A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

YOU THAT ARE BOUND BE STILL. Less twitching, and less. Lots of push into the stillness, lots of a sense of tightening, like twisting a stick in a loop of rope. Haven’t got all of them, there’s a bunch still trying to get to Dove, but not enough anymore, the energy thing can hold them, it’s like they’ve got weight, like there’s an up and a down and Dove and I are at the bottom of the down, and the weed-thing, the hungry limbs, are at the top. It can still just fall on us and that’s going to be even worse for the previous victims.

  Pick one. That one, there. Arrows that come through flesh into air they break off behind and draw through in the direction of travel, there was this terrifically gruesome description of that attached to some early Commonweal battle school spent days on. So keep all the stillness, everywhere, and all the stillness right there, that specific limb, and snap. Don’t think the idea of an edge would work. Shearing, force in three directions, that works. Pull the spike-end through, crumble it into smoke and dust and nothing, gone behind the darkness.

  Next one. Fight the twitching down again. Next. The one after. It’s a lot like the kind of weeding you do in the vegetable garden as a kid, only I have only got the idea of heavy gloves. Have to hope it’s the right idea.

  That goes on for a long time.

  Get through about two-thirds and there’s a tremendous attempt at thrashing, the twitches rise up to something like humming, like a rope too tight in the wind.

  I press down on the will to move, not just the form of the spiky thing. Dove’s still intact, still got the energy-sphere, obvious Dove’s getting really tired. Feeling seriously tired myself.

  Snap. Snap. Snap. Don’t wait for the smoke and dust and nothing to clear, just keep going.

  When my material vision fades back in, I’m on a couch, Dove’s on the same couch. Still in the solar, but it’s afternoon, the light’s moved. Dove doesn’t look good, colour’s awful and right out, unconscious, head back, eyes closed. Breathing, normal sort of breathing, which is something.

  Tiny thin thread of the link, consonance, which is more.

  There’s a purple illusory metronome in the middle of the floor, ticking back and forth. There’s five or six bodies, patients, damaged Line troopers, lying on the floor, and Zora’s cross-legged in the middle of them. They’re breathing at the same time, exactly the same, one breath to four ticks of the metronome, tick-tock out, tock-tick in.

  Chloris has a, yeah, ghosts, that’s a group of ghosts following Chloris around, and Chloris’ smiling and nodding and saying totally inaudible words, almost like dancing, handing ghosts back into their bodies as doctors, people with doctor tattoos anyway, slide bodies away from Zora one by one and do things. The ghosts go back in, the bodies sit up, blinking. It looks like everything works, same number of ghosts and bodies. Lots of crazed smiles.

  Halt is sitting off to one side, not knitting. Seems like a bad sign. Somebody medical hands me a litre mug of whatever it is that Halt carries around in that flask.

  Still have no idea what it tastes like, but it helps. It helps a lot. It helps Dove, a bit, but I wasn’t trying. I hand the mug back, look at Halt. “Could I have another?”

  There’s this noise in the background, from all the Line patients. “I think I can feed most of it through to Dove.” Who still hasn’t moved, not dead, not dying, but that’s the best I can say, and I might be wrong. Not going to let go Dove’s hand.

  Halt nods, and what looks like a quarter-litre pocket flask fills the litre mug, probably again. This time, I, well, I drink it, but so far as the consonance is concerned metaphysical-me is holding up metaphysical-Dove and feeding it to Dove’s metaphysical existence in tiny sips. Takes hundreds of seconds.

  Dove’s colour is a lot better by the end. There’s a quiet, not quiet enough, but quiet, mutter of “Idiot,” and Dove sort of wraps around my hand. The wrapping process winds up with Dove’s head in my lap. Breathing better, colour much better.

  Me, too. That was worrying, there’s a tightness going off my ribs.

  The doctor, yeah, that’s a doctor’s worth of forehead tattoos, looks into the mug, looks at me, looks at Halt, doubt and confusion rolling off in waves. Halt smiles, full of quiet secrets.

  “Edgar.” I look. This is Halt speaking with deliberate emphasis, a whole lot more Halt than normally gets into the grandma persona. Rocks would look.

  “Many people are going to fuss at you, and ask you what you were thinking.”

  I nod. I’m a little surprised Halt isn’t one of them.

