A Succession of Bad Days (32 page)

Blossom gets a considering look and asks Chloris if any of Chloris’ relatives work at the shot shop.

“My cousin Mel does. Mother’s mother’s
younger sister’s second daughter’s third child. Melantha.” Chloris says this without looking up, or even appearing to notice.

Dove gets a small smile.
Chloris’ stopped worrying that we’re not all Creeks,
drifts into my head.
Not before time.

Blossom notes that Chloris’ cousin Mel is one of the neatest hands with a pantograph Blossom’s ever seen or heard tell of, and is currently copying out something
sixteen centimetres square when Blossom gave it over a metre sixty on a side, and there are nine different inks involved, four of which are black.

The idea of that makes Chloris shudder, but it doesn’t get anything smudged. We get it working, the grease smokes, but we’ve got the pattern right. Blossom looks at it, nods, notes that it’s pretty simple and robust is good, so we do the real thing
in lines of gold and platinum set into corundum turned black with magnesium and aluminium. Thick lines, three millimetres wide and five deep, we have more than enough gold from the Round House hoard. The platinum comes from Line stocks, some goes into the battle-standards but Blossom has more than enough on hand and considers armour important. Then we add a layer of clear corundum on top, bound down
chemically in a hard vacuum. “Good for the next thousand years,” Blossom says.

Turning the patterns into live bindings, something with the Power in them, isn’t all that difficult. We can do those individually, but we link up. It’s easier, and it’s practice, because the focus-creation, call it a focus enchantment, it’s not, in some technical sense Blossom asks us to accept, we’re not up to understanding
the theory yet, it’s not easy theory, no one having devised a generally accepted other term is a hint about difficulty,
that
, the thing, the focus enchantment, does take all five of us. All five of us with Dove and me folded all the way into one person and everybody else, Blossom included, pushing hard. Dove’s part of us does the enchantment work, enchantment-like work, Blossom’s sort of metaphorically
looking over Dove’s shoulder but Dove does it.

We get the first one done, everybody drinks a couple litres of water, looks around at the smoking devastation in the blast pit, and tries not to look appalled when Blossom, cheerful as ever, reminds us that this involves a lot of the Power, Blossom told us it did, who was that saying ‘A lot’? Then we realize we’re going to be hopelessly late for dinner,
trudge back to the Round House, sluice off, do extensive damage to the snack food supply, and very nearly all fall asleep in the tub. Blossom spends the night, there’s what was Kynefrid’s room, and Grue’s away, patching up a weeding team that had a serious bad day with some sort of stinging insect.

I dream about complex shapes made of a thousand gleeful singing voices, every voice another variety
of fire.

I get told in the morning Dove dreamt of a vast dim ocean where the water was all the names for silence. Dove thought it was extremely restful.

Day after that is five more solid patterns, they’re pretty, the focus-patterns look like what an enchantment in a story is supposed to look like, swooping lines coloured gold and silver and dark glittering depth.

We can, just, do three of the
bindings in one day; that’s the ninth day. Dove remembered the day before to ask the refectory for a dinner we can take with us. There’s some tsking, but we get one, a generous one, there’s a half-kilo of pumpkin cake each and baked bacon-and-barley with cheese melted over it.

We do two more the tenth day. I don’t know how. Blossom looks seriously weary. I feel dead. Dove’s running on pure will,
which worries me; Dove has more willpower than strength of life, something Blossom points out to Dove in just those words. Chloris and Zora are wavering in and out, too exhausted to fall asleep and too sleepy to string one thought after another.

We got six armouring foci made for the tenth day.

We’ve surprised Blossom, entirely in a good way, and Blossom tells us so. Blossom expected to have to
get Grue involved, to have Power enough, expected that the warding parts of the thing were something we couldn’t do, we don’t really know how but Dove took the pattern Blossom provided and did it by rote.

