Dove takes my hand, which is not the usual order of things.
I can feel Dove deciding to say this aloud. “Last time I undertook specific obligations to the Shape of Peace, keeping them was tougher than I thought it was going to be.”
Crane, I don’t think that’s sympathy, I think that’s fellowship. Crane’s expressions are subtle, it’s tough.
“I have not known so many Independents of either Commonweal as your senior teachers have,” Crane says, dry and quiet into their teacup full of coffee. “Still, I have not known any who did not find what you are undertaking harder than they thought it was going to be.”
Crane smiles, quietly, gently, at Chloris’ look of despair. “Not impossibly difficult. Only the difficulty of a large complex thing first undertaken.”
Dove gets a ‘right, work,’ look, and says, not to anybody in particular, “Yet these things shall come to pass.”
Crane’s eyes widen just a little. Several other people in the hostel look variously alarmed. Dove takes no notice, stacking dishes. Zora’s looking at me, as though I know why Dove said that. I don’t, all I know is that Kynefrid didn’t get the spike of determination that came with it, Kynefrid isn’t shaking again.
We don’t go straight to the Shape of Peace; we have to collect a clerk — not Lester, a Francis — and both of Glyph and Ongen, who are, by Francis, introduced as list-lead and the Maintainer, respectively. No one explains what either of those things mean.
The walk from there is shorter than the walk from the Shape of Peace to the hostel yesterday, but it feels three times as long.
Francis hauls out Lester’s lists of our accomplishments, our attestations of them, and our attestations of intent. We get asked, individually, with careful checks of name and signature, if we do now still so attest our works and intent.
We all do, one by one. I don’t think any of us find it easy to say, it’s not something you think about every day, but the idea of having, of accepting, the legal obligation to turn yourself into a metaphysical life form is one that sticks. Even if it’s the only way to save any kind of your life.
Even if the first bits of your new life are something you really like. Kynefrid wasn’t wrong calling it stepping of a cliff.
If you’re not a sorcerer, you can be sure that the metaphorical cliff is safer. I don’t think that’s true for sorcerers.
I’ve managed to get on the end of the line where I’ll be going last. I get to hear four cautions that the actual process of administration hurts before I get my own personal caution. The cautions aren’t especially worrying. The noises everybody’s making are unnerving, but not hugely so. It’s the not being able to turn to look, the not being able to reach out and tell what’s going on. Dove isn’t there, for the first time in months, and it’s very unsettling. The Shape of Peace is determined that everyone does this as a distinct individual.
The oath isn’t a promise to abide the law of your active thought and will, which is what all the clerk’s oaths and minor office oaths say. You promise to return, to be examined for an Independent, and there’s a connection established so the Shape of Peace will always be able to find you. No getting most of your magical education and heading over the border.
There’s a dabber thing, with a felt end; you get a big splock of oil in the middle of your forehead, and one on of the back of each hand. I found out later the oil is refined from ostrich lard, and that if I can figure out why it works better than anything else I’ve got my own-work project.
The return’s got a time limit. Ten years.
The only possible way to get an extension is to present yourself for judgement. If you’re still in the biological ecosystem, the Shape of Peace can give you more time, it’s been known to happen. Or it can judge you a failure, which is fatal.
Dove’s got, I’ve got, six years at most on the odds. So no worries about an extension.
The words are easy, you get a card with a neat printed version anyway. “I, Edgar, formerly of the Township of Wending in the Province of the Dread River, presently in the keeping of the Galdor-gesith in the Province of Westcreek, do avow by my name that I shall return unto this place in not more time than ten years and one day, to be examined for the qualification of Independent sorcerer.” It’s your card, you thumb-printed it with a drop of your blood. Just the left thumb.
Saying the words is just as easy. It’s a good thing to want the life you’ve got, and this life is the only one I’m going to get.
You say the words, you think “That’s it?” and the consuming pain starts in the middle of your forehead, gnaws its way through your skull, your brain, down your spine, and out, mostly out, your hands. Some of it gets everywhere.
