A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  The whole thirty-metre sweep of the domed ceiling, the unbroken curve of the inside of the roof up to the crystalline spike of a top-light, is…Enamelled? Inlaid? Wrought? I have no idea what it is, but it’s peacock feathers, sixteen really huge ones and the colours glow like the memory of fire. I wouldn’t assert they’re not emitting light.

  The big low stretches of window to east and west and north are what we expected, that the roof extends a bit to the north, over the outside door, that was expected, too.

  It’s nearly sunset. What?

  “Windows tomorrow,” says Wake.

  Chapter 15

  Making glass with Blossom feels different than making glass with Halt, something beyond standing inside the Round House looking at the window openings instead of standing in a sand pit.

  It’s probably just style.

  Blossom’s scary, the same way any large amount of power in a small space is scary, it’s not really any different from being near a big set of water-driven gears or some road team using a fifty-person focus to grind rock. It’s not a focused scary, not any more threatening than the big gears. Blossom ought to look about nineteen, it even works sometimes, but then you realize you’re looking at a self-composing, ongoing, open-ended enchantment, a single terrible purity of Power. I have to decide what kind of Independent to be, and here’s this apparently pleasant and sane person who, when they were about my age, maybe Dove’s age, wanted to be this single awesomely terrible thing.

  Halt’s, Halt’s not really scary. Halt’s mighty, the mightiest thing I’ve ever seen, Halt’s a scary shape, but I’m less and less sure it was the scary shape Halt wanted, rather than the shape Halt got. I’m not sure if any of the old ones ever got what they wanted, it almost couldn’t happen in the Bad Old Days, even if I’ve only met two of them. We’re being handed a huge gift, and we’re not really equipped to recognize how huge.

  I find I’ve taken Dove’s hand. It’s reassuring, it’s reassuring even with Dove still worried about me, not much, but some, and even with Dove’s memory commenting on just what Blossom can do. I don’t begin to understand what happened to that demon.

  Zora takes a couple steps away from us. Dove looks at Zora, quizzical. Zora looks right back. “It’s not especially safe when you two start sharing the brain.”

  Chloris looks baffled, in the way someone who knows they’ve missed something does. Kynefrid looks baffled in the way you do when you aren’t sure you heard that right.

  “Quicker than talking,” Dove says, quite entirely composed.

  “Quieter, too,” Blossom says, with all good humour.

  “We’re making windows, so there are three problems. One is you want your windows to be entirely flat, so they don’t distort what you see through them. Two is that you are going to need some kind of frame, and what you can make affects how thick you want the glass to be. Three is that glass isn’t a good insulator; you would like your windows not to leak heat or coolth nor run condensation, depending on what time of year it is.

  “The fourth, local, problem, is that those — ” Blossom waves at the window openings — “aren’t flat.”

  The roof, one continuous shallow dome, is supported on walls that rise two and a half metres above the level of this top floor, and an average of about one and a half above the level of the ground. There are gaps in the walls two metres high for nearly all the northern curve except for the door-pillars and the empty doorway, and for eight metres each to east and west; that’s the windows. The floor is level with the sod around the door to the north, there’s a dip to clear the windows to east and west, and the back quarter, the whole south wall, the edge of the roof is level with the hill. That’s not quite what the shape of the hill looked like before the house went up, there’s a new back-curve to the surviving edges of what was the three-metre clifflet, so the southern ends of the east and west windows don’t wind up buried.

  Not buried is good, but the walls are still in the curve of a circle, and we’re going to have to deal with that somehow, making the windows.

  The roof isn’t precisely a circle, or if it is it’s larger than the walls; there’s a five-metre overhang over the door, curving back to no overhang just past the southern ends of the east and west windows. Of course, the walls could be off-round instead; judging a thirty-metre round structure for roundness from the inside isn’t something I have a lot of practice with, but I doubt it’s easy.

  Going to be a trick getting the sod back on. With the overhang, we’ve got more roof than there was hill when we lifted the sod away from the excavation.

