Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  So we put the question Blossom says.

  Chapter 17

  Zora

  The language of the question took Chloris and Constant and Crane and the lead engineers for the canal and the dam and Folded Hills trouble team close to four hours to work out; we don’t have a clerk here and formally dispassionate language isn’t easy to do. There are clerks and probably Clerks where the message is going, so we have to get it right if we don’t want to waste time on a re-write.

  In the four days it takes to get an answer back, we drain the reservoir again; we run about doing surveys, especially up on to the problematic flat bits, which may just be going away. I feel badly about that, there’s an ecology there, a sparse dry one because the rain drains rapidly down steep stream channels as soon as it falls and there isn’t much soil anywhere. There’s some decidedly scary stuff in the stream valleys, weeds established to the point the streams are completely clogged. Up the slopes starts to have trees, sheep, elk, and the inevitable cruncher.

  Angren’s secondary talent is namer, but secondary or not, they’re good at it. It’s a real help, even after they have to take an hour to compose themselves after a cruncher decided we looked tasty. Whatever negotiation goes on between the rest of us said it was Dove’s turn, and there wasn’t even ash. I think the slow puff of warm air bothered Angren much more than the simple fact of a cruncher. It made Pelōŕios look comically startled, horn bright and a ward rising around all of us and then no cruncher at all. Nobody laughed; Dove said formal thanks, and there wasn’t even much pause before Pelōŕios accepted the thanks with good grace.

  We come back with firm names for the specific crustal blocks that broke or stuck and didn’t tip into a valley shape, something very difficult to do without going out and walking on them. No one gets hurt or sick, there are fewer weeds than before we went there, Kynefrid gets to prove learning by bridging several streams. Charm-working does suit Kynefrid, it seems oddly constrained but I suppose it’s also predictable.

  Reliable doesn’t seem to come into it, we’re reliable, charms are reliable. Kynefrid sort of smiles, it’s not entirely a happy expression, and says “There are lots of ways to be a sorcerer.”

  There needs must be.

  The people of the Third Valley say yes, quite clearly; risk is worth taking to have the problem solved in a lasting way, and fast. Fast means fewer people subsisting on buckwheat this winter.

  Ed had made buckwheat crepes for breakfast this morning, with dried apple slices soaked overnight with whisky in the water and then fried with the bacon. They were good, and everyone had said so. I mean, in part we cheat, if you want the eggs and currant juice evenly mixed, they are, and Ed didn’t pour any of that whiskey from a bottle, it’s not fair to compare to the results of cooking with a spoon any more than it’s fair to compare Halt’s pastries to someone’s where they have to cut in the butter. Buckwheat crepes for breakfast was notably good by our standards, and that means it takes close to an hour to explain to Pelōŕios why people would be upset about having to eat more buckwheat.

  Why the engineers, breakfasting on leftovers, alleged cheese, and hardtack might look envious Pelōŕios entirely understands. That there are risks to student cooking, student sorcerer cooking, and a custom against offering it to others, Pelōŕios entirely understands that, too. That we are considered students Pelōŕios accepts, doubtfully, as a thing of ritual. The buckwheat is more difficult.

  I can point out that the idea of civilization is to have more choices for everybody, that knowing you don’t have a choice about what there is to eat is better than starving, but not a lot. I manage to hear myself, too, and Pelōŕios’ great strange head ducks a little, acknowledging that I did hear what I said.

  Angren points out that buckwheat is what you plant out of fear, that it’s the crop that might work when the crop you wanted has failed with summer. Everybody makes sure some gets planted every year, in case the seed is needed. If it isn’t, well, buckwheat crepes. Or noodles, I rather like the noodles, it’s something to do when you’ve got ridiculous much broth because there was a big roast the previous night.

  Kynefrid points out that the remark about buckwheat is an indirect acknowledgement that people will starve, there are no food reserves available, the settlement of the Folded Hills has almost succeeded. Only almost, or maybe not yet. And either way there’s not much left the Commonweal can do, the strength and treasure have been spent.

