A Succession of Bad Days (13 page)

I shake my head. “Not knowing what to say isn’t going to keep me from writing it.”

There’s a nod. “Not that different from this visit.”

Dove clarifies, because it’s obvious I’m confused. Something
for this mind-reading thing. Somewhere, there have to be social rules for this. “They’ll be happy to see me, but no one is going to know what to say.”

Which, well, we sit there until the barge slides up to what looks like a tidy little town, it could be a village if it was organized like one. They don’t even tie up, we just say thanks and jump off. I’m a little surprised when my legs work fine,
they haven’t been getting the stress.

The visit itself? Dove’s maternal relatives are embedded in a gean of friendly people, the refectory is warm, lunch is good, despite a few ‘
baked
pickles?’ moments and a preponderance of sharp flavours. I don’t hear anyone use Dove’s mother’s name. Dove must take after their sire; Dove’s mama is a decimetre shorter and, well, quieter. It’s not that Dove’s
loud, it’s the implied hammer-to-the-head full attention spilling out of Dove. Grackle, I can
think
it, hasn’t got that. Lots of warmth and kindness and welcome for a randomly provided fellow student, and no odd looks. There’s a few of those from other relatives, but I can hardly blame them. I don’t look like a Creek or a sorcerer or much of anything.

It’s, well, it’s hard to escape the impression
that Grackle is exactly what Dove would be like with a normal level of talent for the Power.

Dove’s mama works in a soap-making collective. Sends us back with five buckets of soap and another five of shampoo. After interrogating me about favourite flowers, but still. Not the sort of thing that goes with having made a bad impression, even if the soap-making collective has been doing especially
well the last couple of years.

I even manage to explain how being around adult Creeks makes me feel fourteen without sounding too stupid or offending anybody. Actually youthful Creeks are just surreal, they tend to blur a bit when startled, or when they’re trying to get Cousin Dove’s attention.

The only bad part is being run over by a chicken.

Chickens in the Creeks run up to forty kilogrammes,
or so I’m told. This one was young, probably only about thirty kilos, and left some claw marks in my scalp.

It’s apparently not that unusual a thing, even if you knew about the chickens ahead of time, and I even manage to explain in a convincing way why I didn’t try to protect myself with sorcery while the local medic is stitching up my head
without
saying “It would anger Halt”.

That would clearly
have worked, because Dove mentions it and there are those nods.

Still, pretty nearly worth it to feel only the expected kind of odd, meeting the family of someone you don’t actually know very well, even with the chicken. Without the chicken, it’d have been a great Déci.

The barge we catch back to Westcreek Town has Halt on it.

Halt says “Hello, children,” and the knitting needles stop clicking.
They don’t stop
moving
, but they stop clicking.

Saying “Hello, Halt,” is awkward, I’m sure we sound awkward. There’s no pause in the knitting.

“Did you have a good Déci?” Halt says, just like your grandma would.

I nod, I can see Dove nodding. “Even with the chicken,” sounds like an odd thing to say, but it’s true, so I say it.

Dove takes a couple steps to one side, and says “Is it permissible,”
before Halt smiles

“Of course, Dove dear. Just don’t set the boat on fire.”

Dove straightens up a bit, and there’s that strange tickle-on-the-brain feeling again. I close my eyes, take another breath, and another, and reach for it.

I look scared, which is only accurate. There’s this wiggle feeling, like I’ve got trout in my head, and the image of me through Dove’s eyes goes blurry, not like going
out of focus but the way tree buds make the twiggy ends of tree limbs seem blurry in the spring.

If you get really bright, low-angle sunlight, early enough in the spring that there aren’t any leaves yet, a bunch of raspberry canes or an old rosebush might produce a shadow like that, if it was cast onto something rough.

It’s not the same, it’s like looking at the footprints of a duckling and the
place an eagle’s feet have rasped the bark and thinking there’s a similarity in shape, but, rot-where-it’s-not-wanted, there
is
a similarity of shape. I do look, some, a little bit, like whatever is back of the spider.

I open my eyes, and am seeing myself seeing Dove seeing me seeing myself, and then I find the shutoff. Ow.

“Come here, Edgar,” Halt says, speaking directly to me.

I take the six
short steps. Halt motions at my head, and I duck — Halt’s chair has got taller, silently, and without it being apparent just when this happened — so Halt can look at the stitches.

