A Succession of Bad Days (49 page)

“They’re good for sixteen,” Blossom says. “Anyone got objections
to silicon carbide bollards?”

“Not if they’re really smooth,” Zora says.

Which is what we do. The swing bridges, beams, pivot machinery, the gearing, the railings and the deck gratings, everything but the lever into the big gears that swing them, those are silicon carbide, too. Making roller bearings two decimetres in diameter by eight long feels weird, much too big to be bearings, but not as
weird as leaving them exposed to the air. Still, Arch can crank the bridge round alone, just with muscle. It’s not quick, someone’s going to want to put a focus in eventually, a focus or a draught team, but the bridge swings in an even, steady way and Arch doesn’t have to work too hard to do it. Serious grinning.

Signs and ladders and railings are aluminium, like the turning levers; we have enough,
there’s enough zinc in the dirt, plenty of silicon for this, to stiffen it up a bit, Blossom’s head is full of alloy lists, we get passed a subset, I can feel Zora turning pages and feeling gleeful.

Second swing-bridge up by the second set of locks, pick everything up, ingots, canoes, baggage and all, float it all up to the saddle in the ridge we’re expecting to cut, eat dinner. Plan a bit. This
one takes a control dam, some kind of water control, we want to be able to send water down the original stream, the canal can overflow, the gates mean a fixed rate of flow. Almost fixed, they’re larger than they need to be, usually, hot summer days can take a lot of water off. Arch and Blossom have both done the math for that, we think we’re safe.

Being here means we can discuss with full scale
illusions, they don’t do anything, the water flows right through them, a couple of eagles try to land on the idea of the dam and have no success, but it’s much easier to visualize.

The morning is finishing the canal downhill to the Thines-stream, lock, swing-bridges, big water-gates, bollards, all of it. We slow down and get methodical, agree on a list of things and the order before we start.
Blossom sticks an illusion of the list to a handy rock, and when we all surface around lunch time I’m leaning on Dove, Chloris is leaning on Dove, Zora’s leaning on Blossom, and Arch is looking deeply concerned. Probably not because we started in a neat seated circle and now look at us.

Zora looks at Arch and says “Wizard team,” the only one of us who can say it with a straight face. Reliably,
anyway. Blossom
grins
, Halt’s mad idea worked. The rest of us look abashed or embarrassed, more than half the time. First-year apprentices don’t get the name of wizards for moving dirt, is the short version of the consensus.

“Looks kinda like subsumption of the will,” Arch says.

“You,” Chloris says, “can’t hear the arguments about bollard style.”

We wound up alternating round bollards and double-headed
mooring bollards, even picking half the bollards we’d already put in for the first segment back out and replacing them.
Wouldn’t want anyone thinking we were making it up as we went along,
Dove had said.

“Mind if I trot down to the new locks and stick official positions on them?” Arch says. Something Arch had already done for the first two, neat, small, standard plates in bronze. Barge crews tell
stories of weather so foggy people had to get off the barge and read the plate to convince themselves of which lock they were at.

“No.” Blossom looks a bit quizzical. “Lots of mass in motion after lunch, try not to walk into the ward.”

Blossom gets, we get, the sketch of a wave as Arch trots off.

Is Arch really worried you’re controlling our minds?

Yes,
Blossom says.
It’s more plausible than
what we’re actually doing. History is full of bound sorcerers; what we’re doing has no other examples.

Kynefrid?
Chloris says, and Blossom replies
Kynefrid couldn’t, anymore. Doing fine with Crane, last news I had, but traditionally. Not this.

How far?
Dove asks, very calm.

Remember Clerk Lester?
We all nod. The idea of nod.
All that careful review was in part to establish that you really can
work in concert. The concern is fine, of course there’s concern, it looks like something dreadful, sending a message is exactly what Archimedes ought to do. Not objecting is the best proof we can give that we’re not doing anything dreadful. It’s only a problem if Arch refuses to come back and survey for us.

Arch comes back, late enough to be late for dinner if dinner wasn’t late, climbing back
up where we’re sitting on a flattened part of the ridge.