  “Strive mightily, that there be diversity of victuals?” It’s still got some odd whistles in it, but clear enough. Ears can understand it.

  “If the diet’s not there, other striving won’t succeed.” Crane says this abstractly. We’ve brought the end of our explanations and ourselves into an open-sided pavilion-thing, obviously illusory and obviously Grue’s work, Blossom doesn’t make anything look like masonry, even if you can’t just tell.

  Thought I suppose there might not be anyone but us and Halt who can just tell and trust it.

  Blossom looks up.

  “It all has names,” Dove says, head tipping at Angren. “Zora’s abstracted the biome, and Ed had a long chat with the darkness under the earth.”

  A literal chat, the darkness answers back in a slow cultured voice. Kynefrid had to stuff their head in an illusion of silence to muffle their chortling.

  Blossom nods.

  “This is altered terrain, but it’s been a long time. It isn’t likely to become an unstructured nightmare if you alter it again.” Abstract Blossom voice.

  We nod back. We didn’t think so, but that’s the sort of question where experience really matters.

  Blossom wants us to pay attention to a big swathe of illusory construct on the second table, and we do, folding entirely together.

  “Not why I left,” Kynefrid says to Angren, whose eyes got wide. It’s quiet, but audible, has to be intentional. “Nearly why I stayed.”

  There are three problems. Firstly, the smaller, the safer, for any change made to the landscape, but the problem is wanting to make a lot of rock go away. Making this section of the lower valley discontinuous with the valley below it “seems unwise,” Blossom says. We have to handle the degree of change downstream, where erosion products wind up. Secondly, proper anchoring of the established settlements can’t be naive; nobody wants their newly built, still building, village or thorpe left on a narrow pillar of sandstone tens of metres above the altered level of the earth. Which means the name-anchors have to be complex, which means Crane ought to make them, which means in turn we need proper metal wire in quantity, gold is best, copper will do, niobium is better than copper but less available. Thirdly, there needs to be a canal, and the canal needs to work this year, and in future years with both much more and much less precipitation. Working this year means worrying about isostatic rebound, we’re not able to reach to the core of the earth, we’re planning to change the mass of overlying rock. The ground won’t be stable right away.

  You must have stable ground for a dam, for locks, for the whole machinery of a canal.

  “One thing at a time,” Blossom says. “Gold or niobium.”

  All of us make an unnecessary grab for our ears, even Ed, for the warning. The engineers, hands over ears with caution are wondering if it’s necessary to cover their ears when we say WHERE, it’s Ed’s voice but all of us pushing.

  It’s a lot more complicated than one word ought to be, too. No language ought to have subsidiary, secondary, and implicit grammars to go along with the ostensible and actual and asserted grammars, but that language does.

  Four glittering black pins in the big map, and the still voice of Death warning not to touch them.

  “Why not?” A geologist, hand-lens out and stopped in the bending motion that would get eye and lens close to the pins.

  “The starving darkness would consume you,” Ed says, quite apologetic. “The other things would make it hurt.”

  “Hurt more,” Dove says, as a helpful annotation.

  The geologist
straightens up, looks at the map around the pins, points with a ruler. “That one isn’t a kilometre away.”

  Forty metres down Ed says, fingers on the pin. No problematic overburden.

  Half a tonne of molten gold makes a sphere barely four decimetres across.

  It shines warm, bobbing along behind Dove, and the warmth slowly starts to wear away at the irritation of the four engineers who came along. I don’t know if the efficacy of the search technique or the forty-metre-tall cylinder of overburden rising silent out of the earth, or both, is the problem.

  Going back, Chloris says. We’ve all got the angle of distance thing figured out, you can make the overburden smaller than the hole it came out of until you’re done putting it back.

  Blossom nods at us, rummages in their cruncher-hide case, tosses Dove a five kilo slug of titanium, and looks at Crane. Crane says “Eight-tenths of a millimetre round wire, please,” and that’s what we make. A percent of titanium in gold is a better hardener than the traditional nine percent copper, if you use a hard vacuum while you melt it in.

