A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  “It will cut quartz, too,” says Wake. By the time Kynefrid’s conscious, Wake’s taught us the ‘sound, unspecialized’ recipe, and we’ve got sixteen big half-metre square blocks of ‘dense, amorphous, fibre-reinforced’ silicon carbide ten centimetres thick and it’s dinner time. Halt takes one look at Kynefrid, walking into the refectory, fishes out that odd flask, finds a mug, and doses Kynefrid.

  Kynefrid makes faces. Prolonged and disturbing faces, as though the flesh wishes to escape from the skull-bone beneath. Kynefrid then flatly refuses to try to describe the taste, despite considerable curiosity from those around, out of a desperate desire to not to think about it ever again.

  It doesn’t work very well; the taste very nearly prevents even an attempt at eating dinner, which is frightening; we’re all ravenous. Dove ruffles my hair while not saying ‘scion of the spider god’ out loud, and Chloris and Zora are both busy enough trying to get Kynefrid to at least drink something that isn’t wood-lettuce tea that they don’t notice. Zora cheerfully points out that wood-lettuce is a slow poison even to the most susceptible, it won’t be any immediate help.

  Running the hole-saw is easy; you number the carbide blocks, you count in your head, you feed a push in, formally dividing the push in your head by sixteen. Getting the hole saw to run straight vertical isn’t easy, and dealing with the immense mass of dust and chips takes planning. Fifteen centimetres wide doesn’t sound like much of a trench, but for a thirty-metre diameter circle that means about fourteen square metres of kerf, or whatever you call the space emptied by the saw-cut when it’s not really a saw and you’re cutting rock. We’re going down four metres or so, so there are going to be something around a hundred and fifty tonnes of chips.

  It winds up with Kynefrid sitting well back from the pit, holding, hunched over, yesterday’s enchantment-tile, slowly and carefully extending the shoring down about a decimetre behind the position of the cut, Dove running a reverse-rotation mass of water to flush the dust and chips out of the kerf, Zora pulling chips out of the water, and Chloris pulling the heat. If you leave the heat in, the water is steam pretty quick, which, as Wake says, can be fine if you’ve got lots of water. Instead, we’ve got maybe thirty tonnes of water pulled out of the spring pond and floated over. Chloris feeds me the heat back, continuously as it’s removed from the water, another ongoing thing that’s a loop in the Power. It takes me a couple of tries with much smaller amounts to figure out what to do with it, Wake says “Heat is work and work is heat,” to me as a universal principle and I can see that, things heat up when you hammer them or saw them or bend them, anyone knows that, but the heat to work part is a mental leap.

  I get heat-is-work sorted out in my head, Wake puts a small ward — a kinetic dump, which I think means flying rocks will hit it and stop — on me, everyone else gets out of the excavation, I lie down — the face cover doesn’t protect the back of my head, but the living rock ought to — put on the face cover, ward or no ward, and away we go. It’s much, much tougher to work with Chloris than with Dove, but that’s close to saying that I’m aware I’m doing it. It’s not any harder than having to pay attention to the person passing you stuff when filling shelves. There’s no load, no active load, the teeth have mass, we’re not cutting yet, but I can spin the teeth and Dove can run the water and there’s this tiny trickle of heat coming through from Chloris.

  Then there’s the whole drilling straight problem. It takes me an embarrassingly long time trying to lower the whirling circle of carbide teeth to recall that a plumb bob works by gravity, not by being dense or heavy or stretching a string. Once I’ve got that, seeing the cutting teeth as arranged on a planar surface and the surface as normal to the local gravity works fine. I do see it, there’s a pillar of light in my head presumably from the centre of the earth and rising up into the sky.

  Cutting rock is loud, really, really loud. Feed slower walks into my head, unmistakably Wake, and the noise drops and drops again as I feel something like having my ears covered in the idea of mud. As I feed slower the amount of heat running around drops, too. There’s an obvious ideal place, where the most chips come out for the least heat, and we sort of all wobble ourselves to there. Get the teeth below the surface level and the whirling water drops with them, to be a deep thrumming in the rock. It was pretty spectacular there for awhile above the surface, nearly-boiling froth with the big carbide blocks hurtling through it and the haze of rock chips. Another ten tonnes or so of water shows up, there’s some loss as steam no matter how hard Chloris pulls the heat out, steam moving too fast to condense back before it’s out of reach.

