Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  “Sometimes it’s just style.” Blossom chin-points at the swans, who are head-ducking happily and making quiet little gronking noises back and forth. Cygnets. We’re going to have cygnets.

  Not sure there will be enough for them to eat.

  “You made the swans free of the watershed, the Round House spring down to the natural stream.” Blossom waves up the hill. “Big Pond’s got vegetation established.”

  It does, and almost too much; shallow, made ponds choke if there’s nothing eating the plants out of them. Big Pond isn’t all that big, comparatively, but four hectares ought to be enough vegetation for a family of swans.

  We’re going to have cygnets traipsing up the slope, or maybe swimming upstream and trying to climb the weir and needing to be helped up the stairs.

  “Probably.” Blossom’s almost laughing.

  “I like swans,” Blossom says, gently. “Not sure where to start, though.”

  “Could you start with ‘only strictly true’?”

  “Foolish to ask if you remember Halt’s demon classes.” I nod, can’t help it, those are impossible to forget, you want to, with what’s left of being a regular person, but you really can’t. You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t want to, it’s part of the job.

  Demons hide, it’s not just being protean, it’s being arrangements other than matter. You can spot them, but it’s something almost everyone has to do on purpose and Halt won’t confirm the “almost.”

  Blossom nods at me. “Most of my take on shapechanging.”

  “So you were there the whole time?”

  “Since very shortly after you woke everybody up.”

  So much of becoming a sorcerer is not knowing whether to be relieved or infuriated. Especially when your teachers snicker.

  “We’re supposed to keep you alive without letting you get into the habit of believing someone will save you.” Blossom says that, well, about the way your older sibling says that the floor still has to get mopped.

  Which is mild for a quote from Halt, it’s not anything I didn’t know before, and it’s still vexing.

  “Life-tweaking’s development, mostly, as much as you can say where the line between development and heredity goes.” Blossom points at the swans again. “You’re not the first to try to re-domesticate swans.”

  I’m most of the way through thinking that was easy when Blossom says “First survivor I know about.”

  This isn’t a grin, it’s the little prickling crackle across the Power, Blossom snickering in a friendly way.

  “I’m going to have to apologize for ranting about ‘easy,’ aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” Dove says, restraining arm over the neck of a unicorn wild-eyed with concern. “Though if you explain the swans to the township we’ll call it even.” Dove’s grinning, they all are. And proud. The link makes that impossible to doubt, or decide is anything else.

  “Sorcerous domestication of fell creature, precipitous,” “sorcerous domestication of fell creature, planned,” and “sorcerous domestication of fell creature, accidental” are all different categories in the reporting infrastructure. I’d still rather do the paperwork.

  Chapter 10

  Zora

  Wake asks at breakfast if we’ve maintained our trade in wine, and we all nod, all together.

  It might not be entirely proper to call it maintaining a trade when it’s a bottle, or a few bottles, just one cider bottle didn’t seem polite, once a year. It’s more like being polite with the neighbours.

  “Gift-exchange implies mutual knowledge.” Wake is entirely composed, but Wake is always composed.

  “They’ve made that world.” Edgar, not Dove. There’s, it’s not a trophic web, it’s patterns of compulsion, it might be the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. No one else, no one who isn’t us, seems to mind, one more illusion if you can’t hear Ed’s thoughts, don’t know what it is. Pelōŕios is looking up, horn brightening a little, only a very little, I think it’s the habit of someone with a built-in light, not a desire to make use of the Power, but Pelōŕios clearly doesn’t understand.

  Wake studies the thing, I take a deep breath and study the thing, and after a few minutes it’s oddly reassuring. All the compulsion’s what you’d expect from evolutionary processes, the woods as a whole, the forest the idea of the Tall Woods must originate in, that’s in a very pleasant place, there aren’t any parasites or diseases, strictly as such, but the local maximum is stable and it’s all plain selection, there isn’t a will sitting on it anywhere.