I learn some new Creek swear words. Dove doesn’t, but will grant points for impassioned delivery. Chloris and Zora look shocked at different points, Blossom can’t stop grinning, the happy one, not the things-fly-apart one.

The cut’s more than five kilometres long, and shale doesn’t stack well, it’s not building stone, so you have to make
the cut a wide one to be safe, you can’t just make a vertical canyon, it’s shaped like a mostly open book. We didn’t try to keep two channels; there’s a single sixty-metre channel, no deeper, just wider.

None of this is what’s making Arch swear. I think all of that was expected.

The valley’s pretty wide, and shallow, and there’s nothing like a good place to put a dam. We’d have to go ten or twenty
kilometres down the valley to get anywhere narrow, and maybe with the kind of rock you can anchor a dam into. There isn’t enough stream to reliably flood back that far, not without waiting four or five years for the reservoir to fill and waiting to see what subsides under the weight, so that wouldn’t work even if we were willing to drown that much not-especially-weedy valley where there’s going
to be at least a little settlement.

Can’t just turn the stream, it’d flow, but there’s going to be too much of it most, maybe all, of the year, it’s a robust stream. We might not need to do anything to the stream at all, to make it navigable, well, remove snags. Don’t want to block it, either, the stream ought to be navigable for a good way below here, don’t want to make that difficult.

There
wasn’t much carbon in the spoil, it’s clean shale, this far uphill is further down-section, nothing much organic. Lots of oxygen, we had to be careful, venting that straight up, high and widely, well away from the greenery. Didn’t vent all of it, and there was enough aluminium, more than enough, so we don’t have a dam.

We’ve got the whole facing curve of the stream evened out, we left the inside
alone, but the outside of the curve, where it curves toward the canal, where it would erode, the deep-water side, there’s a wall and channel, five hundred metres long. We moved that thirty metres closer to the canal, making the stream wider. It’s got a set of big upstream stop-walls, a metre thick, three metres apart, ten metres long, parallel to the current, and covering about three-fifths of
the original seventy-metre stream width, angled out to upstream, so the barges coming downstream get guided, will have lights, will have a barrier, something to make the turn hard to miss. There’s an openwork deck across the wall tops, movable, silicon carbide and not too smooth, there was enough carbon for that and railings for tall Creeks, it’s not going to be hard for the lock team to get people
out to put up signal lights or flags.

There’s a tall separator wall, five metres thick, it’s got a walkway and railings, access ladders, between the through channel, at sixty metres wide enough for both directions, and the single barge-width channel for barges going downstream and turning into the canal. There’s another big curved single-width channel for barges turning into the canal going upstream,
someday, maybe soon, it’s a nice valley, and another set of matching stop-walls on the downstream side. Anybody who wants to leave the canal and head up or down, they go straight up the middle and into the through channel, it’s separated channels into three sides of a crossing pond, should be plenty of room.

The single barge turn-in channels follow circle sections, big ones, it would be a two-kilometre
circle. The curving channels meet at a crossing pond, triple-size, right about where the common sixty-metre channel starts to be clearly a cut into the rock of the ridge. The pond has locks, to exit, four deep-sill ones, one per in and one per out, the out channels separate past the pond. We sank the channels deeper than the stream bed by a couple metres. It has the regular nine-metre water-gates,
three of them, to keep the canal filled. The stop walls, there’s no way Arch could see this, have gates both sides, and downstream’s stop walls have the outflow. The stream can just about skip the turn, if all the gates are open. Something else the deck is good for, getting people out to the gate winches, to raise and lower the covers.

It’s a lot of gates, but a two-metre gate’s pretty easy, and
we’ve all had a lot of practice with corundum. All six available threads of attention can make a gate that size in parallel, it went pretty quick, even stacking them five-by-three on both sides of the stop walls.

Well, except it really doesn’t take much iron and titanium to colour corundum. Trace amounts, trace amounts we easily had. It’s a sunny day, with a clear sky. These aren’t mountains,
hilly, but nothing even close to tall enough to block the noon sun of late summer out of the northern sky.

Arch is swearing at a half-kilometre curved sapphire wall, ten metres higher than our best guess at high water.

