A Succession of Bad Days (14 page)

The teeth come out looking battered, they’re
neither perfectly square nor a half-metre on a side anymore, but they’d be good for another few holes. We made them from dirt and dead plants in an afternoon, and if Wake will walk us through it again I’d bet we could do it on our own the third time. It’s the first thing that has really made me feel like we’re actually
sorcerers
, because if this was widely available people would use it, and I’ve
never heard of it before. Even on a much smaller scale, a metre-wide hole saw for setting a king post would be worth having.

This isn’t as easy to do as it seems, was, I shouldn’t, can’t, claim it was difficult after it wasn’t.

Zora’s laid out the chips as walkway, connecting the three sanitary ponds. It looks like an edged walkway somehow, too, it’s a very neat job. Must have sorted the larger
chips out and inserted them vertically.

Getting the marble plug out is straightforward, there’s nothing difficult except believing it’ll move before it rises. Walking it down, all five of us, to Westcreek Town isn’t any harder, the Line-style rolling loop of Power, not any rolling up of its gravity-socks. We have to be really careful on a couple of the turns after we’re on roads, it might be only
about four metres thick on a ten metre right-of-way, flipped on edge, but it’s still thirty high and thirty wide. It gets to the shared stone-yard of the three stone-working collectives in Westcreek Town without causing any calamities. Lots of remarks; the leading views are that you can’t make a useful millstone out of marble and that even if we get another one and an axle, what would we ever
get to pull the cart?

Every single one of my fellow students gets a thoughtful look, and I do, too, the first time someone says that. We really could be turning into Independents, even if none of us have the least idea yet how we’d go about making what we’re thinking of.

Between the three collectives, there’s more than a hundred people standing there to watch us rotate the big marble plug on its
side, realize it’s upside down relative to how it lay in the earth, hoist it a careful twenty metres in the air, flip it over with stately caution, and set it slowly down. Wake gets a thoughtful look somewhere in there, then Wake’s hands wiggle at the big shared stone-yard. All the stray bits of rock and gravel and sand clear themselves into appropriate piles, away from where the marble is coming
down.

We get it down whole, no cracking. There isn’t even a thump. Dove looks at the team leads and focus-firsts, who are just staring at us by now, and says “Didn’t have any place to put it.” There are some slow nods, they can about cope with that. Most of them can’t when Zora asks, rather diffidently, if we can have some worktops out of it, not sure how many or how big yet. I can
see
the math
happening in all the team leads’ heads, it’s, with the thick spots, probably eight thousand tonnes of marble, which would supply some immense number of work tops, and the team leads and just about everyone else close enough to hear Zora stagger around laughing. Zora’s “Not
just
work tops,” is in withering tones, and doesn’t help with the laughing.

We are, when composure is recovered, promised
work-tops, and some architectural accent blanks in the bargain. We’re halfway to dinner before Zora stops feeling offended. “We still won that one,” Dove says. I take Dove’s word for it, I have to, Creek social encounter rules are going to take me at least fifty years to understand. It’s not actually a
fight
, it’s got something to do with social authority, some kind of status you can only use
indirectly. Halt has tonnes and tonnes of it, which is a pretty good demonstration that the Creeks are collectively smart. Dove has at least a couple tonnes, something Dove will neither admit nor acknowledge. Makes me think my estimate’s low, but I don’t understand how it works.

Before we go in to dinner, Wake tells us to be sure to wash thoroughly after breakfast tomorrow morning and to wear
clean, fresh clothes. “Any clothes?” Chloris asks, and Wake nods. “This is a requirement of ritual. Clean matters, not worn since the last laundering matters, but style and material do not.”

There’s a mass outbreak of confusion.

“When I was young, we did this fasting. You are all fortunate that’s been discovered since to be no true requirement.”

It’s a good thing we’re all so tired there’s no
chance of that remark keeping us awake all night. Ritual magic on an empty stomach? That wouldn’t go well.

We make a point of scrubbing, instead of sluicing, in the morning; we make a point of carrying the clean clothes down to breakfast so we’re wearing them when we head back up toward the Tall Woods. It’s a clear day, quite shining, but also well into leaf-turning season.