  I do the illusions for the wire dies and the drawing reel. Half a tonne is more than fifty kilometres of fine wire, it winds up as fifty-two neat one-kilometre spools and a loose coil of leftovers.

  Crane wiggles an end of the loose coil and compliments us on our annealing.

  The rest of the day has Kynefrid and Angren making patterns, you need a written name, and those can be subsumed. Dove gets this expression and sort of floats the glowing lines of a structure from Constant into the material world. Crane looks at it, nods, and says “That will do splendidly.” So Dove and Ed and Constant start mining sediment for aluminium, they’re going to be turning Kynefrid’s and Angren’s expressions of names into sapphire beads.

  I get to have a long indirect talk with Pelōŕios about carrying things, and how much running seems practical. The individual name-anchors, as constructs, aren’t very big, and it’s better that whatever happens to things that go with Blossom when Blossom vanishes and winds up somewhere else doesn’t happen to them, Crane was emphatic about that. Floating them along beside me with the Power isn’t as dire, but it risks contamination from my name, I’d be applying a working to some of the name-anchors all day.

  So I get to practice turning into bipedal me without losing track of the panniers, let’s say, can’t be saddlebags, no saddle and the wrong spot. Pelōŕios visibly struggles with the whole question, and then decides this is obviously important, and that it’s a real question. A chance to guard consequential things is apparently worth something, and Grue makes Pelōŕios some panniers, too.

  Chloris carefully asks everyone if they’re willing to accept the risks inherent in student cooking, and then makes dinner.

  Fresh hot white wheat bread, duck breast with honey-herb glaze, blanched new peas, and potatoes whipped with horseradish. Chloris just barely made enough, I don’t think the table candles or the algae-into-napkins hurt, it feels that much more securely civilized and people bother to chew.

  There’s lemon sorbet for nibbles. Five or six people cry. Everyone gets reverent and takes small spoonfuls, even Dove and Blossom.

  Pelōŕios whistles “Tomorrow?” very quietly.

  “Day after,” I whistle back. Tomorrow is Dove’s turn, if everybody’s still feeling brave.

  Chapter 18

  Zora

  It doesn’t look like Crane is moving quickly, but the name-anchors are all done by the end of the day after. Kynefrid and Angren and Chloris stayed up all night making patterns. All today, the Dove-Edgar-Constant consonance wasn’t socially there, making beads fast enough to keep up with Crane. Chloris and I have a moment of being impressed at each other, and then I have to try to get Pelōŕios to stop fussing. Watching that consonance from the outside is something like watching the Captain pick hornets out of the air, what you’re seeing is benevolent and useful but then you think about how they can do it at all.

  Five seasons ago, it was Ed’s turn when a cruncher got ambitious and Ed neatly decapitated it, on the theory there’s worthwhile leather in cruncher-hide.

  I can’t forget things anymore, that’s a huge part of what the metaphysical brain is for, but there are things I try not to remember. Halt in a butcher’s apron teaching us how to take a cruncher apart for cooking is one of them. Halt being gleeful is unsettling, Halt being gleeful while covered in blood is like having a discrete mass of unsettling that follows you around for days after.

  It was lean late-winter cruncher, which you ought to cook slowly. We cooked that one in a huge clay oven with hectolitres of a heavy red wine Halt passed us the pattern for, and an eclectic mix of spices, cinnamon and tarragon and thyme and something Halt claims was mint. It took two days, even when it’s lean an adult cruncher starts somewhere above four tonnes, there was a couple tonnes of meat to cook.

  It was glorious.

  That’s what Dove serves for dinner, piping hot in big earthenware crocks. Barley flatbread, olives, Dove got olives at the Line School and enjoys them, I’m getting used to them, a cold vinegared salad of shredded root vegetables, and beer.

  The beer had no material model, it’s made out of Dove’s liking for beer. Pelōŕios asks for a bucket in a hopeful voice, and lies on the floor, front legs on either side of the bucket, and sips a half-litre at a time. Unicorns have no facial expressions, less than horses do, but something looks beatific, I think it’s around the eyes.

  A few of the engineers start to speculate that the dam actually did fail, and this is the afterlife.

