A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Kid looks up, sees Grue, says “Can you help? It hurts,” in an utterly sad voice and sort of re-slumps. Grue takes actually fast steps, a blur, and sinks down next to the kid. There’s a couple of odd purple marks on the kid’s hands, raised ones, and I’m inhaling along with the rest of us.

  Grue smiles, completely friendly, and says “Nap time!” in a cheery voice. The kid’s slump goes utterly boneless.

  Grue says something in the undertone to Zora, Zora moves up by Grue, and to Chloris, whose eyes close and you can feel Power reaching out.

  Dove, Edgar, I need a glass vessel, fifty centimetres inside diameter, a metre-twenty long, hemispherical ends beyond the metre-twenty, hard vacuum inside. These — a roll of something emerges from Grue’s saddle-case, floats at us, Dove grabs it — embed in the glass, there are instructions.

  There are notes, clearly notes by and for Blossom, it’s Blossom’s thankfully neat handwriting. Whatever they are is a reminder, not an explanation, but the rolls of metal mesh with enchantment-patterns stitched and soldered across them isn’t complicated as a physical object. Loop for the head, loop for the foot, top of the head dome, top of the foot dome, one patch for the middle bottom, it’s pretty coarse screening, getting it into the glass should go fine.

  Vacuum? Dove’s got a couple hundred kilos of silica pulled out of dirt from the ditch. Reading instructions is my job, if we’re in a hurry like this.

  Illusory mandrel, form the glass around it, make it go away?

  No one else alive, Chloris says, voice still and calm. Not within a kilometre.

  That’ll work. Dove’s got the big blob of glass moving, it’s not the good stuff, no boron, we both try to find some right here but there just isn’t any, this is near enough plain old quartz, really, shining hot. We shift it thirty metres down the road. No wards, Grue is very busy with something, you can feel the working, feel Zora doing support parts of it. Heartbeat again, maybe?

  Another blob of dirt comes up, flies apart, shreds, melts. Holding the vacuum is going to take a lot of quartz. I’ve got the mandrel, got the metal spaced out from it, Dove runs the molten glass over it, and we start tumbling it very slowly to keep it from sagging as it cools. Can’t cool it too fast, it’s still glass, the kinds of glass you can fast-quench to make it stronger need additives. Going to be ten minutes or so, Dove/we/I agree on that.

  Ten minutes until it’s cool, gets Fifteen is soon enough, from Grue, so we slow down a little. Not many good places to dump heat, no water, with half a tonne of glass to cool down. Don’t want to make the air hot enough to start a fire. There’s enough trees back of the road ditch, enough grass and forb, that wouldn’t help at all.

  We don’t, no fire, and it’s cool enough, so the illusion in the middle goes wherever bits of the Power go when you stop using them.

  Got it? from Grue, Yes, from Zora, as we float the glass cylinder, completely empty now, over to Grue who waves down at a specific spot, so we do that, it’s round, it would roll. Chloris piles up some dirt to hold it, there’s a quick ripple and the ditch gets deeper and there’s a cradle for the cylinder.

  Grue does something, there’s a couple big glass carboys out of the saddle case, bigger than the opening, I have no idea how that works. The contents of those gurgles through the glass, little gates, I think, it feels like a gate.

  There’s a horrible wet noise, a faint urk from Zora who doesn’t so much as flutter on the working, part of the working, Zora’s running. Grue’s arm pulls back out of the cylinder after putting the kid’s brain and eyes through the glass without disturbing either. No idea how, not a gate. Something complicated starts, Grue’s applying Power to the enchantments in the metal mesh.

  I’m hoping for four out of five, drifts across the undertone, generally, from Grue. I think Zora asked a question. Much better odds growing a body back than trying to cure late-stage wound-wedges.

  Clothes, everything porous, out of it, float it into the buildings. The leather outside of Grue’s saddle case comes off, all Grue’s clothes, hair, there’s a couple of quick gestures and all our hair comes off. Not worth dying over, Grue says. In a day or two you can shift it back.

  We float it all over, small sad body included. Nobody knows where to put their apprentice-buttons, not at all porous and nothing we want to lose. Grue produces a bottle marked ‘Disinfectant’, and in they all go.

