A Succession of Bad Days (46 page)

Finishing the standards consumes the décade after festival.

The novel things from students part goes better than I expected. We do go back and throw out the first eight fire-mirrors, somewhere around six I figured out how to do selective numbers of layers and the ninth one worked properly. Chloris’ infection inerting, sterilization isn’t strong enough language, I really do have to admit
some things are spells, gives us all the shudders, Blossom too. Enough so that we do two and Blossom gets Wake and we do a third one, all linked up, and Wake nods at Blossom, then smiles at Chloris and declares it excellent technique. Chloris isn’t being transitorally dead, but the
spell
is dead, entirely. All of it happens in the otherworld.

It helps, a little, to know that as we shudder our
way through the rest of them.

The insect blocker, I get Halt to check the grammar and wind up learning some fiddly precise language for taxonomy. Doing it’s easy, Dove and I can fold together and do that one ourself, it doesn’t take much of the Power.

Watching the, well, houses, really, they’re ceramic houses, get, Blossom says the word is subsumed, subsumed into the standard, layer two, is something.
I know they’re solid, I helped fire the walls, put some of the giant floor tiles in them, but they just sort of slide into a metal cylinder, five centimetres across and not quite sixteen high. It’s related to the distance at a funny angle thing, but it’s more than one angle and Blossom takes a deep breath and says “Not this year.” Dove’s burningly curious, still.

After that, it’s eight days linking
up and pushing for Blossom in a great big blast pit back of the shot shop, everyone calls it the proofing pit. Blossom’s a coil of white fire the whole time, layer three takes Blossom’s whole will, entirely worthwhile for Blossom to avoid any distractions of the flesh.

Wake gets six boring days running the wards, Blossom hasn’t got the spare attention. Halt runs the wards for the other two days,
it takes one or the other of them. They both stand like statues in the dimmed light, the wards are intense, multi-layered, very thorough things, planned, not a matter of brief intention, there’s a strip of square gold wire, heavy stuff, a centimetre through, all the way around the blast pit, fifty kilos to get around eight metres. Different runes, depending on who’s doing it, too, but the gold
anchor, the hissing bed of cooling ice, are constant.

The shot shop workers have projecting periscopes, dark glass isn’t enough, it’s the same thing you do to look at the sun with a telescope, they watch and cheer as each standard’s done. The inscriptions, diagrams, Blossom hasn’t explained the terminology, the huge complex written parts of the enchantments, layer two and layer three and layer
four have four and six and three of them, respectively, the folks in the shot shop made those. It’s their work going into what they’re cheering for, if it was just us and not us pushing for Blossom I’d figure they were glad we hadn’t spoiled all that intricate work they’ve provided.

The shot shop folks provide litres and litres of cold water, cider vinegar to go in it, sweet pickled onions, and
coarse salt per-standard, too, leaving all of us, student-us, determined to do something really nice for them. Especially because they don’t say anything about the way we eat lunch. Halt’s thing with the big slab of toast just vanishing? Get hungry enough, and it’s hard
not
to do that. Blossom grins at us looking surprised, Chloris’ faint “This can’t be good manners.” Blossom’s lunch, it might
just be for companionship, vanishes.

The standards and the signa, all the banners, have “Peace Behind Us” in the metal, the Line motto, the initial, metal-forming layer-one wreaking puts it there. Brigades, sometimes battalions, can have their own mottos, or traditional decorations, or some significant small thing. Those go — hung from or laced to — on the ring round the bottom of the standard
proper, the metal cylinder, above the socket that the standard pole goes into.

I help Dove knit some ribbons out of fine titanium wire, Dove hasn’t knit anything since school, and it’s not entirely like regular knitting, you have to encourage the wire to bend, but not too much, or it softens and sticks. I’ve at least got a lot more practice knitting, and can pass that over. Two centimetres wide,
two metres long, seven of them. We work some gold wire in to spell “Never Stop” near both ends.

File cabinets, map table, hanging lockers, clothes-chests, bed, and armour-stand all still exist, from the standard of the Seventieth. All but the armour-stand are gone into careful library storage in Headwaters, five hundred years old and more and maybe the only portable things in the Second Commonweal
from not just Laurel’s time but Laurel.

