Much like the Jarokiri with their aggressively outward-looking pantheon, Allor was always going to be on the Palleseen list. A culture intimately intertwined with magic and pacts with Those Below, a holdover from a less rational age. Almost a decade, now, since the armies marched in and put all that moth-eaten occult set-dressing to the torch, dragging the Allorwen kicking and screaming into the modern age. Just about the one place you’d not look to find an Allorwen magician was within a Palleseen army camp, any more than you’d look to find a priest.
As well as the vast number of tents – more tents than the Maric really felt should exist in a sound world – and a quantity of prefab sheds and huts, there were the wagons. The army was a mobile feast, after all. Or, given the rate at which it devoured life, a mobile feaster. Sometimes it was just easier never to unpack, to live off your wheels. The Butcher was leading him through a little district of them right now. Definitely a meaner neighbourhood than the regulation-spaced camping of the soldiers. He, the city boy, was beginning to understand that the camp was itself a city. It had its Hill where the officers were, its Gutter Districts of massed soldiery, its Hammer Districts of forges and workshops, its commercial street where the quartermasters and sutlers bickered and bartered. One could almost have relaxed into it, as though he’d just decided to move out to some other town where everyone had a weirdly similar dress sense. Except that, instead of dancers and buskers and pickpockets, the open spaces here had men and women performing baton drill. The machinists and smiths were repairing and manufacturing the hundred small components of a war machine. The quartermasters were dispensing weapons-grade tablethi and not even asking for money in return.
“What am I doing here?” he complained to himself.
The Butcher had good ears. “I don’t know, Jack. You tell me.”
He wondered whether now was a good time to explain that he wasn’t named Jack, Maric or otherwise. Looking at the slightly sunburned, knot-eared bulge that was the back of the Butcher’s head, at his broad back and powerful whipping shoulders, he decided that it wasn’t worth the venture. And why not? New town, new name. Maybe some of his old bad luck would lose track of him in the crowd because of it.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“They caught you, and some spark remembered the standing order for healers at the hospital department,” the Butcher clarified over his shoulder.
And it had been considerably more than that, from Jack’s perspective, but not as far as any Pal paperwork would evidence. “Well, maybe it’s not that complicated, then,” he admitted.
The Butcher stopped abruptly. Jack almost ran into him and then flinched back when the man turned. He hadn’t meant to. It was the sheer gravity of the man. The fire of the lash was abruptly in the front of his mind again, because even if his back was made whole, that didn’t mean the agony of the punishment had been lost on him. All this must have made it to his face because the Butcher didn’t immediately say what he’d been about to, just studied Jack and decided how he felt about things.
“We don’t have to be friends,” the big man said ponderously, in the manner of a man who doesn’t have friends and doesn’t particularly miss them. “You want to think about the Alder, every time you look at me, maybe that’s for the best. Keep you on the narrow, you get me?” A sullen pause, nothing readable in the man’s pig-like eyes, the great slab of hanging meat that was his face. “You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. You’re just another one. To me. To the Fellow-Inquirer whose coat you tugged at. You’re here because they thought you could make yourself useful. But learn this, Jack. That’s not enough. There was a – a woman. The Chief before me. She was useful. She was useful enough that the rest of us needn’t have been there. That trick you pulled, with the spy—”
“Not me,” Jack said, automatically, but a flick of the Butcher’s smallest finger waved that away.
“That trick, that would have been child’s play to her.” And there was real emotion in his voice, the sort of deep hidden current that drags swimmers to drowning. “I don’t think there was anything she couldn’t heal.”
He even left a gap there, in case Jack wanted to put up any more words for him to trample over, but there was patently another conversational shoe waiting to drop, and Jack just let him dangle it by the laces until he was ready.
“She’s gone now, as you’ve guessed,” the Butcher agreed. “Because she was useful, but she wasn’t compliant. It got too much for her. The way we do things.” And he could have meant not tugging on a coat or he could have meant a hundred thousand soldiers trampling roughshod over a nation. “So remember that nobody’s too useful to be used.” Making a bludgeon of the final word. And for a moment Jack wondered what there had been between the Butcher and his former superior, but that wasn’t it. Not some old romantic scar tugging. He wondered just what this great healer had been, in a woman’s guise. He was from Ilmar, after all. They had a lot of the uncanny in his home city.
