looks disapproving at it, taps it twice with the walking stick, frowns at the dust, finds a stable bit of grass so leaning on the stick works, and visibly discards the first three things Halt had considered to say. “The foundation of the road was despair.”
“Solid despair?” I can understandhow you would want to get vigour in the cranberries, but making a strong emotion solid is only marginally less strange than going and making a road out of it.
“You know how there are different binding figures for enchantments? And the number of points matters?” Blossom’s quiet voice manages to be without the hope this is not a rhetorical “you know”.
I nod. You see enough of the things, that getsobvious.
“Minerals all have characteristic crystal shapes; you can get a bunch of different numbers of points that way, if you squint, and it looks like somebody had an empirical success in getting despair to bind to anything with a body-centred cubic structure. Because they were binding with individual atoms as the points, they could get an enormous amount of the stuff in there.”
“Hence the steppingon the rake.”
Blossom nods.
Halt looks troubled. “It was not synthetic despair.”
“How
many
people?” Even the amount of road we broke would be an implausible number.
“Millions.”
“Or hundreds of thousands, more than once. There’s no reason the drain is destructive.”
Blossom’s ears repeat those words back, and Blossom winces. “Fatal.”
Halt nods. “You could prevent crippling dread like this. Thedrained would be functional.”
I look directly at Halt. Gets easier with practice.
“It would unbalance the humours. Irrevocably, if repeated.”
Humours are arcane, not physical. People would get crazier and crazier in a slow, rot-of-sense way.
“Then why? An especially good road?”
Blossom’s head shakes. “It’s not a good road, as such, but it might be a better defensive ward than they can produceotherwise. It could be like having a layer of salt in the road, to keep plants from growing up through it; all that despair makes it tough for the Hills to shift it around, the motivation for the change would leak out.”
Deep breath. This is information.
“Reems is under such external pressure they’re turning their collective despair into the enchantment binding together the road they’re drivingforward in the hope of escaping their doom?”
Halt looks up from knitting. Didn’t hear the needles clicking, don’t hear the needles clicking. “Can’t prove they’re not.”
“Captain.” One of One’s surviving file. Not that they were all in the same file when this started. Trooper’s shaking, leftover
why aren’t we dead?
from the flesh. Not the only trooper standing here, when I look around. I’ve gota reorganised colour party.
Thanks
goes to Twitch, and something like a smile and a salute comes back at me out of the standard.
“Radish says everybody’s laid out and all of theirs are stacked.” Visible deep breath. “There were two hundred and four of theirs dead of sword cuts in the big pile.”
That does have something to do with why I’m sticky and smell really bad, trooper.
Ain’t in here
waftsout of the standard.
Everybody pay up
.
“The Captain’s not a demon any more than Eustace is a demon, goodness no.” Halt sounds really amused. Sounds like Halt might just laugh.
The live trooper doesn’t have the will or the spine to flat contradict Halt, that’s a list short as eyes, but it’s clear they don’t, any of them, have any belief in what Halt just said, either. The dead more doubtful thanthe living.
“Eustace is like that” — Halt waves at the five tonnes of wool and iron and malice — “because a wizard wished it so. Your Captain’s like that”―Halt’s chin lifts to point at me, much better than the blunt end of a knitting needle — “because a wizard wished it so a kind and species, the Captain’s grandsires all.”
Several missing
Edward Rutherfurd
Edward Lee
Brandi Michaels
Lisa Lim
Brian Aldiss
Adrienne Kress
Philip Cox
C. L. Stone
Lin Enger
Dennis Wheatley