A Succession of Bad Days (15 page)

“You are,” Blossom says. “You’re especially dangerous to everyone around you.”

Chloris would really like to object.

“It’s for a good reason, it’s in the hope of great public service in the future, it’s arguably not merely good but necessary, given the ratio
of area to Independents in the Second Commonweal, it’s something that wasn’t your idea. None of that means you’re not hazards to all about you, or that you won’t be for years.”

“So we need to be way out of town.” Chloris really isn’t happy allowing even that much. “Maybe we need to be underground. We don’t need all this space, we don’t need this, this
magnificence
to live in.”

“The elemental
had no idea about shelter, or warmth, or cold. It’d totally understand Zora’s snowdrift suggestion.” I really don’t want to say the next bit. “What the elemental did understand was an idea of elegance and pride suitable for the rituals of learning.”

Dove’s grin is a quiet thing, in flesh. In the undertone, it’s like the sun coming up.

Blossom makes a big swoopy all-of-this-gesture. “No one has
ever made a building with a fire elemental before. Lots of small intricate things, a few things as large as a cart, one distant historical — ” meaning so far back, pre-Commonweal, that it could be a complete lie — “attestation of a boat. This is in some sense the test run for Wake’s suggestion for how to construct the House of Parliament.”

“Suggestion?” Kynefrid, well, let’s say there’s an expression
of risk-reassessment visible, a parade of expressions and eye-twitches.

“There’s no reason to suppose that the elementals have any equivalent notion of scale, it’s a question of intricacy, not mass. Much more intricacy isn’t common, collaborating with elementals at all isn’t common, but about half the successful collaborations are more intricate than this.” More inclusive wave from Blossom.

“Successful?” It’s a question, but Dove doesn’t sound like it’s an important question. So far as I can tell that’s true; Wake was down there in the hole with us, that’s what matters.

“If the first one succeeds, the rest succeed.” Blossom grins, suddenly. “At least so far.”

“Wake has done many?” Zora, sounding rather nervous.

“Wake has done more than everybody else combined, but Wake only did
the summoning, sent the invitation you might say, for this one. The collaboration was Edgar’s.” Blossom dimples at me. “Given the results, come the day, Edgar’s going to be encouraged to do it again.”

The only good thing about hearing this is that I’m lying on the floor already.

“Wasn’t that…” Chloris stops, stuck for a polite word for ‘insane’.

“You collectively selected Edgar to represent you.”
Blossom doing implacable sounds very gentle. There’s this outer layer of a quarter-inch of marshmallow fluff and then there’s something you don’t even know the name of, but good tool steel would cringe and plead before it failed and died trying to score the faintest of lines in it.

“It’s here, it’s certainly a house, it’s your own work, it
is
magnificent. Get some lights in it and working plumbing
and it may well be glorious. That it’s a demonstration of Wake’s argument that a fire elemental is indifferent to structural mass is a bonus, but none of the other approaches to melting a bunch of gabbro into a house were any safer. Nor have any of you seemed inclined to turn that prairie into sod huts.”

“It’s still
wrong
,” Chloris says. “It’s too much.”

“It’s not like it’s
ours
,” Dove says. Dove
does a good implacable. “There’s no fixed anything for teaching Power use in the Creeks, not for Independents, never has been. Not anywhere in the Folded Hills, either. This is something we’re borrowing from the next bunch of students, and the bunch after that, not something we’re going to keep. We’re going to come back in a hundred years and look at how big the library is getting and try to pretend
that we’re fine with how that bunch of students has organized the kitchen.”

“That bunch of students will have an example of good work.” Blossom’s clearly sympathetic to Chloris’ distress, but not its cause;
not being special
and
do the job
aren’t supposed to come into conflict, there isn’t a whole lot of scope for that in normal daily life in the Commonweal. Opposing those two axioms like that
locks Chloris up, to the point where there’s no words to argue being found anywhere.

Zora’s looking differently troubled. “It’s all open down here. How do we put in walls or even curtains without ruining something?”

Kynefrid’s been sitting up for awhile. “Illusions, little enchantments, one room a time. Like the shoring, we should be able to make those. If we get the first couple wrong they’re
easy to change out. Drop the enchantment thing under a floor tile, let it sit in the hypocaust so no one has to worry about kicking it.”

“Binding,” says Blossom. “If you make a fixed working like that, rather than a fixed shaping for any Power you run through it, that’s a binding, not an enchantment.

