A Succession of Bad Days (11 page)

Wake’s coffee mug is set down with a kind of finality, then Wake turns toward me. “Edgar, it’s preferred if you don’t, if any student in your stage of development doesn’t, spend any lengthy time alone. It’s much like a recent mild concussion; you’re very likely to be well, but you
might fall over, and then the sooner someone notices the better. For you especially, with an adult talent instantiating in a single décade, this is a concern.”

“So I should — ?” I was looking forward to collapsing in a heap, tent or not.

“Come join me for lunch,” Dove says. “You’ll reassure Mama, and you’ll get to see at least a bit of the West Wetcreek.”

If Wake looked even slightly less casually
beatific, the impossibility of this being a set-up would convince me that it wasn’t.

But, hey, I can collapse in a heap on the boat.

So I nod ‘yes’.

This barge is, it looks like a lot of the barges are, meant to move people. There’s a pilot house, right up in the front, above a cabin with windows and a nearly flat roof, that has some part of the driving enchantment in it. There’s a steady rhythmic thumping from up there as twelve people, twelve sets of feet, on the barge team dance Power into the rest of the driving enchantment, down
in the keel.

You could get fifty people in here, standing. It’s just me and Dove; stuff moves on Déci, but not a lot of people, even if some of the emptiness was waiting for the third barge.

I’ve about got used to the thumping, there’s a little niggling sense of the Power moving around to it that I have to work at ignoring. I’ve gone from wondering if I should ask Dove if this was a setup to wondering
how to ask Dove if this was a setup when Dove says “We need to talk.”

Throwing myself out the back of the cabin into the hold isn’t really practical, the back wall looks like a vertical extension of a structural bulkhead.

Bother.

“Skittish reflexes there, Edgar.” Dove sounds like Dove being Dove, instead of whatever persona’s presented when being a good student. It’s not helping with the feeling
rattled. That was a very specific tone of ‘we need to talk.’ Those conversations don’t go well.

“You never used a focus before you wound up in Halt’s clever experiment, did you?”

I shake my head
no
. “No talent, not a Null, just totally flat. Couldn’t latch to a focus.”

“There’s this thing called consonance. For a focus, it’s the word for what happens when it works, when everybody involved’s brains
basically get along. The other thing, everybody says ‘not much consonance’ and shakes their heads, but what it means is that however much Power you’re supplying, your brain and that other brain don’t work together well. It’s why you don’t just grab eight or twelve people and a focus and go do something, it’s not going to work, you need the whole team to — ” Dove points up — “get along together.”

They’re dancing up there to send Power through the keel and back around, which is why the barge is headed upstream maybe three metres per second. I’m starting to think anything ongoing is a loop of some kind.

“So we’ve got consonance?” The whole hand-on-the-lever thing, digging out the spring pond, does sort of argue for that.

“You could say that. You could say that Halt’s old, too, or the West
Wetcreek’s wet.” Dove gets this implausible look, it’s got a lot of wry in it, nothing like Dove’s usual wry humour that never shifts the stern-and-golden-eyed underpinnings. “You have absolutely no idea, do you?”

“No.” I make some aimless hand motions. “I have no idea. I, you know what Wake said about intent? I had better start believing I am actually a sorcerer. Because I don’t, not really,
this is.” I stop, and wave up at the roof. “That’s real, that’s the kind of thing I believe in, that’s been around my whole life. Seeing the individual gravity of a pebble? I had no idea anyone can do that, and I’m terrified I’m going to find out hardly anyone can, like Wake and the cleaning thing.”

Dove nods. “Well, there’s three things. We’ve got a lot, in the wow, that’s surprising sense,
not in the hey, you’re pretty good sense. Blossom and Grue have a strong consonance, they’re not obviously separate people all the time, and Blossom wouldn’t outright say they have more than you and I do.”

Shape of Peace.

“Mama’s going to notice, would never make a sorcerer but Mama notices things. So there’s going to be strong opinion about you pretty quick.”

I realize I’m holding my head in
my hands.

“No reason it won’t be a good one.” Dove looks indescribably sad for a second. “Mama managed to like Hector.”

“Hector?”

“Dead of personal heroism, fighting berserk Reems infantry.” The sad turns into something else. “Really nice muscles.”

What do you say? Where in the wide earth is
Reems
? I can
feel
my brain getting stuck. I don’t like it, I am sure there’s something I ought to say,
and my brain sticks utterly anyway.

