A Succession of Bad Days (37 page)

I don’t mean I sensed it using the Power.

Halt, Halt’s chair, the little side-table with the teapot, they’re all totally indifferent to being set on a bunch of big round rocks. Halt’s still knitting. It’s still got a lot of
orange in it. If those are sleeves, there are six of them.

Blossom’s got big tall pots, the kind of thing you sterilize canning jars in or use to boil stock. Seven of them. No fire, but at least two of the pots are obviously steaming. There’s a bunch of potatoes peeling themselves in the air, slicing themselves, and landing in a big glass dish.

Grue, well, hands isn’t the right word, presents?
— it goes from floating in the water to floating beside Grue to floating in front of Blossom with the potato peels to a cloud, abrupt chemical decomposition, it was a bunch of green things, some sort of water plant, and about half the cloud mists back out over the stream and falls, a slow rain of wet dust.

The other half restructures itself, thickens, acquires crumbling dried herbs from a container,
slathers itself on the potatoes. The dish goes in a pot, the glass lid goes on the dish, the metal lid goes on the pot, the big rock under the pot goes glowing warm, and gravel, it was several rocks seconds ago, heaps over the pot. Whole process took fifteen seconds, maybe a bit less.

“Easier than packing lard,” Blossom says.

I nod. A narrowly specific value of easier.

Still, dinner will be hot,
and soon. We don’t have to do anything except set up shelters for ourselves. Illusory ones, trying to get a flat space in these rocks would take melting and we’re trying to avoid large uses of the Power, Wake’s been emphatic about that.

Illusions make keeping the bugs out a lot easier. Not many of the biting kind, whatever Wake did with wards seems to work on biting insects. We’ve just got the
ones that happened to have been in the warded space when the ward went up.

Well, happen to have been there and haven’t tried to bite Halt — they die — or Blossom — they go up in a tiny ball of fire — yet. None of them try to bite Wake, none of them can bite Grue, all of them can bite us, though they do thin out fast. Doesn’t do anything for the non-biting ones attracted to lights. Grue has a couple
of lights that shine a horrible blue-purple colour. Those get put over past the canoes, just inside the circle of the ward. The insects, all the insects, like those better, and mostly stay over near the canoes, away from dinner.

Doesn’t this seem odd?
Zora may not believe it’s odd, but thinks perhaps a good Creek would think so.

New’s not the same as odd,
Dove says.
Pretty much any Independent’s
got to go looking for something sometime, prospecting, trying to find plants, trying to track down whatever those are that ate all the beets, it’s a regular part of the job. We’re here with more skill and Power than’s at all regular, but I doubt anybody’s a sorcerer-surveyor for very long without figuring out some camp comforts.

Blossom and Grue are, it’s either an argument about smooching or
smooching about an argument, no way to tell. Wake’s organizing a flat space by tipping some rocks. Halt’s looking up from knitting, and just for an instant Halt’s eyes narrow.

Nothing dead falls out of the forest canopy, and whatever it was either wasn’t really there or it left. Or air-jellyfish the size of river-barges dragged it away wrapped in poisonous tentacles, paralysed, alive, and slowly
torn to pieces, there isn’t much way to tell. The sky’s hazed with sunset and narrow with tall trees.

Chloris, it’s not a shudder. Zora does something closer to shuddering.

Dove looks quizzical at them.

You’ve seen Halt angry.
Zora’s making a chair and a little table out of nothing, and looking only at the work.
The possibility’s unsettling.

Chloris nods, fishing through a string of aluminium
tags worn as a necklace, all furniture of one sort or another.

I’ve seen Halt be — 
Dove’s right hand reaches into the air for a word — 
stern? If I ever see Halt get angry I’m going to hide behind Ed.

An entirely reasonable plan, Dove dear.

Dove grins.

Dinner’s good. Dinner’s very good.

Zora says thank you, and asks, peaceably with a willed peaceably, if there’s a test for when it’d be safe to
help in a refectory?

Grue, Blossom, Wake, and Halt, all shake their heads. It’s not incidental eerie unison, but it’s surely unanimity.

Grue fishes a couple of small potatoes out of somewhere, hands one to Zora. It’s not around the fire, it’s around the half-metre ball of warmth hovering just off the ground. Still, close enough for social purposes.