When we drop off the
clothes we were making vast pits in, these last few days, the tagger at the laundry makes muttering noises, and asks us which clothes list we’re on. The response to ‘not’ can be summarized as ‘Well, I guess I’ll have to fix that’. No gean, so no clothes list there; what it means to be an student sorcerer I have no idea, there should be an official school-outside-a-gean in the mechanisms of government
somewhere, but if so, we’re a really small one. Even the Tall Woods must be causing the cadastral survey some issues, somewhere, but no one’s mentioned.

With all the displaced people, I doubt anyone’s going to worry about it, and I even more doubt Wake didn’t sort it out ahead of time, but still. There’s this niggling feeling of impending attestations.

A niggling feeling of impending doom, too,
not at all helped by seeing Wake there in something that isn’t a shapeless mass of coarse brown robe.

Still a robe, but it’s shining white and Wake’s got a giant scarf-thing in deep blue draped over the right shoulder, it looks like nothing but friction holds it, and an impractical octagonal flat hat in matching blue silk. There’s some kind of embroidery all over the scarf-thing in copper and
gold.

“Good morning, students.”

“Good morning,” comes out at five different times and cadences, but I think we all manage to say it.

“Melting gabbro, any mafic rock, is energy-intensive. For an individual practitioner to generate the required energy to melt a large quantity of such rock is very difficult, even with resort to mechanisms disapproved of by Commonweal law. The available options are
thus large foci, which while energetically sufficient lack fine precision, or doing the work in stages, which permits precision but which requires awkward scaffolding mechanisms to prevent the first part from falling over while the subsequent parts of the work are accomplished.”

We all nod.

“The, quite legal, alternative involves non-coercive summoning.”

We don’t nod.

“Isn’t summoning inherently
coercive?” Dove, sounding, not worried, baffled. I’m getting a lot of baffled. Not just from Dove, and all the rest isn’t mine, either.

Wake’s head shakes
no
, with emphasis. “There are inherently coercive mechanisms, but the act itself is not. The idea is to offer an opportunity not otherwise available; the — ” Wake’s face and voice tone shift, very oddly — “traditional sacrificial mechanisms
are effectively this, sources of Power not otherwise available to creatures from elsewhere.” The image of a living heart ripped from the victim is
vivid
. For a few seconds, I wouldn’t mind having skipped breakfast.

“Since we are not going to sacrifice anyone or anything, not even by a large donation of the Power, as was sometimes done, what we have to offer can be thought of as an opportunity
for art.”

What?

“Fire elementals inhabit either a place, or a time period, where nothing possesses a fixed form. To some subset of them, the opportunity to create art of fixed shape, in durable materials, has value.”

“So we’re bribing, paying, a fire elemental with the opportunity to make a house?” Chloris has passed through scandalized and won’t be be in disbelief long, not without slowing down
both soon and much.

Wake’s head shakes through another
no
. “We are offering a fire elemental the opportunity to enter into an artistic partnership to create a valued fixed structure.”

So we end up standing in the middle of the excavation, eight metres below the short-grass prairie meadow that came with Tall Woods, making a house out of nothing. If it doesn’t have to do anything, keep back heat
or dirt or hold weight, forming shapes with the Power is easy, you think at it. You find out how clear your thoughts are, too. Getting a whole house, even a whole house purely as walls and floors, no fixtures or doors or furniture, that’s a bit tougher. Things don’t persist without intent, and you try thinking of an entire house at once.

It winds up with me playing thing-conserver, holding on
to the overall model, and the others adding things. There’s an argument over three floors or four, straight stairs or curved, where the windows go, and almost everything about usage you can imagine. Which is pretty silly; even if we did know how a sorcerer’s work-room was typically set up, Wake had told us, bluntly, we weren’t going to come out in the traditional way. And the place is huge, thirty
metres across is a lot of space for five people before you have three floors. Chloris has problems with that, thinks there must be an eventual population well over fifty. Dove lists, Zora lists, storage, inside talent practice, the lab space we don’t know the appropriate size for, and the inevitable regret at guessing necessary room sizes.

