A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  I suppose this explains why all six of the moored barges have big mooring ropes to four separate bollards, sometimes crossing each other.

  We, the five of us, stop together just back from the walkway behind the sheer bank and as out of the way as we can get. No one says anything, and there’s enough of a linkage generally that you can feel Zora’s Do bollards have to be iron? along with Chloris’ drifting enquiry after depth in the river.

  “Students,” Crane says. It’s much more amused than stern. “They’ve already got one.”

  We nod, it’s one motion.

  “Somebody else is going to want one,” Zora says. “There’s some scouring around the feet of the upstream six pilings,” Chloris says. Crane’s eyes go, something, it’s not something flesh-eyes visible, not narrow or wide or anything like that, then there’s a small nod. “So there is.” Which means we go by the landing-master before heading to the hostel.

  The singular isn’t really correct; it’s four long, well, sheds, almost, sod roofs and low fieldstone walls, square windows on the high side, toward the West Wetcreek. Warm, though, and quiet and dry; flagged floors, gravel under them. Round gravel, out of a stream somewhere.

  Crane’s willing to have us heat the bathwater with the Power, as long as we ask first and heat everybody’s. Nobody objects. Crane wasn’t sure, I don’t think. Creeks have trouble worrying about what Dove and Chloris and Zora are going to do. None of them register as ‘sorcerer’, it looks like they mostly register as ‘neighbour’. Easy to understand why Chloris fears losing that.

  I’m apparently invisible. Even Crane lost me for a bit after dinner, before doing the strange-eyes whatever again. Kynefrid is obviously well-behaved and just as obviously too skinny to be a threat. Various parental sorts of Creeks keep checking to make sure Kynefrid’s eating.

  It’s oddly difficult to sleep. After the last, well, I suppose technically it’s more than two months duration, heating bathwater isn’t enough Power use to notice. Didn’t do anything else today, and it takes some work to get my brain to quiet down, the grown-from-food one or the metaphysical one that isn’t done yet.

  I’m not holding hands with Dove when I wake up, I couldn’t be, Dove’s two rooms away, through a couple of stone walls, but it sure feels like I am. From the Idiot, and the wiggled fingers when we meet, headed toward breakfast, Dove’s had the same feeling.

  Trying to eat breakfast outside-hands-only doesn’t work very well. We keep trying; going to blame that on not being awake. Eating breakfast quickly and drinking one’s tea outside-hands-only works a lot better. Even when Chloris looks pained and Zora looks quietly appalled. Quietly for Zora, anyway. Kynefrid doesn’t normally take any notice. Today, it’s a sort of rueful, maybe, kind of notice? Something.

  It’s, well, I ought to think it’s cold out. It’s colder than winter where I grew up, at least for daylight. There isn’t much wind, though, and the road’s clear, and the day’s bright. Lots of people, waggons rumbling by, almost all the drayage is bronze bulls. About half of them look new. It’s not remotely wilderness, there are rest stops five kilometres apart the whole way.

  It’s kinda nice to just walk and not think for awhile. Which is a really strange value of ‘not think’, if I think about it, which I’m not, entirely, not in the front of my head. I am getting the impression that the metaphysical brain doesn’t stop, doesn’t have the flesh-brain need for food or rest.

  They’re all eccentric. Dove’s wearing gloves out of good-example. I’m wearing gloves out of necessity. Doesn’t make any appreciable difference. Having your brain run at two speeds forever would do that.

  The majority position considers the increasingly detailed synthesia a more probable cause, drifts, very tactfully, half a precise step of long legs, into our brain.

  The principal minority position attributes the obvious tendency to eccentricity to the unnatural degree of self-control necessary to the non-fatal exercise of the Power at large scales.

  So we’re going to be eccentric for unusual reasons. Dove’s grin in the undertone is the smell of fire and sunrise and the sound of the fear of silk, become much too comfortingly familiar to reach strange if it stretches.

  Crane turns that into a discussion of what we’ve done, all five of us have done, specifically, not how we got the Round House built, not what we attested for Clerk Lester, but how individual wreakings, workings, there might be a difference, how using the Power felt and how we see what we do.