“Aside from terminology, that’s a good approach. You all need to learn enough of making bindings
to make lights anyway, so Kynefrid’s suggestion will solve the partition problem neatly.” Blossom sounds actual-pleased, not teacher-pleased, and Kynefrid almost looks happy.

The next set of stairs go down, and down, and down, before they come level into another flat floor. Dove takes a breath, and turns inward, and makes a much, much brighter light.

Most of it comes back; it’s bright out there.
There are inarticulate noises from people still on the stairs.

The walls are about, I find out later exactly, ten metres high. We expected the excavation to be lowered by pulling rock upward to make the house, but not this much. The walls are, floor to ceiling, tiled black and white, black shapes like a flat cruciform kite and white shapes like an extremely stylized swallow or falcon or something,
nothing to it but pointy wings. It’s shiny, it’s very shiny, and the grout between shines silver.

In the middle of the floor is a pile that glitters, the hoard of the neatest dragon that ever lived.

Dove moves forward, I move forward, everybody else comes off the stairs behind us. Blossom’s got one hand on the wall, head shaking half in time to stepping down, stair by stair.

“What is it?” Kynefrid,
sounding confused. Not more confused than I am. I haven’t seen anything like it, it doesn’t look like glass.

“Allotropic carbon.” Blossom’s tone is dry. “The grout is pure nickel; the tiles all have a trapezoid cross section normal to the wall, with the wide side in the wall.”

“There’s something behind them.” I can’t tell what, but the glitter is too consistent.

“Usually that would be scored
foil, so there’s more reflection. This is part of the wall, the nickel back there didn’t oxidize at all, and it’s ridged to scatter blue light.” Blossom’s moving across the floor, bubble of light slowly increasing until the whole place is a glittering bright evenness.

The nickel grout’s a bit higher than the diamond wall tiles. Be tricky to bump directly into one, even if the tiles themselves
are sort of medium, fifteen centimetres on the long axis. Still…

Kynefrid is looking at me. “Workshop down by the ponds in the spring?” I’m nodding before my brain has finished making words out of it. Yeah. No swinging a hammer in here. “Good idea” is what I say out loud.

Chloris’ problems with magnificence haven’t been helped by, it’s got to be almost eight hundred square metres of diamond wall
tiles. Nor has any finding words to argue, Chloris’ eyes are enormous.

Not sure Blossom’s haven’t got a bit bigger. Rest of us, there might be less difficulty finding words.

The ceiling is black and white, a severe thirty-two, no, sixty-four point, the between-points are finer and fainter in grey, compass rose.

“Any bets that North
isn’t
precisely aligned with the spin pole?” Dove’s voice is
quiet.

“I’m not taking a bet that thing won’t move to
stay
aligned.” Kynefrid’s sounds shockey. “I don’t think the tiling pattern ever repeats.”

Zora’s followed Blossom to the middle space, stands there, watching, as Blossom trails a hand across neat stacks of ingots. Some of the stacks are a couple metres on a side and reach nearly to the ceiling.

“Iron, aluminium, titanium, magnesium, nickel,
chromium, vanadium, yes, Zora, that’s gold, platinum, palladium, rhenium.” Blossom sounds startled by that last one. “You really lucked out on the titanium, there’s seven hundred tonnes still here.”

Blossom is sounding thoughtful. “Couple thousand tonnes of aluminium, too. Looks like most of the iron is in the walls.”

I might be getting used to the glittery effect in here. I’m trying to figure
out what ceiling is made out of. It’s smooth sheets, I can’t see any seams in it at all, it just switches between black and white and the faint grey outlines. Be surprisingly challenging to get up there to see. Climbing a pile of mirror-finish ingots would be suicidal, something would slip, but I might be able to use the stack as a reference and float up.

Most of the floor is an even black. It
might be stone, but it looks too even. Even slate usually has some variation in colour.

Blossom has crouched down again, to put a hand on the single narrow bright circle you can see on the side where the piles of ingots are much smaller, then straightens up, slowly.

It shouldn’t be any different from any of the other times Blossom’s stood up from putting a hand on the floor to see what was in
it, but it is.

“Who put what runes in the walls?” Blossom’s voice tone is so completely empty you think of much worse things than stern parents.

“Home and strength and peace and truth and joy,” Dove says. “For luck, there wasn’t any specific intent.”
Seeing as we haven’t learnt how yet,
hovers behind that, unspoken.

Nobody else says anything.

That last little thing you changed?

Yes,
comes back,
somewhat wry.

Blossom’s looking at me. “Edgar, did you express anything about runes or wardings or anything like that to the elemental?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t know it was runes, it was something Dove wanted in the walls, so I passed it through with the rest of the idea of the house.”

