A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  “Knots in the strings?” I want to know what I’m talking about when I say ‘strings’. Probably makes sense not to tell us yet, we’d be staggering around trying to understand stuff we’d never experienced.

  I still want to know. This feels like being sent out to weed unclaimed ground by poking things with a stick.

  “Instead of long threads, can you imagine them in rings?”

  Apparently I can, little snippets of the threads will break off and wind together into rings. I must look a generally successful kind of stunned, thinking about it, because Blossom goes on.

  “Get the rings going opposite directions. All the same is a different kind of magnet, opposite’s a bit like balancing stones in an arch, zero net force.”

  The little rings are stripy; if I remind myself I’m not seeing real things, it’s an idea my brain has about an idea that might describe something real, it’s easy, every second ring can just do a backflip, and then the little stripes from being wound threads can go the other way.

  The drill and the hammer just pop apart; the tongs hit my feet, mostly flat, so it just hurts, nothing breaks.

  Blossom, well, sticks out a hand and the tongs rise up to be grasped, handed to Zora. “You can heat these.”

  Zora’s face says “I can?” before it turns into a frown of concentration. The pincer end of the tongs blurs orange-hot, really fast. Zora’s face goes from concentration to surprised to pain, and then the tongs are being juggled around between what look like oven mitts. I don’t think you can make oven mitts out of snow, even if you are a sorcerer, but that’s what it looks like.

  “It’s not much heat, you can just push it straight up into the air,” Blossom says, still cheerful, and calm, as though someone wasn’t juggling red-hot iron a metre away.

  The frown comes back, and the tongs visibly cool. There’s a heat haze in the air, all headed straight up, but it doesn’t last half a second.

  “What are these mitts?” Zora sounds as if the real question is where they came from.

  “Your reaction to holding something hot.” Blossom pulls a big floppy sun-hat out of clear air. It’s green, and it’s got an amazing purple feather. Blossom waves it gently, it bends in the air as it ought. “Nothing here but Power; same with your mitts.” The hat vanishes, no ripples, nothing, it just goes away.

  “Get good enough and you can make things that move and speak, but it’s still just illusion.”

  Zora gets this look of mad glee; the oven mitts get embroidered cuffs, something mostly in red, run up past Zora’s elbows, develop fingers, and vanish. There’s a distinct pause, and the whole thing reappears, vanishes, reappears, sticks while Zora’s fingers wriggle, and the gloves vanish again.

  Blossom’s voice goes teacher. “Anything you make like this that you’re not paying attention to has a tendency to vanish, before anyone gets hopeful about clothes.”

  Kynefrid gets a very thoughtful look.

  Blossom points at Kynefrid and Chloris, a chin-lift, but it’s obvious. Sorcerers don’t seem to point at things with their fingers. At least our teachers don’t.

  “You two didn’t lighten lunch, so you get a water-cask off the waggon and back here.”

  “How?” Kynefrid, who looks like someone who has a good sense of how much a full hundred-litre cask weighs.

  Blossom looks at Dove.

  “The Line trick is a rolling loop of the Power; you balance the weight on the top of it, and roll it along. Big squishy loop.” Blossom shrugs. “Probably want to imagine the loop lifting the cask before you move it.”

  You can move big things, barges and houses, big things, or huge boulders, with the right kind of sixty-four-person focus, but I never knew how they did it.

  “Zora?” Blossom says.

  “Steam said not to think of the cans as heavy, so I didn’t.” Zora’s shrug is very similar to Blossom’s. “I don’t know why it worked.”

  “Direct lift force,” Blossom says. “Works better on small things; you don’t want to be trying to balance anything large that way, where large is I’d really like a wheelbarrow.”

  “And we already know Edgar rolled up gravity like a sock.” Blossom has the grin back.

  I really wish I knew if I’d been clever or stupid.

  Chloris and Kynefrid get the cask back over here, a stand, and a bucket with a spout. The cask gets up on the stand, too, and nothing gets dropped. Both of them seem surprised by that.

