A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Zora giggles. “Wild yeast in the beer.”

  “Just so,” Wake says, approving. It happens, and it’s bad, and no one really knows the odds.

  Chloris’s face lifts from Chloris’ hands to give a dark look at the half-full state of the second plate. Chloris stabs something with a fork, almost hard enough to risk the plate. “Sorry. I know I should have a question, but I’m stuck on necromancer.”

  Wake’s look goes gentle. “Scarcely famed in story, but useful to the Peace; much of what a necromancer finds themselves doing is asking the freshly dead to explain what they had been doing, just before, or had meant when writing their will. Much else is assuring that someone yet lives, or to survey the general rates of death in wildernesses, to detect new weed species.”

  Chloris’ nose wrinkles. “I’m going to have to learn how to animate skeletons, though, aren’t I? Even if it’s just to make sure I can fight a sorcerer from outside the Commonweal?”

  Wake nods. “All of you will. We seek to teach you what you can learn, not what is most narrowly applicable to your particular expression of talent.”

  Oh, why not. If the answer is worse than ‘scion of the spider god’ I’ve grounds to spend the day having a good gibber. “The metaphysical-part stuff; we’re eventually moving our whole minds there, so there must be a way to think with it. So I think that means using the Power changes how you think, which must mean it changes your personality.”

  “Precisely correct,” says Wake. “The important thing, the matter to keep in the forefront of your mind, whatever substrate that mind happens to be using, is that the personality you get is chiefly a matter of your conscious choices.”

  Which is good, in that it’s basically ‘don’t fail’, and failure already means death, so it’s hardly worse, and horrible, because it means I’m going to have to start believing I’m a sorcerer right now.

  “Wait, the Power works with our brains; if we’re — ” Zora makes the gesture of not knowing the word — “growing a new brain, growing more brain, something, can we get more talented? Or less, or differently?”

  “You’re growing a new brain, that you’ll eventually move into, rather like building a new house in stages before you move from the old one into it; you can certainly get less talented, more is expected with maturity but a slow process, and differently isn’t impossible.”

  “So I could learn to enchant stuff?” Zora’s voice is full of hope.

  “I expect you’ll all learn to construct enchantments. It’s not exceptionally challenging as a skill. The rare thing is the talent which views the Power so the most natural way to produce a spell is to fix it in metal and words.

  “It is not entirely unlike cooking,” Wake goes on. “Following the recipe, making small improvements, adjusting to local ingredients, is something most anyone can do if they care to expend the necessary effort. The insight to invent a way to make cake out of gelatin and cold fat and coarse meal is much less common, and what we mean by describing someone as an enchanter.”

  “It makes that much difference?” Kynefrid, who has a clean plate and from the sound a full brain.

  “An enchanter can hit you with a thousand years.” I tip my head up and back, to see who said this, and then tip it promptly forward again. Standing right behind me, not a portion of someone’s anatomy to tip your head into without specific invitation.

  Wake makes an wry face, Dove looks past me rather fondly, Kynefrid looks lightly stunned, and, looking left, Chloris looks like Kynefrid except for the angle of regard. Zora sparkles with hope.

  There’s this strange tickle of a feeling, and when I reach into it, not even really thinking, I’m looking out of Dove’s eyes. I look like a fish, and close my mouth. The person standing behind me, well, it’s the Wicked Queen from a fairytale.

  Not a Creek, curly gold hair, tall as one, but way too skinny even ignoring the hair, and an implausible, I would have said impossible five seconds ago, body-language smoothly combining ‘Oooh, hello’ and ‘Anger me and die’. As much as I can see past myself, implausibly good-looking, too, to the point where the second thing you think is that some kind of cheating must be involved.

  “Hey kid,” this person says, looking at Zora, “you were asking about baking?”

  Zora nods, twice, and looks at Wake. Wake makes a gesture of dismissal, and Zora shoots up so fast their chair would have fallen without a hasty grab for the back, and then Dove has to — my vision is going double, I’m seeing Dove’s view and my own — wave at Zora or Zora would have left plates and cutlery behind. There’s a blush, but Zora doesn’t slow down very much, collecting utensils.

