A Succession of Bad Days (43 page)

We climb down a little ridge, more outcrop, metre and a half high, maybe. If it was Block’s class we’d just jump, but it isn’t, this is a stroll.

“Two earfuls,” Dove says, a little rueful. “All this consonance might be nothing more than making sure there’s someone who
isn’t scared of you, you know? You’re not scary, either, less than Halt is, you’re
my
multi-limbed strangeness.”

I choke up, just manage to think
Source of warmth,
while there are still words and then we’re both choked up for a bit.

Zora and Chloris are looking at us, they’re beside another little outcrop, but this one is broader and bare, white, mostly white, there’s some silvery veining, it
looks like marble. Not the blue-green marble under the meadow, this isn’t outcrop.

There’s a, pool, marsh, it seems to be filling in, been filling in for awhile, this is where the different trees start, the ones with the spiral bark.

Chloris makes a pointing gesture, low, elegant, very surprising.

There’s a couple of chairs, seats, carved back into the marble. Big ones, ornate.

They’ve weathered.
Anything that sticks out has worn, you can see the sharp edges of the carving under the hand rests.

Between them, on the marble, no, it’s not flagging, it’s all one rock, someone cut the square rise and then cut the seats into it. Between the seats is a big white bowl, glass or marble, glass, there’s.

“A wine bottle.” Dove and I say it together.

Chloris is wide-eyed, Zora is grinning.

“How did
it not break?” Chloris says. “It’s been there at least this winter.”

The bowl is full of leaves, big, bronze-coloured leaves fallen from the tall trees behind us. Doesn’t look like they’ve stained it, doesn’t look like the piles of leaves on the carved seats have stained those, either, which isn’t what I’d expect from white marble.

“Good glass,” Dove says.

There’s some boron in there. Can’t figure
out how the marble works, something to do with the porosity.

The leaves lift, very lightly, a metre or so. Nothing in there but the wine bottle, and whatever’s living in the leaves, I think those are ancestral spiders, regular arthropod spiders, not the modified kind. Should tell Halt.

The bottle lifts, too, it doesn’t look like the usual kind, it’s not the same green, this is more transparent,
faint, like new leaves. Cork, wax, that’s familiar, don’t think it’s big enough to hold a litre.

Dove’s holding the bottle and looking speculative.

“Is it even ours?” Zora’s having trouble with the logic. It’s not, can’t be, the actual same thing from where we got the pattern, not unless Wake’s utterly wrong about how what we did works, and the technique is in common use.

“Would you eat berries
here, if there were berry bushes, and we knew they were safe?” Dove’s not having trouble with the logic. Don’t think Dove’s wrong. We, well, made’s a bit strong, brought into being? everything here. Wrong to claim to have carved those seats, the band-work’s some kind of runes, I can see people getting excited, but we’re certainly why they’re
here
, all of it, trees, marsh, the singing birds.

Zora nods. “I would, but we don’t know that’s — ” a chin lift — “safe.”

Chloris says, with great reluctance, “There’s no death in it.” Zora looks at Chloris. “Not for us,” Chloris says. “There’s ethanol.”

“Methanol?” says Zora, who could answer that question by really wanting to know.

“Ed?” Dove says.

Be known by sight, that is not fit drink and healthy, for I myself and these my shoulder-companions
.

Whups.

The trees are glowing, the marsh, the carved seats, the fallen leaves, bird feathers, the wine bottle itself. None of us are gone strange enough for glass to be good drink.

Be thanked and be still
. The glow goes out, Zora’s collapsed in a heap, snickering.

That which is, and is within, the vessel
 — I’m trying to say ‘Dove’, I say a word, I don’t get what it means — 
now holds, be known
by sight in wholesomeness.

Better to ask if it’ll do us only good than if it’ll do us harm. Any alcohol’s a little harm, I’m not much for nuance with whatever language this is, not yet.

