Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  The rest of us all like history more than me, the collective library’s not lacking. Burying Pelōŕios in details won’t help anything.

  Mulch is old, very old, no one has any idea how old, including Mulch. Many thousands of years. Mulch hasn’t lived most of those years, precisely, people get strange when you withdraw into silent shapes for centuries. When the Commonweal came into being, there were a number of sorcerers who had been overcome by Laurel.

  I wonder how to explain, and Pelōŕios says Have heard tales of Laurel’s name.

  The Wizard Laurel, who decided conquest wasn’t going to result in peace and quiet, and went away when mostly finished taking over the middle half of a continent.

  The Commonweal as it was came from, well, the middle of the middle.

  Two whole generations of fighting. The beginnings of the Line. The creation of the Shape of Peace, which has to be one of the greatest acts of optimism in the history of the world.

  Society has to work, it has to feed people, it has to keep them reasonably healthy, it has to keep functioning over time and in emergencies.

  Pelōŕios is looking up at me, and being, well, not nervous, precisely. Listening carefully.

  The bad old days worked. People had kids, it kept going. It was generally horrible, but it was a society, it existed to make whatever sorcerer was in charge of it happy. The people who founded the Commonweal were determined not to have that society, they needed something else that would work, and they knew they didn’t know how. All they knew is that no one was going to have any inherent authority, something stronger than no slaves, and sorcerers weren’t going to be in charge of anything.

  To have done with the rule of magic Pelōŕios says, and I smile.

  The Shape of Peace is magic, it’s our font of authority. It’s sorcerers who may not rule.

  Bafflement. I suppose it’s stranger than it seems to someone who grew up with it.

  Everyone Laurel had overcome, they were given a choice to serve the Commonweal, as people, to be something other than important, if they could in truth abide the Peace. If they refused, or if they couldn’t, if the knowledge of their name said they lied or dissembled, they were killed.

  Everyone who wouldn’t agree to not being special or important, no more important than anyone else, and not less, either, tended to be killed, sorcerers or not. It was a bloody time.

  We used to call the militant surviving sorcerers the Twelve.

  Images of Halt and Wake, rather fearsome ones, drift across my awareness, and I nod.

  Mulch isn’t militant. Mulch agreed, I think and it’s very much only just barely think, because it was a rising empire, it would have looked like that to someone from the Bad Old Days, and I don’t think Mulch thought it would last.

  Rising powers typically don’t, a century up, two centuries down, is the usual rule.

  Not always.

  I could read those parts of the Book of Halt, some of those parts. I could look up “imperial archeology” in the library. There are things I don’t benefit from knowing.

  Half a thousand, and yet ye will not fall Pelōŕios says.

  I nod, quietly. I think Mulch thought to be free, that a pretense would serve for a time and then the Shape would be destroyed and Mulch could go back to … a habit of hiding.

  Can be wise and skilled and mad, Pelōŕios says, and yet still a slave.

  Mulch can live anywhere in the Commonweal, and eat, whether they work or not, just as any other citizen. Five years in fifty is custom, convention, not every Independent does that. Sometimes it’s four décades in a year, it’s not any different from doing road work or lugging sacks of beans into the township stores. Not that anyone stores beans in sacks these days. No one’s seen a need to rewrite the law around century old customary equivalents that work.

  What Mulch can’t do is leave. Mulch doesn’t know all of a secret, but enough.

  Knowst thou?

  I nod, slowly. Try not to look too rueful. Carefully don’t remember anywhere Pelōŕios will perceive it standing inside a monumental ward, down in a blast pit, pushing with all-of-us-together, and watching vast intricacies of Power fold and align and become battle-standards. Didn’t understand at all then, don’t understand all of it now, probably can’t, some of it’s only comprehensible if you’re militant and some of it’s only comprehensible if you’re an enchanter. Going to remember every intricate tiny incomprehensible part of it as long as I last.

