Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  “Tell me what happened,” Chert says. Not the formal officer voice. The planning voice, where doubt and disapproval are virtues.

  A knitting needle free of yarn, gravity, and Halt’s hands waves its blunt end at the inside slope of the roof. Output graphs run down the whole length. Wake talks.

  “The plague had prepared close cover.” Wake’s implacable calm is more implacable than calm right now. Dull light rings the left-most portions of the output graph. “I would suppose their plan was to destroy anyone responding to the plague, if that could be done. If not, to believe the principal sorcerers identified and enact their prepared ritual attack.”

  “For the record,” Chert says, sounding weary, and Halt chuckles over the needles ticking. “Recorded outputs, General.”

  Not Halt’s recorded output; the record ends with the students. Unused Power is a matter of guessing.

  “That seems like strange technique,” Chert says in a voice for explanations, waving a brass shade of light on something else in the early phase.

  “Weeding reflexes,” Wake says. “All due care to rouse nothing.” Wake approves.

  “The plague cover,” Wake says as the dull light moves, “made a probe.”

  Chert makes the brass light in four places, sword hand waving and chair tipping back. It covers the events just after that probe. The fourth light jitters up and down, emphasis for the size of the output. “Gets their location peeled out of their set defensive obfuscation, their own personal ward dropped and nothing else, then they’re dead. Doesn’t take one whole second to die. Output’s higher than I’d have expected, but,” and Chert shrugs. “It’s a first sorcerous fight with a real fear of death. Weeding reflexes, so never mind caution or sparring for advantage, link up and kill.”

  Wake nods, agreeing. Halt’s paying attention, the knitting’s all plain wool. I think it’s social cover.

  “Then you fed them ice cream and cake.”

  Chert does their best to say it flat.

  “However militant their characters,” Halt says, “three out of four had never killed anyone. Let approval from their metabolic childhoods apply.”

  Chert gets halfway to a harsh grin before their face sets grim again. “Point.”

  “It is good that you killed” doesn’t convince as a plain statement. Not even among graul.

  One of Chert’s lights goes interrogative-shaped, and Wake says “So we taught them to weed.” Chert nods a little bit.

  “Low risk of information leakage?” Everyone else is going sorcerer-cryptic.

  “I’d say none,” Chert says.

  “Never quite none,” Halt says, quiet and abstract and tying on some apparently identical yarn.

  “Many weeds,” Wake says, and we all nod. Many weeds respond to the touch of the Power. This bunch of students can filch hornets out of their nest one by one and slide them sleeping into specimen jars. They have had Halt urge them to subtlety and Wake to delicacy until I heard Halt’s hints and borrowed them for sentry training.

  Creeks have tough hearts, or there’d have been casualties from shock. Illusions ghosted into the middle of camps and barracks the first fifteen, twenty tries until the sentries got to grips with subtle and duty platoons and companies stopped relying on whatever ward layers the standard gave them.

  “But not quiet, not learning long steps.” Chert doesn’t lean back down, Chert’s looking at the ceiling and the brass lights are collapsing and reforming, one, three, one, five, one, seven, all the smaller lights swirling through circles.

  “Diffuse,” Wake says. “Swift, and not much greater in presence than their regular days.”

  Chert nods again.

  “May I remind you of the fencer in the proverb, General?” Halt’s voice is very dry. Chert grimaces, nods again with more conviction in it.

  “Was the Reems attack especially foolish?” The proverb cites the worst fencer, whose conduct skill cannot predict.

  “Desperate, perhaps,” Wake says. “A formidable ritual, long-prepared, and likely planned to overcome such resistance as could be imagined. It is strange that it was expended with such unclear targets.”

  Chert’s lights coalesce to one and move left, back to the start of the sequence. “How tough was this first one?”

  “Between eight hundred and a thousand, and well-provided.” There’s the particular emphasis on well-provided that means “lots of mind-bound subsidiary sorcerers.”

  “So about Rust?”

  “No.” Wake is definite. “Five hundred years of open publication have improved us.” Wake’s wry shrug swirls immaterial smoke. “More than we may realize by few examples.”

