In accordance with the doctrine of perfection so dear to the Palleseen, there were standard-issue versions of everything a soldier or scholar or civil servant might need, produced to exacting specifications in factories across the Sway and supplied at any distance using the effortlessly efficient transport network the Pals had developed. Or that was the theory. Certainly it was technically true that using something non-regulation could be the basis for censure, as evidence of having been corrupted by foreignness. However, between that transport network not being quite as efficient as perfection might demand, and the foreigners having some quite nice stuff, it was a rule that corroded swiftly when exposed to the fresh air of other climes.
It was a good cruet. It had been made in Jarokir, the same place that had produced the Sonori constructs that Cosserby spent his time futtering with, and that had also produced the priest-medicos Tallifer and Lochiver. Like many additions to the Palleseen Sway, Jarokir had spent some decades getting on with the Pals, especially in respect of trade. Hence it was an excellent example of their craftsmanship, but designed for Palleseen cuisine. The wooden box, the eight jars. A soldier’s mess tent set would be no more than that. Plain wood, plated steel, a single sigil on each lid to identify the contents. But Ollery, the Butcher, got fancy when he cooked, and his meals demanded a fancy cruet. The box was intricate fretwork, the intersecting geometrical patterns the Jarokiri liked, where little human and animal faces peeked out between the slats at random intervals. Gods, probably, making the whole piece some way beyond non-regulation and into actual punishable unorthodoxy, but who was counting? The jars were silver, and each one inscribed with a different serpent, the character of the beast somehow suggesting the piquancy of the condiment within. The full name of the contents decorated the lid, Jarokiri characters spelling out Pel words. The Butcher was well aware that a man in his position couldn’t afford to have prized possessions, but nonetheless it was one. He’d be sorry as and when it passed from his hands.
He was cooking. Not in itself a calendar event. Sometimes he cooked for the two of them, sometimes the boy worked up his limited set of recipes. Tonight, however, he cooked. For tomorrow…
Well, they all knew about tomorrow. And, formally, they didn’t, because Higher Orders were doing their best to make the Loruthi spies’ jobs at least slightly challenging, but word was all over the camp. And so he cooked. When he turned his hand and mind to it, there was no better chef in Forthright Battalion. And the big alchemy cauldrons, when cleaned out with the proper degree of care, were good for stews.
The boy was at his back, tending two smaller vessels, one with fish that were pickling down in their own salt, and the other radish darts in a thin spicy oil that would, if not overdone, blow the top of your head off. The first was a traditional Palleseen delicacy that went back to before perfection, when they’d all just been barbaric island raiders making a nuisance of themselves up and down the coast. The latter was from some place he’d served in, way back at the beginning of his career, and taken a fancy to. He was looking forwards to seeing how some of the newer members of the department took to it.
In the main tent, that was a portal to hell and butchery when the fighting was on, Banders and Masty were setting out three folding tables end to end, and enough stools for everyone. He’d sent the boy out with the cutlery – the good set, that had belonged to some aristocrat of some place they hadn’t thought needed perfecting. He’d got it in trade for a particularly efficacious pox cure, from a particularly pox-ridden Sage-Inquirer. More non-standard gear, worthy of censure, but he loved the scrollwork in the metal, and the way the forks had two curved tines, like trailing fishtails. Banders would be setting out the places, and then Masty would go round and reset them because she always put everything crooked and backwards.
He heard voices outside the tent. The stew was bubbling at just the right rate and could do with sitting unmolested for a while before he tasted it again, so he put his head out. A forlorn skinny slump of a man, sloping in, exchanging a thin greeting with Banders, who was outside the main tent having a smoke. Ollery was amazed that box didn’t just fall off the man’s shoulders, they slanted so much.
“You’re late,” he told Maric Jack.
“I’m sorry,” the man mumbled in his heavily accented Pel.
“I should report you. Have you put on a charge.” Ollery keeping his face entirely deadpan serious.
“There was some…” A moment as Jack reached for the word, “administration. Bureaucracy? Official business.” He was deadpanning right back, and Ollery couldn’t work out whether he was absolutely aware that his predicament had been blurted out to the whole department – by Cosserby of all people! Or whether he assumed it was all secret and Prassel had just turned up to spring him from pure chance.
“You have the papers to prove that?” Ollery pressed, because he was never more than an onion skin’s thickness from being mean.
“I’ll get something signed next time,” Jack said. His tone said that he was resigned to there being a next time. “What’s going on?”
