Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  Pelōŕios nods back solemnly, the careful version intelligible to humans, horn a little off the direct line.

  All five judges go right on looking concerned. Metaphysical creatures are more vulnerable, not less, to being influenced by strong expressions of the Power around them.

  “Zora were greatly wroth,” Pelōŕios says, “that Grue, whom Zora much reveres, had done so small a thing.”

  The judges don’t follow.

  “No quarrel but that Zora believes your laws.” Pelōŕios has trouble believing that, this is intellectual conviction, trust in observation, more than Pelōŕios’ own belief.

  “It is either Halt’s Commonweal or the Commonweal’s Halt,” Pelōŕios says. “That ye know not which says it is not all one, the one at the one time and the other at another, and yet peace.” Pelōŕios really doesn’t believe in peace as an ongoing process, you can hear that in their tone. “If I am to be again Zora’s Pelōŕios, I may be that or I may face the future starving.”

  There’s a pause. Everyone manages to remember that even a large unicorn can’t maintain much territory against a herd of unicorns, that the available range of unicorn habitation has shrunk sharply with the settlement of the Folded Hills, that Pelōŕios isn’t being pessimistic to expect a starving future.

  The judges accept that as a plausible reason. Individuals can recognize that all choice rests on getting yourself into the future, too.

  One judge says “For the benefit of a guest, I say that the purpose of law in the Commonweal is to prevent a distinction of persons from being significant.”

  The twist in Pelōŕios’ neck is incomprehension, and the judge recognizes it.

  “It matters not who you are, but only what you do.”

  Pelōŕios whistles agreement, remembers, and nods.

  One after another, all five judges attest the judgement, of name and office and untrammelled will.

  A witness asks if it would be possible to have observers for the actual working.

  Halt points out, delicately, that it’s not a minor working. Enough warding to comply with safety expectations will prevent any detailed observation.

  “Was it not just decided that the working won’t affect anything but the subject?” One of the observing judges.

  “Were the working to slip subjects,” Halt says, entirely cheerful, and the asker subsides. The Galdor-gesith’s regulations insist on that possibility being considered.

  I can’t bear trying to explain that the lower Third wasn’t my quantity of Power.

  Your quantity of Power back of some subtle form quite suffices, Zora dear.

  Halt approves.

  Halt approves so very much.

  Chapter 43

  Zora

  Chloris gets a disturbing expression when Pelōŕios walks into dinner bipedal, enough that Dove makes the kind of mock-reproving face your lovers do when you’re being too open for the setting.

  Ed takes Chloris’ hand.

  The focused expression passes off Chloris with something close to a shudder.

  Pelōŕios isn’t sure what the expression means, or that it’s safe. When you know what Chloris is, that’s more frightening than merely social concern.

  Chloris would rather have more lovers. Honesty, Zora. Your simiform shape is very much to Chloris’ tastes.

  Chloris doesn’t hear us, the rest of us are scrupulously polite, but Pelōŕios’ face now has expressions the rest of us find comprehensible without borrowing my mind.

  “Twenty-three decimetres of elegant muscle with delicate expressive features,” Chloris says, voice carefully conversational. “Striking colour scheme, too.” Chloris grins.

  Creeks are shades of green and brown, medium to dark, except for our eyes. Pelōŕios’ skin is the black of greased iron. It’s a striking contrast to flyaway thistledown hair. I’ll have to explain braiding sometime soon.

  Not as striking as granulated silver irises against sclera only slightly less dark than Pelōŕios’ simiform skin shade. Chloris’ reaction is first and most obvious, but very far from the only one.

  Chairs are a new thing. Spoons make Pelōŕios look entirely morose.

  “You don’t have to practice here,” Dove says, from what is hopefully the optimal place on the escalating scale of authority and terror if you’re still a unicorn looking at us.

  Pelōŕios nods in real relief.

  You should be at least as co-ordinated with thumbs as I am, which is true, but from how long it took me to be comfortable really running as a unicorn it’ll be a few days before you’re settled in to your simiform self-image.