Chloris looks annoyed. Zora makes, grinning around them, gagging noises. Kynefrid looks, mildly, annoyed at
Zora.

“I would really like to talk to that elemental.” Blossom says this almost happily. “Wake that ward up and I’d defy a battalion to break in here in less than a day.”

Dove smiles.

I want to see this smile again, there’s nothing in it but happy.

“Wake did say it was a work of art.” Zora nearly always sounds cheerful, Zora sounds cheerful while complaining, most times, but this has enough
lurking glee in it to set the whole world smiling.

“A work of art where you’re not getting any cuts through the walls for the sewer pipes.” Blossom sounds, well, not precisely
pleased
, it’s not the worst imaginable outcome. “Even if it wasn’t too deep.”

“So we can’t use it?” Chloris, come all the way back into focus.

“So you’re going to learn some really basic gate-making, along with the light-bindings.”

I don’t usually agree with Chloris about looking appalled.

Hundred-kilo ingots of aluminium are, you will pardon the expression, a pig to move. Making a light and floating the ingot and managing the stairs together was an excellent lesson in how much we had left to learn, getting used to managing hundreds of tonnes each on the flat or not.

Digging blast pits, Blossom’s troubling phrase for a specific shape of hole in the ground, meant moving
lots of rocks.

Making little half-litre corundum cylinders, well. Blossom was very cheerful to point out that corundum is just aluminium and oxygen, and if the elemental had been so kind to leave us all this pure aluminium, we might as well take advantage. Corundum is an ideal material for making a light.

The obvious problem is that combining anything with oxygen is usually called a fire. Dove
didn’t have one; the rest of us did, though Kynefrid managed to keep it down to only one. A quarter-kilo of aluminium vapour on fire half a metre from your face will light your hair and your shirt and blind you just from the radiant heat, which is why we do it in sequence with Blossom running a ward for us. Then we find out that’s the practice piece; the real ones either have the writing on something
in
the corundum, like a little strip of metal, or, if we’re going to do a respectable job, we’re going to use this handy bit of vanadium, and this other handy bit of titanium, and this equally handy bit of iron, and go for a really deep evening purple-blue, actual sapphire, like the sky above the last bit of sunset, instead of the plain clear corundum, and we’re going to do that thinking of these
particular words being formed into an open spiral and we shall thereby write the important words and glyphs into the structure of the thing in subtle changes of shade.

The words are numbers, wavelengths from sunlight, Blossom says, and there’s sixteen of them, for apparently traditional reasons. Actual sunlight’s much more complicated, Blossom says, but our eyes aren’t so we can cheat. A scrap
of poetry about the splendour of the morning and the peace of evening go in there, too, and glyphs of sun-runes, top and bottom, with the coil of words hanging between them.

‘Simple little binding’ or not, it gives you a real appreciation of why enchanters are rare.

We all manage to do it. It takes Chloris six tries, three of them fires, before one works, not so much crying as in tears by the
end. Blossom’s general encouraging cheer doesn’t, you can’t say doesn’t crack, it doesn’t even not scuff, it just takes no notice at all of Chloris coming apart in a panic that it’s not working, it won’t work, that there’s no way to avoid having to fail in public.

It bothers Zora a lot, who gets teary watching, especially after Blossom notes to Chloris’ desperation that there’s lots of aluminium
and a whole sky. I get fidgety and Kynefrid climbs out of the pit and starts pacing around the top, but it doesn’t much bother Dove. It’s not that Dove doesn’t care, though I’d be six kinds of idiot to think Dove likes Chloris particular-much. That doesn’t seem to matter either. When Chloris does get it, when Chloris has set the difficult hot rock down and slumped in a heap, Dove puts a litre mug
of water in Chloris’ hand and says “Victory,” like it means something. Chloris tries to say something, tries to laugh, remembers that one must not, covered in sharp burnt black dust, even consider scrubbing tears away from eyes, tries to really cry, and nearly chokes, but gets it all under control, drinks the water, stands up, and hugs Dove.

Actually
obtaining
light out of the things, once we’ve
got them, is ridiculously easy. I couldn’t have done it before the parasite came out, but anybody else who wasn’t an outright null could have.

We’ve entirely missed dinner; it’s full dark. Blossom says something quiet to the sky, clear and chilly and full of stars. About enough time to drink another litre of water later, a white bird that seems to be made of nothing but elegance and a faint glow
swoops down and hovers before Blossom and says, in what is clearly Grue’s voice, “Ninny. Sluice them first,” and then flies away.

