The Palleseen war machine was a great consumer. An insatiable appetite for human bodies to throw into the fighting, for cloth, for boots, for food, for a variety of specialist materials such as the chemicals the Butcher used in his alchemy or alloys for Cosserby’s workshop. The most pressing demand, every moment of every war, though, was for magic. Drained from every available source and infused into the little lozenge-shaped tablethi, the war drank magic like a sot drank wine.
The soldiers marched Maric Jack through half the camp, most definitely into that region of it where more important Pals were housed, as evidenced by the grander tents and huts. Nobody spared him a glance. It was more than that. Anyone who registered him looked away most assiduously. A prisoner brought to this neighbourhood meant bad things. He reckoned some common soldier who’d been drunk and leery towards a superior would just get the sort of turning out he’d received under the Alder, and say no more about it. You had to do something specific to get hauled up to these heights, and the consequent fall from grace would be appropriately shattering. And Jack’d had experience with the Pals and their ways back in Ilmar.
That their destination turned out to be one of the buildings was no consolation. He thought about how a considerate Pal might want to ensure that the more abrasive sounds of their trade would be properly muffled so as not to disturb their neighbours.
The Statlos and squad had said not a word to him. Had barely looked at him, as though whatever fate he’d earned might rub off on them. And he had earned it. Whipping aside, he hadn’t tried hard enough to get word to the man who’d been saved by God. He hadn’t been able to communicate that God couldn’t be trusted, and if He healed you then it was to satisfy His mean sense of humour. And right now God was surrounded by a war, and feeling His back against the wall. So He was acting up, pushing boundaries like He’d never done back home. Jack was worried about God, although right now he felt that he should be saving most of his worry for himself. Thankfully, while his life had been short of many tangible things like money, food and clothes, he’d made up for it with enough worries to last the rest of his life. Low bar as that might be.
They tried to bundle him inside, but he just went with them without resistance, so the whole operation ended up being rather more civilized than intended. And he could actually fight them, he realised. He wasn’t God’s priest any more, not really. And God’s followers were expected to be nonviolent but it wouldn’t be the first time Jack had disappointed God. Except, having spent his whole life not fighting anyone, he didn’t really know how to go about it, and it wouldn’t have done any good, and he didn’t want to.
I really am a wretched worm of a man, he told himself.
Inside was what he’d feared, albeit a more portable and on-the-fly version of it. The hut had two rooms, and the further one, curtained off with a heavy drape, was presumably living space. This near end was a very specialised workshop, and this time round he actually recognised a lot of the implements. There was a chair as well, and it had all the straps he’d come to expect from Pal hospitality. The soldiers’ standing orders didn’t apparently extend to footling about with buckles, though, or even sitting him down. They had him stand against one wall, and then just stared at him as though daring him to explode into furious action. Conjure a demon or throw a curse or something. Probably they’d been told he was a dangerous magician. Wrong on both counts but he wasn’t going to convince them of that.
The pause gave him a chance to calm his heart and catch his breath. To appreciate the efficient construction of the hut. There were big metal brackets and bolts, so that when the army needed to move, the whole thing could be taken down and stowed on a wagon. He thought about how many hands you’d need to do it, and tried to calculate the precise dimensions of wagon it would take, with reference to the various standard sizes the Pal army used. None of that sufficed to take his mind off things.
“So,” he remarked, and the Statlos and escort all jumped, and he almost got a baton up his nose. “Here we are.”
The Statlos waited to see if the words came with some kind of occult backlash, but when nothing lashed back, he prodded Jack with the end of his baton. And a charged baton was no danger unless you spoke the word to release the power in the tableth. Nobody got shot by accident in this army unless they were having a particularly arcane argument. But still, it was hard not to flinch. Jack had seen plenty of what a baton-shot could do to someone, on the streets of Ilmar.
The Statlos leaned in until Jack could smell the faint rot of his breath, until his stubble practically grazed Jack’s cheek. “You led us a dance,” he growled.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,” Jack said.
“Should have expected to find you with your own kind,” the man said, disgusted. Presumably not one of Semprellaime’s regulars, then, or perhaps it was self-loathing. Jack was sure that circle house conjuration was absolutely banned under the Pal rationality, but he wasn’t so naïve as to believe that meant it didn’t happen quite openly, so long as it was expedient to overlook it.
