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

standing on the drill to pull on the hammer doesn’twork, Dove can’t get the hammer off the drill.
    Blossom says “Stop.” It’s not loud, it’s entirely conversational, but you don’t, I can
feel
this like cold oil trickling down my neck, you don’t hear it with your ears. Chloris stops hammering. I think that’s the stop Blossom meant.
    I stand up, which is an improvement; Zora and Kynefrid do, too. Dove hands Blossom the hammer, drill, and tongs, allstuck together.
    “Good thing it was a short drill.” Blossom sounds amused. Better, Dove looks amused. It wouldn’t have been my shoulders that got wrenched if the drill couldn’t lift clear of the hole.
    “Thorough job of magnetizing, Edgar. Trying for something you could turn?”
    I nod. Magnets, well, magnets are something they show you in school. Somebody has to make them but I’ll admit to not thinkingof them as made things.
    Really need to start thinking of stuff done by the Power as
made
.
    “How do I turn it off?” I say, taking back the mass of stuck-together tools.
    I did it, obviously I get to turn it off.
    “How did you turn it on?” Blossom’s still sounding cheerful. I am starting to wonder what it takes to get Blossom to seem anything else.
    I can feel my face contorting. I don’t have the wordsfor any of this stuff. “String? There were all these little bits like wood-grain, only jumbled; I was imagining them lining up.”
    Blossom grins at me. “That’ll do it.”
    Blossom’s voice pitches up, makes it a general comment. “Magnets come from organizing small particles, usually small crystals, though it can be smaller. There’s a bunch of theory, but for where you are now, if it’s a magnet and youdon’t want it to be, you disorganize its insides.”
    Another grin. “Since we need the drill rod to keep working as a drill rod, it needs to stay this shape and it needs to keep its temper, so no heating it up.”
    “Knots in the strings?” I want to know what I’m talking about when I say ‘strings’. Probably makes sense not to tell us yet, we’d be staggering around trying to understand stuff we’d neverexperienced.
    I still want to know. This feels like being sent out to weed unclaimed ground by poking things with a stick.
    “Instead of long threads, can you imagine them in rings?”
    Apparently I can, little snippets of the threads will break off and wind together into rings. I must look a generally successful kind of stunned, thinking about it, because Blossom goes on.
    “Get the rings going oppositedirections. All the same is a different kind of magnet, opposite’s a bit like balancing stones in an arch, zero net force.”
    The little rings are stripy; if I remind myself I’m not seeing real things, it’s an idea my brain has about an idea that might describe something real, it’s easy, every second ring can just do a backflip, and then the little stripes from being wound threads can go the otherway.
    The drill and the hammer just pop apart; the tongs hit my feet, mostly flat, so it just hurts, nothing breaks.
    Blossom, well, sticks out a hand and the tongs rise up to be grasped, handed to Zora. “You can heat these.”
    Zora’s face says “I can?” before it turns into a frown of concentration. The pincer end of the tongs blurs orange-hot, really fast. Zora’s face goes from concentration to surprisedto pain, and then the tongs are being juggled around between what look like oven mitts. I don’t think you can make oven mitts out of snow, even if you are a sorcerer, but that’s what it looks like.
    “It’s not much heat, you can just push it straight up into the air,” Blossom says, still cheerful, and calm, as though someone wasn’t juggling red-hot iron a metre away.
    The frown comes back, and thetongs visibly cool. There’s a heat haze in the air, all headed straight up, but it doesn’t last half a second.
    “What are these mitts?” Zora sounds as if the real question is where they came