Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  “Less cohesion, please.”

  We realize we’re cohered enough for a major working, aren’t planning one, and, yeah.

  Anyone looking up from their sickbed could die of fright, Wake says, really amused.

  “Grant me a moment,” Wake says, squatting down, right down, buttocks on heels and knees under chin in Wake’s rarely seen resting posture, long staff in front of knees.

  Not like Wake.

  “To dispose of something’s existence, a sufficiency of its history, is a technique I learned at an age above two hundred. I cannot think of you other than younger than fifty, instead of the accurate twenty-five.” Wake doesn’t sound disapproving, I don’t know what this sounds like.

  “Terror, if terror I still knew.” That’s benevolent and wry.

  “Chloris.”

  Whose face stills out of not knowing what to feel.

  “You are to me that student who, anywhere but the Commonweal, I should fear to be destroyed once you had learned all you thought there was for me to teach.”

  That’s appalled. Appalled at the stupidity more than the murder. Dove reaches out an arm to take Chloris round the waist, half a hug and enough real pressure to be impossible to miss through the appalled.

  Wake nods. “Just so. I need fear nought other than more time upon my researches.” That’s a real smile. Entropy can smile.

  “I would not fear to teach you did I not believe you would learn.” Wake says that with no inflection at all, the utter plainness of facts. Chloris nods, slowly.

  “One may not freely alter the inhabited present.” This, too, that’s not an arguable assertion.

  “The wound-wedges were old, had no certain arrival, no certain maker; an accumulation of many chances. To banish those from being occupied slight chances.”

  Wake takes a formal breath. “The judgement to know what is slight and what consequential is not swiftly attained. Error readily causes the practitioner to cease.”

  Not next year, something that takes practice instead of simply Power.

  “We’d have to make them not exist and then it splashes everywhere.” The disease creator, Chloris means.

  Wake nods.

  Not going to work.

  “Is making a disease easy?” Chloris asks.

  Wake’s head shakes once, definite. “Nor is it so difficult an undertaking that eventual success cannot be expected.”

  So we can’t break the chain of luck leading to success.

  “Always going to be more where this came from,” Dove says, then “Can we retroactively improve the peace-abiding?”

  Wake smiles.

  “All of it, for everybody, we don’t know how far this goes, but that’s staying in the Commonweal,” Dove says.

  Reach we have, easier, we don’t have to get every single person of whatever species, someone’s already done that, we just have to warn them in the past, there’s a standard annual list, one thing, mystically, probably not physically, but the working won’t care.

  Wake can ask the Shape, and does, a haze of token-lines the shades of dust. Agreement might surprise Wake. Parliament will have to vote, after, about whether we made a good decision but people are dead and dying and the sooner we do this the more likely even the dead shall live.

  There’s a little time, if the shade is close to the border. Not much, but some, if you can make the thing that killed them never to have been.

  “Standing in a circle,” Wake says, somehow amused. “I do not wish to instil in any of you an expectation of success at quick ritual, yet so shall this be.”

  We nod. Wake has to do it, none of us have the delicacy of touch or experience or the pharmaceutical knowledge, but Wake hasn’t got the reach to do it for the whole Commonweal in one go without the ritual, without the ingathered Power. So we get to feed, the ritual won’t care where the Power comes from, and Power we can do.

  We move over a bit, leaving the outbreak map, and Wake stands us back to back, facing out from the points of a triangle. Dove gets north, Chloris gets south-west. Constant gets admonished about centroids and geometry.

  There’s a bunch of drawing, casting two strange powders, nine small glass bottles set at the junctions of lines, several lengths of string, something that looks like the memory in dust of a flower.

  “If there is a response I shall have the bubble,” Wake says. “One of the four presences among you should maintain some watch on the perimeter. Otherwise, I remind you only that the maker of this disease is certainly capable.”

  Go for the mind, Dove says, and Wake nods, in no way benevolent. Approving.