We need the sluicing; we’re black everywhere outside our clothes, and some way inside them, with really fine aluminium powder that settled out of the air. Even Blossom, which is possibly like an indifference to being rained on.

The house Grue and Blossom share was a
mill, it probably still is in some way, and we wind up standing under the long feed trough for the overshot wheel, it can swing out away from the wall and the wheel to over a place you can stand on the other side of the mill race, and scrubbing. It’d be instant shuddery shivering without a fellow student sorcerer standing upstream and heating the water. Today was precision, not output; no one’s tired
in the talent, so the warm water isn’t short. A mix of a day’s sweat, extra-fine aluminium powder, extra-sharp aluminium oxides, and rock dust is a dire thing to get out of your hair. We go through a lot of soap, and Dove and Blossom wind up helping Zora and Chloris with their hair while I add the heat and Kynefrid provides illusory shower heads on hoses or we’d never make it to dinner. Blossom
doesn’t quite have Dove’s muscle definition, but it’s close. The resemblance is much stronger when neither of them is wearing anything and you can see the muscle move.

I have no idea what Grue feeds us, though I do appreciate Grue’s overt notice that the ants have been told to hide, there’s company. It’s good, it’s hot, there’s a lot of it. By the time we’re halfway through, all of us have been
at least tentatively purrbucketed by ocelotters and it’s possible to discuss counting all the many niches for lights in the house without anybody flinching. It’s got to be at least a hundred. “Good practice,” says Blossom, just before a determined ocelotter puts both front paws on Blossom’s left shoulder and attempts to purr its head through Blossom’s.

Casting pits, over the next couple days,
yet more rock. And you don’t want the same shape as a blast pit so we couldn’t very well use the same pits. We do get a lot of new-made clay out of it, suitable for lining the space uphill and southward of the bottom two sanitary ponds, which gives us a place to put the subsoil and the smaller rocks from under the sod after it and its metre of topsoil go back on the roof. The new dirt got a less-ferocious
version of the 'nothing lives’ Chloris had put around the sod, and Chloris looked untroubled for the first time in days, realizing that, sorcery or not, necromancy or not, this was clean dirt for a new garden.

The sod went on the roof the day after we wound up making lights instead of windows. Wake supervised, back in a plain brown robe and customary benevolence. There’s less of an area issue
than I thought there would be; the top of the roof, where the light spike at the peak of the dome comes through inside, is a much larger light-collection area than you might think from inside, plus there’s the big crescent area under the roof overhang, where it’s quite obvious we’re going to have to move the meadow or it’s going to die from the shade. Sod goes back in contact with its fellow meadow
all along the southern edge of the roof and there are no bare patches on the roof. Something subtle happened to the rise of the dirt back there. Wake looks beatific about it, so it has to have been the housebuilding. The gates for the plumbing go in three days after that, the binding, as Blossom put it cheerfully, being “A little more complex,” than the lights, especially as we were feeding one
source into many for water and then many into one outlet, only really eventually three outlets for waste water, one per floor, simply so we could actually make the bindings. The everything-into-one version, Blossom says, is perfectly possible, but it would lack redundancy, so we can always claim a design decision. “You never want to have to replace a complex binding before you can use the privy,”
Blossom says.

Taking something you just made out of iron and gold and your terror of doing it wrong and opening the world to a horror from beyond, wrapping it in ten centimetres of molten glass to keep the iron from rusting, and then dropping it in a pond is an odd feeling, even if we didn’t precisely drop it even after waiting for the glass to cool. Still, aluminium guide stakes or not, it’s
making a spell-binding for the express purpose of burying itself in muck, which is not the kind of story you get as a kid even in the Commonweal.

We lose a day of housebuilding because one of the bathhouses in town, not one attached to the gean that’s feeding us, has a big old wooden water tank like a giant barrel up on stilts, and it finds a surprising way to fail. Wake volunteers us to provide
a replacement, which we do, in the form of a huge foamed glass cylinder with aluminium mounting bands around it. It’s not until dinner that I notice I’m thinking of it as having had kind of a break, twenty kilometres of walking between fetching the aluminium and getting to the sandpit and back, plus making a round water tank twelve metres across and fifteen high, plus peaked roof, lid, mounting
hardware, and plumbing connections, and floating all that back into town and up on to the brand new support pillars the gean had just put up.

There’s a lot of happy faces and we feel useful.