“We were just having tea,” he said, and the Statlos recoiled as though Jack had admitted to some particularly vile perversion. Not a tea-drinker, maybe.
Then the drape obscuring the further room was pushed aside, and an officer came in.
“That’s never the man,” the officer drawled, soundly oddly delighted. He was tall, his hair gone silver in elegant waves. He had a face that looked very dry and stern until any part of it moved, whereupon the whole assemblage transformed to arch humour. And saying ‘that’s never the man’ was quite the contortion, in a language designed for straight talking.
His uniform jacket was open, and the shirt beneath was decidedly non-regulation, formed of hundreds of lustreless metal coils wired together like scaly armour, each one inscribed with strange characters. They rustled faintly as he moved.
The Statlos and his escort gave ground as the man advanced. “I’ll take it from here, Statlos,” the officer said.
The Statlos’s eyes flicked from him to Jack. “He might be dangerous, magister.”
There is a dangerous man in this room, said the officer’s face, and it is not him. “Oh my, yes,” he said, somehow twisting the Pel words to mean No. “Yes, I can see he might leap at me and overpower me. He looks terribly fierce, doesn’t he? Just unbridled savagery prowling back and forth in a cage. Terrifying.”
“Magister.” Spoken with that subordinate’s ambivalence, neither agreeing nor contradicting.
“Just go stand outside,” the officer suggested. “I promise I’ll call if he starts threatening me. Help, help, I’ll go. And you can burst in and save me. How’s that?”
The Statlos’s eyes were all mute hatred, and when the officer took his hand he plainly had to fight not to rip it from the man’s fingers. Two coins were deposited there. Silver – no small sum for a soldier.
“In recognition of your duty to the department,” the officer said sweetly, and then made shooing gestures until the man and his squad left.
“You look terribly uncomfortable standing there like someone shoved a rod up your backside,” the officer observed, looking Jack up and down. “Take a seat, why don’t you.”
And the one seat, of course, came with rather more straps than mere comfort required. The officer saw his look and smirked.
“Look, how about this. At some point things between us are going to get downright uncivilized, and I’ll have the boys back in to pin you down and get rough with you, and all that. Probably. But if I promise to give you fair warning of that, will you at least sit down? Because I want to, and I can’t really do that if you’re standing in the corner like an ugly lamp. What’s your name, soldier?”
Some obscure sense of names bestowing power crammed the words up in Jack’s mouth. Plus a certain residual confusion over which name was even appropriate.
“I’m Fellow-Archivist Thurrel, for example.” A pause. “That’s what we call a ‘name’, here in the army. Plus, while I’m still waiting for yours, I’m pretty sure I’m your superior officer, and so you’re really supposed to answer, when I ask you something.” He leaned in, propping himself on the chair back, and added in a grotesque whisper, “Otherwise, technically I can have you punished in a variety of ways. Shocking, no?”
“Jack,” said Jack. “Maric Jack. Accessory Maric Jack, magister.”
“Well that gives me plenty of options.” Thurrel said, stepping back from the chair to give Jack room. And, devoid of choices, he sat. The straps did not magically flail out to secure him. It was, at this point in the conversation, just a chair.
With one foot, Thurrel hooked at a collapsed stool and, in that single motion, had it next to a desk and neatly unfolded. The desk would fold up too, Jack saw. The shelves hanging above them would all stack together to become a closed crate. The whole room had been designed, with almost obsessive passion, to combine comfort with portability.
There were a lot of things on the desk, some of them the implements he’d noted before. The dark and sinister bottle turned out to smell sharply of strong drink, though. Thurrel poured himself a tumbler and sipped appreciably, lounging against the desk. “You’re a rather lucky boy, Jack.”
Jack practised the mute blankness he’d observed in other soldiers.
“You must understand that Correct Speech wanted you too. The Inquirers, you know. They think you killed one of their people. He died, you know. The man you healed.”
“I didn’t heal anyone. Magister.”
Thurrel shrugged. Play it like that if you want, his expression said. “Anyway, dead. Dropped dead right in front of Higher Orders. Supposed to be a grand reveal. Shock! Scandal! Dead of a ghost-eater arrow, apparently. They got him with it as he was getting out, and then it was eating him up, and then you got hold of him. Or at least Correct Speech said you took credit for it.”
“It wasn’t me,” Jack said.