  I have the full sense, comes from Chloris, still and quiet.

  Inert, not dead, comes from Grue, distracted. Something ferociously complex is happening with the enchantments in the cylinder, Zora’s getting pulled into that working on a ‘hold this’ and ’push there' level, and it’ll be a disaster if Zora’s imagination stops to count physical hands.

  Dove, Edgar, NO OPEN FIRE, sterilize the buildings. And then Grue’s attention is entirely back on the cylinder.

  Chloris’ attention is sweeping out and out, out past the first kilometre radius, out to sixteen, Dove and I don’t do much to push, we’re there as something to lean on, balance, this can come first, the buildings will take time and necromancy is fast.

  I can feel what Chloris does everywhere, the cool sweep of attention, it gets inside my lungs, inside the sinuses in everybody’s head, down through everybody’s ears, everybody’s gut contents, Chloris is terribly thorough, thinks about blood, thinks about it more than once, but decides not. Get that even a tiny amount wrong and it’s horrible lingering death.

  Done, says Chloris, there’s a hemisphere about ten metres across, with a thin green-white layer of intention it, any new wound-wedge spores from either side will be little specks of random chemicals if they cross it.

  Dove’s not, this feels wrong, it’s not angry, not precisely, but this isn’t battlements. That’s impersonal, professional, considered, even when the risk is large. This isn’t, this isn’t more brave than sensible, this is somewhere sense and bravery have stopped being questions.

  I get a wordless question, Dove wants a fire-mirror, the same idea as a gravity sock, can I keep all the light in? We’re only a little bit apart, and that’s getting less. Heat’s just slow light, and we really can’t start a fire, all those fruit trees, the heat-plume, smoke-plume, if there are any spores they’ll spread for kilometres. Chloris had the full-sense of what was killing the kid, nearly had killed the kid, those are gone, there could be another kind, there could be live spores over there, send those up on a plume of smoke and this won’t qualify as helping.

  Gravity won’t do it, light’s slippery, enough gravity to grab all the light is more than I can do. Light has to travel through stuff, though, there’s an interaction, it’s not all school’s straight lines there’s bouncing off of air, solids, molecules of stuff, it’s all odds down there, the odds have names. A lot like tipping little mirrors, a myriad little mirrors, so instead of going all sorts of places all the light, all the heat, all the energy of any kind, it can’t get out, the only chance it has is back the way it came.

  How deep? slides from Dove, over to Grue, gently, it’s like standing at someone’s doorway until they look up.

  Five metres below their well depth, slides back from Grue, I think that’s the book answer, not anything Grue thought about. Grue’s doing something really complicated, another one, in a succession of complicated things. Zora’s utterly fascinated, Zora’s whole sense of self is off to one side, will out of the way so Grue can use Zora’s access to the Power to do stuff with, not enough time to explain anything.

  Fifteen, twenty minutes later, somewhere, my attention comes back out enough that I’ve got a distinct sense of Edgar again. There’s a dark, shimmering cylinder, fifty metres into the earth and fifty high, thirty metres of overkill on the well and none of the buildings were nearly that tall but symmetry is easier, it’s two hundred metres across, and it’s work, I can only just hold this, nothing I can do to keep all heat in there, some of it leaks no matter how hard I lean on the odds, but only a very tiny amount. Two layers might get the leak down to a very tiny amo
unt of a very tiny amount, nothing now is blackened or smouldering, this will do, and I can only just hold this. Mostly thinking about my breathing, stretching into the Power, reaching to make this work.

  Inside the cylinder is ravening hell. There aren’t necessarily atoms in there, it’s that hot. Gas isn’t the right word, anymore. Half of what was in there was rock and water, not air, it wants out.

  Dove’s shaking, breathing still under control, thinking, but this is all Dove can do, too.

  Chloris looks mildly concerned, Chloris a long way gone into the perfect stillness of death. Grue’s alarmed, Zora’s still picking a careful way out of Grue’s immensely complex working, hasn’t seen enough to be worried yet.

  Ground shock, Dove says, it sounds whimsical.

  Grue nods, makes gestures that look like dancing.

