Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  Wake has this one brief smile that looks contented, and knocks for admittance.

  The whole thing blinks out. It has to: we didn’t include a door.

  “Do not,” Wake says, while we’re thinking about whether or not we should. “The cost in strength does not repay itself in utility.”

  Ed gets a narrow look and creates a barrier to probability sliding, a fancy one able to recognize individuals and present an option of admittance to citizens of the Commonweal. The construct gets passed to Wake, who nods solemnly, takes it, and makes three changes. It doesn’t just block, it bounces, in random directions and to random degrees but certainly to an uninhabited and unpleasant place. Someone who hits it hard could be four universes over and not know where they are or why there’s no air, something that Ed just isn’t hard-hearted enough to want to do by default, and it goes much less apparent. I have to think about it to tell what the working is, now, and I know.

  Ed thanks Wake, makes copies, and passes them around. I duplicate mine, and alter the duplicate to bounce anybody who hits it at whatever degree of effort into a specific partial probability, nothing fully real, but enough to keep someone relatively regular alive even if time wasn’t very slow there.

  Anybody I need a ward for by myself, it’s going to end better if I can store them for awhile.

  Blossom appears on another hilltop, waves, grins, makes Line “spin it up” gestures, and vanishes.

  We-together spin the joint ward as far up as it goes, take a slow deep breath together, and then move how far up it goes further up, because this is Blossom.

  Can’t see out very well, can still see the crash of white fire.

  Can’t feel it, can’t feel any of the next six fast things. The bubble doesn’t budge. No heat, not much light, what I think was crushing force, my layer routed it right back outward, evenly.

  The single sharp point of pressure, narrow and exceedingly strong, we can feel. The ward shifts, to oppose with more substance that point. The pressure starts stabbing rapidly for weak spots, like a spirit of chaos trying to darn what it does not understand. The narrow pressure changes faster than the ward can react. We’re getting a wobble. Constant’s expression goes from serene to something saying the best of Dove and Edgar isn’t someone safe to anger before there’s an outer ward layer rolling into its own geometry. At the next contact, the pressure’s devoured into a shining strength for that outer layer.

  Dove’s sure the crushing force was the same implode-a-ward-structure technique Blossom uses to compress metal into implausible densities. That’s a good redirect makes it into words with the sun-in-summer approval.

  Nothing alive, nothing with a name, no demons, show up to test our ward.

  No coercing anything with a mind, no matter how useful it would be.

  Blossom appears again, motions “drop.”

  Wake nods, and our ward folds up and ceases.

  We’re standing in the middle of terrible smells. Ozone, burnt rock, hot salt and ancient ichor, ghastly overtones of something that feels like the taste of a smell of damp.

  Blossom makes Power-clearing gestures. It helps with the overtones, but not the smells.

  Wake says “An excellent beginning. However,”

  And we all say “should we experience doubt in specific ward construction, we shall surely ask.”

  Blossom and Wake are both smiling as we start long-stepping back toward Edge Creek and the road home.

  It’s somehow three hours after lunch, but none of us want to eat here.

  Chapter 44

  Chloris

  I have been utterly dreading this conversation.

  Much better than Mother wanting to know why I was being strange, hard to be worse, Mother wasn’t hearing “strange isn’t voluntary” at all well.

  Still.

  I like the bitter chocolate, I can safely consume it, and it’s not always for direly serious things. Completely sorcerous social context, maybe? Wake’s got a rule for it.

  “Not becoming unduly eccentric.” Wake’s not really benevolent. Wake’s just about impossible to threaten, Wake knows this, it’s not the same thing.

  I get a nod.

  “Yet I still take comfort in the rituals of my childhood.” There’s a small wave of the tall ceramic tumbler.

  “Halt may not, but if Halt does not, I know of no other.” Wake’s quite calm. “Becoming an Independent does not transform one into an unearthly being.”

  I don’t manage to say anything, there’s a tangle.

  “Becoming unearthly is to become a creature free of its ancestry, its history.”

  That’s a real smile. “Even fire elementals, we suspect of possessing history.”

  Unicorns certainly do, even after Zora improves them.

  “I must enter the magical ecology.” Or fail as an Independent, and die of my talent.

  “Picking up the foot yet lightly on the bank.” Wake’s tone, it’s not purely gentle, and Wake’s dropping the social face, rotating.

  This is why we’re surrounded by rock.

  Wake nods, the face of entropy, an entire breadth of natural law.

  I am in part an unearthly being, Wake says.

  The metabolic part of me, call it metabolic, is fine, I’m fine, it’s been a few months since I did much thinking with my inherited brain. Not even an impulse to gibber down there.

  Several seasons Wake says. It is a subtle process.

  Metaphysical part, well, just not frightening. Wake’s concern’s real, kindly, but even without that.

  “I’ve been sleeping with, comforted by sleeping with, a starving darkness and the unconquered sun.” Never mind how much sex we’re having, I mean the waking up in strong arms. “Constant’s … ”

  Constant’s lovely, and elegant, and hard to describe.