“Meh, well.” Thurrel drained the cup and stood to ferret something out from the hanging shelves. “The thing is, Jack, we know the others by now. They’ve been with that department for a while. Not likely the Butcher or that Divinati woman suddenly learned how to bring someone back from that kind of spot, eh? And I got a look at your papers. The ones that came with you from Ilmar.” And Jack felt the man’s voice was like metal from a forge, all that cheery glow of warmth collapsing down into something hard and cold. “Quite the record. The miraculous healing priest. How wonderful that must be.” And he slipped something over his head and turned, and there was a panopticon of glass eyes there, two big lead-grey lenses that didn’t quite align with where his eyes should be, and three other orbs where nobody needed eyes at all. And three whole tablethi set over his brow to power it, and the whole with a crackling radiance that owed nothing to light or sight. And, worst of all, Jack had seen just such a thing before.
“Oh God,” he said, “you’ve got a Hat.”
Thurrel paused, and the set of his mouth beneath the goggling assemblage looked decidedly unimpressed. “My dear fellow, it is not a ‘Hat’. It is thaumatic gauge. They’re very new and extremely clever. You’ve no idea what strings I had to pull to get one out here in the provinces.”
At which point the door opened, and Thurrel turned the full glower of the thaumatic gauge on the intruder. And then pushed the device back up his forehead because it wasn’t the Statlos blundering in, but another officer, and a… something.
Jack stared and then averted his eyes.
“What do you want, Miserly? I’m working.”
The newcomer – Miserly? Was that really a Pal name? – didn’t seem to care. He shouldered over to the desk and poured himself some of the drink as though daring Thurrel to object.
“I heard you’d grabbed the priest,” he said. “Correct Speech is royally pissed.”
“Correct Speech can go frottage themselves,” Thurrel decided. “What do you want, Miserly?”
“I want to see the priest,” Miserly explained. “I want to see Prassel’s latest failure. Did he kill an Inquisition agent?”
“He says he didn’t.” Thurrel had given the man space in a way that told Jack the relationship between the two men was complicated. Miserly was shorter, stockier, probably the same age, though his dark hair had made him seem younger at first. He had a particularly Pal face that was handsome in every detail, but combined in look of cold disdain, bypassing the eyes to tell the soul he was a man to be wary of. The narrowest moustache Jack had ever seen decorated his upper lip, non-regulation and worn to show he could get away with it. His eyes were ice. Blue, yes; cold, yes; but something to their look and texture and the way they caught the light spoke only of ice. The air around them glittered as the moisture in it crystallised out.
All of which first impression came to Jack fractured because his eyes were being constantly dragged towards what had come into the hut with Miserly.
“Inquisition says he did,” Miserly was continuing. “And you know me. Exceptional Stratagems department, always on the lookout for something we can use.”
“Better than having Correct Speech pull his toenails out, I suppose,” Thurrel agreed. “Although I could always decant the toenails, if he’s that magic.”
“I’m not,” said Jack. “Magic. I don’t do magic.” His eyes kept straying, no matter how hard he tried.
She was a demon, Miserly’s companion. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Or rather, she was not a woman. A demon, in a woman’s shape. In a Pal uniform, even, as though she was just some aide-de-camp at Miserly’s beck and call. And she was at his beck and call. Every time Jack looked away, the corner of his eye caught a glittering arc, as though there was a chain between her and the man, that was invisible when he looked straight at it.
And she was perfect, in ways that Pal doctrine surely did not approve of. Face, form, poise. And he understood that she had been made to be a mirror to desires, and that the precise details that had hooks in his eyes might be different for another. Because when you were sufficiently adept at negotiating with the Kings Below, you could be very specific in your requirements.
“You like what you see?” Miserly said. “Want to put in an offer perhaps?”
Jack started guiltily, and the man barked with laughter. “Can’t keep his eyes off her.”
Jack faced up to him, digging his fingers into the arm of the chair to concentrate. “Because you’ve had her fashioned for exactly that, isn’t that the case? You wanted something that people would look at, and want, and envy.”
Miserly looked a little sour at that, which Jack took as all the victory he was likely to get in this situation.
“Introduce yourself,” Miserly said, and there was no chain, not physically, not present, but when he jerked his hand so, the demon woman was off balance for a moment as though there was a collar about her neck.
