A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  “Fifty kilos per is twenty troops the tonne, a hundred tonnes, really ninety, we’ve got six hundred-ninety-something tonnes of titanium left, six tonnes of aluminium, still a couple thousand of that, four tonnes of vanadium, we’ve got fifteen or so, no mining required. Get an illusion of somebody, get an illusion of an existing suit of armour, fit the illusion to the illusion, do what we did with the canoes only maybe more elaborate if there’s annealing or something for hardness.”

  Blossom’s smiling, really smiling.

  “Can’t,” Dove goes on, “do the fittings for two thousand, at an hour per that’d take us a year solid. So we make four armorer’s foci that’ll do the whole stack, and the battalion’s got armour by the end of the summer. More than four if we can, but four will do it.”

  “Won’t it be solid?” Zora’s got an illusion of something on the table, it’s purple and gold and black and squirming as Zora’s thoughts alter. Doesn’t sound like Zora disapproves, it’s a “But how?” sort of question.

  “Armour illusion has to be components, every lamé its own thing. Some notion of a rivet, some notion of deleting and duplicating.” Dove’s mind gets ahead of the words, of Dove’s ability to talk about the Power, it’s an ordered glittering thing taking shape into our mind, I can feel the reality of it, of Dove’s will behind it.

  Maybe Blossom can, too.

  “Fifteen days?” Blossom’s frankly doubtful.

  “Twelve,” Dove says. If there were any actual battlements involved, they’d be crouched somewhere weeping in fear of the terrible fate overtaking them. “Gotta be rested for the second weeding pass.”

  Nobody dies. That’s about all I can say for the next twelve days.

  We do our exercises with Block the whole time, who thinks it’s excellent training when you start tired. Zora bobbles three in a row of Block’s ouchful Power-packets and then something snaps in Zora somewhere. The next Power-packet at Zora just grounds out dead and Zora tosses something mauve. Some of them look like bunnies and they all smell like dead socks. Block seems entirely willing to accept this as a response.

  Blossom points out that while no one is going to stand in the middle of anything involving molten titanium voluntarily, we don’t need the body-illusion; forming the armour illusion from an existing suit around the actual person is fine, as long as they’ve got the proper clothes on and can get out of the way before any actual metal gets involved.

  The clothes, the padded armour smock that goes under, trews with padding and leather wear-patches over the knee and hips, the head-pads for the helmet, all are easy to get. We have to talk to Chuckles, I think it’s Chuckles due to a widespread belief about Chuckles not knowing how, but the Captain wants armour, and Dove’s still first in authority, and Blossom’s still got warrants of authority and commission and an active appointment as a captain. Armour padding we can get, no matter how doubtful Chuckles is that it will do any good.

  I wind up shapeshifting away a few burns before we get the “person being fitted has to get out of the way first,” part entirely right, but we do get it right. The moving away has to be all done before any heat gets involved, and ‘all done’ isn’t easy to explain to the Power.

  The ability to move lamés around, to copy them, to grab one of the illusory shoulder-point pieces and just bend it, I was expecting that to be the hard part. Dove’s great shining thing, terrible in its simplicity, slides whole and entire out of Dove’s mind and the notions of connection and limited variability work first try. It takes a little tweaking to get the rivet-heads in a contrasting colour, Blossom says you can get titanium to be almost any colour you want on the surface. Dove goes for a dull bronzy-gold. The armour itself is a plain dull grey, Blossom got to tweaking and it’s got a bit of chromium in it to make it tougher.

  A bit. Two and a half tonnes, for the whole pile of ingots. When did I start thinking of two and a half tonnes of brittle, shiny, refractory rare metal as ‘a bit’?

  Zora takes a look at the helmets, Dove’s and Blossom’s, concludes they’re like that because of how you can work steel with fire and hammers, mutters darkly, and does things to the illusion copy. Dove and Blossom are both doubtful. They don’t stop being doubtful until we make a helmet to Zora’s design and Blossom sticks it on a stake and smites it repeatedly with a heavy drill rod. The helmet dents, the drill rod bends, that comes out about even, but the hinges still move and the throat ring still unlocks, there really are things you can do when you’re forming metal with pure willpower in four dimensions that you just couldn’t do any other way. Blossom straightens out the drill rod with an absent expression and nods. Dove looks at Zora and says “It’ll do,” which makes Zora smile and smile, despite having been talked out of clear visors.