“I’m cooking,” Ollery told him. “Go help Masty set up.” Though it was mostly done, meaning Jack would get the chance to sit down if he wanted, take the weight from his feet and the box from his back. When the man turned to go, Ollery hailed him back and handed out the cruet. “Take this to the table, will you?” Enjoying Jack’s Maric look, that plainly didn’t even know what it was.
*
“Oh ho!” Banders crowed, seeing it. “Blight me, but we’re having the proper chow down tonight.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I don’t think I understood a word of that.”
She gave him a punch in the chest that was intended to be playful, then had to actually rescue him from falling backwards. He’d been whipped, she recalled, and then arrested. Busy day for the new boy.
“Butcher doesn’t have anything less than the best for the high table,” she told him, trying to speak more slowly but still not sure he was getting it. She took a final long drag of her reed and blew the smoke at the darkened sky and the first scatter of stars. “Needed that. Come on.” Heading in and letting Jack trail after her. Masty had undone all her good work with the cutlery, needless to say. Not like she had a ruler on her but, if she had, she’d bet she could measure the settings and not find a hair’s breadth difference between them now. The man had no sense of artistry.
“What, no nametags?” she jibed at him. “No little calligraphied cards so everyone knows where they’re sitting?”
Masty gave her a Look. It was about as fierce as he ever got. And everyone knew where they were sitting, of course. They’d done this before. A placing that should have been rigidly by rank, high to low, but had mutated to reflect the actual hierarchy in the department, that varied considerably from what got set down in battalion records.
“I don’t know where I’m sitting,” said Maric Jack, putting the cruet down on the table. Masty promptly rescued it and repositioned it at the head, where the Butcher would be.
“I s’pose you don’t,” she admitted.
“I mean, sorry. Am I even sitting? Am I… invited?” The rich smell of cooking was all through the tent now, and she saw his tongue touch his lips hungrily.
“Oh I don’t know,” she said, mugging at Masty. “I mean maybe. Maybe we could squeeze you in. What’s it worth to you?”
“You go here,” Masty said, spoiling that gambit instantly. Banders did the calculations: he’d have Alv on his left and Masty himself on his right, assuming Masty actually sat down to eat rather than playing butler and dishwasher all evening. It put Jack across the table from her, too, and that was fine enough. She reckoned she could winkle sufficient entertainment out of him to last the evening.
There was the thin, clear sound of a bell. The Butcher’s boy would be outside his tent, the old ship’s piece dangling from one hand, a spare fork in the other, calling everyone to their devotions.
“Go change your jacket,” she told Jack. “Get a fresh one on. That one’s manky. We dress up for dinner around these parts.”
He gave her a look which took in her general state of dishevelment.
“What? You don’t think I work hard to look like this? Go change, man. Leave your box. Nobody’s going to rifle it.”
He didn’t look convinced at that, but he left it and he went. Banders shot Masty a look.
“Shall we rifle his box?”
Even Masty couldn’t stop a twitch of the lips at that one. “You’re incorrigible.”
“Only because everyone ‘incorriges’ me.” Banders had given an eminent grammarian an apoplectic fit once. One of her proudest moments. She knelt down by the wooden backpack, peering into the holes. Doubling down on the insouciance precisely because Jack spooked her. Because there had been something nasty in the box, when she’d first looked into it. Because Jack had brought that man back from next to dead, and then sent him right back, or that was the scuttlebutt. Because he was, mild exterior bedamned, an eerie little fucker and she was trying very hard to get over that and make him fit her worldview.
“I wouldn’t,” said Masty, at her back.
“What, like you don’t want to look into his box.”
“I…” And she gave him a wicked look over her shoulder because that had come out exactly as she’d meant it. He had his exasperated look on, and it was always a good day when she’d pushed Masty that far. Then the others were coming in, ones and twos, and she stood up quickly.
And, just as she did, something moved down there. Just at the corners and edges of what she could see. An impression of a little face, hard and savage beneath the slanted brim of an old-timey sea hat. The jut of a bone harpoon head. And she barely saw it, so how did she know the harpoon head was bone, or even the head of a harpoon? The knowledge was inalienable, though. She turned her hasty retreat into a casual circle of the table to get to her place. Diverting her unease into pique as she flicked old Lochiver’s knuckles when he tried to open up the spice jars and lick the contents.
*
“Go to the end of the table,” Tallifer told him.
Lochiver, occasional flautist and medical assistant, gave her a hurt look.
“I only wanted to remind myself which is the one I like.” He stared down at the cruet as though it was a baffling puzzle keeping him from the tomb of an emperor. “These Pals with their complicated food. And why do I have to sit at the end again? I’m always at the end. I want to sit with you.” At her look he amended that to, “I want to sit with everyone else and you can go at the end.”
