Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  Pelōŕios spins in a circle, blurringly rapid. I think it’s just frustration, Mulch really isn’t easy to understand. Politeness to venerable sorcerers isn’t any stranger to a unicorn than it is to anyone else.

  “The Commonweal suffers not the commutation of Power,” Mulch is saying. “Might, you may have, if be you in no wise mighty.”

  Unicorn faces don’t scrunch. You get a sort of reverse-dimness spiralling down the horn, instead. “These are mighty.”

  Something wry, in the whistle. “Among a mighty company.”

  Pelōŕios got quieter and quieter, once we started, well, trotting, mostly, back from the lower Third Valley, not the headlong rush to get there. Romp and Stomp had had a good rest, Pelōŕios’ recovery hadn’t been set back, but Grue and I didn’t want to run any more than we had to. Dove and Edgar and Constant flew, mostly soaring in great big looping spirals. I had to not borrow their view as much as I wanted, because I would have walked into, or off, entirely the wrong thing if I had, but the whole lower valley changed. Higher and steeper border-mountains, risen blocks of something grey and granitoid, a broad flat valley floor, and nothing like a single river. Braided channels, marshes, small lakes, chains of ponds, vast treeless damp areas, five different kinds of wet forest, at least two kinds of wet, annually flooded then emergent then dry, grassland, there’s a canal but it’s twistier than it was. More locks with less lift each, dikes, dams, little spillways as single fused slabs. Whoever did the surveying was early in their awareness that there wasn’t going to be much drainage of fields going on.

  No large dams, no immediate or obvious prospects of concentrated water power, but the agricultural potential is way up, even if the methods are mostly from books and people are struggling to domesticate wild plants. The people of the lower Third Valley suddenly were never hungry, never lacked a varied diet, have children who are a decimetre taller. They would forgive us nearly anything. The reports, we’re still getting copies, from all the settlements are astonished and effusive.

  Even the geologists are happy: the altered terrane is much more interesting.

  Mulch waited for me to come back out of my thoughts, which isn’t going to help with the perception of mightiness.

  “It doesn’t mean I get to tell anyone what to do. It specifically means I don’t.” The Ur-Law is about not being ruled by sorcerers, people care intensely about not being ruled by sorcerers. No sorcerous rule and no slaves, the founders started there and everything else is built on it. You won’t be voted a gean office if you work in a wreaking collective, and no gean anywhere is ever going to have more than three-twentieths of the adults engaged in any kind of wreaking trade. Different words, outside the Creeks, Ed says people usually said “crafter” or “focus-maker,” and that it was generally a tenth, but still. Another reason it’s a bit embarrassing to be using your talent as talent.

  Pelōŕios has a doubtful look. Mulch looks close to blank.

  “Ed wasn’t left in charge of people, Ed was in charge of any necessary amendments to the working.”

  There’s some dubious unicorn body language, because that was indeed people being deferentially polite to Ed, well, me, any of us conscious. “You’re responsible for your job, for doing it correctly and efficiently. Doesn’t matter if it’s mopping the floor or altering terrain. It should have been Blossom but Blossom was going to collapse, and then it should have been Crane but Crane wasn’t going to collapse only because Crane mostly can’t.”

  “Solely voluntary authority,” Mulch says, with the vowel sounds of the early Commonweal and enough bitterness to curl my tongue.

  “Within bounds.” I have no idea how to say this in Unicorn, there aren’t words to make the words from. “Authority must abide the Ur-law, so the law must abide the Ur-law and the exercise of authority must abide the law. Sorcerers … ”

  “Sorcerers are slaves,” Mulch says.

  That’s a most unpleasant arch in Pelōŕios’ neck.

  “Sorcerers are no more constrained than anyone else is.”

  Mulch, it isn’t quite glares, at me.