  Once we get down into some granite, or basalt, or whatever the heavy igneous rock is, the cut slows, but not really all that much. Keeping it from catching takes some thinking, it’s a lot like sawing through a knot, where one part of the material you’re cutting is a lot tougher than the stuff around it. Keep cutting until all the chips are gabbro, Wake says, so we do that.

  The teeth come out looking battered, they’re neither perfectly square nor a half-metre on a side anymore, but they’d be good for another few holes. We made them from dirt and dead plants in an afternoon, and if Wake will walk us through it again I’d bet we could do it on our own the third time. It’s the first thing that has really made me feel like we’re actually sorcerers, because if this was widely available people would use it, and I’ve never heard of it before. Even on a much smaller scale, a metre-wide hole saw for setting a king post would be worth having.

  This isn’t as easy to do as it seems, was, I shouldn’t, can’t, claim it was difficult after it wasn’t.

  Zora’s laid out the chips as walkway, connecting the three sanitary ponds. It looks like an edged walkway somehow, too, it’s a very neat job. Must have sorted the larger chips out and inserted them vertically.

  Getting the marble plug out is straightforward, there’s nothing difficult except believing it’ll move before it rises. Walking it down, all five of us, to Westcreek Town isn’t any harder, the Line-style rolling loop of Power, not any rolling up of its gravity-socks. We have to be really careful on a couple of the turns after we’re on roads, it might be only about four metres thick on a ten metre right-of-way, flipped on edge, but it’s still thirty high and thirty wide. It gets to the shared stone-yard of the three stone-working collectives in Westcreek Town without causing any calamities. Lots of remarks; the leading views are that you can’t make a useful millstone out of marble and that even if we get another one and an axle, what would we ever get to pull the cart?

  Every single one of my fellow students gets a thoughtful look, and I do, too, the first time someone says that. We really could be turning into Independents, even if none of us have the least idea yet how we’d go about making what we’re thinking of.

  Between the three collectives, there’s more than a hundred people standing there to watch us rotate the big marble plug on its side, realize it’s upside down relative to how it lay in the earth, hoist it a careful twenty metres in the air, flip it over with stately caution, and set it slowly down. Wake gets a thoughtful look somewhere in there, then Wake’s hands wiggle at the big shared stone-yard. All the stray bits of rock and gravel and sand clear themselves into appropriate piles, away from where the marble is coming down.

  We get it down whole, no cracking. There isn’t even a thump. Dove looks at the team leads and focus-firsts, who are just staring at us by now, and says “Didn’t have any place to put it.” There are some slow nods, they can about cope with that. Most of them can’t when Zora asks, rather diffidently, if we can have some worktops out of it, not sure how many or how big yet. I can see the math happening in all the team leads’ heads, it’s, with the thick spots, probably eight thousand tonnes of marble, which would supply some immense number of work tops, and the team leads and just about everyone else close enough to hear Zora stagger around laughing. Zora’s “Not just work tops,” is in withering tones, and doesn’t help with the laughing.

  We are, when
composure is recovered, promised work-tops, and some architectural accent blanks in the bargain. We’re halfway to dinner before Zora stops feeling offended. “We still won that one,” Dove says. I take Dove’s word for it, I have to, Creek social encounter rules are going to take me at least fifty years to understand. It’s not actually a fight, it’s got something to do with social authority, some kind of status you can only use indirectly. Halt has tonnes and tonnes of it, which is a pretty good demonstration that the Creeks are collectively smart. Dove has at least a couple tonnes, something Dove will neither admit nor acknowledge. Makes me think my estimate’s low, but I don’t understand how it works.