  The hard part turns out to be hanging everything together; vacuum, you don’t, you really don’t, want titanium molten in air if you can help it, warding, the illusion, the rules for the metal, not just what goes in when but how to cool it and being sure the bits are separate when it has all cooled. There aren’t any straps, the lamés hang from each other on rivets that slide a bit. Plus the copy-an-existing-suit to get the illusion, and Dove’s terrible clarity that makes the illusion something you can change, you can add lamés, take them out, pinch parts narrower, stretch them wider, and it keeps the same set thickness. The steel lamés are close, rolling mills, Blossom says, rolling mills that are all back in the Commonweal-as-was, but we’re doing it exact.

  Greaves, vambraces, copies of Blossom’s intricate and indestructible gauntlets, not the standard Line model, and not with the strange intractable materials of Blossom’s, really responsible for the indestructible, either, but really good. They’ll need leather liners, that’s Chuckles’ problem. We can make them, we can have them float in the air in the right places while they’re being made, rivets and latch hooks and all. Even something, Blossom makes them, clearly not the first time, things like pliers that set the rivet heads hot fast enough to avoid burning leather straps. Setting eight-millimetre titanium rivets with one squeeze of one hand. It shouldn’t startle me so much, not in the midst of Dove’s determination that a hundred tonnes of metal will bend and flow and be armour for a battalion with most of Dove’s living friends in it, but it does.

  Doing the whole thing in our heads doesn’t work, or, rather, we can get it all in our heads and make armour, everybody’s got a suit of armour, I wind up with two full suits from being the fitting dummy, but there’s nothing left over to put what we’re doing into a fixed form.

  Same problem, smaller, very much smaller, as making battle-standards has; nobody can get all of the working in their head at once. We get an explanation of what we’re doing while we’re doing it, individual parts of the working done as bindings, but the traditional kind, where you plan them out ahead of time and write them in runes and patterns. The tests we do by pressing lines into pure aluminium and painting on it with grease with a lot of copper in it. The copper grease gets everywhere, and it smudges. Two messes later, Chloris takes over making lines; Chloris has an uncanny ability to not smudge anything, including copper grease being painted on a warm aluminium plate a metre square.

  Blossom gets a considering look and asks Chloris if any of Chloris’ relatives work at the shot shop.

  “My cousin Mel does. Mother’s mother’s younger sister’s second daughter’s third child. Melantha.” Chloris says this without looking up, or even appearing to notice.

  Dove gets a small smile. Chloris’ stopped worrying that we’re not all Creeks, drifts into my head. Not before time.

  Blossom notes that Chloris’ cousin Mel is one of the neatest hands with a pantograph Blossom’s ever seen or heard tell of, and is currently copying out something sixteen centimetres square when Blossom gave it over a metre sixty on a side, and there are nine different inks involved, four of which are black.

  The idea of that makes Chloris shudder, but it doesn’t get anything smudged. We get it working, the grease smokes, but we’ve got the
pattern right. Blossom looks at it, nods, notes that it’s pretty simple and robust is good, so we do the real thing in lines of gold and platinum set into corundum turned black with magnesium and aluminium. Thick lines, three millimetres wide and five deep, we have more than enough gold from the Round House hoard. The platinum comes from Line stocks, some goes into the battle-standards but Blossom has more than enough on hand and considers armour important. Then we add a layer of clear corundum on top, bound down chemically in a hard vacuum. “Good for the next thousand years,” Blossom says.