  “The Shape of Peace has everybody’s names, the real and true names of every Commonweal citizen. It matters more to sorcerers but it’s also a better defence than anything I’ve ever read about except being Halt.” Unless you are Halt, and I suppose probably Ed, knowing Halt’s true name destroys your mind. I don’t know if that’s factual, doing a controlled experiment has ethics problems, but everybody believed it as a certain fact in the Bad Old Days.

  “Day has dawned with no Halt above the whole width of earth,” Mulch says. “If the thing was done in slaughter of continents and agony of generations, yet was done.”

  Halt’s been bound under the earth at least twice, both times intended to be entirely permanent. No one ever said this is why Halt teaches most of our formal classes on making things stop being enchanted, but we’re all sure it’s relevant.

  Mulch sags a little. “Slaughter always comes.”

  Mulch sags a little more. “Flight might it then save some small few.”

  “Are you in the Second Commonweal because the Second Shape of Peace can move?” It’s a completely tactless thing to ask, even if Mulch has tossed tact out of the world today.

  Mulch looks at me directly, something Mulch doesn’t do. “For cause the First may not.”

  Mulch gesticulates, not wildly, and not anything to do with the Power. “Not so far nor so thorough a fleeing as need asks, but so far as I may go in bondage.”

  Pelōŕios is looking at me in a disturbed way.

  “When the Commonweal began, all the sorcerers whom Laurel overcame were given a choice to serve the Commonweal.” It’s more complicated than that and nobody wrote it down properly. Hardly anyone could have, there weren’t Clerks yet, all we’ve got are very terse notes taken about the votes in Parliament. Eyewitness memory doesn’t extend that much, all the surviving sorcerers only remember being asked what their choice was, they weren’t present for the deliberations.

  “Everybody we’ve still got chose a life with service and survived the judgement of the Shape of Peace. That’s become the definition of an Independent, but those first few weren’t Independents in the same sense as someone deciding to try to become an Independent today.”

  “Halt,” Pelōŕios says.

  I nod. “And Wake, and Mulch, and Ongen, and I don’t think anyone else in the Second Commonweal.”

  There are three or four partial whistles, attempts to say something when Pelōŕios hasn’t really any idea how to express the thought, whether for tact or words or issues with translation doesn’t show.

  “There’s a whole literature about what the Shape of Peace thought it was doing, if you can legitimately say the Shape thinks, it’s not a focus, everybody participates but it’s more of a mechanism for consensus than anything active.”

  “None but Ongen knew of focus-making,” Mulch says. “Few were there to weed. If a sorcerer could work, they might be let to live for the sake of the work.” Mulch looks indescribably sad. “And so slaves.”

  “Having to work isn’t slavery!” Really. Everyone works, if they possibly can. Half the problem with old people is getting them to not hurt themselves with keeping working past their strength. “Not even having to work at what you’re given, sorcerers don’t even get the owed time re-calculated based on expected lifespan.” Partially to avoid trying to calculate things based on specific human lifespans, there are four species that don’t senesce. Everybody owes a tenth of their time to the Commonweal.

  Though Halt and Wake and Blossom might as well have had their time recalculated. I’ve never been sure how voluntary that was, or how many ways there are to have a Shape of Peace that can move.

  “Seed must be scattered,” Mulch says. “Creatures must flee.”

  Who is forever victorious? Pelōŕios says, just to me.

  Chapter 23

  Grue

  There’s something wrong with Creeks, to ignore thi
s gathering. Someone’s mopping the other half of the refectory floor, and not trying to listen. Really not, not their job and not their concern.

  Crane’s coffee cup doesn’t tick on the saucer. Still haven’t figured that out. Not expected to until a hundred-fifty or so.

  “Do not think I regret my survival,” Crane says, Crane who only looks a little tired, “yet I wonder at your students’ estimation of risk as much as at their capability.”

  “Dove isn’t capable of abandoning people,” Spike says. “None of them are going to find ‘me or a fellow citizen?’ a question.”

  Crane nods once, slower than you’d think was a nod. Spike didn’t say “me or a hundred thousand,” didn’t remark on how near things came to that exchange.

