Under One Banner, page 9
part #4 of Commonweal Series
Mel’s illusion acquires the defined areas, broad arcs in bean-shapes along the former Lost Creek that stop a kilometre clear of Split Creek. Curve to the west, curve to the east, curve to the west. The line of the canal up to the Creeks Armoury runs up from the West Wetcreek.
“Northernmost is the neighbours,” Mel says, blinking that area. “Lots of that’s agricultural. Most of it’s dry with a single major stream. The middle section has got less slope, a slower stream, marsh, and more scattered water. We’ve got the pond.”
Eugenia closes their eyes and deliberately reaches out to feel the boat crew’s dancing, the simple ordered push into the driving focus, the smoothness of the water, the mild wind of passage.
“Is the drainage continuous?” It’s Eugenia’s best calm voice.
“There’s some big gates,” Tiggy says. “Which is why the floors are warm, the Armoury is higher than the low end of the middle section.”
“Are we going somewhere on that scale?” Eugenia turns to face Mel directly. “Thank you. I feel like I know where I am, now.”
Mel smiles and lets the illusion go by shining swirls into nothingness.
“Not unsettled?” Xenia sees no reason not to ask this kind of question.
“Not surprised,” Eugenia says. “The edifice doesn’t seem constructed.”
“We’re going somewhere with the same style,” Tiggy says. “Not the same scale.”
Same scale of the Power to make it, Eugenia thinks.
The end of the Armoury Pond is a lock, only one, and a canal tunnel into a cliff.
Not, Eugenia notes, a river-sized canal like the one up to the Edifice. Nor is there a second channel; above the lock the boat crew flipped a flag and took the crank handles, lock gates and sluice-tunnels and gate-valves all together.
The tunnel goes a long way; Eugenia thinks at least ten kilometres. The rock is dark and the tunnel is not lit; there are lights on the boat, and spaced reflective marks so the boat crew can judge their speed.
Then there’s a small pool, only just large enough to turn the boat. There’s a place to tie up, and the boat does. Various supplies come off the boat and on to a cart. The single bronze bull in the harness comes awake, Eugenia supposes it’s awake, when Lily puts a hand on its forehead and says “Wake up, Lump.” Boat and boat-crew depart.
It’s an old bronze bull, done in a different style than the few traditional-working bronze bulls Eugenia has seen in the Creeks. Its joints show wear, but the bull and the cart move steadily.
Not so far; the Shot Team holds hands and a big curved iron plug in the wall rotates until there’s a tunnel through the iron. Eugenia can feel the Power involved, but not precisely apprehend it. It could be a limitation of the device or Eugenia’s use or plain subtlety on the part of the Shot Team and Eugenia firmly decides not to consider the question now.
Cart and people pass through the iron tunnel into a short stretch of rock tunnel with another iron plug at the end. Holding hands again, the Shot Team swings the first plug shut and then the second one open. “Can’t ever have both open,” Tiggy says, neither more abashed nor less cheerful. Eugenia nods. Eugenia would be feeling much worse if the lever with the ratchet and the geared track didn’t show. Even if the whole Shot Team had dropped dead of unsuspected causes, Eugenia could have got the plug open before the air ran out.
Probably. They think probably.
The second plug’s short exit tunnel runs out into a longer tunnel curving through rock. The curve goes down a full circle into another large iron plug. More held hands and a faint rumble tell Eugenia the second plug’s been closed before they see the third one swing open. Opened, the third plug leads into a tunnel at right angles to the direction they had been going.
This tunnel’s more than a kilometre long, because they walk out a kilometre.
“It’s open at both ends,” Mel says. “And it’s wider going the other way. We wanted to be sure there wasn’t any risk of over-pressure getting into the canal.”
The road leads out of the tunnel around a corner, another couple hundred metres of smooth curve and steep cliff above and below, before winding up at a blind gate in a wall maybe four metres high.
It’s not another edifice. It’s black, like its curtain wall is black, and like the edifice is black, and the roof is the same rainbow tile, but it’s not large for a manufactory even without considering the scale of edifice. Eugenia thinks five floors and maybe ten metres by thirty of ground area.
