A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Kynefrid and Chloris spend the time we’re casting railings having a continuous vociferous argument. Their argument produces a severe kitchen in mostly black glass, something that looks like black glass, but they do remember to reserve some space for the marble work tops of Zora’s hope. I find the four ovens a surprise, but everyone else just looks at me about it so I shut up. We get a bunch of bindings in for the pantry walls, real shelves — more of Zora’s work in titanium, spare and practical rather than ornate, pulled out of a melt by thinking like an illusion if someone else will get the metal hot and another someone else will keep the air off it while it’s hot — and a whole bunch of fixtures and all the wall bindings done.

  Blossom makes us wall-wards, pale ghostly things, to go with our illusory wall bindings. “Wards are the last thing,” Blossom says about what we’re going to learn, and even then, these are complicated. No stray thoughts out, no stray noises out or in, but you can call out, push a thought to someone named. You can create a kind of alarm, lock the door, leave a message in the door, the place where the illusory door also is, it’s fiercely complex. Blossom doesn’t seem to think so.

  Zora shows up after the second Déci of Brumaire with a bathing tub. Chloris and Kynefrid had repeated their tavern jaunt, Dove had accepted a lunch invitation from some Line comrades, and I’d read some history in the form of Galdor-gesith records and written my second reply to Flaed, when I wasn’t lying in the middle of the middle floor and staring at the ceiling. The first reply hadn’t gone very well, based on what I got back; I don’t think ‘Edgar’ and ‘sorcery’ got into the same place in Flaed’s head, there was distress. Not that ‘sorcery’ could be a good place in Flaed’s head. Zora had gone right on making stuff, making actual human scale individual things makes Zora happy with a nearly flammable joy. Going to be interesting to see what happens with spring and a garden.

  The tub’s four metres by eight, a rectangle rounded at the corners, and twenty-three decimetres high, too deep to stand in. Chloris isn’t initially entirely approving, that’s very nearly luxury for just the five of us, and only ‘very nearly’ because Chloris doesn’t want to be insulting. Zora points out you can improve the ceiling clearance by taking up some floor tiles and setting the tub straight on the arched floor supports.

  The tub is also a single massive sapphire block, a really deep evening blue with no purple, with a broad lip and flowing even curves everywhere. The drain-gate binding’s built in, part of the whole massive block. The plug is a dome of white glass that must weigh five kilos; it has a free-swinging titanium pull-loop a centimetre thick and some kind of rubber gasket round the bottom, where it overhangs the drain-gate. Rubber? Where would Zora get rubber? That was produced in the far northwest of the First Commonweal.

  “Bug spit,” says Grue, smiling just like the Wicked Queen.

  Zora had carefully pre-wheedled Grue into, apparently not shrinking it, “putting it a bit further away in an unusual direction,” Grue says, so it’s half its actual size and instead of being absolutely impossible to get down to the middle floor the tub traverses the stairs just fine. It installs without difficulty, too, Zora had insisted on leaving lots of space. Dove and Chloris say extensively nice things about it, and just before Zora grabs me and Dove and an indulgent Blossom to go off and make fixtures for it, more solid cast titanium, Kynefrid and I share a look; there is clearly something about lots of hot water and Creeks which we do not understand.

  We’re the first couple days of the third décade mapping the hypocaust, which doesn’t get down to the lower floor but completely extends through both the middle and upper floors. I can just crawl in it. None of the others can, so I wind up fairly contorted. The outlets for air are over the door, in the bottom of the overhang; the inlets are tucked back to east and west, in the narrow part of the overhang. The heat supply is switchable, there’s a property of residency affecting who can switch it, and the unquestioned enchantment managing the notion of residency has some sort of generalized connection to the Power, both to let it work and to generate heat. Blossom spends half of a day I spend crawling through the hypocausts sitting in the middle-floor hypocaust taking notes on the enchantment. It’s something Blossom could do, has done, readily enough, but would never have thought to do it in quite that way.