  “Rust displayed no sign of difficulty with any Reems sorcerer on the March.” Annotation, not argument, and Chert’s brief nod takes it that way.

  “Would it work on Rust?” It is on the ceiling in swoopy lines and a broad white bar for “certainly dead.”

  Wake nods. “It would work on me, accurately directed.”

  “Halt? Blossom?”

  “Sayings about age and treachery yet apply, General.” Halt’s voice is pleased and approving and fond, all together. “Leaving aside a requirement of improbable and appalling circumstances, not yet. Blossom’s design is resistant to entelechy and Blossom exceeds the students’ joint output.”

  “For now.” Chert’s not happy, and not just in voice-tone.

  Blossom’s part of the joint output, and the combination’s headed at an army problem.

  Where it is, the combination put the output of a heavy brigade behind Dove’s will today. Not the Second, three battalions, nothing special except it was five sorcerers instead of eight thousand troops, a signa, and three standards.

  Chert snorts. “So the Reems ritual doesn’t get a single distracted target already tangled up with their front guy. It gets spread out over you two and the students, maybe because they were using a mix of divined threats and ‘whoever did for our front guy’.”

  Wake nods, entirely placid.

  “They would have been figuring on a single pre-eminent, wouldn’t they?” Chert means this as a real question.

  “Possibly,” Wake says. “We don’t know what Reems knows about us.”

  “Transcription is ongoing,” Halt says. All those heads, and memories growing out in Eustace’s wool. It all came off in a big shearing fourteen months ago: Eustace had been looking extremely fluffy. Sorting out what it all says is taking time, and there are never enough clerks, and that will be what Reems knew then, not now. The mechanism was meant to provide a record of what eustacen ate when there were no people around to witness, not to neatly transcribe the minds of hundreds of sorcerers. Halt was improvising, and now we don’t have the skills in the City of Peace, not in concentration nor in amount.

  “Whatever they expected, they got a young entelech and Gentle Death and whatever’s happened to Sergeant Dove’s ‘fundamentally defensive mindset’.” Chert’s brass lights have moved into the middle sections of the output graphs.

  “It was close, General.” Halt is faintly angry, still.

  Brazen light slides right. “Not here, it wasn’t.”

  Chert’s off hand takes two tries to pick up their whiskey glass. The contents go down in a gulp. The glass comes back down tock on the table.

  “Every sorcerer in the Commonweal heard Perish in flames blown in their ears by the trumpets of Fate.”

  Chert draws five slow breaths.

  “Just not their fate today.” Chert’s still having trouble believing it.

  Wake smiles, kindly, but smiles. “Secondary lobe echo,” Wake says.

  “I don’t claim to understand it,” Chert says. “I don’t think either of you understand the whole of it.” Chert reaches for their water glass. “But I know what ‘novel, concise, and systematic’ mean in one of Captain Blossom’s reports, even if I don’t know what ‘implacable’ means in enchanter.”

  “‘It pursues’, General.” Halt approves. “Blossom gave Dove to read of the Boo
k of Snow, and Dove hath surpassed it.”

  Halt destroyed Snow between twenty and fifty years before the Foremost marched. The available fragments of history suggest it was something like work.

  “Nor did Dove indulge in wrath.” Halt looks, flickeringly, prim, and goes on. “No more of a harsh fate than the work asked.”

  “The work.” Chert says it, and stops.

  “To count is to entangle, General.” Wake’s voice is entirely calm. “We may infer from geometry not fewer than seventy ritual participants.”

  “Students,” Chert says, in tones for disbelief and cursing.

  Blossom’s report, and Wake’s, calmly assert the entire destruction of the ritual participants, consumed metaphysically before physically.

  “Until they should pass the Shape of Peace,” Halt says, needles clicking. “And scholars enough to know that the novice ought not attempt subtlety of objective.”

  Chert and I make small harsh noises of agreement. That’s as intensely true of standards as sorcerers, a thing Halt must know.

  “Do please not ignore the personalities, General,” Wake says. “Even less than you may safely ignore the personalities of Standard-captains.”

