A Succession of Bad Days (30 page)

Zora’s approach is, well, taking life away. Not like stealing it into a jar like a story, though for all I know that was really the style in the Bad Old Days, it’s like a single sharp jerk and the aliveness is outside the thing, dissolving into disassociated metaphor.

Dove, the first time took close to ten minutes, complete with, for me, an odd sensation, Dove running through all the possible
kinds of fire. My half of the brain isn’t much full of fire, but Dove’s metaphysical self reaches toward an arrangement of flames. Dove’s list of possible sorts of fire, well, ten minutes and that was going through it quickly. Fire spreads, though, fire isn’t what you want over a wide area, not even tiny fire.

Then there was a smile, and the raw spring wind coiled away from the warmth of it. Wake’s
head came up, cautious. Dove had reached out, and the metabolism of each and every individual of a tree-devouring beetle on that orchard-island ceased, its chemistry crashed into low-energy disorganization, heterogenous slop instead of living cells.

“Did you just now devise that?” Wake had said, and Dove had nodded, almost shy and still smiling.

My first try was a plant, some kind of weed with
‘choke’ in the name, apparently one of the ones that wraps around your neck, rather than poisons you if you eat the tempting berries. I’d been able to take the sense of it from Zora without difficulty, and finding it was easy, the sense of it was there on the orchard island, and then I had no idea what to do. It’s all metaphor, really, the Power works off whatever mix of perception and imagination
you can manage to get to correspond with what’s really there, and I’d remembered the sensation of the spiky limb-things in the hospital at Headwaters. So I’d reached out with a thousand thousand ghostly narrow limbs, each with a single claw, and plucked the life out of all the Longthorn Choke-Vine on the island, seed and stem together.

Wake had suggested, tactfully, that I might want to try the
next one differently, by which Wake meant that Wake wasn’t shuddering, and Dove wasn’t shuddering — Dove had grinned — but everyone else on the boat was going to need ten minutes to set aside their shaking fear of death. “More like being torn to pieces very, very slowly,” Chloris had said, strongly disapproving.

My second try was the spark-mouse. Which is a critter, and really isn’t at fault for
its existence. I’m trying to avoid the same sort of shudder-response, it was hard to avoid the sense that
Wake
had wanted to shudder, which was both tough to credit and easy to want to avoid doing again. So I get the full sense from Dove this time, Zora and Chloris are linked in, setting the area and helping push, and think
oh, of course
and reach out and pop all the spark mice off their history
of descent, not so much killing them as rendering them abruptly never to have lived.

When my perceptions fade back into the sunlight, Wake looks like indecision between laughter and hair-tearing. It’s still a benevolent look, but Wake’s a tiny bit wide of eye about it.

“All the shadows grew teeth,” Zora says. “
Interested
teeth. Teeth with
eyes
.”

Wake nods.

“A succinct description.”

Which is why
I don’t do any of the killing after that. Dove comes up with a way to turn beetles into little waxy statues birds will eat, eat and be nourished by, Chloris starts singing, half-crooning, things that sound like lullabies, and Zora develops a determination to get everything that isn’t actually the weed, in the weed, through the process alive so the weeds will rot faster.

I spend the trip trying
to push my perception out further than the sixteen kilometres or so that seems to be the present limit, handing sense of specimens into the link between us, and providing push. After the first morning we’ve stopped standing on the cabin roof, and I spend a lot of time doing a perhaps unnecessary amount of leaning on Dove, too. There are fitted benches up in the bow, Dove and I get one side, Chloris
and Zora get the other, and Wake perches on some boat-thing in the centre of the deck. Not sure if Wake is looking more pleased or benevolent by the end of the trip.

It’s a day up to the first orchard-island, a day down to Westcreek Town, another day down to the ‘limit of agricultural settlement’, a place called Longbarns, and a fourth, quiet, day back. Wake quizzes us about mud, coming back.

The boat crew, we’re careful to all say thank you, and
not
in incidental eerie unison, spend a couple whole days linked up and working and we do that a lot, they’re polite, but I can tell they’re not sad to have us further away.

Of course that’s why we had Wake with us. Halt wouldn’t have helped their state of mind at all. Wake nods at me.
Much though they may be used to sorcerous practitioners.

“That was excellently done,” Wake says, waving us entirely clean before sending us to dinner. We got a cooked dinner in Westcreek town night before last, but otherwise it’s been hard cheese and hardtack and strange pickles on the trip.

“Anybody hungrier than usual?” Dove asks, as we’re sitting down, and we all shake our heads.

“That was pretty easy,” Chloris says, and sighs.