  I don’t think any of us have the vocabulary. We use up a lot of distance trying.

  Somewhere around the twenty kilometre mark, just past the fourth rest stop, there’s a waggon stopped. It’s just having the pair of bronze bulls unhitched and walked forward; the rear axle’s snapped clean.

  We stop. Crane drifts forward, past us and up to talking with the drover. There are six or seven infants, one a babe in arms and the rest up to about four, in the waggon, along with a couple of adult minders. None of them are Creeks and the waggon’s got a newish canvas tilt. Looks like some of a gean’s infants going somewhere. At a guess, out of temporary housing in the Creeks back to wherever their gean’s got roof and walls put up in the Folded Hills.

  Crane hands us the problem, pure curiosity, I think, leaning on that admittedly wizardly staff Crane certainly doesn’t need to lean on and watching before the last syllable of “Students?” is out on the air. Crane says 'Students’ as a question in the same precise way our teachers do. It might be the most reliably similar thing about sorcery in the Commonweal.

  If there’s anything else Independents all do the same way I haven’t noticed it, and that’s only really four examples. There are hundreds, not many hundreds and we haven’t seen them, but hundreds.

  Kids out, their minders out, check that there’s nothing precious in the waggon that anybody’s going to fear for if we pick the waggon up, pick the waggon up a couple decimetres and float it sideways off the road. Kynefrid gets the wheels off the axle-bits, and then on the illusion of an axle, spinning properly, then back off, the illusion tossed to Dove, who has the broken axle hanging in the air as a blob of molten iron with carbon creeping into it from some road apples gone quietly to charcoal. Zora’s acquired a handful of big nails from a drover coming the other way who stopped to see if they could help; that goes into the melt, and the whole thing extends itself to match the illusion, which Kynefrid, exchanging nods with Dove, lets go. The idea of an axle vanishes; Kynefrid gets a wheel, Zora gets a wheel, to make sure they’re still true and the hubs are sound. They check the springs and the axle mounts, too; having one of those go, having it get shorter than the other, is a common reason for a snapped axle.

  Chloris does the heat-pull; especially in the cold it’s a lot easier to get anything to cool right if you feed in too much heat, which Dove is doing, and pull out the excess. Feeding exactly the right amount of heat when the breeze is pulling out a variable amount is much more difficult. Chloris winds up with a cold-looking curious four-year-old, and then a cluster of warm passengers, because Chloris takes the four-year-old’s hand to arrest the step-stare-step progress toward the big glowy axle in the air, realizes it’s a cold infant, and starts passing some heat over, instead of all of it up into a shimmer on the air.

  Half an hour later there’s a new steel axle down to air temperature, five minutes after that axle and wheels are back on and I can set the waggon down. Re-stowing the warmed passengers is another five minutes only because of some shyly passed out warming-rocks. Those go back toasty, under a mass of lap-robes that’s got all the kids in the middle and the minders on the outside. Dove hands the driver the smooth chunk of slag from the axle break, Kynefrid, rather hopefully, provides the drover on the other waggon, the one with nails and going the other way, with a re-heat for their warming rock. Everybody waves at the kids in the repaired waggon, waving back at us. Bronze bulls are good for three metres per second, steady pace, and we don’t walk that fast, so they pull ahead, but pretty slowly. The kids
wave for a long time. Just as they’re getting out of sight, Zora develops large purple butterfly wings and waves those, just once before illusions go wherever they go when you turn them off.

  Crane’s mouth quirks at the wings but nothing gets said until we’re at the next rest stop.

  “The charm to fix an axle would take me, oh, perhaps forty seconds.” Crane makes a small gesture, fingers almost tapping along the staff. That pose of leaning’s a state notice, I think, much the way Halt not knitting is. Not the same state.

  “Yet those children, at least, will go away thinking sorcerers are friendly and kind, and the adults will believe you did work. Sorcery, but work, lacking any seeming of effortlessness.”

  “It wasn’t difficult to do,” Chloris says. “It was just an axle.”