  “Perhaps fifth is that we have no idea what the walls are made of?” Kynefrid sounds, not diffident, like it’s a real question because maybe every sorcerer worthy of the name knows how to make glue that will stick anything to anything for a thousand years.

  We’re all clumped up, fairly close to the doorway. It makes it a little easier to not have your attention vanish into that amazing ceiling.

  Blossom’s eyes narrow. One bare hand goes on a door post. Then three steps to the broad sill, it looks like two and a half metres, of the window opening, and then sinking down to put the same hand on the floor.

  “Have you looked at the rest of it?” Blossom sounds odd.

  There are two noes and four head-shakes. I have one of the noes.

  “Change of plan,” Blossom says, still cheerful. “Learning how to make a light.”

  We troop outside; light is just heat, Blossom says, only moving faster, but let’s not risk a heat-bloom inside, or where it’s pointed at anyone. Remember how when something is hot, it glows? That’s the same thing, there’s enough intensity of heat that it’s moved up into the energy levels where eyes will detect the glow as light.

  So we line up in the mist, facing east, and are instructed to point our efforts at making a light up and away.

  The way Blossom is talking, this is a straight Power-to-light thing, you summon up some Power and you emit it as light, just as you would with heat to heat something up.

  That might be how the others have been heating things up; I’ve been thinking of heat as the average motion of the atoms, and kinda stirring with the Power to get them moving. Which makes having no atoms, going straight to photons, difficult. Photons are just energy, there’s no actual substance there; if you pull all the energy out of a photon it goes away. Getting the Power, which isn’t itself material, to just become material, well, I know it’s possible, people do it, but I’m not finding a how you do it lying around in my brain.

  Still, there’s a lot of air, and while heating any amount of air white-hot seems implausible as a useful thing to do, heat is just motion, school made an analogy with a harp string. Which disgusted all the mandolin players who had never seen an actual harp. So if I grab some air, a little bit, a litre or two, and make an illusory mirror around the pointed-at-me end, I should be able to hold the stuff in the air, the nitrogen and the oxygen and the water and all the tiny amounts of everything else, fixed, not let them move, because otherwise I’ll get hot air mixing with all the other air, and shove enough of the Power in to get a glow out of my analogy to really tiny harp strings.

  Nothing, nothing, nothing, red light, a beam of red light, narrow as thread and sparkling its way through the mist. Well, red is the first colour things glow when you heat them. Orange, yellow, green, and it’s going blue in an amazing sphere of sparkles off the mist when Blossom says “Edgar, stop.”

  The beam of light doesn’t fall back down to red, it just goes out when I stop adding Power to it. I keep the mirror, and my grip on the air. It’s amazing what rock moving will do toward teaching the novice sorcerer to not just let go of a working.

  I can feel Blossom metaphysically poking at my grip on the air, at the shape of the mirror.

  “That,” Blossom says in a very dry tone, “was tuneable coherent light. Coherent light is traditionally a multi-person laboratory exercise in the fifth or sixth year of study.”

  “Couldn’t fi
gure out how to go straight from the Power to photons.”

  “You do heat injection by stuff-stirring?” Blossom’s really very good at not sounding judgemental; I feel like an incompetent idiot anyway, and nod.

  “Most of the time how you make heat, or light, is inherently obvious. If it’s not, there are — ” I can feel the indicating chin lift — “workarounds, but the breakthrough insight isn’t guaranteed.”

  “Can you turn the coherent light thing off?” There’s a, perfectly audible in my head, unspoken with no bang? following after this question from Dove. From the shifting feet noises, everybody else got the implication just fine.

  I let go of the air, then the mirror. Let go of the air. Perfectly obvious non-metaphorical meaning that involves no valves or tanks or plumbing.

  Dove grabs my hand, and for a second it really is one, well, it can’t be one meat-brain, it’s like there was one metaphysical brain for a second, and when there are two again something got installed in the section of metaphysical brain that’s specifically mine.