Blossom also tells us that this was completely not how you’re supposed to do it, this was making raw Power replace planning, and why people thought the precursors of foci were useless for thousands
of years before the Wizard Laurel made the battle-standards, they couldn’t concentrate enough Power to make one that could produce a useful light, never mind anything complicated, and bindings are, comparatively, nearly absolutely, easy to do.

The armouring foci are, I didn’t expect this, maybe not completely, but significantly, easy to use. They need at least sixteen people linked up, thirty-two
is better, but they’re keyed, Blossom does some structured hand-waving and looks cute, which shouldn’t be possible, and says “Next year?” when we ask what keyed means, for the Line, Blossom just put that in the focus part of the working when writing out the structure for us. It will take a skilled person or two to do the work, but the files being fitted for armour can pile into the focus and power
their own armour-making, the battalion won’t need an enormous staff of armorers.

The eleventh day involves all twenty-four armorers and armorer’s apprentices making themselves armour, they’re mostly smiths, none of them stand in the Line in any sense, they’re not
in
the Line, even if they work for the Line-gesith, they shouldn’t need armour but as a means of convincing people the armour-foci are
safe this works well. The ease of the whole illusion-tweaking part of the process leads to a lot of appreciative comment. The comments turn profane the first time actual metal-forming happens, partially from the bright light — we’re still in a blast pit, it’s nothing like the same energy requirement as making the foci was but why take chances — and partially from how fast it is. The armorers look
at a full suit of armour and see décades of work, not an hour of thinking.

Day twelve involves us making the Captain a full suit, taking that down to the practice field and draping it over a big stake with a crossbar. A couple of dozen people, Wake’s one of them, get out throwing sticks and hurl spears at it from about fifty metres. None of them stick, Dove went for same weight and stronger, not
the same strength and lighter. The few dents, we’ve dug six neat blast pits at the edge of the practice field and brought the foci and the hundred-ish tonnes of carefully pre-alloyed metal ingots. It takes the senior armorer, ensconced in the first pit with the colour party linked up to push, maybe five minutes to have the dents out and another half hour to get the annealing and temper done over.
Good as new, in no figurative way.

“Thank you, Sergeant. You have been of service.” The Captain says that directly to Dove,
solely
to Dove.

Dove says “Sir,” and nods, once. Dove does more change of expression when someone says it might rain, but inside it’s like the whole of the world confused noon and midnight and glory.

There’s a tiny pause and “The Line’s thanks to you as well, Independent
Blossom, and to the Sergeant’s fellow students.”

We all bow, just a little. Independents bow, we’ve all been picking that up, when someone else might grip hands. Same idea as not pointing, I’m pretty sure. Incidental eerie unison, though I can tell Blossom’s going along with it, it’s not accidental for Blossom to be moving exactly with us. The Captain’s edges go really strange, not for long, it’s
too deep to be a flicker but like that. Probably why Blossom went along. Blossom detests the general nervousness about combining an Independent and a warrant of commission.

Thirteenth day is a book day in reverse, Blossom gets us to write up what we did, how we experienced it, helps us stick illusions of the enchantments to pages, stuff like that. It’s surprisingly easy to remember, but then it,
for me anyway it, all started in the metaphysical brain. Different kind of memory.

The fourteenth day, Grue picks us all up after lunch and says we might as well go work on our perceptions.

Grue walks fast.

I’d thought I was getting used to having to work to keep up, but I hadn’t been walking anywhere with Grue. Grue’s right between Chloris and Dove, height wise, taller than Zora, but more of the height is leg.

Well, more of Grue is leg, and I wouldn’t bet Grue needs to eat. We still do. We’re keeping up, but it’s work. Grue could be proceeding at a languid stroll, for all
you can tell by expression and remarks on the surroundings.

