A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Not thinking of the cans as heavy gets tough, quickly; both of them slosh. Not the same slosh, one of them might be bottles, the lid looks loose. The other one’s the same can of water thing as yesterday.

  I’ve got a decent enough hat. I can’t say I’ve actually got glare in my eyes, even crossing the bridge back to the east side of the West Wetcreek — Dove and Chloris and Zora between them have me and Kynefrid about cured of referring to it as a river or just ‘Westcreek’ — and over a lot of sunlit water, but it feels like glare, anyway.

  Chloris suggests stopping to rest our hands at the other side of the bridge; Steam says it’s a learning experience, keep going.

  Kynefrid looks entirely weary for a second, and Zora gets what I’m starting to think is a standard look of betrayal, and my head turns a little to see if Dove is still right behind me. Dove’s swinging both ten-litre cans in one hand as though they were empty.

  The cans weren’t empty when Steam handed them out. The bails don’t squeak like that when they’re empty.

  The Power exerts physical force just fine. Lots of what makes the Bad Old Days bad involve having wizards squash you, or your house, or the milk cow, in a fit of pique from a long way away.

  There’s a place near where I used to live that has a pond shaped like a boot-print a couple hundred metres long. Local knowledge has it the result of some wizard of old deciding to stomp on an enemy, good and hard.

  It’s a deep pond. Fills up with turtles every fall.

  Only place it isn’t the Bad Old Days is either Commonweal. Trying to remember that, I think I have to remember that every day I’m learning sorcery.

  I don’t want to hand my lunch to the wide sky. Doesn’t matter to lunch if it’s incompetence or wrath.

  Getting into a tug-of-war with the vastness of the earth that’s pulling down doesn’t seem like a good plan either. The earth will win. I can kinda feel how you could do that, there’s a dip in nothingness around each of the cans, and me, and the bridge, and everyone else, everything’s got its own. It’s not a bendy dip. Filling it in probably makes it deeper, deeper is just the same as piling more stuff into the dip; our individual dips are bigger than the cans, and the bridge is way, way larger. I think you could, I could, flatten it out, but I don’t want to do the experiment, not walking up a hill in the morning sun.

  There is a way, though, Dove’s doing it. Asking seems like cheating, Steam’s outright said this is a lesson.

  If I make my arms stronger, I have to get everything, skin, bones, tendons, not just muscle, like it’s not just the new chuck that has to turn twice as fast when you rebuild a lathe. That could go nineteen kinds of wrong, and there’s still this hangover-thing, I doubt I’m thinking as well as I could.

  The dips all go straight down. I wonder if I can kinda tip one, rather than bending it? Like moving up a ramp, instead of a straight lift?

  Steam’s head turns. “Edgar — not like that. That’s too exciting for just after breakfast.”

  All right, then, as Chloris looks more baffled than angry and Kynefrid just looks baffled. Kynefrid’s lanky, nearly skinny, but seems to figure carrying maybe twenty kilos up to the meadow was no big deal and isn’t worrying about making the job easier.

  Spin the dip, so the can wants to rise up the sides?

  It’s really hard to get the dip to rotate at all, and Steam is looking alarmed at a quarter-turn, so I stop.

  Zora’s got something, it’s like towing two little boats on the water, the bails of the cans angling back. Doesn’t look anything like as difficult as carrying them.

  Rot.

  Floating things aren’t lighter, they’re less relatively dense; air’s thin, water’s thicker, more things float in water. There’s stuff that’s thicker than water, collectives who make jewel-bearings for clocks use it to float the bits they don’t want out of crushed rock. There were clockmakers across the road and about a kilometre down, before. Dunno where they are now, if they wound up going upstream or over into the Second Commonweal.

  Make the air thicker and I’ll have to drag the thick air along, that’s not going to help. Make lunch more widely distributed? Difficult to see how that’s a good outcome.

  Huh. The dips scale with how heavy the thing is. What if I just sort of roll the edge of the dip down, like the top of a sock? Make the dip itself float higher, if that even makes sense?

  It works!