The model has a tipped roof, higher to the north for the
light, side windows, arched out of the sod, and the actual roof spiralled with a flat so the sod won’t wash off it in the rain. Kynefrid gets very focused on how we keep the runoff headed away, out into the ground around, some kind of bad experience with that, where the thorpe Kynefrid comes from was. I pass a few suggestions to Dove, hypocaust floors and showers near the lab space, before I get
entirely wound up in holding on to the wholeness of the image. Dove is doing something to the walls, I can’t quite tell what.

Wake’s been walking a circle, sunwise, all the way around the outside, one hand trailing on Kynefrid’s shoring-enchantment. Wake goes round like this more than once, I don’t know how many times, chanting. We’re not creating anything substantial enough to impede Wake — hah!
— so the walk and the chant keeps going as walls and floors and stairs shudder and flow into something like a fixed appearance.

We’re all standing in the middle, I can hear, from closer than it seems, Wake saying “Ready?” Everyone’s fine with me holding the house image, I’ve got it, transfer seems rash, and Wake asks everybody individually. Dove takes my left hand, then Zora my right, then we’re
all standing in a pentagon shape holding hands around Wake. There’s a little tweak from Dove somewhere in the structure, and Wake starts talking. I have no certain idea it’s talking, words, meaningful speech, but it sounds like language. Not a language I know, it’s not obviously actually a human thing, it sounds like someone trying to whistle flames while breathing math.

Everything goes white.
It’s hot, it’s impossibly hot; I don’t hurt, there isn’t any pain, it’s not safe but it’s not malice, either, there’s a feeling like standing near the edge of a precipice to it, don’t get into the bad energy state where you’re falling and you’re fine. The fire elemental, I don’t know anything about fire elementals but if you’re thinking of anything simian made of flames you’re utterly wrong, this
is all dots and giggling and whirling wild mind.

Trying to hold the house-shape as though it were immutable won’t, can’t, work, and Wake did say collaboration. I don’t try to explain anything in terms of ‘otherwise we would be cold’ or ‘otherwise we would be wet’, I try to get it into elegance and pride and appropriate containment of the rituals of learning.

Look at it the right way, and that’s
what eating and washing and having a place to stash your spare socks is; we’re here to learn and if we don’t do those other things we won’t learn well at all.

Explaining the learning catches in more than one spot, and then I realize it’s not something I can explain as facts, the elemental is from somewhere where there are no facts that aren’t immediately obvious. Everything else is fluid and willed.
So I tell it we’re trying to learn to be ourselves and each other at the same time, that it’s a thinking dance in slow time out of the shapes of flesh.

That works. Departing constraint makes complete sense, that you might need to learn how to do it makes complete sense, too.

There’s a grand, utter, ornate failure of geometry, and I’m blinking out a window. From the angle of the trees, I’m not
at the bottom of the excavation anymore.

We’re all still holding hands. There’s a cool breeze.

“Are you intact?” Dove says that out loud, and with a lot more emotion underneath in my head.

I nod. “That was really strange, but it wasn’t worse than scary.”

Dove’s looking doubtful. Zora’s eyes are huge, and Kynefrid is looking at me over Wake like I might explode.

“Where did you
go
?” says Chloris.

“Data points beyond Halt’s doses,” Wake says, sounding completely pleased.

Then Wake looks up and smiles like the soul of mercy.

The whole thirty-metre sweep of the domed ceiling, the unbroken curve of the inside of the roof up to the crystalline spike of a top-light, is…Enamelled? Inlaid? Wrought? I have no idea what it is, but it’s peacock feathers, sixteen really huge ones and the colours glow
like the memory of fire. I wouldn’t assert they’re not emitting light.

The big low stretches of window to east and west and north are what we expected, that the roof extends a bit to the north, over the outside door, that was expected, too.

It’s nearly sunset. What?

“Windows tomorrow,” says Wake.

Making glass with Blossom feels different than making glass with Halt, something beyond standing inside the Round House looking at the window openings instead of standing in a sand pit.