  Day after that is the first clear one we’ve had; no rain, no fog, no mist, and no expectation of anything but clear air. Wake and Blossom show up at dawn, Wake with breakfast’s containers bobbing in the air behind like forlorn steel will-o-the-wisps, trapped out in daylight and headed for a hard fate. A lot of rapid aluminium ingot-lugging follows, and a blur of a day. It’s plain cold out, but we don’t feel it. Two windows twelve metres along the circumference and two more eight metres, all two metres high, get made. They’re all quadruple-pane, with the individual panes made of two-centimetre thicknesses of corundum. We use foamed titanium to frame them and pure willpower to coat them with ideas about light so they seem clearer than the air, Wake didn’t so much explain as give instructions but it worked amazingly, and the same sticking-binding we used on the stair railings to attach the frames into the window openings. We were very careful to leave nothing but dry nitrogen between the panes. They don’t open at all, but the hypocaust takes care of air flow better than open windows would. “By spring, you’ll be able to manage an air-gate if you just can’t stand not being able to open a window,” Blossom says, while we’re all collapsed in various heaps.

  The times we all five get into the same big working, something we’re not really doing individually, work better but they’re more tiring.

  Kynefrid and I are both still astonished that it worked; all the window openings are completely level, plumb, and square. Emotionally, that’s a more convincing evidence of the fire elemental than the existence of the house. That’s not natural at all.

  Wake did nothing all day but but watch us closely and wave a hand at the tarps we’d had over the window openings as we got closer with a framed window assembly. The tarps shook themselves dry, folded themselves out of the way, and piled themselves neatly under the overhang. Wake professes a most pleased assessment of our progress, even if Blossom does still have to run the safety wards for us when we’re making corundum.

  “Some knowledge comes after other knowledge,” Wake says.

  After that, it’s a couple days of running around making lights, lugging beds and bedding up to the house, making dishes, “Anything but titanium or corundum,” Chloris had said with feeling, and Wake had run us through 'the very first basics’ of making stoneware. Potter’s wheels aren’t as easy to use as they might look, and what we produce isn’t perfectly round, though it fires very well and glazes to an entirely serviceable finish.

  Chloris uses the double-walled titanium tea mug that says 'Chloris’ when Dove and I make a set of five a décade later, all the same. Kynefrid’s is blue, mine is the plain grey metal, Dove’s is gold, Chloris’ a remarkably delicate leaf green, and Zora’s purple.

  Day after that is a dam emergency about thirty kilometres south of Westcreek Town; we get the thing put back together, pile it a bit deeper and give it a better grasp of its foundations, and then fire the whole thing into a single ceramic curve. That was fun; getting back afterwards is, thankfully, a barge ride, because we’re all ready to fall over after missing lunch from being caught up in the working. It leads to discussions between Wake and representatives of the Food-gesith and the Lug-gesith both, about how many dikes and dams we might be able to see to on a non-emergency basis.

  Day after we get back from fixing the dam has a nice fellow name of Mulch showing up with a couple barrels of starter-sludge for the sanitary ponds. The Independent Mulch has an archaic way of speaking, is impressed by the meadow, fairly much awed by the woods, and has a bunch of garden suggestions for us, which Dove and Chloris both write down. Zora’s too full of glee to pick up a pen, but asks approximately seven thousand sensible questions. Kynefrid and I stick in a bunch of survey stakes and wri
te a bunch of stuff down, rules from Mulch about how you track the water level and silting depth in your ponds.

  Zora’s marble work-tops happen the day after that, and the rest of us lug sixteen big marble blanks and thirty-two smaller ones back up with us. Chloris sits down with Blossom and figures out how to make sheets of opal; Zora co-opts Wake to run wardings and makes the transom windows, half-a-metre high by three metres wide, out of actual sapphire. Somehow the total of the panes comes out to just the blue Zora wanted, despite the four outside layers and the two inner ones. The innermost pane has an off-centre clump of marsh flowers done in gold in delicate outline style. Doesn’t match the meadow flowers on the banisters but it suits.

