A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Solving problems, but those really come down to “making stuff and killing things.”

  Dove nods, a little sad. “Neither of us are really likely to wind up on the making things side. Zora’s headed at the best garden in six days travel, but, well. I’m told really strong talents tend not to be especially constructive.”

  The gesiths keep a lot of depressing statistics. The Galdor-gesith must have a thorough set answering that question.

  I, oh, wait, the sneaks. “We are, aren’t we? Only we’re lumped together and the people teaching us are experienced mountain-movers. So we don’t notice. And that house metaphor from Wake and we’re learning by building an actual physical house we’re going to live in for years while we study.”

  I’m shaking my head. It takes real attention to stop. “Is there a word for being subtle by making something so ridiculously obvious it’s invisible?”

  “Doubt it.” Dove is grinning at me. Still the kind grin, but, yeah, Dove’d figured that out already.

  “Is it metaphorical at all? Or is there a real structure that we turn into, off in magic-space somewhere, wherever the Power comes from? Are we going to need a wall?” Because there’s surely other things out there.

  Dove shrugs. “I think there can be, you get sorcerers like that, it’s a type, but whether it’s a substantial structure or an insubstantial one? I think we get to pick. I think there’s probably as many options as you can really believe in, too, it’s not like any of our teachers do the same thing.”

  Real Halt’s a thing behind a spider-thing behind the wee grandmotherly woman that looks like what the spider-thing is trying its hardest to pretend into existence. Only…

  “Zora can’t see behind the spider-thing, can only just see the spider-thing, doesn’t like it, Zora finds it unsettling to think about. I don’t think many people can see that far, and no, I won’t bet you there isn’t a fourth layer.” Dove’s voice makes it clear bets about a fifth layer are out, too.

  “Yeah. Halt’s an inside-out nested doll of increasingly scary things, Wake’s not really alive, and Blossom’s only fully corporeal by, I guess the word is courtesy.” Blossom can be fully corporeal, real arms swinging that sledge hammer, but if you take a good look at Blossom the coiling white fire is constructing the flesh. It’s, well, not a disguise, Blossom doesn’t make it difficult to tell. Call it a social convenience.

  “Wake’s not really dead, either,” Dove says. It’s a really odd subject to be discussing in a calm tone of voice.

  “There was that one time, back right at the start, I really looked at Wake. Exactly stuck, I think, balanced, precisely between living and dead. Wake might, might — ” I do not want to remember what I saw, but it will hold still in memory if I make it — “be the gateway, the defined space, not the solid-seeming pillars around it, that’d be more like a favourite chair.”

  Learning sorcery makes you say nonsensical things. Really stupid, ridiculous, nonsensical things, and you say them like you’re totally convinced.

  Dove nods a little. Dove’s good at waiting for me to not flail out of my composure.

  “So, if we’re going to keep the consonance, we’d better think about being neighbours?” It takes an act of will to not say “sharing a house” out loud. It leaks through anyway, Dove hears me better than I hear Dove, words, anyway, at least so far.

  “Or we need to make a conscious effort to move apart.” Dove says this…I don’t know, it’s not uncaring, it’s like Dove’s convinced that caring isn’t what’s important.

  My head’s moving no. Not a lot, but I’m not thinking about it, and it’s moving. Well, there’s the vote from my spine. “That wouldn’t be doing the job.” It wouldn’t, and I think I manage to say that so there isn’t any ‘most important thing’ overtone.

  School makes a point of counselling honesty in, well, not this kind of conversation, but similar social ones. And they tell you it’s difficult. And they tell you who you can talk to about it, and there’s a real effort. Because we do all live in fairly compact places where you can mostly keep the garden from devouring anybody or the contents of the privy-pit from getting infected by some ancient war-fungus and going on a rampage, it matters that we all get along.

  Dove and I fused hundreds of tonnes of rock into a useful shape, almost a kilometre away from where the blasting left it rubble. It’s important that we get along.