  That’s…ridiculously simple. I wave my free, right, hand around. Red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet, no problem. Then back down, then bright white, then soft white.

  Zora claps, once, Chloris looks happy, and Kynefrid’s face sort of slumps into a smile.

  Blossom’s lips don’t so much as twitch, visible fleshly face entirely the image of friendly equanimity. Ever been smirked at by a single terrible purity of Power? Even by recent standards, it’s a weird experience.

  I look over at Dove. “Thanks.”

  “Can’t have you slicing up whatever might be in the darkness.”

  Slicing?

  Blossom, rather than Dove, hands me, through Dove somehow, an image of what looks like a whole Line battalion. They’re, mine was a thread, this looks like it’s bigger than the sewer pipe we’ve been making, it’s green, and fifteen kilometres away a mountain is catching fire. You were laudably cautious about energy levels, Blossom’s voice comes into my head. And with all this mist, you’d have had to push it really hard to light anything on fire. Or — another image, much smaller, tiny ornate letters flashing into metal — slice anything up.

  My feet are actually on the stairs before I’m paying any actual attention again. Logic might be a way to go wrong with confidence; magic seems more and more like a way to make the world fragile. I’m still holding Dove’s hand. Dove’s not making anything of it, and I don’t want to. We really don’t know what’s down there.

  The next floor down, there’s nothing like a railing or an enclosing wall for the stairs, but they’re two-metres-fifty wide and have deep treads and shallow risers and run us straight out on to a floor apparently made of sliced-up rock tiles half a metre square. They’d look blacker if they were polished, it’s a faintly rough surface, like it’s been fine sawn. The tiles have tiny narrow completely black lines between them. Grout? No, it’s metal.

  Kynefrid has one tile up, floating, and is setting it down to one side so there’s room to shine a light underneath. “Forty centimetres of hypocaust, on some kind of metal arch framing.” Kynefrid sounds impressed. The metal arches are a surprising deep evening blue.

  The floor the stairs came down through seemed like it was about a metre thick.

  “The metal’s titanium,” Blossom says, contemplatively. “You may have lucked into high-titanium gabbro.”

  “Gabbro?” Chloris.

  “Basalt when it doesn’t reach the surface. This — ” Blossom’s hand-wave floods the room with light, to a completeness and depth none of us are managing — “floor is classic gabbro, made into tiles.”

  There are sixteen big blocks of something, a metre wide and half a metre deep and extending maybe two metres of increasingly tapered length into the room, up under the ceiling. I can’t believe they’re holding floor beams up, who would make all the beams meet in the middle?

  Blossom is looking at the ceiling. “Tensioned. There are cables in there.”

  “More titanium?” Dove, sounding unsurprised.

  Blossom’s head shakes. “Carbon. Diamond, almost. About a hundred times stronger. You put the compressively strong rock in compression with tension in the cables, you get a very rigid, very strong floor. You could have Eustace do jumping exercises upstairs and you’d never even hear it down here.”

  About then, Chloris notices the ceiling, and all of us, Blossom too, wind up lying on the floor with our heads as close to the centre as we can get without bumping into each other. Blossom’s managing a sort of diffuse twilight.

  The ceiling is stars; stylized, a little, but with the real colour tints and relative positions, it’s the autumn sky over Westcreek, on a background of evening blue so deep it seems to have more depth and more blackness than the actual night sky. There are…yeah, it’s millions, I can float a little half-square-metre frame illusion up to the ceiling and count and I’m getting far more than a thousand in two places. Most of the stars are tiny glittering pinpoints, but still. The more you look the more depth it gets, the more stars, like the fall of night when the sun’s just down only with more stars than regular eyes can hope to see.

  It’s insanely gorgeous. I can’t begin to imagine how long it would take people to make just that many little shining metal stars if they had to do it with molds and hammers and polish.

  “I can’t say for sure, not out of my head, but I think that’s the real position of everything from yesterday.” Blossom sounds impressed. “Did anyone say anything about stars in the model-house you communicated to the fire elemental?”