“Anyway. That’s two, and just a social warning. Three, three is that we’re going to affect each other. It’s really obvious in an established file even when they’re not using the focus all that much, not every day, if they’re attuned, if the consonance is just
vaguely functional
they start, well, losing the rough social edges.”

Dove’s looking back out the window,
at the West Wetcreek, I really don’t know why they don’t call it a river, it’s not even a
small
river, flowing by. There’s another barge coming downstream.

“You don’t seem like a bad influence.” Which isn’t much, but it’s all I’ve got to say.

Dove doesn’t.

Good is a tougher question.

“I don’t know if I can deal with the unstoppable, but that’s me.”

“I’ve been around a quantity of unstoppable.”
Dove’s looking at something that isn’t out that window.

“I’ve been around a lot of actual doorknobs.” Dove’s head turns to look at me fast. Not quite abruptly. “Also tool handles, drawer pulls, saw handles, and a sideline in wooden drinking vessels.”

Not shrugging is hard, but it feels important. “Before I got here, I’d have been sure Kynefrid was right about Halt being just a story.” Don’t
smile too much. “Halt isn’t precisely
plausible
.”

Oh, Dove, don’t smile like that. Don’t smile like that at
me
. “Says the scion of the spider-god.”

Not just a joke.

“Next time one of the grownups is around, I’m going to loan you my eyes and let you see what you look like.” It’s, no, really, it’s not a threat. “Preferably standing next to Halt.” It’s got a bunch of implacable in it, but that’s
not the same.

“I don’t look like a giant spider wearing a shapeless purple hat.”

Dove snorts. “Behind the spider.”

Behind the spider
isn’t an improvement. The spider, I mean, if you had a fear of spiders, it’d be a problem, no matter how hard you told yourself you just can’t have a spider that huge. If it was a real spider instead of Halt’s notion of a more plausible explanation it’d have to eat
cart horses, people wouldn’t keep it fed, but it’s not, it’s not even the thing that manifests Halt, it’s really, really obvious if you can see it at all that there’s the thing behind the spider, all right, and the spider is the equivalent of a big smile and a clean shirt and hoping no one who notices the scars can figure out how you got that kind of scarring.

I mean, I don’t know, I’m pretty
sure Dove doesn’t know. “You don’t know what the behind-the-spider actually is, do you?”

Dove’s head shakes
no
, with emphasis. “Not a chance. You can see it better than I can, stuff leaks across from your eyes that I can’t see on my own. Don’t think anyone can see it clearly. Don’t think it’s what it started out being, either, I don’t think there’s anything born into the world that can do what
Halt does.”

“Not just the best wizard.”

Dove waves a hand, I think it’s supposed to be corrective more than disagreeing. “That’s mostly Blossom.”

Blossom? “I thought Blossom was under a hundred?”

Dove nods, turning in from the window. It’s not raining out there, but it’s certainly thinking about it. The Creeks, the land beside the West Wetcreek, is a well-kept place, green and glowing even in
autumn. “Eighty-four. Fifty years older than I am, pretty nearly to the day. Grue’s not a décade older, they celebrate the same day.”

“How do you know this?” It’s not like the instructors at this school are especially forthcoming.

“Comrades in arms. Blossom was on the March North; so was Halt, so was I.” Dove smiles at me. “So was the colour-party you took for a critter-team.”

Wapentake…“Territorial
Line?”

“Regular, now. But yeah. About half of us came back.”

Establishment of Laws.

“You were getting displaced, no reason you’d know. But, well, some stuff happened that got through my determination to pretend I was entirely regular. Blossom talked to me about it. There was a degree of inappropriate social contact.”

I must look dumbstruck.

“The kind with tea.” Dove only thinks
Idiot,
thinks
it with an affectionate overtone. “It’s really tough talking to someone who looks nineteen and is doing the whole grandma-planning-your-life thing, at least Halt
looks
old, it’s not like you’ve got a chance but at least your social reflexes know what’s going on.”

“That’s, well, odd, but it sounds like the whole thing was odd.” I’m certainly feeling like it was odd.

“Blossom’s a Captain, full-on
Regular Line, been to officer’s school, warrants of authority and commission and did well with it, the kind of person they’d try to make a Standard-Captain except for being an Independent. Line custom says you don’t socialize with them if you’re in the Line and not also in the grant of a warrant of commission.”