  “This is three bottles of cider,” Ed says. It’s a much smaller diagram, but you can see layer upon layer, it’s not that the bees are from a lineage with at least four distinct ancestral episodes of weaponization, that the apples have to be watched for distant pollen bringing in hereditary traits called things like ribbon eyes and fatal sleep, it’s weeding, four times a year, then the effort to keep the pressing clean, something specific and unpleasant in the orchard soil that has to be suppressed twice a décade in the spring. After that there’s what happens to the casks, to be sure nothing airborne snuck into them between when the cooper was finished and the fermentation’s done and the cider goes to casks. The bottles got autoclaved, which wouldn’t show if it wasn’t part of the general inerting. Safer and faster and a cider orchard makes enough to upgrade their bottle autoclave because they want to, not because it’s wearing out.

  “We did think about this,” Dove says, quietly and directly to Wake. “We’re not obviously reassuring neighbours.”

  Wake smiles gently, nods, and lets the whole concern go.

  “A more present concern,” Wake says, “is the ward around the Tall Woods.”

  The Tall Woods, and the hilltop meadows, and the Round House, where we all live.

  We’re all baffled, and it shows. That was the fourth sorcerous thing we did as a linked team, and I would, we all would, have thought it was entirely robust. Especially as we were running a Power feed for Wake’s construct, it didn’t rely on any of our skill. We’ve been feeding it Power ever décade since, and it’s grown in depth and density of Power.

  “Sufficient concentrations of the Power dissuade material completeness,” Wake says. “Especially considering the Tall Woods’ clear demarcation from its surrounds.”

  “The Line standing movement orders,” Dove says, and then there’s a list in all our heads, about a fifth of the list is places you don’t go because you might not come back out, then the symptoms of such places. The don’t-go-there list ends with annotations about the unspecific fate of the Third Heavy Battalion of the Sixth Brigade, back in the Year of Peace One Thirty One.

  Wake nods.

  “We don’t know how to alter wards.” Chloris never sounds as cautious as Chloris feels, the sound is always a proper moderate caution, and the felt amount can be anything except that, Chloris wavers between vast caution and none at all. Which isn’t Dove and Edgar’s bad influence, neither of them ever feel an iota more cautious than circumstances compel them to be, and maybe not that much.

  Not that either of them would put it that way. And now they’re both starting to drift into unsettlingly curious.

  “Lot of oomph in that ward.” Dove’s contemplative, there’s a scale graph, the ward loses Power slowly, much more slowly than we’ve been adding it. Adding Power and not thinking about it, this was set up when we had no idea at all, and wards are formally the last thing we get taught as students.

  Sometime after Festival, probably.

  Wake nods at me, specifically, and says “I should defy Halt to alter that ward without extensive ritual preparation. But much as a house foundation found to sink is corrected by addressing the substrate, we might hope to keep the Tall Woods from falling out of the world by some means other than altering the ward.”

  Nobody reaches for the internal library. Whenever a teacher says we it’s not a “let’s see what you can devise” problem, it’s a “this is a bit tricky and we’re going to help you” problem. And you don’t
look those up because if you do look those up sometimes you get the shakes because the literature references involve pre-Commonweal mass casualty events, tentative explanations for how a species of people got like that, the phrase “comprehensive extirpation,” or, and I suppose this is my favourite bit of report language, “widespread inadvertent defacing,” from back when dispassionate language was a new thing in reports.

  “A common problem on a smaller scale,” Wake says, benevolence oblivious to our concern. “Theoretically well-understood subsequent to the initial creation of the Shape of Peace.”

  Which turns into, aside from reading lots of math, surveying in the season of cold mud. Pelōŕios just doesn’t sink into mud, something the creators of this ilk of unicorn got right. Neither does Wake. I’m sure the reason is different. We all have illusions of mud shoes and high boots, and it works, even when early spring gets confused and snows.

  Delicacy is always a tricky thing. Maybe for me especially, it doesn’t matter that both my talent flavours are called tweaker when I’m often trying to affect tiny things. There might have been a third point to that second class with Blossom, not just work when it hurts and this is dangerous, but the hint that the whole of sorcery is a lot like trying to understand what it is helpful to hit with the big hammer.

