A Succession of Bad Days (50 page)

“We’re being taught to do everything outside ourselves, it’s not a focus, it’s
not dumb, it’s not inside our heads, we don’t melt.” Dove says this, it’s not definite, it’s not absence of doubt, it’s the-rocks-all-know-this-now.

“That,” Dove waves at the sapphire wall, “isn’t a spell, it’s chemistry. We can lift things, pull rocks apart into elements, move the elements around, push heat. We can do simple illusions, shape-shift a tiny bit, kill weeds, basic bindings. That’s
it.” Dove inhales carefully. “Just…vigorously.”

“Chemistry,” Arch says, about the same way I’d say “Benevolent unicorns”.

“Chemistry,” Blossom says. “Chemistry with enough intent that the mischief stays out of it.”

“Bridges? Lock-gates?” Arch doesn’t see how even simple machines are chemistry, is how I take this.

“Dove left off eating books.” Blossom’s actually cheerful, I don’t know how.

Would
have, were going to wit-crack.

Have to suppose Dove’s better at judging the effects of stress than I am. Wouldn’t feel confident of Arch’s composure on my own.

“I’ve got a lot of engineering manuals in my head,” Blossom says. “Designs get distributed.”

“Designs for silicon carbide.” Arch doesn’t believe this. Which is fair. The stuff gets used for expensive artificial grinding wheels, even more
expensive bearings, and not much else.

“Didn’t say they were optimal designs.” Blossom’s grinning. “It’s stronger and lighter, fewer thermal issues, use the steel design, we’ll be fine.”

“We really don’t want anybody to starve,” Zora says, quietly and entirely seriously.

“It’s wilderness,” Chloris says. “We’re usually more tactful near a town.”

Arch’s hands come up, but just up, no waving. “Peace.
You’re explicable. I’ll try not to gibber further.”

No further gibbering that night, nor the next day. Arch doesn’t think about the bridges, watching load-bearing machinery condense out of the air, that’s what it looks like, it’s bothersome, but it’s not the first time. Arch seems to be basically fine with our floating the canoes down to the water, that’s a real-sorcerers-can thing, the snags
crumbling into sludge and sawdust is the same. The one time when thirty thousand tonnes of river bottom rises with a roar of loose gravel and falling water from what ought to be the barge channel and distributes itself against the inside bank, that wobbles Arch a little, and then there’s a visible decision it’s just mass, and a lot less mass than the ridge-cut we’ve already made. The survey picks
up a notation that the river wants to go shallow there, it’s going to be something to check after every spring high-water.

Arch’s survey team is at the north end, north and a bit west, of Sad Goat Lake. They look like they’re not even slightly sure why they got told to bring their other canoe. It’d be, I mean, some of the little side-streams are maybe passable, but the map doesn’t say and I doubt
they know, if it’s not on any of the maps. I sure don’t know, but it was probably a thirty kilometre portage. From the way they look, it was pretty steep.

Dove’s turn to cook means bacon cheese potatoes. It also means really excellent bacon cheese potatoes in, it used to be five, but Dove has it down to about three, minutes. We feed Arch’s team; they didn’t beat us there by more than half an hour
and they’re hurting. Food cheers Arch’s team up no end. Arch manages to keep a completely smooth face when Blossom finishes drying dishes and creates an illusion, some ten metres across, of the north end of Sad Goat Lake and says “This one we need to plan.” Arch’s team all look at Arch, look at the illusion, look at Blossom looking like their kid sister, I don’t think any of them caught
how
Blossom
dries dishes, and visibly decide that they’re going to deal with this calmly.

The tunnel needs to be level, if we can possibly manage it. The survey team can get us an exact, well, within a metre, elevation. It’s not like the Old Lake’s level doesn’t change, the tunnel needs to work for the low lake level. It absolutely can’t be higher at this end, well, we could, we could run a gate, set of gates,
so Sad Goat would drain into the Old Lake, but the goal is to feed down from the Old Lake, and only enough to run the locks. Which means slack water in the tunnel.

We wind up with a couple big arches plus a narrow arch in the middle over a sort of broad double u-shape for the actual channels, standard twenty-five metres each. Five metres of arch, three-metre walking path both sides of the channels
along the tops of the canal linings, five metres of arch pillars on each side of twelve metres of centre roadway. Ninety-four metres wide, count the three metre channel lining and the structure of the supporting arches and it’s twenty-five metres high. It makes a convincing illusion.