“That,” Halt says over
a click of needles, “was two décades of hard work for some hundreds, weeding with careful attention and intricate foci.”

Halt looks to have been sitting at the end of our table for a geologic age. Wasn’t there when I set my plates down.

Chloris’ face goes
oh
but no sound comes out. I feel pretty much the same way.

That was a lot easier than moving dirt
Zora doesn’t quite say out loud.

Halt nods,
looking entirely benign. “So it should be, doing but one thing each.”

“Collective sorcery is working?” Dove says this as an actual question only because Dove doesn’t know what Halt was expecting.

Halt nods. “Excellently well. Block’s style forbids thought. Bad for many things, but it suits all of you for Power-raising.”

Wake didn’t expect us to be doing much more than ten or twenty hectares at
a time, wasn’t sure we’d be able to do that whole ten-hectare island to start with. It could have been a much longer trip. We were doing fifteen thousand hectares at a time, and I still think the limit was perception.

“Work on your perception,” Halt says with a twinkle, mostly to me, and a continued contented click of knitting needles. “Though we will start that small, and close. Distant perception
rests on lack of doubt.”

“We can see further if we’re sure what we’re seeing?” Zora, wanting to be sure.

Halt nods.

Not any hungrier than normal is still a three-plate dinner. Some hundreds, call it two, Halt might mean five, but call it two, two décades, four hundred décades work between the four of us is a hundred décades each, three year’s work, nearly.

Somewhere inside, the three plate dinner
stops bothering me, real appetite or not. Dikes and dams and ditches are real work, but not, and I know this doesn’t entirely make factual sense, not like weeding is. Getting weeding to work is where having food starts. The drainage is having
more
food, but you could get that perfect and still be doomed by bad weeding.

“Nobody else can weed like that.” Chloris, finding a little more tension to
release from shoulders and neck. Doesn’t sound doubtful, exactly. More like it would be too good to be true.

“Four sufficing the task is a small surprise,” Halt says. “But you are a sturdy lot.”

Sturdier than we were; we’re all looking back at a searching gaze from Halt.

“You have talked, and made decisions, not shrugged and declared you would think about it later?” We know, I know, Dove knows,
we agree that Zora and Chloris know, Halt is talking about linking up to do magic.

“Yes, Halt.” Incidental eerie utter unison, you can’t tell it’s four people speaking. Heads turn at other tables, wondering who just spoke.

Halt can’t, really can’t, look benevolent. It might work on low-talent people, I don’t know, Halt tries, you can tell it’s meant to look benevolent, but the spider gets
interested
, it leans forward almost into general visibility, something you could see with photons.

If the spider moves forward, the thing behind the spider does, too, and by now Zora and Chloris can borrow enough of my perception to be sure the thing behind the spider is there, but not a whole lot more than that. Dove pats Zora’s hand, Dove’s inside my perceptions, just like I’m inside Dove’s, you can do
a lot with extra dimensions, so seeing the thing behind the spider isn’t sending Dove mad. You know how if you see a completely normal tree or a big rosebush or a raspberry thicket, something like that, something familiar, from a funny angle or in strange light or as shadows on a wall, and suddenly you don’t recognize it and it seems threatening? Same thing, only backwards. It probably
should
seem threatening, but it just doesn’t. It’s Halt.

Halt nods. “Good. You are well along, now, it would be work to stop.”

“Halt?” Chloris sounds a bit hesitant.

Halt’s head tips,
yes
?

“Why did you think this,” there’s a hand motion, “this style of Power use, would work?”

Halt positively beams. “Blossom and Grue not being much evidence?”

Chloris nods. I nod, too. Not any more than Dove and I are
evidence, that’s consonance, not working together and the external manipulation of the Power.

“A very long time ago — ” before at least one of the times Halt got bound under the earth, I think this means — “ there were six siblings, who did something very much like your linking together. They came to a terrible end, but not because of their technique with the Power.”

Halt’s glasses get nudged
up a little before Halt looks straight at Chloris. “Grue and Blossom
are
evidence, you four are evidence. Weeding fifteen thousand hectares at once has been done. Four apprentices weeding any thousand hectares once had not. Fifteen thousand, with a twelve-weed average, twenty-four and twenty-six times, one day and the next day? That’s new in the world, girl.”

I can’t make illusions stick to the
page yet, none of us can, but they’ll linger long enough to do quick figuring on the table. If you’re counting what we applied the Power to, each time, even if it was often the same dirt, that was nine million hectares.

Don’t think I know strong enough language.
Dove
doesn’t know strong enough language.

Halt nods at me. “You’ll do it again, different list, in eighteen days.”