“No big cellars?” Eugenia feels oddly cheerful.
“No big cellars,” Tiggy says. “Welcome to the actual shot shop.”
Chapter 13
Year of the Peace Established Five Hundred Forty-Four, Month of Germinal, Twenty-seventh Day
Eugenia had wondered if there was anyone else in this place, but there is.
Two cooks. Who answer when Xenia calls out, and do something that involves a lot of clanking. The gate is blind, but if you go follow the roadway all ten blind metres into the wall, the inner four metres of the right-hand wall opens.
Well, lifts. And there’s another and another and another, slabs a metre thick, two metres apart. Tiggy’s careful no one sets a foot forward until all four slabs have gone clank as something locks them in place.
Follow around the two sharp turns, right and then left, and there’s a small yard. If there’s another gate it isn’t obvious.
There’s more clanking as the Shot Team picks all the counterweights back up and the gate-slabs fall. No singing, no holding hands, there’s just a moment of agreement, Eugenia supposes. It’s somehow a distinctive expression despite the variety of faces. The motion in the Power seems like a single will moves it, which Eugenia finds strange. It should be more difficult to do anything with one will across eight.
The gate-slabs, like the wall they’re embedded in, are silicon carbide. The edifice is silicon carbide, structurally, and these walls are just that shade of black and have just the same familiar particular feel if Eugenia concentrates. Making a wall four metres high and four metres thick out of silicon carbide, there’s at least that much wall thickness outside the entrance tunnel, seems excessive. Especially as the actual shop does not look defensible, it has regular doors and tall windows for light and no more than the usual weather shutters.
“What happens if someone sends a demon here?” Eugenia has gone from considerations of defensible to thinking that this place is close to the Edge. Not in terms of walking or even vision, but if there are would-be conquerors coming up out of the sea with demons it is not so far at all.
Walking to this place doesn’t seem practical. The view out over the land involves a steep drop and a broad strip of glass at the base of an overhanging cliff, itself as smooth as a mirror. Out at the edge of the glass there’s a ditch, or maybe a moat.
“There are defences,” Tiggy says.
Eugenia has had no inkling of a ward, realizes that they now have considerably more sensory reach than their reflexes expect, and makes a conscious effort to extend their perceptions beyond their habitual fifty-metre radius.
“It said I wasn’t tasty enough.”
Eugenia’s sitting on the smooth dark surface of the yard. Lily’s crouched down behind Eugenia to make sure they don’t fall over, as well as down, and Tiggy’s holding a bone whistle covered all over in fine black lines.
The black lines follow no earthly geometry.
“Well, good,” Tiggy says, entirely as cheerful as usual tucking the bone whistle away. “Something would have gone wrong if you were.”
Eugenia accepts Lily’s offered hand and stands up. “Does it need to eat?”
“We’re assured not.” A commendably firm and certain tone of voice from Try.
“It wants to eat.” Delph sounds certain with no effort at all, and everybody nods.
“We’re told it’s about as clever as a dog,” Tiggy says. “Nothing like having a Line battalion but asserted more than enough for ‘plausible demons’.”
Eugenia carefully fails to enquire as to who was doing the asserting, and thinks Spider Eyes in the reverent voice of their childhood. It doesn’t bother Eugenia until they realize their hands are moving involuntarily through the eight-tap reverent motion of that same traditional childhood.
“The shop has wall-wards, so it’s more secure if we’re here than if we’re not.” Mel manages to sound entirely serene.
Inside the shot-shop there’s unloading the cart, unyoking Lump, and Lily setting Lump back to resting in a stall. Someone’s carefully planked the stall floor. There’s a slate, with counting marks. “Lump gets a contemplative day in the yard every twenty trips,” Lily says to Eugenia while making a chalk mark.
Eugenia doesn’t quite know what to do with themself, beyond pulling their bags off the cart. Everyone else seems to have clear notions, and departs, leaving Mel and Tiggy and Eugenia.
