Safely You Deliver
Page 13
Properly spectral. When it took me a year to stop shuddering.
Still true now.
Much altered your standards of caution, Pelōŕios says, and that almost sounds concerned.
Falling into regular days, I say, and then have to explain; people, it’s nearly a constant across people, you can’t create an increase in capability from yourself without serious intent and planning and maybe not then, the history of success isn’t very good. And this is thinking, and thinking’s much harder than producing a species of people who can eat anything or who don’t age in the regular way. It’s habitual to confuse what you’re used to with what’s possible, and to give that a name.
That gets me the thought of a slow nod. An experience Pelōŕios is having, terrible sorcerers and being offered flowers both.
Thou hast bid different mountains come to dance Pelōŕios says, then seems abashed.
I really did, I manage to say without any of the qualifiers about just setting parameters. I wouldn’t dare try that kind of disclaimer on Grue, I shouldn’t try it on myself.
Someone on a barge waves at us. I wave back. I can never bring myself to do arthropod wing illusions when I’m a unicorn, so these are really big swallow wings and solid enough there’s a hiss of air around the wingtips.
Got really stuck on being the weakest, didn’t I? is about all I manage to think, then we’re at Blue Creek and it’s time to turn around. Which we’ve started doing by going over Lighthouse Hill, the canal and river faces of which are near enough vertical. Pelōŕios didn’t think that was a reason not to, the cloven hooves have a lot of grip strength between the individual toes, and I didn’t have too much trouble learning how. Someone in the lighthouse looks at a watch as we scramble past and tips the hat they’re not wearing, our time’s been improving. Pelōŕios has learned enough about Commonweal manners to do fluttery acknowledging aurora lights back, and so there’s a mix of mauve and white. Everyone tells me Pelōŕios’ lights look eerily similar to Blossom’s, which I suppose they would if you can’t see how dense they aren’t. Entirely respectable, you couldn’t sensibly say weak, but, yeah. Not as strong as me. Nothing like the Goddess of Destruction, but I can tell how dense Blossom’s light-leaks are, in the Power. Most just see the photons. There are a bunch of dead Reems sorcerers who might have just been seeing the photons.
Needst thou not have known your mightiness by count of inches, Pelōŕios says. I come to know that for truth, and not some claim of fierce seeming.
As art thou, grown mighty again. Unicorn diction is tricky, but I’m getting better. Wherefore shouldst thou cease in gain of strength?
Chapter 25
Zora
This isn’t the sort of thing anyone ever does, it’s somewhere beyond rash.
People who get caught up with the weed stay there, you don’t dare open the earth or sift the ashes, weeds don’t care about being dead reliably enough. Some of them are just patterns, those can catch on anyone with a little Power, which is almost everyone. You put a memorial on the cemetery wall, you write the weed-marker numbers on that, it’s not the best thing but there isn’t anything else to do.
Dove spent all of the last month, since we came back from the Third Valley, getting quieter and quieter and then looked up at breakfast today and said “I need to know,” to Halt.
Halt nodded, finished the row, and said “No time like the present.”
So here we are, halfway to Headwaters, east of the West Wetcreek, and I can’t remember Dove’s cousins’ names. They were calm about having Halt show up.
Halt, and Dove with that expression, and Ed being worried, which means you feel like every kind of doom is standing behind you contemplating which sauce to pour over your head. Plus Chloris looking spectral in full daylight to hold hands with Constant, and me, just looking uncomfortable, and a unicorn, looking, if you know what to look for, worried.
You can tell where the weed was. Five hectares of currant bushes shaded by hazelnuts on a shallow north-facing slope, except for the neatly square patch. That’s almost all leadwort, a precise square eighth-hectare. The weed stakes are two layers, outer corners of the leadwort and eight on the major compass points round the mound. Nothing on the mound itself, that’s, yeah, that’s pottery, be centuries before it breaks enough for anything to root on it. Too slick for moss, if it was supposed to be pottery Wake would say it had been over-fired.