Different list, because
different weeds, later in the spring.

“After that, we’ll all be going for a trip in a swamp.”

“All?” Dove says.

“All the students, all the teachers,” Halt says, smiling. “A pleasant excursion, possible since you were all so quick with shape-shifting.” Otherwise Grue would have got the short straw and stayed with us, I think.

“You might wish to put some thought toward travel in the swamp.” Halt
beams at us. The
it’s going to be horribly wet and unpleasant and involve leeches if you don’t
goes unsaid in some technical sense involving sound. It comes through with bell-like clarity all the same.

“Halt?” Zora, who is looking much more nervous than usual for asking Halt things.

“Yes, Zora?”

“What happened to the other people in Grue and Blossom’s class?”

“Timidity. Not theirs, the teaching-committee’s,
insisting on both techniques. They could do what you do, raising much more Power than their flesh might sustain, but they also learnt the old habits of control. In extremity, the more intuitive internal use failed.”

“Cooked themselves.” Dove says it sadly, and quietly, and Halt nods.

“Blossom was two years without eyes and an arm, after.” Everyone winces.

“Blossom did entirely save Grue, and
eventually Blossom.” Halt looks at us, gently, Halt can do gently. “You’ve all been quick, but we should very much like not to have to teach you how to grow your eyes back.”

Halt smiles, terribly.

“It itches.”

“Do illusions float?” Zora asks this walking up from Block’s class, the second day after we get back from weeding.

Yesterday was book-stuff after Block’s class, teachers being cautious, no matter how tired we don’t feel. We’re drifting out of mud and source rocks into other sorts of chemistry. If I only count the Commonweal, Wake’s had five hundred years to eat books. Not counting the
previous thousand years, given a continued preference for writing on clay tablets, seems deeply stupid. And that’s one teacher.

Figure you ever get
finished
being a sorcerer?

My physical hands don’t twitch, I’m getting better at this. Dove gets the idea of thrown up hands and smiles at me.

“They can,” Blossom says. “Thinking of doing boats with a binding?”

Zora nods.

“Bindings like that are small
magic, but still magic. Lots of things out there that attack magic.” Blossom says this as a fact, not as a reason not to try illusory boats.

“And we’re going into a swamp.” Dove is cheerful about it. I can’t manage cheer, swamps are rough places, with extra things inclined to attack. Power, people, anything that looks plausibly digestible, things that exhibit movement, reflections on the water,
it’s a very long list.

Lots of sorcerers in the Bad Old Days seem to have worried excessively about escaped slaves hiding in swamps, or being snuck up on by frog warriors, or something. Around Wending, there were three distinct species of venomous duck, two with rending teeth so they could eat stuff too big to swallow in one go. Westcreek has a species of enormous diving duck, too big to fly,
that’s venomous and breathes fire. I suppose the fire helps them deal with the leeches. They’re certainly prosperous enough; during the winter there were rafts of them, fifty and a hundred a time, in the turning basin at the end of the West-East Canal. Everyone local considers them sort of half-lucky, despite the occasional worry about kids getting too close. “Keeps the swans off,” everyone says,
in judicious, on-the-balance-of-consideration sorts of tones.

Anything like that with a tendency to swarm magic, it’d be inconvenient. Maybe fatal for us, if something venomous or otherwise abruptly deadly gets through before the teachers get it suppressed.

“Everybody’s short of canoes,” Chloris says. “All those surveyors in the Folded Hills.”

“I have no desire to take a flatboat through a swamp.”
Dove says it with an unvoiced
again
. I get some mental images, involving equal proportions of a flatboat, a bunch of Creek youths, mud, and suffering. “No reason we can’t make some canoes.”

“Other than not knowing how?” Chloris is only a little doubtful. We’ve managed a lot of stuff where we didn’t know how.

“Make the illusion, paddle it, get it right, use it as a template for a titanium one.
Or aluminium, but I think titanium’s sturdier.” Dove’s been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about leeches.

“No zinc or magnesium on hand,” Blossom says. “Pure aluminium’s too soft, you can make it tough enough, but we’d have to go mine zinc. We’ve got the vanadium and the aluminium, so the alloy choices are better with titanium.”

“Is aluminium good for anything but making corundum?” Zora
asks, quite cheerful.

“Roof tile, guttering, anything to spread heat, some cast machine parts. It’s soft, but water doesn’t wear on it much. Any kind of outdoor structure, you can make a really good rose trellis.” Blossom isn’t particularly focused on the question.