  “I had a mannerly cataclysm explain what was either mathematical elegance or tactical savagery, after your students devised it under conditions of great risk and no warning.” Crane flips a small disk of dull light over and over across left-hand fingertips. “I find Kynefrid an excellent and rapidly advancing student.”

  “Power feeds on Power.” Halt approves, oh, how Halt approves.

  Crane looks at Spike. “You didn’t direct it.”

  Spike takes my hand. “I’m wretched at landscape. Constant’s never been material, Dove and Chloris are good, Edgar’s excellent, Zora’s off in the realm of legend. Zora says feed in complete trust that the Power will come, I’m going to answer. I’ve got a sister in there, I fit in there.” I don’t, which is why Spike took my hand.

  They’re great and glorious and I love them all, not quite as much as Spike.

  Still don’t want to die, splashed with glory or otherwise.

  “This isn’t about preserving Dove.” Crane doubts this only because Crane can’t see what else it could be about.

  “That’s why Blossom’s in on it.” I say it with a smile.

  “Plus distributing the horrified looks.” Spike’s only a little wry.

  “What are you really doing?” Crane says, looking Halt in the eye.

  “Besides knitting?”

  “Besides knitting.” Crane’s voice isn’t anything except calm. Spike’s snerking quietly anyway.

  “If it was a hive mind, they would serve the abstraction,” Halt says.

  Wake troubles to look more like a person, and less like an ancient calm god. “While I am not my colleague’s match as a mathematician,” Wake says, and none of us remark on how many other ways that’s true as a very simple diagram appears on the air. Just where Crane will see it best, and I don’t need to see it. “Our students have individual access to the whole of what they participate in. The collective arising from the working follows the focus construct pattern.”

  “Without an executive?”

  “In the fixed sense, as provided with focus enchantments?” Spike’s shaking her head. “Not only do they not have one, they can’t. It wouldn’t work. Actively and immediately voluntary or nothing.”

  Dove and Edgar decided that was how their consonance was going to work and meant it, when they’d known each other for five days. Meant it with so much raw talent that reality nodded nervously and said yes, of course, exactly that, of course, yes.

  Spike gets a much more wry look, and so do I. “They know who is good at what, very finely. They’re not deferential at all, ‘bicker like cousins’ doesn’t start to cover it.”

  They all regret Kynefrid’s departure. Kynefrid must have moments of regret. Spike can’t, Halt can’t, because Kynefrid is sensible and prudent and careful. The whole would have locked up, often, because the rest of them are stupid brave.

  “Do note,” Wake says, “that while I could not teach Zora any actual necromancy, Chloris could. There are other instances of similar communication.”

  “They borrow Edgar’s mind to do arithmetic calculation with,” Halt says. “Or one another’s for more complex mathematics.”

  “I find it difficult to view that as prudent,” Crane says.

  “Not much different from borrowing an alembic, only they’re all such reflexive glasswrights they’ll never need to,” I find myself saying. They commit art all over their lab glass, people can’t always bear to touch their kitchen glassware, no matter how durable they know it is. I’m not the only one found staring at Chloris’ glasswork, only some of it decorative, sometimes art isn’t enough of an explanation.

  It really isn’t much different.

  “Talent limits Power,” Halt says. “Even with excellent technique and narrowly wedged moments, disjunction and not extinction, that malice was dealt with once before.”

  We hardly know it was dealt with by excellent technique hangs there unspoken. We don’t, it’s not especially unlikely given how hard it would be to deal with at all but we really don’t know. Slit throats in the tens of thousands with the excellent technique, if you’re stuck with old-fashioned means.

  “So the necromancer and whatever Zora is aren’t limited to the usual upper limits of immaterial or non-destructive talents.” It’s not a question.

  Halt nods. “So we may have Kind Lake and half a valley made over, instead of an hundred thousand dead.”

  “So we may have the increase of choice,” Spike says quietly, and Halt nods, head dipping with every second echo of that quiet statement across the Power.