  All Mulch really knows is that focuses work by voluntary co-operation, it seems like such a little thing. No-one guessed in all the time before Laurel that you could get the Power to combine in a way that was greater than the sum of the contributors. Even if you go with the Second Distant Disjunction hypothesis, and don’t count the first three-fifths of the Power, that’s a hundred thousand years.

  Much to build on a secret, Pelōŕios says. All comes to dust?

  No, it might even help, if other people learnt it. Because the social organization that can use focuses isn’t one of cold command, it can’t be. But it might make keeping the borders much more difficult. A common willingness to share the loot and the slaves would work fine to run a large focus.

  Laurel was wise and skilled and ruthless, we probably won’t find ourselves fighting something as well thought through as graul, I can comprehend the papers on the balance of agency and loyalty in graul, it was studied with nervous care in the first century. It’s a narrow place.

  We’d certain-sure find ourselves fighting something, something with an unjust concentrated economy, it would seriously not help.

  Canst see how Mulch grows bitter?

  All things come in time to die. The Commonweal isn’t exempt. Halt isn’t, I’m not, ask the right theorist and they’ll explain that the world won’t last forever.

  Deep breath. I don’t like this, but it’s true. The Line says united we fall.

  If I was a regular person, Pelōŕios’ head would be too heavy on my lap by now. What you hear, as a child in the Commonweal, is everybody or no-one about anything important, everybody goes to school, everybody works, everybody gets fed, has a place to live. That’s what the whole thing’s for.

  Half a bewildered whistle, faint and it should be distant.

  Everything is tradeoffs. The Commonweal decided, when it was coming into being, that it was going to do at least so well for everyone, or die trying. It’s not dead yet.

  Proud, the unicorn says.

  Just … determined. People who could survive under the rule of sorcerers, and who weren’t going back once they were freed from it. People who had no idea how to do what they were determined to do, the first Shape of Peace can’t move because no one had any idea how. Ours can move because the art advanced, no one could figure out how to move the first one, but the theory was there when we needed it. Deep breath, this is hard. The First Commonweal could have insisted we all move into it, and help, it would increase their chances against the hell-things. There was only one Commonweal, then, and Parliament had the authority to do that. Instead they gave us all the help they could, because it was a better overall chance of getting a Commonweal into the future.

  And if ye twain should meet some day again?

  We’ll have a secure border. Nothing to disdain, I’m not supposed to be aware of Dove or Blossom when they’re worrying about the borders, but sometimes I am anyway.

  “You’re not talking about food,” Chloris says.

  “Commonweal history.” All the context is just there if Chloris wants it.

  “If you run up together,” Chloris says, delicately, and I can’t help grinning.

  If Pelōŕios and I run up, the rest of us can walk, and hold hands, and generally be gooey at one another without it being rude. And I can maybe finish this conversation with Pelōŕios.

  Chapter 28

  Zora

  You get used to the walk you take every day. You get to know what the path’s going to do in the rain, you know the point, coming home, w
here you and your tired classmates look up and think we’re almost there, the place where you walk closer to the trees because that will thin out the rain enough to notice, the spots where you’ve got to go around wide or the snow will slab out from under your feet, it’s not anything like thought.

  Run up that hill on four feet, in the pool of white and purple light that billows about you because that’s what gallop does, as a gait, and it’s suddenly strange.

  Not too strange to recognize.

  It helps that the Round House has the property, not of a thing we made with the Power, but of a thing made for us. It doesn’t have our names in it, it’s not that overt, the sense in which reality thinks we belong there is some subtle thing.

  All the stuff we’ve made to put in the Round House, the work of our intent, that’s perceptible, too. We get told it will matter.

  Tonight it’s a reminder where I’m going, because I wish I really knew.

  I make a big pot of tea. I go sit in the window with the unicorn. There’s a binding for a small table in the teapot. Just have to remember not to leave your mug next to the teapot when you pick the teapot up.

  “Independents, those who are Independents on purpose, change themselves so they’re part of the metaphysical ecology.” I get a slow blink. Pelōŕios’ legs are folded up neatly, but the long neck and strange-jawed head are stretched out flat on the windowsill. It bothers Ed that we call something two metres deep and twelve long a windowsill, but it’s more than the rest of us can do to talk Chloris into calling it an alcove. To be an alcove it has to be level with the floor, and that’s the end of the matter.