  Entropy grins at me, folds back into Wake’s human face.

  “Just so. Beneficial to all concerned, yet.”

  Wake takes my chocolate tumbler, hands it back full.

  “Accurate self-perception is difficult.”

  Lots and lots of the dread, right there. Not being able to know what I’m doing, if it’s wrong, how wrong.

  “Had we not Blossom, Dove alone would be the single strongest talent known to us. Considered as a sorcerer, Edgar alone may or may not be stronger than Shimmer, though Edgar is relentlessly sane.”

  Have to set the tumbler down. Don’t have to hold my head, but I’m going to anyway.

  “Contemplating the combination, that Constant is equivalent in potential strength to Blossom, makes Halt giggle. Contemplating the combination has convinced you of several falsehoods.”

  Still going to hold my head. Constant’s been doing such a comprehensive job of loving me in return.

  “It is true that Dove and Edgar and Constant have borne you up, Power answers Power. You have been given this gift of circumstances, much greater than lovers whom you cannot slaughter by desire.”

  “Lovers who won’t die isn’t small.” Two hundred years of never being able to hold anybody, two hundred years of nagging self-doubt, who will I desire and thus kill today?, two hundred years of no least exercise of desire, I can’t imagine how I could possibly survive that.

  Just three would be really tough if it wasn’t these three, vast and terrible and somehow that’s a good thing.

  “By no means small, yet you have set your estimate of your own strength by the fortunate youth of those fit to devour empires.”

  Empires are centuries ago and somewhere else.

  “Though the Archon is not called Emperor,” Wake says, “and though Reems is indeed somewhere else,” and I nod.

  Sorcerers in Reems just tried to kill a lot of people in the Commonweal. Might not have specifically meant to kill us this time. Next time they’ll be trying to kill me as specifically as they can, because whoever was running that ritual died because I told them to die, to die and be altogether dead.

  Just me, there wasn’t any active link then. />
  Somewhere I turned into someone who doesn’t regret that at all.

  Who wouldn’t, without a Peace worth defending, or the fellow-citizens or the lovers. Those are all real and without them, that sorcerer still needed to die.

  “Someone most probably greater than a thousand years in age.” Wake’s voice doesn’t pretend this isn’t going to hurt, Wake doesn’t want it to hurt, it’s a fact, the opinion about age is a combination of Wake and Halt, the opinion is a fact and probably accurate.

  “I’m twenty five.” If I haven’t, no, I can’t, there’s all these people, I can imagine me losing years, but not the whole gean. Host gean.

  Wake nods. “Necromancy is efficient.”

  “How strong am I?” Not nearly so strong as Edgar, never mind Dove has stopped meaning what I thought it meant.

  “Yourself, today?” Wake moves a hand. “So strong as necromancers become.”

  Myself.

  “The working link is unprecedented.”

  Which I know, so Wake said that so I’d think about it.

  Somewhere in Reems, someone in authority, somebody in some kind of political system where they get what they want because they want it, somebody who can order people killed, who is obeyed through force and fear and the exercise of Power, they’re afraid of me.

  Wake nods. “As you yourself are unprecedented, in the nature of your skill and the scope of Power afforded you.”

  “So I can’t just take that foot off the bank?”

  “You could,” Wake says. “It is likely enough to work.”

  Time to drink the second tumbler of chocolate. It gets me through the trying to think into actually thinking.

  “I have some choice of things to be.”

  Wake nods.

  “You can’t tell me which one will work best, because everyone’s guessing, Halt’s guessing, you’re guessing, no one’s ever done this before, no entelech has bound to a greater sorcerer, there might have been other things like our working link, but putting a sane entelech in it’s new, the amount of power, the external manipulation, it’s an experiment, it’s an experiment where you’re changing more than one thing at a time.”

  Wake nods again. “All facts.”

  “So this has to be escaping constraint.”

  Wake smiles.

  “Your lovers are mightier, and will yet grow in might. You shall not, not in the regular way of things. In skill, in knowledge, in precision, you shall grow, but the strength that has come to you is the whole of your strength should you but lift your foot from the bank and go as the stream goes.”

  “Isn’t that supposed to take a hundred years, even in the Commonweal?” Where you’re not desperate for safety, and able to practice without having to flee.

  Wake nods.

  “Borne up all together,” Wake says. “In a thousand years, perhaps we will know enough of wizard-teams to know if today we ought to be surprised.”

  “Has anyone else ever become partially otherworldly?”

  Wake says “None known” without a head-shake.

  “Nor is it wise to trust good luck to continue.” Wake sounds entirely serious.

  “But I ought to know about the possibility.”

  Wake nods.

  “All-the-way otherworldly just sort of drifts off?”

  Wake nods again. “Embodiments of natural principles do not long retain personality.”

  Not so well even when people worship them as gods, and try to remind them what they’re like.

  Zora’s “things three depressing books agree on” rule. It must be depressing books, or maybe you want to believe whatever candidate fact you’ve found.

  Got a social-us question. Lots of rock, fifteen, twenty kilometres distance, it really ought to be more difficult, somehow.

