A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  “Since your studies have not yet progressed to ward-making, I shall have the bubble.” There’s a brief flash of cheer from Wake.

  I fuss a little. Yes, one of the Twelve; yes, old, and presumably not entirely by chance, but one single flying rock to the head could — and then Dove’s voice says Wake’s on the brigade list, one down from Shimmer, and my worry shuts off.

  One down from Shimmer is two down from Halt, and there’s nothing above Halt. Wake looks like a middle-aged bricklayer, but that’s not more true as a thing than Halt really looks like your grandma. It’s just a much better disguise.

  We get past the dam, stop, stamp around a bit, making sure the footing’s not going to surprise us right where we are. The pit where we lifted the mill foundations looks a bit slumped, but nothing more than you’d expect from wet dirt.

  Wake goes through some arm-waving, and you can feel the ward come up. Way up, Wake’s taking this seriously. Dove and I take off left and right gloves, respectively, it shouldn’t really matter but it might. This consonance thing keeps getting easier to do, and it was no detectable effort when we did it the first time. It’s getting harder and harder to want to stop.

  Zora and Kynefrid and Chloris have less trouble than I’d expected getting sorted out. Some, it takes them a couple of minutes, but what they get looks solid. It looks like the sound of bees made of glass, Dove thinks more bronze dragonflies, and it glitters.

  Chloris spends the next two hours very carefully going through every form of communication imaginable three times, and asking Wake twice if there’s anything that might have been left off the list of what Chloris’ tried. By the end of that, everybody has a clear picture of what is certainly thousands and thousands of tonnes of twisty root-things, not precisely parasitic but taking over big parts of the soil ecology over what must be four or five hundred hectares on both sides of the mill stream.

  “Am I right, that it can’t talk?” Chloris sounds so forlorn, saying this to Wake.

  “It can’t talk.” Wake’s own voice is gentle. “It’s near enough a scutch-grass rhizome system.” Except for the vastness, and vast hunger. Scutch grass isn’t what you want, not a useful plant, but it’s not a weed.

  Chloris nods, and does something. It’s dead. Didn’t need to draw on Zora or Kynefrid at all, I get the impression that was so much easier than making lights there’s no way to compare. Chloris is shaking, not from cold, and Kynefrid and Zora hug Chloris together.

  Nothing stirs anywhere, we don’t see anything going off, no secondary defences, no movement of things or chemicals, nothing poisoning the dirt. Between us, Dove and I have our awareness down to a couple metres deep in what must be the bedrock, and out over five thousand hectares. It’s an odd sensation to do that for hours, you start to feel the worms and the bugs and the chipmunks and the slow seep of water as sounds, see all their strange textures of history.

  “It’s not safe to just let it rot.” Chloris, pulling out of the hug, visibly pulling a scattered mind into the present.

  Zora nods, the blue-green-purple collective mass of them wiggles into a different shape, and this does take all three of them to do. It feels, rippling away from whatever Zora is doing, like being the peal of a bell; not being the metal, not being the sound, being the compression wave in the metal. It’s really strange.

  “Well done,” Wake says, and then a diagram appears in front of Zora. Zora’s nose wrinkles in response to the diagram, and there’s another set of bell-peals, lower and higher in pitch.

  “Once it’s dead, it’s just chemicals,” Zora says, “and chemicals have rules.”

  That makes Wake smile.

  There’s a bunch of slumping, nothing serious, but whatever Zora did took all the structure out of the root-things, it’s doing a worse job of holding the dirt above it up.

  “Dove and Edgar have front for the dam repairs,” Wake says, and keeps the ward up. “Chloris on periphery, Zora and Kynefrid feed to Dove and Edgar.”

