sudden, but ‘Signaller’ is harsh.

  Factual doesn’t mean it’s not harsh. The appointment came through all formal; my copy, and the little scroll-thing that the standard of the Second will absorb.

  “Part of the job.”

  “The job’s keeping track of the other standards. You’re worrying about long-term social trends or how we’re going to get enough artillery or who the Wapentake could recruit for a light battalion.”

  Creeks aren’t the best skulkers. Not in our characters, nor our thews.

  “Resources are at least half sorcerous.” Armour-focuses. Bronze bulls. Weeding. Any kind of focus that does anything in a manufactory. Water purification. Barges. I doubt there’s anybody alive who really knows how to rig a towline or train a six-horse-hitch for towing. There isn’t a lot of the economy that can really do without being sorcerous somewhere. We say ‘wreaking’, we use careful groups, but it’s sorcery, willed manipulation of the Power. And we still can’t quite manage to let ourselves believe the strong ones might be on our side.