I’d have screamed if my jaw hadn’t locked from the pain. I’d have screamed at some length.
When my eyes focus again and I get to my feet, I see Glyph looking apologetic. “That can only happen once.” It’s addressed to all of us, though Kynefrid, who went first, is looking better than I expect, based on how I’m feeling. So maybe it wears off fast.
“The second time is fatal?” Chloris says, sounding shaky and furious at the same time.
“Yes,” says Glyph, completely serious. “You can only bind your name once, for much the same reason that you can only live through the second of time before the present moment once.”
“How’d you get into — ” Dove says to Glyph, with a chin lift at where the Shape of Peace swirls away, faintly, above the rock. It’s not looking as though any of us taste bad. Though if school had it right, the very first such binding was Halt’s, back just after the Shape of Peace was created.
Dove’s question registers. This is the Second Commonweal, but all the Independents are displaced, just like me and Kynefrid. They’d have done their name-binding with the original Shape of Peace.
Glyph very clearly can’t think of how to explain this, you can see, really see, I’d have seen before the parasite came out, a bunch of equations and diagrams starting to hover around Glyph’s head with the thinking involved.
“The First Commonweal cast out our names, but to us, not the Outer Dark.” Ongen isn’t as bothered by the amount of simplification, while Glyph’s halo of math is getting denser, hearing this. “We could thereby commit our bound names to the new Shape of Peace as we made it.”
“The Outer Dark is what happens if we fail the Independent examination?” Zora makes that a question to say, despite not thinking it’s any kind of question.
Ongen nods. “It is.”
We hand our cards to Francis, we get a handclasp of welcome from Ongen and Glyph both, and we all go get lunch. Crane is, well, sympathetic, but also implacable; we need to eat, and by the time we’ve got something into us we’ll believe that.
I like the cooking in Westcreek Town much better, but Crane’s right. There’s an ache, as the pain fades out, it’s the using-the-Power ache, not an abused-muscles ache.
Near the end of lunch, “It has to be like that?” Chloris asks, and Crane nods back.
“Comprehensive name-binding generally wants, generally has, a strong structural bias toward extinction of talent. Forms where the extinction of talent is not accompanied by general extinction of the basic mechanisms of life are difficult to achieve,” Crane says. “The name-binding in the Shape of Peace is traumatic, but does no lasting material damage nor alteration to the talent. Devising a better one is difficult without an ethical source of experimental subjects.”
Since you could only do it once, even if you didn’t kill them or zero out their talents. And if you did it the least bit wrong, they’d be shut out of the Shape of Peace, which is, for a sorcerer in the Commonweal, near enough to a death sentence.
I’m sure everybody’d try to fix it, first. But if they couldn’t, you would die, be destroyed.
I remember feeling a lot less ambivalent about that when I didn’t know I had any talent for the Power. Still the only way to have anything like the Peace with people like me around. Floating ei
ght thousand tonnes of marble through Westcreek Town got us a few odd looks, not panic and screaming. It’s still — something — thinking I’ve got a deadline with real dead in it. Never had that before.
Well, that I knew about. The parasite came with a deadline.
Dove reaches across the table, ruffles my hair. “All we have to do is not die and keep up with Halt’s syllabus, and we’re fine.”
“You’ll be fine,” Kynefrid says. “I won’t be.”
Kynefrid sounds dreadfully certain, and when Zora tries to say something holds up a hand, Stop. “Really. At least half of being able to do something with the Power is belief that you can. I, I got too far with learning charms, I don’t know, but the idea that I can throw myself off the cliff and grow wings and fly before the ground grinds me to grease. I can’t believe that.”
Kynefrid’s hand lowers and Zora’s mouth opens and —
“Zora,” Dove says, “you really can’t argue Kynefrid out of it. It’s not fair to try.”
Zora’s mouth clamps shut, so Zora says nothing, beyond whatever sprouting gloriously ornate butterfly wings and swishing them irritably is intended to convey.
