A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Just like that, Dove says. What was left of the kids cried and called for Mama, my brothers told me to be careful, Dion’s husk avowed undying love.

  Got some of the neighbours, got a dredge focus, piled up dirt a metre over the highest Dion’s husk could reach a hand, and stood there until the road crew got there with a fuser and we baked the whole pile solid.

  Nothing got out, no smoke, not the shadow of a scream.

  Can’t start hugging Dove, I am hugging Dove. There’s not a thing in the world to say, I can’t imagine having to do that. It’s right there, it’s in the memory we share, it ought to be something I can imagine, but my imagination still won’t.

  I can open all the doors, Dove has the sunny side but sometimes you need stillness and peace. The Sunless Sea’s dim and peaceful, and that bench is still in the garden.

  Passed the farm to some cousins, Gran’s mother’s brother’s daughter’s daughter’s daughters, three of them, then went for the Line. Wasn’t going to stay there, didn’t much care what happened. Was just about done doing nothing but grieving, was glad I’d found Hector, was feeling useful again.

  Then we went on the March North.

  Half of everybody died. Hector went early, got brave and effective confused.

  The rain’s cold. A little of the water trickling down my neck is hot, maybe scalding hot. Dove’s head is in my poncho hood, I’m holding on as well as I can. Dove cries quiet.

  It’s really odd, holding on to Dove in the rain, half-leaning on Chloris who has an arm across the curve of the sofa to hold Zora’s shoulder, Zora’s crying, too. So’s Chloris.

  I’m not, I’m sitting on a garden bench in my own head trying to murmur something comforting to Dove. Dove’s weeping there, too, not as quietly.

  Nobody ran, comes only to me, in the back garden of our mind, looking out at the Sunless Sea. It’s the only comfort Dove’s got. More than half of them died, the ones in the hospital were mostly the lucky ones. Dove thinks the job, Dove’s job, was to keep them all alive. No idea what Blossom would say, or the Captain, I might need to ask them someday. Don’t think keeping them all alive was anything like possible.

  “Ed?” It’s Chloris’ voice, very carefully calm.

  I look up. We’re, sofa, the four of us, the glass cylinder with the poor kid in it, a chunk of road, all of it, in a space marked off by a basket-weave of shadows, shadow-forms of legs with far too many joints to be the many-jointed legs of spiders.

  It takes me three or four tries to find the right place in my head, the place the protective impulse has fed into the metaphysical world like that.

  The weave of shadow, the slide-back of the sense of doom that’s radiating outward, that fades out. Takes me a few minutes to do it, a lot of my attention is still on Dove.

  Not just Dove, we’re still all a something.

  “The really troubling thing,” Zora says to the rain, “is that I can’t convince myself I’m not in a life where knowing someone who can do that isn’t purely a good thing.”

  Dove snorts into my neck, pulls back, head out of my poncho hood, starts laughing. Dove stays there, slowly running down to chortles with the rain running off bare scalp, for a good long while.

  Better?

  Dove puts the poncho hood up.

  Much better.

  Dove goes back to leaning on me. I’m entirely fine with that.

  Chloris sort of leans in again, too, now that it will balance.

  It’s full dark, we’ve, even Zora, who decided it was the smaller risk, shifted to rested and well-fed versions of ourselves, there’s been a bit of pacing in illusory shoes, mustn’t risk cut feet, just to make sure no one’s legs kink, it’s a strange little bubble of warm and doesn’t need to be dry in the hard cold rain.

  Sometime around midnight, we haven’t been talking, the link’s up, not active as such, but it’s all the way up, it’s an oddly comfortable way to spend a night out in the rain trusting each other, there’s a sense of something approaching.

  We remember Grue’s instructions about warning people off all at the same time, and make a light. Too much light, thinking light! like that when we’re already linked up is excessive. The rain breaks it into a vast sphere of rainbows, really pretty, but not good for much, can’t see anything. We’ve got it turned back down and have said “Stop!” and STOP, before it registers for any of us that what we saw, half a kilometre down the road, was Wake and a unicorn.

  Wake and a unicorn and six or eight people in warded suits.

  We’re prepared. Grue isn’t sounding cheerful.