The borders of the leadwort are edged, the tiles are on edge and go down half a metre. Won’t stop much, weeds go deep, but it does keep the border from creeping out or in over time. Some weeds are sneaky like that, they’ll emulate the local ground cover to spread.
Thirty-five metres on a side’s more than strictly required for kid-thorn, all the manuals say ten metres is as far as it’s ever reached. Doubt anyone wanted to argue for the minimum area.
Needed to do some digging, Dove says.
Halt makes a quiet commiserative noise, then Chloris and Edgar do something impossible.
Which isn’t factual, if you observe it, it isn’t impossible. Only you might be deluded. Or panicking, or, and I sort of stop, because Constant has been reassuring at me.
Dove’s family, that part of Dove’s family, have been dead seven years and more. You get shades longer than that, for howe-laid dead, when there was some other kind of operant intent, when there’s a great and manifest ability with the Power involved. There’s a sense in which Wake’s been dead for a thousand years.
Infant children, dead abruptly from something that materially eats your brain, shouldn’t leave any shade at all. Dion, Dove’s brothers, maybe, for a little while, a décade, not a season.
Yet here they all are.
There’s a period of emotional chaos.
Dove, somehow, isn’t crying. I am, Chloris is, I have no idea what could make Halt cry. Pelōŕios is standing right behind me and much more glowy than usual. Ed isn’t crying, Ed looks like someone carved murder out of darkness because Dove is upset.
Dion’s shade reaches out and clasps forearms with Ed. Neither of them says anything but the dead Dion visibly and obviously approves.
Approval startles Edgar.
None of the children knew they were dead, knew anything more than a brief fear and worry. “You were very brave,” Dove says to Lark’s shade, as solemn and as serious as any mother ever was. Lark nods, reassured.
“Ran toward trouble,” Dion says. Looks around. “More trouble than I thought.”
“Had to try,” one of the brothers says, with a little bit of a shrug.
Dove actually smiles, it’s not a grimace, it’s a real fond smile.
Dove hugs all of them, carefully tosses each of the twins lightly in the air to spectral shrieks and shining smiles, listens to Lark’s “Love you, Mama,” with somehow only the feeling proper to the live child, and a “Love you too, brave child.”
Dove’s brothers look at Ed, and then Chloris, nod a little with understanding, say “Try to take care of,” and head-tip at their sister.
Death, face streaming with tears, inhales, says “Everyone asks us to do that.”
“It’s not easy.” Both brothers say that together.
“We’ll do our best,” Ed says, voice soft and light, and the Power has gone full of a willingness to do whatever thing might be required to keep Dove safe.
Cities, armies, empires, species upon species of people, the sterilization of continents, there isn’t any end or ethics to it whatsoever.
The brothers have tipped their heads, judicious, and Dion is nodding. “You’ve got a chance.”
Lark looks at Chloris, nods. Then Lark’s face sets with determination before Lark steps forward, reaches up, and takes Ed’s hand. “Do you love Mama?”
Ed squats down to be able to look Lark in the eye. “I love your Mama very much. As much as darkness loves the dawn.”
Lark clearly has no idea how much that is, and looks a little doubtful, and looks at Dove, who nods. “Nearly as much as I love you,
wise child.”
“All of you,” Dove says, and hugs them all again, and steps back, and says, “Let’s get you some better rest.”
The shades fade, one by one, as the bodies rise from the open mound still wrapped in dirt.
Not seeing the mummified bodies with eyes doesn’t help as much as I wish it would. I entirely don’t understand what Constant does to the ceramic, but everybody goes into a proper coffin, it’s the same ceramic, it’s just changed arrangement, it doesn’t feel any newer.
Lark says, the small whisper of a small ghost, “I’m sorry Mama,” turning back from the coffin, and Dove steps forward until Dove’s forehead rests on risen Lark’s. “You did the brave thing. Sometimes the brave thing isn’t enough.” Dove takes a breath, and it feels as though the sun has risen again, that all the hope in the whole world is right here, whole and entire.
