An entirely reasonable plan, Dove dear.
Dove grins.
Dinner’s good. Dinner’s very good.
Zora says thank you, and asks, peaceably with a willed peaceably, if there’s a test for when it’d be safe to help in a refectory?
Grue, Blossom, Wake, and Halt, all shake their heads. It’s not incidental eerie unison, but it’s surely unanimity.
Grue fishes a couple of small potatoes out of somewhere, hands one to Zora. It’s not around the fire, it’s around the half-metre ball of warmth hovering just off the ground. Still, close enough for social purposes.
Grue’s potato squiggles, there isn’t another word, it’s nearly writhing. Then it’s a blintz. A really nice one, hot, it has jam. Pumpkin? It’s pale orange.
“Try,” Grue says, and Zora’s potato melts into something hot, but also sticky and not blintz-like. Zora says “Ow!” and makes a rapid hand shaking motion, then winces until the burns shift away.
Grue hands Zora the blintz that was a potato. “It’s learning a lot of things so well you forget you ever didn’t know them. It takes time.”
Zora nods. Not happy about it, but the “Thank you,” for the blintz is entirely comprehensible.
Wake’s drinking a tall cup, tumbler, of something dark. If anybody told me they can smell the bitter of it in the Otherworld I’d believe it.
“We’ve set you a narrow road, and hurried you along it. You have done much, have all shown flashes of startling brilliance.”
All clearly means all the students, though I suppose it’s true of our teachers, too. Only everybody expects it of them.
Think about who you startled, children, comes into my mind, all our minds, on the tiny precise steps of spider feet.
“There’s a wide land beside the road, and we’ve kept you out of it. The hope, my hope as your teacher, is that you shall go back and explore there once you are yourself Independents.” Wake says this about the way you’d expect someone to discuss barge schedules, planning a trip.
“It’s not just keeping Dove alive, is it?” Chloris’ voice is half-way to the stillness of Death, the first time I can recall hearing. Usually it’s all one or all the other.
“Nor simply keeping the class as a whole alive,” Wake says. “You have grown mighty very swiftly. Half a year after your first successful working in conventional studies of sorcery, you might be lighting candles reliably.” Wake’s benevolence entirely encompasses this.
I can feel my mind skip. Ethics. Sorcery in the Commonweal has rules, they call them meetings, meetings for the consideration of the ethics of conduct. It’s mostly not sorcerers belonging to the meetings. You have to go apply to do things with anything alive, Grue isn’t allowed to make anything that can reproduce, something about bees, there was a tonne of paperwork, not literally but trying to be, all of a five-drawer cabinet, about Halt’s giant sheep, it was really, really dry and I didn’t understand it and I skipped almost all of it, looking for survival statistics for sorcery students.
“You could only get permission because it wouldn’t work.” I don’t, I can borrow Dove’s ears and be sure, I really don’t, sound offended. I do sound surprised.
“Nobody in the ethics meeting thought it could work, the official best-case was extended survival. You had to have had a plausible expectation of success, but you’d never have got permission if the board thought it could work, work like this.” A board that has to have been back in the First Commonweal.
“Statistics do not apply to individuals.” Wake says that calmly, just the way Wake says no-thank-you when offered asparagus. “Even if they make good policy.”
“There’s a flying dismount in here somewhere?” Dove isn’t surprised. Dove isn’t even surprised I’m not surprised.
“No, Dove dear.” Halt’s got a teacup. Nothing I’ve ever seen called tea glows red up into its own steam. It looked like tiny tentacles grabbed the sugar lump, too. “Dismounting, getting to the bottom of the hill, Kynefrid’s concern for landing, all these things suppose you shall stop and be again as you were.”
Halt beams at us through the red steam, gently bops something rising behind the tiny mass of tentacles with the bowl of the teaspoon. It sinks again, tentacles in affronted postures.
“You were none of you especially pleased with the lives you had.” Halt’s voice is quiet. “Thus you should choose new forms with a whole heart and strong hope, perhaps. Perhaps you would, and rise in truth.”
