A Succession of Bad Days by Graydon Saunders Read Free Book Online

able to put our hands on stuff buried metres deep, but sorcerer logic is leaking into everyone’s brain.
    After we’ve about got the breathing-out part, which feels strange enough that I carefully don’t think about it, we spread out into a wider line and squat down and do it with our finger tips touching the ground.All this breathing stuff is circles, out comes back in, it’s purely mystical — breathe the actual air you just breathed out back in and bad things happen pretty fast — but as mystical it works.
    Thirty hectares of immense trees, sure, I’m in the shadow, and the birdsong, and the strange sharp smell, of the immense trees. The trees that just couldn’t have grown, before, not if the best life-magesorcerer you ever heard tell of had sat there for a thousand years and pushed.
    Loose dirt isn’t much heavier than water, call it a fifth. So a hectare of the loam under the trees is twelve thousand tonnes for the first metre. Times thirty hectares, times however many metres it goes down before it hits the bedrock.
    No way it’s not much more than three metres deep but that first three metres issaying 'a million tonnes’ into my mind very persistently. It’s not like we really lifted it, or created it, or even precisely made it, and I certainly didn’t do it myself.
    I keep telling myself that, and my brain keeps saying 'a million tonnes’ as though it isn’t millions and millions of tonnes. My no-talent brain’s stuck on the first million.
    The bit that knows it has a talent, because it’s exhalingthrough its fingertips and getting something back, it’s not really helping because I can feel stuff down there. I don’t know what it is, but the sensations change, the top bit has to be actual turf, then there’s something less squirmy, and then a lot more of something slidey that feels like the taste of salt, and then something that goes down deeper than I can reach, stiffer and cold and feelingmore bitter than the salt.
    Steam motions
stand up
at all of us, and we do, and shake out our arms. The tingling in my fingers isn’t like they’ve fallen asleep.
    “It’s practice, isn’t it?” Zora sounds like someone who should have known better. “You have to have felt things before to know what they are.”
    Nothing alters in the general benevolence of Wake’s expression. “Considerable practice is requiredfor confident identification by this method.”
    “Is it like having to do some long seams by hand before you’re permitted to use the sewing machine?” Zora asks this in entirely calm tones, they’re not plaintive at all. It cracks Wake’s expression anyway.
    “No.” Wake says it firmly.
    “Consider it to be like kneading bread; you must do so until you know what dough that has been kneaded enough feelslike. Only with this, the analogy breaks down, because instead of the one thing which is bread, there are a very great many.” Wake makes a specific gesture, seemingly at the sky.
    “Many other tests for the nature of a substance exist; the entire discipline of chemistry and all manner of particular tests making use of the Power. This means is not precise, it takes a lifetime of practice, but itis also extraordinarily difficult to mislead. Even if your experience suffices only to say ‘a rock, that is a rock there’, you can be confident that it is indeed a rock.”
    “Not certain?” Chloris, who sounds entirely certain of the answer.
    “Nothing is entirely certain.” Wake says it with a complete absence of doubt.
    “So there might not be water around here somewhere?” Steam still doesn’t soundlike anyone who cares a whole lot.
    “With those trees?” Kynefrid sounds stuck between appalled and disbelieving. “There’s a lot of water down there somewhere.”
    “Might not be anywhere it’d be decent to dig for it.” Dove sounds brisk. “Never mind where we put the sewage pond.”
    “One thing, then the other thing,” Wake says. We do at least know that the pit latrine