The wine bottle shines, shines deep red. Which, well, it’s red wine. If it’s grapes, could be plum, or cherry, or something they have there, and we don’t here. Shining like blood and fire’s not the best thing to
be thinking.

Anybody see anything else shining?
The pond’s not, but if anything else is, I got this try wrong, too.

Nobody can, so I say thanks to the glow. It goes out.

Zora stands up.

Dove hands Zora the bottle. “Anything scary in there?”

Zora’s eyes close, open again after a little while. “No.”

Zora hands the bottle back. Dove takes it carefully, both hands.

“Make some glasses?” Actually a
request, Dove’s voice has a complete lack of even implied battlements anywhere.

Zora says “Isn’t this still unwise?” Unwise wasn’t one of the first six things Zora considered saying.

Dove’s head shakes. “Remember the constraints on summoning up this place. We wanted an entirely clean terrain.”

Zora looks up, looks around, you can feel Zora’s, mind, no, it’s Power, Zora’s particular, personal
strength, reaching out, out again, back: “We got one.” It’s more definite than Zora usually sounds.

Zora makes a gesture, and is holding four stemmed glasses, thin as soap bubbles, but tangible. “Save some?”

We all nod. Someone will want to analyze it.

Someone will want to analyze it no matter what does, or doesn’t, happen to us.

“Is this proper?” Chloris says, not sure that it isn’t.

“Wine bottles
of our labour,” Dove says.

Chloris grins.

Zora hands everyone a glass, Dove swaps me my glass for the bottle, I probably do have more of a knack for small things, and I slide the wax off and the cork out as two careful, separate steps.

Red wine’s supposed to be left open to the air, but we pour the glasses and I put the cork back in and the wax back on, the bottle full, a little bit over-full,
of dry nitrogen above the quarter or so left, no reason to let it oxidize.

“Must have been under the leaves the whole time,” Dove says. Certainly smells right, no vinegary sharpness.

It’s a very quiet quarter-hour.

Nobody tries the leaf-strewn seats; it doesn’t seem polite. Dove and I wind up to the west, left of the left-hand seat, Zora’s in the middle, feet swinging over the broad bowl, still
full of leaves, and Chloris sits past the eastern seat.

There are bugs in the Tall Woods.

None of them bite. Everybody’s got their bug-charm, but we don’t need it, not even to keep wasps out of the wine. There’s, big, floppy wings, it’s the middle of a sunny summer morning, has to be a butterfly, though coloured all the shades of twilight, there’s almost a buzz of bugs hovering over the pond,
there are birds, one that dives, some kind of arboreal pangolin-thing, scales and the caution of an anchoring tail and a boundless appetite for caterpillars.

After a little while, we all raise our glasses. No rim-clinking, hard enough to believe the wine didn’t pop the bare sheen of the thing, it’s not glass, but a toast.

“Peace and Plenty,” we all say, and we mean it.

Wake returns to an absence of cataclysm. Starting to get bored, everything written down, garden in fine shape, have tiptoed into the Tall Woods in the dark to hear the dawn chorus from the birds, Dove insisted, but no fires. No giving in to the impulse to move a lot of dirt out of habit, either. We did spend most of a day moving a lot of gravel out of the West Wetcreek, playing dredge
for the Lug-gesith, that helped.

The tree is indeed the Independent Mulch, in, so far as Wake is able to determine, no distress.

“I’ve got
the
expert on gardens watching mine for the next year?” Zora says, and Wake’s head shakes. “Some span of time,” Wake says, contemplatively, and Chloris says “Your?” in admonishing tones.

“The Round House garden,” Zora says. “Ours, but — ” and stops, because
Chloris is smiling as though Death has a sense of humour.

“In the records of the Commonweal, Mulch has assumed tree-shape for not less than twelve days and for not more than sixty-one years.” Wake’s tone is completely factual. “I would not expect twelve days. Establishing agriculture in the Folded Hills did not prove usually laborious.”