  The dam doesn’t need replacing, it probably doesn’t need fusing as such, but it’s clear that the narrowness of the bridge they’ve got over the stream here is a problem, it’s the only bridge between the landing nearest the West Wetcreek and Hopfields, and it’s not wide enough to take a waggon. So we leave the existing spill-race foot bridge alone, and the sluice-gates, but sort of walk the dam face upstream another three metres. Getting the water out of the bottom-mud before we do anything hot to it is something we still check, but I’m starting to feel like I understand how to do it. Dove always did, I think from making roads with the Line. Railings, says Dove, and there aren’t enough bits of old lost iron in the pond to do a complete railing but we can do sockets; I pull the oxygen off the iron and hand it, floating and molten, to Kynefrid, who makes a couple dozen post-sockets out of it, holds them up hot for Zora to glass them, tussles with them a bit to make sure the inside sizes with the glass are all twenty centimetres a side with good square corners, and hands them back.

  Dove’s got the dam-top road to a good camber and a good curve and raised on arches, one of them clean over the sluice gate, and I’ve got the sockets set three to the span of an arch. Nothing to be done about the sluice mechanism, it’s still usable even if someone’s going to need a ladder to get to it, and we keep it usable while fusing the whole of the dam into a single solid mass, old rocks and new mud and down into the bedrock on a big sweeping curve, the bedrock’s just as slabby here, we want some depth. It takes all four of us to do that, and then we have to grab all the steam and keep it from icing up everything into impassibility for a kilometre around.

  The spill-race, Chloris and Kynefrid and Zora do the banks and bottom solid while Dove and I confuse the water into flowing a metre above the channel. The pond banks are a mess, long sections were mostly weed-rhizome-root-things there, and we can’t figure out how to fix it, the squishy slumpy nature goes back a long way and we don’t want to kill the surface plants. We eventually settle on a big hollow glass wedge, almost like a ploughshare, and making a bunch in different appropriate widths and wedging them under the slumped bank sections, then stuffing the open backs full of pond-mud and sort of rattling that into proper sedimentary order. That breaks the wedge up, too, not a lot, but enough that it’s not impermeable to water.

  Wake is pleased, says so, and we troop back up to Hopfields, pick the mill up, and come back, having collectively preferred being done to getting lunch first. Wake has a way to say ‘as you were’ to the slumped dirt, so the mill fits right back into the hole it came out of, by the time summer comes you won’t be able to tell we moved it.

  That leaves us with one astonished clerk, one astonished gerefan, and considerably more than six flabbergasted members of wood-working collectives, who had followed their mill back at a respectful, careful distance, and the kind of offer of lunch you can’t possibly refuse without the utmost rudeness.

  Dove tries to be apologetic about how none of the road turns into the new dam-top bridge-road are done; the good people of Hopfields are having none of it, to the point where the sixty-odd people of the town road team have gathered, the team lead’s shaken our hands, and they’re all headed down the road with a dirt-dredge and a top-fuser. The dirt-dredge looks like a small brass shovel and the fuser, as is apparently traditional in the Creeks, looks like a clothes-iron.

  Chloris hasn’t said a thing since remarking that the weed couldn’t be safely left to rot. Even thanks and hello and yes please have been head-ducks and murmurs, which is not like Chloris at all.

  We’re through lunch, and on to “Alas, but one each, and a half-litre for Kynefrid and Edgar,” beer, really good beer, but, well, Hopfields, you might suppose there’s a connection. Chloris stares at the mug, not even holding it, mug’s on the table, and that’s not like Chloris, either.

  “I don’t like killing things,” Chloris says. “Even weeds.” I can, I think we all can, hear necromancer floating in Chloris’ thoughts. Don’t think anybody from Hopfields can. I hope not
.

  “There is no reason whatsoever that you should,” Wake says.

  Chapter 18

  Keeping Kynefrid from freezing becomes a general project. Before we all got displaced, Kynefrid says winter got dealt with by not going outside much, and that was a warmer, dryer winter. Not going to work at sorcery school, where we seem to be alternating days fixing drainage systems and days spent out in the snow doing blob-of-Power exercises. Actually using the Power, Kynefrid is fine; there’s enough, I don’t know, it almost has to be leakage, Power getting stuck in Kynefrid’s flesh instead of going off to do work, that the cold isn’t noticeable, and there’s been some ferociously cold days with wind while we’re working on drainage.

  It’s when we stop that Kynefrid starts to freeze.