  Fiddle a little with the amount of roll, and I can get it, carefully, so each can’s about half a kilo. I stop there; I still don’t want to hand my lunch to the sky. Plus Steam started looking alarmed again somewhere around the kilo mark.

  The rest of the walk goes a bit quicker after that, or it feels like it, anyway.

  Chloris is looking plenty steamed, and Kynefrid’s sweating, but they make it fine. Zora’s had a nice even tow going on the whole way, and Dove’s still swinging both pails. I’ve got the roll balanced and have about stopped fiddling with it the last kilometre or so, to Steam’s apparent relief.

  Just east of the meadow and down, over the hill, right down below where we found the dark rock to be highest yesterday, there’s a waggon and a couple of bronze bulls. They’re doing that disturbing happy contemplative chewing thing, like they were actually alive and ate stuff.

  Someone comes round the waggon, patting both bronze bulls absently on the forehead. Doesn’t look quite like a Creek, colour’s wrong, hair’s one shade of black and skin tone’s at the medium end of brown, but my first impression is that this is Dove’s kid sister.

  Dove’s pails get set down with a clunk. “Captain Blossom!”

  Whoever it is grins. “Hi Dove. Just Blossom.”

  Dove looks plausibly embarrassed.

  Zora looks young, is young, still in youth. Wake doubtless thinks we’re all young. Whoever this is looks young, too, but not the same way. There’s something else there, which I suppose goes with the Captain.

  Line Captain? Add an extra ten years on the looks, that still seems unlikely. Maybe a barge team captain? Different kinds of people age at different rates, look different in their ages.

  Ow.

  Glare, nothing but glare in the world.

  Just exactly what you want when you’re feeling hungover.

  Nothing but glare, though. I mean, it’s not actually there, or my hat would be on fire, but no horrible texture or accompanying sounds or smells of forlorn longing. Just straight up why-did-you-look-at-the-sun-through-a-telescope glare.

  You’d think I’d learn about the whole mystical perception thing and teachers. Even Steam looks blue and has too many arms. Doesn’t give me shaking fits, but ow.

  Steam looks, well, be fair, it’s not the mean kind of amused.

  “Blossom, this is Edgar. You’ll approve, Edgar got stuck on trying to alter the curve of gravitational potential energy.”

  Blossom grins at me, too, and the grin suddenly gets a good deal brighter. “Can you put them down?”

  I don’t see why not, it’s just unrolling the sock. Works fine, there’s the moment of the full weight on my hands, but that’s much better than the full weight the whole way up here.

  Blossom gives me an approving nod, Steam introduces the other three, and Blossom says “Everybody grab a hammer or a drill rod,” waving one of each in either hand, up from off the waggon bed.

  Steam says “See you at dinner,” gives us a general wave, and trots off as we’re moving forward to be handed implements.

  It’s surprising how much Steam leaving makes me nervous.

  There are face covers, tight wire mesh you can see through but which will stop the chips, and some long tongs for holding the drill rods, so you can be mostly out of the arc of the hammer and still turn the rod.

  Chloris and Kynefrid have a brief argument about who gets the hammer; Chloris wins it by the expedient of holding the five-kilo sledge straight out from the shoulder in one hand. It doesn’t quiver, despite staying there while Chloris points out at moderate length that bei
ng considered frail would be found personally and specifically offensive.

  Dove mutters something about a fortunate lack of horseshoes, and tosses me — gently — a drill rod. I see no reason to argue.

  Besides, there are what look like two-and-a-half-metre drill rods in the waggon bed. Pretty sure we’re all going to get a turn.

  Yesterday’s marker pegs are still there.

  I don’t know why they wouldn’t be, but that stopped meaning ‘of course nothing has moved them’ sometime yesterday.

  Kynefrid’s used a chalkline before, I’ve used a chalkline before, we get to set the line; there’s enough bare dirt that there’s only a couple places we have to toss some sad plant. Wrong kind of tongs for it, but they’ll do.

  Then there’s the other line; four metres away, another twenty meters long. Holes every two metres. We’re in for a long day.

