A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Wake had me not do any of the killing after the second time by the island, I’m doing a competent job but Wake’s concerned about the aura flavour splashing on any people in the weeded area.

  It takes us a day, switching sides of the river and then moving down another ten kilometres, to get back to Westcreek, and then another day headed south and a day to come back upstream. It turns out the elevation and mountain-shadows to the warmer north evens out with warmer wind off the presumed sea to the south, there was one the last time anybody we know about went to look more than a thousand years ago. Spring comes to the West Wetcreek more or less all at once. That’s not at all true further east in the Creeks.

  The boat crew, who are used to moving, mostly people, as quick as they can, find the whole stop-and-start progress strange, but they do a good job. They’re a bit distant, but we’re standing on top of the people-cabin all morning discussing the best way to kill things. Weeds, things, but we’ve clearly never done this before, either. I’d have been as distant as possible, I doubt I could have got distant enough, if I’d found myself stuck next to a bunch of novices imposing experimental flavours of death on swathes of landscape, before. It’s plenty odd from my present perspective.

  Chloris, well, Chloris can just say die. Which sounds like it’s harsh and cruel, but it isn’t, the way Chloris does it you’d think die meant sleep, rest, pleasant dreams being said to the exhausted. Wake looks solidly approving, more approving than benevolent, and makes a couple of technique suggestions to Chloris I can’t follow at all.

  Zora’s approach is, well, taking life away. Not like stealing it into a jar like a story, though for all I know that was really the style in the Bad Old Days, it’s like a single sharp jerk and the aliveness is outside the thing, dissolving into disassociated metaphor.

  Dove, the first time took close to ten minutes, complete with, for me, an odd sensation, Dove running through all the possible kinds of fire. My half of the brain isn’t much full of fire, but Dove’s metaphysical self reaches toward an arrangement of flames. Dove’s list of possible sorts of fire, well, ten minutes and that was going through it quickly. Fire spreads, though, fire isn’t what you want over a wide area, not even tiny fire.

  Then there was a smile, and the raw spring wind coiled away from the warmth of it. Wake’s head came up, cautious. Dove had reached out, and the metabolism of each and every individual of a tree-devouring beetle on that orchard-island ceased, its chemistry crashed into low-energy disorganization, heterogenous slop instead of living cells.

  “Did you just now devise that?” Wake had said, and Dove had nodded, almost shy and still smiling.

  My first try was a plant, some kind of weed with ‘choke’ in the name, apparently one of the ones that wraps around your neck, rather than poisons you if you eat the tempting berries. I’d been able to take the sense of it from Zora without difficulty, and finding it was easy, the sense of it was there on the orchard island, and then I had no idea what to do. It’s all metaphor, really, the Power works off whatever mix of perception and imagination you can manage to get to correspond with what’s really there, and I’d remembered the sensation of the spiky limb-things in the hospital at Headwaters. So I’d reached out with a thousand thousand ghostly narrow limbs, each with a single claw, and plucked the life out of all the Longthorn Choke-Vine on the island, seed and stem together.

  Wake had suggested, tactfully, that I might want to try the next one differently, by which Wake meant that Wake wasn’t shuddering, and Dove wasn’t shuddering — Dove had grinned — but everyone else on the boat was going to need ten minutes to set aside their shaking fear of death. “More like being torn to pieces very, very slowly,” Chloris had said, strongly disapproving.

  My second try was the spark-mouse. Which is a critter, and really isn’t at fault for its existence. I’m trying to avoid the same sort of shudder-response, it was hard to avoid the sense that Wake had wanted to shudder, which was both tough to credit and easy to want to avoid doing again. So I get the full sense from Dove this time, Zora and Chloris are linked in, setting the area and helping push, and think oh, of course and reach out and pop all the spark mice off their history of descent, not so much killing them as rendering them abruptly never to have lived.

  When my perceptions fade back into the sunlight, Wake looks like indecision between laughter and hair-tearing. It’s still a benevolent look, but Wake’s a tiny bit wide of eye about it.

  “All the shadows grew teeth,” Zora says. “Interested teeth. Teeth with eyes.”

  Wake nods.

  “A succinct description.”

  Which is why I don’t do any of the killing after that. Dove comes up with a way to turn beetles into little waxy statues birds will eat, eat and be nourished by, Chloris starts singing, half-crooning, things that sound like lullabies, and Zora develops a determination to get everything that isn’t actually the weed, in the weed, through the process alive so the weeds will rot faster.

  I spend the trip trying to push my perception out further than the sixteen kilometres or so that seems to be the present limit, handing sense of specimens into the link between us, and providing push. After the first morning we’ve stopped standing on the cabin roof, and I spend a lot of time doing a perhaps unnecessary amount of leaning on Dove, too. There are fitted benches up in the bow, Dove and I get one side, Chloris and Zora get the other, and Wake perches on some boat-thing in the centre of the deck. Not sure if Wake is looking more pleased or benevolent by the end of the trip.

  It’s a day up to the first orchard-island, a day down to Westcreek Town, another day down to the ‘limit of agricultural settlement’, a place called Longbarns, and a fourth, quiet, day back. Wake quizzes us about mud, coming back.