“I am the succubus Caeleen,” she said. Her voice was beautiful as music, and she made it flat and toneless and as ugly as she possibly could, “bound by contract into the service of the worshipful and puissant magus Fellow-Invigilator Maserley.”
Jack processed that. Specifically what it told him about the demon’s master’s ego. And that Thurrel had been subtly mispronouncing the conjurer’s name so that it sounded like an insult in Maric, a language that Maserley plainly didn’t speak but that someone named Maric Jack obviously would. And where someone like Thurrel had picked up the tongue, Jack had no idea.
“You’d like a taste, wouldn’t you,” Maserley said, placing a proprietorial hand on Caeleen’s shoulder.
“No, magister,” said Jack, and the man’s whole face just stopped in surprise. When he stared, unblinking, for more than a few seconds, the thinnest possible frozen sheen glazed over his eyes.
“It’s forbidden,” Jack explained, because he never could get out of his knee-jerk need to be helpful. And then he stopped because explaining your religion to two Pal officers probably wasn’t conducive to a long life.
But Thurrel was there anyway. “He’s a priest,” he noted. “They’re down on demons. They’re down on fun too, most of the time.”
Maserley curled a lip. “You know too much about the subject. One day it’ll be you Correct Speech comes for.”
“Nothing wrong in a broad education.” Thurrel’s tone was flinty, but then he smiled at Jack. “If I offered you some brandy, boy, are you allowed that? Or does your god ban that too?”
“It’s a minor infraction, magister,” Jack said. “But I’ll risk it.”
Thurrel trilled with laughter and turned to find another tumbler. Maserley’s hand on his arm stopped him.
“Don’t waste it,” the Fellow-Invigilator said. “Just tell me what he’s got to him. Analyse him and get it over with.”
“Are you going to take him off me?” Thurrel actually pouted.
“If he’s worth it. If I can use him. Otherwise, you can decant him.”
“And if I won’t let you?” Hard to see the full nuance of Thurrel’s expression with the thaumatic gauge riding his brows. “If he’s got that kind of power, that fills a lot of tablethi. And I know Exceptional Stratagems trumps decanting, but I’m the one who hosts the wine tasting and the dinners that Uncle likes, and so who’s he going to back?”
And Jack just sat there, looking between the two men because he was strenuously trying not to look at Caeleen. Both men stood quite casually, Maserley with his thumbs hooked into his belt, Thurrel leaning on the desk like a study in nonchalance. The air flexed with interdepartmental tension. And Jack had no idea if they were cousins with an actual uncle, or if ‘Uncle’ meant something special to Pal officers. He had no idea what Exceptional Stratagems was, save that he wanted no part of it. On the other hand he knew a great deal about Thurrel’s ‘decanting’, because that was how the Pals took the magic from anything that had it, and drained it into their tablethi for general use.
“You said ‘use’ me,” he observed to Maserley, in the taut quiet that followed Thurrel’s words. “In the war, did you mean?”
Maserley looked at him and Jack shivered like a fever victim.
“We’re in the army,” he man said. “What did you expect, exactly.”
“Only I can’t. Fight. Hurt people. At all. Under any circumstances.” And their expressions, paired, showed utter incomprehension. He might as well have declined to exist in three dimensions for them. “That’s what happened with the spy,” he added, still so desperate to help. “He was healed, but conditionally. Only so long as nothing he did harmed another. And probably whatever he knew, that they wanted to get from him, was going to harm someone. It’s an army, like you say. So I guess he opened his mouth and… died. It all came back. The thing, the… ghost eater? I don’t even know what that is. I’m so sorry. I was trying to get to him, to tell him not to… not to….” The utter hopelessness of the thought defeated him. As though Higher Orders would just have let the spy stay silent.
The disparity in their expressions told him a lot about the two men. Maserley was incredulous, almost pitying. Thurrel was narrow-eyed and thoughtful, turning the logic of it over in his head to see where the joins were, that he could get a knife-point into. Jack wasn’t sure which he preferred.
Caeleen was watching too. Her expression was cool and unreadable, but he didn’t even know if anything her face said was real, or if it was just a part of the way she’d been fashioned. He knew very little about demons.
She met his eyes and he braced himself for some occult jolt of desire to rampage through his head. There was just contact, though. The contact of one victim with another. A little sympathy even, passed underhand to him like a folded note between the bars of their cages.
“Well that’s useless,” Maserley said at last.