  We all go through the wet-the-drill step, how to check you’ve got all the chips and dust — “Don’t want to pad the rock ahead of the drill,” says Blossom — and then it’s back to drilling with the next length up.

  Dove hands me the hammer. All the magnetism is out of it, quietly enough that I didn’t notice Dove doing it at all.

  “Not used a five-kilo sledge much,” gets me a grin, and a “Start slow,” so I do.

  Not much like tapping window brads, but there’s an arc there, and I can get my sense of the Power into it, like running my hand up the nap of flannel the slow way. It’s a bad idea to try to swing the hammer down on an inhale, that was like punching myself in the gut, it’s up with the in, out, in, down for awhile, before I can manage up with in, hold, down.

  It works, pretty much entirely to my surprise. It sparkles and feels chewy but it doesn’t smell of anything but sweaty people and stone dust and mud.

  After a couple of decimetres, it’s stop, pour, pull, and back. Dove reminds me to drink; one of the ten-litre cans each is indeed just a bucket of water. It’s not that warm out, it’s a pleasant enough day but it’s getting late in the year, and I might still need all ten litres.

  I don’t hear what Kynefrid says, it’s quiet, might be an offer to switch with Chloris after they’ve pulled their first drill, but the results are hard to miss.

  “Not frail — ”CLANG — “not delicate — ”CLANG — “if I must — ”CLANG — “do this unseemly — ”CLANG — the way Chloris says unseemly you’d think it was ‘gratuitous cannibalism’ or ‘become an aristocrat’ — “messy, crazy THING — ”CLANG — “I will — ”CLANG — “NOT be delicate — ”CLANG — “and get the job DONE.” CLANG.

  Kynefrid obviously, visibly, decides against arguing the point, and keeps on holding the drill.

  There’s a break in the middle of the morning and a quick lesson in sharpening rock drills. We all get to try Zora’s oven mitt trick. Mine come out segmented, like armour gauntlets. “Not very much like armour gauntlets,” Dove says, and leaves it at that. They work, everybody’s work, we re-temper the whole set of drills; we’ve got three holes done.

  “The rest should go faster,” says Blossom, still smiling.

  Let’s just say we get the job done.

  Even with the Power, with a good lunch — bread and pickles and amazing pumpkin chutney and half a kilo of dry sharp cheese, and there were bottles, a litre of cider and a couple litres of the frothy joy-beets drink each — and lots of water, swinging a hammer half the hours of daylight, even in the fall, is something you notice.

  Something that leaves me feeling like my arms can’t decide if they’re going to catch fire or fall off.

  Getting the second empty water-cask back on the waggon is harder work than getting it off full was, but we get that done, too. It and its stand are the last thing. Twenty two-metre holes in — weak — rock, all neatly plugged with wooden pegs and ready for whatever comes next.

  Blossom’s still grinning. Dusty, did as much drilling as any of us, but not looking anything like tired. I don’t know if this is an inspiration to learn or a source of despair.

  Blossom gets the waggon turned around without doing anything visible, or, so far as I can tell, invisible, to communicate with the bronze bulls.

  “Get dinner, get breakfast, sleep in between, wash at least once. Leave the gravity alone unless I’m there or Wake’s there to supervise. Back here after breakfast tomorrow,” Blossom says, from up on the waggon seat, and rolls off.

  We pick up th
e lunch cans, and start walking.

  Well, shambling.

  I can about manage shambling.

  Chapter 9

  It’s bucketing down rain the next morning.

  We did see Steam at dinner. There was advice, and some instruction, on how to do breathing exercises to encourage muscle recovery. It worked, I could feel it working. From the way I feel now, I’d be dead if the exercises didn’t work.

  Kynefrid had asked about the wisdom of using breath as a metaphor for life; all of us had been taught that you weren’t dead until your brain was dead, that the first really reliable test for death that anybody could use involved listening for a heartbeat.

  “Brain, heart, sure, but stop breathing and neither of those will keep working long,” Steam had said. “If you’re trying to put yourself back together, it has to work, and you’d rather it worked without having to think too hard.”

