A grey woman. Nothing wrong with that. It was de rigueur for the orderly and rulebound Palleseen after all. An excess of character was in itself a character flaw. So she made herself neat and cleanly, kept her uniform immaculate and had down, by muscle memory, every little tic of decorum. Only her gloves, her aversion to skin against skin, marked her out. And who would want to shake hands with a necromancer?
Fellow-Inquirer Prassel had a tendency to enumerate. Honestly she sometimes thought she should have ended up in Correct Exchange, counting beans and embezzling. It had always seemed the most pedestrian branch of Correct Thought to end up in. Now she could count at least three classmates who were doing very well for themselves, thank you very much, and hadn’t even had to leave the Palleseen Archipelago. Hadn’t had to go to war. Hadn’t had to learn magical techniques. And magic was just a part of the world, to be mastered and understood. No more inherently controversial than double entry book-keeping. Except, because so much of the current understanding had been borrowed from more primitive and less sound cultures, a certain touch of the barbarous clung to it nonetheless.
And, honestly, necromancy.
Last time she’d been home on leave – three years ago now – she’d spoken about the subject at her old phalanstery, before the eyes of her former lecturers. She’d painted the whole discipline as admirably clean and antiseptic; exacting, scientific. You applied the energies to animate the dead flesh. You manipulated them thus to create fields that could trap or exclude a ghost. All well understood, thank you very much. And been aware, as she spoke, of their eyes on her. The faint but cutting disapproval of her teachers, the eager horror of the students. No, no, she’d tried to make them see. It wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t ghost stories and vengeful spectres. It wasn’t… superstition and dirty things.
Except it was, she had to admit to herself, here in her tent with dawn threatening outside. It was a filthy discipline and it meant she had to work twice as hard and show some really outstanding results if she wanted to look even half as good as the bean-counters. And that was a problem.
She added it to the head of the list she was making. Problem Number One: necromancy is horrible.
Her current aide made a game try of putting her teacup down without spilling. His hand shook, and precious drops spattered her tiny fold-out desk. She winced. There were only three intact cups from the service she’d brought from home. The man was scarred, limping, no longer battlefield material but still serving.
“You’ve not been taking your medicine,” she reprimanded him. “Go to Ollery and get him to mix you up a new batch.” And when his lack of expression displayed no recognition. “The Butcher. Go to the Butcher and have him resupply you. You’re a reflection on me, man.”
He mumbled something and left her little tent. She sipped the tea.
It was the very best tea. Not the insipid stuff they grew on the Archipelago, not the decent Maric blend, but from the plantations in the Oloumanni territories. Good enough that, they said, it was the chief reason Oloumann had been added to the Palleseen Sway. So good it was a problem, because Prassel was down to one small packet and her requests to get more added to the supply shipments had been ignored for the best part of six months. And so soon, within days, she’d have to find some inferior blend, and it wouldn’t be the same. One more small pleasure ironed out of her life by the relentless Palleseen military machine. Which would rather have tablethi and batons or new boots for the soldiers, than decent tea for a poor Fellow-Inquirer.
She looked mournfully at the spilled drops and pictured how it would look if someone came in while she was sucking them up from the desktop. Not good. Maybe she could claim it was a necromantic ritual.
Problem Number Two was an insufficient quantity of acceptable tea, therefore. She wondered if the Loruthi had good tea, and whether any might be captured when the much-fabled Great Advance happened. Which Advance was at least partially dependent on her being able to provide necromantic support, which right now wasn’t at all certain given various other shortages she was labouring under.
She drained the cup a sip at a time, considering logistics. Slotting numbers back and forth in the invisible spaces within her imagination. It was something she was good at. She seldom committed calculations to paper. She’d always been reprimanded for not showing her working, at the phalanstery, even though she always hit the right answers. Another reason she should probably have been counting beans rather than bodies.
*
When she ventured outside, tugging on her gloves, she met a local weather phenomenon partaking equally of fog and drizzle. Her uniform coat glittered with droplets almost immediately. Every sentry she passed looked thoroughly miserable to have been given the dawn slot. A discontented grumble reverberated from the mess tents, punctuated by the clatter of cutlery. The tea the regular soldiers got was, she was reliably informed, worse even than the rank dregs they’d served at the phalanstery. Probably she’d have personal experience of it soon enough.