  Wake comes forward, nods to us, once, the motion full of reserve, Wake’s got a staff, Wake’s working, wreaking, someday I’ll know how that distinction applies, there are broad motions with the staff and arms, the staff passing between hands.

  It’s something immense. School books use the phrase ‘in their kingdoms of wrath’ a lot, it was the standard phrase about the pre-eminent sorcerers, those that had their own stable territories, back in the Bad Old Days. It’s not something that makes a lot of sense, not if you grew up in the Commonweal, never mind have had Halt sitting at the end of your refectory table knitting and asking you how the barge trip went.

  This doesn’t make me understand, it’s one thing, I know it’s not directed at me, but it gives me some idea. It feels as though the night and the rain are flinching away from whatever Wake is doing. It’s an enormous, really immense, amount of Power, it’s not abstract, it’s this terribly specific extension of Wake’s will that the world should be different.

  The folks in the warded suits have a rain canopy on poles, and lights, and a lot of stuff with them on a couple of the one-big-wheel-in-the-middle wheelbarrows Creeks prefer. And they’ve got wet boots, I can hear them squelching. We get checked, and given horrible stuff to drink, and checked again. Very thoroughly, there’s a long sequence of tests.

  “Your lungs are full of stuff that used to be wound-wedge spores,” a voice from a warded suit says.

  Wake’s huge working completes. For, I don’t know, I’m sure there is duration but I couldn’t tell you what the duration is, there’s nine distinct moments, moments with different real time to them, where the whole world feels like it’s gone, that I’m hanging in the otherworld, physically, that I’ve passed living into the land of the dead.

  It stops, and I’m trying to figure out what it was. Chloris is clearly trying to understand how Wake did that. Dove’s looking concerned at the medic who was about to take a blood sample. Zora’s looking worriedly at the glass cylinder, Grue’s making some sort of reassuring unicorn head motion back at her, Grue’s taken the feed to the cylinder back while Zora’s being examined.

  All the doctors, I suppose they’re doctors, look shaken. Really shaken, two of them are shuddering, big broad shakes they can’t will away from themselves. Dove and I run the air temperature around everybody up five and then ten degrees. It got a lot colder when it got dark, it’s not summer yet, and the rain’s early spring rain, not as cold as winter rain and that’s all you can say for it. I think it helps the doctors physically. Too much widespread sorcery for one day.

  They get themselves collected, go on with the checks. They do them all twice. They do some of mine three times, the first time they try for a blood sample the needle won’t draw anything, they have to try a wider one. Whatever I’m using for circulatory fluid isn’t red. I suppose it has to be circulating, I’m still eating, even with no heart. It’s a funny brilliant shade of blue, Grue mutters Not at room temperature, not at room temperature, in a way we all catch but none of us understands.

  Wake, walking with that long staff, comes back into the lighted space. Wake looks like someone who’s been working. Not tired, precisely, but as though Wake’s put in a day’s work and then some.

  “In these circumstances, thoroughness is much to be lauded.” Wake means that, getting the standard benevolent look back. “Such thoroughness as to prevent me from being able to raise the shades of th
e dead I have not often encountered.”

  “I didn’t count them.” Chloris is quiet. “I wanted to be sure we hadn’t missed anyone alive. More than twenty.”

  Wake nods, one of the doctors says “Exactly right, you don’t triage the dead.”

  Chloris looks a little less worried.

  One of the doctors, not the same one, looks at Wake, Grue, Grue’s still a unicorn, Wake again, says “They’re clean. I don’t know how, I don’t believe it, but they all test clean.”

  Dove grins, turns to look straight at Chloris, says “Thanks, Chloris!” in ringing tones.

  Wake times it perfectly, Chloris’ face makes it clear that slow thoughts, we’re all a bit slow, have just done the sums to get the same answer Dove got when Wake says “The utility of necromancy.”

  Chloris blushes faintly green.

  There’s another half hour before Wake, realizing that the doctors, it requires consensus, just aren’t going to certify us as clean, that the lack of belief is in no way rhetorical, the careful redundant tests being at fault is much easier to believe than that we’re not infected, there are more than a thousand dead from the outbreak, most of them due to spores in the lungs, returning us to Westcreek Town is more of a risk than these particular doctors can bear to take, stops looking benevolent.