  Turning the patterns into live bindings, something with the Power in them, isn’t all that difficult. We can do those individually, but we link up. It’s easier, and it’s practice, because the focus-creation, call it a focus enchantment, it’s not, in some technical sense Blossom asks us to accept, we’re not up to understanding the theory yet, it’s not easy theory, no one having devised a generally accepted other term is a hint about difficulty, that, the thing, the focus enchantment, does take all five of us. All five of us with Dove and me folded all the way into one person and everybody else, Blossom included, pushing hard. Dove’s part of us does the enchantment work, enchantment-like work, Blossom’s sort of metaphorically looking over Dove’s shoulder but Dove does it.

  We get the first one done, everybody drinks a couple litres of water, looks around at the smoking devastation in the blast pit, and tries not to look appalled when Blossom, cheerful as ever, reminds us that this involves a lot of the Power, Blossom told us it did, who was that saying ‘A lot’? Then we realize we’re going to be hopelessly late for dinner, trudge back to the Round House, sluice off, do extensive damage to the snack food supply, and very nearly all fall asleep in the tub. Blossom spends the night, there’s what was Kynefrid’s room, and Grue’s away, patching up a weeding team that had a serious bad day with some sort of stinging insect.

  I dream about complex shapes made of a thousand gleeful singing voices, every voice another variety of fire.

  I get told in the morning Dove dreamt of a vast dim ocean where the water was all the names for silence. Dove thought it was extremely restful.

  Day after that is five more solid patterns, they’re pretty, the focus-patterns look like what an enchantment in a story is supposed to look like, swooping lines coloured gold and silver and dark glittering depth.

  We can, just, do three of the bindings in one day; that’s the ninth day. Dove remembered the day before to ask the refectory for a dinner we can take with us. There’s some tsking, but we get one, a generous one, there’s a half-kilo of pumpkin cake each and baked bacon-and-barley with cheese melted over it.

  We do two more the tenth day. I don’t know how. Blossom looks seriously weary. I feel dead. Dove’s running on pure will, which worries me; Dove has more willpower than strength of life, something Blossom points out to Dove in just those words. Chloris and Zora are wavering in and out, too exhausted to fall asleep and too sleepy to string one thought after another.

  We got six armouring foci made for the tenth day.

  We’ve surprised Blossom, entirely in a good way, and Blossom tells us so. Blossom expected to have to get Grue involved, to have Power enough, expected that the warding parts of the thing were something we couldn’t do, we don’t really know how but Dove took the pattern Blossom provided and did it by rote.

  Blossom also tells us that this was completely not how you’re supposed to do it, this was making raw Power replace planning, and why people thought the precursors of foci were useless for thousands of years before the Wizard Laurel made the battle-standards, they couldn’t concentrate enough Power to make one that could produce a useful light, never mind anything complicated, and bindings are, comparatively, nearly absolutely, easy to do.

  The armouring foci are, I didn’t expect this, maybe not completely, but significantly, easy to use. They need at least sixteen people linked up, thirty-two is better, but they’re keyed, Blossom does some structured hand-waving and looks cute, which shouldn’t be possible, and says “Next year?” when we ask what keyed means, for the Line, Blossom just put that in the focus part of the working when writing out the structure for us. It will take a skilled person or two to do the work, but the files being fitted for armour can pile into the focus and power their own armour-making, the battalion won’t need an enormous staff of armorers.

  The eleventh day involves all twenty-four armorers and armorer’s apprentices making themselves armour, they’re mostly smiths, none of them stand in the Line in any sense, they’re not in the Line, even if they work for the Line-gesith, they shouldn’t need armour but as a means of convincing people the armour-foci are safe this works well. The ease of the whole illusion-tweaking part of the process leads to a lot of appreciative comment. The comments turn profane the first time actual metal-forming happens, partially from the bright light — we’re still in a blast pit, it’s nothing like the same energy requirement as making the foci was but why take chances — and partially from how fast it is. The armorers look at a full suit of armour and see décades of work, not an hour of thinking.

  Day twelve involves us making the Captain a full suit, taking that down to the practice field and draping it over a big stake with a crossbar. A couple of dozen people, Wake’s one of them, get out throwing sticks and hurl spears at it from about fifty metres. None of them stick, Dove went for same weight and stronger, not the same strength and lighter. The few dents, we’ve dug six neat blast pits at the edge of the practice field and brought the foci and the hundred-ish tonnes of carefully pre-alloyed metal ingots. It takes the senior armorer, ensconced in the first pit with the colour party linked up to push, maybe five minutes to have the dents out and another half hour to get the annealing and temper done over. Good as new, in no figurative way.

