A Succession of Bad Days (31 page)

“Then why’s it metal?” Pallas’ partner, newly arrived. Lots of muscle definition.

There’s an “Ed, Celandine, Cel, Edgar,” introduction from Pallas that surprises me. I do my best to look pleased and collected.

“It’s metal because we had some, and nobody’s got a spare regular canoe nor will they until long after Halt wants to take us through a swamp.” Dove
gets slow nods from this. Arguing with Halt is widely understood as impractical, and it’s not like you want to
walk
through a swamp.

“So, cold, but not very heavy and as strong as Dove thinks it needs to be?”

Dove’s head shakes, a firm no, almost emphatic. “Stronger, and heavier, than Dove thinks it needs to be.” Dove’s chin lifts. “Wake would they were stronger.”

That’s supposed to imply something,
I can see the little twitches. Presumably that Wake isn’t dead, somewhere past three times the age of the Peace Established.

“Still drink beer?” Pallas’ tone is too offhand.

“When I get the chance.”

“Figure they’ll let you loose for Festival?”

Dove shrugs one shoulder. “Déci implies Festival.”

Pallas grins. “See if you can find us. Bring the likely lad.”

Dove grins back, slaps hands with Pallas,
and says “Deal.”

We’re most of the way to dinner when Wake, who is looking an especially pleased sort of benevolent, remarks that Creeks will apparently forgive sorcery for utility.

Takes me most of dinner to figure out what Wake meant.

The next morning, we’re just starting our breathing exercises, no running backwards or Power manipulation yet, when Halt shows up with a severed head.

It’s higher than Halt is tall; it’s at least four times longer than high. It looks more like it’s made out of sculptured metal than anything like flesh, school mentioned some things that had a lot of metal in their scales, but this looks
like a single smooth thing. Doesn’t look like skin, it looks like steel got so angry it flowed into a hungry shape.

Block makes the gesture that pauses the class, turns, makes a short bow at Halt, straightens, makes a narrow head-shake
no
. Blossom’s head shakes
no
, too. And the Captain’s.

Doesn’t look like a herbivore. Can’t imagine what it’s supposed to eat. What do you need eight-metre jaws
for? Even if you were a herbivore? Huge trees?

“Was that in Split Creek?” Zora sounds happy, which is not what you’d expect from Zora presented with a severed head.

Halt nods.

“Did it have any legs?”

“Six,” Halt says. “These are known?”

“There are stories,” Zora says. “Most of them say Split Creek wells up from a place outside the world where fates are recorded, and there’s a bunch of things
like that in the well, chewing on the dull fates.”

Halt nods to Zora, pokes the head almost irritably. The ferrule of Halt’s stick doesn’t leave a mark on it. “Thank you.”

“The ones with no legs are supposed to be much worse.” Zora sounds shy.

Both Halt’s eyebrows go up. “This one conducted itself appallingly.” Halt says that to the sky, or the severed head, and not very loudly. Halt turns to
look at the Captain, who is looking searchingly back.

“Many sheep, three brave sheepdogs, some barns, several hundred metres of roadway, six bridges, a quantity of chickens, and a hitch of oxen, but no persons. It chased chickens obsessively.”

Gave the people time to run,
comes clear to me, I don’t know to who else. Looks like Block, who has an incrementally grimmer look.

The Captain nods, once,
looks at Blossom. Blossom looks tired. Blossom
is
tired.

“Fifteen days to the next round of weeding, Captain. Weeding, swamp trip, call it a décade if it works. Not less than three décades after that.”

“Swamp trip?” The Captain’s voice is calm, tone polite. I can feel Dove tensing. Something about this is serious.

“Essential ingredient. I need Grue, I need Wake, we’ll be too busy to worry about
the perimeter, so Halt. Can’t leave the students unsupervised.” Blossom says all of this is the same recitation-of-facts voice.

Zora looks somewhat offended at ‘unsupervised’. Or maybe ‘students’, Blossom says it the way you’d say ‘kids’, your kids, your cousin’s kids. Dove’s will puts a map of the West Wetcreek across all our minds, bracketed by the patches of a hundred-fifty square kilometres
at a time where we killed all of something. We really did; weeding teams have been sending complimentary thankful messages since before we got back. Longer lists to Wake for the second pass in fifteen days, too.

Zora sort of nods, not physically, I don’t think, Zora’s behind me, I can’t actually see, but the acknowledgement is there. Nothing at all says we couldn’t do that to people, as a matter
of capability.

The Captain doesn’t, not that I can tell, move, do anything, but Blossom grins. It’s a rueful grin. “Everyone in the shot shop’s busy as can be. Put them on pointy sticks and it stops being three décades.”