  There’s, well, it’d be chanting if Wake wasn’t doing it with sign language, perimeter pacing, outside the nine bottles at the points of something, it’s not a regular polygon, I have no least idea how this works, none of us do.

  Zora’s busy, it feels like an absence of bad news but the rest of us are about to go peak output, don’t want to backflood Zora’s work, takes a bit of structuring. We’ve practiced, but not at peak.

  Don’t know what Wake is doing, but you can tell when to feed the ritual, inescapably obvious and a sound like the smell of hot salt water.

  It feels like lifting something just about too heavy, it’s not a heave, it’s one continuous feed and it takes time.

  It lifts, in a taste of bending iron and the texture of gladness, steady and inexorable.

  Lighter and lighter, until the weight is gone and I hear someone say, confused, “Mama?”

  The ward around us splashes thunder black and silver, an ache in the teeth and a distant gibbering.

  That one Chloris says, peeling out the full sense of the mind behind the minds, the chained tools behind the chained thunder-thrower that are arrayed as a shield of confusion.

  Front passes among us like Block’s exercises for balance, a lean, push, lean, immaterial thought.

  BE YOU OPEN UNTO ALL THE WORLD

  There were layers of wards, but it’s enough, directly at the one controlling will, caught in a bare instant.

  Balance again, swift, bodies would break at this speed.

  Dove and Constant push fire, every synapse of the target’s mind made of power warm then hot then swift, hurled apart. Half its own frantic thought to pull together tipped into hissing chaos, the whole of the thing given unto wild fire.

  Lean, push, lean.

  The fire dies, and dies, and dies, in the death of dust too slight of memory to make a shade or pass or be.

  Nice Dove says to Chloris, admiring, more than half the thought of a kiss.

  There’s a long broad curve of melted dirt, molten glass, nearly, on the river side of the ward, I have a moment of “bricks or window panes?” and decide on bricks, it’s not going to be usefully clear glass without a lot of effort, and, with a lift from Dove to get all our feet up out of the way, get the square cobbled. Easier than making the melted stuff back into dirt.

  It leaves Wake’s ritual setup down there, except the bottles, risen up by feet. Didn’t want to crush them. Wake doesn’t object. It preserves a record for later analysis.

  Wake drops the ward, leans on the plain long staff that goes with war and ritual, head shaking just a little ruefully.

  We’re coming up, reaching out of the full link, can’t find anyone sick, can’t find anyone dead, I think the hard part worked.

  There’s a clear route, no sense of obstruction in the way, so I pluck the sleeper, sleepers, there are five of them, up from wherever they are and float them over.

  The five of them land as gentle as we can manage. There are rules about this, not quite as simple as death for invading. The sorcerously bound, the enslaved, are not necessarily to be executed, having had no capacity to do other than they were commanded.

  One medic’s emerged, needing an explanation of why they’re not dead. They remember being dead. Wake, I’m so glad it’s not me, manages to provide that, that we’ve retroactively improved the peace-abiding, no one should be ill of the new plague, not anywh
ere in the Commonweal.

  People start moving around, the plague banners are still up in a few places, those come down, Wake says the past is lumpy when we’re baffled, people remember something, usually, nobody really wants to come out and talk to the sorcerers and find out it’s much worse than they thought.

  A couple Broadthews do come out, very polite, and offer us beer.

  Not a thought I would have had in Wending, but Broadthews look like someone tried to extract half the height from a Creek, and nearly managed. Metre-thirty, and shoulders like a wall.

  Odd to feel tall.

  Wake, very politely, accepts.

  It was last year some time that Grue pointed out Chloris had just drunk five litres of ice-cold medical ethanol and not noticed. It was part of the explanation of why the recovery from distraction classes were starting to use actively magical substances.

  It’s really good beer, and we say so, each of us.

  Wake does most of the talking, to explain, offhandedly, what just happened.

  Might have been reassuring that way. Don’t know Broadthew body language, with today I’ve met four. They might just not have had any idea what to make of anything about us.