  Extra layers, including a vast coat, help; hard sugar candy, well, some help, it keeps the worrying shade of blue at bay for ten minutes at a time. But Kynefrid still has trouble with the cold, and it’s going to get colder. “Not really cold,” Dove says, “squeaky-snow cold, not hat-not-optional cold like they get way over east past Slow Creek.”

  Chloris, despite whatever delicacy being able to float implies, is just as happy to have snowball fights gloveless as Dove and Zora are. I sit in the window, drink tea, and watch. Kynefrid sits at the kitchen table, drinks tea, and sketches. Some of it’s gardens, some of it’s mechanisms, a lot of it is hydraulic, water wheels and watercourses and ways to make the sluice-gates self-adjusting so the turbine keeps the air tank full on its own.

  It should be dark out there. We hung lights around the overhang, so there’s plenty of light for throwing snowballs. Anything the ward around the Tall Woods won’t stop, we’re not going to have much luck with, so it’s not like it’s unsafe. It still seems really weird to want to throw frozen water at each other, but they’re clearly having fun at it.

  “Think we’re going to live through this?” Kynefrid says, quietly. I can hear fine; the acoustics in the Round House are remarkably better than the hard surfaces would make you expect. Blossom’s said something about a very precise roughness to the walls.

  No idea how to answer, even if I think I know why I can hear the question.

  “All of us? If it’s independent odds, all of us would be a surprise.” One chance in thirty-two. “Don’t think it’s independent.” Statistically independent, not the we’re-becoming. I’m not going to make it without Dove. Not totally sure it’s true the other way around, but it could be.

  “Westcreek Town’s a provincial capital. They don’t have a full duplicate of the records, I’m not sure there’s but the one full copy up by the new Shape of Peace and there’s a bunch of clerks working their way backward making more copies, but the stuff that is here, the last forty years or so of the First Commonweal, that looks like quoting individual odds is really misleading. It’s the class; pretty much the whole class makes it, or the whole class doesn’t.”

  The records I can get to don’t go back far enough, but there’s some indications that Blossom and Grue might be the only survivors of their particular class. I’m hoping it’s a disturbing indication that Edgar doesn’t know how to use the Galdor-gesith’s index, not that something dreadful happened the last time something like the teaching style for our class got tried.

  “So you think we’re not going to flub something big? For ten years?” Kynefrid sounds cranky, not trying to pick a fight, that’s actual fear.

  “Closest thing we’ve had to a flub is you losing the binding for the shoring on the first try. So far as the rest of us know, all that did was make you really tired.”

  We say it together. “And get me dosed.” If that stuff of Halt’s tastes bad to you, it’s persistently bad; Kynefrid was a décade waiting for the whole of the taste to go away. At least Kynefrid can grin about it now.

  “I think all the teachers are being really careful to give us stuff to do that works like that; you might exhaust yourself, you might make a huge mess, but it’s going to be an external mess.”

  Kynefrid looks…doubtful, let’s say. Been a bit something since the weeding, quieter than Chloris but more consistently something.

  “Look, Independents, full ones, have a half-life, right? Something around a hundred and twenty years.” That’s not a statistic anyone makes an effort to tell you, but it’s public. Current value reported to Parliament every year. Not precisely cheering, even for mortality statistics, but there’s a way to look at it. “The prize isn’t immortality, it’s not getting old.”

  “A long life doing interesting stuff.” Kynefrid says this as though the prospect doesn’t particularly appeal. “I get the idea.” Almost waves the tea mug, puts it down first. “This place is a strong argument.”

  It’s getting easier to pry my attention out of the underside of the dome. There’s some clanging, the outer door opening, and then more as it closes and the inner door opens. There’s something in the doorway floor that drains, just water, it leaves the mud, but it leaves dry mud. I think Chloris’ ‘easy to clean’ had more consequences than widely realized. There’s a lot of boot-kicking. Coat racks, even splendid, elegant, Zora-work titanium coat racks, look really odd, just sitting there beside the doorway, but there they are, it’s winter. Boot trays, too.

  “It’s not fair;” Chloris. I can’t see Dove’s eyes roll, not from something more than ten metres. There’s no visible motion before Dove’s left hand has a firm grip on the top front of Chloris’ coat, and not a whole lot as Chloris’ feet leave the floor. Dove has to lean back a bit to hold Chloris in the air at arm’s length, but it’s not otherwise obviously difficult.