  The boat crew, we’re careful to all say thank you, and not in incidental eerie unison, spend a couple whole days linked up and working and we do that a lot, they’re polite, but I can tell they’re not sad to have us further away.

  Of course that’s why we had Wake with us. Halt wouldn’t have helped their state of mind at all. Wake nods at me. Much though they may be used to sorcerous practitioners.

  “That was excellently done,” Wake says, waving us entirely clean before sending us to dinner. We got a cooked dinner in Westcreek town night before last, but otherwise it’s been hard cheese and hardtack and strange pickles on the trip.

  “Anybody hungrier than usual?” Dove asks, as we’re sitting down, and we all shake our heads.

  “That was pretty easy,” Chloris says, and sighs.

  “That,” Halt says over a click of needles, “was two décades of hard work for some hundreds, weeding with careful attention and intricate foci.”

  Halt looks to have been sitting at the end of our table for a geologic age. Wasn’t there when I set my plates down.

  Chloris’ face goes oh but no sound comes out. I feel pretty much the same way.

  That was a lot easier than moving dirt Zora doesn’t quite say out loud.

  Halt nods, looking entirely benign. “So it should be, doing but one thing each.”

  “Collective sorcery is working?” Dove says this as an actual question only because Dove doesn’t know what Halt was expecting.

  Halt nods. “Excellently well. Block’s style forbids thought. Bad for many things, but it suits all of you for Power-raising.”

  Wake didn’t expect us to be doing much more than ten or twenty hectares at a time, wasn’t sure we’d be able to do that whole ten-hectare island to start with. It could have been a much longer trip. We were doing fifteen thousand hectares at a time, and I still think the limit was perception.

  “Work on your perception,” Halt says with a twinkle, mostly to me, and a continued contented click of knitting needles. “Though we will start that small, and close. Distant perception rests on lack of doubt.”

  “We can see further if we’re sure what we’re seeing?” Zora, wanting to be sure.

  Halt nods.

  Not any hungrier tha
n normal is still a three-plate dinner. Some hundreds, call it two, Halt might mean five, but call it two, two décades, four hundred décades work between the four of us is a hundred décades each, three year’s work, nearly.

  Somewhere inside, the three plate dinner stops bothering me, real appetite or not. Dikes and dams and ditches are real work, but not, and I know this doesn’t entirely make factual sense, not like weeding is. Getting weeding to work is where having food starts. The drainage is having more food, but you could get that perfect and still be doomed by bad weeding.

  “Nobody else can weed like that.” Chloris, finding a little more tension to release from shoulders and neck. Doesn’t sound doubtful, exactly. More like it would be too good to be true.

  “Four sufficing the task is a small surprise,” Halt says. “But you are a sturdy lot.”

  Sturdier than we were; we’re all looking back at a searching gaze from Halt.

  “You have talked, and made decisions, not shrugged and declared you would think about it later?” We know, I know, Dove knows, we agree that Zora and Chloris know, Halt is talking about linking up to do magic.

  “Yes, Halt.” Incidental eerie utter unison, you can’t tell it’s four people speaking. Heads turn at other tables, wondering who just spoke.

  Halt can’t, really can’t, look benevolent. It might work on low-talent people, I don’t know, Halt tries, you can tell it’s meant to look benevolent, but the spider gets interested, it leans forward almost into general visibility, something you could see with photons.

  If the spider moves forward, the thing behind the spider does, too, and by now Zora and Chloris can borrow enough of my perception to be sure the thing behind the spider is there, but not a whole lot more than that. Dove pats Zora’s hand, Dove’s inside my perceptions, just like I’m inside Dove’s, you can do a lot with extra dimensions, so seeing the thing behind the spider isn’t sending Dove mad. You know how if you see a completely normal tree or a big rosebush or a raspberry thicket, something like that, something familiar, from a funny angle or in strange light or as shadows on a wall, and suddenly you don’t recognize it and it seems threatening? Same thing, only backwards. It probably should seem threatening, but it just doesn’t. It’s Halt.

  Halt nods. “Good. You are well along, now, it would be work to stop.”

  “Halt?” Chloris sounds a bit hesitant.

  Halt’s head tips, yes?

  “Why did you think this,” there’s a hand motion, “this style of Power use, would work?”

  Halt positively beams. “Blossom and Grue not being much evidence?”

  Chloris nods. I nod, too. Not any more than Dove and I are evidence, that’s consonance, not working together and the external manipulation of the Power.

  “A very long time ago — ” before at least one of the times Halt got bound under the earth, I think this means — “ there were six siblings, who did something very much like your linking together. They came to a terrible end, but not because of their technique with the Power.”

  Halt’s glasses get nudged up a little before Halt looks straight at Chloris. “Grue and Blossom are evidence, you four are evidence. Weeding fifteen thousand hectares at once has been done. Four apprentices weeding any thousand hectares once had not. Fifteen thousand, with a twelve-weed average, twenty-four and twenty-six times, one day and the next day? That’s new in the world, girl.”