  “Thank you, Sergeant. You have been of service.” The Captain says that directly to Dove, solely to Dove.

  Dove says “Sir,” and nods, once. Dove does more change of expression when someone says it might rain, but inside it’s like the whole of the world confused noon and midnight and glory.

  There’s a tiny pause and “The Line’s thanks to you as well, Independent Blossom, and to the Sergeant’s fellow students.”

  We all bow, just a little. Independents bow, we’ve all been picking that up, when someone else might grip hands. Same idea as not pointing, I’m pretty sure. Incidental eerie unison, though I can tell Blossom’s going along with it, it’s not accidental for Blossom to be moving exactly with us. The Captain’s edges go really strange, not for long, it’s too deep to be a flicker but like that. Probably why Blossom went along. Blossom detests the general nervousness about combining an Independent and a warrant of commission.

  Thirteenth day is a book day in reverse, Blossom gets us to write up what we did, how we experienced it, helps us stick illusions of the enchantments to pages, stuff like that. It’s surprisingly easy to remember, but then it, for me anyway it, all started in the metaphysical brain. Different kind of memory.

  The fourteenth day, Grue picks us all up after lunch and says we might as well go work on our perceptions.

  Chapter 26

  Grue walks fast.

  I’d thought I was getting used to having to work to keep up, but I hadn’t been walking anywhere with Grue. Grue’s right between Chloris and Dove, height wise, taller than Zora, but more of the height is leg.

  Well, more of Grue is leg, and I wouldn’t bet Grue needs to eat. We still do. We’re keeping up, but it’s work. Grue could be proceeding at a languid stroll, for all you can tell by expression and remarks on the surroundings.

  The Creeks are apparently fortunate, in that there are a great many non-invasive, non-food plants; can’t call them weeds, they’re not dangerous, they’re just not good for anything. Anything people, human-type people, want, anyway, for all we know unicorns love thistles or lily-of-the-morning, there are seeds and berries mice and birds eat, it’s an actual food ecology, beside the human-maintained one. This is good, so fa
r as Grue is concerned. A lot of places get one or two things that used to be weeds, that were and are intensely invasive but have lost the dangerous characteristics, usually because some poison that takes energy to make lowers their reproductive success, the ones you get the most of are the least poisonous. Keep that up for a few dozen generations and they’re not really weeds anymore.

  Still plenty invasive, being invasive does lead to there being more of them in the future, so you don’t get any kind of complexity, and you get hardly anything in the way of birds or animals or even insects, unless you get something that can eat the one thing you’ve got and then you get population booms and crashes. Years when there’s nothing but one species of grasshopper thing, millions upon millions of them, trying to eat everything. The Creeks don’t get that, much of the Commonweal-as-was had stopped getting that, but the Creeks as a place hasn’t had the problem in at least a thousand years, probably, Grue says, more than five times that; there’s too much local diversity for the shorter time period to be likely.

  We haven’t actually tried to sense anything with the Power yet, it’s all this fast walk and Grue pointing stuff out. We’re supposed to be headed about twelve kilometres south of Westcreek Town, on the west side of the West Wetcreek, where there’s a small marsh Grue likes. It’s a flood channel for a tributary stream, it should be full of water right now, and there’s a lot of diversity there. Lots of diversity is just the thing for working on your perceptions.

  Grue stops.

  We’re going by, I don’t think it’s a thorpe, as such, it’s a big orchard, the trees look old, there’s a cluster of substantial buildings a hundred or so metres from the road, with low garden, some kind of herbs, probably flavouring, between the road and the buildings. Two old stone gateposts, they’ve got lichen, but no gate. There’s a kid sort of slumped against one of the gateposts, they look maybe four, five, I have trouble telling. Creeks don’t get strong until they’re into their youth but the infants are still larger than anybody I grew up around.