  There are no words, I doubt there are any words that Halt knows, that really capture how hard it is to be honest sometimes. I woke up in a hospital bed nine days ago, and it wasn’t that far off returning from the dead.

  “I was…pitied a bit, I guess. No one wants to be a sorcerer, sorcerers are weird and socially dubious and no one forgets the conclusions of the Bad Old Days.” Though we don’t really believe in them, we haven’t had them for centuries, not in the parts of the Commonweal either of us are from. “Having no talent at all, though, not being able to use a focus, it’s a problem. I had to work at it to get into the collective I wanted. There was a lot of doubt I could really do all the job, and they weren’t wrong, I couldn’t. I could do the stuff I could do well enough to be worth it, but any time the air tank needed topping up or the drying oven needed a run I was useless. If everything went really well I was going to get good at one of the things I could do, probably fine turning work, and do that for the rest of my life. I’d contribute, but not especially much. Somebody’s who’s just slow in the wits, they do what they can but it’s not much more than enough.”

  “You’re not slow in your wits.” Dove says it quietly, an observation and not a judgement.

  “Not anymore. I sure was. Don’t think I’m quick enough to do wit-work really well, either, only, it’s all moving. Getting that parasite out, all of a sudden I’ve got enough talent that I’m at risk from it, I’m a risk because of it, things look like tastes or feel like sounds, all my experience of being me is false now. I’ve got no idea who I am, and the flesh brain I need to work on not using if I want to live isn’t working the same way.”

  Deep breath, only one, or I turn into a fire hazard.

  “If I could be sure it wasn’t wishful thinking, I’d think I was still getting smarter. Someone at the hospital told me there was more to the parasite than the talent load, it’d make you unobtrusive.” Which was a lot more tactful than just saying ‘dull’, a word even Flaed had been known to use.

  Dove squeezes my shoulder, once and quickly.

  “You know how a kitchen with a hot stove smells, that underlying hot iron smell, that really basic we’re home, it’s warm, the house is safe and the stove is working and nothing is wrong? I mean, maybe there’s still the dishes to do or another load of something to carry or even scrubbing the floor, but it’s this really basic safety and comfort thing.”

  Dove nods at me, cautiously. I suppose either of us having detailed thoughts about fire on a wooden barge isn’t completely sensible.

  “You feel like that smell.”

  “Which,” and I don’t shout, I’m pretty sure that kind of it’s-too-much shouting has to stay with the former life, “doesn’t actually mean anything, any more than all that purple around Zora means anything, it isn’t even my brain trying to tell me something.”

  If I could be sure I could tell.

  “Nobody decided that, it’s not information, it’s just, well, good luck, given the stuff that does have meaning. I like it. I like it a lot. It makes me feel safe. And I have to remember it doesn’t mean anything else, it’s not the basis for a decision or a hint from the universe or some kind of sorcerer’s luck, it’s just there like sunsets.”

  Deep breath. How by the rot untimely can the emotional temperature stay low? 'The rest of our lives’ is this independently discontinuous function of how well we do with sorcery.

  Well. Not really independent, is it?

  “I like you. You’ve got a brain, you’ve got a spine, working with you, working with you is a joy.” Not really a deep breath. “But that’s four d
ays, from someone whose self-knowledge ceased to exist five days before that.”

  Dove turns around, sinks down until it’s like sitting on nothing, back on the front bulkhead, I think. Front wall? It puts Dove’s head just above the bottom of the window. Looks like it’s comfortable, don’t know how.

  “Think we’re going to work harder next décade?”

  Was that the easy intro? It, it has to be, there was no theory and no expectation we’d figure out the order of steps or what steps were required, that, all of it, that was getting us to provide our own confidence-building rigged demonstration of how easy it was.

  “Do people ever win arguments with Wake?” I’ve got my forehead on the next upright over from the one Dove is leaning on.

  Dove grins, what might be really Dove, the person who’s there for Dove to talk to in the dark, rather than the presentation of unstoppability. “I’m not covering that bet, not even about Wake.”