“These stairs,” Tiggy says, chin pointing, and the risers are just as high as the stairs in the edifice. Eugenia’s mostly stopped noticing.
The rooms are smaller, the single bathing room has one long tub, and the privies are one at each end of the hall. It’s still much nicer than anywhere Eugenia lived as Order’s student. The thought makes Eugenia smirk, because they can’t imagine how Order would react to the general Creek taste in bathing tubs.
As long as Eugenia can find one where the water hasn’t been heated to poaching temperatures, Eugenia quite approves of the practice.
Dinner is quiet and served to the table. It feels like a family Festival dinner or how it used to be in Eugenia’s sorcery class, and Eugenia goes a little misty. Everyone seems to understand. Eugenia doesn’t manage to catch either cook’s name but finds themself smiling despite having to sit on a biscuit box. The cooks are at one end of the table leaning on each other and Mel and Tiggy are at the other end in nearly enough the same pose.
Breakfast is boiled potatoes and roast beef, chopped and fried together in duck fat with eggs stirred over the whole. Eugenia couldn’t have told it was duck fat, before. The device has a more capable sensitivity than their individual talent had. Toast with apple preserves and big mugs of tea, or, for Eugenia, coffee in a much smaller mug. Which means a quarter-litre instead of a litre, smaller being relative. The Edifice refectories have decilitre mugs, but the Shot Shop proper doesn’t. Eugenia carefully does not fill the mug past half.
It’s work-day food.
Eugenia never gets asked to do dishes; they have neither the height nor the length of arm and, as someone said back in the Edifice, it wouldn’t be polite to ask Eugenia to stand in the sink to solve these problems. They can carry, but everyone else twitches. So Eugenia usually mops. They’ve hung the mop to dry when Tiggy pops up and collects them.
A décade ago, Eugenia would have felt startled. Now everyone is obvious, here on the ground floor and one floor up. The floors above the first aren’t perceptible at all. Once Eugenia’s on the second floor, the lower two aren’t perceptible. Neither are the floors above, or anything outside.
Tiggy does something with broad gestures. The whole volume shimmers into metaphysical diamond shapes that tip into rhombuses and melt into a pattern of differently proportioned figures, so that if Eugenia concentrates it seems like projection drawings of cubes here and there in the pattern.
Given a little time, the volume clears as the pattern shifts to the edges of the room. It’s not tight to the walls and Eugenia cannot keep from thinking that it drains up to the ceiling.
It’s entirely incomprehensible, but also fascinating; it reminds Eugenia of watching iron and carbon mix into mineral structures as hot steel cools, only these patterns don’t repeat.
“Wall ward’s up,” Tiggy says.
Mel and Lily take hands like they’re dancing something that has longways sets and sing twelve notes each in harmony.
That doesn’t sound erie, that sounds cheerful, goes through Eugenia’s mind. What in the world’s width are they doing?
“We’re a little bit to one side of reality now,” Tiggy says. “Which is why there’s a separate privy through the rightmost door in the far wall.”
Eugenia nods.
“A little bit to one side of reality?” The assertion could mean several things, and Eugenia is well aware they don’t know the comprehensive list of possibilities.
“Half-a-dimension displaced from the world,” Lily says. “Half is the average across three spatial and time and they’re all either positive or negative. No individual displacement smaller than an eighth.”
“We’ve got an air brick like a battle-standard,” Mel says quickly. “No worry about the air.”
Air brick like a battle-standard repeats itself through Eugenia’s understanding and instead of finding a potter’s bench to collapse on Eugenia straightens. “Please explain with more cohesive detail,” comes out in the tone everyone thinks Eugenia intends when reading that exact comment left on their initial written explanations and there’s a general outbreak of smiles.
“It’s not in the common knowledge so we don’t want anyone else able to find out.” Tiggy still seems entirely cheerful. Eugenia doesn’t understand how.
“The wall-wards are from the neighbours, they’re fairly resolute.” That’s Mel.