I have absolutely no idea what to say. Dove reaches over and ruffles my hair. There’s a thought forming, it starts with yet, and Blossom raises an admonishing eyebrow at Dove. Sometimes Blossom’s barely there, gone, lost into thinking. Sometimes there’s a crackly sense of power, like a thunderstorm you can’t see.
Sometimes you get Blossom’s full attention.
“There’s a proverb. Misery makes sorcery, It’s annoyingly true, at least for the survivors. The Commonweal tries hard, both of them, the idea is to produce someone who hasn’t developed a need for the blood of the living, or compulsions involving pain, or really serious holes in their ability to think rationally.”
Something slithers through Blossom’s fingers, loops, twists, spirals into pretty patterns. This is Blossom’s equivalent of twirling a pencil or the end of a braid or tapping rhythms. It takes me a few seconds to realize it’s not illusion, it’s twenty or thirty kilogrammes of molten nickel. Nickel and vanadium.
“The price of that is being told how it works. And that approach works, as teaching, we get Independents, they can do the job.”
Chloris takes a deep breath, stops, careful, tea mug on the little table that goes with the chair Chloris made, sits up very straight, hands folded. “This is a bet that if we just turn into what we think is, is, interesting, it will work?”
“Of course, Chloris dear.” Halt’s voice is gentle. “That is true of any strong talent. It so often fails because there is time for the wrong doubt, an un-comprehended accumulation of hurts.”
Dove nods, twice, and then makes a sort of seated bow at Halt, and then Blossom. “Self-honesty preferable to will.”
Blossom nods. “Will toward anything except self-honesty…” and makes a hand motion, rolling band of nickel following.
“Grow up or die.” Zora sounds admiring, in a deeply offended way.
“Grow up and live.” Chloris’ voice slides between, not quite Chloris’ normal voice, a human voice, and the perfect stillness of Death practically by syllables, saying this.
“Precisely, Chloris dear.” Halt beams at Chloris. “This is not an experiment to see what happens, we have all, even the very young — ” Grue, well, call it a grim grin, and thinks Eighty five, practically a baby — “seen enough apprentices die horridly. We seek to — ” Halt is at the end of a row, and switches the yarn knitting on to one that isn’t orange — “throw you into the sky, where you shall travel swifter and learn better for the wider vantage.”
Chloris looks straight at Halt. “Doesn’t this depend on being unusually talented?”
This depends on being talented together, we’re lifting each other. It wouldn’t work if we’d thought we’d known how sorcery works, it didn’t work for Kynefrid, who was, is, totally convinced there was, is, no way to survive our course of study. Conflict with previous knowledge.
Halt smiles, directs a head-tip at Wake.
“You are concerned because you may be the least mighty among your fellows?” Wake’s got more of whatever the darkly bitter stuff in that tumbler is. And another pottery tumbler, tall bowl, it’d be a mug if it had a handle, too, Wake passes that one to Chloris. Who looks too surprised not to take it.
Chloris says “Yes,” as an answer to the question, echoing surprise.
“Do you know why we are here?”
None of us do.
“A portion of the battle-standards involves necromancy, the means that permit the newly dead of the Line to wait, and continue to serve for a time. The ritual enchantment for this r
equires a quantity of human bone about which nothing is known.”
“Nothing?” I’m thinking Don’t you have to know it’s human? That it’s dead?
Wake makes a hand-rocking motion, with the hand the doesn’t have the cup. Chloris is halfway down the bitter drink from Wake, still highly uncertain about it, so much so you can tell from facial expressions.
“It is not a rational criteria. It has the concern of former days with name and sense, not one of phylogeny.”
I nod. It probably does make some kinds of magic easier, if no one made a concerted effort to teach you natural philosophy.
“Obtaining bone that admits of the criteria is difficult; easier in the old days, easier in places that have known less peace. It is possible that there’s an area of pre-Creek settlement in the middle of this swamp, which is why we are here.”
