A Succession of Bad Days (21 page)

“It’s not the same social rules. It’s not the same construction of responsibility. It’s not…tolerant of human frailty, put it that way. That’s what the whole
make
yourself into someone magical
part of this is
about
. It’s not just that you can’t use the Power, it’s the social definition of
can’t use the Power
, too. Can’t be that patient, or can’t be that responsible, or just can’t not take it personally, if you’re using the meat brain you were born with.” Dove says this talking to the ceiling.

“Fragile or likeable.” Chloris says it like sentence of court.

“You lose more kinds of fragile than likeable.” Kynefrid’s out of tea, looks morose, but doesn’t sound it. “There’s this collegiality among Independents, it’s not all lonely contemplation on mountaintops. Even if you don’t — ” Kynefrid’s chin tips at me and Dove — “count these two or Blossom and Grue.”

Zora pats Chloris again, says “It really is hard.” Zora’s trying hard not to smile, but it’s
not all working. “I wasn’t done growing up the first time, and being told to do it over’s still wretched.”

“I don’t know what to do.” Chloris is somewhere way past sad. “I have just no idea.”

“Talk to Halt.” Dove says it gently, then says “Talk to Halt,” again, even more gently, when Chloris’ eyes go wide. “Halt wants this to succeed, and Halt has seen everything twice. Maybe you even need to
tell Halt you’re not convinced.”

Chloris twitches, but we’ll call it a nod.

“Tonight, though, you and Kynefrid get to bed. Zora gets the lights, Ed washes, I dry, we get to bed, and tomorrow.” Dove sits up straighter, looks at all of us.

“We’re going to take a nice barge trip, we’re going to get off the barge and walk west to the Shape of Peace, we’re going to go through the ritual, and we’re
going to come home without embarrassing our teachers.” Dove says all of this like a description of natural law.

“Home?” Chloris says.

“Home,” Dove says, waving at the dome. “We made it, we live here, it’s home.”

Getting off the barge is easy.

Not to slight the barge; it’s the apparently usual big, well-maintained, sturdy thing, and this one has glass windows for the passenger space. Between us, Crane, and what looks like representative adult members of most of a thorpe, it’s warm, too. Warm enough that Zora’s doffed jacket and sweater, nothing but the shirt left, leaning beside a window, one
layer of cold glass, and still looking warm. Stepping outside would work better, but the door’s dead-centre ahead, and it lets the wind in. Since it took an hour or so for the room to warm up in the first place, I think Zora’s decided that would be unacceptably rude.

If Chloris wasn’t pleased to be handed a detailed list, specific instructions, and a letter of credit by Halt, I was entirely fooled.
Back together, had done the work of reassembly, I think. Couldn’t outright ask.

Coffee seems to reanimate Kynefrid, going through a couple extra mugs, talking to Wake after Wake went through the details of what we’re doing on the trip with us. It’s not complicated.

I, well, I get breakfast, I stack some chairs, I wipe some tables, I try not to think. Dove had terrible dreams, mostly dreams, some
of it’s memory but I have no idea which parts. Wouldn’t know it at breakfast. Might have guessed, once Dove slept pretty much the whole of the barge trip north.

Crane isn’t talkative. The sense of being observed would make me very nervous indeed if I were a small terrestrial creature. It ought to make me a little nervous anyway, but after Halt’s full attention, checking to see if we’re doing the
wrong thing making glass? It’s reassuring; not a familiar grown-up, but there’s still one to hand, just in case any of us have the Power equivalent of a sneezing fit. Allergic to weeds in the water or something.

None of us are. None of us fall off the barge, either, nor trip on the way to the hostel. It used to be the Hill Road Landing, and just about just that, not a single proper bollard, I’m
told more than once. Since the new Shape of Peace, just before I became a student, there’s a full sheer bank, shored back of big driven piles hung with barge-bumpers, and bollards for twenty barges downstream of the ferry. “Upstream can go worse,” one of the barge crew remarks. “Takes about four hundred seconds to get the keel-focus up enough to move against the current.”

I suppose this explains
why all six of the moored barges have big mooring ropes to four separate bollards, sometimes crossing each other.

We, the five of us, stop together just back from the walkway behind the sheer bank and as out of the way as we can get. No one says anything, and there’s enough of a linkage generally that you can feel Zora’s
Do bollards have to be iron?
along with Chloris’ drifting enquiry after depth
in the river.

“Students,” Crane says. It’s much more amused than stern. “They’ve already got one.”

We nod, it’s one motion.

“Somebody else is going to want one,” Zora says. “There’s some scouring around the feet of the upstream six pilings,” Chloris says. Crane’s eyes go, something, it’s not something flesh-eyes visible, not narrow or wide or anything like that, then there’s a small nod. “So
there is.” Which means we go by the landing-master before heading to the hostel.