  “You’re already part of the metaphysical ecology, but you could be differently so.”

  I get a very cautious interrogative whistle.

  “The unicorn-shape I understand I had from Mulch, indirectly, Mulch gave me the names of what the creator of your species was using for a model.” Honesty catches me a little, Mulch isn’t a teacher, I can’t understand Mulch’s lack of cautions and qualifiers in the same way.

  “Or what Mulch thinks was the model.”

  Though Mulch can turn into almost anything, and does speak Unicorn Four. I don’t know how much that should be taken as indication of direct knowledge in a sorcerer who can turn into a sparkle of light on water.

  “That shape does not depend on predation for its metabolism, it’s metabolically connected directly to the Power.”

  Which means you wouldn’t need to follow me carefully around, in fear of either starving or the consequences of murder. Which increase of choice is an improvement in both our circumstances.

  There’s a whorfly little snort.

  Little advantage to become as Romp or Stomp.

  It takes me much too long to understand. Then I haul up the whole protocol list, how you make another Romp or Stomp, and have it scroll by where Pelōŕios can see it. I don’t think they can read it, not yet, but some sense will come through.

  Really not what happens to bad unicorns.

  Grue explained, but Pelōŕios does not trust Grue.

  I don’t know if I can explain the story about Blossom and Grue’s joint birthday party when they were seven, where Halt made rideable illusory unicorns. “Birthday party” is going to be a vast swamp. Or why it’s better to show up riding something instead of appearing impossibly from nothingness, the way Blossom usually does with, well, family.

  Besides, you’d have to do it yourself.

  Pelōŕios’ best doubtful look ought to make walls start to question their verticality.

  As a matter of law, not capability. I can see how to do it, there are at least three ways I could do it, and I’m sure Halt can tell me which of them would work best for what intent, too.

  Must the law be obeyed?

  It must.

  There’s a long, long pause.

  Hath it?

  May I look into your mind?

  Look, and look alone?

  Only looking.

  There’s a slow, careful nod, dimming and brightening.

  Halt’s, warning, injunction, I’m sure Ed knows the declarative word for these fragments of shadows keenly voracious but I really don’t want to hear it echo across my mind, goes this tiny bit more alert, still invisibly edge-on but rippling. Pelōŕios doesn’t move, doesn’t seem nervous, but that’s not as indicative as I’d like.

  There’s, in among a lot of horrible history, I don’t learn any more of it than that it’s there, the thing I was looking for. Pelōŕios is afraid of Grue, will always be afraid of Grue, was altered to be afraid of Grue. To be afraid of what Grue will do if Pelōŕios ever causes me harm.

  Narrowly and specifically, but altered.

  “That might be lawful, I would have to ask at least one judge, but it isn’t proper.”

  Talk to Halt, then to Grue.

  Chapter 29

  Zora

  In the morning after breakfast Dove’s in Dove’s work shed doing something with spell-structures, dozens of little ones, making graphs, and swearing quietly and carefully at the big lump of ferrous carbide. Ferrous carbide doesn’t suffer much from sudden temperature changes.

  All the context, it’s not like it was only in my head, Dove elects to pay attention to it, there’s a pause, a sympathetic look, and a “Figure you can mind your nose?” to Pelōŕios, who nods carefully.

  A narrow gold line glows around more-than-a-unicorn of clear space along one wall. “That’s today’s warm spot,” Dove says directly to Pelōŕios.

  Pelōŕios chuckles darkly, and picks their delicate way over there, lying down as compactly as nine hundred long-legged kilogrammes can manage.

  Dove looks straight at me. I don’t say oof, which gets me half a grin.

  “You’re not wrong.” Dove’s face is still, and Dove’s voice is quiet, and the spell structures behind where Dove is sitting glow enough to shade already dark hair into complete blackness.