  No hammer this time; no blurring of history, something you can use to keep your study from coming unstuck, the study you built out of the same material and contingency as everything else around it, but “entirely unsuitable,” Wake says, for the Tall Woods.

  So we make metaphysical string. Lots, and spread it out over a huge area, some of it runs under the West Wetcreek and more of it runs under the Canal. Western West-East Canal, it’s not East-East until it’s east of Slow Creek, but no one ever calls it that casually, it’s just the Canal. That involved paperwork, the Food-gesith’s clerks in Westcreek Town don’t have a flinch response to us showing up with forms. The Galdor-gesith’s do, though I think that’s mostly because the first time one of them just had to get into a stubbornness contest with Dove.

  All of that was fine, it even looks like we’re doing something, galumphing about on mud shoes and sticking material anchors, zirconium dioxide ones because we’re doing this with Wake and alumina wouldn’t be ceramics practice. With zirconium dioxide we have to do the internal markings with hafnium, which at least is found with the zirconium. We have to make sure to do the separation without either metal catching fire, but we’re used to worrying about fires.

  We’re all pretty good at scowling at oxygen by now, bubbles of vacuum, and several other phrases that I can’t use when I write letters to my sister, because there will be worry and years of being extremely careful writing to my mother will suddenly fail.

  It’s impossible to convince myself corundum isn’t a regular material, it might not be anywhere else but it’s what soaking tubs are made out of in Westcreek Town. There’s a really stubborn collective formed by some clockmakers and some tub-coopers determined to devise a way to extend that, too, and there are five geans just as determined to fund them.

  Then it’s my job to keep the big string-weaving from cutting through or damaging anything alive, which is mostly a problem of getting things to move out of the way as the, have to call it tension, comes on to the ideas of strings. Pelōŕios doesn’t ask questions when I’m working. Not all of my fellow-citizens have that much sense, though you’d think they would.

  The main weaving’s Ed and Constant. When it’s done Dove thinks scion of the spider-god in a tone that makes Chloris blush and Pelōŕios shy a little and there’s a pause while Wake’s perceptions filter through all of it, we get told it suffices the purpose, and there’s the inevitable abide and cohere pronouncement.

  Pelōŕios looks panicked, I do my best to make reassuring noises, there is no way to say “don’t worry, everything will be fine” in Unicorn Four and saying “it can’t hurt us” would be an audacious lie. Won’t, certainly, but that’s not the same, if you just met Edgar. You can say “reliable allies” in Unicorn, and I do, but Pelōŕios doesn’t seem convinced. Progressively calmer, when nothing else terrifying happens, which is not the same thing as convinced.

  Can’t hug a unicorn without asking, can’t ask until the twitching stops. Can’t guess what else to do, so I stand there and wait.

  Chapter 11

  Zora

  The problem with knowing how to shapeshift is that it creates more problems than it solves.

  Being enormously skilled at shapeshifting, being Grue, still creates problems. They’re mostly social and reputational and metaphysical by then, instead of noting that I know how to be myself really well, but not anything else and the anything else is only more useful than dangerous if it turns out I did it flawlessly.

  Being able to get rid of being tired and hurt is really useful. It’s essential to the whole metaphysical metabolic transition we have to make, it’s essential to getting through the course of study that makes that metabolic transition practical, at least to doing it quickly enough to survive. It does no good to be ready for the transition after your talent’s found a way to kill you. It doesn’t even have to be cooking your brain, losing half the enzyme chemistry in your liver will do, too. Lots and lots of ways.

  I’m not actually bad at this, being most of a sorcerer’s much more dangerous than not at all, for any given thing, the same way a mostly finished house has a lot more to drop on your head when it falls down than a foundation excavation does. So if I was really bad at it I’d be dead. My classmates aren’t even further up the sky than I am, no matter how much I feel like a song-sparrow among dragons.

