A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  There’s a startled metaphysic blink, as Zora and Chloris drop entirely out, and then very quickly reappear in, re-create, the basic joint working link. “I’d forgotten it was there,” Chloris says, shaken.

  “The Line’s a lot like that, it’s a focus, it’s not your own head, but you get used to having it there. You know you’re not alone. I didn’t figure the consonance was going to be a lot different.” Dove’s head won’t fit in my lap from there, the windowsill is too high, not a lot too high but enough, so Dove’s head leans into my hip instead. “Wrong about that.” I can’t quite hug Dove, with the angle and one hand around Zora, but I try.

  Dove’s, it’s not sad, exactly. “Really didn’t want to lose the not-alone. I’m on the books as Regular Line, I’ll be the senior in authority of the Wapentake until something kills me, but I’m gone for an Independent. Won’t be the same.”

  Dove inhales enough I can feel my right hand rise, there on Dove’s shoulder.

  “Anyway. We’re not merging. We’re not deliberately disassembling the consonance. It’s this thing we’re doing together, on purpose. Not-being-alone is you — ” Dove’s chin points at Chloris, Zora. “Ed’s like my head got bigger, I don’t think there are words.”

  Haven’t found any.

  Having someone nod with the top of their head resting just below your hip is an odd sensation.

  “So once you’ve hatched you might want to be lovers with Dove?” Chloris, directly to me.

  “I might.” I don’t know how to say this. “Don’t know how I’m going to come out when I hatch, don’t know what will be there, I don’t know what hatch means as material events. It might change what Dove wants.”

  Careful deep breath.

  “In the end, attraction’s a decision, it’s something to add or leave out. Can’t be any tougher than neglecting a physical heart was. If Dove wants me as a lover, after I’ve hatched, if I add it back in I’ll want it. If it’s there anyway, and Dove doesn’t want, I can take it out. Consent gets odd with sorcery.”

  “Solely for Dove?” Chloris’ voice takes no notice of what emotions move in Chloris.

  “Not taking any bets Dove’ll be interested, consonance or not, after I hatch.” It’s a tough thing to say out loud. “Never been much of interest, and sorcery’s bad enough without whatever I hatch into.”

  “You sound like you don’t care.” Zora, talking to the windowsill.

  “I care.” No hands to gesture with, don’t want to let go. Making some kind of waving gesture anyway, a faint clatter of shadows. Chloris puts a hand on one, and I leave it there on the windowsill under Chloris’ hand, shadow of the shadow of the shape I’ll hatch into. “I’m talking about the other half of my mind, when I’m turning into, into whatever you’d expect if you weren’t used to the way my aura goes.” I can feel Zora wince a bit, under my arm, and then Zora straightens right up and hugs me.

  “Remember the cautions about wanting things at people?” Dove’s straightened up a bit.

  Zora nods around me, Chloris eyes close before there’s a quiet, pained “Yes”.

  “I can’t make this a story, Ed can’t make this a story, or we start going decision-observation instead of observation-decision. We get what we get, we make the best decision we can, we go from there and get something else. Try anything else and it — ”

  “Gets coercive”, Chloris says. Chloris’ emotions have caught up.

  Dove leans out, puts a hand out, Chloris takes it. “It gets coercive, which remains utterly unlawful even when we’re all tangled up like this, when we all want to be tangled up like this.”

  “Chloris?” Zora leans back, away from me, so I can look at Chloris directly. “I’m not that stupid.”

  The shadow-limb gets a pat, and Chloris nods.

  “I also figure, Dove might have a reason, but I’m not the same species as you are, wasn’t, I’m sure not now. Don’t expect to be interesting.”

  It’s odd. Narrowed eyes would be more unsettling, because narrowed eyes would go with the memory of conversations going badly. Chloris’ humanity falls off and I’m looking at the perfect still countenance of Death, hearing the gentle voice, empty of every passion because all things come in time to die. Continents, Halt, stars, every breathing thing, it doesn’t matter.

  “Edgar, you are the one lad in the world I know I won’t just have the life out of, you’re much too strong. You started stronger, you’re getting stronger faster than I’m getting stronger.”

  Death can look shy.

  “And you’re not ever going to tell me I’m delicate.”

  “You’d throw me into the fish-pond.” A real smile, good.

  There’s a pause.