“To you,” Thurrel observed. “I can still decant him. No such thing as a pacifist tableth. Let’s take a look at him.” And he slipped the gauge down again, transforming himself into the all-seeing monster. The lightless radiance about the thing increased and Jack heard a faint crackle from it. But then it wasn’t the first time he’d seen one in operation. The Perfector of Ilmar, the new one who’d come in and begun harvesting the city for magic, had owned just such a thing and made free use of it.
“For a priest, you don’t seem terribly holy.” Thurrel was playing with some gradated wheels on the gauge, still peering.
“I’m not a priest. Any more.”
“But you healed the spy.”
“No.”
“If your toy is proving unequal to the task,” Maserley put in impatiently, “then perhaps I should just conjure a worm to burrow after what’s worthwhile in him.”
Any hope that this was an empty or hyperbolic threat died when Thurrel sighed, “Oh you and your worms, Miserly.”
The door banged behind them and both men jumped. Thurrel shoved the gauge back up irritably. “Statlos, this really is… ah.” Stepping back to sit on the edge of the desk, looking speculative.
Fellow-Inquirer Prassel closed the door behind her. And Jack really wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Because she’d had him whipped, and she was the superior he’d presumably disgraced, and she had Inquirer in her rank which meant that maybe it was the toenails after all.
And she nodded to Thurrel, but the look she turned on Maserley was one hundred per cent combative. A necromancer and a conjuror, and surely if there were such a thing as looks that could kill then one or both would have dropped dead then and there. The temperature dropped to the point where Jack looked for ice forming on the walls. An Ilmari winter would just about have matched it.
And a warm hand on his shoulder. Caeleen. And of course demons were warm. They were things of fire, weren’t they? And he had no illusion that she meant him well, or any human, but they were both prisoners right then and there. Apparently even demons understood common ground.
“You have one of mine, Thurrel,” Prassel said.
“Well,” Thurrel said thoughtfully. “I understood he’d been rather naughty. In a thaumatologically interesting way. And it was reason’s own job to find him – gone to ground in a brothel, can you believe? But I thought that he might as well be put to use, for his sins. I mean, a man is dead.” Mock horror at the thought, and absolutely no real contrition at all. Jack decided maybe he didn’t like Thurrel much better than Maserley after all.
“A man died under the auspices of the Inquisition,” Prassel said blandly. “Correct Speech is, of course, investigating itself. We await the results with bated breath. As for Accessory Jack, he will be put to use. He was, in fact, being put to use. In the hospital department.”
Maserley snorted at that. “You’re really owning that freakshow.”
Prassel’s look went past ‘kill’ and into setting him on fire and pissing on the ashes. “My man, if you please.”
“No,” Maserley said. “I’ll have him for Exceptional Strat, and to the hells with you.”
“Fellow-Archivist Thurrel.” The slightest tilt of Prassel’s head cut Maserley out of the conversation. “Your prisoner, I believe. Do you need me to sign something?”
Thurrel slipped the gauge off his head and looked at it ruefully. “Oh well. Sorry Jack, another time perhaps?” As though they’d be having a picnic if not for killjoy Prassel hauling him back. And Maserley tried to butt in, but he was effortlessly sidelined, no longer someone with any traction on the situation, chill the air as he might. An angry gesture of one hand and Caeleen was hauled to his side by that non-existent thread.
He tried to storm directly for the door, but Prassel wouldn’t budge for him, meaning he had to twist awkwardly to avoid ramming shoulders with her. And though he was broader and heavier, there was something stony about the woman that Jack felt he might have broken against. Maserley shoved his demon outside, then slammed the door petulantly at his heels, hard enough to shudder the whole hut. The hanging shelves shivered and Thurrel deftly caught a couple of dull, uncharged tablethi that jumped out.
“You are sure you want him back?” he asked Prassel thoughtfully. “He’s trouble, you know. I could see that. Let me have him. I’ll split the proceeds.”
“I’m not playing games,” she told him. “I meant it about the paperwork. Assuming he’s here officially, and you didn’t just do, as per usual.”
“Oh well, you know me.” Thurrel made a vague gesture. “Goodbye Jack. Perhaps later you can introduce me to any interesting friends you might have.” A flat, acquisitive stare that said, I know what you didn’t bring with you. Jack’s thoughts were instantly on the box in Mother Semprellaime’s wagon, and he clamped down on them in case the man could read the details in his face.