I straighten up, and Halt rummages, somehow reaching shoulder deep in a knitting bag that looks like it’s maybe three decimetres deep. The flask that emerges is either silver or glass. It looks like it switches, depending
on how far from the knitting bag it is. Or maybe how long it’s been out. Halt hands me the cup-cap of the thing full of, well, whatever was in the flask.

I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what that colour is called, it’s visibly viscous.

This
is
Halt. I don’t even consider not drinking it.

Halt is looking at me, and looking so enormously serene I can’t help but think of giggling. Dove is looking
at me half-alarmed, and the undertone is nearly all alarmed. “Does it taste bad?”

“Don’t know what it tastes like, but it’s not bad.”

“Not bad at all?” Dove is having trouble with this.

“It tastes like an emotion I’ve never felt. I mean, the sensation when my scalp ate the stitches was off-putting, and my head twinged a bit, but the taste is fine, I just haven’t got anything at all to compare
it to, I think you’re asking a baby about their first taste of solid food.”

Halt smiles beatifically, at me, at Dove, it’s hard to tell.

“That answers all my questions about what you are, Edgar. Not all of yours, of course, and certainly not all of Wake’s, but all of mine.” Halt’s speaking straight at me.

“I’m pretty sure I was born human.” I don’t sound as sure as I’d like.

“I might have been,
too, dear, I don’t honestly remember. It’s not so much a disadvantage as you might think.”

Halt can do an amazing twinkly smile. It makes Dove visibly nervous. The awful squashing possibilities of dropping a thousand tonnes of rocks, being squashed with utter thoroughness because neither I nor Dove had ever done this before didn’t make Dove look nervous. Nigh-certain there wasn’t any internal
nervous from that, either.

“All your choices about
who
are still quite real, dear, today this is merely information about your capacity for style.” The needles never stop, but there’s this flash of smile, a smile where the spider smiles, too, the mouth parts that look like legs curving wide and showing two-thirds of the venom spikes. “I shall be most curious to observe what you do.”

The needles
start clicking again, and Dove is squatting against the bulkhead, muttering something about needing to stop making even implausible jokes, so I go over and put a hand on Dove’s shoulder. I think it helps both of us; I’m sure it helps me.

It’s not like ‘scion of the spider god’ is the worst thing anyone’s ever called me, not in context.

We’ve got time, and the weather’s decent enough, to trot up
to the tent and back before dinner, but neither of us have anything to change into that’s any better than what we’re wearing, and it’s tacitly agreed that it’s better to hand the others their buckets of shampoo some place the light is good.

We’re all getting a bit cautious about being handed things.

Kynefrid and Chloris show up together. Chloris looks relaxed. I don’t think I’ve seen Chloris relaxed
before; even the breathing exercises don’t seem to get through that basal watching-self tension. Kynefrid looks, well, it might be smug. It might just be having been somewhere, doing something, where the rules were the expected rules, things were understood, not surprising, for the first time in days.

Zora shows up nearly late, we’re standing around the doors wondering where Zora is, who we could
ask, and Zora arrives riding pillion behind the Wicked Queen. I find myself thinking that if Zora looked any happier, it would be a fire hazard, and then thinking that the aphorism might be a real risk now.

Zora’s radiating so much happy that I don’t notice Blossom right away. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible even when it was just Blossom, never mind Blossom on another blood-red horse-thing.
Zora stands there and holds food tubs and a stack of pans and they’re still coming out of a saddlebag that really isn’t large enough for one of them, so we all move forward to help. Five of us can just about carry it all.

Blossom takes both horse-things away, tack already floating off them, and we follow Grue inside like ducklings.

It’s Déci, so it’s the kids’ table for us; Halt and Wake and Blossom
and Grue and the Line officer I thought was a team lead from the critter team and somebody, not a Creek, I don’t recognize them, have the back far corner, and we get the next one out from it.

Chloris appears to have skipped lunch, is famished and very pleased at how they said convincing nice things at the tavern. Kynefrid isn’t saying anything, it’s not a funk, but there’s no social presence,
Kynefrid’s fallen a long way back inside, no self in the eyes, it’s to the point of putting jam on a baked potato. Kynefrid eats it, too, and doesn’t seem to notice at all.

Zora had an amazing time baking, Grue’s kitchen and kitchen garden are cleaned, maintained, and apparently assisted by a multi-species nest of enormous ants, to the point where Zora was handing dirty dishes to ants and getting
them back clean. “I didn’t watch that very closely,” Zora says, and then rattles off the list of knowledge and qualifications required to make a horse-thing, Grue’s apparently entirely willing to share the recipe.