  “Did that get the knots out of the tangle?” Zora, voice cautious.

  “I think so,” Dove says, sitting up.

  Chloris nods, picking up both shadow-limbs, and hugging them. Really odd sensation, they’re in contact with the cool calm knowledge of Death, not the warm lass.

  The shadow limbs bend, they’re strong, I can curl them around Chloris a little, and Chloris leans back into them, looking beatific.

  Zora looks at me, looks at Chloris, looks at Dove, sighs.

  “If we’re going to be a, a wizard-team, even if we’re a little one, should we be tangling our heads up on purpose?”

  “Changing how we develop to make sure we stay team-like?” Though I think it’s really down to four terrified people relying on their friends.

  Dove’s utterly certain that’s just what it is.

  Zora nods. “You — ” a chin lift at me, a chin-lift at Dove — “have, you talk about, a house, I’ve got a tree.” Zora looks across at Chloris, whose hands turn up. “Any reason not to think about those as being close together?”

  “We’d be deciding to keep doing this, that it’s going to go on while we do. We won’t be here — ” Dove waves at the Round House — “but we’d be going on together. It wouldn’t stop.”

  “Blossom and Grue can spend time apart, even lots of time apart. They don’t like it, but they can.” Zora, quietly definite.

  Dove nods.

  “Nobody likes spending time away from home.” Chloris, in the still voice of Death.

  Deal?

  Deal.

  Eight arms, four people, more than two shadow limbs, and a windowsill make for an awkward sort of hug. Different from not being a good one.

  Chapter 23

  Spring isn’t especially spring-like, not calendar-spring. First day of Germinal we get forty centimetres of mushy snow.

  Not precisely cold, either, not the way it’s been. Block stops producing drifts to run through uphill and backwards and starts with unevenly icy slopes. We get a good two hours of how to make our feet have variable traction with the Power, standing in place, first, and then walking frontwards up the slope for practise, before doing it backwards. Steam, without ever saying anything, gives the impression that Block’s being extra-nice to us.

  Mushy snow sets off garden planning in pretty much every Creek over six who isn’t Dove or Chloris. It can’t really be every single other Creek, but it seems like it. Even Halt is setting out trays of seeds under glass inside the north window of the little cottage Halt inhabits; someone, I don’t know who, asked at dinner what Halt was planning to grow and got told “Strange flowers,” in entirely distracted tones.

  There was a general pause in the flow of conversation in the refectory.

  Grue decides we’re far enough along with shape-shifting to try counteracting external influences, and shows up one afternoon with several bottles. It turns out Creeks are relatively difficult to make drunk, something which explains how they survive their taste in beer, and what Grue is following local custom to describe as brandy is nearly pure ethanol with some delicate flower infusions in it for flavour. Or green gooseberries and maple sugar, something I wouldn’t want to try from the description, but Dove really likes it. Grue’s head shakes at my attempt to get up and get some water to thin
the stuff out, so I take really small sips. It doesn’t taste at all the way it tastes to Dove. Neither does the dusk-rose, or the squash blossom, or the chrysanthemum. I don’t think I like the chrysanthemum, Dove’s not much fond of it either, but the squash blossom’s good. It tastes like patterns of warmth, spice warm, sunlight-warm, opened oven door. Baking oven, something a bit damp like pie.

  “How did I drink half a litre of neat alcohol and not get even slightly drunk?”

  Grue grins at me. “To be certain, I’d have to dissect you.” Chloris looks appalled; Zora giggles. Dove looks, feels, just like Dove, only those battlements we’re storming are a lot closer.

  “Here.” It’s a stoppered flask, it’s got a straw, the whole thing, straw and all, is glass. The liquid is opaque and mauve. “Try a small sip,” Grue says.

  “Foremost,” Dove says, because it tastes good, and everybody’s eyes are streaming from the flask being unstoppered. I stick the stopper back in. It takes three tries the second time.

  “All right,” Grue says, “back to sober.”

  I’m drunk, I’m very drunk, but Edgar isn’t drunk. Edgar is made from stones, cold and sober stones from the Silent Sea.

  This turns out to be true. Dove’s, Dove’s sober, sitting in an intangible mass of shattered battlements, but sober. Dove smiles at me. Grue’s head shakes again. Grue can manage a lot of fond approval.