“You can sit at the end because that’s where you always sit,” Tallifer told him. “Also because nobody wants to sit next to you.”
“I am a High Theophonist of the Unclean Sacristy,” Lochiver insisted.
“Not for twenty years you haven’t been,” she pointed out. “You’re just a bad flautist who never washes his hands properly.”
And rather than rise to that so they could have a good spat in front of everyone he just looked at her, and she realised she’d gone too far. Because he didn’t wash his hands, just about ever. Because it was a forbiddance, and it was hard to hold on to those, amongst the Pals, in the army. Because he had a god to appease, just as she did. Fingernails of divinity pried from their accustomed places and taken on the run, because the Pals had come with their armies and their relentless perfection. Which had no room for, say, an old man who wouldn’t wash his hands. Or not even an old man, back then. Even she and Lochiver had been young once. Or at least middle aged.
“All right,” she said, kneading at the bridge of her nose. “You’re a mediocre flautist. On your good days, an almost tolerable one. Now go sit down.”
He looked very slightly mollified and did so, that placing set just slightly further away from everyone else than they were from each other. Masty balancing tact and necessity. Tallifer put the lids back on the cruet jars and took the seat to the left hand of the head of the table, with Banders already lounging on her right. And it shouldn’t be possible to lounge on a folding camp stool but Banders was a woman of many talents.
Masty passed down the table, slotting tablethi into the lamps so that a warm glow suffused the inside of the tent. Not the harsh clear glare they used for their butchery but something pleasant and homely. And before her he set a candle, just a stump of one. A flourish with the steel of his lighter and it sported a brave little flame, dancing gamely and constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by the spill of its own burning. And she knew how that felt.
Cosserby came in then, because he was formally one of the department and so they couldn’t exactly snub him, even though there was nothing more gory on his hands than grease. He took his place on the far side of Banders, elbows tucked away from both her and Lochiver. The new man arrived too, his jacket buttons in the wrong holes and looking half-strangled by his collar. Tallifer watched him narrowly. You got a bad feeling about some people. Not just the type who just self-immolated when exposed to the volatile environment of a Pal army, but the type who set everyone around them on fire in the process.
And yet he seemed meek, and he’d been all over himself to be helpful, back when there had been lives on the line. Benefit of the doubt, she told herself, against all instinct.
Mazdek slithered out of her sleeve onto the table to look into the candle’s wavering. Not that Masty had intended it as an offering for her diminished god, of course, he just knew it mattered to her, and Masty was the most self-effacingly considerate man alive. But she’d take it. If it kept the little elver of her faith warm one more evening, she’d take it.
Alv came last, or last before the food and their host anyway. Her face was still a sheen of shiny skin, one hand too. As though she’d been burned years ago, rather than so recently. She had that usual moment, pausing in the tent’s entrance, looking at them all as though she couldn’t imagine who these terrible, savage people were, and why she was sharing a world with them. But that was just the Divinati, the way they reacted to everything. Alv had been out of that world for a full ten years but she’d never lost the distance.
She sat across from Tallifer, at the table’s right hand. The pair of them, the backbone of the hospital department. She managed a smile. Tallifer saw her hands in motion beneath the table’s lip and knew she’d be peeling away that crisp dead skin, revealing only perfection beneath. The Divinati were the one culture in the world that the Pals would deign to take lessons from.
And then the Butcher was rolling in, bringing a mismatch of pots and setting them about the tables. His boy pattered down to the far end to set one between Cosserby and Lochiver, fighting with the weight of it, sending a spatter of stew across the old flautist’s shirt. And that, too, was an offering, and perhaps it hadn’t happened by chance. Doubtless Lochiver’s filthy god had arranged it somehow. Tallifer shuddered.
Over twenty years now, the pair of them. On the run at first, after the conquest. In the army after that, when their wild ride of insurrection and forbidden faith had been brought to an end. An old married couple, everyone thought.
Mazdek, the Cleansing Flame, doing battle with the stinking rot god Sturge of the Unclean Sacristy, the ancient struggle of destruction, growth, decay and renewal that was the order of the universe. Ancient enemies whose very enmity was the spine of creation. A thousand tales, a thousand-year body of knowledge and story and wisdom. All gone, all gone, and just one sad old woman and foolish old man left, and the tiny, guttering embers of their gods.
She started out of her reverie when the Butcher ting’d his tin cup with a spoon. Masty was going down the table, pouring out what smelled like a rather acceptable fortified wine. She had to remind herself that she’d done better than everyone else from the High Fane. And Lochiver’s coreligionists had been shot on sight, hunted down with a vengeance. And we endure. Maybe that’s all there is.