  Yeah. Halt. Dove thinks this is mostly Halt’s idea, a way to get a wizard-team that can really work together.

  Dove looks at me, it’s a funny angle, but I can feel Dove’s gaze on me, if that could make any sense, feel the thinking. “We don’t get to stay who we were. That hit you faster than the rest of us, but there’s no way to be an Independent by mistake, you’ve got to decide that’s what you’re doing. A big part of the stress level has to be trying to push all of us out of our beliefs about ourselves.”

  “So who I am doesn’t matter, it’s who I decide to be.” Not a question. It can’t be. I can run mad, and defy logic, or I can accept that I could hardly be stable and cohesive right now, the point is which stable and cohesive I get to in the future.

  “That’s my best guess.” Dove’s expression is something I wouldn’t recognize if I could see it better, because what I’m getting from, from the consonance, how many times do I need to see out of someone else’s eyes to believe this is real thing, isn’t an explicable feeling.

  “You ever take any militia training?” Dove’s voice has gone strange, up a register, that’s not an easy question to ask, don’t know why not.

  “No.” Not a lot of point in considering the Line or a critter team when you can’t latch to a focus, and I figured I wouldn’t be good at it even physically. I needed to put my effort into something I could be good at, my mom was always really clear about that, and by the time I could have taken the training I agreed.

  “Your mom seems pretty sensible,” Dove says. I thought that would get through. Easier that way. I suppose it feels more private. Couldn’t do this with anyone else in here.

  “There’s a feeling that goes with catching the next trooper over in the corner of your eye, their shield-edge or just some moving bit of them, when you’re in the middle of a fight.”

  The words are going into the empty passenger cabin, quiet and composed and not directed at me, it’s a conversation with the still air. The other stuff, that’s coming straight at me and it’s got a lot of shrieking and death in it, this isn’t theory Dove is talking about, no kind of theory with all that muscle memory of shock, impact.

  “That’s what you feel like.” Dove looks up at me. I look back, right into the even face and the golden eyes.

  “You’re right that it doesn’t mean anything. I was telling myself I was just being stupid about loneliness, I’ve been stupid about that before, here I go again, attaching all that we-haven’t-lost-yet to some poor Regular near-kid who showed up via the hospital and having Grue pry a horror from your innards. Then you took an easy exercise and solved it by telling a defining, fundamental aspect of the world what to do, because you thought that was the easy, obvious way. And it scaled, you got all the loose rubble out of the blast pit.”

  This is much quieter as spoken words. “You’re so comfortable to work with it’s terrifying.”

  The not-words aren’t quiet.

  My turn for the hand on the shoulder, but I leave it there, lightly.

  “When I was learning lathe work, there was a lot of emphasis about trying to do it right. The thing was, if you tried to make sure you didn’t do anything wrong, it was too many things. Doing it right was just the one set of things, there’s a list, follow the steps in order it’ll, it won’t necessarily be good, usable, but you don’t get hurt. Which is, which is much more difficult than it sounds, but I figure it’s possible. So we don’t have to decide corporeal or non-, or how hard to try to hang on to making stuff, worry about what would be wrong, that’s all emergent, isn’t it?”

  “We don’t know, we’re going to find out.” Dove says that quietly, it’s a quote, I think an acquaintance, an experience, not a book.

  “The stuff that really matters is, is deciding we’re going to do this with a ‘we’ in it, that turning into sane Independents, Independents who survive the Shape of Peace, means coming up with a way to think about the Power that’s basically adult, peaceful, not a way to get direct gratification, and that it works for both of us.”

  I really hope the undertone for this has more than shrieking in it. Wizards, sorcerers, they’re not the good people. Independents are Independents because no one wants them in their gean, when you get right down to it, fussing about long lives and political effects being the polite cover or not.

  “Everything that makes that harder isn’t what we want.”

  Dove doesn’t look as relieved as I feel, but I don’t think the face exists that could do that, everything coming back from Dove is relief and agreement. No real doubt, there’s some “Where’s the paintbrush?” sort of feeling.