Day after Wake gets back, Wake takes us down to the practice
field for a meeting. Blossom has the design, preferred design, Blossom’s preferred design, for the new battle-standards done. The Captain, a general named Chert, Ongen, who is about the only other Independent reliably able to comprehend Blossom’s enchantment designs should those designs seek to optimize anything, Wake, Blossom, and the four of us. It seems really odd to even consider discussing
battle-standard workings outside, anywhere, and then Wake signs four words that sound like the feel of swallowing custard and we’re in an utterly dark hemisphere.

It’s not even a warded space, it’s, Wake says “As the Tall Woods, incomplete and in reverse.” Disconnected from the accumulation of history, is what I get out of that. Someplace not of earth.

Can’t follow, Dove can’t follow,
we
can’t
follow, the actual discussion, though we get closer than Dove, and Dove’s closer than I am. Lots of words, very few sentences. ‘Acyclic’ and ‘reticulation’ are the sort of words that need context.

Aside from the educational benefits, Blossom says with a grin that could bend granite into spoons, we’re there because Blossom wants to include something like the insect-repellent, the fire-mirror from
the orchard, and Chloris’ exercise in spore-removal into the design. Blossom can’t do any of them, ‘not yet’ in the case of the fire mirror, maybe not in the case of the insect repellent, and not at all in the case of the spore removal.

“You can’t?” says Chloris, then blushes.

Blossom ignores the blush. “It could only be purer necromancy if you’d been dead when you did it.” Blossom’s next grin
is a little wry. “No skill with necromancy.”

Which means, given the real haste to get the standards done,
we’re
going to have to do it, if any of those things are to go in. We can link up with Blossom.

Neither the Captain nor General Chert actually say
yeah, sure
, it’s slightly more formal. Ongen’s concern about student contribution isn’t measurable. Ongen wants to talk, later, we do talk later,
about the insect repellent, Ongen’s enchanted plant tag has been consuming a large fraction of the Maintainer’s attention. General Chert is firmly of the opinion that anything not actually harmful is worth trying if it makes attack wasps easier to deal with. Current best tactic involves heating large volumes of air to five hundred degrees. They don’t generally have time to pull the oxygen away
first, so it’s mostly preferring dealing with a big fire to dealing with wasps.

Zora’s mood improves sharply when Blossom, all of us back in the regular world, out of the geometer’s cave of forbidden probabilities, points out the captain’s quarters in the standards, the standards and the signas and the pennons, will need furnishing on very short notice, and hands Zora, us, all of us, a, call it
a mental illusion, don’t know what Blossom would call it, it’s not a memory or an idea or just facts, precisely, it’s a detailed description of the volume those quarters have to fit into, where the various gates go, that handle air and water and sewage, the necessary location for the portal to the subtended otherworld antechamber, it’s medium complicated.

“They’ll all be the same,” Zora says,
cautious.

Blossom nods. “The Line’s in favour of that.”

An army is, technically, this has never really happened, five brigades, each with five battalions. Twenty-five standards. Plus a pennon for the general, which is only different from a standard by what it gets called. One signa per brigade, which isn’t a standard but which does need to house the brigadier.

“Thirty-one bathtubs,” Zora says,
sounding pleased.

“Thirty-two,” Dove says. “It’s good to have a spare pennon for the spare general.”

“We have a spare general?” Zora sounds surprised.

“We will someday,” Dove says. “Standards are meant to last.”

Two days on bathtubs, complete with taps, fill-gates, and drain-gates, and a day on single-piece ceramic bathing room floors, the drain gate done with differently conductive clays fired
into the floor, off-centre in the sluicing corner, Wake’s gate style instead of Blossom’s. Then a day doing sinks with Wake and Blossom, Blossom’s got to wait for something to set or dry or be finished by other people, that’s not clear, but we do the sinks in aluminium-nickel-bronze four centimetres thick. We sort of get, well, not silly, happy, enthusiastic, something like that. It’s not the way
we were with the armour, no do-or-die, but we
did
the armour. We’re all certain we can do this.

