A Succession of Bad Days (23 page)

I’m sure everybody’d try to fix it, first. But
if they couldn’t, you would die, be destroyed.

I remember feeling a lot less ambivalent about that when I didn’t know I had any talent for the Power. Still the only way to have anything like the Peace with people like me around. Floating eight thousand tonnes of marble through Westcreek Town got us a few odd looks, not panic and screaming. It’s still — something — thinking I’ve got a deadline
with real dead in it. Never had that before.

Well, that I knew about. The parasite came with a deadline.

Dove reaches across the table, ruffles my hair. “All we have to do is not die and keep up with Halt’s syllabus, and we’re fine.”

“You’ll be fine,” Kynefrid says. “I won’t be.”

Kynefrid sounds dreadfully certain, and when Zora tries to say something holds up a hand,
Stop.
“Really. At least half
of being able to do something with the Power is belief that you can. I, I got too far with learning charms, I don’t know, but the idea that I can throw myself off the cliff and grow wings and fly before the ground grinds me to grease. I can’t believe that.”

Kynefrid’s hand lowers and Zora’s mouth opens and — 

“Zora,” Dove says, “you really can’t argue Kynefrid out of it. It’s not fair to try.”

Zora’s mouth clamps shut, so Zora says nothing, beyond whatever sprouting gloriously ornate butterfly wings and swishing them irritably is intended to convey.

Chloris says “Remember you can come back.”

Kynefrid’s head shakes. “The ward would let me in, you’d all be happy to see me, and I’d try to do what you were doing and fry myself.”

Completely certain about that.

“So what are you going to do?”
I try to say it flat, no emotional subtext.

“In strict law,” Crane says, “formally accepted students are free to wander as they please. There are even three examples of successfully attained Independent status after spending a dozen years meditating in the wilderness.”

Three. In five centuries.

“In the particular case, having conferred with Wake, I have offered Kynefrid a more traditional course
of instruction.” Crane sets the teacup down, quietly, very precisely centred on the saucer.

“Which I have accepted.” Kynefrid says that almost sadly, but I think Crane understands.

Dove, and Dove’s bag, produce Kynefrid’s blue mug. Dove hands it across. Kynefrid looks like someone whose head might fall off, just from surprise.

Dove just looks at Kynefrid, holding the mug out, until Kynefrid
gets collected enough to take it. Crane’s looking at Dove in a distinctly approving way.

“You may not want to finish there, but you still started with the Tall Woods. The Round House’ll have your doors for a long time.”

Dove’s head turns to look at Crane. “Try to bring our fellow student back for Festival, some years?”

Crane produces a small, completely serious smile. I don’t know how you smile
in a completely serious way, but that’s what Crane does, before nodding once. “I shall.”

Can we get walking?
drifts out of Chloris in a cloud of misery, and we all nod at each other, and get up, and say something like “Good luck,” to Kynefrid, and “Thank you,” to Crane, and head out.

Headwaters is a surprise. I was expecting more or less Westcreek Town, maybe arranged a bit differently.

Instead of a fairly big place, spread along both sides of the West Wetcreek and the East Canal, even if that’s really three sides, it’s a very compact settlement on an island too round to be entirely natural. It has walls. It’s got maybe three thousand people, though I’m told that
goes up to five in the summer. Everything’s at least five or six stories, except the warehouses around the edge, which look like they’re at least three.

“This is the right time,” Zora says, and then tells horrifying stories about what the biting bugs are like in the summer. More horrifying is the purpose of the warehouses; there are quite some number of Creeks, four or five townships worth, living
north and west of Headwaters, up in various damp little valleys where the Folded Hills mush into the Northern Hills and the bugs are “serious”, Zora says. “Really serious. You can’t go outside after dark, some months. But they keep bees and make whiskey and sheep’s cheese and maple syrup and indestructible socks.”

“Also smoked boar and excellent insect repellent,” Dove adds.