  “Dove and Blossom consider themselves sisters, and never mind species or the fifty-year age difference. Dove’s bunch of fundamentally defensive mindset evaluations maybe mean they were just defending the durable people they’ve found to love. Chloris is socially proper between very and painfully. Edgar’s intensely concerned with being useful, in the general judgement of Commonweal society. Constant loves them all, arcane mathematical theory, and formal clothes.” Chert’s voice has found some kind of calm, the chair doesn’t tip down, Chert really knows these things.

  Wake and Halt are both nodding.

  Chert’s wave across the ceiling’s nearly distressed. “That’s a sequence of executions. That’s a level of aggression terrifying in a new ensign, we don’t ever appoint anyone half that aggressive a sergeant. It’s like weaving-shop apprentices out digging for truffles getting surprised by a tide of crunchers and then they’re worried about trowel cleaning, mustn’t taint the truffle taste with cruncher lights.”

  Chert takes a careful breath. “It’s not bad that there’s cruncher lungs everywhere, but it’s an unsettling outcome.”

  “Distinct isn’t separate,” Halt says. “The construct was trying to separate Dove and Edgar. Their response is not very different than yours would be, General, to someone trying to divide your body into approximate halves.”

  Chert nods, slowly. “So I take the footnotes about three major sorcerers expiring in something less than a second as fear?”

  “Edgar’s choice of verb was shred.” Halt translates in a perfectly contented grandma voice. Echoes of echoes of the true word mince the shadows back of Chert until a dust of darkness falls.

  Terrifying an entelech is nothing to do by mistake.

  Give me a hale brigade and a good plan and I still don’t care to.

  Wake says, carefully, “The students are aware we found them in circumstances where they could die, or learn, and perhaps not die.”

  Chert looks at Wake, the chair comes down, and I don’t know what language Chert uses. Halt looks amused.

  “Four years with their heads stuck in win or die.” Chert’s face does something I don’t know the name for. “Independents are supposed to be sane.”

  “This entire Commonweal is stuck in win or die, General.” It doesn’t bother Halt.

  Extensively bothers Chert.

  “Did we win?” Chert’s not going to ask, and I can’t tell.

  “On the balance,” Wake says, with a judicious hand-rocking gesture.

  “No linkage?”

  Wake’s head shakes as Halt says “No” with flat certainty.

  “Conquest provides connection,” Wake says. “To kill by disease is yet to kill, and to kill widely establishes greater connection.”

  Everybody nods. One practical reason for the Ur-law’s prohibition of conquest, it tangles up with other attempts to conquer. From the entire metaphysical landscape of domination and dominion, the Commonweal has sought to free itself, until we seem empty to distant auguries and doubtful to our neighbours.

  “Yet there was no conquest,” Wake says. “In this time, those deaths did not happen.”

  “If we need to, those three and you can do that again?” Chert says to Wake.

  “Those four, preferably all five, and either myself, or Grue and Blossom, or my present colleague.”

  Wake’s voice is a bit off for a technical answer, and Chert grimaces across Halt’s slow nod back to Wake’s chin-lift.

  “Can’t help their chances with the Shape.” Chert truly does not know what they think about that.

  “We may hope the children continue to see such matters as duty and not exaltation,” Halt says.

  Chert snorts, and downs a big slug of water. “We killed them. There’s a connection there, if they want it in Reems.”

  “Chloris’ public reputation involves gently floating pangolins,” Wake says. “This is incomplete.”

  Mustn’t underestimate anyone about whom Dove will be publicly besotted.

  I think that, and Halt smirks at me.

  Chert’s sword hand moves through explain.

  “The first sorcerer, covering the plague,” Wake says. “Chloris pushed their disintegrating existence into the far lands of death, beyond shade or name or significance.”

  Chert takes a moment before they nod, once and slowly.

  “The ritual itself, and then the ritual co-ordinator, were not disintegrating, yet they died with no less thoroughness.”

  Wake’s proud.