Nods. Halt is knitting away, Blossom’s doing something that results in clean cooking pots, Grue’s fishing out a couple eggs to go with a pile of flour and a jug of water and some sugar and five or six potatoes. They’re not for oil, there’s a sphere of oil floating out of somewhere. The whole rises up, renders itself an approximation of evenly mixed, emits eggshell, and proceeds to turn into cake.
“Thirty or forty grammes of powdered bone, that permits, at need, the shades of eight thousands to abide and act. This is not a thing I could have done; there are those who taught me in my youth who would swear on their names it could not be done at all, never mind what you might choose to do it with.”
“You’re going to tell me Laurel did that by being smart.” Chloris, I don’t know what Chloris is thinking. “I’m really not very smart either.”
“Neither am I”, Blossom says, quite cheerful. “Not stupid, but it’s easy to find a smarter sorcerer.”
Grue’s eyes roll, then stop, because it’s rolling the cake.
The cake, cakes, it’s going to be a layer cake, drift down to land, well, stay, there’s a decimetre showing between the layers, on a plate on Halt’s side table. “Thank you, Grue dear,” Halt says, downs knitting, and produces a tub of icing.
It’s amazing how even you can get icing if you’re not obliged to use anything material to spread it. Or if you’re Halt. Not sure which it is.
“Despite the eye-rolling, Grue’s a good deal smarter than I am. So is Halt, so is Ongen, so are any number of people. Talent doesn’t correlate much with intelligence, which’d be a real problem if any of you were actually slow. I get by on persistence and experimentation, rather than brilliance. It works, it’d work for you.”
Blossom, who became the shape of something that has no law but Power.
Blossom takes a slice of cake, smiles thanks at Halt, produces a fork out of nothing, stops, puts that one away, produces a different one. “No using indestructible cobalt-chromium cutlery on Halt’s festive plates,” Blossom says, half to the air. The second fork looks like it’s carved out of horn.
“It worked for Laurel,” Blossom goes on. “I’ve read every scrap of Laurel’s notes for the standards, everything we have which is nearly all of it. It’s not really true the standards took Laurel six hundred years, it’s closer to say a hundred years to prove the idea would work, four hundred years to jot down ideas while working on graul, and another hundred years to make and breed enough graul while producing complete working examples of the standards.”
Chloris is handicapped by holding a cake plate, no way to make really expressive gestures about being handed the Wizard Laurel as an example of conduct. We got forks handed to us, pretty sure they’re nearly pure silver. Specifically cake forks, too. Really part of Halt’s take on civilization, being able to care about which fork to use.
“I never understood something from school,” Zora says.
“All the early Commonweal history says the Foremost marched for Laurel, only then Laurel didn’t assume control of the conquered territories, Laurel went away, no one knows where, with the people who’d been the Foremost. Only they’d never have called themselves that, that’s what they were called after the Shape of Peace got made and the Line came into existence and wanted an example. Only there’s almost forty years in there, and the Twelve were overcome by the Foremost. So what was going on, while everybody was arguing about setting up Parliament?”
“It was more like thirty than twelve, at the start,” Halt says, counting back and forth on the fingers of the other hand with the cake-fork shaft. “Leaving aside three or four unassuming powers like Ongen, thirty-one.”
Halt pours tea. The other cup, the one with the red light and the steam and the occasional tentacles, it’s still on the side table. Halt directs a stern look at the emerging tentacles, moves the cake, provides a lump of sugar to the tentacles, and drops another into the teacup with tea in it.
Somewhere, some distance away, something howls, long and wavery and lost. It’s well and truly dark, black-dark and moonless, a night full of stars. What I can see of Halt with my eyes is washed red.
“The Foremost did not march alone, Laurel went with them, and Laurel was prepared.” Halt says this without any emotion at all, not even a lack of emotion, it’s just words. “What Edgar did with time to the metabolism of weeds, Laurel did something very much like that to the minds of those overcome.”
“I thought…” Chloris says.
“That Laurel was not especially powerful?” Wake nods punctuation to the statement. “Laurel was not, is not, I expect Laurel is up some other mountain somewhere to this day, having called failed their mighty experiment in being left alone.”
Wake’s face goes some ancient kind of stern.
