A Succession of Bad Days (17 page)

We wind up on the nice
warm upper floor again, after the grownups have looked over the kitchen and the doors and the windows in some detail, and Lester has another set of questions. Do we know what we’re doing, legally?

The answer is a chorus of “No.” We know why we’re doing this, having been informed we’re all high-talent enough that training to an Independent standard of practice gives us fifty-fifty odds of making
the age of fifty, instead of zero odds.

Lester nods at us, taps the used sheets of notepaper square, and starts explaining.

Typically, sorcery students study sorcery from the age of sixteen — school runs from nine to fifteen, so right into sorcery — to the age of twenty-five, and are then examined for potential. Those demonstrating the potential to become functioning Independents are offered formal
student status, those who cannot demonstrate such potential are encouraged to find other work. “It is common,” Lester says, “for those lacking sufficient potential to recognize this and move into other sorts of work, often high-output focus teams of one sort or another, prior to being examined.”

We all nod. Sorcery is not the sort of thing where you want to wait for the bad flub before deciding
that maybe this isn’t for you.

Formal student status makes you a
leornere
, free to seek out an existing Independent as your particular teacher,
heáhláreów
, and to complete the all-own-work project you have to submit before being permitted to petition for Independent status. It puts you into the keeping of the Galdor-gesith, grants you a stipend — pens, paper, apparatus, travel, Lester says into
Chloris’ appalled look and Zora’s doubtful one — and requires that you present yourself at the Shape of Peace to take binding oath.

“Already?” Dove, still sounding calm.

“Not the acceptance as an Independent.”
Not the one where the Shape of Peace might kill you as mad, bad, or aristocratic,
hangs in the air. “A notation of status, much like taking a clerk’s office.”

Dove nods. There’s a thread
of reassurance in the undertone. If Dove can ruffle my hair, I can send the idea of a hand squeeze. The smile that comes back makes me close my eyes, just for a second.

Lester looks very clerkly, gaze-over-glasses, at us and notes that at no time has anyone used the words
leornere
or
heáhláreów
in normal speech; they are specific ancient terms in law, older than the Commonweal, and if much used
in the Galdor-gesith’s records and formal contracts of instruction not generally used as a form of address.

We all nod again.

Lester carefully notes that while it is legal, permissible, and not actually unknown, for a project to be completed and a student to achieve Independent status without having found a
heáhláreów
, it can’t at all be recommended as a course of action.

We don’t even nod. None
of us want to die. We’re doing this to
not
die, substantially. Well, Zora’s doing this because it’s fun, and Dove’s doing this to find peace, and I’m doing this because not doing it would be about as easy as inhaling for an hour. I’m not sure why Kynefrid is doing this, maybe nothing else to do. Chloris might not know why. But for all of us, there’s a lot of
not die
back of the other reasons.

Lester seems to get the
not die
part.

“Do you wish to take up the status of
leornere
?”

“Are we qualified?” Dove says.

“If you, rather than the elemental, had done the heating enchantment, this house would do for an own-work project,” Lester says. Not a dry voice, but I think if Lester was here as a person, not a clerk, it would be. “Even a joint project.”

We must look dubious; I surely enough feel
dubious. Lester starts ticking things off, dry end of the pen counting over fingers. “Entirely clean terrane; bulk-fused earthen dams, the technique extended into the service of the wider community on minimal notice; fast, cheap, collaborative precise hard rock excavation techniques absent any form of blasting or bulk melting; first well-attested use of a fire elemental to construct anything even
a tenth this large; rapid, highly detailed titanium casting; those cruncher-bouncing windows; that astonishingly refractory and complexly mechanical and quite beautiful pair of double doors.”

“Those are odd?” says Zora. “I thought we got lucky with terrane.”

“There is always luck,” Lester says. “But entirely clean terrane requires an ability to believe in the possibility, which is not common.”
Too much experience of weeding,
floats around, all of us and most of the grownups. “We make note of an ability to make good on high hopes.”

Zora’s face goes “Oh,” soundlessly.

Crane’s bright eyes search over us.

“The only vaguely usual thing in this astonishing edifice is the binding in the lamps. Though I note that the Independent Blossom created that specific binding while a student, and that
while it is in wide use, it is almost always performed in four steps. Creating the fixed glyphs of the wreaking through tint changes in the sapphire you’re synthesizing from vapour-phase aluminium in the open air is — ” Crane inhales, just a little “not a commonly undertaken performance of the binding.” The
I’m not sure I’d care to try that,
comes through under the words.