  “I wanted easy to clean.” Chloris sounds a bit stunned.

  “I said something about nice ceilings.” Zora isn’t usually that quiet. “Nice, not…impossibly beautiful.”

  Blossom sits up, turns half around. The light goes from dim to bright, and a band of brightness runs around the wall under the ceiling. The top half-metre or so of wall, safe from even Creek shoulders, heads, the ceiling’s three metres off the floor, is polished mirror-flat.

  “All the cornices, or whatever they’re supposed to be called, have lamp niches.” Kynefrid’s impressed. “Point the lights at the wall, and you get diffuse light everywhere.”

  “Are we really going to have to put a privy and a bathroom down here?” Zora, sounding troubled. “It’s nearly too nice to walk through, never mind use for anything.”

  “A bunch of privies and a big bathroom, you could get fifty people on these two floors.” Chloris, sounding even more troubled. “Just the five of us here is, is, it’s hard to see how it’s not claiming we’re special.”

  “You are,” Blossom says. “You’re especially dangerous to everyone around you.”

  Chloris would really like to object.

  “It’s for a good reason, it’s in the hope of great public service in the future, it’s arguably not merely good but necessary, given the ratio of area to Independents in the Second Commonweal, it’s something that wasn’t your idea. None of that means you’re not hazards to all about you, or that you won’t be for years.”

  “So we need to be way out of town.” Chloris really isn’t happy allowing even that much. “Maybe we need to be underground. We don’t need all this space, we don’t need this, this magnificence to live in.”

  “The elemental had no idea about shelter, or warmth, or cold. It’d totally understand Zora’s snowdrift suggestion.” I really don’t want to say the next bit. “What the elemental did understand was an idea of elegance and pride suitable for the rituals of learning.”

  Dove’s grin is a quiet thing, in flesh. In the undertone, it’s like the sun coming up.

  Blossom makes a big swoopy all-of-this-gesture. “No one has ever made a building with a fire elemental before. Lots of small intricate things, a few things as large as a cart, one distant historical — ” meaning so far back, pre-Commonweal, that it could be a complete lie — “attestation of a boat. This is in some sense the test run for Wake’s suggestion for how to construct the House of
Parliament.”

  “Suggestion?” Kynefrid, well, let’s say there’s an expression of risk-reassessment visible, a parade of expressions and eye-twitches.

  “There’s no reason to suppose that the elementals have any equivalent notion of scale, it’s a question of intricacy, not mass. Much more intricacy isn’t common, collaborating with elementals at all isn’t common, but about half the successful collaborations are more intricate than this.” More inclusive wave from Blossom.

  “Successful?” It’s a question, but Dove doesn’t sound like it’s an important question. So far as I can tell that’s true; Wake was down there in the hole with us, that’s what matters.

  “If the first one succeeds, the rest succeed.” Blossom grins, suddenly. “At least so far.”

  “Wake has done many?” Zora, sounding rather nervous.

  “Wake has done more than everybody else combined, but Wake only did the summoning, sent the invitation you might say, for this one. The collaboration was Edgar’s.” Blossom dimples at me. “Given the results, come the day, Edgar’s going to be encouraged to do it again.”

  The only good thing about hearing this is that I’m lying on the floor already.

  “Wasn’t that…” Chloris stops, stuck for a polite word for ‘insane’.

  “You collectively selected Edgar to represent you.” Blossom doing implacable sounds very gentle. There’s this outer layer of a quarter-inch of marshmallow fluff and then there’s something you don’t even know the name of, but good tool steel would cringe and plead before it failed and died trying to score the faintest of lines in it.

  “It’s here, it’s certainly a house, it’s your own work, it is magnificent. Get some lights in it and working plumbing and it may well be glorious. That it’s a demonstration of Wake’s argument that a fire elemental is indifferent to structural mass is a bonus, but none of the other approaches to melting a bunch of gabbro into a house were any safer. Nor have any of you seemed inclined to turn that prairie into sod huts.”

  “It’s still wrong,” Chloris says. “It’s too much.”