  The which I have had me all my days. Pelōŕios is a little bit less surprised, hour by hour, that the working was successful. Or that I haven’t bound them in some subtle way, I’m not sure.

  Not that thou might do it, but that such a thing might be done.

  Pelōŕios’ notions of what sorcery can accomplish have been having a rough time with us.

  Consider the present example of my teachers.

  It really wouldn’t do to consider their pre-Commonweal example for the two of them that have one.

  Pelōŕios doesn’t move, doesn’t make any audible sound, but I get the strange combination of a snort and a shudder.

  Wake’s benevolence has a little bit of a smile in it, saying “Tomorrow may not do for ward instruction, since neither I nor Blossom might devote a sufficient portion of the day. Please avoid anything strenuous tomorrow, and expect all the day after shall go to ward-working.”

  It’s been months since we’ve all put in a day together on learning something new and metaphysical. I can feel that awareness passing through us together.

  Wake nods. “Warding, and then your own-work projects, remain of the formal syllabus.”

  Wake doesn’t, really doesn’t, actually say Not a time to lapse in caution, we all hear it in our heads in Wake’s voice anyway.

  Which I suppose is an educational success.

  The warding class is going to be in the Eastern Waste, way out past Edge Creek on a salt flat too contaminated with ancient ichor and little sputtering pockets of malice to be good for anything at all. If Pelōŕios wants to keep me company, we need to get permission to run there tomorrow, because the rest of us will take long steps to get there.

  Shalt I not be well content to inhabit the Wood of New Hope?, Pelōŕios says, meaning the planting along Long Pond. The wood of thy thought is all of comfort, as thy companions arrayed for war are not.

  As indeed they are not, no matter what anyone thinks of unicorns.

  I am as thou now accounted of the eighth ilk of unicorn Pelōŕios says, smiling, and I wind up putting my forehead on Pelōŕios’, just under the horn, standing under the porch of the Round House because it feels true.

  “Entirely factual” and “feels true” still aren’t the same thing, even when most of your mind has nothing to do with any inheritance of flesh anymore.

  The salt flat is depressing.

  Regular salt pan is only almost lifeless but this one feels utterly so. It feels blighted, and not really that long ago, in a some-of-the-people-I’m-descended-from-were-here way, certainly pre-Commonweal but maybe not pre-Creeks-species.

  Sixty square kilometres isn’t that surprising, there were some big lakes in the eastern part of the Creeks. The amount of contour, the lobate shape, and the strange hard crust even where you can’t see discolourations where something splashed into the salt all argue nothing much in the way of natural processes were involved.

  The light doesn’t help, pitiless sun through dry air, and still low with morning.

  Encourages the correct frame of mind Dove says, as we stand on the one salt hill that isn’t dark with ancient ichor.

  No one wants to talk. No one wants to breathe deeply.

  Wake looks less benevolent. Not angry, not threatening, but the slow wind and the salt and the horror ringing out of the landscape are weaker things than Wake.

  In this time, an Indepe
ndent of the Commonweal.

  Wake’s much older than the First Commonweal is, or was. I’m four times older than the Second, today; I’ll always be a little older.

  Maybe someday someone’s going to look at me and suppose that I’ll naturally outlast everything around me, geology or not.

  “Warding,” Wake says, “is a demarcation. The Power imposes separation between the categories specified.”

  Which is a prefatory remark, the what and not the how.

  “In the usual course of events, the first thing any practitioner learns is to ward, as part of protecting themselves from the Power.”

  Which we all know. Wake doesn’t usually tell us things we already know.

  “Have to ward our own output,” Ed says, halfway to a smile.

  Wake produces a single solemn nod.

  Our quite ridiculous output, individually or collectively.

  “Haven’t we been separating things our whole course of study?” I’m remembering, well, everything, starting with making corundum with just enough oxygen and with the trace metals in just the right amounts and places.

  “As a matter of applied will,” Wake says, “requiring some present awareness.”