  “Yes, but you melted it, you didn’t charm it, it wasn’t some unfamiliar process.” Crane’s face moves, just a little. “Arguing with Halt is hard work.”

  Dove is grinning. “Who is there to hold that untrue?” and after a pause, “What do we call you, if we’re trying to be polite?”

  “Crane. A hierarchy of titles among sorcerers is no more appropriate than it would be among anyone else, and easily less.” A small smile, but I think they’re all small smiles.

  It’s a very bright afternoon.

  “Keep going until we’re there, or stop here and walk the rest of the way on Déci?” Crane says, two rest stops later. Which is tactful; Kynefrid is much too blue, the axle-fix helped, but once Kynefrid’s skin tone starts to match their hair, the slow shakes start. Those are set in now, it’s not just starting, Kynefrid’s way too cold. There’s a four-voice chorus for stop; Kynefrid’s shaking so much that talking would be difficult. Kynefrid will often not vote to stop over the cold, out of hating to be a bother. No matter how many times anybody points out there’s ‘bother’ and there’s 'accidental death attestations’ and that one is much more trouble than the other.

  Déci is another fine day, not that cold, clear, sunny. Kynefrid sets out into it with a certain grimness, all the same.

  It’s not that far, though, another twelve kilometres. There’s a rest stop, there’s a rest stop three kilometres past, the road goes right on past, not through. It’s not even a town yet, it’s mostly tents, and it looks like the few rough buildings are mostly full of records, rather than people.

  I started to feel the Shape of Peace from two rest stops back.

  It’s Déci, so we can’t do anything, but we can go look at it. There are a bunch of tents, the familiar Line-model ones, like the one we were in all of Brumaire, in a big horseshoe arrangement past the Shape of Peace, up on the bare ridge of rock. That’s where Parliament is meeting, would be meeting, if it wasn’t Déci.

  The Shape itself looks like chalk lines, but, well, they’d never do that. It’s going to be as close to permanent as they could make it, and besides, someone’s swept snow off it with a broom without any signs of blurring. Try sweeping snow off a chalk line and not touching the chalk.

  “The chalk lines were layout marks, like a carpenter’s pencil marks on wood. They got caught up in the enchantment and may now be permanent.” Crane’s voice is cool, considering. “Can you tell where the actual enchantment resides?”

  The rock is dark, there’s a lot of iron and one of the m-names, manganese or magnesium, which I can’t reliably tell apart. I can tell they’re different, but remembering which is which seems beyond me.

  Fifty, sixty metres down there’s the top curve of a ward. There’s a shallow curve, it can’t be spherical, it’d be ten kilometres across…

  Crane is shushing someone. There’s the strangest feeling in the air. Zora’s rustling, standing right there, there’s nothing, no butterfly wings, but rustling. Chloris is a single singing hunger like famine in winter, white as ice and green as leaves an hour unfurled. Kynefrid, Kynefrid’s not cold, and looking very surprised about that.

  Dove’s right there, I’m right there, Dove’s standing on the other side of Zora, but it doesn’t matter at all. I can’t, Dove can’t, actually see the Shape if we have to do it divided, but our mind can manage. The ward, the chalk, it’s pretty much all a decoy. A really good, careful one, someone worked hard to move little bits of iron and magnesium in precise ways far down in the basalt, and it’s complicated. The actual Shape of Peace, this is like the top of a standing wave, the place where the Shape rises. Not materially accessible, but maybe materially present? The Shape of Peace is everywhere in the Commonweal, it has to be, everyone with a local office uses it for something. It’s not bound to the dirt or the people, the people are it, but the enchantment itself is written in the shadows of the shapes of the memories of names.

  I have no idea what that means, but the explanation is right there, hidden before the world.

  That’s the last thing that fades of the vast complex structure. Shadows of the shapes of the memories of names.

  I don’t think that’s next year, Chloris says.

  You can’t quite say any of the five of us laugh, it’s not a place for just starting to laugh, but I think we all get something of a manic look.

  “Back with us, students?” Crane says, quietly pleased. There’s a couple of other Independents standing beside Crane, introduced as Glyph and Ongen. “Didn’t change my name,” Ongen says, smiling.