The warehouses are
where the surplus goods get stored, sometimes brought on sleds in the winter but usually paddled in by canoe when the water is high in the spring. So they’re there because thousands and thousands of people live in a landscape that alternates bog and rock and is mostly impassable, you get a brief paddling season and a not-quite-as-brief hard freeze when the rot in the bogs isn’t producing enough heat
to make the ice treacherous. Otherwise you stay home. Unless you’re willing to risk going mad from the bug-bites. Really, chemically, mad.

It’s more than enough to make me glad my former collective is down at the southern end of the Folded Hills.

I ask if anybody lives in the Northern Hills. Presumably, if people are willing to live up in the Corner like that.

I get wide eyes from Zora and Chloris
and a certain amount of confusion. Apparently you could go berry-picking and things there, at least in the foothills, in Chloris’ grandma’s youth, but not for the last generation and not for the last fifteen years, for sure. The Hills have mostly been mountains, and they keep getting less pleasant.

I’m probably looking baffled. I’m certainly
feeling
baffled. “Conscious terrane,” Dove says. “Reems
was trying to colonize it, it’s in an inhospitable mood.”

“All that altitude and snow, there will be flooding problems,” is Chloris’ contribution, and I can believe that; the snow, well, there’s snow, you can see it on the frozen marsh, you can see snow all around, but if you look up, and concentrate, the northern edge of the world is this glittery pure white.
Lots
of snow, way high up.

Lots of
snow right here. It’s higher, some, there are two sets of locks around dams drowning rapids to get barges up to Headwaters, and colder than Westcreek. Plus I’m told the Corner is a weather trap; the prevailing winds come from the south-east. So more water falls out of the sky. Someone keeps the streets clear, can’t see anything that looks like sweep-marks or shovel-bites on the edges of the snow,
so it’s probably a focus. Clear streets are helpful. Chloris has had a couple of days to recover from grief and recreate a determination to do a good job of shopping for dyestuffs. Determination doesn’t mean Chloris knows where one needs to be to get anything on Halt’s list, so there’s going to be a good deal of walking.

Chloris and Zora set off to do that, Zora having offered to carry, even on
the condition of no spurious illusory anything.

I’m following Dove, who knows where to go, fellow soldiers to visit. My offer to go with Chloris and Zora instead was turned down, with emphasis, so it’s not precisely like I shouldn’t be there.

It’s, well, the hospital is way too big for a town this size, six stories, two big buildings, and it’s not at all full. Which is doubtless why the word ‘regional’
was over the door, and I suppose in winter nobody’s getting hurt by weeds. Or nothing like as much as spring planting, anyway. We’re headed toward outside, more than halfway through and the hospital’s on the north side of town, so the side that gets a lot of the light. There’s a lot of glass, it’s practically a solar, and there’s a bunch, a big bunch of folks, maybe forty.

None of them look especially
ill until you notice slings and crutches and one or two problems with drool.

I hang back a bit; everyone’s clearly happy to see Dove, there’s card games that just stop, cards set down face-up. It’s not obvious any of them notice me standing in the doorway.

Big lad, well, near enough a regular lad, height-wise, for a Creek, but wide even for a Creek, gets up. Has trouble, looks like the arm and
the leg don’t work on their right side.

“Hey, Slice,” Dove says, taking the offered left forearm.

Something’s not quite right, and then something’s completely wrong.

CHLORIS! ZORA! HOSPITAL! HELP!

That gets me noticed, not much, I’m just whoever stepped into the room behind the head-noise and reaching for Dove and then they all go strange, eyes-rolling, falling-over strange.

Dove’s not doing well,
and then I’ve got a hand on the middle of Dove’s back and we’re not doing well together.

All of the people, Line-troopers, they must have been, there’s a spike in the metaphysical part of them, one or two, only through limbs, the limbs that aren’t working, and the spikes all move, pushing through, reaching at Dove.