  Kynefrid makes the doors. We’ve been having a discussion about this, and had decided to be somewhat fancy, the doors should be worthy of the house, and never mind that’s getting the proverb backwards. The two outer and two inner doors are alike double slabs of nickel-chromium-vanadium, shiner than silver, hinged their whole height, and double so they can be internally barred; pull them closed and a mass of nickel-alloy bars drop, half the middle layer of the doors, interleaving with each other. Kynefrid claims it’s really easy to build if you can just tell things to be the exact same size. The milk-white opal sheets Chloris has made get inset, had spaces made to hold them when the door panels were made, and the remaining door surfaces, where the frame would be on a wooden frame and panel door, are filled with leaves in gold outline, as close as Kynefrid can get to the shapes of the leaves from the Tall Woods. Those have been falling with autumn and enough have blown near that we don’t have to go under the trees for examples. We’re going to do that, but not, we all think, until spring. We’re all still something like fire hazards if you startle us.

  Dove and I spend that time cutting marble columns; we get the wire mesh face guards, a strong belief in a heavy smock, and Dove spins the marble blanks vertically while I imagine an extremely sharp edge that moves up and down. The pediments and capitals are harder, I have to get those square. Fourteen of those go under the overhang, seven on each side of the walkway to the door, and two out where the pathway crosses the line of the outer ward around the whole of the Tall Woods. Nothing but decorative, but no harm in some decorative. Saved-out marble boulders from under the sub-soil of the big dirt plug get roughed square and used to hold up the pediments, there’s still a metre or so of dirt missing from where the sod came out, and it looks a little strange for awhile, rough-cut boulders under the neat pediment blocks.

  After that it’s gravel, for under the overhang, and flagstones, to go over the gravel and down the path. The stone-workers are more than happy to hand us enough fine-sawn flagstones from the short supply bin; several sandstones, one a pure quartzite, three different sorts of granite, six individual tiles from a large dredge-boulder that, whatever it started as, had to have been metamorphosed by a nearby magical working. Tamping those down is my job, wandering along and running the gravity up on them, very careful to do it slowly and not crack anything. Dove spends most of that day carving little details into the column capitals, a blue-green marble nesting swallow, a spray of vine-leaf, an implausible peering pond-turtle.

  It’s the twenty-ninth day of Brumaire, and we’re pretty much done. I have never been half this tired in my entire life, but we’re done. It’s a bit of a shock to stop working on the house.

  “This is remarkably presentable, children.” Halt sounding approving is a surprise every time it happens. “You could bounce a cruncher off those windows.”

  With Halt are Wake, Grue, and Blossom; also another obvious sorcerer, introduced as the Independent Crane, and a clerk from the Galdor-gesith, who is introduced as Lester.

  We made eight chairs, and a kitchen table big enough to need them and a few more, a slab of marble a metre-fifty by four metres on a wrought titanium frame. Zora looked nearly as beatific as Wake does pointing out that the kitchen table is certainly a work surface. It gave Chloris a struggle, but the sheer prettiness of the swirled blue and green marble is winning.

  Eight seats should be one more than we need for the grownups, but Halt’s always got that chair. So theoretically two of us could sit at the table, too.

  Dove sort of shrugs and sits cross-legged on the floor, far enough away that no one has to bend their neck too much to see each other. It’s a pleasantly warm floor. We all do the same, and leave the chairs for the grownups.

  Lester has a list. It takes main force of will, visibly so, for Lester’s attention to return from the ceiling, but an accredited clerk with a job to do and a list can manage that.

  Only just, but none of us have any grounds to fault the difficulty.

  Lester starts by presenting their credentials and explaining why a clerk from the Galdor-gesith has taken an interest, the house was presented to the Galdor-gesith as a kind of entrance exam for official student-of-sorcery status. “As the Law requires,” Lester says, “a suitable clerk must make an evaluation of the tangible work.”

  We go through a listing of what we did, how the place was made, attested, properly attested, you can feel the Shape of Peace in your head, legal and binding attestations. Lester counts construction from the sixth day of the third décade of Vendémiaire, the day we…invoked? created is wrong, it was already somewhere else, we just borrowed the chances that created it, the Tall Woods.

  It’s the first time I’ve stopped and counted. Thirty-four days from different bedrock to the Round House. And we’re…well, we started as complete novices. Not so much now.

  I can feel Wake smiling at me as I think that. Wake’s actual face goes on looking positively solemn.