  Zora’s mind has a lot of trouble pulling out of the kittens, there are illusory kittens all over the floor, fading in and out of romping. Chloris seems to fall through the perfect calm stillness, it takes a minute or two to find it, but once Chloris does it’s a single exhale to entire sobriety. Chloris gets up and comes back with a pitcher of water. I want more water than will reasonably go in a brandy glass, so I go get five of the big glass mugs we use for water. I’m halfway down mine by the time the kittens get organized into something leonine, and then that sort of blurs itself into a tree and Zora says “That was awful.”

  Grue nods. “Alcohol is reasonably safe.” Unlike, hangs unspoken, all the venomous critters or malign sorcery that will also make it hard to think, chemically or otherwise.

  “What did I get?” It wasn’t alcohol.

  “The solvent is ammonia,” Grue says. I look so appalled Dove starts laughing.

  No one laughs at the appalled looks when the mud starts, halfway through Germinal; they nod at me, and say things like “First spring around Westcreek for ya?.” It’s Zora’s first spring around Westcreek, too. There are grim mutters that everyone was too polite describing what it was like in Westcreek in the spring. People wear mudshoes, anywhere off a fused road, like snowshoes only smaller. Illusory mudshoes have the big advantage of not needing to be cleaned.

  It gets us into a refectory discussion of how hard they’d be to make for others. We don’t know, and Zora gets a speculative look that makes the rest of us uneasy. Anything illusory and tight can be a problem, illusions only flex or stretch if you put that in. Zora’s first attempt at an instant bodice left Zora unable to breathe. If the illusion had been tried as a binding, there would have been a problem.

  Wake cheerfully explains that we’re all first-year apprentices; you wouldn’t expect objects in trade from any other first-year apprentices, and you shouldn’t expect it from new sorcerers, either. There are nods, a few muttered “Safer that way.” remarks, but if I can’t think of anything else, reliable production of illusory mudshoes might do for an own-work project. Blossom’s was hats. Halt knit the enchantment into our formal apprentice-hats, which is why they never tilt, blow off, get dirty, or move unless the wearer — or Halt — moves them. Also how Blossom wears enormous swoopy sun-hats with plumes no matter what the weather is like and nothing bad ever happens to the hat.

  The mud starts to solidify around the end of Germinal. You still get muddy, we’ve switched from illusory mud-shoes to illusory over-boots, you get muddy but you’re not at risk of being mired, or just plain sinking out of sight. The over-boots are tougher to create, they have to bend and you need something for traction, it’s not enough to make them a bit concave.

  The twenty-eighth of Germinal, Wake takes us away from Block, sends us through the bathhouse to sluice off the mud, and loads us on a boat, not a barge. Narrow, high prow, high stern, you could row it upstream if you had enough other rowers and you had to. We do head upstream, but the boat-team does it with a focus, not oars.

  Wake always looks benign. Any time we’ve seen, anyway. Wake being not-benign isn’t likely to be reported much. So we’re starting to be able to tell what kind of benign we’re seeing. This one might be hopeful.

  “It is,” Wake says, “a simple matter to kill everything. One imagines a volume of dirt, and forbids life within it.”

  We all nod. We can all do it; Chloris doesn’t have to think about how, but we can all do it, we all did it putting in the pond-bottoms before we flooded them, building the house. It’s not something you can do once you’ve got good soil and a working garden. You kill everything you want along with what you don’t want.

  “Similarly,” Wake says, “killing any single thing is a simple matter. The difficulty is to remove the weeds and leave the soil alive.”

  We all nod again. Even the weeds you don’t need a weeding team for are a lot of work.

  Wake produces, from somewhere, a big wooden rack, half a metre by a metre, full of quarter-litre glass jars. The jars have labels, and sloosh faintly. Preserved plant specimens, it looks like.

  The next rack has arthropods; the rack after that is tiny, twelve jars. Those look like critters. Regular mice don’t have eight legs.

  Wake also has a list.

  “The first stop is an island, just below the Headwaters bank-edging.” Wake waves the list, gently. You know it’s Wake’s list because it’s a fired-clay tile mostly full of angular marks. “Five varieties of plant, seven of arthropod, one creature.”

  “Which creature?” Chloris says, very still.