“That will take a few years,” says Dove. I think it’ll take about twenty, if I’m understanding all the words properly.

Zora nods. “Yeah. But now I have a reason to study.”

Dove doesn’t
mention the chicken. Everybody says thank you for the soap, even Kynefrid emerges just enough for politeness.

Oh, and bland cooking? Bland. I think I drink five litres of water. Can’t make myself stop eating, which ought to be worrying. Pulled seven-legged-critter haunch is an argument that organic solid fire is addictive tasty stuff.

Dove was right. That first half-décade was the gentle introduction.

For all of Brumaire, we eat, we sleep, and we move rocks.

Other things, too, but I don’t think there’s a day we don’t move rocks.

Making the other two, and then three, dams, creating stream channels and lining them and the ponds, which means making clay first, and then making a whole other overflow stream because there’s
far more water than the sewage ponds will take without flowing too fast. Which means a marsh. A small marsh, “Twenty ducks, eight geese, or a pair of swans,” Wake says, and then has to explain that where Wake is from, swans are only twice the size of geese. What’s small in the world still means a lot more clay lining and finding out that Wake knows more about clay than it seems possible there
is to know, it’s just a type of mud, isn’t it? Which runs us into Wake’s knowledge of
mud
, vast beyond belief. We can all tell because trying to fit the fraction imparted into our brains produces this increasingly familiar feeling of uncomfortable fullness.

The ponds all work, the water flow doesn’t strip the lining, we’ve even got it set up so the marsh will put any down-flow silt in useful places,
it’s a success as civil engineering. It’s not a house, it’s what makes a house possible.

Getting the prairie sod up and off is ridiculously easy; Grue’s taught Zora how to get the line of intent to go between living things, it’s not so much a technique as a way to apply a rule on the invocation of Power, one required to avoid frying Grue’s kitchen-ants. So we put a stake in for the centre of the
circle, Wake suggests an appropriate radius of fifteen metres, we stretch thirty metres of string around the stake to be sure we’ve got ourselves lined up on the clifflet rise in the slope, we move the stake, and then we move the stake again; this is something to get as completely right as we can manage, not just right enough. Once the stake’s in, Zora makes a circle around that doesn’t do anything
but divide the sod, right clean down to the bedrock. Dove and I pick the whole thing up and march it over to a clean space Chloris had made.

Chloris, face screwed up and brow speckled with sweat, had sterilized that space, killed it dead, deader than that, refusing everything inside the just-large-enough ward Wake set up permission to live, and then, the thing Wake described as the ‘interesting
part’, explained to the ward while passing the sod through it and to the sod itself that the sterilization didn’t mean
it
, the sod was to believe in its expectation of continued life. Considering that the sod is still sitting on a metre of topsoil and three metres plus of subsoil and rocks, it’s not all that difficult to maintain a conviction that it wants to live. Wake says that; from Chloris’
face I’m not sure I entirely believe it. We’ve even got it more or less into the same sun-angle, which should help.

Keeping the small ward going is harder; it has to hold
in
all that dirt, and hold out anything that might let weeds in. Chloris manages it, working with three levels of thinking, so far as I can tell, and two of them are panicking, one that the working is using necromancy and another
at the thought of messing this up, being incompetent in public. The third skein of thought’s getting the job done, so I hope it wins the overall argument when it has time. There’s a daily topping-up-the-ward for three days after that, everybody trooping over the hill before breakfast and feeding Power to Chloris to feed into the thing. The ‘before breakfast’ part isn’t much fun, but if we all
do it that means nobody’s facing the day already tired.

The big ward around the Tall Woods we only have to feed once a décade. “A more advanced technique,” Wake says. “Meant to be there indefinitely, where we wish the retaining ward to leave as little evidence of itself in the future as we might arrange.”

Temporary isn’t really a property of exercised Power, any more than it’s a property of rain,
or anything else that doesn’t rot. It isn’t always raining, but the possibility of rain means flowing water, there isn’t any getting away from it, it doesn’t decay out of the world. I can start to see how that must change how sorcerers think about things; life is in the category of stuff that rots, but using the Power isn’t.

