A Succession of Bad Days (22 page)

Crane is shushing someone. There’s the strangest feeling in the air. Zora’s rustling, standing
right there, there’s nothing, no butterfly wings, but rustling. Chloris is a single singing hunger like famine in winter, white as ice and green as leaves an hour unfurled. Kynefrid, Kynefrid’s not cold, and looking very surprised about that.

Dove’s right there, I’m right there, Dove’s standing on the other side of Zora, but it doesn’t matter at all. I can’t, Dove can’t, actually see the Shape
if we have to do it divided, but our mind can manage. The ward, the chalk, it’s pretty much all a decoy. A really good, careful one, someone worked hard to move little bits of iron and magnesium in precise ways far down in the basalt, and it’s complicated. The actual Shape of Peace, this is like the top of a standing wave, the place where the Shape rises. Not materially accessible, but maybe materially
present? The Shape of Peace is everywhere in the Commonweal, it has to be, everyone with a local office uses it for something. It’s not bound to the dirt or the people, the people
are
it, but the enchantment itself is written in the shadows of the shapes of the memories of names.

I have no idea what that means, but the explanation is right there, hidden before the world.

That’s the last thing
that fades of the vast complex structure. Shadows of the shapes of the memories of names.

I don’t think that’s next year,
Chloris says.

You can’t quite say any of the five of us
laugh
, it’s not a place for just starting to laugh, but I think we all get something of a manic look.

“Back with us, students?” Crane says, quietly pleased. There’s a couple of other Independents standing beside Crane,
introduced as Glyph and Ongen. “Didn’t change my name,” Ongen says, smiling.

“There are Independents of two hundred years’ service who can’t see that clearly,” is what Glyph says. It’s not disapproving, really, but there’s a lot of surprise.

Chloris and Kynefrid tip their heads at me, Zora almost points and turns it into a sort of elbow sweep. “Edgar does most of the unusual perceptions.” Kynefrid
gets that out in an
admiring
tone, somehow.

“Not enchantments.” Hard not to sound skittish. “More than half of that was Dove.”

“You could pass the image to the others?” Glyph says to Dove.

“I’m not Blossom.” Dove grins. “I’d have said Ed had six-tenths of that.”

“If you were Blossom, I would be certain Halt was putting something in the water.” Ongen says this in good humour. It sounds like
Ongen would not much disapprove if Halt was.

“But you — ” Glyph’s chin includes Chloris and Zora and Kynefrid — “all saw?”

We nod, all exactly together. It’s not planned, there’s no intent to do it, but we’re still a little bit linked up. Actively linked up. It happens.

“Doing things together wouldn’t work if we didn’t share perceptions,” Chloris says. I don’t think how much Chloris wants to let
that sound prim comes through outside the five of us.

“Things.” Ongen’s smile is much wider, and at least as friendly.

“They have made a collection of mighty things into a house,” Crane says, quite solemn.

“Not a remark for which it is easy to devise a response.” Glyph is looking at us more than Crane, but seems willing to leave the whole thing.

“Sorry to have disturbed your Déci,” I remember
to say. Gets me a solemn head-shake and a brushing-out wave with a grin behind it, respectively.

Turns out the Galdor-gesith maintains a hostel for travelling sorcerers. Also turns out it’s got no water; the tank’s fine, but the pump is waiting on windmill parts, so all the water is being lugged out of the little lake with buckets.

It takes us about ten minutes to conclude we can’t make a pump,
not right now. No patterns for the parts, and we really shouldn’t tackle a new binding on our own just yet, even if the easy fix would be to plunk water-gates in the tank and the lake. The hosteller doesn’t quite snicker at me when I ask if the roof lifts off the water tank.

It doesn’t, but there’s an inspection hatch, which is nearly as good. I don’t think Crane liked the almost-snicker much,
not from the immensely calm response in the face of the hosteller’s reaction to a couple tankfuls of water lifting out of the lake, and even calmer explaining that, no, see, the students are being extremely careful to make sure that, chemically, they have absolutely nothing but water, and that mystically, it’s not just dead, it’s
inert
, you can see Wake’s teaching in that.