  The relevant distance isn’t material. Constant, being sensible.

  You know how if you’re somewhere really high, you can see the line of sunrise moving over the world? Like that, only with affection. And diagrams. Ed points out he’s more or less already done this, wasn’t planned, but the Edgar walking around’s not the real Edgar in any sense, it’s something the real Edgar, that vastening embodiment of elemental darkness, constructed.

  Dove doesn’t, I don’t, want Ed to put a heart back into his present humanity because this way he warms up just to your body temperature and no further, cuddle for hours and you don’t overheat and get sweaty.

  Didn’t plan Dove says, not precisely abashed. Got lucky.

  Red-gold fire, coiling, and certainly not Dove’s regular presence in the world. Better an infestation of dragons.

  Dove makes a hmph noise, nearly like Halt, and doesn’t argue the point.

  Better an infestation of dragons than the non-material part of any of us, really. Even Zora, because nothing would be on fire but everything would be lasting strange.

  Zora gave me a bunch of equations just after Festival, precisely how worried Zora doesn’t quite need to be about dying of me and metaphysical contact.

  Extra risk, Ed says, but maybe different extra risk? Wake’s not saying it makes you tougher, but it would.

  Terrified foreign sorcerers in Reems are just the start.

  We don’t get a vote about who you are, Dove says. You won’t suddenly get strong enough to murder us by smooching, anything else we can work with.

  Remember that we’re the local gods, Constant says. You don’t need a whole element to be one.

  Because it’s social, Constant says, Wake’s, maybe not completely appalled. Nobody has to worship anybody, it’s not a control relationship either way, it’s a reassurance. There’s a grandmother-god, who will resolve your problems. It’s embarrassing, it’s an admission, to ask for the help, no one wants to do it, but they know it’s there. There are gods of death and destruction and healing, we might have more nuance than that, recognize Wake as entropy and not precisely death but socially, people call on Wake when something needs to die.

  “Gods who are chastised for arriving late to dinner.”

  An immaterial nod. Local gods. It’s a job description, Constant says.

  So I’d be Death’s apprentice?

  Dove makes a noise. I’m not all of fire.

  Lady of the Ice, Constant says. Ice reflects and refracts, you get light and perception in there. Ice that makes all clean. Peaceful death in due season.

  Wake’s chocolate tumbler gets set down, tick. Never the tick if Wake doesn’t mean there to be.

  “This seems plausible to all of you.”

  Spectral nods, my own nod, Dove’s thought saying Constant’s smart.

  “I departed my culture of origin to avoid worship,” Wake says, voice dispassionate. “Yet I may not of reason refute you.”

  Creek social thing, Dove says. Halt doesn’t have to help anybody, Halt’s too old, absolutely no one is of Halt’s generation, no way to significantly help Halt. No social bonds, never mind what the law says about the Independent Halt, no one believes anything commands Halt except Halt. So the only way to approach Halt is like a local god, the stuff you do to keep the mischief down, to placate the hidden things.

  “Conduct entirely invisible to a stranger,” Wake says.

  Ever see Eirene have anything alcoholic served without making sure Halt gets offered some first? Dove’s not precisely amused. Then you? She’s smiling, she’s happy, but this isn’t necessarily funny.

  Or how no one ever asks you or Halt or Blossom anything until you’re done eating?

  “I had thought that courtesy.”

  It is, only it’s not the people category. Wake looks at me when I say this, and I can look back. Meet Wake’s eyes, and look back, and Wake’s not, this is what made Ed faint our very first class.

  I so do not want to make people faint from seeing me.

  There’s an impression of a hug vast as tectonic movement. The other three’s attention goes elsewhere.

  Wake looks up, away, probably in the direction of the Round House.

 
Looks back.

  “Local gods.”

  “It’s a custom.”

  This is so hard to say. “Lady of the Ice is maybe right.” Walls and ditches. Dividing land, sources of rivers, it’s all processes, they don’t plan, they don’t even keep up with people rearranging the geology with other chances, but the idea of some natural order’s there.

  Wake nods. “They know you well.”

  This is getting much too close to conversations with Mother.

  “There is this point for everyone,” Wake says. “When you cannot regard an accumulation of skill as sufficient explanation.”

  “It was the demons for Dove.”

  “Very probably,” Wake says. “Hatching for Edgar.” Wake smiles. “No obstinacy could survive.”

  Ed almost didn’t. We almost didn’t. For, well, maybe less almost than it felt like at the time.

  Wake’s head shakes. “I cannot put odds to Halt’s machinations. Most certainly not to decisions of a frightened Parliament.”

  Really almost.

  “Really almost.”

  Never entirely sure what kind of opinion to have about me.

  “Chloris.” Wake sounds, it’s not kind, it’s sympathetic, I think.

  “I am old and mighty and inhuman.”

  Nodding’s not really voluntary. I think Blossom and Grue are old, and they’re eighty eight. Not somewhere absent-minded about a precise count of centuries and only young to Halt.