Zora and Chloris make furniture while we’re knitting, titanium frames and deep green corundum surfaces. The four kitchen chairs get laced leather seats and backs in the hide of that seven-legged creature that tasted like solid fire, someone in Westcreek Town thought that was fitting and provided the hide they’d been saving with a “Too thick for boots.”

Zora gets a strange expression after and the file cabinets and shelves and the map table come out in silicon carbide slicked with iron, the various drawers on tracked wheels and jewel bearings. Fronts and sides get impossibly delicate leaves and flowers, a prowling ocellotter, in all the bright tones you can wring out of alloying gold and copper, silver and aluminium.

Blossom provides a set of
kitchen utensils, indestructible cobalt-chromium cutlery included.

Lot of emotion when the standards are presented to the new battalion; there’s a brigade’s worth for the Wapentake, signa and five standards, twenty-five company banners, and one standard and set of company banners over, which goes to the battalion they’ve got now.

No visible emotion when Dove presents the ribbons. Not the Captain,
not Blossom, not Halt, who is there as a witness, not Chert, none of the two thousand in Chert’s pennon, Chert came to get the other four brigades worth of standards, they’ve been getting by on wood and ink and nervousness since the Second Commonweal got created, nothing from any of the two and a half thousand Creeks standing in big company blocks, it’s not indifference, it’s like it’s too important
for their individual opinions to mean anything.

That’s not a Commonweal kind of belief, outside a real emergency.

Blossom gets still-faced in armour every time I’ve seen it, Dove, you couldn’t tell Dove could feel anything from the outside. I have trouble keeping myself still, my own face still, I don’t understand this, but the feeling in Dove would
melt
the battlements.

When the emergency happens,
this is what we believe, how we conduct ourselves,
Blossom says, quietly, not still, very balanced, saying it just to me.
Dove’s senior in authority, it belongs to Dove to pick what the Wapentake believes for the future.

There’d be more people involved if there’d been more survivors.

Don’t think anyone else but Blossom notices Dove’s one slow tear catching fire, Dove doesn’t, no one’s looking
at Dove, they’re looking at the standards.

After that, there’s a sort of pause.

We go right on doing stuff; Block’s back from the Folded Hills, our regular morning classes with Block are just us, now, the Line recruits have company banners to learn how to latch with. Zora’s formally out of the combative parts of the class, Block’s got Zora doing energy circulation exercises, welcome, well-liked
ones. Block’s got the rest of us doing the same ball-of-energy drills, but in total darkness, high winds, surrounded by loud noises and sudden bright lights, sometimes all those things together. I’m not sure if it’s relaxing or stressful.

Grue starts perception classes. We get down to the section of marsh we were trying to get to when we ran into the wound-wedges outbreak. Lots of birds, ocelotters,
who have their doubts about Spook, three species of pangolin, and a Broad-barred Stilted Racket, a creature one is certain to remember, because if you startle one it makes noises like the end of the world.

There are people working in the orchard. They wave, and we wind up, the second trip, having a discussion about what they think is a cap-stone, and then where to put a well, and the next day
we bring liner pipe and put in four new wells, Grue doesn’t even have to remind us that you can’t put a well in hot, not without making a mess. They’ll have to get pumps, we haven’t done pumps yet, but it still seems useful.

Second half of Messidor, and into Thermidor, still feels like a slow time. Lots of people busy around us, harvest, but we’re not, especially. It’s looking like a good harvest;
doesn’t break any records, but over the average, there’s tension going out of people in the gean. Feels odd not to be doing anything associated with harvest. Still, we’re doing the work we’ve been given, learning perception from Grue and minerals from Wake is work, and Block’s class is work to
do
, it doesn’t feel like the same sort of work to learn.

Still, it’s almost a relief when Blossom shows
up at breakfast and asks how we feel about canal-building.

Zora looks at Blossom and says “How much canal?”, having skipped the attempt at mass and volume calculations the rest of us are making.

Blossom sits down. “Between Old Lake and somewhere on the East West-East Canal, preferably not anywhere near the Erebos Reservoir.”

Dove inhales, stops thinking about moving dirt, starts thinking about
maps.