The Butcher judged that his message had been heard and understood, and continued between the jumble of wagons until he arrived at a high-sided, curve-roofed affair. It was painted a grey-blue that was plainly trying to be army standard but hadn’t quite matched shades, with paler circles on the long walls. A fair-sized conveyance, though shabby. On the steps at the back, an old woman sat smoking a long, twisted reed – a vice Jack had seen here and there about the camp but that was unknown in Ilmar. She looked up and flicked the last ashy inch onto the ground.
“Early for business, Chief,” she said. Her voice was a gravelly croak, the accent unmistakeable. An Allorwen, here in the midst of a sea of Pals.
“Jack here needs breathing space,” the Butcher said. “He’s learning the ropes the hard way. Just ‘cos he’s still got his shirt on doesn’t mean it wasn’t for want of any trying from me.” A little gesture of the wrist that somehow encapsulated the whole whipping. Jack found himself flinching again and hated himself for it. “Better he gets a hot drink and maybe makes a friend outside the department, in case he needs someone to come to.” And a coin, a worn penny, conjured up by those thick fingers. “Not business, just a place to be that isn’t full of all those nosy sons of bitches at the hospital prying into him.”
“And what did he do, that they’d pry?” the old woman asked suspiciously.
“Healed someone from death.”
“I didn’t,” Jack put in automatically, but neither of them paid him any heed.
“You don’t want to go about healing people in a hospital. Sets a precedent,” the woman said sourly. “I’ve got the kettle on the fire. I’ll get him tea.” She inspected the penny. “Not the good tea, though.”
The Butcher nodded. “Jack, Mother Semprellaime. Mother, this is Maric Jack, latest damned soul in hell.”
*
After the man had gone, Mother Semprellaime levered herself up from the backboard of the wagon, making a big show of unkinking her back. She really was a caricature of a Allorwen witch, with a face full of wrinkles, a hook of a nose and warts. One eye bulged, the other nested in a webwork of creases. She wore layer over layer of ragged smocks and shifts and dresses. Jack, who found Pal clothes to pinch in all the wrong places, rather envied her that. Whatever she did in the army, it didn’t require her to wear the uniform.
“Let me get the clothes in,” she said. “Then tea.” There were cords hung between all the nearby wagons, with uniform shirts and breeches and stockings swaying like the boughs of a sartorial forest. A lot of the wagon-owners around here seemed to be old men or women, and Jack guessed that laundry was a part of warfare that never got written up in the histories but was big business nonetheless.
She began plucking down garments and folding them, her crabbed hands still nimble. After a couple, Jack came over to help.
“I thought the Butcher whipped you,” she noted.
“Oh he did,” Jack agreed. “Didn’t take. I think he’s worried it’s going to become a regular thing. Weekly entertainment at the hospital… district?”
“Department,” she corrected. “Pals love their departments. Schools, offices, armies. All one to them. I’ve got family in Telmark. Ilmar.”
“I’m from Ilmar.”
She stopped, the air between them frosty. Because the Marics didn’t like the Allorwen much more than the Pals did, traditionally. And Jack didn’t say, Some of my best friends are Allorwen, or start talking about the little ghetto her people lived in, in his city. Or talk about his own particular visits to that gnarl of streets. None of it would do anything but widen the distance between them, even though he actually had made Allorwen friends, in the end. After his life had gone wildly off the tracks and he’d become a dangerous criminal.
She let him help bring the laundry in, and afterwards she went into the wagon and he trailed after. There was a little fire there, and it burned in a metal bowl without obvious fuel. The bowl was decorated with sigils he recognised as ritual workings. Probably once it had been part of some grand incantation, a witness to fiendish bargains and the invoking of otherworldly powers. Now there was a kettle hung over it, and Mother Semprellaime prepared two cups of what smelled like modestly decent tea.