“Is it technically a ward?” Eugenia’s memory is full of lists of things that are referred to as wards, but aren’t, in a structural sense.
“Open question.” Thistle sounds irked, but Thistle often sounds irked. “Three-or-more-mathematical-careers-open.”
“Line banner can’t get through it.” Tiggy’s become notably cheerful. “We did the experiment.”
Eugenia’s eyes close. For a static structure where there isn’t anyone or anything actively feeding it Power this is something for which Eugenia completely lacks an adjective.
“I need to formally communicate that the work done here is not part of the common knowledge.” Tiggy’s a little bit more abashed, and their face has gone formal. All the Shot-team faces have.
“Understood.” Eugenia is suddenly sharply curious. The common knowledge is nearly everything. There’s supposed to be a cavern under the original Shape of Peace with a few things in it: the Independent Ongen’s carefully complete recipe for making a battle-standard beside the Wizard Laurel’s recovered notes, the seven or eight people worth of notes and instructions from the first creation of the Shape of Peace, and, if you believe the stories, the Book of Halt. The stories are never consistent about the material of the covers around the Book of Halt.
Those things in the cavern are outside the common knowledge; no copies in libraries, no open discussion, never even a hinted mention in a permanent record. Certainly never put in a letter; nothing anyone outside the Commonweal could discover by simple observation. It’s not something Eugenia ever expected to encounter, but they know about it. Anybody studying to be an independent would have met the concept, even the concept of something meant to be a secret from other citizens, which is what Tiggy has just told Eugenia this is.
Which is why the second floor’s quite such a startlement. It looks like a potter’s workshop, or perhaps like a porcelain shop, Eugenia isn’t sure. And then Eugenia notices the coal bins and begins to suspect that at least two of the substantial structures aren’t kilns.
“So we don’t think about this stuff when we’re not here, not in any detail.” Xenia’s uncharacteristically firm. Xenia’s looking uncharacteristically focused, too.
“There’s two layers of discontinuity,” Eugenia says. “One of them from material reality and one from the Power.”
Everybody nods.
“What are you doing?” Eugenia manages to keep the question conversational. Red shot, artillery shot that has magical effects, typically loud ones, has been around in one form or another for as long as there’s any intimation of history. Even momentum-creation artillery has been around for centuries.
“The problem with red shot is cost,” Mel says. “You’re comparing working time for someone who could have been doing something else, and more useful, like a water-gate or a weed-killer or just a forging-binding or a barge focus, to the amount of lifetime you use up in Line troopers. The Line troopers are traditionally less expensive. The standard-captains still wanted artillery because the kinetic energy transfer could force a response and pin an enemy under an immobile ward.”
Eugenia nods. Ward structures work most easily with the Power and with charge. Kinetic energy takes more complexity and more attention to create the ward, and then more Power to uphold the ward’s cohesion. A rapid succession of what amount to fast anvils can keep even a capable sorcerer too busy to do much else than ward, and then the heavy battalion can catch them.
“Only there aren’t enough of us.” Aella’s usually calm. This is too calm to Eugenia’s ears, some product of thoughts Aella carefully doesn’t consider unless they must. “Really not enough, not enough people in the Second Commonweal to do all the jobs our economy requires. The Line-gesith would never let the neighbours help so much if that wasn’t true.”
“So we want not just red shot, but pointy sticks — ” the magically active javelins the Creeks battalions use — “in quantity. And there’s just us.” Tiggy’s hand-wave makes it clear this us is the eight people on the Shot Team.
“Tiggy hates it when the answer is work harder,” Delph says. “So they came up with a way to make a focus that creates complex binding structures.”
“I really should have sat down,” Eugenia says.
“It’s got constraints,” Tiggy says.
“It works,” comes as a chorus from the whole rest of the team.
“My own-work project,” Eugenia says, tone severe, “concerned adjusting martensite formation in carbon steels. No focus, no rapid production, I just demonstrated a novel technique. The examiners said approving things about it.” Order had sat by a doubtfully conscious Eugenia’s hospital bed to read them the final report, and been clearly approving themself.