  Have to think pretty hard about leaving the tent. It’s chilly, the rain will be cold, I think we all hurt, I know I want to whine but no one does. Maybe nobody wants to be first.

  We all get moving. Part of that might be the knowledge of which direction breakfast is in.

  The rain is cold all right, it doesn’t help the ache.

  Steam, I don’t know if it’s showing or explaining, how to dry off and stay dry helps. Bad enough being in a refectory where you’re not on the work rotation without dripping on the floor.

  Breakfast helps. I’m not quite miserable enough before to consider drinking some of the wood-lettuce-root tea the Creeks all drink. It’d be a closer thing if it didn’t smell like the way cold cooked onion feels.

  The walk up to the Tall Woods — no one wants to use ‘new’, it’s easier to think of it as having been there all along — may not help, exactly, but practise making lunch lighter and keeping the rain off at the same time is at least a distraction. And the walk probably does loosen some muscles and help a bit.

  Being grinned at by Blossom doesn’t help at all.

  There’s no waggon today, just a couple boxes, proper ones with latches and hinged lids, and a handful of sticks like extra-length broom handles.

  Blossom’s wearing outright gauntlets, can’t call them gloves. Serious gauntlets; whatever they’re for is dangerous. They don’t look like metal or I’d say they were from fighting armour. Odd colours, too, I think it’s stains of some kind.

  “Good morning!” Blossom says it sincerely, hard cold rain and all. We’re two, three hundred metres from the actual trees, just outside the ward-loop around all the novel terrain, and I can feel the ward but the overwhelming thing is the way the rain roars on the leaves.

  “Now that we’ve got those holes drilled, we can break the rock up in a controlled way. We want controlled so no one gets their skull crushed by flying rocks, first, and second, we want controlled so we’ve got a good idea how big the hole will be before we start.”

  There’s something about the way Blossom says ‘skull crushed’. It’s not any least kind of approval, but it’s not like there’s going to be any kind of surprise, either. Right. This is actually dangerous.

  Blossom’s head comes up a bit, looking at each of us instead of looking at all of us. “Do any of you remember why steam’s impractical?”

  There’s an abrupt quirk to Blossom’s lips. “Water vapour, steam, not the Independent Steam.”

  Kynefrid speaks doubtfully into the extended pause. “Something about adding heat the second time.”

  Blossom nods. “Thermodynamic cycles. If there’s a Null available to keep the Power away, you can get work out of heat mechanically. But then you have to add heat again. It’s the cyclical nature that does it, the Power objects and you get serious mischief. If there’s no Null, anything that works by moving heat explodes. Using high-pressure steam to cook food faster will eventually explode, less immediately but certainly.”

  Everybody’s nodding. Being careful with kettles, it doesn’t matter if you’re making soup or dyeing wool, everybody knows about being careful with kettles. A lid mustn’t fit too tightly.

  “An explosion is just stuff flying apart, stored energy becoming kinetic energy all at once. You can get that by storing energy in the structure of the stuff with heat or with chemistry. Enough Power in a continuous application of will can keep the mischief out until you remove your will from the working.”

  Hard to tell in the rain, but this is a locked stillness, not just silence. I don’t think any of us think we can do that. I really hope Blossom doesn’t.

  “Since on-site, as-needed high-energy chemistry is more work than we need to do today, we’re going with something simple.” Blossom’s grin has edges. I’m feeling my spine ache at me as my back tenses up solid. This isn’t safe, echoes through my head in a voice I don’t recognize.

  Dove grins back at Blossom. Kynefrid looks totally bored. Chloris and Zora have nearly identical fixed looks. I don’t suppose respectable young Creeks blow stuff up very often. Nobody did in the part of the Commonweal, First Commonweal, I was from, there were lots of rocks but not much outcrop.

  “Time to turn the umbrellas off,” Blossom says, and obviously starts getting damp. You can hear the rain rattling off our hats, the tone off Blossom’s hat is different, harder, more like a roof than fabric. “You never have any kind of actual Power working going on when you’re blasting. That’s rule one. Rule zero is you don’t even consider it if you’re drunk, hungover, unwell, or are otherwise not able to supply your full attention.”