Grue’s potato squiggles, there isn’t another
word, it’s nearly writhing. Then it’s a blintz. A really nice one, hot, it has jam. Pumpkin? It’s pale orange.

“Try,” Grue says, and Zora’s potato melts into something hot, but also sticky and not blintz-like. Zora says “Ow!” and makes a rapid hand shaking motion, then winces until the burns shift away.

Grue hands Zora the blintz that was a potato. “It’s learning a lot of things so well you forget
you ever didn’t know them. It takes time.”

Zora nods. Not happy about it, but the “Thank you,” for the blintz is entirely comprehensible.

Wake’s drinking a tall cup, tumbler, of something dark. If anybody told me they can smell the bitter of it in the Otherworld I’d believe it.

“We’ve set you a narrow road, and hurried you along it. You have done much, have all shown flashes of startling brilliance.”

All
clearly means all the students, though I suppose it’s true of our teachers, too. Only everybody expects it of them.

Think about who you startled, children,
comes into my mind, all our minds, on the tiny precise steps of spider feet.

“There’s a wide land beside the road, and we’ve kept you out of it. The hope, my hope as your teacher, is that you shall go back and explore there once you are
yourself Independents.” Wake says this about the way you’d expect someone to discuss barge schedules, planning a trip.

“It’s not just keeping Dove alive, is it?” Chloris’ voice is half-way to the stillness of Death, the first time I can recall hearing. Usually it’s all one or all the other.

“Nor simply keeping the class as a whole alive,” Wake says. “You have grown mighty very swiftly. Half
a year after your first successful working in conventional studies of sorcery, you might be lighting candles reliably.” Wake’s benevolence entirely encompasses this.

I can feel my mind skip. Ethics. Sorcery in the Commonweal has rules, they call them meetings, meetings for the consideration of the ethics of conduct. It’s mostly not sorcerers belonging to the meetings. You have to go apply to
do things with anything alive, Grue isn’t allowed to make anything that can reproduce, something about bees, there was a tonne of paperwork, not literally but trying to be, all of a five-drawer cabinet, about Halt’s giant sheep, it was really, really dry and I didn’t understand it and I skipped almost all of it, looking for survival statistics for sorcery students.

“You could only get permission
because it wouldn’t work.” I don’t, I can borrow Dove’s ears and be sure, I really don’t, sound offended. I do sound surprised.

“Nobody in the ethics meeting thought it could work, the official best-case was extended survival. You had to have had a plausible expectation of success, but you’d
never
have got permission if the board thought it could work, work like this.” A board that has to have
been back in the First Commonweal.

“Statistics do not apply to individuals.” Wake says that calmly, just the way Wake says no-thank-you when offered asparagus. “Even if they make good policy.”

“There’s a flying dismount in here somewhere?” Dove isn’t surprised. Dove isn’t even surprised I’m not surprised.

“No, Dove dear.” Halt’s got a teacup. Nothing I’ve ever seen called tea glows red up into
its own steam. It looked like tiny tentacles grabbed the sugar lump, too. “Dismounting, getting to the bottom of the hill, Kynefrid’s concern for landing, all these things suppose you shall stop and be again as you were.”

Halt beams at us through the red steam, gently bops something rising behind the tiny mass of tentacles with the bowl of the teaspoon. It sinks again, tentacles in affronted postures.

“You were none of you especially pleased with the lives you had.” Halt’s voice is quiet. “Thus you should choose new forms with a whole heart and strong hope, perhaps. Perhaps you would, and rise in truth.”

I have absolutely no idea what to say. Dove reaches over and ruffles my hair. There’s a thought forming, it starts with
yet
, and Blossom raises an admonishing eyebrow at Dove. Sometimes Blossom’s
barely there, gone, lost into thinking. Sometimes there’s a crackly sense of power, like a thunderstorm you can’t see.

Sometimes you get Blossom’s full attention.

“There’s a proverb.
Misery makes sorcery,
It’s annoyingly true, at least for the survivors. The Commonweal tries hard, both of them, the idea is to produce someone who
hasn’t
developed a need for the blood of the living, or compulsions
involving pain, or really serious holes in their ability to think rationally.”

Something slithers through Blossom’s fingers, loops, twists, spirals into pretty patterns. This is Blossom’s equivalent of twirling a pencil or the end of a braid or tapping rhythms. It takes me a few seconds to realize it’s not illusion, it’s twenty or thirty kilogrammes of molten nickel. Nickel and vanadium.