It shines through Halt, and is still hope.
“No one can always be sure if the brave thing is going to work or not. You weren’t wrong to be brave.”
Lark’s believing “Yes, Mama,” is a smaller whisper, the small ghost fading into the small coffin, but I hear it.
Dove’s holding on to Ed hard enough that most anyone else would be dead in several separate pieces.
Chloris is holding on to Constant and sobbing. Constant isn’t solid, but Chloris isn’t solid right now either.
All seven coffins are still just floating there, because Halt, some tiny thread of Halt’s attention, wills that they should.
I could be sobbing, but I am more tired of feeling useless than I am sad. There’s a unicorn worried enough that I can feel their nervous breath across the side of my neck as much as the back.
The rest of the mound, there really isn’t anything structured in there, it’s mineral powder, inert, the coffins have real bodies but nothing else, this was rash but they’ll be safe enough in a graveyard, safe even if the coffins decay, which they’re going to, now. Constant didn’t include the over-fired outer bit, water’s going to get in.
The mound itself, metaphysically, some tide of wrath sloshed through it more than once, that has to have been Ed and I’m not going to think about how I could possibly have missed it. I suppose all the Dove’s-upset had to go somewhere.
I’m not completely sure the Power can work in there. I think it should, I can’t see how it wouldn’t, but the sorcery rules I think I know seem to have been suspended today.
It does. Or mine does, the working link full of grief is still our working link, the obliteration in there recognizes my right to alter the mute substance of the dead world. Halt moves the coffins out of the way for me.
Eighth of a hectare out of five, two and a half percent, I can borrow soil organics, bacteria, the necessary chemical balances, from the rest of the field without hurting anything, everything will fill back in. I have a mind full of plants, I can leave the mound edges level and put in a raised bed and seven roses, I mostly just now made the roses up, they’re roses, nice robust climbing roses. Next year, when they’re established, they’re going to bloom like sunrise.
Then there’s a pause, and Halt nods approval before making an emphatic formal motion. Any formal magical motion from Halt’s unnerving, ones involving Halt’s cane doubly so. This time there’s a heptagonal trellis there, seven half-arches and an open circle peak. It all gleams with the black of weathered bronze, which it most certainly is not.
It’s the same aesthetic as many of Halt’s tea cups, it’s got ornate fine decoration ornamenting elegant basic shapes.
After a while, the sobbing’s stopped and the grief’s ebbed a bit. Dove looks at the roses, at me, at the trellis, and at Halt, and says “Thank you,” in an emphatic polite way and starts walking.
We all do, I even know where we’re going because the link’s full of directions and memories about where the cemetery with the memorial markers is, someone may ask Halt if this is safe but I don’t think they’re going to argue.
Still don’t have any idea how Ed and Chloris did that, or how it could be possible at all.
“Necromancy may combine,” Halt says, in such placid tones that I find myself thinking totally implausible things about Halt and Wake’s interaction.
Gets me a look over the glasses and a quelling “Not a social primate,” that no-one else seems to understand.
Chapter 26
Zora
It looks to all the world as though I am by myself, walking into Westcreek Town on two feet. Think “by myself” and with the thought I know what Dove and Edgar and Chloris and Constant are doing. Some small difference of emphasis tells me what Blossom and Grue are doing.
We’re all very tactful about it, Blossom and Grue are exemplary about it, really, it’s so easy to forget they’re almost ninety. I’m sixty-seven years younger than either of them, I hope it’s not like having your eight year old cousin inescapably stuck in your head but I’ll never really know. Won’t really remember no link by then, it’s not very likely the next bunch will wind up connected to us, Dove and Blossom’s degree of connection surprised Halt, most other people try not to believe it.
I have a lot of trouble remembering no link now.
Don’t want to remember not having the link, from here in the better world.