  Chloris does the perfect still voice of death, the easeful death that frees you from overwhelming pain you can escape no other way. Wake doesn’t. Wake’s voice goes ‘all things come in time to die,’ sure, but ‘in time’ is now, this narrow instant, and it doesn’t care if the time is due and fitting. I can see the bones of my hands, there’s a smell of the sound of thunder, it tastes like the weight of cold dirt in your hands.

  No idea what Wake said, what language it was in, nothing.

  I’ve seen a unicorn look shocked. Maybe not a unicorn that was born one, I don’t know if they look shocked, look shocked just like that, but Grue is so shocked as to shift human.

  “I am called Wake, I am an Independent of the Second Commonweal, and I am a Keeper of the Shape of Peace.” Wake’s voice is still, calm, inexorable. Mountains wear away to the sea in a voice like that, if you could make the millions of years fast enough to hear with ears. There’s a short bar of something shiny in Wake’s left hand, half a centimetre thick, five wide, seventeen long. Token-size. It’s in the middle of an insubstantial tangle of circles and arcs and strange tiny writing a metre across, shining dark blue and bone white, a dark red like old blood, and eight distinct shades of dust. The tangle of light goes right through Wake, moves through Wake as it moves, as the hand holding it moves.

  “This was a terrible fungus, a cruel weed, but it had no wits of its own. Those wits which wreaked it are dead. In these apprentices, so too is the fungus dead, dead beyond recall of shape or pattern of life. Nothing in them lives which is not essential to their lives and benevolent in its function.”

  “I so attest by my name and the Peace.” Anybody else would say “By the Peace and my name within it,” but the Keepers, it’s an extra dimensions thing. Their names are part of, not bound within, the Second Shape of Peace.

  We get checked again, the glass cylinder gets checked again, Wake and Grue and the doctors get checked again, when we get to Westcreek Town. It’s almost dawn. Still entirely negative.

  I’m going to learn how to do better illusory socks before I walk that far in illusory shoes again.

  Halt’s there. There’s a green shimmer over Halt, it’s not just a ward, something complicated. Can’t tell what it does, but it’s more than just a barrier.

  Some things that touch it die, comes into my thinking on spider feet. Useful for medical emergencies.

  Halt’s very dry tone makes Dove smile.

  I get handed a mug, a small one, smaller than I’d want for a tea mug, of that draught of Halt’s. I say thanks and drink it. No idea if it’s any good for fungus or not, but there’s only so much I can do with shape-shifting to make me believe I’m rested and we’ve got some weeding, or at least a barge ride to weeding, right after breakfast. The draught helps a lot.

  Dove gets offered a mug, too, and takes it, sniffs it, performs Chloris-style nose wrinkles at it, and hands it to me.

  “It’s good for you, Dove dear.” Halt’s voice is entirely mild.

  “I’ll start drinking mine myself when — ” Dove’s chin lifts at me — “starts drinking wood-lettuce tea.”

  Halt dimples.

  I drink Dove’s, too, it’s really not difficult to slide the benefits over, even if the actual stuff’s not in Dove’s digestive system. I probably should figure out how to drink wood-lettuce tea, how to be harder to poison in general, the tea keeps on smelling delicious, I’ll slip up and drink some eventually.

  “I lost them,” Grue says, very quietly to Halt. Zora and Chloris don’t get Halt’s draught, they do get huge mugs of wood-lettuce tea.

  “No safe places,” Halt says to Grue, it’s not a remonstration. “Chloris, that was excellently well done,” is the next thing Halt says, and Wake nods.

  “An ability to figure out what needs doing and how to do it is cheering in one’s students,” Wake says, “but not nearly so cheering as the student doing it well.” Wake’s got a mug of beer. Not what I’d try drinking if I’d been up all night, but, really. Whatever Wake wants, short of human blood. Not that there wouldn’t be people willing to donate, after Wake’s suppressed this wound-wedges outbreak.

  Zora’s walked over to hug Grue, Grue’s doing badly now that the crisis has passed. Even leaving us there to die, raising the alarm was exactly the right thing to do. It’s what Grue did, Grue has to know that. I’d think it’s obvious we all agree, too, but probably better to let Zora communicate it.