The Creeks are apparently fortunate, in that there are a great many non-invasive, non-food plants; can’t call them weeds, they’re not dangerous, they’re just not good for anything. Anything people, human-type people, want, anyway, for all we know unicorns love thistles or lily-of-the-morning, there are seeds and berries mice and birds
eat, it’s an actual food ecology, beside the human-maintained one. This is good, so far as Grue is concerned. A lot of places get one or two things that used to be weeds, that were and are intensely invasive but have lost the dangerous characteristics, usually because some poison that takes energy to make lowers their reproductive success, the ones you get the most of are the least poisonous. Keep
that up for a few dozen generations and they’re not really weeds anymore.

Still plenty invasive, being invasive does lead to there being more of them in the future, so you don’t get any kind of complexity, and you get hardly anything in the way of birds or animals or even insects, unless you get something that can eat the one thing you’ve got and then you get population booms and crashes. Years
when there’s nothing but one species of grasshopper thing, millions upon millions of them, trying to eat everything. The Creeks don’t get that, much of the Commonweal-as-was had stopped getting that, but the Creeks as a place hasn’t had the problem in at least a thousand years, probably, Grue says, more than five times that; there’s too much local diversity for the shorter time period to be likely.

We haven’t actually tried to sense anything with the Power yet, it’s all this fast walk and Grue pointing stuff out. We’re supposed to be headed about twelve kilometres south of Westcreek Town, on the west side of the West Wetcreek, where there’s a small marsh Grue likes. It’s a flood channel for a tributary stream, it should be full of water right now, and there’s a lot of diversity there.
Lots of diversity is just the thing for working on your perceptions.

Grue stops.

We’re going by, I don’t think it’s a thorpe, as such, it’s a big orchard, the trees look old, there’s a cluster of substantial buildings a hundred or so metres from the road, with low garden, some kind of herbs, probably flavouring, between the road and the buildings. Two old stone gateposts, they’ve got lichen, but
no gate. There’s a kid sort of slumped against one of the gateposts, they look maybe four, five, I have trouble telling. Creeks don’t get strong until they’re into their youth but the infants are still larger than anybody I grew up around.

Kid looks up, sees Grue, says “Can you help? It hurts,” in an utterly sad voice and sort of re-slumps. Grue takes actually fast steps, a blur, and sinks down
next to the kid. There’s a couple of odd purple marks on the kid’s hands, raised ones, and I’m inhaling along with the rest of us.

Grue smiles, completely friendly, and says “Nap time!” in a cheery voice. The kid’s slump goes utterly boneless.

Grue says something in the undertone to Zora, Zora moves up by Grue, and to Chloris, whose eyes close and you can feel Power reaching out.

Dove, Edgar,
I need a glass vessel, fifty centimetres inside diameter, a metre-twenty long, hemispherical ends beyond the metre-twenty, hard vacuum inside. These — 
a roll of something emerges from Grue’s saddle-case, floats at us, Dove grabs it — 
embed in the glass, there are instructions.

There are notes, clearly notes by and for Blossom, it’s Blossom’s thankfully neat handwriting. Whatever they are is a
reminder, not an explanation, but the rolls of metal mesh with enchantment-patterns stitched and soldered across them isn’t complicated as a physical object. Loop for the head, loop for the foot, top of the head dome, top of the foot dome, one patch for the middle bottom, it’s pretty coarse screening, getting it into the glass should go fine.

Vacuum?
Dove’s got a couple hundred kilos of silica
pulled out of dirt from the ditch. Reading instructions is my job, if we’re in a hurry like this.

Illusory mandrel, form the glass around it, make it go away?

No one else alive,
Chloris says, voice still and calm.
Not within a kilometre.

That’ll work.
Dove’s got the big blob of glass moving, it’s not the good stuff, no boron, we both try to find some right here but there just isn’t any, this is
near enough plain old quartz, really, shining hot. We shift it thirty metres down the road. No wards, Grue is very busy with something, you can feel the working, feel Zora doing support parts of it. Heartbeat again, maybe?

Another blob of dirt comes up, flies apart, shreds, melts. Holding the vacuum is going to take a lot of quartz. I’ve got the mandrel, got the metal spaced out from it, Dove
runs the molten glass over it, and we start tumbling it very slowly to keep it from sagging as it cools. Can’t cool it too fast, it’s still glass, the kinds of glass you can fast-quench to make it stronger need additives. Going to be ten minutes or so, Dove/we/I agree on that.