I have a lovely family, I miss them, I miss Mikka, I’m sure they love me and that I love them.
Love is not the same thing as being useful, as knowing what kinds of things there are to do.
It’s entirely not the same as not being angry all the time because my talent wants out of my head and I don’t even really know I’ve got any. Spontaneous awareness of the Power, very common, but not in the Commonweal, because if you grow up in the Commonweal no one tries to kill you, no one beats you to make you obey, you don’t, on the odds of the thing, run into any weeds unless you’re adult and trained.
Pelōŕios, in the grip of unicorn social norms, is talking to Ed. Pelōŕios can believe Ed doesn’t have an excessively cheerful view of the Commonweal, can believe that having a frank discussion with Ed is survivable, and can’t believe that I don’t have that excessively cheerful view.
Pelōŕios doesn’t notice my particular teacher being, well, pained, I think, that I can, in defiance of five hundred years of tradition and a great many long standing policies, produce reproducing species without any more concern than a request that I file the proper forms with the Food-gesith and Galdor-gesith’s clerks. There wasn’t even a hearing, it’s purely some sort of terrifying clerkly consensus that I’m responsible.
Grue isn’t allowed to make anything actually alive, not for a hundred years. There’s not quite fifty of those hundred left.
It has something to do with bees. We’re not allowed to know unless and until we’re Independents, and I haven’t asked, and Grue tries hard not to be angry with me. Grue’s very angry with the Commonweal, or the Galdor-gesith, or someone, about that, still.
It makes me feel odd, dropping off the forms for the roses, sunrise-roses, a committee provides the formal designation, on my way over to the hospital. There are people growing strawberries in their garden plots in Westcreek Town, strawberries were the first thing, Halt saying in the refectory that I had improved them, the clerks concluded that I’d made what Halt gave me, a memory and a model, taste better, be more nutritious, much more hardy, more productive, and easier to grow and pick. Then there was a general consensus that I just wasn’t going to produce anything inimical. I have to stick to macroscopic life, but that’s true of everyone. Anything microscopic takes a long time to get approved, and it’s really rare as an occurrence.
I could have said it was just six species, seven with the roses, without the lower Third Valley. That’s going to take years and years to catalog, and other people are going to do it, and, well. Not all of that’s macroscopic, so I’m going to go on thinking of it as borrowed probability, and never mind the things in it that couldn’t have come from anywhere else but our minds and memories, my mind and desire.
Wash, change clothes, scrub, meet the first patient.
“Are you willing to have a student examine you?” Grue’s good at making that sound like a real question. It is, it has to be, but people in pain may not remember.
There’s a “yes.” There isn’t much of a pause in front of it. Middle-aged weeding-team members aren’t known for dithering.
Check everything. There’s an obvious bump on the back of the neck. Nothing else.
Well, the ward on this particular gown registers as a decidedly annoying buzzing, like having a fly actually in your ear, and especially with that bump it’s distracting. If I have my senses open, no, no, it has nothing to do with life, I can jiggle things around. There. No more buzzing.
Not larval anything, not fungal, oh, there’s a little bit of something in there, tiny bit of thorn-tip, from the angle it walked itself in. So many kinds of inimical thorns the thorns that are just pointy get viewed as cases of not knowing about the inimical effect.
“You’ve got a bit of thorn under the skin. You’re hale enough to fight it to a draw.”
“Stitches?” It’s not a happy question. Stitches mean several décades of not being able to weed, you can’t weed with an incision that isn’t completely healed. It’s not smart to weed with any skin break at all, but it happens, scratches, blisters, raw patches where the protective gear wears roughly or you’ve just sweated too much because you’ve been working sixteen hours straight. Most people on a weeding team douse themselves with alcohol twice a day when they’re working, curling up into a barrel full’s common. You just can’t with an incision fully through your skin, better than even odds you’ll be a major casualty. Pollen gets everywhere, weeds with powder surfaces, the fungus you weren’t worried about because you didn’t know it was there.