  Heat is slow light, but energy is stairs. Add energy, stuff climbs the stairs, gets further apart from itself. The mass inside the fire-mirror is so far up the stairs it’s off the top of the tower, off into places where the metaphor of stairs becomes tenuous, like climbing above the sky one step at at time.

  Ready isn’t a word, it’s a feeling, an internal consideration. As much as I am I, I am, and the top of the fire-guard vanishes just as the will of Dove-of-us grabs all the substance that was corpses and cider and old stone buildings and slams it to the bottom of the stairs.

  Stuff has rules; the energy has to go somewhere, and it goes as photons. The rules for photons are odds, and the odds don’t require a continuous trip, there can be a gap. Lean into it, everything Dove and I can do together, this is going to hurt in the morning, maybe a lot, and the odds can put it up, way high straight up, don’t have to be able to perceive that, it’s just an idea of distance. Somewhere well above the clouds, you can feel the flash, not on eyes or skin, but you can feel it across the Power if you’re paying attention. See it, the clouds pulse white over the width of the sky.

  There’s a shock wave anyway, Chloris’ bubble of death-to-fungus snaps out, wider and wider again, there’s a few snapping noises from fruit trees losing branches. There’s some sparkle in the air, we don’t get all the light, and some of it’s really fast, dangerous fast, it’d be much worse than sunburn if it was right here, not over there behind a hundred-plus metres of air.

  Enough, though. We got enough. The ground-shock goes on and on, crash and then rumbling. Doesn’t knock anybody over, doesn’t roll the glass cylinder. Start from a homogeneous mass remembering it’s made of atoms and it takes a minute for the chemistry to stop.

  Where the buildings were, once the swirl of air curls off of them in mist, is a two-hundred-metre circle of dead flat something, colder than ice.

  Grue takes a deep breath, another deep breath, while shaking out tension. Starts and ends with hands, but goes over everything, narrow, precise motions. “Better?” Grue says to Dove. Dove nods. Dove’s not wobbly, precisely, but should probably sit down.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Grue is saying. “You stay here, you don’t move from here, you’re all officially contaminated, anybody you see you warn off as far away as you can with word of bad weeds. If that was as infectious as it looked and it didn’t start here this could be very bad.” Whole-digit percentages of the population dead, Grue means by very bad.

  We all nod, and Grue blurs into a unicorn. Gold hooves and horn and tail-tuft and leg-stripes, the rest the same sort of crust-on-white-bread-brown colour Grue’s skin usually is, one sweeping glitter of dark gold eye, and gone in a blur of speed and a fading drumbeat of hooves.

  Zora’s keeping the cylinder running, doesn’t have to do anything but feed it Power, it’s not a lot, but it needs to be even. The thing accumulates Power, Zora says, Grue explained, it can’t accumulate very fast, something about safety.

  Chloris runs a hand over bare scalp, none of us have so much as eyelashes, never mind eyebrows, sighs, picks up a pebble, stuffs a binding for a big low quarter-circle sofa into it. Zora produces a distracted “Thanks,” moving on to the sofa, one arm reaching behind to find it, you sit on the outside, Zora’s looking away from the road, right beside the glass cylinder.

  I say “Thanks,” Dove smiles, doesn’t want to move. Chloris grabs some bits of grass out of the undisturbed ditch, in a little bit there’s a loop of grass you can toss over your head, holding a big poncho-thing as a binding. There’s waist-ties, and big loose hoods. It’s a help, it’s not precisely warm out, it’s probably going to rain.

  “Not going anywhere, don’t need shoes.” I nod, Dove says “Thanks,” to Chloris getting the poncho settled. Zora’s only barely got a poncho on, doesn’t want to move very much.

  Then we’re all collapsed on a big green couch that looks like leather from any distance, wrapped in frost-white ponchos, staring at a big glass cylinder or at a bottle full of pure alcohol, arcane poisons, and apprentice buttons. Now and then we look up at a lot of empty road.

  I’m wondering what just happened.

  Zora says Wound-wedges get in cuts, anything that puts a hole in your skin. The usual kind is slow, it grows between muscle fibre and then bone, you get radial or parallel, both usually produce a smooth raised purple welt, there isn’t any pain. Radial leads to squishy amputation, Grue said. Parallel removes long bones, the fungus eats the marrow. Fatal, they’re both fatal, but it’s usually slow, there’s effective treatment. This stuff’s really fast, Grue was happy the kid’s eyes were clean.