“Can all of you swim?” Blossom still sounds a bit
abstract
. I’m getting a strange sharp smell across my vision, too. I doubt there
are any actual metal flowers, but that’s what I’m thinking about.

“Need to go write something down?” Dove’s voice is light, but the concern is very real.

Blossom makes a gesture. I have no idea what it means; Dove understands it completely. It’s a strange feeling.

“We can stick to illusions and caution until we get the shape right. Won’t shift an ingot until you’re back.” Dove says this in cheerful
practical tones, more than usual.

Blossom looks at each of us, and I nod, Dove makes a “Go, go,” hand wave, Chloris nods, and Zora says “We’ll be careful.”

Blossom says thanks and isn’t there. Just
gone
.

“You, you can’t gate somewhere with no gate?” Chloris finds not knowing how appalled it’s appropriate to be really annoying.

“Don’t think so,” Dove says. “Even the little water-gates are hard
to miss.”

The ponds are well and truly melted; ice all off, various bits of green doing their best along the verge, tiny shoots above the water all along the south bank. There was still ice on them when we left to go weeding. Still going to be really cold if anybody falls in.

The useful canoe size for travelling with is seven metres in length. That’s not even a question, it’s settled knowledge.
It’s also apparently the only thing any of the other three agree on about canoe design. We don’t know where we’re going or why, nothing about how long a trip or how much stuff we’ll need to bring. It takes close to half an hour before Dove says “Ed? Not much time paddling?”

“Wending was about a kilometre upstream from the place the Dread River started, everybody wanted to keep kids out of, and
off of, the river. So we did just enough boat and swimming stuff for school, a day and a half upstream.”

Oh. Right. Not something they’d necessarily know.

“Once you were on where the river turns into the Dread River, you’re never seen again. The boundary moved, some, it wasn’t always the exact same distance from the Iron Bridge. Everybody was a bit nervous about it.” That being the polite way
to say ‘unreasonably terrified’. Got a lot worse after the bridge fell, and we thought for a while the Line could hold the hell-things. Kids didn’t go on the water and boat crews didn’t swagger about how they did.

I’m surprised you got out.

Folks south of town didn’t.

That’s a hug, not a hair-ruffle, and neither Zora nor Chloris is looking the least displeased about the undertone.

Chloris hands
me the writing tablet. “You get to count votes.”

It’s about an hour later that I realize that the intensity of the not-an-argument rests on the prospect of appearing in public in a canoe of your own, their own, design. That’s apparently a very significant thing to do, in terms of that Creek indirect social authority. You’re claiming you’ve got something
better
, and there’s a real limit to how
far making the canoe out of titanium will get them with that, it has to be near-optimal for a canoe made out of the new material.

After a couple of hours, a lot of vote-counting, and a great many full-scale illusions, I ask if I’ve got that right.

Apparently I do.

Halt’s there at dinner. I don’t know why I hand Halt the tablet before I sit down, but it was the right thing to do. Anything Halt
will stop knitting for is important. There are a couple of “Hrmm,” noises and a few, not really illusions, illusory, but you can see through them, they don’t look like a canoe, appear while Halt is reading.

Wake wanders back up to the Round House with us after lunch the next day, or at least to the pond. Wake has some strong opinions about something called tumblehome and something else called
rocker, but is mostly worried about a combination of stiffness and reserve flotation. I don’t worry about that, I’ve got yesterday’s list of votes to turn back into one illusion, one held in enough parts that I can change individual things.

Wake’s had doings with metal boats before, the folks who brought Wake over the equatorial ocean used them. Theirs were much larger than a canoe, riveted iron
and larger than the cargo-barges used in the Creeks, but they were always concerned with being sure to have enough air trapped in the hull that it would keep floating, even when something unpleasant might have created a hole. The illusory model acquires air tanks, sealed ones, stuffed up in the narrow parts of bow and stern. That’s the reserve flotation. Stiffness is tougher; there’s an almost
snarly discussion, and the illusion acquires a single deep keel, thumb-thick until it tapers outside the double bottom, the double bottom on both sides of the keel, separately filled with a very broad honeycomb of support around empty spaces. You could never make it without the Power, getting the taper and the load-spreading curves on the top and bottom of the honeycomb spacer wouldn’t work even if
you didn’t have to put it between two seamless metal sheets.

“Metal is cold,” Wake says. “Un-wearing. Kneeling pads, something for the seat rails, we’ll want both.”

“Not in titanium,” Dove says, looking at the illusion and smiling.