There’s a flash of
something really complex from Chloris, face dipping into hands and shoulders briefly locking.

“I’m in,” says Dove.

Lester makes a 'come sign this’ motion, and we get up, line up, and sign. I can feel the Shape of Peace in Dove’s head, as well as in mine. It can tell.

“If the Independent’s schedule will permit — ” you can hear just how optional this really is in Lester’s tone, this is one of those
things that takes a specific emergency to get out of doing — “I shall ask the Independent Crane to conduct the new students to the Shape of Peace during the last décade of Frimaire.”

“My schedule certainly permits,” Crane says.

“It is unvarying custom,” Wake says to us, “that it not be your particular teachers who conduct you to the notice of the Shape of Peace.” Wake gets one of the non-cheery
smiles, just a little one. “Unlike the acceptance.”

Right. The other Independents would want to avoid surprises of all sorts, hence the custom.

“Indeed,” Crane says. “And in honesty,” and here Crane takes out a couple of five-mark gold coins. One gets handed to Wake, and one to Halt, both with a small bow. “Elementals will build large structures,” Crane says to Wake, with another little bow. Wake
bows back. “External manipulation of Power can be efficacious in the novice,” Crane says to Halt.

Halt beams at Crane, nods in formal acknowledgement.

Halt gives Chloris a list of ingredients, it looks like dyestuffs, to “Nip up to Headwaters and look into, while you’re travelling, would you Chloris dear?”

Chloris says “Of course!” with a real smile, as though actually happy to be asked. Crane’s
eyebrows may never come down; they’re still rather skittish as the grownups all depart, Lester with a handclasp for each of us.

Déci, well, we sleep in. We cook our own breakfast, or, rather, Zora cooks, we all eat, Dove and I wash. We dry the tent, and strike it, and pack it up as neatly as we possibly can. The pit-latrine gets back-filled; no one wants to try hoisting it into the upper sewage
pond. We try out Zora’s tub. We get down to Westcreek Town, packed tent in tow, in what is actually snow, and get grabbed by the clothes-clerk of our hosting gean. Boots, winter pants, jackets, broad-brimmed waxed-canvas hats with ear flaps that look, to Kynefrid and me, ludicrous, but, well, Chloris doesn’t hesitate. So it’s normal Creeks winter wear, and there’s got to be a good reason. I manage
to get sock-wool, as well as socks; I’ve got narrow feet and had rather knit my own. The wool in the Creeks, or at least some of it, is good stuff, fine and springy and smooth. The sweater I get is plain wadmal grey. Dove’s is yellow-gold, Chloris’ is green, Kynefrid’s is blue. No purple, so Zora winds up in a magenta-pink thing, a bit too large. A pile of smalls. Stern, nigh-ferocious, injunctions
and admonitions to bring clothes to the laundry, not to try cleaning by spell. Cleaning by spell universally horribly destructive. We all nod.

The tent goes back to the gloomiest person, and certainly Creek, I’ve ever seen, a man Dove addresses as Chuckles. That the tent, unpacked, is dust dry throughout deepens the gloom. The deepened gloom makes Dove smile, and the thought of
no more tent
has
all of us full of cheer headed over to the refectory.

We make the first sitting of dinner, and Blossom, there already, explains the coin exchange thing; that’s the public acknowledgement that your hypothesis has been falsified among Independents. Not any old hypothesis, but a significant one you’ve disputed with another Independent to the point you’re both getting “somewhat focused,” Blossom says,
“on how certain it is you’re the correct party.” It gets used as a way to make sure policy disputes stay over, an important thing when the people involved live for centuries and, Blossom says it wryly, “Have characters not necessarily unsuited to the holding of grudges.”

First day of Frimaire will be an undercut mill-dam plus sluice and spill-race, and we’re to both meet Wake there and to do
no least thing by ourselves, the mill itself being flammable timber.

The Creeks really get snow. It’s mostly wet in Westcreek Town, it wants to make things icy, but snow that sticks on the ground is not something I’m used to. The idea of wearing the thin socks under the thick socks is one I have to have explained.