The idea that necromancy can be used to keep things alive, from soil
bacteria to people, bothers Chloris. It bothers Chloris for décades. As a thing, a technique, it’s obviously really useful for, say, transplanting cuttings, but more obviously terrible if you had someone badly hurt and weren’t willing to admit that they were going to die, even if you didn’t want them to. That could be just hideous. “Yes, it can be,” says Wake, and I look at Dove and Dove looks at
me and we both, together, it’s the same decision, not the two of us each deciding the same thing, decide not to think about what that would have meant in the Bad Old Days.

Kynefrid’s part of the job was to make something, not a ward, what Wake calls ‘mis-described illusion’, a great big barrel made out of the Power like we made insulated mitts when sharpening the rock drills. It’s even got hoops,
but on the inside, compression structures instead of tension ones. It’s kept the dirt around the huge plug we lifted out from collapsing, which leads to a pay-attention-students moment when we all troop back to the hole.

Kynefrid can’t stay there all day and all night to keep the whole thing from vanishing with inattention, we couldn’t even take turns, it’s Kynefrid’s working, none of the rest
of us were involved. Passing workings is possible, but, Wake’s tone goes dry, “Not so soon in your studies.”

Wake produces a wooden box twenty centimetres square and maybe five deep, fills it with clay — the clay drifts a kilometre through the air from the patching pile of extra we left at one end of the not-filled-yet marsh — smooths it dead level by waving a hand at it, and produces a stick
from somewhere. More a dowel, and it’s got one end pointed and the other end cut to an angled wedge. We learn a ‘paucity of basic signs’, the one for ‘the whole working’ and the one for ‘permanence in the indefinite present’ and a few others. Kynefrid doesn’t have to
write
the thing, but does have to figure out how to take the ‘intention of shoring’ already made — there are a lot of possible signs
for shoring — and hook it into the, it must be an enchantment, Wake’s written. Plus handle a Power-feed from the rest of us, if it turns out that Kynefrid needs more of the Power than that directly available while already keeping the existing shoring up.

It doesn’t work. The clay cracks, Kynefrid wobbles, and the shoring almost goes, bits of it blink out before Wake gets it stable, I don’t know
how, don’t think Wake takes over the working, it just stops failing until Kynefrid manages to get a grip on it again.

“Know what you did wrong?” is all Wake says to Kynefrid, while the fired clay powders into dust and disperses on a breeze that isn’t blowing anywhere else. Kynefrid nods. Not looking well, looks like someone awake much too long, days, but also entirely determined.

The second try,
Kynefrid asks for a lot more Power, we feed Kynefrid a lot more Power, and it works; there’s a wooden box indifferent to being in contact with white-hot ceramic, no ‘crack’ sound, and the shoring stays up after Kynefrid collapses. Which leads to a discussion of Power-exhaustion first aid, arranging Kynefrid in the recovery position on the grass on and under a blanket from Wake’s satchel, and, very
carefully, floating everybody else down into the excavation. I can’t fly, there’s no good way to move to the side, but Dove and I between us can manage straight up and down for everybody. I need the external anchor or I start to wobble. We can’t just climb because the shoring is the same height all the way around; the ground isn’t, there’s only a metre of dirt to the north, but the shoring is
the same four metres there as it is to the south, and it’s way too smooth to climb. So we float.

The bedrock is marble. Gorgeous un-fractured blue-green marble, suitable for statuary and rolling-pins and the work-slabs of confectionary-makers, and none of us want to blast it into rubble. Seems like a complete waste. What we want for the house is the igneous rock below that, we can all feel it,
it’s only another four metres down or so. The junction there’s easy, you can feel the discontinuity and there’s more than enough meaning to get the Power to latch on to just the marble and lift, but how we get only the marble under the excavation out isn’t obvious. Even if we could lift the whole hill.

I wind up sitting down and having a brief gibber for ten minutes or so, because I caught myself
thinking
thirty-metre hole saw
as though it was a serious option. Wake smiles at me after I explain the gibbering in response to a quizzical look; it turns out making a hole saw
is
a serious option, though not the simplest. For starters, we don’t have anything suitable for the cutting teeth on hand. Dove makes a face, points out that it’s marble, not pure quartz, and there’s all the poor struggling
forb we pulled out before the clay pond linings went in, to be the start of the bottom muck or the compost pile, depending. Lots of carbon there, and we can go get sand if we need to, because silicon carbide will
certainly
cut marble.

“It will cut quartz, too,” says Wake. By the time Kynefrid’s conscious, Wake’s taught us the ‘sound, unspecialized’ recipe, and we’ve got sixteen big half-metre
square blocks of ‘dense, amorphous, fibre-reinforced’ silicon carbide ten centimetres thick and it’s dinner time. Halt takes one look at Kynefrid, walking into the refectory, fishes out that odd flask, finds a mug, and doses Kynefrid.

