A Succession of Bad Days (4 page)

We stay out from under the trees. Dove sums it up for everybody by saying “It feels holy in there.” It does, even after carefully sorting out that none of us think holy involves gods, that known-to-be-inefficient way to concentrate more of the Power than one person can raise.

Still, it does feel holy in there. It doesn’t feel old, which is odd, given the trees, but it’s deep and peaceful
and clean.

Wake has Steam run us through some different breathing exercises, ones about sensitivity rather than power. Trying to imagine breathing out through my fingers is bizarre, but it starts to do something after awhile.

“Why fingers?” from Kynefrid, gets met with “Touch is the most basic sense,” from Wake, and the real problem is that the answer nearly makes sense. You can see it go through
everyone’s face, that shouldn’t make sense, it’s not like we’re actually going to be able to put our hands on stuff buried metres deep, but sorcerer logic is leaking into everyone’s brain.

After we’ve about got the breathing-out part, which feels strange enough that I carefully don’t think about it, we spread out into a wider line and squat down and do it with our finger tips touching the ground.
All this breathing stuff is circles, out comes back in, it’s purely mystical — breathe the actual air you just breathed out back in and bad things happen pretty fast — but as mystical it works.

Thirty hectares of immense trees, sure, I’m in the shadow, and the birdsong, and the strange sharp smell, of the immense trees. The trees that just couldn’t have grown, before, not if the best life-mage
sorcerer you ever heard tell of had sat there for a thousand years and pushed.

Loose dirt isn’t much heavier than water, call it a fifth. So a hectare of the loam under the trees is twelve thousand tonnes for the first metre. Times thirty hectares, times however many metres it goes down before it hits the bedrock.

No way it’s not much more than three metres deep but that first three metres is
saying 'a million tonnes’ into my mind very persistently. It’s not like we really lifted it, or created it, or even precisely made it, and I certainly didn’t do it myself.

I keep telling myself that, and my brain keeps saying 'a million tonnes’ as though it isn’t millions and millions of tonnes. My no-talent brain’s stuck on the first million.

The bit that knows it has a talent, because it’s exhaling
through its fingertips and getting something back, it’s not really helping because I can feel stuff down there. I don’t know what it is, but the sensations change, the top bit has to be actual turf, then there’s something less squirmy, and then a lot more of something slidey that feels like the taste of salt, and then something that goes down deeper than I can reach, stiffer and cold and feeling
more bitter than the salt.

Steam motions
stand up
at all of us, and we do, and shake out our arms. The tingling in my fingers isn’t like they’ve fallen asleep.

“It’s practice, isn’t it?” Zora sounds like someone who should have known better. “You have to have felt things before to know what they are.”

Nothing alters in the general benevolence of Wake’s expression. “Considerable practice is required
for confident identification by this method.”

“Is it like having to do some long seams by hand before you’re permitted to use the sewing machine?” Zora asks this in entirely calm tones, they’re not plaintive at all. It cracks Wake’s expression anyway.

“No.” Wake says it firmly.

“Consider it to be like kneading bread; you must do so until you know what dough that has been kneaded enough feels
like. Only with this, the analogy breaks down, because instead of the one thing which is bread, there are a very great many.” Wake makes a specific gesture, seemingly at the sky.

“Many other tests for the nature of a substance exist; the entire discipline of chemistry and all manner of particular tests making use of the Power. This means is not precise, it takes a lifetime of practice, but it
is also extraordinarily difficult to mislead. Even if your experience suffices only to say ‘a rock, that is a rock there’, you can be confident that it is indeed a rock.”

“Not certain?” Chloris, who sounds entirely certain of the answer.

“Nothing is entirely certain.” Wake says it with a complete absence of doubt.

“So there might not be water around here somewhere?” Steam still doesn’t sound
like anyone who cares a whole lot.

“With those trees?” Kynefrid sounds stuck between appalled and disbelieving. “There’s a lot of water down there somewhere.”

“Might not be anywhere it’d be decent to dig for it.” Dove sounds brisk. “Never mind where we put the sewage pond.”

“One thing, then the other thing,” Wake says. We do at least know that the pit latrine by the tent is still there, everybody
visited after lunch. It might have been a much more urgent question, otherwise.

The two most-uphill tent pegs aren’t, the guy ropes are fine but the pegs aren’t there, at least not so as you could see them. Maybe breathing-fingers will be a way to find them.

The one thing, the first thing, turns out to be standing in a line and walking, east to west, and writing down what we feel. Well, Wake writing
down what we feel.

It’s squat, reach, try to figure out what words to use for things like relative depth or mass or the horrible cold squelch, like the ghost of something rotten, I run into a few times. Then it’s a couple metres forward, and do it again.