“It’s not easy to get to Old Lake,” Chloris says.

Blossom nods. “The other thing about Old Lake?”

I have no least idea.

“Land surplus,” Dove says. “More clean land than they can farm. More water power than they can use. There’d be a lot more people there if it weren’t for the lack of transport.”

Blossom nods.

“There’s somewhere between fifty and sixty thousand people in the Folded Hills
whose supporting crops are going to fail, and fail hard, this year.” Which is, one angle, not much over a tenth, insanely good for sudden settlement of wilderness. Another angle is tens of thousands dead of starvation.

Blossom makes a swoopy sort of gesture. It’s not a map, precisely, but it’s like a map. Takes me a couple of seconds to figure out that the lines are transport volume, not roads
and rivers. The West Wetcreek is enormous, both West-East canals, Blue Creek, Slow Creek, are big, the East-East Canal and Edge Creek are substantial, and there’s lots of short, can’t say small, they’re all the same size for width and draft and locks, canals, some as sections of tributary streams.

End-to-end canals going in, have mostly gone in, each of the three inhabited valleys of the Folded
Hills; not done yet, but getting there, the work down to lock-gate winches and sluice-gate hoists, the new canals will be in service sometime in Fructidor, they’re going to have transport in each valley, the Line put in big water management dams last winter, they’ll have navigable water. Which is great if the valleys have local surplus, miserable if not, because the transport volume across the four
valleys, the route to the other valleys and the Creeks, is a narrow thing, the one high road.

All the displaced came in by that road, once, but a lot of those oxen are stew and a lot of those barrels have been repurposed. The established ability to produce compact food, there was a lot of swapping northward with above the escarpment as the displaced started moving so people wouldn’t have to displace
with buckets of potatoes for stores, that ability isn’t there anymore. It would have to be buckets of potatoes, where there are potatoes to spare, and the Folded Hills as a whole isn’t in food surplus. It’s places that are just getting by and the places that aren’t. Not enough spare waggons, not enough spare bronze bulls, not enough oxen, all the spare food in the Creeks is evenly distributed,
stuffing it back into the Folded Hills, all the way over to the first valley, isn’t going to work. The rate’s not there.

“Have to get the people somewhere on the Creeks transport network.” Dove says this absently, thinking about where to put them.

Blossom nods. “The two near valleys, third and fourth, are almost in food balance, there are going to be a couple of brigade transport marches, they’ll
be able to feed everybody in the near two after.”

‘What keeps’, and the distance/loss graphs, show up from Dove and Blossom. A standard, never mind a signa, is a blunt instrument; hoist tens of thousands of tonnes of gravel, sure, melt a road, also sure. Enormous amounts of Power. People, whoever has executive, can only concentrate for so long. If the concentration slips, you stop having wheat
or pumpkin seeds or potatoes, you’ve got anything up to a carbon fire. Not doing that takes precisely the kind of fussy precision that
loses
fights, something the Line trains out of you.
Can’t hit the foreign sorcerer too hard,
floats out of Dove and Blossom, truth and irony together.

Going to take two brigades out of service for more than a month each, the sustained movement rate’s barely ten
kilometres a day. It might expend a standard-captain.

“Strictly for emergencies,” Zora says, and Blossom nods and smiles in response.

“Townships of Greenstilt, Sluice, and Abyss, over on Edge Creek, have offered to take ten thousand between them,” Blossom says. “Cold nights, hard winters, but lots of non-shippable food, and no insurmountable problems with housing or long-term work.”

Crayfish,
Chloris says.
Swamp-squid stuffed with camas.
Half a sigh.
But not dead.

“That leaves about forty thousand.” Blossom’s diagram of transport capacity vanishes. “They could all be scattered into corners, it’s about one in ten, but that breaks up geans and collectives, the economic cost’s high. Better if we can put them together, someplace they can feed themselves.”

Dove’s figured it out. “If we
can produce the much-discussed Old Lake Canal in, what, the next month? We can ship everybody up there, they’ve got more than enough space, it’d be an economic gain.”

Blossom nods. “The survey team says it’s not impossible. There’s some politics, no accepted canal route below Old Lake, not everybody’s happy about losing their isolation, we’re going to have to be tactful.”