Zora turns out to have a real knack for making elegant things, and if you’ve got someone named Edgar there to slap on the fine clay slurry before the heavier firing clay and someone named Dove to fire the
clay for you, you can get a long way rather quick doing lost-illusion casting. Especially if you encourage the melt to flow down into the mold by turning up the gravity. But not too far; we get one spectacular mold failure, good proof of the wisdom of Blossom’s insistence on the casting pits. Also a memorable lesson in why titanium fires are something to avoid, an aluminum fire is bright and hot but
you can put those
out
, once the titanium starts the clay mold burns up with it. We get a full set of stair railings done as foamed titanium — you stuff some nitrogen into the melt and insist that it not react with the titanium; it helps a lot if the person pushing the melt isn’t the one managing the nitrogen — in delicate traceries of flower stems; the surface is perfectly smooth. It takes some
will to get that.

It’s not quite pure titanium; apparently if you add some aluminium and two-thirds as much vanadium as aluminium your titanium gets a good deal stronger, and, as Blossom says, “Too strong is a hard thing to get in a railing”.

“I’d never do it like this if I hadn’t figured out how to dust with the Power,” Zora confesses, and I understand, it’d be making more work forever, if we
couldn’t dust by wanting to, but the railings are gorgeous. They’re even fairly easy to fasten to the floor; it’s not glue, it’s a binding, and I cannot follow Blossom’s explanation of how it works whatsoever or at all, but it works, without so much as a bolt hole.

Kynefrid and Chloris spend the time we’re casting railings having a continuous vociferous argument. Their argument produces a severe
kitchen in mostly black glass, something that looks like black glass, but they do remember to reserve some space for the marble work tops of Zora’s hope. I find the four ovens a surprise, but everyone else just looks at me about it so I shut up. We get a bunch of bindings in for the pantry walls, real shelves — more of Zora’s work in titanium, spare and practical rather than ornate, pulled out
of a melt by thinking like an illusion if someone else will get the metal hot and another someone else will keep the air off it while it’s hot — and a whole bunch of fixtures and all the wall bindings done.

Blossom makes us wall-wards, pale ghostly things, to go with our illusory wall bindings. “Wards are the last thing,” Blossom says about what we’re going to learn, and even then, these are complicated.
No stray thoughts out, no stray noises out or in, but you can
call
out, push a thought to someone named. You can create a kind of alarm, lock the door, leave a message in the door, the place where the illusory door also is, it’s fiercely complex. Blossom doesn’t seem to think so.

Zora shows up after the second Déci of Brumaire with a bathing tub. Chloris and Kynefrid had repeated their tavern
jaunt, Dove had accepted a lunch invitation from some Line comrades, and I’d read some history in the form of Galdor-gesith records and written my second reply to Flaed, when I wasn’t lying in the middle of the middle floor and staring at the ceiling. The first reply hadn’t gone very well, based on what I got back; I don’t think ‘Edgar’ and ‘sorcery’ got into the same place in Flaed’s head, there
was distress. Not that ‘sorcery’ could be a good place in Flaed’s head. Zora had gone right on making stuff, making actual human scale individual things makes Zora happy with a nearly flammable joy. Going to be interesting to see what happens with spring and a garden.

The tub’s four metres by eight, a rectangle rounded at the corners, and twenty-three decimetres high, too deep to stand in. Chloris
isn’t initially entirely approving, that’s very nearly luxury for just the five of us, and only ‘very nearly’ because Chloris doesn’t want to be insulting. Zora points out you can improve the ceiling clearance by taking up some floor tiles and setting the tub straight on the arched floor supports.

The tub is also a single massive sapphire block, a really deep evening blue with no purple, with
a broad lip and flowing even curves everywhere. The drain-gate binding’s built in, part of the whole massive block. The plug is a dome of white glass that must weigh five kilos; it has a free-swinging titanium pull-loop a centimetre thick and some kind of rubber gasket round the bottom, where it overhangs the drain-gate. Rubber? Where would Zora get rubber? That was produced in the far northwest of
the First Commonweal.

“Bug spit,” says Grue, smiling just like the Wicked Queen.

Zora had carefully pre-wheedled Grue into, apparently not shrinking it, “putting it a bit further away in an unusual direction,” Grue says, so it’s half its actual size and instead of being absolutely impossible to get down to the middle floor the tub traverses the stairs just fine. It installs without difficulty,
too, Zora had insisted on leaving lots of space. Dove and Chloris say extensively nice things about it, and just before Zora grabs me and Dove and an indulgent Blossom to go off and make fixtures for it, more solid cast titanium, Kynefrid and I share a look; there is clearly something about lots of hot water and Creeks which we do not understand.