  “You won.” Halt sounds completely approving. It’s an unsettling effect.

  “Victory does not justify, merely a requirement.” That comes with a twinkle. “You made good decisions on short notice and shielded those behind you. Those serve as justification.”

  I nod, there’s really nothing to say. I have no idea what you can possibly say when Halt commends you for excellence of conduct. From the low mutter around the room, the troops of the Line have no idea either.

  “What happened, that there were ghosts?” I try to say this levelly, but it’s hard. I want to sleep as I have never wanted anything.

  “Disembodiment,” Halt says. “Limb-twitch, when it attacked.”

  Several of the medical sorts wince. Most of the formerly hurt, paralyzed, do. You’d think something like that would hurt. From the faces, it hurt a lot.

  Zora’s standing up, doesn’t look a whole lot better than I feel. Some, though. The metronome goes tick-tock even fading into nothing.

  Halt’s head turns. “Excellently well done, Chloris, Zora.” Not a tone of voice you could doubt. “You have much reduced the cost.”

  Chloris straightens, smiles in this shy and utterly unselfconscious way. Zora lights up, too, but Zora does that when happy, it’s a regular thing. Chloris has gone something special. I can see five or six of the Line troopers, looking at Chloris, going from grateful to smitten. Smitten enough that it’s getting through their realization that nothing’s paralysed.

  There’s stumbling, they’re all weak, months of no exercise, but we wander out on a lot of tears, as well as doctors urging caution and sitting back down and food and careful therapeutic exercises, not charging out the door.

  Getting Dove back to the hostel takes wrapping in a blanket and floating, despite some muttered protests. I’m sure it looks strange, three obviously exhausted young people and a floating figure wrapped in a hospital blanket, drifting along behind Halt.

  Nobody saying anything isn’t strange at all, Halt looking determined and walking with a deliberate stick-tapping motion moves in a bubble of silence and shifting aside.

  Breakfast is, well, breakfast is odd.

  I’m implausibly sure Dove didn’t have any nightmares because we spent most of the night having a long talk about the future. I’m pretty sure it was a dream because I don’t remember anything except the shifting landscape, stream-bank meadow to mountainside and day into night in some implausibly gentle way, and I don’t feel exhausted. I don’t even feel tired, which is maybe the two mugs of that draught of Halt’s, but sleep had something to do with it.

  Dove looks tired, still, but nothing worse than tired, talent-tired. Chloris is still somewhere special. Zora’s not looking tired, but is looking worried about Chloris. Halt, though, Halt is eating, not just the scones of ceremony, it’s a very substantial breakfast. Three eggs doesn’t sound like that much to me if I just say it, even after being run over by the thirty-kilogramme chicken, but it is. Creeks don’t have specific little egg spoons.

  Halt looks entirely cheerful, even if I am down last. Halt’s got a little jar of some sort of preserves open, and is passing it to Dove. Dove gets a proper Dove grin, and stabs some with a fork, says thank you, hands the jar back, and eats the forkful.

  Dove looks really surprised. Also much more awake. I can’t tell why, there’s something muzzy about my awareness of Dove.

  Halt positively beams. “Dove, dear, you really might wish to consider that your…admiration of unstoppability
in other persons is not found universally appalling.”

  Zora makes a noise. Dove mimes bonking Zora with a spoon, the bowl of the spoon maybe a metre from Zora’s head when the striking motion happens. Then Dove looks at Halt, and nods. “Point taken.”

  Chloris looks at Halt, and says, “Is Kynefrid going to be…successful?” having clearly discarded a few initial word choices.

  Halt’s head tips a little, looks at Chloris over a raised teacup. Chloris goes right on looking back, and doesn’t fidget.

  “The future remains obscure, girl. Crane is strong and kind and suitably ruthless. It will suit Kynefrid better than the exercise of hope.”

  Chloris sort of nods, looks down, goes right on looking somewhat unlike Chloris.

  I set my breakfast down, sit down, look at it, slump a little. I’m not going to have any appetite unless.

  “Halt? Do you know what that was?”

  “It’s dead now, dear.” Halt puts honey on the bacon on the butter on the toast, picks the toast up, and it just vanishes. It wasn’t a small piece of toast, there’s no apprehension of chewing, there’s certainly no noise, the big spider’s not anywhere manifest enough to have done it, and spiders, I’m pretty sure spiders don’t chew anything anyway.

