The Palleseen war machine sought perfection in all things. However, in its efforts to export perfection to the rest of the world, Higher Orders considered short-term means justified long-term ends. When the Pals encountered an enemy with a useful trick, they tried to find a way to incorporate it into their subsequent offensives, preferably with any associated ritual shorn off. Given the tidiness of mind the Pals espoused, they tended to clump such experiments in dedicated departments that could, if need be, be conveniently excised and disavowed.
Cohort-Monitor Cosserby fussed in front of a mirror. Or, rather, in front of the mirror-finish he’d worked onto the chest of one of his charges, large enough to reflect the whole of his relatively meagre height if he stepped back a bit. He only polished the one. It was the lead, that the others were slaved to follow.
He examined himself, finding everything aligned in accordance with the doctrine of perfection, flicked the lenses back and forth over the right ocular of his spectacles to check he hadn’t missed anything when shaving. And he should have an assistant to do it for him but somehow he kept putting in the requisition and it kept getting lost. He couldn’t get any respect, was the problem. He should complain. Maybe he would tomorrow. Not today, though, because he had a lot of things to do today. And so somehow it was always tomorrow.
The arctinic lamp had done its work by then. A soft blue glow, radiating from three separate heads and falling upon a curved metal plate. He unshipped his toolstrip and set to work, referring frequently to the measurements he’d made back in the medical tent, in the midst of the blood and the screaming. One gift he had – one of the several gifts that people didn’t generally acknowledge he possessed – was the ability to work with absolute focus no matter the chaos.
With careful, precise motions he moulded the plate into a precisely contoured cup while it was still malleable from the arctinics. Sculpting war-grade bronze and steel like clay, then slipping the tablethi out of the lamp, killing the teal radiance. The metal cooled and was hard; he fitted the cup into the rest of the prosthetic, a new shoulder-piece for an existing arm. It was beautiful work, that arm, a full human limb in lightweight alloys, multiple points of articulation, and the hand was his best work. It made him sad.
The verisimilitude of the piece was marred by a slot in the underside of the forearm, where the veins would run if it were flesh and blood. He took out one of his advanced tablethi and slotted it into place. Not the regular kind, the golden lozenges that provided power to his lamp, or soldiers’ batons. A proper artificer’s piece inscribed with exacting chains of incantations.
Time to do his rounds. One more reminder of his lot in life: the respect, and the lack of it. Cosserby, the artificer, the skilled professional, consigned to this joke of a department. Placed in the shadow of Fellow-Inquirer Prassel, a most unpleasant woman. Because someone had looked at his particular specialism and decided it fit within the remit of the hospital. A joke, basically. That was what Cohort-Monitor Cosserby’s career had come to. Some clerk back home having two-point-seven seconds’ worth of a chuckle before going for lunch.
The prosthetics were a sideline. Making himself useful in this unrewarding role they’d cast him in. When the actual fighting started, he had other jobs. Important, war-winning jobs. Albeit no better appreciated.
Having packed his bag with the arm and the other bits and pieces, and his tools, he turned at the flap of the tent, looking back into the shadows of the workshop. They stood there, ten of them, plus the two that were partly disassembled as he worked to right the damage from the last engagement. Each one nine feet tall, humanoid, hulking. Massive-shouldered. Heads formed in the likeness of a Pal soldier wearing a peaked cap, but below the brim they’d kept the howling, horrible face the original makers had used, to strike fear into the enemy. Sonori. Because when they moved, their hollow bodies made the sound of dirgeful bells. Because, in Jarokir where they’d originally been used – against the invading Pal forces – they’d been made in the bell foundries of temples, and using the same techniques as sacred bells. And they had some fancy religious name in Jarokiriis, Cosserby knew, but to the Pals who’d fought them they’d been Sonori, and that name had followed them into Pal service after the conquest of Jarokir. Sonori, and so his new-minted profession was a Sonorist, which sounded as though it was his job to bore people to sleep.
He was, he would admit, not the greatest of conversationalists.