It’s probably just style.

Blossom’s scary, the same way any large amount of power in a small space is scary, it’s not really any different from being near a big set of water-driven gears or some road team
using a fifty-person focus to grind rock. It’s not a focused scary, not any more threatening than the big gears. Blossom ought to look about nineteen, it even works sometimes, but then you realize you’re looking at a self-composing, ongoing, open-ended enchantment, a single terrible purity of Power. I have to decide what kind of Independent to be, and here’s this apparently pleasant and sane person
who, when they were about my age, maybe Dove’s age, wanted to be this single awesomely terrible thing.

Halt’s, Halt’s not really scary. Halt’s mighty, the mightiest thing I’ve ever seen, Halt’s a scary shape, but I’m less and less sure it was the scary shape Halt wanted, rather than the shape Halt got. I’m not sure if any of the old ones ever got what they wanted, it almost couldn’t happen in
the Bad Old Days, even if I’ve only met two of them. We’re being handed a huge gift, and we’re not really equipped to recognize how huge.

I find I’ve taken Dove’s hand. It’s reassuring, it’s reassuring even with Dove still worried about me, not much, but some, and even with Dove’s memory commenting on just what Blossom can do. I don’t begin to understand what happened to that demon.

Zora takes
a couple steps away from us. Dove looks at Zora, quizzical. Zora looks right back. “It’s not especially safe when you two start sharing the brain.”

Chloris looks baffled, in the way someone who knows they’ve missed something does. Kynefrid looks baffled in the way you do when you aren’t sure you heard that right.

“Quicker than talking,” Dove says, quite entirely composed.

“Quieter, too,” Blossom
says, with all good humour.

“We’re making windows, so there are three problems. One is you want your windows to be entirely flat, so they don’t distort what you see through them. Two is that you are going to need some kind of frame, and what you can make affects how thick you want the glass to be. Three is that glass isn’t a good insulator; you would like your windows not to leak heat or coolth
nor run condensation, depending on what time of year it is.

“The fourth, local, problem, is that those — ” Blossom waves at the window openings — “aren’t flat.”

The roof, one continuous shallow dome, is supported on walls that rise two and a half metres above the level of this top floor, and an average of about one and a half above the level of the ground. There are gaps in the walls two metres
high for nearly all the northern curve except for the door-pillars and the empty doorway, and for eight metres each to east and west; that’s the windows. The floor is level with the sod around the door to the north, there’s a dip to clear the windows to east and west, and the back quarter, the whole south wall, the edge of the roof is level with the hill. That’s not quite what the shape of the hill
looked like before the house went up, there’s a new back-curve to the surviving edges of what was the three-metre clifflet, so the southern ends of the east and west windows don’t wind up buried.

Not buried is good, but the walls are still in the curve of a circle, and we’re going to have to deal with that somehow, making the windows.

The roof isn’t precisely a circle, or if it is it’s larger
than the walls; there’s a five-metre overhang over the door, curving back to no overhang just past the southern ends of the east and west windows. Of course, the walls could be off-round instead; judging a thirty-metre round structure for roundness from the inside isn’t something I have a lot of practice with, but I doubt it’s easy.

Going to be a trick getting the sod back on. With the overhang,
we’ve got more roof than there was hill when we lifted the sod away from the excavation.

“Perhaps fifth is that we have no idea what the walls are made of?” Kynefrid sounds, not diffident, like it’s a real question because maybe every sorcerer worthy of the name knows how to make glue that will stick anything to anything for a thousand years.

We’re all clumped up, fairly close to the doorway.
It makes it a little easier to not have your attention vanish into that amazing ceiling.

Blossom’s eyes narrow. One bare hand goes on a door post. Then three steps to the broad sill, it looks like two and a half metres, of the window opening, and then sinking down to put the same hand on the floor.

“Have you looked at the rest of it?” Blossom sounds odd.

There are two noes and four head-shakes.
I have one of the noes.

“Change of plan,” Blossom says, still cheerful. “Learning how to make a light.”