  I’m thinking, Chloris is thinking, not especially, because sorting elements together doesn’t, not anymore. I have to think more about braiding my hair. Dove and Edgar don’t usually sort elements when we work together, they’re why something is disintegrating into component atoms, but none of us really have to think about it. Even immaterial Constant, too much corundum and too many binding structures where the copper has to stay out of the gold and the glass.

  Ed’s presence in the link goes shuddering — Ed doesn’t, you do — and there’s a growing ball of power. It gets about a metre across and hangs there, tending slowly upward. There isn’t any oxygen in it, and it keeps going despite not being an active working and being set in the air without a solid anchor.

  There’s five spheres in short order. Constant mimes exhaling theirs to size. Mine isn’t any more difficult than paying attention to Ed’s and thinking that’s how it works. Dove’s just appears, I think Dove’s understood wards since we helped Blossom with the battle-standards.

  Wake looks pleased. I don’t think any of the teachers are going to owe another five marks in gold, but I could be wrong.

  We unstructure the spheres before they float very far. That particular structure in the Power seems much more stable than anything in the air ought to be.

  Wake watches the faint sparkle in the air and stands on another hilltop. Wake’s voice comes to us calm and conversational across kilometres. “Before you attempt a collective ward, consider that you need to breathe.”

  Since the ward won’t necessarily drop, indeed should not drop, just because we’ve all lost consciousness.

  Though maybe Dove and Edgar wouldn’t. And Constant can’t need to breathe.

  The link’s a good way to have a discussion, though this time there isn’t much of one, Constant has been thinking about the whole thing.

  We’ve used ward-like things for years Constant says, and presents a structure.

  It’s not a tetrahedron. The distance between Dove and Edgar’s less, the distance between Chloris and Constant is more than Dove and Edgar but it’s smaller than the distance between either of them and either Dove or Edgar. Constant’s a property of Dove and Edgar’s consonance, don’t ask me how Constant can be further from them than they are from each other. Don’t ask Blossom unless you’re comfortable visualizing seven-dimensional geometry. Four isosceles triangles, and, really, none of them are that far apart. The thing glitters down its immaterial edges, keenest across Dove and Edgar.

  I go in the centroid of the shape, where I ought not to fit but Constant suborned another unsuspecting geometry in subtle ways and there I am, or at least metaphysical-me, the physical’s still standing on the horrible salt. We go for twelve metres, ten would be enough but twelve is a more mystical number.

  The light dims, and I feel less like I ought to be wearing another hat around my neck to stop the sunlight bouncing up off the salt.

  Wake appears next to the ward, smiles, and steps straight through.

  Chloris thinks something harsh. The ward is strong, but it’s one single layer addressing energy. Wake knows more about that than we do.

  The battle-standards use a selection of ward layers, half of them initially picked randomly from a much larger number. There’s always a kinetic dump, a barrier to life, and a barrier to the Power. There’s always a reflection of compulsion, an obstruction of demons, and a diffusion of charge into set grounding channels.

  There’s always, in the new ones, a barrier to dust.

  We get into a good technical bicker. We can all remember all the layers that went into the battle-standards, I don’t think we could do equivalent workings to every last one of them, but we don’t need to, really. What we need is an individual ability to put up an effective ward immediately, once it’s up there’s a little more time to think about specific specialized problems like demons or creatures protected from the Power.

  Constant’s fix for protected creatures is a middle layer of active vacuum. The creature might be protected from the Power but the air in their lungs or equivalent generally isn’t.

  Which is too much detail, Dove points out. It’s not just the ability to raise wards quickly, it’s the ability to keep the link functioning despite wards, warding has an inescapable relationship between surface area and strength. If we’re not standing right beside each other, we won’t be in the same bubble, and someone skilled can try to follow the channels for the link through the ward.

  Well, someone skilled, but more likely demons. That’s the sort of thing demons do.

  Then there’s the problem that we’re not all equivalently good at things, never mind the amount of Power, I’d have a lot of trouble with Dove’s non-repeating mass of snowflakes made out of the name of fire and so constructed to fix in place the protean nature of demons. I can understand it, it’s not difficult to understand if someone shows you one, but it’s difficult to do. Ed’s Bide against this place of earth, to keep the ward from being ripped off the substrate, I couldn’t do at all. Ed says it quietly, and it still makes Wake wince.