“That’s hard rock,” Arch says, looking at the model and then up at the slope above Sad Goat. There’s a few small
trees, a few low places with strips of bog in them, mostly tussocky grass and low shrubby conifer things. I nod. “Not going to do it all at once.” Arch nods, reassured. The rest of the survey team’s not reassured, and now they’re worried about their team lead.

We have a discussion about elevation; four-eighty-five means we should put the canal bottom at four-eighty, just in case we’re a metre
off height for four-eighty-one, and accept an exit lock into the Old Lake, you can do ten metres in one lift without doing anything clever at all. That’s the conservative choice, and Blossom and Arch look at each other and both nod.

With the model and a quick pattern enchantment thing, it takes Dove four tries, something which annoys Dove and impresses Blossom, we’re about set for the next day.

“We’re going to need a place to pile a whole lot of big ingots,” Blossom tells Arch the next morning. “Can you find a twenty-five or thirty hectare flat place, convenient to the water?” Arch nods.

We walk up to the marked four-eighty one metre elevation point, carefully check we’re all carrying lunch and water, carefully check that Arch’s team is well clear, carefully check we’re pointed the same
way, it’s not going to be a completely straight tunnel, we’ve got the curve built into the pattern enchantment for the tunnel shape, Dove and I fold together, Blossom puts the ward up, Chloris thinks something wistful about all the lights we’re going to have to make, and Zora says
Onward!
in immensely cheerful tones.

It’s hard rock, all right, but that’s almost a help. Put up the fire mirror,
feed heat ahead of it, move it forward, pull constituent elements out, pull heat out of them, feed the heat back forward and feed atoms to Zora for arranging into canal structure or feed them to Chloris for ingotting, get more heat back from Zora and Chloris and feed that forward of the fire-mirror, too. The hot face is only about a decimetre deep, but we can move it as fast as we can walk, could
move it faster but a fast walk is plenty to manage with your spine when your mind’s all in the working. Blossom’s got the ward that keeps us from cooking or being crushed if the overhead falls, the central balance around the path we’re supposed to walk, and an extension of the ward that’s handling the oxygen vent. Blossom’s not providing push, doesn’t need to, this would be much harder open to the
air, something else the ward is there to prevent, there’s a couple valleys we’re going to cross where the tunnel might break through to daylight, but Blossom is in snug to the working link. If we all need to feed the ward we’re going to need to do it fast.

Five hours later we’re looking at one end of the Old Lake, having climbed out of the cut. We stopped in the rock, stopped well back, just as
soon as we kept seeing sky. Locks here shouldn’t be difficult, and we’re not getting any seep to mention. Lunch goes quick, pulling the first ten kilometres of metal slugs and ingots out of the channels is pretty quick, we don’t have to make a flat space, there’s a broad rock shelf, and then it’s walk back, with pauses to reinforce the tunnel shoring and put in an air vent every hundred metres.
Plus big clear plugs, in lieu of safety railings, at the two places the tunnel does break out to daylight. Emerge after dinner time, eat hardtack and what Dove calls alleged cheese, as good a term for it as you could hope to find, and pull the slugs and ingots from this end of the canal, stacking them on the carefully staked out flat space.

Next morning is two sets of locks, four-sixty-six metres
up to four-eighty, seven metres each. They’re as close to Sad Goat Lake as we can get them, we put in three hundred metres of piers both sides of the entrance channel, room for thirty-two barges to moor and wait for daylight. The afternoon goes for four hundred and fifty lights, we’re aiming for one every hundred metres down the tunnel roof, but first we make a couple of one-metre corundum sphere
lights, and apple-slice style covers that’ll fold around from all covered to all-but-an-eighth showing, and put those up on spinner bearings on top of ten metre hollow towers with inside stairs at the ends of the piers. “Roof later,” Blossom says.
The Lug-gesith’s regular servants can do it,
Dove says, and I nod. Bits of thinking about fill times, and time that might be lost to politics, leaks
over from Blossom when we’re all linked up. The point in time where something else has to be done to keep those people alive if we haven’t got the canal done isn’t clear, it’s past the end of Thermidor but not far past.