“The
price of that is being told how it works. And that approach works, as teaching, we get Independents, they can do the job.”

Chloris takes a deep breath, stops, careful, tea mug on the little table that goes with the chair Chloris made, sits up very straight, hands folded. “This is a bet that if we just turn into what we think is, is,
interesting
, it will work?”

“Of course, Chloris dear.” Halt’s
voice is gentle. “That is true of any strong talent. It so often fails because there is time for the wrong doubt, an un-comprehended accumulation of hurts.”

Dove nods, twice, and then makes a sort of seated bow at Halt, and then Blossom. “Self-honesty preferable to will.”

Blossom nods. “Will toward anything except self-honesty…” and makes a hand motion, rolling band of nickel following.

“Grow
up or die.” Zora sounds admiring, in a deeply offended way.

“Grow up and live.” Chloris’ voice slides between, not quite Chloris’ normal voice, a human voice, and the perfect stillness of Death practically by syllables, saying this.

“Precisely, Chloris dear.” Halt beams at Chloris. “This is not an experiment to see what happens, we have all, even the very young — ” Grue, well, call it a grim
grin, and thinks
Eighty five, practically a baby — 
“seen enough apprentices die horridly. We seek to — ” Halt is at the end of a row, and switches the yarn knitting on to one that isn’t orange — “throw you into the sky, where you shall travel swifter and learn better for the wider vantage.”

Chloris looks straight at Halt. “Doesn’t this depend on being unusually talented?”

This depends on being
talented
together
, we’re lifting each other. It wouldn’t work if we’d thought we’d known how sorcery works, it didn’t work for Kynefrid, who was, is, totally convinced there was, is, no way to survive our course of study. Conflict with previous knowledge.

Halt smiles, directs a head-tip at Wake.

“You are concerned because you may be the least mighty among your fellows?” Wake’s got more of whatever
the darkly bitter stuff in that tumbler is. And another pottery tumbler, tall bowl, it’d be a mug if it had a handle, too, Wake passes that one to Chloris. Who looks too surprised not to take it.

Chloris says “Yes,” as an answer to the question, echoing surprise.

“Do you know why we are here?”

None of us do.

“A portion of the battle-standards involves necromancy, the means that permit the newly
dead of the Line to wait, and continue to serve for a time. The ritual enchantment for this requires a quantity of human bone about which nothing is known.”

“Nothing?” I’m thinking
Don’t you have to know it’s human? That it’s
dead?

Wake makes a hand-rocking motion, with the hand the doesn’t have the cup. Chloris is halfway down the bitter drink from Wake, still highly uncertain about it, so much
so you can tell from facial expressions.

“It is not a rational criteria. It has the concern of former days with name and sense, not one of phylogeny.”

I nod. It probably
does
make some kinds of magic easier, if no one made a concerted effort to teach you natural philosophy.

“Obtaining bone that admits of the criteria is difficult; easier in the old days, easier in places that have known less peace.
It is possible that there’s an area of pre-Creek settlement in the middle of this swamp, which is why we are here.”

Nods. Halt is knitting away, Blossom’s doing something that results in clean cooking pots, Grue’s fishing out a couple eggs to go with a pile of flour and a jug of water and some sugar and five or six potatoes. They’re not for oil, there’s a sphere of oil floating out of somewhere.
The whole rises up, renders itself an approximation of evenly mixed, emits eggshell, and proceeds to turn into cake.

“Thirty or forty grammes of powdered bone, that permits, at need, the shades of eight thousands to abide and act. This is not a thing I could have done; there are those who taught me in my youth who would swear on their names it could not be done at all, never mind what you might
choose to do it with.”

“You’re going to tell me Laurel did that by being smart.” Chloris, I don’t know what Chloris is thinking. “I’m really not very smart
either
.”

“Neither am I”, Blossom says, quite cheerful. “Not stupid, but it’s easy to find a smarter sorcerer.”

Grue’s eyes roll, then stop, because it’s rolling the cake.

The cake, cakes, it’s going to be a layer cake, drift down to land,
well, stay, there’s a decimetre showing between the layers, on a plate on Halt’s side table. “Thank you, Grue dear,” Halt says, downs knitting, and produces a tub of icing.