Jack unshipped his box from his shoulders and glanced around. They were in a room that must have taken up no more than a third of the wagon’s interior. The more he looked, the more of a sense he had, of what Mother Semprellaime might be. There were twisted corn dolls on the walls, and he’d seen those before in the Allorwen district of Ilmar. The scroll pinned up by the door was a calendar that tracked moons and stars that weren’t to be seen in the regular sky, and he knew how the Pals were jealous about everyone using their own days and weeks and weights and measures. And there was that magical bowl, amongst a people always looking for an excuse to squeeze the power out of things for their own use. And…
He stepped back carefully, staring at his feet. The wooden boards of the wagon were remarkably clean and scrubbed, save where he’d tracked mud in. But he could still see the faint scuffs where chalk markings hadn’t quite been scrubbed away. He could even connect the pale remnants, draw the circle in his mind.
When he looked up, he met Mother Semprellaime’s crooked gaze. Behind all of that time-raddled topology it was hard to read her, but easy to guess that she’d seen him work it out.
“I won’t tell,” he said quickly. Not because he was in the lair of a conjurer, surrounded by her magic workings and potentially at her mercy, but because he wouldn’t tell. Shopping people to the Pals wasn’t something you did, even if he was now wearing the uniform. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. You’re safe.”
Her look twisted to a whole new level of crookedness. “What are you talking about?”
“Your conjuring. It’s nothing to do with me. I won’t tell.”
“I mean, it could be. To do with you,” she said carefully, watching him for a reaction or, no, trying to understand what he meant.
“I mean it. It can’t be easy. With the army right there. But it’s your… your… I won’t tell anyone.”
“You keep saying that,” the old woman said mildly. “What do you think I’m doing here, Maric?”
His eyes strayed to the clothes basket. “Laundry…?”
She laughed like a toad. “Oh, we all do the laundry. Means that if some Sage-Inquirer with a stick up his ass comes calling, there’s a reason for us being here. But that’s just daytime work.” She stared at him. “Maric, don’t you know what a circle house is?”
And that explained those designs on the outside of the wagon, because the Palleseen army apparently had standard décor even for those things that it couldn’t officially admit existed.
“This wagon,” he clarified, “is a circle house? You’re a…?”
“A bawd,” she said flatly. “And this wagon is a brothel. It just happens to be one where you get a demon, rather than a flesh and blood woman. There are advantages. It can be less complicated. Or there are specialised tastes. We cater to all sorts. Some people prefer it.”
“Yes,” said Jack. “Yes, they do.”
Remembering.
“No,” snapped a peevish voice from around knee level. He closed his eyes. Not that he could ever forget he was never alone, but sometimes it was nice to push the thought to the back of his head for a while.
He glanced down at the box. God was sitting on top of it. Ragged, filthy God with His snarled beard, wasted legs dangling, minuscule heels knocking at the wood. Arms folded like a disapproving aunt.
“You will not indulge in that foreign filth.” Thus spake God, who was a Maric God and Did Not Approve.
“I’m not your priest any more,” Jack said. “I can do what I want.”
“I still forbid it,” God said. “It’s unnatural.”
“Well, yes,” Jack agreed weakly. “By definition.” And Mother Semprellaime was watching him talk to his box, of course.
“I was going to ask,” she said carefully, “if you wanted seed, for your birds. But I take it that a handful of grain won’t cut it?”
“I mean they’d take it. As an offering,” Jack said.
“I will not!” God kicked harder at the box and there was a complaining sound from within which meant one of the others was awake now, too. “Although I will have the tea.”
“It’s foreign tea,” Jack said meanly. “You wouldn’t like it.”
“Any port in a storm,” God decided. “You will just have to do penance for serving your God inferior tea.”
“I’m not your priest any more.”
“Worshippers can still do penance.”
Jack closed his eyes, feeling not for the first time that he was the very exemplar of no good deed going unpunished. When he opened them again, Mother Semprellaime had a shallow bowl for him, a thin skin of tea lapping around the interior. As though he was about to feed a cat with peculiar appetites. He took it and placed it on the box. God rolled His eyes, as though aggrieved the woman didn’t have a tiny teacup for Him. It wasn’t as though He actually physically drank the tea anyway. He just sat near it, and it slowly dried up.