  Twelve, fourteen hours expecting to have to tell Halt and Blossom that we were all dead, dead in Grue’s care. And the doctors won’t declare us clean. Not free of stress. Dove says, and I nod. Actually nod, I’m not doing a good job of keeping inside and outside distinct.

  I go lean on Dove, both of us still in our poncho things. I doubt there’s a way to keep these, but if there’s a way to transfer the binding into something sturdy I want to do it.

  An upset, two upset, doctors are arriving with somebody else, also in the kind of warded suit the doctors are in.

  It’s the member of Parliament for Westcreek Town, the riding is a slice of the West Wetcreek to get, not the whole town, the part of the town on the west side of the West Wetcreek, and somewhat past, then everything west of that to the Folded Hills in the bargain. Dove just knows this, slides the awareness over so I know it, too. There’s a discussion, between the MP and Wake and the doctors. Grue’s shaking a bit, whatever Wake did didn’t just surprise, it frightened Grue, Grue’s standing behind Halt.

  Hey, grand-sister-by-marriage. Wasn’t that just strong necromancy? Dove makes it sound, Dove is, cheery and curious. Dove doesn’t seem to mind almost dying.

  Got used to it, the words just inside our head, and the sensation of a hair ruffle. Not going to work for real for awhile.

  It was probability, the second thing, not necromancy. Past the Tall Woods.

  There’s a pause, partially because the doctors and the member of Parliament and Wake have hit a pause themselves. Wake’s Keeper of the Shape of Peace token is out again. It’s got a legal meaning, but everybody’s still getting used to it, the First Commonweal didn’t have them. They had a Maintainer, they had the same Maintainer, but it’s not the same.

  Grue goes on, not sounding any more shaken, not sounding any less. Any disease any of you still had, anybody else who had it seriously might have just got well, because there’s a broad area in which it never existed. Not cured, it just never happened, they never had it, they don’t know why they were in that bed, they may have just lost scarring they never had, that was insanely strong. I didn’t know that was possible. Worse than the Dove-and-Edgar furnace trick.

  I judge not Wake by the kind expectations of youth. Halt’s purely amused.<
br />
  Dove’s next question doesn’t have words. Grue nods, jerkily, shaking a bit, not too much to hold a mug of tea. Why I can’t cope with fights, the bad possibilities all get real and I have a breakdown. Medical emergencies, bad ones, I have the breakdown after.

  “If we are moved by fear, that is not the Peace.” Wake’s voice is still the terrible even tones of grinding down mountains.

  “They are not safe, they are student sorcerers. Safe is the same as dead, if you mean safe entire. The tests do not have false negative rates worth mentioning, you have performed them five times, thrice and twice by each of two means, there is an excellent explanation for why they were not ill, and they have been subjected to a cure far beyond the power of the disease to withstand.”

  There’s a pause. I don’t think Wake is doing the slow coiling in the air on purpose, not the slow spiralling coil nor the sense that something far off is burning.

  “Not the malice of a god,” Wake says, answering some question I cannot hear.

  Halt’s face quirks, I can’t call it a smile. It’d have to be a stupid god.

  Zora’s put their mug down to take Grue’s mug and set it down. Grue isn’t looking all that well. I can hear Zora saying You didn’t lose us, it didn’t happen, hugging Grue.

  Chloris drifts over and puts an arm around me. It does balance, I’m still tilted because there’s more Dove than Chloris, but it works. Think we’ll get quarantined?

  As long as it takes to weed? Dove’s mostly amused. Four days, we’d surely have symptoms by then if we’re gonna. Can’t burn the boat, sinking won’t kill fungus. Quarantine usually wants a couple layers of hard-glaze tile.

  There never used to be Independents in the Creeks, Chloris says. An outbreak like that would have killed more people. Buried whole towns, there was a substantial town down by Longbarns a hundred years ago. Lots of memories of having to leave loved ones to die, so everyone wouldn’t.

  The two doctors are utterly stuck on not possible. One of them has tried to talk to Wake about the necessity of acknowledging the inevitability of death, that you can’t save everyone, we don’t know why the test keeps reporting your students to be clean but they cannot be.