The singular isn’t really correct; it’s four long, well, sheds, almost, sod roofs and low fieldstone walls, square windows on the high side, toward the West Wetcreek. Warm, though, and quiet and dry; flagged floors, gravel under them. Round gravel, out of a stream somewhere.

Crane’s willing to have us heat the bathwater
with the Power, as long as we ask first and heat everybody’s. Nobody objects. Crane wasn’t sure, I don’t think. Creeks have trouble worrying about what Dove and Chloris and Zora are going to do. None of them register as ‘sorcerer’, it looks like they mostly register as ‘neighbour’. Easy to understand why Chloris fears losing that.

I’m apparently invisible. Even Crane lost me for a bit after dinner,
before doing the strange-eyes whatever again. Kynefrid is obviously well-behaved and just as obviously too skinny to be a threat. Various parental sorts of Creeks keep checking to make sure Kynefrid’s eating.

It’s oddly difficult to sleep. After the last, well, I suppose technically it’s more than two months duration, heating bathwater isn’t enough Power use to notice. Didn’t do anything else
today, and it takes some work to get my brain to quiet down, the grown-from-food one or the metaphysical one that isn’t done yet.

I’m not holding hands with Dove when I wake up, I couldn’t be, Dove’s two rooms away, through a couple of stone walls, but it sure feels like I am. From the
Idiot,
and the wiggled fingers when we meet, headed toward breakfast, Dove’s had the same feeling.

Trying to
eat breakfast outside-hands-only doesn’t work very well. We keep trying; going to blame that on not being awake. Eating breakfast quickly and drinking one’s tea outside-hands-only works a lot better. Even when Chloris looks pained and Zora looks quietly appalled. Quietly for Zora, anyway. Kynefrid doesn’t normally take any notice. Today, it’s a sort of rueful, maybe, kind of notice? Something.

It’s, well, I ought to think it’s cold out. It’s colder than winter where I grew up, at least for daylight. There isn’t much wind, though, and the road’s clear, and the day’s bright. Lots of people, waggons rumbling by, almost all the drayage is bronze bulls. About half of them look new. It’s not remotely wilderness, there are rest stops five kilometres apart the whole way.

It’s kinda nice to just
walk and not think for awhile. Which is a really strange value of ‘not think’, if I think about it, which I’m not, entirely, not in the front of my head. I am getting the impression that the metaphysical brain doesn’t stop, doesn’t have the flesh-brain need for food or rest.

They’re
all
eccentric.
Dove’s wearing gloves out of good-example. I’m wearing gloves out of necessity. Doesn’t make any
appreciable difference.
Having your brain run at two speeds forever would do that.

The majority position considers the increasingly detailed synthesia a more probable cause,
drifts, very tactfully, half a precise step of long legs, into our brain.

The principal minority position attributes the obvious tendency to eccentricity to the unnatural degree of self-control necessary to the non-fatal exercise
of the Power at large scales.

So we’re going to be eccentric for unusual reasons.
Dove’s grin in the undertone is the smell of fire and sunrise and the sound of the fear of silk, become much too comfortingly familiar to reach strange if it stretches.

Crane turns that into a discussion of what we’ve done, all five of us have done, specifically, not how we got the Round House built, not what we
attested for Clerk Lester, but how individual wreakings, workings, there might be a difference, how using the Power felt and how we see what we do.

I don’t think any of us have the vocabulary. We use up a lot of distance trying.

Somewhere around the twenty kilometre mark, just past the fourth rest stop, there’s a waggon stopped. It’s just having the pair of bronze bulls unhitched and walked forward;
the rear axle’s snapped clean.

We stop. Crane drifts forward, past us and up to talking with the drover. There are six or seven infants, one a babe in arms and the rest up to about four, in the waggon, along with a couple of adult minders. None of them are Creeks and the waggon’s got a newish canvas tilt. Looks like some of a gean’s infants going somewhere. At a guess, out of temporary housing
in the Creeks back to wherever their gean’s got roof and walls put up in the Folded Hills.

Crane hands us the problem, pure curiosity, I think, leaning on that admittedly wizardly staff Crane certainly doesn’t need to lean on and watching before the last syllable of “Students?” is out on the air. Crane says 'Students’ as a question in the same precise way our teachers do. It might be the most
reliably similar thing about sorcery in the Commonweal.

If there’s anything else Independents all do the same way I haven’t noticed it, and that’s only really four examples. There are hundreds, not many hundreds and we haven’t seen them, but hundreds.

Kids out, their minders out, check that there’s nothing precious in the waggon that anybody’s going to fear for if we pick the waggon up, pick the
waggon up a couple decimetres and float it sideways off the road. Kynefrid gets the wheels off the axle-bits, and then on the illusion of an axle, spinning properly, then back off, the illusion tossed to Dove, who has the broken axle hanging in the air as a blob of molten iron with carbon creeping into it from some road apples gone quietly to charcoal. Zora’s acquired a handful of big nails from
a drover coming the other way who stopped to see if they could help; that goes into the melt, and the whole thing extends itself to match the illusion, which Kynefrid, exchanging nods with Dove, lets go. The idea of an axle vanishes; Kynefrid gets a wheel, Zora gets a wheel, to make sure they’re still true and the hubs are sound. They check the springs and the axle mounts, too; having one of those
go, having it get shorter than the other, is a common reason for a snapped axle.