We troop outside; light is just heat, Blossom says, only moving faster, but let’s not risk a heat-bloom inside, or where it’s pointed at anyone. Remember how when something is hot, it glows? That’s the same thing, there’s enough intensity of heat that it’s moved up into the energy levels where
eyes will detect the glow as light.

So we line up in the mist, facing east, and are instructed to point our efforts at making a light up and away.

The way Blossom is talking, this is a straight Power-to-light thing, you summon up some Power and you emit it as light, just as you would with heat to heat something up.

That might be how the others have been heating things up; I’ve been thinking of
heat as the average motion of the atoms, and kinda stirring with the Power to get them moving. Which makes having no atoms, going straight to photons, difficult. Photons are just energy, there’s no actual substance there; if you pull all the energy out of a photon it goes away. Getting the Power, which isn’t itself material, to just become material, well, I know it’s possible, people do it, but I’m
not finding a
how
you do it lying around in my brain.

Still, there’s a lot of air, and while heating any amount of air white-hot seems implausible as a useful thing to do, heat is just motion, school made an analogy with a harp string. Which disgusted all the mandolin players who had never seen an actual harp. So if I grab some air, a little bit, a litre or two, and make an illusory mirror around
the pointed-at-me end, I should be able to hold the stuff in the air, the nitrogen and the oxygen and the water and all the tiny amounts of everything else, fixed, not let them move, because otherwise I’ll get hot air mixing with all the other air, and shove enough of the Power in to get a glow out of my analogy to really tiny harp strings.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, red light, a
beam
of red light,
narrow as thread and sparkling its way through the mist. Well, red is the first colour things glow when you heat them. Orange, yellow, green, and it’s going blue in an amazing sphere of sparkles off the mist when Blossom says “Edgar, stop.”

The beam of light doesn’t fall back down to red, it just goes out when I stop adding Power to it. I keep the mirror, and my grip on the air. It’s amazing what
rock moving will do toward teaching the novice sorcerer to not just let go of a working.

I can feel Blossom metaphysically poking at my grip on the air, at the shape of the mirror.

“That,” Blossom says in a very dry tone, “was tuneable coherent light. Coherent light is traditionally a multi-person laboratory exercise in the fifth or sixth year of study.”

“Couldn’t figure out how to go straight
from the Power to photons.”

“You do heat injection by stuff-stirring?” Blossom’s really very good at not sounding judgemental; I feel like an incompetent idiot anyway, and nod.

“Most of the time how you make heat, or light, is inherently obvious. If it’s not, there are — ” I can feel the indicating chin lift — “workarounds, but the breakthrough insight isn’t guaranteed.”

“Can you turn the coherent
light thing off?” There’s a, perfectly audible in my head, unspoken
with no bang?
following after this question from Dove. From the shifting feet noises, everybody else got the implication just fine.

I let go of the air, then the mirror. Let go of the air. Perfectly obvious non-metaphorical meaning that involves no valves or tanks or plumbing.

Dove grabs my hand, and for a second it really is
one, well, it can’t be one meat-brain, it’s like there was one metaphysical brain for a second, and when there are two again something got installed in the section of metaphysical brain that’s specifically mine.

That’s…ridiculously simple. I wave my free, right, hand around. Red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet, no problem. Then back down, then bright white, then soft white.

Zora claps, once, Chloris
looks happy, and Kynefrid’s face sort of slumps into a smile.

Blossom’s lips don’t so much as twitch, visible fleshly face entirely the image of friendly equanimity. Ever been smirked at by a single terrible purity of Power? Even by recent standards, it’s a weird experience.

I look over at Dove. “Thanks.”

“Can’t have you slicing up whatever might be in the darkness.”

Slicing?

Blossom, rather than
Dove, hands me,
through
Dove somehow, an image of what looks like a whole Line battalion. They’re, mine was a thread, this looks like it’s bigger than the sewer pipe we’ve been making, it’s green, and fifteen kilometres away a mountain is catching fire.
You were laudably cautious about energy levels,
Blossom’s voice comes into my head.
And with all this mist, you’d have had to push it really hard
to light anything on fire. Or
 — another image, much smaller, tiny ornate letters flashing into metal — 
slice anything up
.