  Before we go in to dinner, Wake tells us to be sure to wash thoroughly after breakfast tomorrow morning and to wear clean, fresh clothes. “Any clothes?” Chloris asks, and Wake nods. “This is a requirement of ritual. Clean matters, not worn since the last laundering matters, but style and material do not.”

  There’s a mass outbreak of confusion.

  “When I was young, we did this fasting. You are all fortunate that’s been discovered since to be no true requirement.”

  It’s a good thing we’re all so tired there’s no chance of that remark keeping us awake all night. Ritual magic on an empty stomach? That wouldn’t go well.

  We make a point of scrubbing, instead of sluicing, in the morning; we make a point of carrying the clean clothes down to breakfast so we’re wearing them when we head back up toward the Tall Woods. It’s a clear day, quite shining, but also well into leaf-turning season.

  When we drop off the clothes we were making vast pits in, these last few days, the tagger at the laundry makes muttering noises, and asks us which clothes list we’re on. The response to ‘not’ can be summarized as ‘Well, I guess I’ll have to fix that’. No gean, so no clothes list there; what it means to be an student sorcerer I have no idea, there should be an official school-outside-a-gean in the mechanisms of government somewhere, but if so, we’re a really small one. Even the Tall Woods must be causing the cadastral survey some issues, somewhere, but no one’s mentioned.

  With all the displaced people, I doubt anyone’s going to worry about it, and I even more doubt Wake didn’t sort it out ahead of time, but still. There’s this niggling feeling of impending attestations.

  A niggling feeling of impending doom, too, not at all helped by seeing Wake there in something that isn’t a shapeless mass of coarse brown robe.

  Still a robe, but it’s shining white and Wake’s got a giant scarf-thing in deep blue draped over the right shoulder, it looks like nothing but friction holds it, and an impractical octagonal flat hat in matching blue silk. There’s some kind of embroidery all over the scarf-thing in copper and gold.

  “Good morning, students.”

  “Good morning,” comes out at five different times and cadences, but I think we all manage to say it.

  “Melting gabbro, any mafic rock, is energy-intensive. For an individual practitioner to generate the required energy to melt a large quantity of such rock is very difficult, even with resort to mechanisms disapproved of by Commonweal law. The available options are thus large foci, which while energetically sufficient lack fine precision, or doing the work in stages, which permits precision but which requires awkward scaffolding mechanisms to prevent the first part from falling over while the subsequent parts of the work are accomplished.”

  We all nod.

  “The, quite legal, alternative involves non-coercive summoning.”

  We don’t nod.

  “Isn’t summoning inherently coercive?” Dove, sounding, not worried, baffled. I’m getting a lot of baffled. Not just from Dove, and all the rest isn’t mine, either.

  Wake’s head shakes no, with emphasis. “There are inherently coercive mechanisms, but the act itself is not. The idea is to offer an opportunity not otherwise available; the — ” Wake’s face and voice tone shift, very oddly — “traditional sacrificial mechanisms are effectively this, sources of Power not otherwise available to creatures from elsewhere.” The image of a living heart ripped from the victim is vivid. For a few seconds, I wouldn’t mind having skipped breakfast.

  “Since we are not going to sacrifice anyone or anything, not even by a large donation of the Power, as was sometimes done, what we have to offer can be thought of as an opportunity for art.”

  What?

  “Fire elementals inhabit either a place, or a time period, where nothing possesses a fixed form. To some subset of them, the opportunity to create art of fixed shape, in durable materials, has value.”

  “So we’re bribing, paying, a fire elemental with the opportunity to make a house?” Chloris has passed through scandalized and won’t be be in disbelief long, not without slowing down both soon and much.

  Wake’s head shakes through another no. “We are offering a fire elemental the opportunity to enter into an artistic partnership to create a valued fixed structure.”

  So we end up standing in the middle of the excavation, eight metres below the short-grass prairie meadow that came with Tall Woods, making a house out of nothing. If it doesn’t have to do anything, keep back heat or dirt or hold weight, forming shapes with the Power is easy, you think at it. You find out how clear your thoughts are, too. Getting a whole house, even a whole house purely as walls and floors, no fixtures or doors or furniture, that’s a bit tougher. Things don’t persist without intent, and you try thinking of an entire house at once.