The workshop adjoined the main clutter of medical tents. He braced himself before crossing the boundary, like a man dropping into waters of unreliable temperature and current.
“Oi oi!” a voice greeted him almost instantly, and he shrank from it, wishing desperately that it had been anybody else. Banders, though: the Former Cohort-Broker. He still wasn’t sure how that peculiar ranking even worked. What it didn’t do was impart to the woman any kind of humility. Banders intimidated Cosserby dreadfully. It was as though, by dropping out of the bottom of the chain of command, she had become some sort of mystical force capable of anything. Certainly she could get anything, at a price. Cosserby’s constant wranglings with the quartermasters had forced him to call on Banders more than once, shamefully paying her goods he couldn’t spare to get hold of things that the army should have divvied up for free. And always she smirked and smarmed at him and made him feel very small and inadequate. And she wore the uniform improperly in a way that kept him up at night.
“Got ‘em all lined up for you,” she told him with one of those dreadful grins. She scratched herself, just digging around under her half-open shirt. Cosserby closed his eyes for a moment. It was going to be Banders hanging at his shoulder, making snide comments and jokes, belittling his professional knowledge, taking his hat and trying it on, all the usual. It was going to be intolerable. He would shrivel up and die.
And then she was saying, “I’ve got errands, though. Masty’ll look after you,” and he felt a vast rush of relief that could have swamped a walled city, touched with an utterly unprofessional spike of regret. Accessory Masty, though, he could cope with. The medical unit’s other permanent orderly was meek and deferential and didn’t bring Cosserby out in sweats.
Masty saluted, the way a foreign Accessory should, even to a mere Cohort-Monitor. Cosserby had no idea where the man hailed from. He was neat, lean, darker than a Pal and with a trim beard that a regular soldier wouldn’t be allowed. He’d been with the army forever – since he was just a child they said, and with the medical unit for a lot of that. Always there, tirelessly competent, never complaining. Perfect, and how about that for irony, compared to the decidedly imperfect but Palleseen Banders?
The invalids were lined up like a parade ground, which – while neat and therefore pleasing to the idea of perfection – wasn’t going to make anyone like him any better. The woman with the arm – or rather without the arm – was at the end, and probably best that way. He asked them to stand at ease and began fitting the less demanding pieces. Two bronze fingers, without articulation, pre-curved so that they would go properly around a baton. Murmuring words about proper care of the stump so that the prosthetics didn’t chafe. Then was a superior officer that he saluted. The man had an ear shot off, and Cosserby had a tin replacement – admirable sound reproduction but might affect your appreciation of music, magister, ho ho (no answering laugh). He fit it to the crinkled, inflamed scar that was the side of the man’s head, saw the officer’s expression as he buckled the strap over the man’s remaining ear. That look which said But everyone will see I’m maimed.
“There are long-term solutions,” he said. “When you’re somewhere with a fuller range of facilities, magister. That are less… unsightly. For now, though.” And he fit a tablethi into the leather pouch that sat alongside the curve of the tin, and saw the man’s eyes widen as the sounds of the world on that side of his head were suddenly clear as crystal, probably better than the flesh and blood equivalent.
“You’ll probably need to replace this every month, on average, magister,” Cosserby explained. But the man was a Fellow, and a tablethi a month was nothing.
And then a couple of other routine pieces, unpowered, cosmetic. And then the arm.
The woman had been watching him go down the line, and Masty was already there with a stool so she could sit down for the fitting. Her eyes fixed on the prosthetic when he pulled it from his satchel and unfolded it. The beauty of its joints, the sculpted musculature. And the fit of the cup against her scar was perfect, because one thing Cosserby could do was take exacting measurements and the other was to shape metal.
Right now it was just hanging there, of course, and that was because making an arm move was a complex operation, far more so than just receiving and passing on sounds. The complicated gubbins for the sense of hearing were inside the skull, and outside of Cosserby’s abilities to replicate. The tin ear had been just collection and amplification.