And the other two were emerging now. A spindly figure either wearing or made of bundled twigs, shedding a constant sad rain of dry leaves, a haunt of woodlice and termites and other things that lived in dead wood. It turned a round wooden mask on Jack, that was mostly two owlish eye sockets, and hooted. The third one was more shadowy. An angular figure in oilcloth and canvas, like a sailor buried at sea. The sharp prong of a harpoon that it never let go of. A hat like a slanted roof with the hint of a grim little skull beneath the brim. They jostled God until He grudgingly let them get at the tea.
“What have you brought,” Mother Semprellaime said, “under my roof?”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I should have thought. I should have asked. Gods. It’s gods.”
“Gods plural?”
“I’m afraid so.”
She watched the tea dry up, then went and fetched a couple of biscuits. One she broke into several pieces that she sprinkled onto the little plate, the other she gave to Jack.
He looked at it, a tiny and unasked-for kindness, and was abruptly fighting back a wave of tears vast as the sea. His shoulders, released from the box’s existential weight, shook with the effort of not just bawling like a child. The emotions came at him from nowhere – or from behind the brave face he’d tried to hang onto as the Alder came down across his shoulders. From the moment he’d understood it was execution or exile from the only home he’d ever known. From the fighting in the streets of Ilmar. From the long-ago day he’d seen his mentor dangling at the end of a rope, and the time, more recently, they’d tried to serve him the same way. And he clutched the teacup so hard it was a miracle he didn’t crush it, and bent his head over it, and shook. Shook for all these things, and for the hated uniform they’d made him wear, and for all the things to come.
After a while Mother Semprellaime pulled up a stool and guided him down onto it, then lowered herself creakily into another. Her hand hovered at his shoulder like a fly wary of the swat, then came to rest there.
“Welcome to the army life,” she said. “You’ll get over it. Or most do. It’s not the life any of us would have chosen.” And maybe she’d be a grand votaress in Allor, if the Pals hadn’t come. A great and respected scholar. A mother, a wife, any regular person who wasn’t a part of the Palleseen war machine.
“You’re a priest, then,” she said. “Is that what they got you for? Then you were lucky. Mostly the Pals still kill priests. Be glad they’ve found other uses for some of them.”
“I’m not a priest any more,” he got out. “I was. A priest of God. God god.” Meeting the angry little creature’s scowl, as though he’d been caught revealing trade secrets. “But I left His service, broke His strictures. It made sense at the time. I was trying to save lives. Then things got complicated.”
Semprellaime sipped her tea.
“You are not to tell her,” God said. “I forbid it. They forbid it as well.” He gestured at the other two gods. The dying nature god cocked his circular face and made a sound like crickets. There had been oracles, Jack guessed, who had listened on the wind for its mystic pronouncements, foretold the deaths of kings and the fall of empires. But those days were dust and nobody yet lived who could interpret the god’s messages. Just animal noises, from prophecy to low-rent children’s entertainment. Save that there weren’t even children who could hear it.
The other god, the grim one, said nothing. Probably it did forbid. It looked the sort that forbad things.
“I saw gods,” Jack told Mother Semprellaime. “It was like, my whole life, I’d seen God. And when I threw Him out, there was a hole left, and through the hole I could see… gods. All the gods that had been worshipped once, been brought to Ilmar by some congregation, even just a single follower maybe. And nobody was left who remembered them. Except they hadn’t gone away. The streets of Ilmar were littered with discarded gods. I could see them all. It was horrible.”
“So that is, what, a charitable hostel for homeless gods?” She poked a square-toed clog at the box but stopped short of actually kicking it.
“It was. A shrine. I carried it around the city. People made offerings. For a little while things were actually going quite well.” Honestly better than any other time of his life, really. He’d found he had friends all over the city. People who looked at him and saw someone worthwhile, though mad. Doing something that, even though none of them believed in the little gods he talked about, still had a kind of symbolic value. Like a licensed fool in the court of a bored emperor.