She marched herself to the southern perimeter of the camp, her feet finding the way through the perpendicular plan of tents and open spaces. Every one the same, no matter the terrain, no matter the war. Drop a Pal soldier into any encampment in any theatre in the world and they’d be able to find the muster squares and the mess and the privies. The Loruthi didn’t have the same exacting standards, she’d heard. It had given the Palleseen some early victories, night attacks against camps full of soldiers who didn’t know where the guy ropes were. Although the extrapolated predictions of a swift and complete victory had then failed to materialise.
The assault on the Loruthi lines that had just finished, that had seen such a brisk trade at the Butcher’s tent, had been a qualified success. The Loruthi had pulled back, ceded another few miles of ground. Except, in this case, ‘ceded’ meant ‘filled with all manner of nasty surprises’ so the Palleseen couldn’t just march triumphantly in to fill the vacuum. This was Problem Number Three. The Loruthi fought smart. Palleseen expansion generally involved the ironclad armies of reason clashing with opponents who were zealots, idealists, berserkers, any or all of the above. Marics with bird flags willing to die for their nation, Allorwen conjurer-lords on demon steeds, Oloumanni cult votaries with sacred disembowelling sickles, all that. And those were opponents that the inexorable might of the Palleseen army was very good at dealing with. A measured advance, a clear-eyed strategy and an iron re-education.
The Loruthi, on the other hand, didn’t really believe in anything much except profiting from other people, and their soldiers were either conscripts from their own overseas territories, or mercenaries, neither of whom would obligingly throw themselves into massed baton-fire until they broke. So, fighting the Loruthi, even winning against the Loruthi, was a series of careful, tentative steps because they would happily retreat in good order to fight another day, and make every lost step of ground a gift-wrapped present that you had to open very carefully indeed.
Needless to say, they’d be waiting for the Palleseen to over-extend themselves, fall foul of the bonecutters and ghost-grenados and the rest, before launching their own precisely calibrated counterattack.
She took the watchtower stairs at a decent clip. The whole edifice rattled, suggesting it hadn’t been put up with regulation precision. She decided it wasn’t her job to raise a complaint. She had more than enough paperwork from actual necromancy business without poking logistics in the eye. They’d be taking it down and moving it all three miles south soon enough, if she did her job properly.
At the top, the arcanolite sat on its tripod like a telescope wearing an extra pair of spectacles. The soldiers who’d set it up stepped back smartly, trying to make it look like respect rather than discomfiture. And yes, everyone was a bit twitchy around Correct Speech, but at least with the regular Inquirers – the interrogators and torturers and guardians of orthodox thought – it was the honest fear of a purge. With her it was the other thing, the dirty thing. The death thing.
And here she went, doing the death thing. She stripped her gloves off and flexed her bared fingers, trying to ignore the uncomfortable shuffle of the soldiers. She put her eye to the lens of the arcanolite and mustered the proper regimen of thought, the precise series of exercises that unlocked what primitive magickers called the Dead Eye. She saw into the interstitial space between the material world and the Eroding Abyss where ghosts got caught and certain classes of magical working existed.
Under the lidless scrutiny of the Dead Eye, it was evident that the ground between their camp and the Loruthi lines was mined to fuck. The retreating enemy had conscientiously left behind a whole constellation of magical caltrops for the triumphant boots of the aggressors. If they advanced into that, they’d lose more people than in the actual battle.
She put her gloves back on. The black leather gloves that, when they came off, you knew the dark magic was about to happen. Terrifying to underlings, intimidating to rivals, a symbol of her status as the worst kind of psychopomp, the woman who could send you out to fight for your country even after you were dead. Especially after you were dead. And nobody guessed that she’d taken to wearing them because she had a horror of touching filthy things. Like corpses. Her Dead Eye meant she could see the rot in them, burgeoning beneath the skin of every corpse. She could see the incipient decay even in the living. Every exercise of her trade made her want to scrub her skin from the inside out. The gloves were the absolute bare minimum of a barrier between her and the world. And, because they were such a symbolic protection between her and the filth, she couldn’t do her job with them on, because her job was in itself filthy. See Problem Number One: necromancy was horrible and she didn’t actually like it very much.
Which segued neatly into Problem Number Four because Fellow-Inquirer Prassel was very keen to be recognised, ideally in a way that got her promoted to some position involving less corpses. At some point there would be a battalion Sage’s credentials handed out, no doubt, along with a position appropriately rewarding and supplied with good tea. She was just the sort of resourceful young Fellow with a good war record. Unfortunately, so were several others of her acquaintance. They had their own stigmas, it was true, but there was no getting away from the fact that she was the one who pushed dead bodies around for a living. All a bit unsound. A science still half-mired in irrational beliefs.