My feet are actually on the stairs before I’m paying any actual attention again. Logic might be a way to go wrong with confidence; magic seems more and more like a way to make the world fragile. I’m still holding Dove’s hand. Dove’s not making anything of it, and I don’t want
to. We really don’t know what’s down there.

The next floor down, there’s nothing like a railing or an enclosing wall for the stairs, but they’re two-metres-fifty wide and have deep treads and shallow risers and run us straight out on to a floor apparently made of sliced-up rock tiles half a metre square. They’d look blacker if they were polished, it’s a faintly rough surface, like it’s been fine
sawn. The tiles have tiny narrow completely black lines between them. Grout? No, it’s metal.

Kynefrid has one tile up, floating, and is setting it down to one side so there’s room to shine a light underneath. “Forty centimetres of hypocaust, on some kind of metal arch framing.” Kynefrid sounds impressed. The metal arches are a surprising deep evening blue.

The floor the stairs came down through
seemed like it was about a metre thick.

“The metal’s titanium,” Blossom says, contemplatively. “You may have lucked into high-titanium gabbro.”

“Gabbro?” Chloris.

“Basalt when it doesn’t reach the surface. This — ” Blossom’s hand-wave floods the room with light, to a completeness and depth none of us are managing — “floor is classic gabbro, made into tiles.”

There are sixteen big blocks of something,
a metre wide and half a metre deep and extending maybe two metres of increasingly tapered length into the room, up under the ceiling. I can’t believe they’re holding floor beams up, who would make all the beams meet in the middle?

Blossom is looking at the ceiling. “Tensioned. There are cables in there.”

“More titanium?” Dove, sounding unsurprised.

Blossom’s head shakes. “Carbon. Diamond, almost.
About a hundred times stronger. You put the compressively strong rock in compression with tension in the cables, you get a very rigid, very strong floor. You could have Eustace do jumping exercises upstairs and you’d never even hear it down here.”

About then, Chloris notices the ceiling, and all of us, Blossom too, wind up lying on the floor with our heads as close to the centre as we can get
without bumping into each other. Blossom’s managing a sort of diffuse twilight.

The ceiling is stars; stylized, a little, but with the real colour tints and relative positions, it’s the autumn sky over Westcreek, on a background of evening blue so deep it seems to have more depth and more blackness than the actual night sky. There are…yeah, it’s millions, I can float a little half-square-metre
frame illusion up to the ceiling and count and I’m getting far more than a thousand in two places. Most of the stars are tiny glittering pinpoints, but still. The more you look the more depth it gets, the more stars, like the fall of night when the sun’s just down only with more stars than regular eyes can hope to see.

It’s insanely gorgeous. I can’t begin to imagine how long it would take people
to make just that many little shining metal stars if they had to do it with molds and hammers and polish.

“I can’t say for sure, not out of my head, but I think that’s the real position of everything from yesterday.” Blossom sounds impressed. “Did anyone say anything about stars in the model-house you communicated to the fire elemental?”

“I wanted easy to clean.” Chloris sounds a bit stunned.

“I said something about nice ceilings.” Zora isn’t usually that quiet. “Nice, not…impossibly beautiful.”

Blossom sits up, turns half around. The light goes from dim to bright, and a band of brightness runs around the wall under the ceiling. The top half-metre or so of wall, safe from even Creek shoulders, heads, the ceiling’s three metres off the floor, is polished mirror-flat.

“All the cornices,
or whatever they’re supposed to be called, have lamp niches.” Kynefrid’s impressed. “Point the lights at the wall, and you get diffuse light everywhere.”

“Are we really going to have to put a privy and a bathroom down here?” Zora, sounding troubled. “It’s nearly too nice to walk through, never mind
use
for anything.”

“A bunch of privies and a big bathroom, you could get fifty people on these
two floors.” Chloris, sounding even more troubled. “Just the five of us here is, is, it’s hard to see how it’s not claiming we’re special.”