“And then the new man came,” he explained, because he’d love to leave it there, with him happy, but it wasn’t honest and didn’t explain his change of wardrobe. “The old Perfector got recalled, after the troubles. Or went mad and ran away. Or something. Nobody was quite sure. But the new man was from Correct Erudition, and the war was starting, this war, the Loruthi war.” Because the Pals were always at war with someone so you had to make the distinction. “He turned up with orders to squeeze the magic out of Ilmar. Harvest it for tablethi to be sent to the front. And he came down hard on your people. Sorry. And he raided the Guildhall and the Armigers. And he had this thing, this… sort of a hat.”
That hadn’t been where Semprellaime had been expecting the sentence to go and she snorted into her tea, but Jack hadn’t been trying for comedy. There was probably a formal Pel word for the hat, but he didn’t know it.
“A hat, with these… lenses. You put tablethi in, and it gave out a light you couldn’t see… except, in that light, he could see gods. This was a thing he’d done elsewhere. Like someone who works out there’s a few grains of gold in the dust under their feet. The lowest, meanest possible source of profit, but if you can harvest it efficiently enough…”
Something had changed in her face, some inner revulsion that left her features just hanging there like dead things. He chose to interpret that as her agreeing with his sentiments.
“They sent out… they called them Ratcatchers. Special squads, with gear to catch all the little—” he almost said vermin then, which God would not have appreciated. “All the things that had just built up, encrusted Ilmar over the centuries. And I know that’s what they do, just sand down everyone’s culture until we’re all like them. But they were doing it with the stuff we didn’t even know we had, but it was still us, you know? And someone had to do something.”
Mother Semprellaime had presumably seen a lot in her life, of wickedness and the weird, but this was apparently a new one on her. She was completely rapt, tea cooling and forgotten.
“I started smuggling gods out of the city,” Jack said. “I would get them into my box. I’d go ahead of the Ratcatchers. There would always be someone who’d give me a lift out to a village, a farm, where I could let them out. Or the Wood, one or twice.” He shuddered, and she obviously didn’t know enough about Ilmar to catch the capital letter. “I can’t fight. I’m not allowed to fight. It’s my faith. It’s God’s one real commandment.”
“I have other commandments,” God commented acidly. “It’s just the only one you kept.”
And Jack faced down God, stared and stared until He, the divine He, looked away, ashamed of Himself.
“But I fought,” Jack finished the sentence. “I fought by saving gods from the Decanters. I thought it was a good thing to do. And it wasn’t as if I was doing much good otherwise.” And perhaps that was selling himself short. The tasks he’d been handy about in the hospital had been skills he’d learned on the streets. God wouldn’t heal injured rebels and victims of the Pals – not if they wanted to stay healed – but Jack could stitch and bandage and make a stab at the right sort of medicine half the time. A weirdly piecemeal education to have become his actual profession now.
“They must have been very grateful,” Semprellaime said, and Jack laughed. A real, big, braying laugh, with just an edge of hysteria.
“Oh, you think?” he asked her, wide-eyed. “The people, you mean, or the gods, or any of them. Oh, doing favours for divinity is a good way of starving to death, believe me!”
“I resent that,” God said. “I have always looked after you.” And that was a lie so vast that Jack was vaguely surprised God didn’t unmake Himself simply in the telling of it.
“And you brought the gods here?” Semprellaime asked. “You know there’s a decanting department right over there, yes?”
“I mean, no, but I could probably have guessed if I thought about it,” Jack said, rubbing at his face. “But they caught me. They worked out what I was doing. The new man, he was sharp. Or sneaky enough to spot another sneak. And I was on their books already. As a healer. And the war, like I said. Someone looked at the scales and decided it was better to send me here to save Pal lives than just hang me again, I guess. And I couldn’t leave God. Or the others I hadn’t found homes for.” The faint odours of divinity. Decaying leaf litter; dead fish, salt and anger. “I know it’s not safe, but where is? Should I have left them in a cellar for the Ratcatchers?”
She put a hand on his knee and he twitched at the contact. “I think you’re a good man. Within your limits.”