By the time her feet had taken her to the Butcher’s domain, she’d got the numbers straight in her head. What it would take to clear a path through the mines, how she could best go about it, what resources she needed. And there was one resource that shouldn’t have been in short supply in a war zone, of all places. But here she was, cap in hand. Not literally. She kept her peaked cap jammed down about her ears. The air around the Butcher’s domain reeked of unorthodoxy and she didn’t want to get it in her hair.
The menagerie of misfits masquerading as a field hospital generally ate together in the evenings, but the Butcher took his morning tea alone. Or, at least, only accompanied by his son. The child was sitting at his feet now, a boy of maybe ten, though Prassel claimed no particular expertise. She stopped, choosing her approach. The big man looked up at her with an avuncular twinkle, straining tea through his moustache from a regulation tin cup. Just a jovial fat man ready to serve up half a pound of sausages, although perhaps the sort who got a visit from Correct Exchange for shorting the weights and measures.
He was sitting on a crate marked ‘receptacles, amber-clay, 2 doz’ with the size of said receptacles obscured by the breadth of his calf muscle, prominent and massy as a weightlifter’s. At the slightest nod the boy scrambled forwards on hands and knees to pull a similar box out, marked ‘fish extract, bottled, 4 doz, 16dr’. She chose not to see it as some sort of fantastically elaborate insult.
“Spoilage,” she said, sitting down.
His eyes, small and secret in his big face, looked left and right as though trying to spot what she was referring to. “Good morning to you, magister,” he said.
“I have fields need clearing,” she told him.
The Butcher sipped at his tea, making a big show of excluding absolutely everything from his world bar savouring the taste. “Use sheep,” he said.
“We don’t have any sheep,” Prassel said. “Also, never again. Not after last time. The mess.” Exploded sheep, possessed sheep, still-living sheep turned into woolly pincushions of their own bones. Better than living Pal soldiers, obviously, but it hadn’t done much for morale. And nobody would touch the meat. A waste. Which was why they wanted a necromantic solution. Necromancy was an inherently efficient use of resources. “Spoilage, Ollery.” And, when he affected not to hear her, “Chief Accessory Ollery, report.” His rank, his shame. A man ten years her senior but so very far below her in station. A Pal, sporting a rank usually reserved for turncoat foreigners. A man under her jurisdiction, because some clerk attached to Higher Orders had doubtless been amused to place the experimental field hospital as a sub-department of Necromancy.
“My people,” he said, “have excelled themselves. Other than those you took delivery of during the battle, our charges are all clinging to life. Many will be back in active service soon, the poor bastards. There is no spoilage, magister.”
“I’m sure there are some who will not pull through,” Prassel told him tightly.
“My people endeavour to ensure that is not the case.”
“Your people could stand to be less good at their job.” And it was ridiculous, obviously. They both knew it. This whole circus of a field hospital was a tenuous experiment. A word from Higher Orders could have Ollery and his quacks returned to whatever fates they’d been plucked from. The only reason the business was still, as the Butcher said, ‘clinging to life’ was that they kept soldiers alive where regular Pal medicine wouldn’t suffice. But that in itself was an intrusion into the army’s carefully-balanced economy. A greater supply of recovered soldiers meant a decreased supply of dead bodies.
“I can’t believe we’re sitting here,” Ollery said, “after a massed battle, and you’re short of corpses.”
“The Loruthi have learned to take their dead with them,” Prassel said grimly. And it wasn’t out of respect for their fallen comrades. The enemy had their own necromantic practices, the filthy heathens. Almost as bad as Prassel’s own.
The boy was at her shoulder then, mutely shoving a tin cup at her. She took it absently.
“I heard west, along the line, whole camp got overrun at night. Some detachment of Loruthi fighting back towards their own,” Ollery observed. “Maybe they didn’t get the chance to pack all their luggage on the way out.”
“And you heard this from?” Prassel didn’t believe it. It was just something he’d made up to send her somewhere else for a bit.
“Banders said,” Ollery told her, shrugging his rounded shoulders like an earthquake. And his orderly, Banders, heard a lot, and some of it was true, but it still sounded like a necromantic goose chase. She sipped the tea and froze.
“Where,” she said, with a slight quiver in her voice she was ashamed of, “did you get this?”
He had been watching her, waiting for it. His face creased with triumphant humour. “Good, isn’t it?”
“This is pure Oloumanni-Alta blend.”
“Ah, well, I bow to your superior taste. All I know is it’s good. Banders found it.”
Banders, the aforementioned orderly, found a great many things.