It takes a surprisingly long time to get across the whole new meadow that way. There are a few ripples in it, too, dips I wouldn’t call a dell,
but the stone underneath isn’t perfectly smooth and the meadow isn’t, either.

Then we come back, closer to the trees.

The whole line of the ridge, the thing that was there before we changed it, slopes down to the west, getting lower toward the West Wetcreek. The meadow is over something glittery; under that is something dark, and denser. It wasn’t lying in anything like the same way, before, except
the slope, and even that’s higher, you can see the hump in the ridge-line where it got higher. The dark stuff dives down northward more steeply than the hill slope; presumably that’s what gives room for the trees.

Trying to think of this makes my head hurt. From the faces, I’m not the only one. The important thing seems to be that the dark stuff is practically at the surface on the east side;
it doesn’t just tip north, it’s northwest, and the place it came from, or its heap of chances, I don’t imagine there’s a sudden hole in some other world somewhere, or we’d get vast sudden pits appearing here at least occasionally.

Though if the dirt just switches, who would notice? It’s not like someone
lives
on most dirt.

Probably shouldn’t think about that much.

Wake motions us off the meadow,
off to the east and a little north and down off the curve.

“Reach down,” Wake says, gesturing.

I do, we do: the…original, unaltered, something, standing on the stunted forb within reach of the meadow grass makes the whole thing suddenly real, I’m awake, this is really happening, and down there I can feel the angle of the heavy dark stuff, dropping away down but not vertically, it splays, out to
the east and tipped a little westward so if the face of it was a wall it leans back and in. It sloshes down there, all the free-draining rock has to be piling water up against the wall-face of the terrain we added.

It sloshes not very far down. Feels like it’s barely half my height.

“Tomorrow is digging out a spring,” says Wake.

It’s like being hungover, the ache doesn’t seem to be a muscle thing.

Steam handed every one of us a pair of ten-litre cans after the post-breakfast sluicing; no yokes, just advice to avoid thinking of them as heavy.

We don’t go to the sandpit, we go back up toward the tent and the new meadow.

If it was a hangover, I would’ve had to have drunk something except water and altered beets.
If it was a hangover, I’d be feeling better for the amount of water I got into me at breakfast. Also the salt. I don’t, so that’s not what it is.

Not thinking of the cans as heavy gets tough, quickly; both of them slosh. Not the same slosh, one of them might be bottles, the lid looks loose. The other one’s the same can of water thing as yesterday.

I’ve got a decent enough hat. I can’t say I’ve
actually got glare in my eyes, even crossing the bridge back to the east side of the West Wetcreek — Dove and Chloris and Zora between them have me and Kynefrid about cured of referring to it as a river or just ‘Westcreek’ — and over a lot of sunlit water, but it feels like glare, anyway.

Chloris suggests stopping to rest our hands at the other side of the bridge; Steam says it’s a learning experience,
keep going.

Kynefrid looks entirely weary for a second, and Zora gets what I’m starting to think is a standard look of betrayal, and my head turns a little to see if Dove is still right behind me. Dove’s swinging both ten-litre cans in one hand as though they were empty.

The cans weren’t empty when Steam handed them out. The bails don’t squeak like that when they’re empty.

The Power exerts physical
force just fine. Lots of what makes the Bad Old Days bad involve having wizards squash you, or your house, or the milk cow, in a fit of pique from a long way away.

There’s a place near where I used to live that has a pond shaped like a boot-print a couple hundred metres long. Local knowledge has it the result of some wizard of old deciding to stomp on an enemy, good and hard.

It’s a deep pond.
Fills up with turtles every fall.

Only place it isn’t the Bad Old Days is either Commonweal. Trying to remember that, I think I have to remember that every day I’m learning sorcery.

I don’t want to hand my lunch to the wide sky. Doesn’t matter to lunch if it’s incompetence or wrath.

Getting into a tug-of-war with the vastness of the earth that’s pulling down doesn’t seem like a good plan either.
The earth will win. I can kinda feel how you
could
do that, there’s a dip in nothingness around each of the cans, and me, and the bridge, and everyone else, everything’s got its own. It’s not a bendy dip. Filling it in probably makes it deeper, deeper is just the same as piling more stuff into the dip; our individual dips are bigger than the cans, and the bridge is way, way larger. I think you
could, I could, flatten it out, but I don’t want to do the experiment, not walking up a hill in the morning sun.

There is a way, though, Dove’s doing it. Asking seems like cheating, Steam’s outright said this is a lesson.

If I make my arms stronger, I have to get everything, skin, bones, tendons, not just muscle, like it’s not just the new chuck that has to turn twice as fast when you rebuild
a lathe. That could go nineteen kinds of wrong, and there’s still this hangover-thing, I doubt I’m thinking as well as I could.