“While the dread of my name could not begin to claim the tenth part of the shadow of the shadow of the rumour of the dread of Halt’s due and insufficient harbinger,” Block says,
in cheerful calm observational tones, “I may perhaps prove dread enough.”

It makes the Captain look, not calmer, less tense isn’t always calmer. The troops around the Captain, still looking a bit scuffed, they look calmer. Halt’s looking entirely pleased.

I think Block’s plenty dread enough. We’ve been sprinting uphill backward with big rough sacks full of wet sand over our shoulders.

After we
got back from weeding, Block’s taken to tossing shapes and patterns of energy at us while we’re sprinting, some of them have duration, they go on for ten or fifteen seconds and change while they do it. Somewhere in the middle of today’s round of that, Dove thinks
No one has any armour.
It’s an explanation for the sacks of sand, not ours, the ones the Line recruits have been carrying while exercising.

Dove’s got armour, it’s on a stand in Dove’s room. Blossom’s got armour, the Captain’s got amour, I’m pretty sure the Line troops who go critter-team have armour, too.

Short company, very short after spines and ichor. Trying to raise a battalion. Not enough, it’s all fitted.

Block doesn’t object to us talking; Block doesn’t object to us talking out loud. Any lapses in concentration
hurt
, it’s not
likely to be lasting damage, Grue gets complicated when you ask about that, but catching Block’s notion of energy packets with the Power is something you really want to do.

This one tries to wiggle on me, they’ve started doing that, you get the front of it and it folds up and tries to splash on you.
Sphere
isn’t a thought, anymore, it’s just a reflex, and there’s a smell like leaning into something
completely solid and it’s not the energy Block threw anymore. I have to throw something on, but I don’t have to throw what Block threw. Zora looks relieved. Zora’s been having to work at keeping up with Block’s class.

It’s bothering Dove, no armour for the new battalion. Brings it up when we’re walking to the pre-lunch sluicing. Doesn’t want to suppose Blossom will be at lunch.

“Captain Blossom?”
Dove doesn’t do deferential questions, and this one isn’t, but it’s more of a real question than Dove usually manages.

Blossom goes right on looking tired. “Nothing to do except answer questions from the shot shop until you’re all done weeding.” Blossom doesn’t weed; something like that critter Halt showed up with the head of, yes, reported very good at that, but in general, no. Halt says “No
capacity for subtlety,” Wake says, Chloris asked, “Creativity is not desirable in all things,” and pretty much everybody who isn’t an ancient terror of the world says things like “I would have sworn on my name that couldn’t possibly burn.”

There’s, well, not precisely cake, something involving a lot of carrot preserves between two layers of sticky gingerbread, with lunch. One of those things where
you suspect someone of wanting the jars the carrot preserves were in more than the carrot preserves, but it’s good. Sticky, amazingly sticky, but good. We’re all working on our second slabs when Blossom says, apparently to the air, “No iron, no steel foundry, no rolling mill, no annealing ovens, and two-thousand-plus to fit in fifteen days.”

“Fifty kilos per is twenty troops the tonne, a hundred
tonnes, really ninety, we’ve got six hundred-ninety-something tonnes of titanium left, six tonnes of aluminium, still a couple thousand of that, four tonnes of vanadium, we’ve got fifteen or so, no mining required. Get an illusion of somebody, get an illusion of an existing suit of armour, fit the illusion to the illusion, do what we did with the canoes only maybe more elaborate if there’s annealing
or something for hardness.”

Blossom’s smiling, really smiling.

“Can’t,” Dove goes on, “do the fittings for two thousand, at an hour per that’d take us a year solid. So we make four armorer’s foci that’ll do the whole stack, and the battalion’s got armour by the end of the summer. More than four if we can, but four will do it.”

“Won’t it be solid?” Zora’s got an illusion of something on the table,
it’s purple and gold and black and squirming as Zora’s thoughts alter. Doesn’t sound like Zora disapproves, it’s a “But how?” sort of question.

“Armour illusion has to be components, every lamé its own thing. Some notion of a rivet, some notion of deleting and duplicating.” Dove’s mind gets ahead of the words, of Dove’s ability to talk about the Power, it’s an ordered glittering thing taking
shape into our mind, I can feel the reality of it, of Dove’s will behind it.

Maybe Blossom can, too.

“Fifteen days?” Blossom’s frankly doubtful.

“Twelve,” Dove says. If there were any actual battlements involved, they’d be crouched somewhere weeping in fear of the terrible fate overtaking them. “Gotta be rested for the second weeding pass.”

Nobody dies. That’s about all I can say for the next
twelve days.

We do our exercises with Block the whole time, who thinks it’s excellent training when you start tired. Zora bobbles three in a row of Block’s ouchful Power-packets and then something snaps in Zora somewhere. The next Power-packet at Zora just grounds out dead and Zora tosses something mauve. Some of them look like bunnies and they all smell like dead socks. Block seems entirely willing
to accept this as a response.