  It winds up with me playing thing-conserver, holding on to the overall model, and the others adding things. There’s an argument over three floors or four, straight stairs or curved, where the windows go, and almost everything about usage you can imagine. Which is pretty silly; even if we did know how a sorcerer’s work-room was typically set up, Wake had told us, bluntly, we weren’t going to come out in the traditional way. And the place is huge, thirty metres across is a lot of space for five people before you have three floors. Chloris has problems with that, thinks there must be an eventual population well over fifty. Dove lists, Zora lists, storage, inside talent practice, the lab space we don’t know the appropriate size for, and the inevitable regret at guessing necessary room sizes.

  The model has a tipped roof, higher to the north for the light, side windows, arched out of the sod, and the actual roof spiralled with a flat so the sod won’t wash off it in the rain. Kynefrid gets very focused on how we keep the runoff headed away, out into the ground around, some kind of bad experience with that, where the thorpe Kynefrid comes from was. I pass a few suggestions to Dove, hypocaust floors and showers near the lab space, before I get entirely wound up in holding on to the wholeness of the image. Dove is doing something to the walls, I can’t quite tell what.

  Wake’s been walking a circle, sunwise, all the way around the outside, one hand trailing on Kynefrid’s shoring-enchantment. Wake goes round like this more than once, I don’t know how many times, chanting. We’re not creating anything substantial enough to impede Wake — hah! — so the walk and the chant keeps going as walls and floors and stairs shudder and flow into something like a fixed appearance.

  We’re all standing in the middle, I can hear, from closer than it seems, Wake saying “Ready?” Everyone’s fine with me holding the house image, I’ve got it, transfer seems rash, and Wake asks everybody individually. Dove takes my left hand, then Zora my right, then we’re all standing in a pentagon shape holding hands around Wake. There’s a little tweak from Dove somewhere in the structure, and Wake starts talking. I have no certain idea it’s talking, words, meaningful speech, but it sounds like language. Not a language I know, it’s not obviously actually a human thing, it sounds like someone trying to whistle flames while breathing math.

  Everything goes white. It’s hot, it’s impossibly hot; I don’t hurt, there isn’t any pain, it’s not safe but it’s not malice, either, there’s a feeling like standing near the edge of a precipice to it, don’t get into the bad energy state where you’re falling and you’re fine. The fire elem
ental, I don’t know anything about fire elementals but if you’re thinking of anything simian made of flames you’re utterly wrong, this is all dots and giggling and whirling wild mind.

  Trying to hold the house-shape as though it were immutable won’t, can’t, work, and Wake did say collaboration. I don’t try to explain anything in terms of ‘otherwise we would be cold’ or ‘otherwise we would be wet’, I try to get it into elegance and pride and appropriate containment of the rituals of learning.

  Look at it the right way, and that’s what eating and washing and having a place to stash your spare socks is; we’re here to learn and if we don’t do those other things we won’t learn well at all.

  Explaining the learning catches in more than one spot, and then I realize it’s not something I can explain as facts, the elemental is from somewhere where there are no facts that aren’t immediately obvious. Everything else is fluid and willed. So I tell it we’re trying to learn to be ourselves and each other at the same time, that it’s a thinking dance in slow time out of the shapes of flesh.

  That works. Departing constraint makes complete sense, that you might need to learn how to do it makes complete sense, too.

  There’s a grand, utter, ornate failure of geometry, and I’m blinking out a window. From the angle of the trees, I’m not at the bottom of the excavation anymore.

  We’re all still holding hands. There’s a cool breeze.

  “Are you intact?” Dove says that out loud, and with a lot more emotion underneath in my head.

  I nod. “That was really strange, but it wasn’t worse than scary.”

  Dove’s looking doubtful. Zora’s eyes are huge, and Kynefrid is looking at me over Wake like I might explode.

  “Where did you go?” says Chloris.

  “Data points beyond Halt’s doses,” Wake says, sounding completely pleased.

  Then Wake looks up and smiles like the soul of mercy.