The dips all go straight down. I wonder if I can kinda tip one, rather than bending it? Like moving up a ramp, instead of a straight lift?

Steam’s head turns. “Edgar — not like that. That’s too exciting for just after breakfast.”

All right, then, as Chloris looks more
baffled than angry and Kynefrid just looks baffled. Kynefrid’s lanky, nearly skinny, but seems to figure carrying maybe twenty kilos up to the meadow was no big deal and isn’t worrying about making the job easier.

Spin the dip, so the can wants to rise up the sides?

It’s really hard to get the dip to rotate at all, and Steam is looking alarmed at a quarter-turn, so I stop.

Zora’s got
something
, it’s like towing two little boats on the water, the bails of the cans angling back. Doesn’t look anything like as difficult as carrying them.

Rot
.

Floating things aren’t lighter, they’re less relatively dense; air’s thin, water’s thicker, more things float in water. There’s stuff that’s thicker than water, collectives who make jewel-bearings for clocks use it to float the bits they don’t want
out of crushed rock. There were clockmakers across the road and about a kilometre down, before. Dunno where they are now, if they wound up going upstream or over into the Second Commonweal.

Make the air thicker and I’ll have to drag the thick air along, that’s not going to help. Make lunch more widely distributed? Difficult to see how that’s a good outcome.

Huh. The dips scale with how heavy the
thing is. What if I just sort of roll the edge of the dip down, like the top of a sock? Make the dip itself float higher, if that even makes sense?

It works!

Fiddle a little with the amount of roll, and I can get it, carefully, so each can’s about half a kilo. I stop there; I still don’t want to hand my lunch to the sky. Plus Steam started looking alarmed again somewhere around the kilo mark.

The rest of the walk goes a bit quicker after that, or it feels like it, anyway.

Chloris is looking plenty steamed, and Kynefrid’s sweating, but they make it fine. Zora’s had a nice even tow going on the whole way, and Dove’s still swinging both pails. I’ve got the roll balanced and have about stopped fiddling with it the last kilometre or so, to Steam’s apparent relief.

Just east of the meadow
and down, over the hill, right down below where we found the dark rock to be highest yesterday, there’s a waggon and a couple of bronze bulls. They’re doing that disturbing happy contemplative chewing thing, like they were actually alive and ate stuff.

Someone comes round the waggon, patting both bronze bulls absently on the forehead. Doesn’t look quite like a Creek, colour’s wrong, hair’s one
shade of black and skin tone’s at the medium end of brown, but my first impression is that this is Dove’s kid sister.

Dove’s pails get set down with a clunk. “Captain Blossom!”

Whoever it is grins. “Hi Dove. Just Blossom.”

Dove looks plausibly embarrassed.

Zora looks young,
is
young, still in youth. Wake doubtless thinks we’re all young. Whoever this is looks young, too, but not the same way.
There’s something else there, which I suppose goes with the
Captain
.

Line Captain? Add an extra ten years on the looks, that still seems unlikely. Maybe a barge team captain? Different kinds of people age at different rates, look different in their ages.

Ow.

Glare, nothing but glare in the world.

Just exactly what you want when you’re feeling hungover.

Nothing but glare, though. I mean, it’s not
actually there, or my hat would be on fire, but no horrible texture or accompanying sounds or smells of forlorn longing. Just straight up why-did-you-look-at-the-sun-through-a-telescope glare.

You’d think I’d learn about the whole mystical perception thing and teachers. Even Steam looks blue and has too many arms. Doesn’t give me shaking fits, but
ow
.

Steam looks, well, be fair, it’s not the mean
kind of amused.

“Blossom, this is Edgar. You’ll approve, Edgar got stuck on trying to alter the curve of gravitational potential energy.”

Blossom grins at me, too, and the grin suddenly gets a good deal brighter. “Can you put them down?”

I don’t see why not, it’s just unrolling the sock. Works fine, there’s the moment of the full weight on my hands, but that’s much better than the full weight
the whole way up here.

Blossom gives me an approving nod, Steam introduces the other three, and Blossom says “Everybody grab a hammer or a drill rod,” waving one of each in either hand, up from off the waggon bed.

Steam says “See you at dinner,” gives us a general wave, and trots off as we’re moving forward to be handed implements.

It’s surprising how much Steam leaving makes me nervous.

There
are face covers, tight wire mesh you can see through but which will stop the chips, and some long tongs for holding the drill rods, so you can be mostly out of the arc of the hammer and still turn the rod.

Chloris and Kynefrid have a brief argument about who gets the hammer; Chloris wins it by the expedient of holding the five-kilo sledge straight out from the shoulder in one hand. It doesn’t
quiver, despite staying there while Chloris points out at moderate length that being considered
frail
would be found personally and specifically offensive.