“Thousands of graul, with the first battle-standards ever seen in the world, melting their way through the warded hills and slaughtering any that dared stand before them?”
Wake looks, briefly, extremely wry, goes back to the stern.
“The standards were Laurel’s corrective for not being especially powerful, make something mighty beyond the possibility of any degree of individual talent, then make a species of people mete to war, made so you are their chosen god, their ideal of service. Not servile, not controlled, I did not see it myself but any number of well-attested accounts have graul arguing with Laurel, but be sure that the voluntary nature of the standards does not take them out of your control because everyone bound to one loves you above their lives or kin.”
Wake’s face goes back to, not benevolent, but the sternness falls off it.
“Even one very mighty, trying to fight that, trying to understand how to fight that, might not notice Laurel doing something swift and subtle,” Wake says. “We were still those lucky; there were a few who, by guess or luck or supposition, escaped Laurel’s fetters.”
“The Foremost killed them.” Chloris says this in an entirely human voice.
Wake nods. Halt says, still in a voice with nothing at all in it but the words, “The Foremost ground their ashes into dust.”
“What flavour is this icing?”
It’s very good, I’ve never had anything that tasted like it before, and I entirely do not want to hear Halt say anything else in a completely toneless voice, especially not after ‘ground their ashes into dust.’
“Strawberry, dear,” Halt says, a little absent but sounding mostly like Grandma Halt.
“Strawberry?” Zora says. I can near enough hear the rustling as book pages turn in Zora’s head. “Do they grow in the Creeks?”
Halt sets teacup and saucer down and smiles, quite gently. “I haven’t seen an actual strawberry in, oh, a very long time.”
Grue’s head tips over in a particularly inquisitive way.
“It was in a pot, on a windowsill, in a city on another continent, Grue dear. I’m not going to try to reconstruct the eclipses.”
“It’s really good,” Zora says, and we all nod.
Halt smiles, and makes a complex sound, I think it’s words, and says “Here, child,” handing Zora something.
Zora takes it. It vanishes into Zora.
; “All my knowledge of strawberries,” Halt says. “Perhaps you shall make them live again.”
Zora’s eyes get wide and rather bright, and Zora nods several times.
Not what people think when you say ‘The Book of Halt’. There are all sorts of stories about how the only physical copy is kept by Null librarians in a cavern under the Shape of Peace, the first one, right next to the recipe for making the battle-standards and the Shape of Peace itself.
Chloris makes, I thought Chloris was thinking of asking for a second slice of cake, there’s enough, but it’s not a planned wave of the plate, Chloris almost squeaks. There’s an ocelotter butting its head into Chloris’ knee, quite determined.
Chloris gets a strange look, and looks across at Wake while petting the ocelotter; it’s intensifying its head butting, but into Chloris’ hand.
“The wards do not interfere with harmless things,” Wake says.
“It’s dead.” Chloris doesn’t, is trying hard not to, say this as a contradiction.
“And yet harmless to we here.” Wake smiles, leans to rescue the empty earthenware cup Chloris is trying to set somewhere safe. Ocelotters have heavy, muscular tails, and that close to Chloris the ghost of this one is near enough to solid, something Chloris’ small table is not meant to withstand.
“Ocelotters possess a modicum of wits,” Wake says. “Some gentle death can leave the shade of such to wander for a time.”
“Should I…help it?” Chloris says. Finish dying, hangs in the air, a loud thought.
The ghost is twining between Chloris’ feet. A fully-grown ocelotter’s maybe twenty kilos; this one would have been large for its kind, but it’s, I don’t know, it’s a large kitten. Gangly. There’s an audible purr, very faint, but I can really hear it with my physical ears.
“Commonweal law does not approve of taking familiars,” Wake says, “but it is entirely permissible to maintain a volunteer.”
Zora’s best illusory air-fish get a sniff, and some elaborate, between-all-the-toes, paw washing. Chloris’ much paler version works splendidly. The ocelotter springs and swims down through the memory of water and brings the dead illusion back to drop at Chloris’ feet, ghost fish from a ghost cat.
A Succession of Bad Days Page 37