Dove’s got something up, not a ward, raw energy, intact behind it, Dove’s dropped
the link, there’s a whole lot of spikes, more, extra, none of them have reached past, the energy-thing’s in the way, it’s not a smart metaphor, it’d maybe have fumbled along the link but now it’s just trying to get at Dove. Too hot to reach through, for some value of hot, the energy sphere, and the hungry spines are twisting, like trying to wrestle a rosebush in a windstorm by holding up a mattress.

Metaphysical weeding problem.

Individual spikes, limbs, whatever, keep moving and feinting and trying different angles. It presumably thinks it can win against Dove. Hopefully it really didn’t notice me, and flubbed its assessment.

If the spines, spikes, they’re like big jointed thorn-branches, the patients get hurt worse flailing with them. First thing after stopping the pushing at Dove is to
stop them from coming at
me
, because I can’t do that shell thing.

Noun, verb.
THIS SHAPE OF SPIKES BE BOUND TO STILLNESS.
Don’t want to lock up anybody trying to come in and help. The thought is quiet, underneath, hardly anywhere near the part of my mind I’m thinking with. That’s going, it’s all going, oddly dim, like being colour-blind for material reality. The spikes are just ends, feet, something,
on long jointed limbs. Or vines, no obvious body. They’re twitching, little waves travelling up and down them, but they can’t move, can’t shift the place they’re in, all they can do now is push, straight forward into where they’re stuck.

YOU THAT ARE BOUND BE STILL.
Less twitching, and less. Lots of push into the stillness, lots of a sense of tightening, like twisting a stick in a loop of rope.
Haven’t got all of them, there’s a bunch still trying to get to Dove, but not enough anymore, the energy thing can hold them, it’s like they’ve got
weight
, like there’s an up and a down and Dove and I are at the bottom of the down, and the weed-thing, the hungry limbs, are at the top. It can still just fall on us and that’s going to be even worse for the previous victims.

Pick one. That one, there.
Arrows that come through flesh into air they break off behind and draw through in the direction of travel, there was this terrifically gruesome description of that attached to some early Commonweal battle school spent days on. So keep all the stillness, everywhere, and all the stillness right
there
, that specific limb, and
snap
. Don’t think the idea of an edge would work. Shearing, force in three
directions, that works. Pull the spike-end through, crumble it into smoke and dust and nothing, gone behind the darkness.

Next one. Fight the twitching down again. Next. The one after. It’s a lot like the kind of weeding you do in the vegetable garden as a kid, only I have only got the idea of heavy gloves. Have to hope it’s the right idea.

That goes on for a long time.

Get through about two-thirds
and there’s a tremendous attempt at thrashing, the twitches rise up to something like humming, like a rope too tight in the wind.

I press down on the will to move, not just the form of the spiky thing. Dove’s still intact, still got the energy-sphere, obvious Dove’s getting really tired. Feeling seriously tired myself.

Snap
.
Snap
.
Snap
. Don’t wait for the smoke and dust and nothing to clear, just
keep going.

When my material vision fades back in, I’m on a couch, Dove’s on the same couch. Still in the solar, but it’s afternoon, the light’s moved. Dove doesn’t look good, colour’s awful and right out, unconscious, head back, eyes closed. Breathing, normal sort of breathing, which is something.

Tiny thin thread of the link, consonance, which is more.

There’s a purple illusory metronome in
the middle of the floor, ticking back and forth. There’s five or six bodies, patients, damaged Line troopers, lying on the floor, and Zora’s cross-legged in the middle of them. They’re breathing at the same time, exactly the same, one breath to four ticks of the metronome, tick-tock out, tock-tick in.

Chloris has a, yeah, ghosts, that’s a group of ghosts following Chloris around, and Chloris’
smiling and nodding and saying totally inaudible words, almost like dancing, handing ghosts back into their bodies as doctors, people with doctor tattoos anyway, slide bodies away from Zora one by one and do things. The ghosts go back in, the bodies sit up, blinking. It looks like everything works, same number of ghosts and bodies. Lots of crazed smiles.