  Rain’s still cold.

  “Rule two; have some place to hide when the boom happens.”

  We all look around; it’s pretty much locally flat.

  “Over the ridge line?” Zora sounds doubtful; that’s a couple hundred metres away.

  Blossom nods. “You want to hide where the boom can’t get you, not where you think it won’t get you. Over the ridge is correct.”

  Zora looks a bit surprised, and then cheered. I know I’m happier having a hill between me and the boom. Power…I don’t want to have to rely on the Power just yet.

  “Everybody, tidying exercise; you do not want to have any residual Power on you anywhere.”

  So we all do. It only seems silly for the first few breaths-worth, now, and then stuff happens, the texture of the rain stops smelling like roses and starts being more like cat fur. I try to think about the rain washing any bits of Power away. It seems less oppressive that way.

  When we’re done, Blossom has one of the cases open, and is holding something slung in a hankie with a loose grip on the hankie corners between least and third fingers.

  “Rule three; you never hold these things in your hand.”

  “It’s that reactive?” Kynefrid does a sort of shuffle-step, half a step back and half a step forward. Kind of inclined to do the same thing.

  “Growing your arm back is that unpleasant.” Blossom says this with immense conviction. “Or your eyes, or half your face, presuming I can keep you from dying.”

  This grin is just flat frightening. “First aid is not my best skill.”

  “These work by resistance to conducting the Power. They’re not supposed to go off on their own, but nothing’s immune to mischief.”

  Or one of us having a novice failure of control. Blossom doesn’t say it. Blossom pauses, so we’ve all got time to think it for ourselves.

  “When they go off, the boom is just little stuff moving really fast; faster than sound in the medium. It’s not connected, it’s just all flying along, and it’s tiny, so it bounces. That means it follows the path of least resistance.” Blossom waves the hankie, and you can see something heavy enough to swing in it. “Like this, the hankie dies in fluff, I feel like I’ve been whacked in the hand with a plank, but it’s not likely anything will break. Better than getting your hand stepped on by a horse, on the odds.”

  “A live riding horse.” Dove says this rather dryly, I don’t know how anyone sounds dry with cold water running off them. I suppose the rest of us could
try it if we wanted.

  Blossom nods. They don’t keep all that many horses in this part of the Creeks, and the ones I’ve seen are enormous draft beasts. “One of those draft horses would be for sure worse.”

  “Hold it in your hand, the force is contained by your hand. When the boom happens, you lose that hand to the elbow.”

  Blossom wiggles the fingers of the hand that’s not holding the hankie. “That’ll put you behind on your studies.”

  Chloris laughs. It’s a bit ragged, but it’s a real laugh.

  “Everybody come closer; you need to be able to see this.”

  Blossom sets the hankie down, flips it open with a sodden flap. “This is a couple of copper ends, and the twisted stuff between them is technically wool.”

  “Wool?” I have been getting better at believing things since I woke up in Westcreek, but this one’s tough.

  “It’s iron and carbon and a coating that’s more like the outsides of ants than hair. It works for this because the coating fails all at once and the carbon conducts Power well. But the thing it grows on is generally considered a sheep, so wool.” Blossom sounds amused.

  “Technically.” Dove is grinning, and the dry tone won’t stick, this is clearly very funny if you know what they’re talking about.

  Nobody else does, and Blossom makes a waving gesture. “The copper ends have a very minor working on them, so that there’s a preference in one cap for the Power to flow in, and in the other to not flow out. There’s also a predilection toward being noticeable to talent.”

  Blossom looks at us carefully; none of us get curious about what that means and reach out. Might be the rain, might just be good sense.

  Blossom nods.

  “The predilection takes touch to set up; you can’t just fumble around, notice these things are there, even out of the box — ” there are runes all over the boxes, incised in the brass edging — “and set them off by accident with a little too much Power when you’re curious.”

  “So we’re going to try one each, on the surface. Flood it with Power and it flies apart. Then we’re going to come back and set the actual charge.”