  Dove has strong thoughts about getting the Folded Hills on the same canal network, maybe they don’t want to sell this beer, maybe there isn’t enough to consider that, but their gean ought to have the option. Might be a collective, not much beer gets better in the aftertaste.

  If Dove and Chloris are anything to go by, they don’t usually agree about beer, a lot of Creek geans would buy it by the barge-load.

  Wake’s moderately certain that their abrupt stepping from mountaintop to valley will kill the prisoners; can’t, well, shouldn’t, barring terrible emergency, do the experiment. So we trudge down to the river path, down that to the main canal, badly startle more people wondering why they’re not dead or deathly ill. The floating guys from Reems don’t help with the startle.

  Get asked by the lock clerk, finding us a barge going south to the high road’s not any kind of problem, if there’s going to be more of that.

  “Not from that guy,” Dove says, about the way you say you’re done turning over the garden. Chloris produces a tiny shy smile full of secrets, and the lock clerk’s eyes go wide, and right back to Dove.

  Your shadow filled with smiling eyes Wake says to me, tone incapable of sternness. Dove ruffles my hair.

  Halt’s there at the high road.

  Halt has a table, an enormous table umbrella, and lunch, off to one side of the flat bit where the stairs come up beside the road bridge. I almost don’t notice the howdah sleeping in the shade.

  New road bridge, wider, higher, not what was there when I got displaced.

  “Most excellently well done, children,” is the very first thing Halt says, and Wake nods at us.

  Then we get to set the Reems watchers down and I get to wake them up.

  They get just long enough to recognize Halt before they go back under, the same enchanted sleep Blossom used as first aid on Zora after Kind Lake. Not precisely kind, I suppose, but there were a lot of dead Commonweal citizens when we found them. Can’t say as I’m feeling kind. I’ll try for decent, we do put them carefully in shade.

  Halt says “Guard” to the howdah, and it, I don’t know how I know, but it responds. Not one of the noises.

  It’s not even a hurried lunch.

  “Was that a major sorcerer?” Chloris eventually asks, we’ve been through the fruit salad, the strange little sandwiches accompanied by tiny sweet pickles, and the egg salad, and are on to the ice cream and custard and chocolate topping dessert.

  Halt cackles. Can’t possibly claim it’s chortles. A bronze bull in the flat space on the other side of the road, waggons loading up from barges before turning back east, makes a distressed metallic lowing, it’s a lot like what a turbine sounds like driving stripped gears.

  Chloris bounces off offended and grins, the perfect still face of Death splashed full of joy.

  “You have put my faith in the Commonweal to the test,” Wake says, quietly. “Our opponent was set, prepared, waiting. I might have been half a day against them, with no great hope they should not succeed in fleeing at the end.”

  “Think it’ll discourage them?” Dove, this really is a job of work to Dove. Not the best work, but nothing to neglect.

  “Any witnesses free of will shall bide a long time hidden,” Wake says. “Yet even with what must be a great freeing of rank and place among the mighty of Reems, this one thought to come over the mountains as though conquest was the lesser risk.”

  “The Captain thought they might really be fleeing something.” Dove’s thoughtful.

  “Some greater thing than the enmity of the Northern Hills that needs must be,” Wake says.

  Dove’s dessert’s about gone, last spoonful rising. The dish refills, different toppings, fruit, some kind of baked chocolate.

  Dove looks startled, says thank you.

  “I am sure I do not surprise you, children, to say that Wake wonders from time to time if I really thought this through.” Halt’s voice is entirely serious without being stern, haven’t heard that before.

  Wake nods.

  “Thinking through the matter does not entirely constrain the outcome, even if you are Halt.” That’s a twinkle. “Nor is there any way to know, until the event, how well you fight arcanely.”

  “Most of Block’s drills were harder when we did them,” Chloris says.

  “Drills are meant to be,” Wake says. “Yet this was not the first fight we should have chosen.”

  Dove’s face quirks. It’s not really a smile, it’s Dove’s recognition that there are times when people worry if you smile. “Worried we’d have been all flustered if that first pattern hadn’t worked?”

  Wake nods.