  Back of my own eyes, I see Wake looking speculatively at Dove. Dove’s looking back at Wake entirely calmly. No idea how Dove can possibly do that.

  “If you take Edgar with you, can you not do that?” Wake asks it as a real question, it’s not an instruction phrased as a question.

  “I can intend not,” Dove says.

  Zora’s pattered out with, well, it has to be Grue. I am going to have to count on my fingers to figure out how many different kinds of joke that choice of name is. Chloris is finishing off the now-cold second plate, radiating frustration. Kynefrid appears to be reassembling a capacity for social function, and I’m medium certain Kynefrid’s entirely one for the lads.

  Wake stays thoughtful until Kynefrid and Chloris have headed out themselves. I think they’ll be in the tavern before they notice just how clean Wake’s unspoken wave of dismissal left them. Chloris is furious enough to maybe not notice at all. Or to want a whole barge crew.

  Wake’s coffee mug is set down with a kind of finality, then Wake turns toward me. “Edgar, it’s preferred if you don’t, if any student in your stage of development doesn’t, spend any lengthy time alone. It’s much like a recent mild concussion; you’re very likely to be well, but you might fall over, and then the sooner someone notices the better. For you especially, with an adult talent instantiating in a single décade, this is a concern.”

  “So I should — ?” I was looking forward to collapsing in a heap, tent or not.

  “Come join me for lunch,” Dove says. “You’ll reassure Mama, and you’ll get to see at least a bit of the West Wetcreek.”

  If Wake looked even slightly less casually beatific, the impossibility of this being a set-up would convince me that it wasn’t.

  But, hey, I can collapse in a heap on the boat.

  So I nod ‘yes’.

  Chapter 13

  This barge is, it looks like a lot of the barges are, meant to move people. There’s a pilot house, right up in the front, above a cabin with windows and a nearly flat roof, that has some part of the driving enchantment in it. There’s a steady rhythmic thumping from up there as twelve people, twelve sets of feet, on the barge team dance Power into the rest of the driving enchantment, down in the keel.

  You could get fifty people in here, standing. It’s just me and Dove; stuff moves on Déci, but not a lot of people, even if some of the emptiness was waiting for the third barge.

  I’ve about got used to the thumping, there’s a little niggling sense of the Power moving around to it that I have to work at ignoring. I’ve gone from wondering if I should ask Dove if this was a setup to wondering how to ask Dove if this was a setup when Dove says “We need to talk.”

  Throwing myself out the back of the cabin into the hold isn’t really practical, the back wall looks like a vertical extension of a structural bulkhead.

  Bother.

  “Skittish reflexes there, Edgar.” Dove sounds like Dove being Dove, instead of whatever persona’s presented when being a good student. It’s not helping with the feeling rattled. That was a very specific tone of ‘we need to talk.’ Those conversations don’t go well.

  “You never used a focus before you wound up in Halt’s clever experiment, did you?”

  I shake my head no. “No talent, not a Null, just totally flat. Couldn’t latch to a focus.”

  “There’s this t
hing called consonance. For a focus, it’s the word for what happens when it works, when everybody involved’s brains basically get along. The other thing, everybody says ‘not much consonance’ and shakes their heads, but what it means is that however much Power you’re supplying, your brain and that other brain don’t work together well. It’s why you don’t just grab eight or twelve people and a focus and go do something, it’s not going to work, you need the whole team to — ” Dove points up — “get along together.”

  They’re dancing up there to send Power through the keel and back around, which is why the barge is headed upstream maybe three metres per second. I’m starting to think anything ongoing is a loop of some kind.

  “So we’ve got consonance?” The whole hand-on-the-lever thing, digging out the spring pond, does sort of argue for that.

  “You could say that. You could say that Halt’s old, too, or the West Wetcreek’s wet.” Dove gets this implausible look, it’s got a lot of wry in it, nothing like Dove’s usual wry humour that never shifts the stern-and-golden-eyed underpinnings. “You have absolutely no idea, do you?”