I’m still doing better than Kynefrid, whose attenuated frame really wants to be somewhere warm. There are narrow stretches of ice along the
edges of the river, but apparently the main stream never freezes; something to do with the tributaries of Westcreek flowing into it, Westcreek that’s dust-dry, magically so. This is not evidence that it doesn’t get, that it isn’t, cold.

The idea that Westcreek is the default Westcreek, because according to tradition, it was the original, present lack of water notwithstanding, well, I can deal
with that, that’s the kind of silliness tradition about names will produce. That the thing actually
exists
is getting tougher to believe, after we’ve built water-gates so the house will work. Getting fish through gates alive is, well. Chloris asked Blossom about what might come through into the kitchen taps; Blossom ran us all through exactly what the gate does, all eleven layers of it. Which
is ten layers after the recognition that a basic gate will kill anything alive, there are a lot of nasty things that aren’t. So the West Wetcreek getting live fish and warmed water from the frozen-over tributaries of the Westcreek-that-was “Presents a challenge to the explanatory power of current theory,” Blossom says.

The water isn’t frozen. Can’t argue with that, there aren’t even any thick
chunks of floating ice going by in the current.

Zora hasn’t even put on gloves. Shows no sign of wanting to come inside the barge, either; this one has an open section to the front of the passenger area, then a wall, but no glass windows, so ‘inside’ might be too strong, but the wall does cut the wind.

By the time we’ve gotten off the barge, about twenty kilometres north of Westcreek Town, Kynefrid
is shivering pretty much continuously. The walk helps a bit, as does getting some hot soup when we get to the mill. Still not looking that good. Chloris, I don’t think anything’s said in actual words, but a large wool blanket appears, and Chloris and Zora wind up pressed on either side of Kynefrid under the blanket. I’d bet there’s some joy in ceasing to shiver.

The mill itself is a four-way joint
tenure; a quarter is the township, because the dam keeps the water level high enough to irrigate some fields, and the other three-quarters are a barge-building collective and two collectives of coopers, all people who want their timber carefully quarter-sawn. It’s also a good ten kilometres from the West Wetcreek heading east, a location that we would have needed to make a road to reach on dry
land. “Too much swamp to bother with,” Dove says.

There’s something very wrong. The dam is undercut, sure, but it shouldn’t be, there’s no explanation in flowing water, you can see not just the old, old courses of big rough stone blocks at the core of the dam now that the earth facing’s fallen off them, you can see little speckles of what look like fresh rock. A really big flood might do that,
but a flood at the end of Brumaire? It’d have to rain hard for days. Otherwise only if a big dam failed upstream, and if that happened someone would have said, to explain the mud that’d be everywhere if for no other reason.

Dove takes my hand, and I get a wordless explanation of, well, it has to be a light-bending trick of some kind, but Dove thinks of it as seeing further. It’s every bit as straightforward
as making a light, once Dove’s put it in my half of our head, and I, well, I wind up with my head on Dove’s shoulder for a bit when I’m murmuring “Thanks.” Dove’s gone a bit glittering-sound-of-trumpets, but only a bit. Still has a firm grip on any impulses to mayhem.

It’s definitely patches of fresh rock. Not like someone was at it with a hammer, like something was scraped across it.

Wake, well,
Wake is wearing a shapeless brown robe and sandals, same as always. There’s half-melted snow getting more melted between Wake’s toes. If that’s any sort of annoyance to Wake, it doesn’t show at all. Wake looks entirely amused. I can hope it’s because of getting to within arms’ reach without either of us noticing.

“Bad weeds,” Dove says.

Wake nods. “The first report of any change to the dam face
was three days ago.”

Wake doesn’t look happy that Kynefrid is half-frozen, but I think pleased we stuck to instructions. Now that Wake’s here, Kynefrid can, and does, use the Power to warm up. The blanket goes back with thanks from Kynefrid and Chloris. Wake has a murmured conversation with the people in the Mill; a couple of team leads from each collective and a clerk from the Peace-gesith and
a gerefan from the town, there’s no attempt at a day’s work being made.

The only living rock around has the mill on it. Wake looks dour, which makes all of us look at each other.

“So, students, presuming bad weeds, since it is better to be embarrassed than dead, and noting that the one bit of outcrop has a flammable edifice, what would you suggest?”

Wait,
Dove says. I don’t say “Is this similar
to any known local weed?”