  Blossom looks up and says “I wouldn’t dare work you as hard as the dead,” before Dove reaches over and squeezes Blossom’s shoulder. Grue gets there four steps later.

  What we’re planning isn’t free from risk, isn’t close to being free from risk, altering an inhabited landscape’s accumulation of events was something used in war in the Bad Old Days because the expected outcome, the most probable outcome, is dreadfully bad. If anyone, engineer or otherwise, had an even slightly better idea this wouldn’t ever be considered. And Blossom can’t do it, Blossom’s terrain alterations go metallic. If we flub this, a hundred thousand people could just go away. They wouldn’t even be dead, they’d be obliterated in a smear of unrealized probability, nothing to bury, maybe no memory that they ever existed anywhere but in us, maybe retroactively lost and eaten years ago by the hell-things from over the Dread River.

  “We asked first” wouldn’t be much of an explanation in those circumstances.

  No-one is the least bit unhappy getting their settlement’s name tokens, sometimes it’s a group of five people, township or town office-holders and a judge, because the flood warning has everybody else uphill somewhere. Sometimes it’s practically everybody who saw the unicorns run up. I trot the last thirty metres with Pelōŕios, shift back to human person, go through the placename check three careful times, hand over the token, answer any questions about how you place tokens, which are rare, the ritual for this is easy and in the Whole Book, it’s pure intention, you don’t need any talent at all, excuse ourselves as there’s the next settlement to get to, and off we go again.

  Token delivery makes a long day, and I have to swap cooking dinner with Ed. There was a discussion about Ed cooking during breakfast, Grue’s been doing breakfasts for everyone then spending the days checking Blossom’s math, and it comes down to an opinion that after the last two nights, social embarrassment would have to be nigh-lethal if what Ed comes up with isn’t food. It might be memorable food, no one expected to have their hearts broken with sorbet or to drink the idea of beer, but it’s going to be food.

  With utter predictability after that discussion, dinner is a whole coelacanth, two-and-a-half metres long, stuffed with bacon and onions and fresh fennel and baked. The salad is seaweed, real, salt-sea seaweed, out of the parts of the Book of Halt none of the rest of us can read, and the starch is roast sticks. Sticks you split for the pith, which is tasty and substantial, but everyone’s surprised. No-one k
nows what the sticks are called, Wake got the pattern on an island in the Equatorial Ocean but didn’t get a name.

  It’s good, but I could wish no one had expressed their expectation of strangeness.

  Venison with currant sauce next time Ed says, smiling. I’ll admit, I like coelacanth least out of us. The leggy fins always make it look like it’s going to wiggle, and for taste I’d rather swamp squid, or the huge benthic arthropods that are also from the Book of Halt, but those would be too strange, no matter how delicious. Grue went through the hereditary differences that make squid taste so good to me and so awful to Chloris, it was one of the first specific heredity things we did, early in our second year as students.

  Chloris and I aren’t close enough to use each other’s tastebuds. I’m fairly sure Constant’s borrowed Chloris’ a few times. That Dove and Ed don’t see anything strange about borrowing each other’s sense of taste and switch between one bite and the next is one of the things I strive diligently not to think about at all.

  The day after, I haven’t got anything to do but worry and cook. Crane and Blossom are making entirely sure the pattern’s there for the entire landscape and the geology it arises from, the whole Third Valley south of the road. It’s hard not to compare the process to tuning a piano, experts and tiny changes and judgment.

  Grue collects Pelōŕios and I to run up to the high road; nothing’s been moving on the canal, and Grue can bring the whole great stack of mailbags up. Not going to bring anything back until after the ritual, but everybody’s letters can leave. Pelōŕios carefully keeps on the side of me Grue isn’t on, but doesn’t otherwise comment.

  Dinner is lamb and new potatoes and asparagus, and the nibble is apple pastries, extremely simple unspiced ones sweetened with plain sugar. The one unusual thing is the strawberry wine. I still have trouble with cider, we’ve been given some spectacular strong ciders from the folks up in Morning Vale, and those creep into my attempts at table cider.