  No, we, as we understand it, the only work on the actual house done by a teacher was Wake’s summoning of the fire elemental, Grue’s assistance getting the tub down the stairs, and Blossom’s creation of the wall-wards for our bedrooms; everything else, except Blossom’s hammer-drilling, if we count the ponds, was our work. Even slicing up the wretchedly touchy aluminium ingots. Teachers did many safety things, wards we don’t know how to produce, including the ward around the Tall Woods as a whole.

  “The encircling ward that has the student’s names in it?” Crane says, in the tones of a point of clarification.

  That’s news. Wake’s solemn holds. “New students will add their names to the ward as the time presents itself,” Wake says, addressing our narrowed eyes.

  Add their names to a promise to preserve the woods, comes into my head from Dove.

  Yeah. Sneaky. Because the alternative is to not come here to study, and assuming we don’t all die, that’s going to matter in a few years.

  My hair ruffles. Dove doesn’t move, the attentive-on-the-clerk look doesn’t alter, but my hair ruffles. Crane’s eyebrows go up. Crane’s name suits the sorcerer, tall and narrow and with hair that goes a little like hackle-feathers.

  We wind up following the grownups down the west stairs — that’s the rule, down the west stairs, up the east; no one wants to be heading up and meet a bathtub headed down — for a slow inspection.

  Blossom’s confirmed that the middle-floor ceiling is the exact position of the star field, invisible with day, as it would have been visible from this spot at the moment the elemental and I agreed that, yes, please, this house should be built. It’s been a little masked by the eight, four-a-side outside, curving east and west, bedrooms outside the curve of the two privies with the sanitary arrangements and the showers, and those beside the big bathroom with Zora’s sapphire tub at due south, but it’s still an exercise in attention-prying, however lesser than the peacock-feathers of the dome. The pocket doors of the bedrooms and bathrooms, illusory rollers are apparently a surprise, the whole hypocaust floor, the lights, get comments; the tub gets a combined double-take from Crane and Lester. Grue grins behind them, and Zora, asked, says “There were tonnes and tonnes of aluminium, and it should last,” which produces a nod from Clerk Lester you can see taking substantial willpower to make.

  The lower floor still
has its hoard, not much diminished. Even with the windows and the losses to fires, we’ve used barely five tonnes of aluminium. Less titanium, and beyond that there’s only the doors. Which are massive enough, but not compared to the pile of ingots.

  “That circle,” Lester says, and Blossom says “Platinum, two centimetres wide, five centimetres deep.”

  Halt chortles, the full chortle, with stick-taps. I can see the fine hairs rise on the back of Crane’s neck, and Lester’s whole body twitches. “Not much ward that won’t hold,” is all Halt says.

  Blossom and Grue were Halt’s students, specific personal students, not the way we’re being Halt’s students. Wake was there, between where the Commonweal started and Halt, as much alive as now, and master of stable domains, before the Commonweal began. We haven’t been getting an example of how most Independents react to Halt. Never mind react to Halt in an ornate subterranean ritual space behind wards Blossom says could hold off a Line battalion.

  Lester inventories the hoard; Blossom has laid claim to the rhenium for the Line, something to do with making new battle-standards. Lester nods and makes a note of that.

  We wind up on the nice warm upper floor again, after the grownups have looked over the kitchen and the doors and the windows in some detail, and Lester has another set of questions. Do we know what we’re doing, legally?

  The answer is a chorus of “No.” We know why we’re doing this, having been informed we’re all high-talent enough that training to an Independent standard of practice gives us fifty-fifty odds of making the age of fifty, instead of zero odds.

  Lester nods at us, taps the used sheets of notepaper square, and starts explaining.

  Typically, sorcery students study sorcery from the age of sixteen — school runs from nine to fifteen, so right into sorcery — to the age of twenty-five, and are then examined for potential. Those demonstrating the potential to become functioning Independents are offered formal student status, those who cannot demonstrate such potential are encouraged to find other work. “It is common,” Lester says, “for those lacking sufficient potential to recognize this and move into other sorts of work, often high-output focus teams of one sort or another, prior to being examined.”