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

other side of the bridge; Steam says it’s a learning experience,keep going.
    Kynefrid looks entirely weary for a second, and Zora gets what I’m starting to think is a standard look of betrayal, and my head turns a little to see if Dove is still right behind me. Dove’s swinging both ten-litre cans in one hand as though they were empty.
    The cans weren’t empty when Steam handed them out. The bails don’t squeak like that when they’re empty.
    The Power exerts physicalforce just fine. Lots of what makes the Bad Old Days bad involve having wizards squash you, or your house, or the milk cow, in a fit of pique from a long way away.
    There’s a place near where I used to live that has a pond shaped like a boot-print a couple hundred metres long. Local knowledge has it the result of some wizard of old deciding to stomp on an enemy, good and hard.
    It’s a deep pond.Fills up with turtles every fall.
    Only place it isn’t the Bad Old Days is either Commonweal. Trying to remember that, I think I have to remember that every day I’m learning sorcery.
    I don’t want to hand my lunch to the wide sky. Doesn’t matter to lunch if it’s incompetence or wrath.
    Getting into a tug-of-war with the vastness of the earth that’s pulling down doesn’t seem like a good plan either.The earth will win. I can kinda feel how you
could
do that, there’s a dip in nothingness around each of the cans, and me, and the bridge, and everyone else, everything’s got its own. It’s not a bendy dip. Filling it in probably makes it deeper, deeper is just the same as piling more stuff into the dip; our individual dips are bigger than the cans, and the bridge is way, way larger. I think youcould, I could, flatten it out, but I don’t want to do the experiment, not walking up a hill in the morning sun.
    There is a way, though, Dove’s doing it. Asking seems like cheating, Steam’s outright said this is a lesson.
    If I make my arms stronger, I have to get everything, skin, bones, tendons, not just muscle, like it’s not just the new chuck that has to turn twice as fast when you rebuilda lathe. That could go nineteen kinds of wrong, and there’s still this hangover-thing, I doubt I’m thinking as well as I could.
    The dips all go straight down. I wonder if I can kinda tip one, rather than bending it? Like moving up a ramp, instead of a straight lift?
    Steam’s head turns. “Edgar — not like that. That’s too exciting for just after breakfast.”
    All right, then, as Chloris looks morebaffled than angry and Kynefrid just looks baffled. Kynefrid’s lanky, nearly skinny, but seems to figure carrying maybe twenty kilos up to the meadow was no big deal and isn’t worrying about making the job easier.
    Spin the dip, so the can wants to rise up the sides?
    It’s really hard to get the dip to rotate at all, and Steam is looking alarmed at a quarter-turn, so I stop.
    Zora’s got
something
, it’s like towing two little boats on the water, the bails of the cans angling back. Doesn’t look anything like as difficult as carrying them.
    Rot
.
    Floating things aren’t lighter, they’re less relatively dense; air’s thin, water’s thicker, more things float in water. There’s stuff that’s thicker than water, collectives who make jewel-bearings for clocks use it to float the bits they don’t wantout of crushed rock. There were clockmakers across the road and about a kilometre down, before. Dunno where they are now, if they wound up going upstream or over into the Second Commonweal.
    Make the air thicker and I’ll have to drag the thick air along, that’s not going to help. Make lunch more widely distributed? Difficult to see how that’s a good outcome.
    Huh. The dips scale with how heavy thething is. What if I just sort of roll the edge of the dip down, like the top of a sock? Make the dip itself float higher, if that even makes sense?
    It works!
    Fiddle a little with the amount of roll, and I can get it, carefully, so each can’s