  Wake doesn’t rummage, though there’s a pause to check the list. Up comes a jar. Spark mouse, not something I’ve heard of. Four legs, but scales instead of fur and it’s twice as wide as long. Chloris’ upper lip curls back in a way that makes me consider diving off the boat.

  “These are all entirely unambiguous weeds.” Wake says this calmly, I suppose Wake has few worries about dropping dead. “The hope is that the combination of the four of you might effect the removal of weed species from a significant area. Not unusual, new weed species, nothing as substantial as spline-beasts, simply those weed-things that must be dealt with every year.”

  “So the weeding teams that aren’t in the Folded Hills can keep up.” Dove’s completely certain about this.

  Wake nods.

  “We’re starting in the morning?” Even an actual boat won’t get us all the way to Headwaters today.

  Wake nods again. “Providing the calm environment of a boat trip to consider means.”

  Which is kind of Wake but it doesn’t take a lot of planning. We don’t have to handle different critters at the same time, we don’t have to do lasting structure with the Power, we especially don’t have to make it safe for other living things.

  We go through all the steps carefully anyway, but getting from the preserved specimen to the name-nature, the full sense, of the live thing, something the Power can grip on, isn’t difficult. It’s new, and Zora and Chloris get it faster than Dove and I do, but once we’ve got it it’s there, the next preserved plant or arthropod isn’t another new thing. Once we’ve got the full sense, finding all of them in a volume isn’t very hard. At least we think it’s all of them, but Dove and I get the same number of arthropods when we’re stopped for the evening as Zora and Chloris do, we go through the whole rack. The number is pretty high, but it’s all one thing in one place. Wake gets the location image from us, wanders off up a laneway. When Wake comes back in half an hour the only thing that prevents panic is that absolutely no one, not even Halt, would stroll along swinging an eye-
wasp nest from one hand if any of the wasps were alive.

  Eyes aren’t where they sting you; eyes are where the grubs emerge from.

  “An excellent confirmation,” Wake says, and provides a short lesson on eye-wasps while dismantling the nest. It’s fascinating, the wasps mix sand into semi-digested wood pulp, each part of the nest looks almost perfectly like a rock, the rocks match the gravel where it was found, it’s almost as tough as rock though Wake just waves a hand at each bit and they fall into neat halves. Three rocks is a large nest. “There’s a corpse in the woods somewhere,” Wake also says, “these all hatched last fall.” Wake can tell when the wood died, apparently to the hour.

  In the morning, the island is about a kilometre long and about a hundred metres wide, never more than a hundred-fifty. It’s got an old nut-orchard all over it, I think hazelnuts. Getting our attention over ten hectares like that isn’t difficult, the shape takes a bit of attention but it’s just there afterwards. We take turns, Wake wants us to be sure we can do all of the parts of the task even when “There may be predilections to one part or the other.” Two of the plants and one of the arthropods aren’t there, reaching for the full sense doesn’t find anything. Wake, I have no idea how Wake’s looking, can’t find any either.

  The next spot is above the island on the west bank; Wake has us reach as far inland as we can, for a kilometre of bank. It’s just area, the four of us linked up can reach a one-kilometre-wide strip into the Folded Hills, if we don’t have to be any more precise than that. Wake says, “Not where we are weeding today,” still benevolently cheery. It has to be ground where we’ve got a clear sense. So it becomes a five-kilometre strip, fifteen kilometres inland, and then a ten-kilometre strip, fifteen kilometres inland. I think we could reach further but that’s about the limit of useful perception for any of us.

  Affecting the large area isn’t a whole lot more difficult than ten hectares, even when Zora’s doing the killing part of it. Zora’s face scrunches over the critters, it’s not their fault someone horrible made them to make it impossible to farm, which is certainly true, but Zora’s from a gean that’s more than half farmers. The necessity of weeding isn’t something Zora can phrase as a question, the way it sometimes gets to hopeful people. Turning the critters into something that isn’t a weed, well, Wake describes that as ‘intractable,’ which is, so far as I’m learning the jargon of independents, ‘Can’t prove it’s impossible’. No one’s done it yet, Dove says. Impossible is a very bad word. Dove and I are just doing scope and pushing on that one, more than enough spare attention to talk, and that bit of conversation leaks into the linkage a bit. Chloris’s head turns, the better to direct a disapproving look, Zora giggles at the look, and Wake’s benevolence has this tiny flicker of ‘What have we done?’.