  We seem to be, shielded is too strong, but we’re always sort of metaphysically behind Ed when something declarative gets said. It helps.

  Chloris’ trick from early in our second year, make the idea of a binding in your head, hang small workings on the idea, generalizes a little. Everybody can have a stable one, we’ve all got that for repetitive workings like water-gates, everybody has a selection. We can pass the individual workings around so everyone’s got the same basic sixteen things, and then Wake mentions cognitive toxins, coercive summoning — where they summon you out of your ward — and the actual ambulatory dead. So the basic list goes up to thirty two, and then we put a lot more thought into energy handling, a basic ward sits there and ablates as it gets pounded on, you’re in a race between your ability to maintain structure in the Power and the ability of impinging forces to disrupt it. I can do stuff with motion, a kinetic mirror instead of a straight kinetic dump into some hapless mass, Dove and Constant can do things with the straight-up Power, and Chloris can do things with entropy to make what impinges become organized, to feed into the warding instead of disrupting it. That’s easiest with charge but it generalizes. Ed, individually, can go declarative about what ends the Power serves, or eat the energy, or recreate it as warding, and none of the rest of us can begin to do the first two but the third one, as a not-technically-an-enchantment hung on the binding, is possible.

  Constant and Ed produce this combination of the declarative underpinnings of names and math and something that’s probably an enchantment if you can look at it from the right increased-dimensional angle. We all have to do it at the same initial time, but it stuffs the working link into a shifting haze of partial dimensions, the shift follows rules but not
readily apparent ones, you’d have to do a lot of difficult math very fast to do something useful before the next shift happens. If you could see through the outer ward shells well enough to tell what’s happening. Something, somewhere, probably can; some great king among demons, some hypothesized terrible entity from well beyond the world.

  If you’re not that thing, you’d have no idea the working link was even there. Not available as a way in.

  The math doesn’t get easier to deduce the next change after it’s run for awhile, the possibilities grow because it’s inherently impossible to observe the partial dimensions perfectly. We should just run this part after we’re Independents. We’d need to have Grue and Blossom there, if they’re going to keep being able to participate in the link.

  There’s a chorus of the idea of nods.

  Can just run it today Dove says, and we do. It’s not easy, incorporating an enchantment’s much more difficult than a binding, and the three strongest aren’t especially material anymore. Well, Ed’s sort of meta-material. Takes almost an hour, but we do it.

  Wake watches the whole thing with an interested expression. If we were being silly or chasing a cuckoo, Wake would say something.

  If we spread out over the hilltop, we can bubble up individually, and keep the link. We can keep the link at full output, we try it and I can’t tell a difference, I know it’s there, it’s observable, but it’s not something I feel while I’m working.

  We can walk the bubbles into each other and merge, too. We walk them back out and add personal layers and walk them back in. There’s a standard order, Dove-Constant-Ed-Chloris-me, that we adopted for “whose job is this?” questions, and it’s been reflex for years. Load balancing large output doesn’t encourage introspection. The joint ward’s got the personal layers in that order. The joint, resumed, something, ward has everybody inside Constant’s metaphysical structure. We can hand bubble responsibility around the structure, everybody can put the whole link into it, run the output up or down, switch layers in or out, either off the binding or something novel. Everybody’s got “air quality” on their idea-of-a-binding, and Ed’s declarative binding-to-the-earth is in the idea, not an individual automated working hung off the hook, it’s not a layer of the ward, but a property of any ward instantiated in that way. None of the rest of us could do it except Ed, but we can pass immaterial anything through the link, so all I’ve got to do is not lose my instance of the idea. The declaration can go with closing the bubble off with a floor, which is harder but not enough harder not to do. Nobody wants to find out their ward’s filled up with ground-nesting hornets or worse, and while harder is also slower, we can make it three stage, so the bubble comes up fast, the floor goes in, and the declaration applies.