  “No.” I make some aimless hand motions. “I have no idea. I, you know what Wake said about intent? I had better start believing I am actually a sorcerer. Because I don’t, not really, this is.” I stop, and wave up at the roof. “That’s real, that’s the kind of thing I believe in, that’s been around my whole life. Seeing the individual gravity of a pebble? I had no idea anyone can do that, and I’m terrified I’m going to find out hardly anyone can, like Wake and the cleaning thing.”

  Dove nods. “Well, there’s three things. We’ve got a lot, in the wow, that’s surprising sense, not in the hey, you’re pretty good sense. Blossom and Grue have a strong consonance, they’re not obviously separate people all the time, and Blossom wouldn’t outright say they have more than you and I do.”

  Shape of Peace.

  “Mama’s going to notice, would never make a sorcerer but Mama notices things. So there’s going to be strong opinion about you pretty quick.”

  I realize I’m holding my head in my hands.

  “No reason it won’t be a good one.” Dove looks indescribably sad for a second. “Mama managed to like Hector.”

  “Hector?”

  “Dead of personal heroism, fighting berserk Reems infantry.” The sad turns into something else. “Really nice muscles.”

  What do you say? Where in the wide earth is Reems? I can feel my brain getting stuck. I don’t like it, I am sure there’s something I ought to say, and my brain sticks utterly anyway.

  “Anyway. That’s two, and just a social warning. Three, three is that we’re going to affect each other. It’s really obvious in an established file even when they’re not using the focus all that much, not every day, if they’re attuned, if the consonance is just vaguely functional they start, well, losing the rough social edges.”

  Dove’s looking back out the window, at the West Wetcreek, I really don’t know why they don’t call it a river, it’s not even a small river, flowing by. There’s another barge coming downstream.

  “You don’t seem like a bad influence.” Which isn’t much, but it’s all I’ve got to say.

  Dove doesn’t.

  Good is a tougher question.

  “I don’t know if I can deal with the unstoppable, but that’s me.”

  “I’ve been around a quantity of unstoppable.” Dove’s looking at something that isn’t out that window.

  “I’ve been around a lot of actual doorknobs.” Dove’s head turns to look at me fast. Not quite abruptly. “Also tool handles, drawer pulls, saw handles, and a sideline in wooden drinking vessels.”

  Not shrugging is hard, but it feels important. “Before I got here, I’d have been sure Kynefrid was right about Halt being just a story.” Don’t smile too much. “Halt isn’t precisely plausible.”

  Oh, Dove, don’t smile like that. Don’t smile like that at me. “Says the scion of the spider-god.”

  Not just a joke.

  “Next time one of the grownups is around, I’m going to loan you my eyes and let you see what you look like.” It’s, no, really, it’s not a threat. “Preferably standing next to Halt.” It’s got a bunch of implacable in it, but that’s not the same.

  “I don’t look like a giant spider wearing a shapeless purple hat.”

  Dove snorts. “Behind the spider.”

  Behind the spider isn’t an improvement. The spider, I mean, if you had a fear of spiders, it’d be a problem, no matter how hard you told yourself you just can’t have a spider that huge. If it was a real spider instead of Halt’s notion of a more plausible explanation it’d have to eat cart horses, people wouldn’t keep it fed, but it’s not, it’s not even the thing that manifests Halt, it’s really, really obvious if you can see it at all that there’s the thing behind the spider, all right, and the spider is the equivalent of a big smile and a clean shirt and hoping no one who notices the scars can figure out how you got that kind of scarring.

  I mean, I don’t know, I’m pretty sure Dove doesn’t know. “You don’t know what the behind-the-spider actually is, do you?”

  Dove’s head shakes no, with emphasis. “Not a chance. You can see it better than I can, stuff leaks across from your eyes that I can’t see on my own. Don’t think anyone can see it clearly. Don’t think it’s what it started out being, either, I don’t think there’s anything born into the world that can do what Halt does.”

  “Not just the best wizard.”

  Dove waves a hand, I think it’s supposed to be corrective more than disagreeing. “That’s mostly Blossom.”