  “How are you with books?” Dove’s got a hand over mine, that’s still on Dove’s shoulder.

  “Books?”

  “Learning from books. Never got anywhere with that.” Dove’s embarrassed, and worried. Yeah, there’s going to be a tonne of memorization, isn’t there? Names, if nothing else, and there’s got to be a lot of ‘else’.

  I do the side-to-side head tip. “Not great; I can do it, I know how to do it, a way to do it, but it was always work.” I feel myself grinning.

  “Goes right after a conviction in the necessity, respectability, and utility of using the Power lawfully in the new house?” I can’t make this really sound like a question. It’s really not. Not unless we have to put in something to keep from frying our brains, and I figure some teacher would have mentioned that if it was likely.

  “Yes.” Dove says it standing up. Dove’s not really that enormously much taller than I am, decimetre and a half, but there’s this whole moving-like-oiled-metal aspect to it. Most of the Creeks seem to have some of it, Dove’s got a lot of it.

  “I refuse to shake hands on this one.” Dove doesn’t get a lot of intensity into the words.

  It’s a really good hug.

  We wind up on one of the benches against the back bulkhead. Dove says there’s about an hour to go. It should be a lot more awkward than it is, sitting next to each other.

  “Should we talk to the others?” I have no idea; social rules for school say everybody or nobody, the point isn’t to excel, it’s to get everybody educated. Inviting someone else into the consonance doesn’t seem possible, and I wouldn’t want to if I could. One entire complex other person getting better and better at reading my mind is, well, it’s not any kind of shortage.

  “I’d give it a couple décades, or maybe wait until the house is done. I know we’re the test case, but there’s who knows how many thousands of years of experience with people, baby sorcerers, going into this.” Dove just sounds thoughtful, voice and undertone.

  Then Dove snorts. “It’s not like I’d want to try telling Chloris ceasing to be respectable is inevitable or Kynefrid that, no, really, it’s important that you do this.”

  Yeah.

  “Zora?”

  “Grue’s got Zora, that wasn’t a purely random kindness baking invitation.” A very thoughtful look. “Besides, Zora likes using the Power. Plus Zora’s people think it’s good, gaining new skills. They might be happier if it was some
thing less complicated, or safer, but I’d bet new skills are a better thing than being a sorcerer is a bad thing. Still getting lots of letters, still happy to get them.”

  Letters. Right, I’m going to have to say something to Flaed. Not right now, though.

  “Not a lot of worry about the Bad Old Days over by Blue Creek, it’s had even less trouble than Westcreek has.” Dove sounds contemplative, before looking at me with a strange grin. It’s a look down, I’m still getting used to that. “Don’t leave that letter too long.”

  I shake my head. “Not knowing what to say isn’t going to keep me from writing it.”

  There’s a nod. “Not that different from this visit.”

  Dove clarifies, because it’s obvious I’m confused. Something for this mind-reading thing. Somewhere, there have to be social rules for this. “They’ll be happy to see me, but no one is going to know what to say.”

  Which, well, we sit there until the barge slides up to what looks like a tidy little town, it could be a village if it was organized like one. They don’t even tie up, we just say thanks and jump off. I’m a little surprised when my legs work fine, they haven’t been getting the stress.

  The visit itself? Dove’s maternal relatives are embedded in a gean of friendly people, the refectory is warm, lunch is good, despite a few ‘baked pickles?’ moments and a preponderance of sharp flavours. I don’t hear anyone use Dove’s mother’s name. Dove must take after their sire; Dove’s mama is a decimetre shorter and, well, quieter. It’s not that Dove’s loud, it’s the implied hammer-to-the-head full attention spilling out of Dove. Grackle, I can think it, hasn’t got that. Lots of warmth and kindness and welcome for a randomly provided fellow student, and no odd looks. There’s a few of those from other relatives, but I can hardly blame them. I don’t look like a Creek or a sorcerer or much of anything.

  It’s, well, it’s hard to escape the impression that Grackle is exactly what Dove would be like with a normal level of talent for the Power.