  If only it were dragons. There are critter teams that can handle dragons.

  Could talk to Grue, but not really ask, because Pelōŕios is frightened of Grue, more frightened of Grue than of Halt, which ought to be the only time that’s ever happened.

  At least happened for any length of time, and now I really am dithering.

  The garden doesn’t seem to bother Pelōŕios, despite a traumatic arrival, despite swans. Every now and again you can hear the gleeful territorial trumpeting. Waterfowl or not, I think swans like a day when it’s finally not raining just as much as anybody else. The original paths are still holding up, even with hooves, translucent and adamantine, ticking along them.

  You can look a unicorn in both eyes at once, they’ve got lots of binocular vision because their heads really aren’t in the least horse-like beyond the basic blunt-wedge profile, Unicorn Four jaws articulate on the spine as well as the skull, they’re certainly not synapsids in skeletal architecture. Eyes to the side, but the grooved rostrum doesn’t get in the way when the eyes rotate forward in the socket. It looks much stranger from the front.

  In Unicorn, it comes out as something like “It is conceivable that your sojourn among us would be less unpleasant were you to permit an increase in my understanding of your form,” only the various uses of your come out half inferior and half superior, which probably means I sound indecisive or incomprehensible.

  Wasn’t clear, I get “I do not understand” back, in what would be human tones if it wasn’t half full of really deep whistles like fast air in big tunnels. Pelōŕios has been learning, too.

  “Were you to travel the roads alone, passerby would be alarmed.” Even with, and it was nine-tenths joke, Dove’s suggestion of an “if found, please return” collar. No one would be able to avoid being alarmed, unicorns really are alarming. Unicorns think that’s a good thing, and outside the Peace I suppose it is. It took a while for Grue to stop being alarming on trot-to-work days, and Grue had warned people first. Even with the warning, Grue shifts back and explains.

  Holding still’s obviously difficult for this increasingly healthy unicorn, but Pelōŕios has no ability to shift human and explain. It matters that passerby are alarmed, that’s part of what “peace” means. That there’s an authority who will object is going to have to suffice for now, explanation-wise.

  The explanation
of what, exactly, I want, not Pelōŕios’ actual shape but the history of this kind of unicorns, takes a lot longer. I can make up something that looks like a unicorn, tell the Power to make me something that looks like anything I can imagine, but that’s somewhere between rash and suicidal, the Power is not benevolent, it needs to be a shape where I know the constraints, the mechanisms of function. Asking for works, well, works; appearance can turn you into a statue, there’s three of those in material artifact libraries in the City of Peace.

  So I can either spend twenty or thirty years on research, or I can use a working unicorn example, if I want to be able to turn into a unicorn. Which means getting the unicorn to understand that what’s involved, so they can say yes or no about it.

  Which is one reason to be out in the garden, outside, always better to a unicorn, and no especially troubling memory for the place. Pelōŕios seems to go by events, and losing an accumulation of hurts stuck more than being terrified did, or maybe it’s just a clear distinction being made between sorcerers. I’m still having no success explaining. “Like reading a book” conveys very little, unicorns have no notion of personal property, there’s territory and authority and dominion but not much in the way of things, it’s your rock if you can kick any other unicorn who might want to say it’s theirs. Exchange of knowledge seems to be unheard of, you get given bits, you discover bits on your own, unicorns just aren’t a co-operative species.

  “Could you ask a tree for an account of its years?” It comes out worse than that, stilted, it’s hard to say ask in Unicorn, I’m not even sure I’m making the right whistle-tones.

  And “account” is wrong, no notion of formal reports or financial records. “Recount its years? Tell you the story of its experience of time?”

  “That tree?” with a head-flip. Unicorns point with their horns, I suppose there aren’t many options.

  That tree is the Independent Mulch, and I manage to explain that no, not that tree, not the general idea of a tree, some regular tree that has no especial characteristics, you just wish to understand its kind so you start with an example and reach back into the history you’ve got a specific expression of sitting there in front of you.