  Blossom? “I thought Blossom was under a hundred?”

  Dove nods, turning in from the window. It’s not raining out there, but it’s certainly thinking about it. The Creeks, the land beside the West Wetcreek, is a well-kept place, green and glowing even in autumn. “Eighty-four. Fifty years older than I am, pretty nearly to the day. Grue’s not a décade older, they celebrate the same day.”

  “How do you know this?” It’s not like the instructors at this school are especially forthcoming.

  “Comrades in arms. Blossom was on the March North; so was Halt, so was I.” Dove smiles at me. “So was the colour-party you took for a critter-team.”

  Wapentake…“Territorial Line?”

  “Regular, now. But yeah. About half of us came back.”

  Establishment of Laws.

  “You were getting displaced, no reason you’d know. But, well, some stuff happened that got through my determination to pretend I was entirely regular. Blossom talked to me about it. There was a degree of inappropriate social contact.”

  I must look dumbstruck.

  “The kind with tea.” Dove only thinks Idiot, thinks it with an affectionate overtone. “It’s really tough talking to someone who looks nineteen and is doing the whole grandma-planning-your-life thing, at least Halt looks old, it’s not like you’ve got a chance but at least your social reflexes know what’s going on.”

  “That’s, well, odd, but it sounds like the whole thing was odd.” I’m certainly feeling like it was odd.

  “Blossom’s a Captain, full-on Regular Line, been to officer’s school, warrants of authority and commission and did well with it, the kind of person they’d try to make a Standard-Captain except for being an Independent. Line custom says you don’t socialize with them if you’re in the Line and not also in the grant of a warrant of commission.”

  Dove’s looking out the window again. I have no idea what to do, or say. This isn’t…I can’t even think ‘straightforward’. But maybe I can be calm about it, and Dove’ll catch some of it. I’m certain-sure Dove isn’t telling me all of it, or even half of it. Which means it’s way worse than the bits being alluded to, which are pretty bad. About half? If it was ‘about half’ the apples, it would mean less than half.

  “It sounds like I was better off with the anti-panda.” It comes out tentative.

  Dove snorts, and looks at me. �
�Any of them going to be happy to see you, if you go back there?”

  “Probably not.” Saved their lives, likely, but still. Getting locked up, suddenly and with no warning and no idea why, that has much too much of the Bad Old Days in it. “I was still the new kid, you know? Sometimes the new kid doesn’t work out, they go do something else than what they were doing at their first collective.”

  That happens a lot. I’d bet it hurts as much when it’s for a more usual reason than locking up anti-pandas by extra-dumb luck.

  “Mama’s going to be happy to see me.” Dove’s face goes wry. “Mama’s name is Grackle. Don’t use it, you’d have to be that generation or older, but try not to look surprised if someone else does.”

  I’m looking surprised now, but hopefully that will count for getting it out of the way. Creek names are different.

  “Anyway. Blossom’s not one of the old ones, didn’t have to get learning irregularly or survive desperate and skittish and hiding for centuries, Blossom had trustworthy teachers from the age of five. Much, much further along than ‘not a hundred’ sounds like, most of the stories are still Bad Old Days stuff where not-a-hundred meant you were still in desperate-to-survive territory. And Blossom’s an enchanter, Halt claims a much better enchanter than Laurel.”

  Laurel’s, well, Laurel’s where the Commonweal comes from, and Grue’s line about getting hit with a thousand years. It’s not what anyone thinks the Wizard Laurel meant to do, but the Hard Road and the battle standards and the graul, which every Commonweal school-child learns really did take Laurel close to a thousand years of work to create, are why there could be a Commonweal.

  And now there are two, and I wonder what this one will do for a Hard Road.

  “You figure we’re for all the, what did you call them? Three-demon problems? So Blossom can get on with figuring out how to build a Hard Road?”

  Dove’s head tips side to side through maybe, the really thorough version with torso tipping in it. I think that’s less ‘maybe’ than ‘true, but irrelevant’. “What are Independents good for?”