Sticking the lights on the tunnel ceiling slows us down the next day. Floating the survey-team’s canoes doesn’t. Surveyors are a bit subdued. I think Arch has about recovered,
but the other three are, well, they’d probably be ranting if Arch wasn’t calm, at least, acting calm. We have, Dove and Chloris have, a discussion about whether we want to do the lights offset or not. Blossom’s contribution is “The manual doesn’t say,” with an amused look.

Were there any canal tunnels in the old Commonweal?
There sure aren’t in the Creeks, there’s a canal
bridge
, but that’s not
the same.

Not unless you count going under a wide bridge,
Blossom says.

Zora’s contribution is to do pretend lights, we don’t want to be unsticking the physical lights, and we wind up agreeing that parallel is better. Offsetting the lights does awful things to the shadows through the central support pillars.

“You realize,” one of the surveyors says, walking along behind us and trying not to look
nervous watching their canoes floating along above about eight metres of drop, “that’s going to go into the official standards manual for canal tunnels.”

“Shouldn’t it?” Maybe a tenth of Zora’s attention is involved in the reply. Zora’s sticking lights to the ceiling, Chloris is lugging the lights, hundreds of fifteen-centimetre corundum hemispheres trailing along like a quiet flock of slow birds,
I’ve got the illusory hundred-metre measure. Four, really, pull the trailing one up past the current one every time Zora puts a light up on each side. Dove’s floating the canoes, ours and theirs.

Day after that is the locks out to Old Lake. The surveyors save us a lot of trouble by paddling out and doing soundings. It’s nearly a kilometre before there’s any kind of reliable four metres of depth,
peak depth on the way is close to sixty metres, but there’s a mess of rocks and ridges and who knows what down there, too. Couple places you can scrape the bottom of a canoe. No obvious channel, I don’t understand how it hasn’t silted level, there isn’t a stream coming in here, couple little trickles a kilometre or two away, nothing like enough to scour. Might just not be any sediment coming in,
there’s a lot of bare rock back up the hill.

We stick a big illusion on a straight line to deep water, really soft at first and slowly harder and harder until it’s waterproof. Anything that can move will move; same when we sort of sort of heave back until we’ve got sixty metres of channel-width with no water in it, it’s a slow heave. Lot of wet rocks, shouldn’t be any fish, shouldn’t be anything
that could move. It’s a useless mess of wet rocks, no consistent composition at all.

My front,
Blossom says.

“Clear away!” Dove says, emphatic, not loud. The surveyors hear just fine five- and six hundred metres away. They paddle for shore, but not shore anywhere near us.

They’re clear,
Dove says, as we fold together and pick up the illusion hold from Chloris and Zora, Blossom wants the far end
wider and further, a pie-slice instead of a broad line. We do that, swinging water. Zora and Chloris’s corner of the working link connects up with Blossom and something happens, it looks like mist rolling down the space in the illusion.

The mist clears on a smooth slope, five metres depth dropping down to twenty, just about as deep as the lake is at the end of the illusion.

Fade the illusion out,
Blossom says,
the water should come in slowly, no turbulence if we can help it.
Dove and I fold the illusion in, collapse it, there’s a serious whistle of air at the land end, crumple it up slowly down to the new lake bottom like rolling a tent.

“No piers?” Zora says, and Blossom waves illusory lines at the hillside. “Turning basin. We can put up lights at the channel ends.”

It makes the pile
of ingots larger, lots of iron in this rock, and the near lights, the ones marking the channel entrance, those need to be yellow, same as the pier ends at Sad Goat Lake. Not hard to do. Even excavating the channel in the rock on land isn’t particularly difficult, we need to cofferdam the water away unless we want to poach the surroundings, but that’s easy. We leave the illusory cofferdam there; good
for a couple years at least, Blossom says, and we don’t want to start filling the canal yet.

It’s only lunch time. We have a discussion with the surveyors about canoe-pushing with the Power over a quick lunch, and make Morning Vale a bit more than three hours later.

People are surprised to see us; they weren’t expecting the surveyors back so quick, they weren’t expecting us, they knew someone
sorcerous was coming but four young-women-might-be-youths and a small lad from elsewhere don’t, visibly don’t, fit their expectations.

We get the canoes put away, the Morning Vale Meeting will meet after dinner to talk to us, there’s an hour of figuring out where to put us, no full time hostels in Morning Vale, plus some blinking at the assumption Dove and I are sharing a room. Nobody says anything,
Dove gets this look of wide-eyed innocence that I think translates into Creek as
They will never find the body.