  Blossom makes sure everybody’s facing mostly the same way with the hammers, all on one line; if a hammer flies, it’s going to make some sad plant sadder, not cause a casualty. I can hear the team lead who does machine safety in, in what used to be my collective, saying “casualty”.

  The top of the dirt isn’t sure if it’s dirt or rock; the rock itself is pretty mushy stuff. That’s still a lot of holes.

  Zora’s holding for Blossom in the middle, I’m holding for Dove closest to the meadow, and Chloris and Kynefrid have the outside. Two metres doesn’t seem like much distance when you’re about to have someone swinging a sledgehammer on both sides of you.

  Blossom picks up what I supposed was a spare drill rod, about a metre long. We’re going to get there, but what we’ve got now are not much more than half a metre long. Blossom steps out in front, turns around, and goes all teacher.

  “You did a big working yesterday, you’re all talent-tired, and this looks like a nice simple physical day involving hammers, to let you get charged back up.” Blossom looks left and right. It’s a real smile, there’s real friendliness. It’s not reassuring.

  “If you were using a focus, that would be basic safety advice, as basic as everybody using eye shields.” Blossom gestures at the tilted-up mesh mask perched on their head.

  “Since we’re trying to turn you into accomplished sorcerers and want to get there before your talent kills you, that’s not what we’re doing.”

  Blossom grabs the metre of drill rod by both ends and twists it into a coil, both hands moving in circles. The rod winds into a spiral with horrible noises. It looks just like a large coil spring, if coil springs were red-hot enough to show a glow in daylight.

  Blossom drops the coil, and there’s a smell of scorched dirt and a few small flames as sad vegetation dies by fire.

  “If I have to stick to muscles, I’m not that strong.” Blossom says this conversationally. “It’s not totally unknown, but most sorcerers don’t put that kind of effort into physical strength.”

  “If all of you stick to muscles, we’re not going to get these holes drilled today, and the more the schedule slips, the longer you’ll be living in a tent in the rain.” It’s a totally friendly smile. If it weren’t for the words, I’d say Blossom looked kind. I can see Dove out of the corner of my eye, nodding, no look of surprise, no look of distress, this seems reasonable to Dove.

  Hard not to wonder where Dove’s expectations come from. All the Creeks I’ve met so far seem like decent people, lots of them are friendly, no one even seems to mind having five students dropped on their refectory without even being put in a dishwashing rotation.

  “So the plan has you working through the talent-tired. That builds your ability to summon the Power, it gives you practice with noticing when you’re about to actually damage yourselves through overstrain, and it’s not very much Power, so it should still be recuperative.”

  “Drilling twenty holes in rock is recuperative?” Zora, voice full of a wish to be precise and careful and get this correct.

  “Yes.” Blossom says this with total conviction. “Every Independent has ways of staying awake and useful for a décade at least. A nice simple day practising strength enhancement through simple concentration on the Power and getting a good night’s sleep at the end? After food? Completely recuperative.”

  It’s not a joke at all. Blossom means it. And Dove is nodding again.

  Sounds like the notion of balance between ‘get the job done’ and ‘don’t harm yourself’ is different for Independents.

  Drilling isn’t very hard as an idea; you whack the drill with the hammer, some rock breaks, you turn the drill, you whack it with the hammer again, more rock breaks, you get a hole a decimetre deep or so, you pour some water down the hole before you pull the drill rod, and the stone chips mostly stick to the drill. As the hole gets deeper, you switch to using longer and longer drill rods.

  In practice? You’ve got to hold the drill plumb; you’ve got to not flinch when someone with a big hammer is swearing just over there, you’ve got to get methodical about twisting the drill, without holding it so tight in the tongs that you’re making it harder for the person on the hammer to do anything. Traditionally, there aren’t any tongs, you hold the drill with your hands, and presumably just hope your luck is good enough that the person with the hammer, who might be you, doesn’t miss today. Hitting the drill over and over again, precisely, isn’t easy, though it doesn’t have to be hit all that hard, at least not on this rock. You need enough to flake rock, it’s not like you’re trying to stun an aurochs.

  If you could find an aurochs.