Halt is sitting off to one side, not knitting.
Seems like a bad sign. Somebody medical hands me a litre mug of whatever it is that Halt carries around in that flask.

Still have no idea what it tastes like, but it helps. It helps a lot. It helps Dove, a bit, but I wasn’t trying. I hand the mug back, look at Halt. “Could I have another?”

There’s this noise in the background, from all the Line patients. “I think I can feed most of it through
to Dove.” Who still hasn’t moved, not dead, not dying, but that’s the best I can say, and I might be wrong. Not going to let go Dove’s hand.

Halt nods, and what looks like a quarter-litre pocket flask fills the litre mug, probably again. This time, I, well, I drink it, but so far as the consonance is concerned metaphysical-me is holding up metaphysical-Dove and feeding it to Dove’s metaphysical
existence in tiny sips. Takes hundreds of seconds.

Dove’s colour is a lot better by the end. There’s a quiet, not quiet enough, but quiet, mutter of “Idiot,” and Dove sort of wraps around my hand. The wrapping process winds up with Dove’s head in my lap. Breathing better, colour much better.

Me, too. That was worrying, there’s a tightness going off my ribs.

The doctor, yeah, that’s a doctor’s
worth of forehead tattoos, looks into the mug, looks at me, looks at Halt, doubt and confusion rolling off in waves. Halt smiles, full of quiet secrets.

“Edgar.” I look. This is Halt speaking with deliberate emphasis, a whole lot more Halt than normally gets into the grandma persona. Rocks would look.

“Many people are going to fuss at you, and ask you what you were thinking.”

I nod. I’m a little
surprised Halt isn’t one of them.

“You won.” Halt sounds completely approving. It’s an unsettling effect.

“Victory does not justify, merely a requirement.” That comes with a twinkle. “You made good decisions on short notice and shielded those behind you. Those serve as justification.”

I nod, there’s really nothing to say. I have no idea what you can possibly say when Halt commends you for excellence
of conduct. From the low mutter around the room, the troops of the Line have no idea either.

“What happened, that there were ghosts?” I try to say this levelly, but it’s hard. I want to sleep as I have never wanted anything.

“Disembodiment,” Halt says. “Limb-twitch, when it attacked.”

Several of the medical sorts wince. Most of the formerly hurt, paralyzed, do. You’d think something like that
would hurt. From the faces, it hurt a lot.

Zora’s standing up, doesn’t look a whole lot better than I feel. Some, though. The metronome goes tick-tock even fading into nothing.

Halt’s head turns. “Excellently well done, Chloris, Zora.” Not a tone of voice you could doubt. “You have much reduced the cost.”

Chloris straightens, smiles in this shy and utterly unselfconscious way. Zora lights up,
too, but Zora does that when happy, it’s a regular thing. Chloris has gone something special. I can see five or six of the Line troopers, looking at Chloris, going from grateful to smitten. Smitten enough that it’s getting through their realization that nothing’s paralysed.

There’s stumbling, they’re all weak, months of no exercise, but we wander out on a lot of tears, as well as doctors urging
caution and sitting back down and food and careful therapeutic exercises, not charging out the door.

Getting Dove back to the hostel takes wrapping in a blanket and floating, despite some muttered protests. I’m sure it looks strange, three obviously exhausted young people and a floating figure wrapped in a hospital blanket, drifting along behind Halt.

Nobody saying anything isn’t strange at all,
Halt looking determined and walking with a deliberate stick-tapping motion moves in a bubble of silence and shifting aside.

Breakfast is, well, breakfast is odd.

I’m implausibly sure Dove didn’t have any nightmares because we spent most of the night having a long talk about the future. I’m pretty sure it was a dream because I don’t
remember
anything except the shifting landscape, stream-bank meadow
to mountainside and day into night in some implausibly gentle way, and I don’t feel exhausted. I don’t even feel tired, which is maybe the two mugs of that draught of Halt’s, but sleep had something to do with it.