Zora didn’t need to
make the funnel purple, and really didn’t need to decorate its outer surface with stylized daisies, even if it does look cheery. Works fine, and the excess water wanders back to the lake, somewhat diminished by a few water troughs and a kitchen cistern.

Crane, well, it’s possible to look solemn and bemused at the same time. Dove looks over and says “Creeks. Baths. It’s important,” and Crane actually
laughs.

Breakfast, bath, clean clothes, wait for Crane’s final cup of tea to be finished. Breakfast involves some cinnamon-and-honey pastries from the cook whose cistern we filled, which was a lot nicer than they needed to be.

It’s getting so I can breathe for calm without the Power buildup, which is good. The hostel’s got a lot of wood in it where it isn’t still canvas.

Everyone who might know
what’s involved treats the formal student status as being like joining a collective, or maybe more like taking a minor gean office, something that hands you specific responsibilities but it’s not formally your main job. I suppose Independents are a large, very distributed collective, there are less than three hundred Independents, there were a couple thousand but most of them are in the First Commonweal
still, but there are plenty of collectives that size and some larger.

Which I suppose isn’t wrong, the specific responsibilities part, it’s agreeing that you’re going to, for whatever reasons seem good to you, set out to become an Independent, not just someone capable of sorcery, someone able to exercise their talent to predictable material effect. You’re going to have to be acceptable to the
Shape of Peace as a whole, but that’s
how
you exercise your heightened talent, after you’ve departed life for the metaphysical. The minor sorcerer is still in the life they inherited from their parents.

Dove takes my hand, which is not the usual order of things.

I can feel Dove deciding to say this aloud. “Last time I undertook specific obligations to the Shape of Peace, keeping them was tougher
than I thought it was going to be.”

Crane, I don’t think that’s sympathy, I think that’s fellowship. Crane’s expressions are subtle, it’s tough.

“I have not known so many Independents of either Commonweal as your senior teachers have,” Crane says, dry and quiet into their teacup full of coffee. “Still, I have not known any who did not find what you are undertaking harder than they thought it was
going to be.”

Crane smiles, quietly, gently, at Chloris’ look of despair. “Not impossibly difficult. Only the difficulty of a large complex thing first undertaken.”

Dove gets a ‘right, work,’ look, and says, not to anybody in particular, “Yet these things shall come to pass.”

Crane’s eyes widen just a little. Several other people in the hostel look variously alarmed. Dove takes no notice, stacking
dishes. Zora’s looking at me, as though I know
why
Dove said that. I don’t, all I know is that Kynefrid didn’t get the spike of determination that came with it, Kynefrid isn’t shaking again.

We don’t go straight to the Shape of Peace; we have to collect a clerk — not Lester, a Francis — and both of Glyph and Ongen, who are, by Francis, introduced as list-lead and the Maintainer, respectively.
No one explains what either of those things mean.

The walk from there is shorter than the walk from the Shape of Peace to the hostel yesterday, but it feels three times as long.

Francis hauls out Lester’s lists of our accomplishments, our attestations of them, and our attestations of intent. We get asked, individually, with careful checks of name and signature, if we do now still so attest our
works and intent.

We all do, one by one. I don’t think any of us find it easy to say, it’s not something you think about every day, but the idea of having, of accepting, the legal obligation to turn yourself into a metaphysical life form is one that sticks. Even if it’s the only way to save any kind of your life.

Even if the first bits of your new life are something you really like. Kynefrid wasn’t
wrong calling it stepping of a cliff.

If you’re not a sorcerer, you can be sure that the metaphorical cliff is safer. I don’t think that’s true for sorcerers.

I’ve managed to get on the end of the line where I’ll be going last. I get to hear four cautions that the actual process of administration hurts before I get my own personal caution. The cautions aren’t especially worrying. The noises everybody’s
making are unnerving, but not hugely so. It’s the not being able to turn to look, the not being able to reach out and tell what’s going on. Dove isn’t there, for the first time in months, and it’s very unsettling. The Shape of Peace is determined that everyone does this as a distinct individual.