There’s the most heart-rending sigh I think I’ve ever heard, at all, from anyone, from Chloris. Eyes full of tears, swimming-full, it’s not crying, precisely, nothing wrong with Chloris’ breathing but there are tears running down Chloris’ face. Zora’s looking confused, Dove’s not looking like anything. Kynefrid clearly thinks about hugging Chloris, and just as clearly
thinks better of it, arms falling again.

“Energy use. It can’t be high metabolism in anoxic ice water, so it’s either really, really big, thousands of tonnes, all through the root-layer everywhere around here, and using stored energy on its periphery, or it’s got a mystical metabolism and it might be really big anyway.” Chloris’ voice is clear, conversational, a bit distant. How Chloris tries
to sound having arguments about the aesthetics of the dishes.

Wake nods, face calm and a little inquisitive, not quite looking at Chloris.

“So the first thing, the very first thing, is to get everybody who isn’t a sorcerer of some kind out of here.” Chloris looks briefly sad. “And find out what losing the barrel production would do to the food supply. We might want to get the mill machinery out
of here, too.”

Which is just what we do, mill and all. It’s on living rock, but it’s slabby living rock with the bedding plane almost flat. More importantly, Wake is allowed to help, this isn’t house building for examination. I don’t know what Wake does to the bedrock, it’s complicated, but the mill, whole and entire, and about six metres of the rock it’s on, lift just fine when Dove and I grab
it by the gravity. It’s not a flat slice through the rock, we’re going to have to find just the right angle of hillside to set it down, but the clerk can point that out easily enough, right by the township town of Hopfields. We draw a small crowd, nobody’s used to seeing a sawmill float by. Especially since there’s a belt of woods there, yellow birch and sugar maple and those funny-looking fountain-trees,
so we have to float the mill out over treetop height. Everybody walking out with us is pretty quiet.

Half the Creek weeding teams are in the Folded Hills, helping the displaced. Which is maybe why we got called, aside from a chance to teach us something. But I don’t think anyone in Hopfields expected to see their sawmill fly.

Water, bread with butter, Wake’s complimentary about the bread, which
is a very nice chewy mostly-rye, and we start walking back. It’s about five kilometres.

“Now that the safety of the bystanders is assured,” Wake says, I think in the way of a prefatory remark, there was going to be more, and Chloris says “If it doesn’t talk, just kill it.”

Chloris sighs again. “We don’t know anything, none of us are local weed specialists, I’ve never heard of it, Zora’s never
heard of it, Dove’s never heard of it, but that’s not really conclusive, there are so many kinds of weeds and some of them go dormant for so long.” Centuries, some of them. That’s why the weeding teams have big shared libraries and maintain secretaries and archivists to write everything up and index it. You don’t want to have any more learning experiences weeding than you can possibly avoid.

Wake doesn’t look the least bit bothered by being interrupted.

“So it could be anything, do anything, spew toxic gas, explode, it could catch fire and burn down a thousand hectares, we could be fighting hundred-metre tentacles in a minute, we just don’t know.” Chloris feels
odd
, brittle, despite the calm voice and attention on the surroundings. If you expect hundred-metre tentacles, paying attention
is only prudence.

“But if it’s alive at all, if it’s not all gears and cables, I can kill it.” The knowledge does not bring Chloris joy. “So if it’s not a question of bringing it into the Peace, once it’s dead, it’s, it’s,
on the odds
, it’s easier to handle.” Meaning, yeah, we might get that fire, but dead first and fast is about twice as good as dead-by-pieces, if you look at the statistics
of half a millennium.

Wake nods. “There is virtue in an uncomplicated plan.”

Chloris looks startled.

“It is customary, in such work, to apportion three roles; the traditional names are
front
,
bubble
, and
periphery
.” Wake’s voice is pure teacher, but Dove gets this grin.

“Chloris, you will have front; Kynefrid and Zora will assist you. If it does not speak, you worry about getting the weed dead.”
There are a few terrible stories about people mistaking a genius loci for a weed. The ‘speak’ part is important.

“Dove, Edgar, you will have the periphery; you worry about surprises, anything sneaking up, poison gas, anything that might distract Chloris from the job as front.” Dove nods, I nod. “Suppress the mess,” Dove says, easy to say and maybe hard to do.

“Since your studies have not yet
progressed to ward-making, I shall have the bubble.” There’s a brief flash of cheer from Wake.