  “There are Independents of two hundred years’ service who can’t see that clearly,” is what Glyph says. It’s not disapproving, really, but there’s a lot of surprise.

  Chloris and Kynefrid tip their heads at me, Zora almost points and turns it into a sort of elbow sweep. “Edgar does most of the unusual perceptions.” Kynefrid gets that out in an admiring tone, somehow.

  “Not enchantments.” Hard not to sound skittish. “More than half of that was Dove.”

  “You could pass the image to the others?” Glyph says to Dove.

  “I’m not Blossom.” Dove grins. “I’d have said Ed had six-tenths of that.”

  “If you were Blossom, I would be certain Halt was putting something in the water.” Ongen says this in good humour. It sounds like Ongen would not much disapprove if Halt was.

  “But you — ” Glyph’s chin includes Chloris and Zora and Kynefrid — “all saw?”

  We nod, all exactly together. It’s not planned, there’s no intent to do it, but we’re still a little bit linked up. Actively linked up. It happens.

  “Doing things together wouldn’t work if we didn’t share perceptions,” Chloris says. I don’t think how much Chloris wants to let that sound prim comes through outside the five of us.

  “Things.” Ongen’s smile is much wider, and at least as friendly.

  “They have made a collection of mighty things into a house,” Crane says, quite solemn.

  “Not a remark for which it is easy to devise a response.” Glyph is looking at us more than Crane, but seems willing to leave the whole thing.

  “Sorry to have disturbed your Déci,” I remember to say. Gets me a solemn head-shake and a brushing-out wave with a grin behind it, respectively.

  Turns out the Galdor-gesith maintains a hostel for travelling sorcerers. Also turns out it’s got no water; the tank’s fine, but the pump is waiting on windmill parts, so all the water is being lugged out of the little lake with buckets.

  It takes us about ten minutes to conclude we can’t make a pump, not right now. No patterns for the parts, and we really shouldn’t tackle a new binding on our own just yet, even if the easy fix would be to plunk water-gates in the tank and the lake. The hosteller doesn’t quite snicker at me when I ask if the roof lifts off the water tank.

  It doesn’t, but there’s an inspection hatch, which is nearly as good. I don’t think Crane liked the almost-snicker much, not from the immensely calm response in the face of the hosteller’s reaction to a couple tankfuls of water lifting out of the lake, and even calmer explaining that, no, see, the students are being extremely careful to make sure that, chemically, they have absolutely nothing but water,
and that mystically, it’s not just dead, it’s inert, you can see Wake’s teaching in that.

  Zora didn’t need to make the funnel purple, and really didn’t need to decorate its outer surface with stylized daisies, even if it does look cheery. Works fine, and the excess water wanders back to the lake, somewhat diminished by a few water troughs and a kitchen cistern.

  Crane, well, it’s possible to look solemn and bemused at the same time. Dove looks over and says “Creeks. Baths. It’s important,” and Crane actually laughs.

  Breakfast, bath, clean clothes, wait for Crane’s final cup of tea to be finished. Breakfast involves some cinnamon-and-honey pastries from the cook whose cistern we filled, which was a lot nicer than they needed to be.

  It’s getting so I can breathe for calm without the Power buildup, which is good. The hostel’s got a lot of wood in it where it isn’t still canvas.

  Everyone who might know what’s involved treats the formal student status as being like joining a collective, or maybe more like taking a minor gean office, something that hands you specific responsibilities but it’s not formally your main job. I suppose Independents are a large, very distributed collective, there are less than three hundred Independents, there were a couple thousand but most of them are in the First Commonweal still, but there are plenty of collectives that size and some larger.

  Which I suppose isn’t wrong, the specific responsibilities part, it’s agreeing that you’re going to, for whatever reasons seem good to you, set out to become an Independent, not just someone capable of sorcery, someone able to exercise their talent to predictable material effect. You’re going to have to be acceptable to the Shape of Peace as a whole, but that’s how you exercise your heightened talent, after you’ve departed life for the metaphysical. The minor sorcerer is still in the life they inherited from their parents.