The oath isn’t a promise to abide the law of your active thought and will, which is what all the clerk’s
oaths and minor office oaths say. You promise to return, to be examined for an Independent, and there’s a connection established so the Shape of Peace will always be able to find you. No getting most of your magical education and heading over the border.

There’s a dabber thing, with a felt end; you get a big splock of oil in the middle of your forehead, and one on of the back of each hand. I found
out later the oil is refined from ostrich lard, and that if I can figure out why it works better than anything else I’ve got my own-work project.

The return’s got a time limit. Ten years.

The only possible way to get an extension is to present yourself for judgement. If you’re still in the biological ecosystem, the Shape of Peace can give you more time, it’s been known to happen. Or it can judge
you a failure, which is fatal.

Dove’s got, I’ve got, six years at most on the odds. So no worries about an extension.

The words are easy, you get a card with a neat printed version anyway. “I, Edgar, formerly of the Township of Wending in the Province of the Dread River, presently in the keeping of the Galdor-gesith in the Province of Westcreek, do avow by my name that I shall return unto this
place in not more time than ten years and one day, to be examined for the qualification of Independent sorcerer.” It’s your card, you thumb-printed it with a drop of your blood. Just the left thumb.

Saying the words is just as easy. It’s a good thing to want the life you’ve got, and this life is the only one I’m going to get.

You say the words, you think “That’s it?” and the consuming pain starts
in the middle of your forehead, gnaws its way through your skull, your brain, down your spine, and out, mostly out, your hands. Some of it gets everywhere.

I’d have screamed if my jaw hadn’t locked from the pain. I’d have screamed at some length.

When my eyes focus again and I get to my feet, I see Glyph looking apologetic. “That can only happen once.” It’s addressed to all of us, though Kynefrid,
who went first, is looking better than I expect, based on how I’m feeling. So maybe it wears off fast.

“The second time is fatal?” Chloris says, sounding shaky and furious at the same time.

“Yes,” says Glyph, completely serious. “You can only bind your name once, for much the same reason that you can only live through the second of time before the present moment once.”

“How’d you get into — ”
Dove says to Glyph, with a chin lift at where the Shape of Peace swirls away, faintly, above the rock. It’s not looking as though any of us taste bad. Though if school had it right, the very first such binding was Halt’s, back just after the Shape of Peace was created.

Dove’s question registers. This is the Second Commonweal, but all the Independents are displaced, just like me and Kynefrid. They’d
have done their name-binding with the original Shape of Peace.

Glyph very clearly can’t think of how to explain this, you can see, really see, I’d have seen before the parasite came out, a bunch of equations and diagrams starting to hover around Glyph’s head with the thinking involved.

“The First Commonweal cast out our names, but to us, not the Outer Dark.” Ongen isn’t as bothered by the amount
of simplification, while Glyph’s halo of math is getting denser, hearing this. “We could thereby commit our bound names to the new Shape of Peace as we made it.”

“The Outer Dark is what happens if we fail the Independent examination?” Zora makes that a question to say, despite not thinking it’s any kind of question.

Ongen nods. “It is.”

We hand our cards to Francis, we get a handclasp of welcome
from Ongen and Glyph both, and we all go get lunch. Crane is, well, sympathetic, but also implacable; we need to eat, and by the time we’ve got something into us we’ll believe that.

I like the cooking in Westcreek Town much better, but Crane’s right. There’s an ache, as the pain fades out, it’s the using-the-Power ache, not an abused-muscles ache.

Near the end of lunch, “It has to be like that?”
Chloris asks, and Crane nods back.

“Comprehensive name-binding generally wants, generally has, a strong structural bias toward extinction of talent. Forms where the extinction of talent is not accompanied by general extinction of the basic mechanisms of life are difficult to achieve,” Crane says. “The name-binding in the Shape of Peace is traumatic, but does no lasting material damage nor alteration
to the talent. Devising a better one is difficult without an ethical source of experimental subjects.”

Since you could only do it once, even if you didn’t kill them or zero out their talents. And if you did it the least bit wrong, they’d be shut out of the Shape of Peace, which is, for a sorcerer in the Commonweal, near enough to a death sentence.