  “At the time of injury, a metaphysical toxin, destructive to belief in ownership of flesh.” A roll with jam vanishes.

  “Halt, just how fast did you get to Headwaters?” Dove’s more curious than it sounds, and Dove sounds curious.

  Halt produces a mad pixie smile. “So swift as I was able.”

  Dove thinks that’s as much answer as there is to be had.

  “Was I that loud?” I say, looking at Halt.

  Chloris and Zora are looking at me in disbelief. “I still have the headache,” Chloris says.

  “Not,” Chloris says, putting up a hand, “that you shouldn’t have shouted. I don’t think you knew how loud it was.”

  Halt nods. “I shall be unsurprised if the Eighteenth makes report.”

  Buttering my own toast only goes so far. Even eating it doesn’t add much time, trying to think of what to say.

  “Do we learn how to do that properly?”

  “Possibly.” Halt is still smiling. “Properly depends on the student.”

  Halt makes a sort of ‘as I was saying’ motion with a fork; the slab of egg pops off it, presumably into Halt.

  “Yesterday, well. An immaterial predator. Against which you all did splendidly well.” Halt clearly remains pleased about that.

  Dove isn’t. “No way to tell, is there.”

  Halt’s head shakes, the hand without a teacup reaches out to pat Dove’s forearm.

  Dove looks sideways down at me, across at Zora and Chloris, then settles into a fixed look. “Near the end, I had Three Platoon to cover the artillery for Blossom while the Captain took the standard, Two Platoon, the colour party, and Halt into a Reems fortress.”

  “We got piled into by a bunch of Reems infantry. The infantry had critters with it, like really spiky wolverines, and the spikes, the spines, are what produced the injuries in everybody you saw in the hospital. So it could be that it went off today because I was the first sorcerer it saw after it — ” Dove grimaces, waves the hand that doesn’t have a spoon in it — “ripened, or because it was always trying to get me and just didn’t manage the first time.”

  “Was there a One Platoon?” Zora sounds very tentative.

  “One and Two and Four turned into Two, after the second fight at the wall where we all wound up breathing solid despair.” I find myself putting an arm around Dove, I don’t make a decision to, the bleakness gets into my spine and my arm moves. “Three mostly came out of that fight.”

  Dove’s mug gets picked up, set down.

  “After that, One was the dead who stuck in the standard, so they went into the fortress, too.”

  Chloris has a bit of the what-is-happening-to-me look, but only a bit. “You were leading, and it was trying to get you specifically?”

  Dove’s face twitches. “Blossom was leading, overall, but nobody’d try to get Blossom with critters. I’d have been the best available target.” There’s a pause, and Dove gets quieter. “They might really have thought I was making the ward, not just running it.”

  “Dove.” Halt pauses, patting with a napkin. Napkin? Didn’t see any anywhere else in the hostel dining room. “You won.”

  Dove nods, still looking grim.

  “I did not, Grue did not, various careful doctors did not, have the least suspicion. Persistent metaphysical toxin, yes, quite vicious. Trap did not cross my mind.”

  Which means it’s beyond sneaky stuff. Was. Was beyond sneaky stuff.

  “Had the word trap occurred, I should have done something about it.” Halt sounds stern.

  “As it is, well. Grue is invisible to the Power, Dove dear. A competent trap wouldn’t try me or Blossom. You were the next sorcerer to walk in. You didn’t die, despite having, most very deliberately on your teachers’ part, no idea what you were doing in that kind of fight. So perhaps it was still trying for you, yes, or perhaps it thought it could win.”

  “Like bloodroot never going for the bunnies.” Zora sounds very definite. “Bloodroot is barely a plant. It can’t be that difficult to stick I can eat that into even a really dumb critter, if someone got it into bloodroot.”

  Dove smiles, a little. “Point. So I have to put this to dumb luck, not my incompetence.”

  “Entirely, Dove dear.” Halt is looking round the table, and Chloris passes, in succession, the biscuit basket, the wire caddy with the preserves jars, and a dish of larded potatoes. “Especially since you did the best thing you could have, pinning it like that. Edgar wouldn’t have been able to withstand its full attention.”