She sipped at the tea, which tasted like Heaven. And a good Pal scholar-soldier did not of course believe in Heaven, but the Oloumanni did and you surely could taste it in their tea. And Higher Orders expected her to clear the field still, for which she needed some conveniently dead bodies she could send shambling through to set off all the nasty traps. And maybe there were some spare dead lads piled up west, and maybe not, but…
“I can have a packet sent to your tent if you like,” Ollery said casually. “I have two. I’m a open-handed man. I can share.”
She weighed it up. On the one gloved hand, the necessity of actually doing her job. On the other, the transgressive bliss of sitting down tomorrow morning with some really good tea.
Butcher Ollery’s expression was amused, sympathetic, diabolic. Yes, I tempt, that look said. But why not? The crooked meat vendor slipping a bribe to the inspector to dodge a fine. Although in this case it would be a fine of the most grievously wounded of the hospital’s living patients.
“West, you say,” she noted.
“Banders said.” Another monumental shrug, disavowing any faith in Banders’s veracity.
“Well, thank you for the tip,” said Prassel. “And the tea.” And, despite the urgency in her orders, she sat there a while longer, refusing to hurry the cup.
*
There was one more problem to deal with, she discovered, as she strode back to her tent to write her requisitions. A half-dozen soldiers were there, buttoned-up uniforms and batons and everything, far more parade-ground neat than most of the active-duty mob. For a moment her gut lurched. What did I do? What didn’t I do? What act or omission had attracted sufficient censure from higher up that she was going to be marched out through the camp? Inquirers of Correct Speech didn’t fall often but, when they did, everyone enjoyed the meaty splat at the end of it.
She couldn’t think of a thing, but that meant nothing. Plenty of ways you could step in something and not realise until someone was using a thumbscrew to ask what the smell was. You might even get taken up for something you hadn’t done at all, but that some sly joker had put your fingerprints all over. And it wasn’t as though she didn’t have rivals for that fabled promotion who wouldn’t do just that if they could get away with it…
But no. She saw they were an escort already supplied with a prisoner, rather than hoping to acquire one. A skinny little man fenced into their midst, wearing what looked like three separate threadbare coats, with a wooden box on his back, pierced with holes like a birdhouse. He didn’t look like someone it took six burly soldiers to secure. Half of one would probably suffice.
“Wrong tent,” she called as she approached.
The Statlos in charge of the squad glanced at a piece of paper in his hand. “Fellow-Inquirer Prassel?”
“Yes, but I don’t do interrogations. I’m Necromancy.” That was usually enough to get rid of people. “You want Loyalty and Oversight, if they want to put the screws on him.” And technically she did do interrogations, but only on an overflow basis, not for preference.
The Statlos checked his paper again. “Says your name right here, magister,” he said, with that particular deference that made plain he’d be as obstructive as possible because that was how he got his jollies with superior officers.
She scanned the close-lettered script of his writ, feeling her gut sink. Another one for the Butcher’s circus. Some business about healing hands. “A priest.” Spoken with a good Pal’s distaste for the trade.
The Statlos shrugged. His entire encyclopaedia of knowledge on his prisoner was contained within the paper she held and, as it was her who was holding it, he considered himself well rid of the problem.
She looked over the list of crimes set down, automatically setting aside the usual ones that just got added by rote to any criminal involved in the occult. An actual priest, though, which would usually mean decanting and correction. A revolutionary, which would usually mean execution, so probably just a sympathiser. Certainly the man – young, thinning hair, hands clasping one another nervously – didn’t look like he would be lighting the fires of resistance any time soon. And a…
She frowned. “What in reason,” she asked, “is a ‘god smuggler’?”
The Statlos didn’t dignify the question with a shrug. The man himself – she had to crane awkwardly past the Statlos’s shoulder and then he wouldn’t actually meet her gaze – seemed embarrassed. As though someone having to invent an entirely new crime for him was far too much, and people really shouldn’t have gone to the bother.
He’s mine, Prassel thought. They’ve given him to me. Some pointless Maric charlatan, fool enough to get caught doing something unnatural. More useful as a corpse, surely. He could be first into the breach on the mine-clearing venture. The Butcher doesn’t even have to know.
It was the tea, in the end. The very good tea. Some residual sense that she owed the man. Later, after it all happened, all the unlucky events and bad decisions, she’d think back on that moment, when she could have just done away with the man. She’d weigh it up and decide that, yes, cutting his throat and sending his reanimated cadaver to clear mines would definitely have been the right decision. In retrospect, it really did turn out to be powerfully expensive tea.