  Pelōŕios’ eyes go startled, pupils dilating other colours, because Pelōŕios hasn’t heard Dove do that before. I just nod once, and go out, and walk the whole way back to town on two feet.

  Grue’s home, Grue hands me a cup of tea and says “Unicorns are dangerous.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. So Grue goes on to say “Just because you’re more dangerous, the less dangerous thing isn’t suddenly no risk.”

  Which is supposed to make me protest about dangerous, because I’m not the dangerous one of us. Not that any of us are really dangerous on our own yet. Wards and experience are a requirement for dangerous.

  “Can you think of anything Pelōŕios, Pelōŕios or any unicorn, could possibly do that would harm me before Halt’s … counter-measure … happened?”

  Grue’s head shakes, a little ruefully. A sleeping ocelotter rolls over, stretches, makes a “fnrp” noise, and tucks its nose under both wide front paws. A line of medium-sized ants tick across the floor, carrying stalks of rhubarb.

  “The aversion’s there, it’s legal, because you did it as a sub-lethal prompt response to high perceived risk before the militant sorcerers got there, the risk is agreed to have been real, but now Pelōŕios is a guest and the aversion is strong enough to be hereditary.” There was a bemused judge, last night, talking to the little images of me and Halt that appeared, maybe four decimetres high, on the judge’s sitting room’s mantel. Which tells you how old the sitting room is, and how calm people are getting about sorcerers in Westcreek Town.

  No least idea how Halt did it, either, but that’s much-more-often-than-not.

  “Removing the aversion isn’t legal, Pelōŕios is a person conducting themselves within the Peace, anything mind-altering they have to do themselves, or, if Pelōŕios was a citizen, as a therapeutic matter which takes about a year to set up.”

  You can’t specify what you want to have happen sufficiently well, but if you try, by making the thorough attempt that involves having at least five practitioners produce individual and parallel descriptions of the desired alt
eration. More than five is better. Do it that way and you can get a useful result without making someone unrecognizable to their friends. It’s a substantial chunk of the magical medical literature because enough weeds try to make you some combination of violent and stupid instead of immediately dead.

  “I would like the exact specifics of what you did to Pelōŕios.”

  Grue takes a deep breath, then another, their mind going, it’s not closed, it’s opaque. Like trying to look through silty water with the wrong angle of sun.

  Lots of things Grue doesn’t want to tell me.

  “Your primary talent flavour’s coercer.” Head-shredder, it’s got a lot of impolite names. The kind of talent where someone can make you stab yourself slowly in the eye with the handle of a spoon and giggle while you wonder why you’re dying. “You’re militant by capability and inclination, but having to make Independent with coercer and shapeshifter as your talent flavours left you with significant self-doubt.”

  Grue goes from closed to startled, it’s subtle, it’s not physical at all, but it’s there.

  “The lower Third Valley woke me up.” I’m not as smart as you are, Halt might not be as smart as you are over the same sequence of time, but I’m not stupid and I started connecting facts. “Even leaving aside Dove and Edgar, the known consonances were well-studied. Blossom can’t be the Goddess of Destruction and you not be militant at all.”

  Ed calls this look of Grue’s “the Wicked Queen.”

  “When we stumbled into the wound-wedges outbreak, and you told Dirce it was nap time, I know how to induce sudden therapeutic unconsciousness now. Only what you did then isn’t what you taught me.” Pure command, it worked, nothing therapeutic wrong with it. Hardly anyone could do it just like that.

  I have no idea what facial expression this is. “Kelpies as a social habit make no sense if you’re a shapeshifter with a life-mage secondary talent, because you couldn’t reliably kill them if they wouldn’t let you go, a kelpie could tell, and you can, you have, and all the kelpies knew that.” I don’t know of any kelpies in the Creeks, there might be some in the Second and Fourth Valleys. The records from the First Commonweal are there in the archives, and Dove and Ed had already eaten them. Kelpies aren’t as strong as unicorns, Grue’s more powerful than any three kelpies, but that’s not the same thing as being able to overpower something’s metaphysical metabolism with forcible shapeshifting.