  I can’t make illusions stick to the page yet, none of us can, but they’ll linger long enough to do quick figuring on the table. If you’re counting what we applied the Power to, each time, even if it was often the same dirt, that was nine million hectares.

  Don’t think I know strong enough language. Dove doesn’t know strong enough language.

  Halt nods at me. “You’ll do it again, different list, in eighteen days.”

  Different list, because different weeds, later in the spring.

  “After that, we’ll all be going for a trip in a swamp.”

  “All?” Dove says.

  “All the students, all the teachers,” Halt says, smiling. “A pleasant excursion, possible since you were all so quick with shape-shifting.” Otherwise Grue would have got the short straw and stayed with us, I think.

  “You might wish to put some thought toward travel in the swamp.” Halt beams at us. The it’s going to be horribly wet and unpleasant and involve leeches if you don’t goes unsaid in some technical sense involving sound. It comes through with bell-like clarity all the same.

  “Halt?” Zora, who is looking much more nervous than usual for asking Halt things.

  “Yes, Zora?”

  “What happened to the other people in Grue and Blossom’s class?”

  “Timidity. Not theirs, the teaching-committee’s, insisting on both techniques. They could do what you do, raising much more Power than their flesh might sustain, but they also learnt the old habits of control. In extremity, the more intuitive internal use failed.”

  “Cooked themselves.” Dove says it sadly, and quietly, and Halt nods.

  “Blossom was two years without eyes and an arm, after.” Everyone winces.

  “Blossom did entirely save Grue, and eventually Blossom.” Halt looks at us, gently, Halt can do gently. “You’ve all been quick, but we should very much like not to have to teach you how to grow your eyes back.”

  Halt smiles, terribly.

  “It itches.”

  Chapter 24

  “Do illusions float?” Zora asks this walking up from Block’s class, the second day after we get back from weeding.

  Yesterday was book-stuff after Block’s class, teachers being cautious, no matter how tired we don’t feel. We’re drifting out of mud and source rocks into other sorts of chemistry. If I only count the Commonweal, Wake’s had five hundred years to eat books. Not counting the previous thousand years, given a continued preference for writing on clay tablets, seems deeply stupid. And that’s one teacher.

  Figure you ever get finished being a sorcerer?

  My physical hands don’t twitch, I’m getting better at this. Dove gets the idea of thrown up hands and smiles at me.

  “They can,” Blossom says. “Thinking of doing boats with a binding?”

  Zora nods.

  “Bindings like that are small magic, but still magic. Lots of things out there that attack magic.” Blossom says this as a fact, not as a reason not to try illusory boats.

  “And we’re going into a swamp.” Dove is cheerful about it. I can’t manage cheer, swamps are rough places, with extra things inclined to attack. Power, people, anything that looks plausibly digestible, things that exhibit movement, reflections on the water, it’s a very long list.

  Lots of sorcerers in the Bad Old Days seem to have worried excessively about escaped slaves hiding in swamps, or being snuck up on by frog warriors, or something. Around Wending, there were three distinct species of venomous duck, two with rending teeth so they could eat stuff too big to swallow in one go. Westcreek has a species of enormous diving duck, too big to fly, that’s venomous and breathes fire. I suppose the fire helps them deal with the leeches. They’re certainly prosperous enough; during the winter there were rafts of them, fifty and a hundred a time, in the turning basin at the end of the West-East Canal. Everyone local considers them sort of half-lucky, despite the occasional worry about kids getting too close. “Keeps the swans off,” everyone says, in judicious, on-the-balance-of-consideration sorts of tones.

  Anything like that with a tendency to swarm magic, it’d be inconvenient. Maybe fatal for us, if something venomous or otherwise abruptly deadly gets through before the teachers get it suppressed.

  “Everybody’s short of canoes,” Chloris says. “All those surveyors in the Folded Hills.”

  “I have no desire to take a flatboat through a swamp.” Dove says it with an unvoiced again. I get some mental images, involving equal proportions of a flatboat, a bunch of Creek youths, mud, and suffering. “No reason we can’t make some canoes.”

  �
�Other than not knowing how?” Chloris is only a little doubtful. We’ve managed a lot of stuff where we didn’t know how.

  “Make the illusion, paddle it, get it right, use it as a template for a titanium one. Or aluminium, but I think titanium’s sturdier.” Dove’s been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about leeches.

  “No zinc or magnesium on hand,” Blossom says. “Pure aluminium’s too soft, you can make it tough enough, but we’d have to go mine zinc. We’ve got the vanadium and the aluminium, so the alloy choices are better with titanium.”

  “Is aluminium good for anything but making corundum?” Zora asks, quite cheerful.

  “Roof tile, guttering, anything to spread heat, some cast machine parts. It’s soft, but water doesn’t wear on it much. Any kind of outdoor structure, you can make a really good rose trellis.” Blossom isn’t particularly focused on the question.

  “Can all of you swim?” Blossom still sounds a bit abstract. I’m getting a strange sharp smell across my vision, too. I doubt there are any actual metal flowers, but that’s what I’m thinking about.

  “Need to go write something down?” Dove’s voice is light, but the concern is very real.