  “We might well have an hierarchy of sorcerers,” Crane says quietly. “It is a proverb that you do not know what to expect from a talent until they who bear it have survived to their hundredth year.”

  If the kids live, there will be worse worries than about Spike, and that solution won’t work again.

  “Sorcery is a long and weary way,” Halt says. “Increasingly solitary with skill. The children I hope to spare that, who are dear to one another.”

  “They trust each other beyond reason or question, recognize that’s actively insane, and are making relentless conscious efforts to be people for whom such trust is not insane.” I try, as best I can, to say this without judgement, as an observation only.

  It’s working. Somehow.

  “A laudable undertaking,” Wake says. “When we began this, I asked my colleague ‘What youngster would choose to be lonely?’” Wake shades back into imperturbable old god. “In full age and power, one might accept loneliness as a necessary cost, but it seemed unlikely to be a true choice if offered to the young.”

  “The alternative being to compel their loneliness, when it is not a necessary cost,” Halt says, with some emphasis on not.

  Crane nods, slowly. “Customary beyond thought.”

  “As customary as our pliability checks,” Spike says, a little rueful. It was, for awhile, a lot distressed.

  They’d been truly thorough, the kind of thorough that makes some clerk ask if the cost of the thing accomplished need be so great. The checks are meant for superficial geography, not fundamental geology. The formalisms suppose nobody ever changes the fundamental geology because nobody can, not without some vast atrocity of rent hearts or slit throats.

  Crane pauses completely, then says “Yes. A more comprehensive demonstration that customary and successful are not synonyms could not be asked.”

  Crane takes a careful swallow of coffee. “Yet we may still have an hierarchy of sorcerers.”

  “More formally than aforetime?” Spike sounds almost as sad as she really is. “Everyone knew about the Twelve, about the battalion list.”

  “The Twelve were given tasks when there was no other way.” Wake ought to know. “The present change of custom is less concerned with ‘no other way’.”

  Crane looks up, face still and terrible. “Was there another way to rescue the Third Valley?”

  “No more than there was for the Old Lake Canal,” Halt says, voice placid. “Yet the children have been occupied with many things.”

  Smaller things than lives.

  “So there will be others.” Crane will have no opinion about that, not yet.

  “Perhaps” Halt says. “We do not yet know if these will succe
ed.”

  “The Third Valley expects an extensive food surplus,” Spike says, quietly.

  Not something that necessarily matters, or means good things, when the Shape of Peace judges you.

  When the end of the world loves you so much.

  Chapter 24

  Zora

  A few days later I get to talk to Pelōŕios about food the way I wanted to, after a detour through what being an Independent means now.

  The idea that anybody can change themselves that much startles Pelōŕios, unicorns aren’t, at least in their own traditions and expectations, mutable. The idea that it’s possible to stop being constrained to be a predator, that drawing sustenance directly from the Power is far from unknown and a practical possibility, is almost visibly rejected as something Pelōŕios believes. The idea that there’s no reason not to be a better unicorn doesn’t get mentioned yet. Whatever Mulch thinks of the Commonweal, they did give me what Unicorn Four physiology was modelled on, I can’t so much as advocate for mind alteration, even if Pelōŕios were to do it all themselves, but I don’t think that’s important, either. Pelōŕios isn’t having difficulty with the Peace as behaviour. Comprehending the idea of the Peace might not ever happen, but staying inside the Peace in actions isn’t looking like any sort of challenge. Several small children and a few large infants have tried to feed Pelōŕios flowers and the unicorn was more patient with them than I would really have wanted to be. Especially after the first time, it’s turning into something that’s half a dare.

  Harmless dare, Pelōŕios says. Having to show you’re brave, Pelōŕios understands. Being grounds for being considered brave is good, too, especially when it’s bravery to approach with a hopefully tasty flower.

  Was tried with daisies but the once Pelōŕios says. I think that might even be a smile.

  Everyone’s looking recovered, I don’t know about Crane but Blossom’s properly vivid and Chloris is properly spectral again.