  Left is Dove’s off hand.

  Chloris squeaks.

  Dove sets Chloris down. Chloris looks appalled, and more appalled to see Zora grinning.

  “That I can do that, that it’s materially possible, not that I’ve done heavy work, and you can’t, that’s unfair. Pure heredity. That your reaction involves squeaking isn’t unfair, that’s you never learnt what to do.”

  Kynefrid pours some more tea. I get off the windowsill — it’s two metres wide, it’s hard to think of it as a sill — and head for the table. This has been coming for awhile now.

  By the compressed nature of time in sorcerer’s school, awhile. Probably why Kynefrid made the big pot of lettuce-root tea. It’s not so much that I’m getting used to the smell as I’ve figured out how to borrow Dove’s brain to smell it with, at which point all I have to do is to remember not to drink it, because now it smells good.

  Zora pours a mug of tea, puts a big spoonful of raspberry vinegar in it, stirs. Not used to that particular culinary habit, either. Don’t try it if you’re not a Creek, not even in beef broth or something else sturdy and savoury.

  “Dove can chuck both of us in a snowbank.” Zora shrugs. “At once. This isn’t surprising unless you won’t see Dove to look at.”

  “Dove admitted it was unfair.” Chloris doesn’t put vinegar in wood-lettuce tea. Salt, yes, four or five grammes. I’ve about stopped flinching. I’m not sure Kynefrid ever will.

  “Dove asserts that the strength difference is unfair, but the ability arises because I’ve practised and you haven’t.” Dove doesn’t put anything in wood-lettuce tea.

  “What exactly would practice get me?” Chloris remembers not to wave the mug.

  “Skill.”

  Chloris makes a face. It’s not clear those are skills Chloris is inclined to value, put it that way.

  Dove sounds sad, but it’s not sad, I think it’s tired somehow, but I can’t really tell. “It was a plant.”

  Chloris nods, angry. “And I would have pulled a little one out of the garden, it isn’t any different, only it is. I didn’t do anything, I just thought, it’s…”

  “Exactly the same.”

  Chloris looks at Dove. Dove said that so you kinda have to look, look Dove in the eye.

  “Swords, an adci, spears, a hoe in the garden, it doesn’t matter if it’s metal or a rock or the Power, it’s the intention.
It’s the decision that does it.”

  “The decision was easy.” Chloris is having a lot of trouble with this, that’s a short sentence for anybody’s voice to be changing pitch erratically.

  “Which it should have been. It was a weed, you’d checked three times that a weed was all it was, you checked with Wake, you could see the serious harm it had done, it was a lot less of a risk you had that wrong than hitting yourself in the foot with the hoe in the garden would be.”

  “And the next one, and the one after that, and eventually I’ll start killing people, because it’s so easy. It’s — ” Chloris waves at the dome, vaguely around. “This was hard, I though I was going to die or catch fire every day when we were building the house. It made me think magic is hard, terribly difficult stuff, even if it’s faster and more beautiful it was really, really difficult.”

  “Then the weed was so easy.” Chloris says that into the tea mug, and if all we had to go on was the actual sound we’d never be able to tell anything got said, it’s so quiet.

  “Sometimes people are pretty easy, too.” Dove says that quietly, to the tabletop more than the rest of us, but just ears would be enough to hear. Good ears.

  Dove looks up, looks right at Chloris. “Doesn’t mean you have to do it, passing like a murrain among the enemies of the Commonweal. It does have to get done.” Lots of the glitter of trumpets.

  “Has to?” says Chloris, only a little louder and still to the mug.

  “At a pass in the Northern Hills I doubt still exists, there was a fortress. The Reems troops on the wall were speculating about what kind of prices they could get, selling such large women into sexual slavery.” Dove’s voice is entirely conversational.

  Dove shrugs. “They had a lot of demons and a big army. That was part of what they really meant to do.”

  “You’re sure that’s what they said?” Zora, trying really hard not to sound horrified.