Ten minutes until it’s cool,
gets
Fifteen is soon enough,
from Grue, so we slow down a little. Not many good places to
dump heat, no water, with half a tonne of glass to cool down. Don’t want to make the air hot enough to start a fire. There’s enough trees back of the road ditch, enough grass and forb, that wouldn’t help at all.

We don’t, no fire, and it’s cool enough, so the illusion in the middle goes wherever bits of the Power go when you stop using them.

Got it?
from Grue,
Yes,
from Zora, as we float the glass
cylinder, completely empty now, over to Grue who waves
down
at a specific spot, so we do that, it’s round, it would roll. Chloris piles up some dirt to hold it, there’s a quick ripple and the ditch gets deeper and there’s a cradle for the cylinder.

Grue does something, there’s a couple big glass carboys out of the saddle case, bigger than the
opening
, I have no idea how that works. The contents
of those gurgles through the glass, little gates, I think, it feels like a gate.

There’s a horrible wet noise, a faint
urk
from Zora who doesn’t so much as flutter on the working, part of the working, Zora’s running. Grue’s arm pulls back out of the cylinder after putting the kid’s brain and eyes through the glass without disturbing either. No idea how, not a gate. Something complicated starts,
Grue’s applying Power to the enchantments in the metal mesh.

I’m hoping for four out of five,
drifts across the undertone, generally, from Grue. I think Zora asked a question.
Much better odds growing a body back than trying to cure late-stage wound-wedges.

Clothes, everything porous, out of it, float it into the buildings.
The leather outside of Grue’s saddle case comes off, all Grue’s clothes,
hair, there’s a couple of quick gestures and all
our
hair comes off.
Not worth dying over,
Grue says.
In a day or two you can shift it back.

We float it all over, small sad body included. Nobody knows where to put their apprentice-buttons, not at all porous and nothing we want to lose. Grue produces a bottle marked ‘Disinfectant’, and in they all go.

I have the full sense,
comes from Chloris,
still and quiet.

Inert, not dead,
comes from Grue, distracted. Something ferociously complex is happening with the enchantments in the cylinder, Zora’s getting pulled into that working on a ‘hold this’ and ’push there' level, and it’ll be a disaster if Zora’s imagination stops to count physical hands.

Dove, Edgar, NO OPEN FIRE, sterilize the buildings.
And then Grue’s attention is entirely back
on the cylinder.

Chloris’ attention is sweeping out and out, out past the first kilometre radius, out to sixteen, Dove and I don’t do much to push, we’re there as something to lean on, balance, this can come first, the buildings will take time and necromancy is fast.

I can feel what Chloris does everywhere, the cool sweep of attention, it gets inside my lungs, inside the sinuses in everybody’s
head, down through everybody’s ears, everybody’s gut contents, Chloris is terribly thorough, thinks about blood, thinks about it more than once, but decides not. Get that even a tiny amount wrong and it’s horrible lingering death.

Done,
says Chloris, there’s a hemisphere about ten metres across, with a thin green-white layer of intention it, any new wound-wedge spores from either side will be
little specks of random chemicals if they cross it.

Dove’s not, this feels wrong, it’s not
angry
, not precisely, but this isn’t battlements. That’s impersonal, professional, considered, even when the risk is large. This isn’t, this isn’t more brave than sensible, this is somewhere sense and bravery have stopped being questions.

I get a wordless question, Dove wants a fire-mirror, the same idea
as a gravity sock, can I keep all the light in? We’re only a little bit apart, and that’s getting less. Heat’s just slow light, and we really can’t start a fire, all those fruit trees, the heat-plume, smoke-plume, if there are any spores they’ll spread for kilometres. Chloris had the full-sense of what was killing the kid, nearly had killed the kid, those are gone, there could be another kind, there
could be live spores over there, send those up on a plume of smoke and this won’t qualify as helping.