  Dove’s first couple of swings are tentative, and then Dove gets into a rhythm, and not flinching from the swearing is nothing compared to not flinching from the way the blow kicks back up the tongs handles into my hands. The ringing doesn’t help, either; everybody with a hammer has a rhythm, but they’re not the same and even with only three it’s a lot like the evil opposite of music.

  I’m not doing anything that requires any strength; squatting and holding the thing vertical isn’t effortless, but it’s not anything like swinging a sledge. So I start thinking about talent, and if I can do a better job.

  The tongs are some drag; hands would be, too, but I ought to be able to hold the drill. I mean, if I can make a couple ten-litre cans light, fixing the drill vertically should be pretty straightforward, that dip may be narrow for what’s really just a half-metre steel bar, but it’s there, I can see it, and it wants to point down. Getting the round top of the dip to centre on the physical round top of the drill is really easy.

  Spinning the drill by spinning the dip won’t do me much good. It’s a lot of effort, and from the way Steam reacted it’s got a messy way to go wrong.

  But it’s steel, and it’s right there, and it’s not the tongs because I’m touching the tongs and I’m not touching the drill and it’s not the hammer because the hammer keeps moving in big sweeping arcs. So there should be some other way to get the Power to grab at it; I’m pretty sure there are enchantments that move steel things, and if an enchantment can do it, awake live talent can, too.

  I start reaching into the drill, trying to feel if there’s anything that changes when I turn it with the tongs. I get a bell sound, a big ripply thing like a sheet flapping on a clothesline, every time the hammer hits it, a bitter taste like overcooked soap, and a pattern that feels something like wood grain. It’s not wood grain, but there’s the same kind of thing, strings of something with something else holding them together.

  If it was wood, it’d be awkward, the strings are short and mixed and kinda twist. Not really wood grain, I can imagine them straighter, if they’re straight it’s almost like gear teeth, I can make the drill rotate.

  And I can, too, except the tongs get ripped out of my hands, the whole drill rings when it’s struck with a ripple that runs through the gear teeth and doesn’t move them. Dove catches the hammer at the top of the backswing, breaks their rhythm, doesn’t swing down, pauses, and then sets everything down. The spurt of rock dust falls quickly, it’s not very fine, not like sanding
dust from wood. The drill is stuck to the face of the hammer, the tongs are stuck to the drill, and standing on the drill to pull on the hammer doesn’t work, Dove can’t get the hammer off the drill.

  Blossom says “Stop.” It’s not loud, it’s entirely conversational, but you don’t, I can feel this like cold oil trickling down my neck, you don’t hear it with your ears. Chloris stops hammering. I think that’s the stop Blossom meant.

  I stand up, which is an improvement; Zora and Kynefrid do, too. Dove hands Blossom the hammer, drill, and tongs, all stuck together.

  “Good thing it was a short drill.” Blossom sounds amused. Better, Dove looks amused. It wouldn’t have been my shoulders that got wrenched if the drill couldn’t lift clear of the hole.

  “Thorough job of magnetizing, Edgar. Trying for something you could turn?”

  I nod. Magnets, well, magnets are something they show you in school. Somebody has to make them but I’ll admit to not thinking of them as made things.

  Really need to start thinking of stuff done by the Power as made.

  “How do I turn it off?” I say, taking back the mass of stuck-together tools.

  I did it, obviously I get to turn it off.

  “How did you turn it on?” Blossom’s still sounding cheerful. I am starting to wonder what it takes to get Blossom to seem anything else.

  I can feel my face contorting. I don’t have the words for any of this stuff. “String? There were all these little bits like wood-grain, only jumbled; I was imagining them lining up.”

  Blossom grins at me. “That’ll do it.”

  Blossom’s voice pitches up, makes it a general comment. “Magnets come from organizing small particles, usually small crystals, though it can be smaller. There’s a bunch of theory, but for where you are now, if it’s a magnet and you don’t want it to be, you disorganize its insides.”

  Another grin. “Since we need the drill rod to keep working as a drill rod, it needs to stay this shape and it needs to keep its temper, so no heating it up.”