  “Are the Line patients going to be all right now?” Zora says it tentatively.

  Halt nods, tapping a folded piece of notepaper stuck under the saucer-edge. “All well, as they would not have been, had you and Chloris not been so prompt.” Halt twinkles at that side of the table.

  “Even when we have no idea what we’re doing, we’re useful.” Chloris wishes believing this was optional, but doesn’t feel like the knowledge is a burden. Day before yesterday, Chloris did.

  “A thing Wake and I wished very much to prove.” Halt smiles beatifically. “Finish up, children. Chloris still has some shopping to do — ” Halt’s hand dips into the knitting bag, and returns with Halt’s letter of credit, Chloris’ hand-written list of dyestuffs, Chloris’ mechanical pencil, and Chloris’ warm knit hat to Chloris, of course everyone knows where Halt is staying after the apprentices sprint out of the shop — “and then we have a barge to catch.”

  Chapter 21

  Westcreek Town in winter gets a fair good deal of snow, half a metre or more on the ground, and winter’s colder here than Wending was.

  I don’t much notice the cold. It’s, there’s an explanation, I understand the explanation, I can experimentally test the explanation, it’s obviously correct, and the whole thing renders me uneasy anyway.

  Dove and I got the consonance sorted out, it had tipped a bit between the Shape of Peace and the spiky-trap critter, getting tossed into that kind of fight when it was already a bit out of balance from being forcibly shut down by the Shape of Peace.

  Wake, asked, produced the most completely dry explanation of energy circulation imaginable, so much so that it was two days before either of us figured out what the explanation meant. It was useful as the dry description, we just had to get to the implications ourselves. Common, not merged, but certainly common, the way you can have your own room in a house and share the rest with someone who has their own room, metaphysical brain constructs eventually turn into something that’s got a metaphysical metabolism, just like the unshared metaphysical self-construct does. That was the first implication. Only Dove and I have antithetical talent flavours, I’m apparent as a cloud of darkness with edges in it, and Dove’s, well, it’s not just a blazing scream of tr
umpets, there’s a lot more brass instruments in there now and a sense of heat, not just light.

  I’d be bothered by the darkness if it seemed to be changing my character. My character’s changing, sure, sorcery school is supposed to do that, but I can’t see any way it’s the darkness doing the changing. Growing a new brain not based on flesh would have to change something, even if I was doing nothing else. I’m not creeping out anybody, anybody with a regular amount of talent, any more than Chloris is. Zora sort of gives everybody response-whiplash, and both Wake and Blossom point out that life-mages are a lot less creepy for completely irrational reasons, it being life-mages who can decide to alter your brain or heredity in undetectable ways. It’s life-mages who cure diseases and up crop-yields, too, and that’s what seems to stick, socially. Even for seventeen-year-old incipient life-mages with a penchant for illusory wings.

  Dove isn’t creeping anybody out, Dove gives people a case of “Where are these battlements we’re storming?” but everybody who’d know says Dove always did, it’s just gotten stronger.

  So, anyway, crunchy darkness with tooth-like structures, brass orchestra on fire with glory. Shouldn’t work, as an energy balancing problem. Especially shouldn’t work because Dove’s lots stronger than I am.

  Only it works just fine, because Dove’s half of the house becomes the metaphorical sunny, northern side, the paved courtyard and the broad windows and the long slope to the river, covered in trees and clean fields. My half, we’re not counting the middle, shared, half, is the shaded, dim, south side. I was trying for backing on to the dim forest primeval, but I don’t believe in forest primeval, I don’t well remember the four days I spent in one being displaced, and even then anywhere you can get to on a road isn’t truly primeval. So what I’ve got is a sunless sea. It’s dim and vast and quiet, and I, Dove too, we’re repeating “metaphysical rules” to ourselves and not trying, trying not, to sort out how the drainage could possibly work.

  Well, except it does, because it’s purely metaphorical, it’s not actual water, it’s a personal understanding of the Power. Fire feeds over to me, darkness feeds round to Dove, it’s working fine. You might as well call it convection and be done with it, only then you’d have to figure out if there’s heat, a temperature analog that applies to the Power, the Power as a thing, rather than using the Power. Using the Power, you get heat; work is heat.