Dove mutters something about a fortunate lack of horseshoes, and tosses me — gently — a drill rod. I see no reason to argue.

Besides, there are what look like two-and-a-half-metre drill rods in the waggon bed. Pretty sure we’re all going to
get a turn.

Yesterday’s marker pegs are still there.

I don’t know why they wouldn’t be, but that stopped meaning ‘of course nothing has moved them’ sometime yesterday.

Kynefrid’s used a chalkline before, I’ve used a chalkline before, we get to set the line; there’s enough bare dirt that there’s only a couple places we have to toss some sad plant. Wrong kind of tongs for it, but they’ll do.

Then
there’s the other line; four metres away, another twenty meters long. Holes every two metres. We’re in for a long day.

Blossom makes sure everybody’s facing mostly the same way with the hammers, all on one line; if a hammer flies, it’s going to make some sad plant sadder, not cause a casualty. I can hear the team lead who does machine safety in, in what used to be my collective, saying “casualty”.

The top of the dirt isn’t sure if it’s dirt or rock; the rock itself is pretty mushy stuff. That’s still a lot of holes.

Zora’s holding for Blossom in the middle, I’m holding for Dove closest to the meadow, and Chloris and Kynefrid have the outside. Two metres doesn’t seem like much distance when you’re about to have someone swinging a sledgehammer on both sides of you.

Blossom picks up what I
supposed was a spare drill rod, about a metre long. We’re going to get there, but what we’ve got now are not much more than half a metre long. Blossom steps out in front, turns around, and goes all teacher.

“You did a big working yesterday, you’re all talent-tired, and this looks like a nice simple physical day involving hammers, to let you get charged back up.” Blossom looks left and right.
It’s a real smile, there’s real friendliness. It’s not reassuring.

“If you were using a focus, that would be basic safety advice, as basic as everybody using eye shields.” Blossom gestures at the tilted-up mesh mask perched on their head.

“Since we’re trying to turn you into accomplished sorcerers and want to get there before your talent kills you, that’s not what we’re doing.”

Blossom grabs
the metre of drill rod by both ends and twists it into a coil, both hands moving in circles. The rod winds into a spiral with horrible noises. It looks just like a large coil spring, if coil springs were red-hot enough to show a glow in daylight.

Blossom drops the coil, and there’s a smell of scorched dirt and a few small flames as sad vegetation dies by fire.

“If I have to stick to muscles, I’m
not that strong.” Blossom says this conversationally. “It’s not totally unknown, but most sorcerers don’t put that kind of effort into physical strength.”

“If all of you stick to muscles, we’re not going to get these holes drilled today, and the more the schedule slips, the longer you’ll be living in a tent in the rain.” It’s a totally friendly smile. If it weren’t for the words, I’d say Blossom
looked kind. I can see Dove out of the corner of my eye, nodding, no look of surprise, no look of distress, this seems reasonable to Dove.

Hard not to wonder where Dove’s expectations come from. All the Creeks I’ve met so far seem like decent people, lots of them are friendly, no one even seems to mind having five students dropped on their refectory without even being put in a dishwashing rotation.

“So the plan has you working through the talent-tired. That builds your ability to summon the Power, it gives you practice with noticing when you’re about to actually damage yourselves through overstrain, and it’s not very
much
Power, so it should still be recuperative.”

“Drilling twenty holes in rock is recuperative?” Zora, voice full of a wish to be precise and careful and get this correct.

“Yes.” Blossom says this with total conviction. “Every Independent has ways of staying awake and useful for a décade at least. A nice simple day practising strength enhancement through simple concentration on the Power and getting a good night’s sleep at the end? After
food
? Completely recuperative.”

It’s not a joke at all. Blossom means it. And Dove is nodding again.

Sounds like the notion of
balance between ‘get the job done’ and ‘don’t harm yourself’ is different for Independents.

Drilling isn’t very hard as an idea; you whack the drill with the hammer, some rock breaks, you turn the drill, you whack it with the hammer again, more rock breaks, you get a hole a decimetre deep or so, you pour some water down the hole before you pull the drill rod, and the stone chips mostly stick to
the drill. As the hole gets deeper, you switch to using longer and longer drill rods.

In practice? You’ve got to hold the drill plumb; you’ve got to not flinch when someone with a big hammer is swearing just over there, you’ve got to get methodical about twisting the drill, without holding it so tight in the tongs that you’re making it harder for the person on the hammer to do anything. Traditionally,
there aren’t any tongs, you hold the drill with your hands, and presumably just hope your luck is good enough that the person with the hammer, who might be you, doesn’t miss today. Hitting the drill over and over again, precisely, isn’t easy, though it doesn’t have to be hit all that hard, at least not on this rock. You need enough to flake rock, it’s not like you’re trying to stun an aurochs.