When Arch notices there’s some more swearing at the four-metre-thick strips of channel wall showing across the land, straight and curved. We made them rough, good walking traction,
they don’t especially shine, but they’re blue, blue like we made them out of the idea of blue.

Arch’s down to muttering by the time Blossom says “Surveyor?” and Arch stops, takes a succession of slower breaths.

“Sorry,” Arch says, not looking entirely abashed. “They said
students
, not a cataclysm.” There’s some more very deliberate, very deep breathing.

“That’s Halt.” Dove’s more sympathetic
than amused, but really is amused. I have trouble being amused, Arch seems like a decent enough person, but that looked like it could have got messy, punching messy.

Big illusory bell jar,
Dove says, still amused.
Wait for their air to run out.

I’m thinking
Practical,
when I put my head on Dove’s shoulder.

“I was expecting, I don’t know, help getting the canal line clear, a full survey job, more
than we could do with just us four, then everybody from two Creeks over with a dredge or a digging focus showing up and maybe we’d get it done by the end of the year, more likely spring.” Arch has about stopped gesturing by the end of this.

“This,” there’s a couple unstructured waves at the wall, the locks, the fairy ramparts, “Yesterday and the day before wasn’t warning for this.”

“It’s really
durable,” Chloris says. “And it’s pretty and it’s easier to make than silicon carbide.”

Arch sits down, thump, on the bare ridge-rock. It’s flat here, that’s why we’re here, and all the baggage. Really bad idea to start rolling down hill when all your attention is in a linked-up working.

“
Pretty
isn’t an engineering word,” Blossom says. “Pretty costs extra.”

Arch snorts, head tipping forward into
hands.

“I have formal civil engineering qualification.” Blossom says it gently. “Here, this was the simplest, fastest, and best time-value thing we could do with the materials at hand.” Even with that, we’ve had to level a lot of ground with new gravel, pick up the sod and the topsoil and run the gravel under, the stretch between the curved canals is raised in the middle, don’t want any low
damp spots breeding bugs in there.

“Tomorrow?” Arch sounds a little muffled, head still in hands.

“Three swing bridges,” Blossom says, “get the canoes in the water, get up to Sad Goat, channel improvements as required.”

“Rest day,” Zora says. Zora’s all for it, we all are. The standards were more work, the three-armour-foci day, but today wasn’t easy.

Blossom nods. Arch is giggling.

“Surveyor?”
Dove says.

I straighten up; that’s Dove’s this-is-serious voice.

Arch, it’s a struggle, but Arch straightens back up, looks at Dove, talks.

“Five people and
installing
one, only one, bridge, a bridge delivered to them in large, manufactured pieces for them to assemble, it’s a rest day because they can’t
do
it, there is no possible way.” This isn’t composure, not really, we’ve done something to
Archimedes’ understanding of the world.

“Five isn’t enough for a focus.” Dove says this calmly, and Arch nods. Eight, at least eight, any kind of heavy lifting or excavation’s usually at least thirty-two.

“Five isn’t enough to do it with block and tackle.” I think Arch is just being complete.

“Not without teams of horses or oxen or something,” Dove agrees. “And you’re enough of a sorcerer to
know we can’t be doing this, to be looking for the Line battalion.”

Arch’s head shakes, emphatic. “I was up in the far valley, in the Folded Hills, last autumn, most of the winter.” Stable composure seems to be coming back. “The Line can make rock cuts through mountains, they can melt anything, but they can’t make machinery, or water-gates like they were — ” hands wave, high and random — “pancakes,
or — ” words clearly fail Arch, pointing at the sapphire wall — “
that
.

“Weed Creek, that was
just
possible, the scary old ones don’t all
look
old, I don’t know them, I couldn’t tell.” Arch’s voice is wavering, really upset.

“Even if you’re five of the Twelve, trying out new and inexplicably sane identities,
you couldn’t do that
.” Another wave at the turning channels.

“I just turned twenty-three”,
Chloris says. “After Festival.”

Dove leans over, touches the top of Chloris’ near hand.

“Foci work by creating a mind to do the work with. It’s dumb, but it doesn’t melt. You can use more of the Power than anybody’s head.” Dove’s looking right at Arch, who is listening. I think the air and the rocks are listening.