He brought out another artificer’s tablethi, marked not just with a single command word like a piece of soldier’s ammunition, but with a logic-chain of instructions. It was probably the largest and most complex piece of working the woman had ever seen. He fit it into the forearm slot, feeling the tug as it clicked into place, that showed that both tablethi and arm had been properly fashioned.
He spoke the simple Pel word, Obey, that unlocked the architecture of its magic and told it to follow the minute twitching motions of the woman’s shoulder. “And now just move it,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” she told him. “Move it how?”
“It’s your arm, soldier,” he said. This was the point of wonder and magic and he should be feeling terribly pleased with himself, but instead he just felt miserable.
The arm moved. The woman started, as though trying to put distance between herself and something that was strapped to her. It raised, folded at the elbow. The fingers flexed. And none of the joints went backwards and she didn’t poke herself in the eye and that had all happened before when he hadn’t quite calibrated things right. This time he’d done his job properly though.
There were tears in her eyes. He hated himself for it.
“So if you attend at the quartermasters they will arrange for a debit from your wages until the cost of the materials in the arm have been recouped.” Already flinching from her reaction, using that precise wording that placed the blame for the situation on any department except his own.
She stared at him, tight-jawed, but she kept moving and flexing the arm, and he guessed that being able to clap was worth the dock to her pay. But that, of course, was not all of it.
“The tablethi should last from between one to two weeks, depending on severity of use,” he told her. “You will be able to order replacements from myself or another army artificer or Sonorist, at cost.” And he named the price, the absolute minimum price that he was mandated by army regulations to charge for the things. Because they were specialist goods, and either he or some other would spend an age inscribing the logic chains into them, and they took as much magic as a score of regular tablethi to charge up.
Her mouth worked. Cosserby was very aware of Masty, standing by without expression but surely radiating distaste. Aware of the wider hospital and everyone in it, somehow watching him in this moment and collectively curling their lip.
“I can’t,” the woman said, “afford that. How am I supposed to afford that? On a soldier’s pay? And the arm as well? It isn’t possible.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Look, maybe try it for a few days. See how it…” As though the arm would lead her to a cache of buried treasure that would enable her to afford it. And yes, they were on campaign, and on the advance, and in such circumstances your common soldier sometimes did end up with a surprising amount of non-regulation wealth that someone like Banders could turn into proper money. But the woman with the arm had not, apparently, had that kind of opportunity before losing a chunk of herself at the shoulder. And now, given what she’d lost, was unlikely to have it come her way again. Hard to fill your boots with just one hand.
Her face had gone hard and set. In it was the clearly expressed sentiment, I lost this for your army, and this is what I get? And it wasn’t even his army, and he absolutely agreed with her, but regulations and practice cast him as the villain in this scenario and the least he could do was give her someone to hate.
“Get it off me,” she told him flatly, and he did so, undoing the buckles and straps, uncovering the gnarl of her stump.
He sat there for a bit, after she’d gone, and Masty didn’t try to hurry him out. He flicked lenses back and forth, but no amount of magnification made the world look any better.
The Butcher was waiting for him when he left the tent. Or, rather, the Butcher just happened to be outside his own temporary residence, boiling up something that was too fume-heavy to have inside. But Cosserby knew full well that Ollery had been waiting to have a go. He still had the prosthetic arm in view, slung over one shoulder, and he braced himself for the joke. Can I give you a hand, Cohort-Monitor?
As it fell out, the Butcher didn’t even feel him worth a pun today, “You’re still touting that, then? Not sent it walking out with a third owner? Like an old friend, that arm. You’d miss it, if it actually went.”
And that was another sore point, because he had placed the arm a couple of times but neither of the amputee recipients had survived the fighting long enough to need a second tablethi. Cosserby gritted his teeth, delved within himself for a devastating rejoinder, and came up empty.
“I hear it’s cursed,” Ollery observed to his bubbling pot. “Or maybe it’s the ghost of the first man to wear it. Amazed it doesn’t go crawling about on its own.”