Dinner, we’re on time, no one’s exhausted, it’s been a fun three days. Even Wake’s seeming almost cheerful, along with the benevolent; nothing to do but hold wards, teach us how to make pottery gate bindings, and make sure we’ve thought things through might be close to a rest for Wake. Dove’s got four
letters, unusual-many, Chloris has a letter, Zora’s got three letters, I don’t get one, it’s unlikely I’ll get anything from Flaed until after Festival and no one else is far enough away to write. Which means I get to make the ‘of course’ gesture. Sometime in the winter, the idea that we didn’t know one another well enough to read letters at dinner seemed ridiculous, and we got a dispensation from
the refectory manager, on the grounds it was the only time they or anybody ever saw us sitting down.

Zora had protested that we sat down during Block’s class all the time, and got told that ‘slumped in a heap’ was not the same thing as sitting down.

Chloris hands that one letter to Dove. Dove’s face goes from concerned to set, and there’s, just a flicker, but for an instant it’s really there,
one of the fire-feathers curling back over Dove’s ear. It gets Wake’s attention.

Aggrandizement,
says Chloris, so upset there’s no cloud of lamentation.

I don’t think I actually form the word
what
, but Dove hands me the letter anyway, reaching across the table to hold Chloris’ wrist with the other hand. Zora’s hugged Chloris, which isn’t an expected behaviour.

It’s a really short letter. Salutation
and:

“While I am hopeful you were of some assistance to your teachers, I should not care to think any child of mine should aggrandize their role in something of such importance.”

That’s all.

What am I missing?

My mother
refuses
to believe I could have killed our wound-wedge infection.
Chloris’ tone has so many emotions in it there aren’t any, utterly flat.

Phrasing is ‘recant or be disowned’
Dove
says.
Family disowned.

Not like I’m still
in
the gean,
Chloris says, with a pulse of grief.

“Wake? Can I make some lights for myself?” Chloris, with a best try to sound calm.

There is not a ripple in Wake’s benevolence. “In propriety, a fifth part of the aluminium is available to you, but — ” and Wake turns a hand over. “Four hundred tonnes of aluminium is many lights, detrimental to the prosperity
of several wreaking collectives.”

Almost involuntarily, Chloris smiles. “Three.”

Then “Lights, not hundred tonnes.” Chloris sounding prim on purpose is a lot of prim.

Zora’s very carefully not looking appalled. Dove’s, well, Dove taps, there isn’t anything to the contact, Chloris’ shoulder, but it’s certainly still the shoulder-punch of ritual approval. This is some sort of Creek social thing.

One standard needs six lights, the signas need eight, so we need to make two hundred and two. No spares; light bindings last in proportion to the durability of the materials. Blossom had shrugged at us when we asked. There are four working copper and glass light bindings eight thousand years old in a Material Artifacts Library in the First Commonweal, someone made a set very carefully. Solid blocks
of corundum should be tougher. “Not many data points,” Blossom says; the oldest light made this way is Blossom’s first success, it’s sixty-three.

Chloris’ three lights are red, ruby, it takes a tiny amount of chromium, instead of clear, and the reflectors, silver with aluminium in it instead of copper, for strength, it doesn’t tarnish, are, it’s not ornate design, precisely, but they’re certainly
fancier than the ones for the standards.

“That gets out and we’re going to be re-backing a lot of mirrors,” Zora says.

“You could do those three with platinum,” Blossom says, drifting through to see how we’re doing. I suspect also to get away from the shot shop, where it doesn’t help if Blossom paces. Whatever it is must still be drying or setting or something.

Chloris’ head shakes, once, firmly.
“That would be sarcastic.”

Dove nods.
Plenty sarcastic,
Dove says.