I fuss a little. Yes, one of the Twelve; yes, old, and presumably not entirely by chance, but one single flying rock to the head could — and then Dove’s voice says
Wake’s on the brigade list, one down from Shimmer,
and my worry shuts off.

One down from Shimmer is two down from Halt, and there’s nothing
above Halt. Wake looks like a middle-aged bricklayer, but that’s not more true as a thing than Halt really looks like your grandma. It’s just a much better disguise.

We get past the dam, stop, stamp around a bit, making sure the footing’s not going to surprise us right where we are. The pit where we lifted the mill foundations looks a bit slumped, but nothing more than you’d expect from wet dirt.

Wake goes through some arm-waving, and you can feel the ward come up. Way up, Wake’s taking this seriously. Dove and I take off left and right gloves, respectively, it shouldn’t really matter but it might. This consonance thing keeps getting easier to do, and it was no detectable effort when we did it the first time. It’s getting harder and harder to want to stop.

Zora and Kynefrid and Chloris
have less trouble than I’d expected getting sorted out. Some, it takes them a couple of minutes, but what they get looks solid. It looks like the sound of bees made of glass, Dove thinks more bronze dragonflies, and it glitters.

Chloris spends the next two hours very carefully going through every form of communication imaginable three times, and asking Wake twice if there’s anything that might
have been left off the list of what Chloris’ tried. By the end of that, everybody has a clear picture of what is certainly thousands and thousands of tonnes of twisty root-things, not precisely parasitic but taking over big parts of the soil ecology over what must be four or five hundred hectares on both sides of the mill stream.

“Am I right, that it can’t talk?” Chloris sounds so forlorn, saying
this to Wake.

“It can’t talk.” Wake’s own voice is gentle. “It’s near enough a scutch-grass rhizome system.” Except for the vastness, and vast hunger. Scutch grass isn’t what you want, not a useful plant, but it’s not a weed.

Chloris nods, and does something. It’s dead. Didn’t need to draw on Zora or Kynefrid at all, I get the impression that was so much easier than making lights there’s no
way to compare. Chloris is shaking, not from cold, and Kynefrid and Zora hug Chloris together.

Nothing stirs anywhere, we don’t see anything going off, no secondary defences, no movement of things or chemicals, nothing poisoning the dirt. Between us, Dove and I have our awareness down to a couple metres deep in what must be the bedrock, and out over five thousand hectares. It’s an odd sensation
to do that for hours, you start to feel the worms and the bugs and the chipmunks and the slow seep of water as sounds, see all their strange textures of history.

“It’s not safe to just let it rot.” Chloris, pulling out of the hug, visibly pulling a scattered mind into the present.

Zora nods, the blue-green-purple collective mass of them wiggles into a different shape, and this does take all three
of them to do. It feels, rippling away from whatever Zora is doing, like being the peal of a bell; not being the metal, not being the sound, being the compression wave in the metal. It’s really strange.

“Well done,” Wake says, and then a diagram appears in front of Zora. Zora’s nose wrinkles in response to the diagram, and there’s another set of bell-peals, lower and higher in pitch.

“Once it’s
dead, it’s just chemicals,” Zora says, “and chemicals have rules.”

That makes Wake smile.

There’s a bunch of slumping, nothing serious, but whatever Zora did took all the structure out of the root-things, it’s doing a worse job of holding the dirt above it up.

“Dove and Edgar have front for the dam repairs,” Wake says, and keeps the ward up. “Chloris on periphery, Zora and Kynefrid feed to Dove
and Edgar.”

The dam doesn’t need replacing, it probably doesn’t need fusing as such, but it’s clear that the narrowness of the bridge they’ve got over the stream here is a problem, it’s the only bridge between the landing nearest the West Wetcreek and Hopfields, and it’s not wide enough to take a waggon. So we leave the existing spill-race foot bridge alone, and the sluice-gates, but sort of walk
the dam face upstream another three metres. Getting the water out of the bottom-mud before we do anything hot to it is something we still check, but I’m starting to feel like I understand how to do it. Dove always did, I think from making roads with the Line.
Railings,
says Dove, and there aren’t enough bits of old lost iron in the pond to do a complete railing but we can do sockets; I pull the
oxygen off the iron and hand it, floating and molten, to Kynefrid, who makes a couple dozen post-sockets out of it, holds them up hot for Zora to glass them, tussles with them a bit to make sure the inside sizes with the glass are all twenty centimetres a side with good square corners, and hands them back.