Chloris says “Remember you can come back.”
Kynefrid’s head shakes. “The ward would let me in, you’d all be happy to see me, and I’d try to do what you were doing and fry myself.”
Completely certain about that.
“So what are you going to do?” I try to say it flat, no emotional subtext.
“In strict law,” Crane says, “formally accepted students are free to wander as they please. There are even three examples of successfully attained Independent status after spending a dozen years meditating in the wilderness.”
Three. In five centuries.
“In the particular case, having conferred with Wake, I have offered Kynefrid a more traditional course of instruction.” Crane sets the teacup down, quietly, very precisely centred on the saucer.
“Which I have accepted.” Kynefrid says that almost sadly, but I think Crane understands.
Dove, and Dove’s bag, produce Kynefrid’s blue mug. Dove hands it across. Kynefrid looks like someone whose head might fall off, just from surprise.
Dove just looks at Kynefrid, holding the mug out, until Kynefrid gets collected enough to take it. Crane’s looking at Dove in a distinctly approving way.
“You may not want to finish there, but you still started with the Tall Woods. The Round House’ll have your doors for a long time.”
Dove’s head turns to look at Crane. “Try to bring our fellow student back for Festival, some years?”
Crane produces a small, completely serious smile. I don’t know how you smile in a completely serious way, but that’s what Crane does, before nodding once. “I shall.”
Can we get walking? drifts out of Chloris in a cloud of misery, and we all nod at each other, and get up, and say something like “Good luck,” to Kynefrid, and “Thank you,” to Crane, and head out.
Chapter 20
Headwaters is a surprise. I was expecting more or less Westcreek Town, maybe arranged a bit differently.
Instead of a fairly big place, spread along both sides of the West Wetcreek and the East Canal, even if that’s really three sides, it’s a very compact settlement on an island too round to be entirely natural. It has walls. It’s got maybe three thousand people, though I’m told that goes up to five in the summer. Everything’s at least five or six stories, except the warehouses around the edge, which look like they’re at least three.
“This is the right time,” Zora says, and then tells horrifying stories about what the biting bugs are like in the summer. More horrifying is the purpose of the warehouses; there are quite some number of Creeks, four or five townships worth, living north and west of Headwaters, up in various damp little valleys where the Folded Hills mush into the Northern Hills and the bugs are “serious”, Zora says. “Really serious. You can’t go outside after dark, some months. But they keep bees and make whiskey and sheep’s cheese and maple syrup and indestructible socks.”
“Also smoked boar and excellent insect repellent,” Dove adds.
The warehouses are where the surplus goods get stored, sometimes brought on sleds in the winter but usually paddled in by canoe when the water is high in the spring. So they’re there because thousands and thousands of people live in a landscape that alternates bog and rock and is mostly impassable, you get a brief paddling season and a not-quite-as-brief hard freeze when the rot in the bogs isn’t producing enough heat to make the ice treacherous. Otherwise you stay home. Unless you’re willing to risk going mad from the bug-bites. Really, chemically, mad.
It’s more than enough to make me glad my former collective is down at the southern end of the Folded Hills.
I ask if anybody lives in the Northern Hills. Presumably, if people are willing to live up in the Corner like that.
I get wide eyes from Zora and Chloris and a certain amount of confusion. Apparently you could go berry-picking and things there, at least in the foothills, in Chloris’ grandma’s youth, but not for the last generation and not for the last fifteen years, for sure. The Hills have mostly been mountains, and they keep getting less pleasant.
I’m probably looking baffled. I’m certainly feeling baffled. “Conscious terrane,” Dove says. “Reems was trying to colonize it, it’s in an inhospitable mood.”
“All that altitude and snow, there will be flooding problems,” is Chloris’ contribution, and I can believe that; the snow, well, there’s snow, you can see it on the frozen marsh, you can see snow all around, but if you look up, and concentrate, the northern edge of the world is this glittery pure white. Lots of snow, way high up.