“Blossom?” Zora sounds tentative, actual tentative, not rhetorical tentative. “Why are we making these?”

“Why do these get made?” Blossom says.

Zora nods. “Everybody else gets tents.”

“The Line establishes permanent barracks in usual times,” Blossom says. “Standard-captains get quarters in the standard because they’re bound. Can’t
get more than four kilometres from their assigned standard. The quarters, aside from being a place to store maps and battalion records out of the wet, are compensation.”

“What happens when they retire?” Chloris asks, thinking about ‘retire’ being the right word.

“If a Standard-captain retires, they’re assigned a standard in retirement. We’ve got, will have, more standards than battalions by twice.”
Blossom goes entirely serious, and looks a little sad. “Only about a quarter of them ever retire.”

Wake’s made, not precisely a brick, it’s porcelain, it’s a binding for an illusion-form. Once we’re done the furnishings, we’re going to cast the standard quarters around the form, it’s an advanced version of a technique Wake’s been teaching for making houses, single bulk ceramic firings. Needs
lots of clay, but whatever it’s called, the West Wetcreek lies in a river valley, there is lots of clay to be had. It takes us maybe an hour to dig enough up, Wake’s got the map giving where we’re allowed to dig from, it’s managed, we can’t just lift out a four-metre cube, and then the rest of the day to wedge and sort the stuff properly, Wake’s being particular about it.

Twenty-seven standards
and the five signas, signas have meeting rooms, it’s a different binding and a different illusion-form. The binding comes out cold, all that illusion’s insulative, and it takes the four of us maybe twenty minutes to get each structure fired. It’s a long day, but we get them all done. Wake does something that keeps the air off, it fades, by the time the structure’s cool it’s gone. “Keeps the oxidization
down,” Wake says.

Chloris has a letter done, written, neat and formal, and an aluminium box, just large enough to hold the lights and some exploded wood fluff. The wood fluff took four tries, it’s done with steam and layers, no kind of necromancy.

Made things, the lights, the box, Chloris says it works to think of that as the death of all other possibilities. Can’t fault the results.

The whole
package, someone in the post office will wrap it, the whole contents of the package, comes along with Chloris, going to dinner.

“It is,” Wake says, “one thing to write a letter, and another to send it.”

Chloris nods. “I spent my whole youth fighting with my mother. I was trying to argue about, about if I had to be prim. Mother was arguing about what kind of prim was the best kind.”

Chloris stops,
this is where you’d turn for the post office.

We stop, too, and sort of flatten the clump out a bit, there are people going by. They go by Wake the way a stream goes around a boulder. Wake’s not being rude, Wake’s not paying attention to anything that isn’t Chloris.

“Mother has a story about what I should be like. I’m never going to follow it. I want to live, I want to be an Independent, those
aren’t really the same decision.” Chloris gets a little quieter. “I don’t want children.” There’s, it’s not a sigh, I think of it as like a sigh, the cloud of lamentation gets, briefly, shallowly, it’s not the dense lamentation, fifteen metres from Chloris. “However much Mother wants grandchildren.”

“This — ” the box lifts — “is
polite
, it’s not, it’s what another adult would do. To say Mother
needs to listen to what Mother’s said, at least, even if maybe not what I’ve said.”

“Your mother might listen to me?” Wake says, in purely speculative tones.

Chloris’ head shakes. “It would turn into some story about how I, a proper daughter, had been seduced away by sorcery.” Adjectives like
fell
and
nefarious
flit through Chloris’ conversational mind.

No shortage of stories like that. No shortage
of species like that, kelpies do that, unicorns sometimes, there’s a whole category of study around problematic blandishments, wholly separate from the stuff that just takes over your mind, ‘the illusion of choice’ is a phrase you have to use really carefully talking about this.

“Besides,” Chloris says, “I want to find out who I am.”
Arguing with Mother didn’t work,
floats along behind, and Wake
nods.