“I’m not. Or if I am, I’m so limited as to make no difference to the world.”
“You made a difference to the gods.”
His hands attempted to describe how big the world was, how small the gods. The sympathy from her was bringing on the tears again. It really had been quite a long while since anybody had been nice to him. He had lost his armour against it.
“Don’t,” God warned. “I will not have you falling to the wiles of this Allorwen hussy.”
“This what?” Jack demanded. “I’m not – I mean she’s not going to, I mean, she must be—” Trying to indicate without actually saying it that Mother Semprellaime was plainly four decades and change older than him and so no hussying was likely to be happening. And, midway through that dumbshow, seeing that most of the lines on the woman’s face were drawn on with pen, that the nose and the eye and the warts were a combination of make-up and wax and the way she had of holding her face. That the ancient crone, exactly the sort of person you’d expect to be keeping a circle house of forbidden delights, was not much older than he was.
She saw him see it, and recoiled like a sea creature retreating into the sand. A sudden wariness, and he understood there were other reasons you didn’t want to look young when you were surrounded by Pal soldiers short on entertainment.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “I won’t tell. Anyone.” Odd echoes of his previous misunderstanding. “The Butcher…?”
She nodded. “Oh it’s hard to put one past Chief Accessory Ollery. We go back some years. We do each other favours. Plus we both need the same reagents sometimes. It’s good to have friends.”
“That sounds like a fine thing,” Jack agreed, with another sour look at God. You couldn’t be friends with a god. Or not with this cantankerous specimen, anyway.
“Drop by, if you need to get away from the hospital,” she said, straight out. “If you need better tea than they have. If you need to talk.”
He stared at her. “Why?” Not ungrateful, just not sure why the privilege was being extended to him. And, at the back of his mind, the other thing, the actual purpose of her wagon, the services it provided. That one time, back in Ilmar, when he’d…
“You will bloody not,” God told him. “You won’t even think it. I – we all three of us utterly forbid. Yasnic, listen to me now.”
“It’s Jack,” he told God. “Maric Jack. Didn’t you hear? That’s me, now. And thank you.” To Semprellaime, because it wasn’t like he had much to thank God for. “I… don’t want to be a burden. To anybody. But I would like to. If that’s all right. Maybe.”
She waited to see if he had any more qualifiers to water down the sentiment with, then took his finished cup from him.
“Another?”
“I’ll go back to the hospital now, I think.” He stood, feeling almost ridiculously better just from having been able to sit down and talk. “I won’t say that they’re missing me, but I don’t want them to think I’m a slacker.”
“I think Banders has that position nailed down,” she said, taking the empty plate from his box with a curious respect, a nod of reverence for the motley of divinities she couldn’t see.
God stuck His nose in the air aloofly, refusing to have anything to do with that foreign respect, even though He’d taken the tea. Jack stretched, considering how lucky that he could do that without opening six lines of pain across his back. He opened the door to the wagon and was faced with a squad of soldiers. The hiss of surprise from behind him showed this wasn’t just Mother Semprellaime’s regular gentleman callers.
“Papers, soldier,” said the Statlos.
Numbly, Jack fumbled out the scrawled card that Banders had given him. The man squinted at it, and for a second Jack thought he might be saved by poor calligraphy. One of the other soldiers leaned forwards to murmur in his officer’s ear, though, and the man nodded.
“It’s him,” he decided. “You’re to come with us.”
“Why? What’s happened?” They already had their hands on him, ready to use force but finding that he just went where they tugged. Never any fight in Maric Jack.
“Some man you healed died,” the Statlos told him, and he’d known it. In his heart he’d known it. And probably it wouldn’t have made any difference even if they’d let him talk to the spy, and without his intervention the man would be just as dead, but somehow it was still his fault.
“Jack,” Semprellaime called from the wagon’s door. She cast a look down at her feet. The box was there, and the gods. His curse and the only valuable thing he had. They were clustered at the edge, staring with alarm, with owlish blankness, with a bitterness deep as the sea.
He shook his head, ever so slightly, and let the soldiers haul him away. Where he was going was no place fit for gods.