Chloris does the heat-pull; especially in the cold it’s a lot easier to get anything to cool right if you feed in too much heat, which Dove is doing, and pull out the excess. Feeding exactly the right amount of heat when the breeze is pulling out a variable amount is much more difficult. Chloris winds up with a cold-looking
curious four-year-old, and then a cluster of warm passengers, because Chloris takes the four-year-old’s hand to arrest the step-stare-step progress toward the big glowy axle in the air, realizes it’s a cold infant, and starts passing some heat over, instead of all of it up into a shimmer on the air.

Half an hour later there’s a new steel axle down to air temperature, five minutes after that axle
and wheels are back on and I can set the waggon down. Re-stowing the warmed passengers is another five minutes only because of some shyly passed out warming-rocks. Those go back toasty, under a mass of lap-robes that’s got all the kids in the middle and the minders on the outside. Dove hands the driver the smooth chunk of slag from the axle break, Kynefrid, rather hopefully, provides the drover
on the other waggon, the one with nails and going the other way, with a re-heat for their warming rock. Everybody waves at the kids in the repaired waggon, waving back at us. Bronze bulls are good for three metres per second, steady pace, and we don’t walk that fast, so they pull ahead, but pretty slowly. The kids wave for a long time. Just as they’re getting out of sight, Zora develops large purple
butterfly wings and waves those, just once before illusions go wherever they go when you turn them off.

Crane’s mouth quirks at the wings but nothing gets said until we’re at the next rest stop.

“The charm to fix an axle would take me, oh, perhaps forty seconds.” Crane makes a small gesture, fingers almost tapping along the staff. That pose of leaning’s a state notice, I think, much the way Halt
not knitting is. Not the same state.

“Yet those children, at least, will go away thinking sorcerers are friendly and kind, and the adults will believe you did work. Sorcery, but work, lacking any seeming of effortlessness.”

“It wasn’t difficult to do,” Chloris says. “It was just an axle.”

“Yes, but you melted it, you didn’t charm it, it wasn’t some unfamiliar process.” Crane’s face moves, just
a little. “Arguing with Halt is hard work.”

Dove is grinning. “Who is there to hold that untrue?” and after a pause, “What do we call you, if we’re trying to be polite?”

“Crane. A hierarchy of titles among sorcerers is no more appropriate than it would be among anyone else, and easily less.” A small smile, but I think they’re all small smiles.

It’s a very bright afternoon.

“Keep going until we’re
there, or stop here and walk the rest of the way on Déci?” Crane says, two rest stops later. Which is tactful; Kynefrid is much too blue, the axle-fix helped, but once Kynefrid’s skin tone starts to match their hair, the slow shakes start. Those are set in now, it’s not just starting, Kynefrid’s way too cold. There’s a four-voice chorus for stop; Kynefrid’s shaking so much that talking would
be difficult. Kynefrid will often not vote to stop over the cold, out of hating to be a bother. No matter how many times anybody points out there’s ‘bother’ and there’s 'accidental death attestations’ and that one is much more trouble than the other.

Déci is another fine day, not that cold, clear, sunny. Kynefrid sets out into it with a certain grimness, all the same.

It’s not that far, though,
another twelve kilometres. There’s a rest stop, there’s a rest stop three kilometres past, the road goes right on past, not through. It’s not even a town yet, it’s mostly tents, and it looks like the few rough buildings are mostly full of records, rather than people.

I started to feel the Shape of Peace from two rest stops back.

It’s Déci, so we can’t do anything, but we can go look at it. There
are a bunch of tents, the familiar Line-model ones, like the one we were in all of Brumaire, in a big horseshoe arrangement past the Shape of Peace, up on the bare ridge of rock. That’s where Parliament is meeting, would be meeting, if it wasn’t Déci.

The Shape itself looks like chalk lines, but, well, they’d never do that. It’s going to be as close to permanent as they could make it, and besides,
someone’s swept snow off it with a broom without any signs of blurring. Try sweeping snow off a chalk line and not touching the chalk.

“The chalk lines were layout marks, like a carpenter’s pencil marks on wood. They got caught up in the enchantment and may now be permanent.” Crane’s voice is cool, considering. “Can you tell where the actual enchantment resides?”

The rock is dark, there’s a lot
of iron and one of the m-names, manganese or magnesium, which I can’t reliably tell apart. I can tell they’re different, but remembering which is which seems beyond me.

Fifty, sixty metres down there’s the top curve of a ward. There’s a shallow curve, it can’t be spherical, it’d be ten kilometres across…