  Chloris says an illusion of necromantic notation, white and green and shining, specifics of name and entropic smoothing, too flat, no possible distinctions sharp enough in energy to sustain a mind or life, death, not to the named sorcerer, but to their entire possibility of life.

  Dove’s is a diagram, one, simple, terrible, elegant, wards all push out, you can convolve that through most of a single dimension and then the ward comes in like being under twenty kilometres of water. Blossom uses it to make metals denser, part of making the layer one standard-binding. The twisting part of the trick wrote itself into Dove’s understanding. Grip and twist and push, push with a tide of fire. Have to be stronger, but Dove is stronger than they were, never mind we are.

  Haven’t got any notation for mine, working on that, but the illusion’s clear enough, time smear across ten seconds, and cease said to dust. My metaphor, but anyone is the augmentation of some dust.

  All at once, Constant says. Whichever one’s working best gets the full push.

  “Cease,” Wake says, with overtones of disbelief.

  “Cease has worked on weeds,” I say, quietly, Wake’s looking really bothered. “Not like I know the Rune of Unbinding.”

  “Not quite yet, dear” Halt says, patting the back of my hand.

  “We’ve thought about this,” Chloris says. “Wouldn’t be time when it happened.”

  There’s a small sigh. “I worried people would be like weeding. It wasn’t, it shouldn’t be, but all my qualms and pity are soluble in plague.”

  Halt nods once at Chloris, acknowledging correctness.

  “Good chunk of Blossom’s repertoire,” Dove says. “With necromancy and hungry shadows.”

  Wake’s facial expression stops.

  Halt looks delighted.

  “A million people supports not more than three brigades of the Line,” Halt says. “Not if the Peace Established is to come with a substantial prosperity. There are four material frontiers.”

  Wake’s face doesn’t start moving, but there’s a nod.

  “Old-style sorcerer upbringing, win or die, only with society and an education,” Dove says. “We co-operate by reflex and we grew up in
the Peace, it’s not an intellectual appreciation. Replacements for your former colleagues among the Twelve.”

  Not what Halt’s going to do with anybody with less talent than Zora.

  Of course not, dear, they’re much more useful at something where they’ll last.

  Can’t hold hands with Constant, and even Halt starts to give us a bit of an odd look when Dove and I try to eat one handed all through a meal. Hooked ankles with Chloris, Dove’s got both feet on the outside of that, Halt’s chairs and table aren’t really Creek-sized.

  Wake nods, picks up the wrong spoon, sets it down, picks up the ice-cream spoon. Someplace was beyond settled, to have different spoons for fruit salad and for dessert. Never had the sense Halt just makes this up.

  “It is one thing to understand the goal,” Wake says, “and quite another to witness the first arrival of an adult capacity.”

  Several spoonsful of ice cream go by. Wake never quite manages to approve of sweet chocolate sauces, but that doesn’t seem to be a concern now.

  Wake’s is full of pepper oils, dear.

  “Nor did I expect, today, to have thousand-year-old suspicions confirmed.”

  Halt really can’t look benevolent. “The Peace is so much simpler, once you’ve got one,” Halt says.

  Wake almost makes a wave of agreement holding the spoon, sets it down, nods.

  “Not what we were expecting this morning,” I say.

  “Nor those,” Wake says, chin pointing at the five sleeping guys from Reems. The howdah has been, very quietly, wrapping them in some kind of string. Three done, fourth nearly done, only one to go.

  “All the sick people,” Chloris says. “The scalded brewers.”

  “We’re ahead,” Dove says. “Got to the scalded in time, solved the plague, killed the source” — Chloris makes a tiny grim nod at killed — “and nobody in Reems will have a good idea of how.”

  Wake and Halt are nodding.

  “The Northern Hills might be why Reems is trying to get down here,” Dove says. “All that extra moisture and accumulating snow. If I was a conscious terrane and I’d had the kind of trouble with Reems it’s had I might try a good long drought and then big floods.”

  “Entirely possible, Dove dear,” Halt says.