Gravity won’t do it, light’s slippery, enough gravity to grab all the light is more than I can do. Light has to travel
through
stuff, though, there’s an interaction, it’s not all school’s straight lines there’s bouncing off of air, solids, molecules of stuff, it’s all odds down there, the odds
have names. A lot like tipping little mirrors, a myriad little mirrors, so instead of going all sorts of places all the light, all the heat, all the energy of any kind, it can’t get out, the only chance it has is back the way it came.

How deep?
slides from Dove, over to Grue, gently, it’s like standing at someone’s doorway until they look up.

Five metres below their well depth,
slides back from
Grue, I think that’s the book answer, not anything Grue thought about. Grue’s doing something really complicated, another one, in a succession of complicated things. Zora’s utterly fascinated, Zora’s whole sense of self is off to one side, will out of the way so Grue can use Zora’s access to the Power to do stuff with, not enough time to explain anything.

Fifteen, twenty minutes later, somewhere,
my attention comes back out enough that I’ve got a distinct sense of Edgar again. There’s a dark, shimmering cylinder, fifty metres into the earth and fifty high, thirty metres of overkill on the well and none of the buildings were nearly that tall but symmetry is easier, it’s two hundred metres across, and it’s work, I can only just hold this, nothing I can do to keep
all
heat in there, some
of it leaks no matter how hard I lean on the odds, but only a very tiny amount. Two layers might get the leak down to a very tiny amount of a very tiny amount, nothing now is blackened or smouldering, this will do, and I can only just hold this. Mostly thinking about my breathing, stretching into the Power, reaching to make this work.

Inside the cylinder is ravening hell. There aren’t necessarily
atoms in there, it’s that hot.
Gas
isn’t the right word, anymore. Half of what was in there was rock and water, not air, it wants
out
.

Dove’s shaking, breathing still under control, thinking, but this is all Dove can do, too.

Chloris looks mildly concerned, Chloris a long way gone into the perfect stillness of death. Grue’s alarmed, Zora’s still picking a careful way out of Grue’s immensely complex
working, hasn’t seen enough to be worried yet.

Ground shock,
Dove says, it sounds whimsical.

Grue nods, makes gestures that look like dancing.

Heat is slow light, but energy is stairs. Add energy, stuff climbs the stairs, gets further apart from itself. The mass inside the fire-mirror is so far up the stairs it’s off the top of the tower, off into places where the metaphor of stairs becomes tenuous,
like climbing above the sky one step at at time.

Ready
isn’t a word, it’s a feeling, an internal consideration. As much as I am I, I am, and the top of the fire-guard vanishes just as the will of Dove-of-us grabs all the substance that was corpses and cider and old stone buildings and slams it to the bottom of the stairs.

Stuff has rules; the energy has to go somewhere, and it goes as photons.
The rules for photons are odds, and the odds don’t require a continuous trip, there can be a gap. Lean into it, everything Dove and I can do together, this is going to hurt in the morning, maybe a lot, and the odds can put it up, way high straight up, don’t have to be able to perceive that, it’s just an idea of distance. Somewhere well above the clouds, you can feel the flash, not on eyes or skin,
but you can feel it across the Power if you’re paying attention. See it, the clouds pulse white over the width of the sky.

There’s a shock wave anyway, Chloris’ bubble of death-to-fungus snaps out, wider and wider again, there’s a few snapping noises from fruit trees losing branches. There’s some sparkle in the air, we don’t get
all
the light, and some of it’s really fast, dangerous fast, it’d
be much worse than sunburn if it was right here, not over there behind a hundred-plus metres of air.

Enough, though. We got enough. The ground-shock goes on and on, crash and then rumbling. Doesn’t knock anybody over, doesn’t roll the glass cylinder. Start from a homogeneous mass remembering it’s made of atoms and it takes a minute for the chemistry to stop.