Dove’s looking out the window again. I have no idea what to do, or say. This isn’t…I
can’t even
think
‘straightforward’. But maybe I can be calm about it, and Dove’ll catch some of it. I’m certain-sure Dove isn’t telling me all of it, or even half of it. Which means it’s way worse than the bits being alluded to, which are pretty bad.
About
half? If it was ‘about half’ the apples, it would mean
less
than half.

“It sounds like I was better off with the anti-panda.” It comes out
tentative.

Dove snorts, and looks at me. “Any of them going to be happy to see you, if you go back there?”

“Probably not.” Saved their lives, likely, but still. Getting locked up, suddenly and with no warning and no idea why, that has much too much of the Bad Old Days in it. “I was still the new kid, you know? Sometimes the new kid doesn’t work out, they go do something else than what they were
doing at their first collective.”

That happens a lot. I’d bet it hurts as much when it’s for a more usual reason than locking up anti-pandas by extra-dumb luck.

“Mama’s going to be happy to see me.” Dove’s face goes wry. “Mama’s name is Grackle. Don’t use it, you’d have to be that generation or older, but try not to look surprised if someone else does.”

I’m looking surprised now, but hopefully
that will count for getting it out of the way. Creek names are different.

“Anyway. Blossom’s not one of the old ones, didn’t have to get learning irregularly or survive desperate and skittish and hiding for centuries, Blossom had trustworthy teachers from the age of five. Much, much further along than ‘not a hundred’ sounds like, most of the stories are still Bad Old Days stuff where not-a-hundred
meant you were still in desperate-to-survive territory. And Blossom’s an enchanter, Halt claims a much better enchanter than Laurel.”

Laurel’s, well, Laurel’s where the Commonweal comes from, and Grue’s line about getting hit with a thousand years. It’s not what anyone thinks the Wizard Laurel meant to do, but the Hard Road and the battle standards and the graul, which every Commonweal school-child
learns really did take Laurel close to a thousand years of work to create, are why there could be a Commonweal.

And now there are two, and I wonder what this one will do for a Hard Road.

“You figure we’re for all the, what did you call them? Three-demon problems? So Blossom can get on with figuring out how to build a Hard Road?”

Dove’s head tips side to side through
maybe
, the really thorough
version with torso tipping in it. I think that’s less ‘maybe’ than ‘true, but irrelevant’. “What are Independents good for?”

Solving problems, but those really come down to “making stuff and killing things.”

Dove nods, a little sad. “Neither of us are really likely to wind up on the making things side. Zora’s headed at the best garden in six days travel, but, well. I’m told really strong talents
tend not to be especially constructive.”

The gesiths keep a lot of depressing statistics. The Galdor-gesith must have a thorough set answering that question.

I, oh, wait, the sneaks. “We are, aren’t we? Only we’re lumped together and the people teaching us are experienced mountain-movers. So we don’t notice. And that house metaphor from Wake and we’re learning by building an actual physical house
we’re going to live in for years while we study.”

I’m shaking my head. It takes real attention to stop. “Is there a word for being subtle by making something so ridiculously obvious it’s invisible?”

“Doubt it.” Dove is grinning at me. Still the kind grin, but, yeah, Dove’d figured that out already.

“Is it metaphorical at all? Or is there a real structure that we turn into, off in magic-space
somewhere, wherever the Power comes from? Are we going to need a wall?” Because there’s surely other things out there.

Dove shrugs. “I think there can be, you get sorcerers like that, it’s a type, but whether it’s a substantial structure or an insubstantial one? I think we get to pick. I think there’s probably as many options as you can really believe in, too, it’s not like any of our teachers
do the same thing.”

Real Halt’s a thing behind a spider-thing behind the wee grandmotherly woman that looks like what the spider-thing is trying its hardest to pretend into existence. Only…

“Zora can’t see behind the spider-thing, can only just see the spider-thing, doesn’t like it, Zora finds it unsettling to think about. I don’t think many people can see that far, and no, I won’t bet you there
isn’t a fourth layer.” Dove’s voice makes it clear bets about a fifth layer are out, too.

“Yeah. Halt’s an inside-out nested doll of increasingly scary things, Wake’s not really alive, and Blossom’s only fully corporeal by, I guess the word is
courtesy
.” Blossom
can
be fully corporeal, real arms swinging that sledge hammer, but if you take a good look at Blossom the coiling white fire is constructing
the flesh. It’s, well, not a disguise, Blossom doesn’t make it difficult to tell. Call it a social convenience.

“Wake’s not really dead, either,” Dove says. It’s a really odd subject to be discussing in a calm tone of voice.