  “Dove’s response,” Halt says, smiling just a little, “required the full sense of the ritual just then ended. It referenced no other thing, and was thorough, so that there is little metaphysical difference between events as they transpired and a ritual that failed of itself.” The needles click on, tempo smooth and even and swift. Halt’s knuckles glow with every flex. Splendid girl hangs there, officially unspoken.

  “And your interpretation of policy?” All the invading sorcerers over an arbitrary output labelled “two hundred” are to die, in preference to troops, if you can’t get everyone. Been formally like that since the Year of Peace Fifty, and practically since Year of Peace Eighteen, the first time anyone got away. A long generation’s embarrassment’s delay to formality.

  “Applied to the ritual and only the ritual, General.”

  “Which you got?” Chert’s not expecting to like the answer

  “From Edgar, quite entire.” Halt smiles. “No reaching out for it.”

  I share a glance with Chert. Dead and disintegrating hundreds of kilometres away and neither of us doubts Halt could have pulled those echoes out of the world.

  Would almost rather Halt had.

  Chert’s sword hand twitches, once and twice. Halt thinks their Staff Thaumaturgist token is an excellent jest, yes, but not the job or the Commonweal or the Peace, somehow, and never mind how many joints in the limbs in the shadows behind Halt.

  “It was no more than it needed to be, General,” Halt says, “if somewhat showy.” Halt produces an honestly amused smile. “It was not only in the Commonweal that sorcerers heard perish in flames, and I wished to maintain the theme.”

  “A somewhat threatening theme.” Chert doesn’t approve. Threats are a form of conquest.

  “If policy demands deaths, survivors may fear.” This smile’s not amused. “Yet fear was not the purpose.”

  Chert tries to nod, fails, makes a two-handed “it’s nothing” motion.

  Chert hasn’t had much practice talking to Halt.

  I’ve read the initial reports, dashed shorthand and incomplete sentences about burning things tall and terrible looming over mountains. Uncomfortable guesses at height and distance and how far above the air were made. Rigid duty noting that the apparent twisting motions cannot be explained by the physics of heat.


  Chert was hurrying east, and saw Halt’s wrath rise up over the rim of the world.

  “Even without connection, someone could presume an agent and seek to do them harm.”

  Wake and Halt nod in acknowledgement of possibility.

  Past rash, and numerous historical examples.

  “Are you certain-sure no one in Reems has enough to go after Dove’s family or estranged Chloris’ mother and cripple the survivors with guilt?”

  “Guilt?” Wake says in tones of vast doubt.

  “Nearest kin, unqualified, would get me, General.” Halt sounds a little wistful. “Weight of years. Weakest of them might get to Zora, very skillfully done. I doubt the skill survives and I doubt more any youthful survivor will have leisure to contemplate such folly.”

  “If someone tries it anyway, I can expect a calm response?” Chert wishes these weren’t real questions.

  “Not from me,” Halt says. “The Law is clear that sorcerous attacks on Commonweal citizens are not to prosper.”

  It’s a bright room, but not while Halt says that.

  “General.” Chert looks. “I’m around them many mealtimes, I see them going by together, I watched Block train them, I’ve been doing weapons-work with Edgar. The militant three, four, get the job of dealing with whatever attacked Zora, it’ll be hushed tones forever.” Outright missing landscape. Hunger from beyond the world reaching out of death you can’t escape to.

  Inhale.

  “Any of the Keepers get the job, I’d expect the same thing. First of the First, the very best we can. People like Zora.”

  Chuckles likes Zora.

  Chert nods, just like the standard of the First hadn’t filled with something between assent and growling. “Deterrence only works on the sane.”

  “There truly is no substantial basis for connection.” Wake speaks with the peace of old graves, a state a major attack might excite to merely calm. “I should be concerned for many things before I concerned myself with such assaults.”

  “We keep fighting Reems.” Chert makes something of a face. “Or successor-Reems. Or what we think is Reems.”

  “Empire, cultural cluster, spreading rise-from-chaos ethnogenesis, extensive single god-king autocracy, or mere language group,” Wake says, “it has met little success.”