  Dove’s leaning on me. There’s a mutter, and Chloris is leaning on my other shoulder. Dove, it’s too tired to call a grin, sticks the arm behind me out so that hand is on Chloris’ shoulder. Chloris starts a bit, uncoils, moves to have a hand back on Dove’s shoulder, my head’s on both arms.

  I’m getting used to feeling a bit buried, and the warmth and the closeness is nice.

  There’s a mostly-together concern, it doesn’t make it into words before Zora says I’m not left out, I’m over here doing my job. There’s a small pause, Zora thinks twice about saying the next thing, says it. Today has been enough like cuddling with Death and Strange Mayhem already.

  No argument here, I say. Which for most of what Zora means is completely true, and one really glorious thing about the whole connecting-up stuff is that there’s no possibility of Chloris hearing I think I’m cuddling with death. Death, yeah, if you accept Zora’s nomenclature I’m Strange.

  Zora’s a life-tweaker, stuff-wreaker, going to be a really amazing gardener and feed people. Block’s increasingly sure Zora’s not militant at all, much less than Grue is, Grue functions fine in emergencies, I’m not sure Zora would. Do the job someone assigns, sure, with the roof on fire and the water rising, Zora just did that, but picking which job first is tough. I’m not sure Zora’s ever going to have the knack for that. Not sure I’m ever going to do that myself, instead of borrowing Dove’s head. Dove’s good at it, as solutions go that’ll more than do, but it feels like cheating somehow.

  Dove, especially right now, after being all folded wholly together, that’s just cuddling with the rest of me. Me-that-is-us involves a lot of potential mayhem, that’s been clear for awhile. So I’m feeling pretty contented, even if I’m exhausted and today went horrible and it has started to rain pretty hard.

  We’re tired, Dove and I, but not so tired we can’t make sure Zora, unwilling to shift any attention away from keeping the cylinder running, stays warm while it rains and rains.

  Chloris mutters and tweaks and makes sure the sofa won’t puddle water.

  After about an hour of being rained on, Dove says “No smoke,” out loud. That matters, I don’t know why. Then Dove starts talking.

  When I was twenty-four, my father died. Wasn’t fifty yet, it was sudden and unexpected, had just taken up an eighth-thorpe by inheritance, Gran was getting on, and to look at Da was fine. Probably, looking back, Da’s where I got the talent from.

  I got Da’s eighth-thorpe, none of Da’s sisters’ kids wanted anything to do with being farmers, already, and
Gran’s, too, Gran didn’t want to go back to farming. Been too tired before being too sad. So I and my two brothers and my regular lad — faces drift across our awareness, all the people Dove’s mentioning — we took the farm up. Went really well, I had Lark almost right away and then Niketas and Agathon arrived together, it was a lot of hard work but we were prospering.

  Four adults for a quarter-thorpe? Even with whomever might have had established profit-shares, and how common focus-implements are in the Creeks, ‘a lot of hard work’ seems like understatement.

  One day I was away, down to the canal landing to talk schedules and barge-rates for kegged flax oil. Two kilometres, maybe an hour. Dove’s staring at something that’s not here. Not rigid, but that’s pure will. Chloris is looking past me, trying to see through Dove’s pulled forward hood and the hard rain.

  Got back, there was a lot of shrieking and running going on. Kid-thorn had got the twins, then Lark, Lark was always trying to be a good child and take care of the twins. My brothers and Dion had tried to get them out, more courage than sense.

  Chloris doesn’t know any words that are bad enough to apply to kid-thorn.

  Fast sprouting vine-like pseudo-plant. It’s a recitation from Zora, a list of facts from a book. Very long dormant time in soil, encysts deeply. Mobile only with a host. No leaves, even when fully mature; purely carnivorous. Neurophagic, not classical mind-control with the Power. Victims unrecoverable. Spores will spread on the heat-plume from a fire. Victim-husks will protest their essential health and ask for help. Disperses by hosting in victim-husks and walking.

  Zora can’t maintain an even voice, saying that. The feed to the glass cylinder doesn’t waver.