Dove holds a hand out, thumb up. Chloris does the same. Zora passes over big anchored loose rings at the bow and stern, ten centimetres across, and smaller bulges,
three centimetres by one or so, one per metre down the inside of the top wales. Dove and Chloris’ thumbs stay up; Dove is looking rueful. Zora puts one thumb up. Wake nods. I bind the shape into one of the aluminium plant tags Chloris made, right about the time we got slushy snow. Chloris admits there are way too many for this year, or possibly the next ten. They weigh nothing, a couple thousand to
the kilogramme, and make excellent targets for stuffing a minor binding into. Partially because you can tear them in half and light them on fire if you get it wrong, but partially because they don’t care about wind and rain or regular heat.

The rest of the day goes to paddling; everybody but me has a very clear notion of what a paddle should be like, and produces one. Wake extracts a material
one, wood, some dark hardwood I don’t know, from the battered and nondescript satchel Wake always carries. As a paddle, it’s wider and shorter than what the others are producing, and it’s got a rawhide wrapping on parts of the shaft. I’ve seen baker’s peels that looked like it. Halt’s knitting bag, Blossom’s and Grue’s saddle-cases, something larger on the inside than the outside seems to be a standard
Independent thing. I don’t find the canoe hard to paddle, after Dove explains paddle sizing and I conjure myself one. That’s about all I can say. Everyone else is pleased, even with no kneeling pads. Wake takes some careful measurements with a length of string and knots, and asserts a responsibility for the kneeling pads.

We get Wake again the next day; Blossom, Blossom Wake describes as having
been “stricken with inspiration,” which is something I don’t want to think about.

Copying the illusion in actual metal, well, that takes three tries for the first one. No titanium fires. Complex shapes, shapes that have an inside and an outside and layers, it’s tougher than I thought it would be. Then we realize we’ve made the mooring rings as solid pieces, they don’t lie flat, and have to melt
that one back to an ingot.

Try four works, careful removal of oxides and all. We get five more made before dinner time. Only need four for the trip, eight people, four canoes, but there is a shortage and both Dove and Chloris know people they think are adventurous enough to try a metal boat made by sorcerers. Metal boats right on fifty-five kilos in weight. I’m told this is good for a seven-metre
canoe, I still don’t want to carry one, though I suppose it’ll be easier than I expect it to be, now, if I have to.

Easiest way to take the canoes down to Westcreek is to float them, the ponds run off to a stream that feeds into the West Wetcreek above Westcreek Town. Wake takes one, Zora and Chloris take one, Dove and I take one. The other three we can bring tomorrow. It’s pretty easy, none of
the bridges are low enough that anybody has to duck and the water’s high enough that it’s much closer to having to steer than actually paddle.

There are remarks. Dove’s careful not to seem pleased about them, Chloris
isn’t
pleased about them, Zora’s ignoring them, and Wake doesn’t have to try to seem anything other than pleased.

Wake didn’t do it, just made sure we didn’t catch fire.

So Wake’s
allowed an obvious good opinion of the work?

As long as it goes unsaid.
Dove finds my bafflement at the Creek social rules amusing.

Chloris isn’t pleased.

Chloris doesn’t speak barge-crew, it sounds like accusations of laziness. It’s admiration for cleverness. Wouldn’t be if you were doing gean-work.

Which is what Chloris did, before.

Docking, pulling up to a sheer wall with bollards and ladders,
ought to be tricky, not something we did in school and that was awhile ago. Dove knows what I should do, I can borrow how from Dove’s memory, translating that into something someone with my reach can do isn’t hard, I’m getting pretty good at that, and somewhere in there we stop being entirely separate people. That’s probably overkill, but I suppose it matters that the canoes look handy.

That you
look like you know what you’re doing.
The ‘Idiot’ lurks under anything Dove’s contribution to us is going to come right out and say on the water.

The water’s high in the West Wetcreek, too, still spring, there’s a lot of snow melting in the high places to the north. So getting out is easy, and getting the canoe out of the water’s nearly as easy.

I wind up carrying it, it’s not far to the boat
shed our host-gean has a half-interest in, and it’s a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. Ridiculously much easier. Didn’t notice Block’s classes were having that much of an effect, that the new shape had.

Dove’s acquaintance, Pallas, is in the boathouse. Dove’s mention of canoe availability leaves Pallas torn between glee and a distrust of novelty. Pallas and a partner do maintenance
surveys on waterways, work for the Lug-gesith, and have been sharing a canoe with another survey team. Dove watches Pallas reduce to paralytic indecision before saying “There isn’t any magic
in
it.”

“None whatsoever,” Wake confirms from where Wake and the boathouse clerk have been discussing getting some kneeling pads made. The translation from string to centimetres is going far more smoothly
on Wake’s side of the conversation.