“There is no such thing as a cursed arm, Chief Accessory,” Cosserby got out.
“Really? In this wide world, so full of heathen imperfections? I find that very unlikely.” And the Butcher shifted a little, and Cosserby was brutally aware that the man took up twice as much space and a distressing amount of that could be turned into mechanical advantage. And he outranked Ollery. He was a member of the Palleseen army in good standing, Cohort rank, a monitor of the School of Correct Conduct. Ollery was still a Pal, but he’d done something bad enough to get him thrown out into the ranks of the Accessories, who were otherwise a rabble of foreign collaborators. And so, obviously, the big man should jump at Cosserby’s every shout. Except that Cosserby was seconded to the hospital, and while that meant he technically reported to Fellow-Inquirer Prassel, Prassel had made it clear that Ollery ran the place. Leaving Cosserby and the Butcher in an intolerable limbo, an abscess within the chain of command that ate Cosserby up inside and bothered Ollery not at all.
“I, will,” he stuttered out. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Actually.” And then, under the brute scrutiny and hating himself, “Chief.”
Ollery’s lips twitched. “Sure it is,” he said. “You go play with your toys.” And Cosserby was aware of all of them, all the actual medicos. The Divinati woman and her little cadre of students, the old hag priestess and her horrible old husband, the Pal surgeons. People who saved lives, and into whose company he, the fondler of machines, had been thrust. He wanted to glare around at all of them, to lecture them about the vast importance of his profession, key to the war effort, very very crucial. But he couldn’t meet the gaze of even one of them, and so he scurried from the camp. And he didn’t actually hear their harsh laughter, but his mind manufactured it, as though he had fit himself with a defective tin ear that amplified the unkind thoughts of others.
His next job would take him to Higher Orders, the officers who ran the Battalion and directed the war. One of Sage-Monitor Runkel’s aides had lost an eye three years ago, and the crystal orb sitting in that scarred socket had been throwing up double images. A messenger had tripped down to the hospital forthwith, summoning the Sonorist to come check it out. And Cosserby already had a shortlist of what the problems might be. His profession was relatively new, but he and his widespread peers shared information whenever they could, and a body of knowledge was slowly being assembled. He would test the offending prosthesis and hopefully have the man seeing everything only once before the day was out. And in an ideal world they’d take the opportunity to brief him on what they wanted the Sonori to achieve in the next engagement, but more likely he’d get back to the workshop only to find a message telling him to trek back across the camp to Higher Orders, because that was the way things tended to fall out for Cohort-Monitor Cosserby.
He was almost at the Sage-Monitor’s command tent when the little escort crossed his path. A Statlos and his squad, and a small soldier in their midst who was plainly in serious trouble. And that wasn’t Cosserby’s problem by any means. It would be an unusual day when the army sat encamped and someone didn’t get themselves on a charge. Except the prisoner’s face dragged at his attention. He’d seen this man recently, and given he didn’t really have any friends that seemed odd.
The new man. Most recent addition to the Butcher’s freakshow. That Maric fellow.
And whatever he’d been doing, it hadn’t been in the hospital. Not if they were going crossways over Cosserby’s own path. Which left him with something of a quandary.
“I mean,” he said to himself – an occupational hazard from working amongst the resonant bulks of the Sonori, “that’s not my problem.” Cosserby considered that life handed him more than enough without his taking on the difficulties of others. And it wasn’t as though the Butcher would thank him. More likely scowl and roll his eyes at Cosserby making it his problem. And none of it would necessarily relieve the problems of the Maric, who was plainly in a very problematic situation indeed. Because he wasn’t being marched to any regular stockade, but into the part of the camp where any prisoners were likely to get a very bespoke service. And the man hadn’t even looked at him, let alone mouthed a desperate request for help. And probably he had done something truly vile. And the high-ranking aide with the dodgy eye was waiting for him.
“Oh screws,” Cosserby said, turned on heel and hurried back along his own trail.