Kynefrid makes faces. Prolonged and disturbing faces, as though the flesh wishes to escape from the skull-bone beneath. Kynefrid then flatly refuses to try to describe
the taste, despite considerable curiosity from those around, out of a desperate desire to not to think about it ever again.

It doesn’t work very well; the taste very nearly prevents even an attempt at eating dinner, which is frightening; we’re all ravenous. Dove ruffles my hair while not saying ‘scion of the spider god’ out loud, and Chloris and Zora are both busy enough trying to get Kynefrid
to at least drink something that isn’t wood-lettuce tea that they don’t notice. Zora cheerfully points out that wood-lettuce is a slow poison even to the most susceptible, it won’t be any immediate help.

Running the hole-saw is easy; you number the carbide blocks, you count in your head, you feed a push in, formally dividing the push in your head by sixteen. Getting the hole saw to run straight
vertical isn’t easy, and dealing with the immense mass of dust and chips takes planning. Fifteen centimetres wide doesn’t sound like much of a trench, but for a thirty-metre diameter circle that means about fourteen square metres of kerf, or whatever you call the space emptied by the saw-cut when it’s not really a saw and you’re cutting rock. We’re going down four metres or so, so there are going
to be something around a hundred and fifty tonnes of chips.

It winds up with Kynefrid sitting well back from the pit, holding, hunched over, yesterday’s enchantment-tile, slowly and carefully extending the shoring down about a decimetre behind the position of the cut, Dove running a reverse-rotation mass of water to flush the dust and chips out of the kerf, Zora pulling chips out of the water,
and Chloris pulling the heat. If you leave the heat in, the water is steam pretty quick, which, as Wake says, can be fine if you’ve got lots of water. Instead, we’ve got maybe thirty tonnes of water pulled out of the spring pond and floated over. Chloris feeds me the heat back, continuously as it’s removed from the water, another ongoing thing that’s a loop in the Power. It takes me a couple of tries
with much smaller amounts to figure out what to do with it, Wake says “Heat is work and work is heat,” to me as a universal principle and I can see that, things heat up when you hammer them or saw them or bend them, anyone knows that, but the heat to work part is a mental leap.

I get heat-is-work sorted out in my head, Wake puts a small ward — a kinetic dump, which I think means flying rocks will
hit it and stop — on me, everyone else gets out of the excavation, I lie down — the face cover doesn’t protect the back of my head, but the living rock ought to — put on the face cover, ward or no ward, and away we go. It’s much, much tougher to work with Chloris than with Dove, but that’s close to saying that I’m aware I’m doing it. It’s not any harder than having to pay attention to the person
passing you stuff when filling shelves. There’s no load, no active load, the teeth have mass, we’re not cutting yet, but I can spin the teeth and Dove can run the water and there’s this tiny trickle of heat coming through from Chloris.

Then there’s the whole drilling straight problem. It takes me an embarrassingly long time trying to lower the whirling circle of carbide teeth to recall that a
plumb bob works by gravity, not by being dense or heavy or stretching a string. Once I’ve got that, seeing the cutting teeth as arranged on a planar surface and the surface as normal to the local gravity works fine. I
do
see it, there’s a pillar of light in my head presumably from the centre of the earth and rising up into the sky.

Cutting rock is loud, really, really loud.
Feed slower
walks into
my head, unmistakably Wake, and the noise drops and drops again as I feel something like having my ears covered in the idea of mud. As I feed slower the amount of heat running around drops, too. There’s an obvious ideal place, where the most chips come out for the least heat, and we sort of all wobble ourselves to there. Get the teeth below the surface level and the whirling water drops with them,
to be a deep thrumming in the rock. It was pretty spectacular there for awhile above the surface, nearly-boiling froth with the big carbide blocks hurtling through it and the haze of rock chips. Another ten tonnes or so of water shows up, there’s some loss as steam no matter how hard Chloris pulls the heat out, steam moving too fast to condense back before it’s out of reach.

Once we get down into
some granite, or basalt, or whatever the heavy igneous rock is, the cut slows, but not really all that much. Keeping it from catching takes some thinking, it’s a lot like sawing through a knot, where one part of the material you’re cutting is a lot tougher than the stuff around it.
Keep cutting until all the chips are gabbro,
Wake says, so we do that.