Blossom points out that while no one is going to stand in the middle of anything involving molten titanium voluntarily, we don’t need the body-illusion; forming the armour illusion from an existing suit around the actual person is fine, as long as they’ve got the proper clothes on and can get out of the way before any actual metal gets involved.

The clothes, the padded
armour smock that goes under, trews with padding and leather wear-patches over the knee and hips, the head-pads for the helmet, all are easy to get. We have to talk to Chuckles, I think it’s Chuckles due to a widespread belief about Chuckles not knowing how, but the Captain wants armour, and Dove’s still first in authority, and Blossom’s still got warrants of authority and commission and an
active appointment as a captain. Armour padding we can get, no matter how doubtful Chuckles is that it will do any good.

I wind up shapeshifting away a few burns before we get the “person being fitted has to get out of the way first,” part entirely right, but we do get it right. The moving away has to be all done before any heat gets involved, and ‘all done’ isn’t easy to explain to the Power.

The ability to move lamés around, to copy them, to grab one of the illusory shoulder-point pieces and just bend it, I was expecting that to be the hard part. Dove’s great shining thing, terrible in its simplicity, slides whole and entire out of Dove’s mind and the notions of connection and limited variability work first try. It takes a little tweaking to get the rivet-heads in a contrasting colour,
Blossom says you can get titanium to be almost any colour you want on the surface. Dove goes for a dull bronzy-gold. The armour itself is a plain dull grey, Blossom got to tweaking and it’s got a bit of chromium in it to make it tougher.

A bit. Two and a half tonnes, for the whole pile of ingots. When did I start thinking of two and a half tonnes of brittle, shiny, refractory rare metal as ‘a
bit’?

Zora takes a look at the helmets, Dove’s and Blossom’s, concludes they’re like that because of how you can work steel with fire and hammers, mutters darkly, and does things to the illusion copy. Dove and Blossom are both doubtful. They don’t stop being doubtful until we make a helmet to Zora’s design and Blossom sticks it on a stake and smites it repeatedly with a heavy drill rod. The helmet
dents, the drill rod bends, that comes out about even, but the hinges still move and the throat ring still unlocks, there really are things you can do when you’re forming metal with pure willpower in four dimensions that you just couldn’t do any other way. Blossom straightens out the drill rod with an absent expression and nods. Dove looks at Zora and says “It’ll do,” which makes Zora smile and
smile, despite having been talked out of clear visors.

The hard part turns out to be hanging everything together; vacuum, you don’t, you really don’t, want titanium molten in air if you can help it, warding, the illusion, the rules for the metal, not just what goes in when but how to cool it and being sure the bits are separate when it has all cooled. There aren’t any straps, the lamés hang from
each other on rivets that slide a bit. Plus the copy-an-existing-suit to get the illusion, and Dove’s terrible clarity that makes the illusion something you can change, you can add lamés, take them out, pinch parts narrower, stretch them wider, and it keeps the same set thickness. The steel lamés are close, rolling mills, Blossom says, rolling mills that are all back in the Commonweal-as-was, but
we’re doing it exact.

Greaves, vambraces, copies of Blossom’s intricate and indestructible gauntlets, not the standard Line model, and not with the strange intractable materials of Blossom’s, really responsible for the indestructible, either, but really good. They’ll need leather liners, that’s Chuckles’ problem. We can make them, we can have them float in the air in the right places while they’re
being made, rivets and latch hooks and all. Even something, Blossom makes them, clearly not the first time, things like pliers that set the rivet heads hot fast enough to avoid burning leather straps. Setting eight-millimetre titanium rivets with one squeeze of one hand. It shouldn’t startle me so much, not in the midst of Dove’s determination that a hundred tonnes of metal will bend and flow
and be armour for a battalion with most of Dove’s living friends in it, but it does.

Doing the whole thing in our heads doesn’t work, or, rather, we can get it all in our heads and make armour, everybody’s got a suit of armour, I wind up with two full suits from being the fitting dummy, but there’s nothing left over to put what we’re doing into a fixed form.

Same problem, smaller, very much smaller,
as making battle-standards has; nobody can get all of the working in their head at once. We get an explanation of what we’re doing while we’re doing it, individual parts of the working done as bindings, but the traditional kind, where you plan them out ahead of time and write them in runes and patterns. The tests we do by pressing lines into pure aluminium and painting on it with grease with
a lot of copper in it. The copper grease gets everywhere, and it smudges. Two messes later, Chloris takes over making lines; Chloris has an uncanny ability to not smudge anything, including copper grease being painted on a warm aluminium plate a metre square.