Lots of snow right here. It’s higher, some, there are two sets of locks around dams drowning rapids to get barges up to Headwaters, and colder than Westcreek. Plus I’m told the Corner is a weather trap; the prevailing winds come from the south-east. So more water falls out of the sky. Someone keeps the streets clear, can’t see anything that looks like sweep-marks or shovel-bites on the edges of the snow, so it’s probably a focus. Clear streets are helpful. Chloris has had a couple of days to recover from grief and recreate a determination to do a good job of shopping for dyestuffs. Determination doesn’t mean Chloris knows where one needs to be to get anything on Halt’s list, so there’s going to be a good deal of walking.
Chloris and Zora set off to do that, Zora having offered to carry, even on the condition of no spurious illusory anything.
I’m following Dove, who knows where to go, fellow soldiers to visit. My offer to go with Chloris and Zora instead was turned down, with emphasis, so it’s not precisely like I shouldn’t be there.
It’s, well, the hospital is way too big for a town this size, six stories, two big buildings, and it’s not at all full. Which is doubtless why the word ‘regional’ was over the door, and I suppose in winter nobody’s getting hurt by weeds. Or nothing like as much as spring planting, anyway. We’re headed toward outside, more than halfway through and the hospital’s on the north side of town, so the side that gets a lot of the light. There’s a lot of glass, it’s practically a solar, and there’s a bunch, a big bunch of folks, maybe forty.
None of them look especially ill until you notice slings and crutches and one or two problems with drool.
I hang back a bit; everyone’s clearly happy to see Dove, there’s card games that just stop, cards set down face-up. It’s not obvious any of them notice me standing in the doorway.
Big lad, well, near enough a regular lad, height-wise, for a Creek, but wide even for a Creek, gets up. Has trouble, looks like the arm and the leg don’t work on their right side.
“Hey, Slice,” Dove says, taking the offered left forearm.
Something’s not quite right, and then something’s completely wrong.
CHLORIS! ZORA! HOSPITAL! HELP!
That gets me noticed, not much, I’m just whoever stepped into the room behind the head-noise and reaching
for Dove and then they all go strange, eyes-rolling, falling-over strange.
Dove’s not doing well, and then I’ve got a hand on the middle of Dove’s back and we’re not doing well together.
All of the people, Line-troopers, they must have been, there’s a spike in the metaphysical part of them, one or two, only through limbs, the limbs that aren’t working, and the spikes all move, pushing through, reaching at Dove.
Dove’s got something up, not a ward, raw energy, intact behind it, Dove’s dropped the link, there’s a whole lot of spikes, more, extra, none of them have reached past, the energy-thing’s in the way, it’s not a smart metaphor, it’d maybe have fumbled along the link but now it’s just trying to get at Dove. Too hot to reach through, for some value of hot, the energy sphere, and the hungry spines are twisting, like trying to wrestle a rosebush in a windstorm by holding up a mattress.
Metaphysical weeding problem.
Individual spikes, limbs, whatever, keep moving and feinting and trying different angles. It presumably thinks it can win against Dove. Hopefully it really didn’t notice me, and flubbed its assessment.
If the spines, spikes, they’re like big jointed thorn-branches, the patients get hurt worse flailing with them. First thing after stopping the pushing at Dove is to stop them from coming at me, because I can’t do that shell thing.
Noun, verb. THIS SHAPE OF SPIKES BE BOUND TO STILLNESS. Don’t want to lock up anybody trying to come in and help. The thought is quiet, underneath, hardly anywhere near the part of my mind I’m thinking with. That’s going, it’s all going, oddly dim, like being colour-blind for material reality. The spikes are just ends, feet, something, on long jointed limbs. Or vines, no obvious body. They’re twitching, little waves travelling up and down them, but they can’t move, can’t shift the place they’re in, all they can do now is push, straight forward into where they’re stuck.
A Succession of Bad Days Page 23