A Succession of Bad Days (54 page)

Block and Blossom are nodding, not quite together.

Blossom takes us back through town, endures a rather terse exchange with the refectory manager, who is happy to send us off with lunch and not at all happy with our perceived state of overwork, and gets us, floating Chloris once we’re over the bridge across the West Wetcreek, back to the Round House.

“Plunk
yourselves in the tub,” Blossom says, after making sure we actually eat lunch. “If I don’t see you at dinner I’m going to send Halt.” I nod, Dove says “Mean,” with a grin, and Chloris snorts into a just-empty tea mug. Third big mug of wood lettuce tea.

It’s another décade and a half, into the first décade of Fructidor, before the Hale-gesith’s clerks, the Galdor-gesith’s clerks, the Peace-gesith’s clerks, and the one lucky clerk-at-large who gets to come to Westcreek Town and talk to Halt and Blossom and Grue at the same time about what they want to do, get everything sorted out about what they want to know before Halt and Grue and
Blossom can wake up Zora.

Doesn’t help with my uneasy feeling. I can’t even tell if the feeling is about Zora, or something else. Lots of sorcerer-stuff got easier after the circulation exercise, we’ve achieved the first of the seven things required of Independents, the sufficient quantity of Power.

We, except for Zora.

The problem, if I’m understanding what Halt means, I’m sure I’m understanding
what Halt says but it’s not quite the same, is that Zora’s metaphysical brain necessarily grew, changed, expanded, there isn’t a specific verb for ‘met the challenge by restructuring itself’, moving all that forest up in Morning Vale, dealing with at least the idea of millions of names. That’s, generally, a good thing, much better than flubbing a working and vastly better than flubbing that particular
working, any working on that kind of scale.

The bad thing is that Zora’s physical brain didn’t change. It can, that’s one of the reasons to teach us shape-shifting as soon as we could learn it, to let the metaphysical brain change the physical brain, our physical brain structure’s still the, Grue says,
Dominant substrate,
the thing that we’re using most of the time.

“Less and less,” Halt says,
“as it should be”.

Right now, still what we’re using to talk to people and walk around and generally function, we’ve started being entirely in our metaphysical minds when we’re handling large amounts of the Power, this is, all three present teachers are clear, just what should be happening, but we’ve got to shift back to the meat-brain the rest of the time. Which is fine as long as it keeps up,
reflects what the metaphysical brain becomes, and then Zora’s reflexive shape-shift restored a brain ‘suitable to previous challenges’. It’d been hurt in the first place because the new organization, structure, of the metaphysical brain involved assumptions about the physical, and those were wrong, the working pushed Power through Zora’s physical brain, Zora’s whole body, it’s not at all purely
a brain thing, in damaging ways.

Makes me wonder if you want a physical brain for anything, once you’re an Independent.

“Facial recognition, social cues, physical sensations, proprioception,” Grue says. “Works fine if you stick to one brain organization per shape, label them, keep track. Lots of evolution in a brain.”

Clerk Hyacinth’s spoon ticks distinctly on a plate. The Clerk looks at Grue
and says “Is this a refectory conversation?”

Grue says “Why not?” just before Blossom says “Workings of our trade. The kids discuss melting rock by the thousand tonnes, it’s less concerning than having us mutter about this stuff in private.”

Kids,
gets Blossom identical severe looks from Dove and Chloris; Blossom raises both hands and looks abashed, just for a second before Blossom grins at them.
Hyacinth, an amiable matronly sort whose neck and wrists show considerable muscle definition, translates that more easily than I do as ‘kids’ meaning family members of a later generation, not the objectionable ’not adult'.

Someone going by catches Hyacinth’s eye and says “We like knowing what else we’re worried about,” and keeps going, hands full of pickle-caddies.

“A tradition of aloof sorcerers
need not constrain the future,” Halt says, somehow in a combination of perfect grandma voice and utter ruthless certainty. “The aloof isn’t good for the sorcerers.”

Clerk Hyacinth’s doing well. That much determination from Halt makes, is making, Blossom a little uneasy, and Hyacinth’s maintaining a proper professionally disinterested clerkly face. Though I suppose I can only tell Blossom’s uneasy
because we’ve been linked up.

Makes me wonder what clerk school is like.

Makes me wonder what Blossom expects,
Dove says.

Maybe Blossom’s got the same sense of incipient dread I do. If it’s really dread. It might be dread when it gets here.

Explaining the details takes longer than lunch, we wind up walking toward the hospital in a clump, but the basic idea is simple. Zora needs to shape-shift
to a different physical brain, that’s not something Zora knows how to do on purpose, none of us do. There’s a tendency to have it happen, if we’re ‘conscious of novelty’, is how Halt puts it. Zora didn’t realize the sheer scale of names would make something so much harder, that the risk, having cognitive substrates out of step with each other like that, needed to be addressed.

Not that Zora had
any trouble doing the work, Blossom points that out, we’re all nodding. The tunnel and the canal-turn from the stream down from Sad Goat Lake involved more Power, there wasn’t any indication Zora was under strain when the forest was moving, that’s probably the problem, Zora thought it was easy because it seemed easy.

It’s not legal for anyone else to rearrange Zora’s brain. There’s no question
that Zora’s sane, competent, and legally adult. Practically, it’s almost impossible to do in a way that doesn’t badly constrain future ability with the Power. You tend to get stuck where you’re put, and that’s not even a temporary solution, we’re learning fast enough that it might not last the month, Grue says. A good trade for someone with some troubling madness and regular or even stable amounts
of talent. Ornate murder in Zora’s case.

What works, if anything works, is to connect the person up to someone with sufficient shapeshifting ability, “Any able sorcerer,” Halt says, which is not an accurate description of Grue on the subject of shapeshifting. Grue says ‘more than fifteen species is hard,’ about turning into a cloud of dragonflies, something done for fun, because it’s a nice sunny
day worth enjoying better.

Halt can make the connection, it takes Halt because Zora’s strong, the person doing the connection has to be stronger, as much stronger as you can get, but also subtle enough.

The way Hyacinth nods, Halt might be the only Independent who could do this for Zora. Nobody could do it for Dove.

Or you,
comes to me with half a smile and all of sunrise.

Blossom’s there to turn
off the enchanted sleep in a controlled way, to backstop Halt and lend power to Grue.

None of that’s the problem.

“Let us take as given that Zora’s present capacity to exercise choice is only very slightly greater than that which obtains for the dead; that no one would not wish to see Zora’s entire capacities restored; and that the proposed course of treatment is that least likely to render the
situation worse.”

Hyacinth’s got a definite voice. I’d expect the walls are thick enough, we’re in discussion room in a corner of the hospital’s third floor, at least one side’s storage, not patients. Plaster over brick, no door, but four bead curtains down the entrance hall.

“I am here in an official capacity to investigate formal complaints of overworking apprentices, all three of you present
and certainly including Zora. Since those responsible for your training, and thus the overwork, were overwork to be found, are those who propose to provide Zora with an opportunity to magically alter Zora’s own mind, there is an unresolved conflict of interest.”

We’re blinking in unison. Pretty sure Hyacinth notices. Blinking’s not as obvious as talking in incidental eerie unison, but it unsettles
some people.

“The phrase
bicker like cousins
appeared in several of the letters.” Clerks aren’t supposed to smile when they’re working, so I suppose this is something else, even if it was rapid. “Concerns that you are collapsing into a hive mind are slight.”

Hyacinth does the Clerk paper-tapping thing, not to straighten the edges, it’s the dry end of a pen going down a list of points.

“Concerns
that you are rarely seen sitting down, as distinct from collapsed in heaps, that you arrive to the refectory in haste, that you miss meals, that when you do show up it’s even odds you’ll be nearly late, seriously muddy, covered in black burnt metal dust, drenched, sometimes in sweat, or so tired you’re giddy.”

Hyacinth looks up. “Further, there’s what I can only call a consensus among the Line
recruits that the minimum honesty required of them as good Creeks compels an admission that they couldn’t possibly have survived the drills you did with Block.”

A specific letter is picked up, there’s that brief moment of finding where the part you want starts, and Hyacinth says, in a voice for quotations, “They grin about it, and run uphill backwards juggling spectral fire. It’s the fun part
of their day.”

The letter gets set down.

“The existing consensus that sorcery is dangerous and that the young have no sense about risk does not appreciate being expected to add
juggling spectral fire
as the fun part of your day.” You’d almost think Hyacinth thinks that’s funny.

“Hardly fire,” Dove says.

Hyacinth looks at Dove, medium sternly.

“Not all energy is fire,” Dove says. “Not even when
it sparkles.”

“Overwork is when you get weaker.” Chloris says this with the authority of the formal legal definition it is, that everyone learns in school. “When you go back the next day and you do less and worse, because everything hurts and you ache and your muscles haven’t recovered.”

Hyacinth nods, formal as a judge.

“None of what we’ve done was overwork, none it was close to overwork, the
armour foci
hurt
, but we got stronger. If we weren’t worried about all those people, the canal would have been fun. Parts of it were fun anyway.” Chloris sounds worried, a little, all those people. We’ve been seeing the barges go through Westcreek, turning into the West East Canal. Maybe forty people to a barge, by the time they get to Morning Vale the barge is going to need five tonnes’ load
for each of them, mostly food.

“Edgar?” Hyacinth expects me to say something.

“Know that bit from school, that luck is inevitable, and the purpose of society is to mitigate the bad luck and maintain the circumstances that permit the good luck?” School, but it comes from the Ur-law.

Hyacinth, formal clerk-face or not, isn’t sure what that has to do with overwork, so I get one careful nod.

“School
emphasizes that it’s the
circumstances
that should be maintained, not the actual particular luck. Actual luck is declaring people special.” That’s unstable, it turns into a fight over who is more special.

This is really hard to say.

“There are ways we’re lucky we live in the Commonweal, that we’ve got the teachers we do, that we’re all here at the same time.”

That we exist, together.

That we’re
not dead.

“Mostly, though,
functionally
, we’re Halt’s good luck. We’re the example that Halt’s right, that you can train high-talent people this way and it works better, you get a, a wizard-team.” Pretty sure I’m blushing, saying that out loud. “The circumstances are unlikely, the four of us at once, the Commonweal splitting, no one has time to fuss that much about training sorcerers or four
people who are statistically dead.”

Hyacinth’s hand almost taps the pen-end at
statistically dead
.

“Any overwork, any
pattern
of overwork, is an argument that Halt’s not smart enough to notice that the circumstances of long-awaited good luck include Halt’s credibility, the long argument that a new form of sorcery training is a good thing to try.”

“Do you feel overworked?” That sounds like a real
question, not a formality.

I shake my head. “I wouldn’t know. I got through an apprenticeship as a turner for fine work. There aren’t any baulks of timber involved. Sorcery’s a more difficult course of study, but I’ve got no experience and no access to a quantified basis for judgement.” Turning was something a slow kid can do well enough to be useful, that’s true, Hyacinth would know it’s true.
I’d still rather not have to say it.

“I do know there are kinds of work that go better slowly, and kinds that go better fast. Maybe the Power’s a very hard edge, maybe student sorcerers are soft, maybe it only
works
if we go fast.”

Hyacinth makes some rapid notes. Halt reaches into that knitting bag, produces a tiny plate of tiny scones, and hands it to me. I take one, the scones get much larger
when you lift them off the plate, say thank you, and pass the plate to Dove.

Hyacinth’s head is shaking, but no objection is voiced, and Hyacinth takes a scone when the plate gets around to the head of the table.

They’re really good scones.

“Everybody’s always been really careful about hydration, any time we used the Power.” Chloris’ tone is careful. “I don’t think I could have drunk five litres
of water before, I think we’ve changed more than we notice.” Something quirks across Chloris’ face. “I never knew you could sweat through your shoes.”

There’s a small sigh, a billow of lamentation. “Anybody worried about me being overworked
now
needs to go put up preserves with my mother.”

“My take on overwork started as a farmer.” Dove sounds a little wry. “This feels like we’re being a bit
slack, everyone’s taking extra care with us.”

Hyacinth sets the pen down.

“The four of you, five with Blossom, put in a hundred and forty kilometres of canal in less than a month. Do you want me to work out the equivalent work-years for doing that with workshops and dredge foci and more mundane skills?”

Dove grins. “What Chloris said about it being fun’s all true.”

Sis?

Blossom waves some diagrams
into existence.

“General idea of a focus, make a mind, the mind uses the talent of the participants, you get a multiplier based on the power of two of the participants, eight’s three times, sixteen’s four times, stops at thirteen times and what’s going to be about eighty-five hundred participants, foci that big are messy.”