“You’ve all heard,” the Butcher started, and then stopped, looking at Maric Jack. The new boy had a spoon of stew already in his mouth, eyes wide and flicking from one face to another. He removed it – emptied – and smacked his lips nervously.
“I’m sorry. Is it a rank thing? Was I not supposed to. I’ve not done this before.”
“It’s not that it’s a rank thing,” Banders drawled. “It’s more that we like to let our host eat just in case he—” and then the Butcher gave her a look and she stopped saying that just as quickly.
“How…” Cosserby asked, watching Jack’s face with a dreadful fascination, “how was it?”
“Really good,” said Jack, and the table as a whole relaxed. Because the Butcher was a very good cook. And other things. Tallifer had known him for a dozen years now, but after she heard the details of what got him sent to the department, a Pal lumbered with a foreigner’s dishonourable rank, she was always just a little leery of being the first one to eat.
“Well I suppose you’d better tuck in, then,” the Butcher said, giving up on his speech. Everyone began ladling out now that Jack had done the tasting honours. Ollery’s boy turned up hopefully with a bowl in his hands, and was given grudging permission to help himself.
Banders jogged Tallifer’s arm just as she was about to lapse into contemplation again.
“What?”
“They want the condiments at the arse end of the table, if you’re done.” She nodded over to where Lochiver, out on his promontory, was gesturing urgently.
*
Masty ferried the cruet down to the old man, who began ladling out some greenish powdery stuff in what Jack felt were unwise quantities. After that, Masty tried to top up everyone’s wine but by then people were shouting at him to sit down and actually eat something himself. He slid onto the stool beside Jack with an odd smile. A man coming home.
“What’s the green?” Jack asked him warily.
“Isfel, root and leaf, ground,” Masty said and hooked the cruet from under Lochiver’s hands. “That’s probably enough, you know.”
The old man looked sour but Tallifer called from towards the head of the table, “Yes it’s enough. I have to share a tent with you, you flatulent sod!” and that was that.
Jack tried the isfel, which he couldn’t taste against the stew. Then he tried a little of the yellow crystals of dhanver against his tongue. “Oh, that’s tart.”
“Don’t have them from a spoon,” Masty advised. “Just a pinch straight onto the sauce. They react against the silver.”
“This is silver?” Jack examined the cutlery. “In Ilmar, they only had silverware on Armigine Hill.” Which probably meant nothing to Masty but would have people watching him to make sure he didn’t walk off with the forks.
“The paste stuff there,” Banders said across the table, mouth full and chewing, “is bloody delicious. Sweet, you know. Honey in it. It’s made with flies.”
There was a Maric saying about flies and honey but that didn’t seem to be what she meant and Jack was leery about asking for details. Sometimes you just wanted a bit of sweet and best not to ask further.
“This red though.” Banders tapped one of the jars with her knife-handle. “Recommended serving for that is just having it somewhere on the table. Or even in the next tent. Set fire to the top of your head, it will.”
“You’re a milksop,” Lochiver said. “Give it over. I love it.”
“Nothing of your tongue works except the talking part,” Tallifer told him loudly.
Lochiver’s answering laugh was spectacularly filthy without him needing to actually say anything.
Jack dipped his spoon into a dollop of the radish and ate what turned out to be an inadvisable quantity of it. Which was possibly any of it. Whatever colour he went led to widespread hilarity, the Butcher bellowing from the head of the table, slapping his thigh. Everyone then had to try the stuff themselves, and Masty was up and passing round the water jug before Alv caught his eye and sent him back to his seat.
“Oh God save me, that was too much,” Jack got out. He said it in Maric, and paused to see if anyone was going to haul him off for another whipping. Nobody did, and the conversation moved on, leaving only God standing with folded arms beside his plate, pointedly not saving him from anything.
The other two were out of their box too. The nature thing was sprinkling a little circle of isfel, which would be hard to explain if anyone noticed. The grim spearman was trying to skewer a piece of the salt fish. Jack fished a bit out for him and left it beside his plate, where it might count as an offering.
“And what do I get?” God demanded peevishly.
“I mean, what would you like?” Jack asked. “What can I get you?”
“I am not a patron of a restaurant. I am a God befitting an offering. I shouldn’t need to look at a menu.” God stared at the food, and Jack realised that He, the divine He, was a bit lost. It was all foreign muck to Him, not good Ilmari cuisine. He didn’t know what He wanted and was afraid to ask.
“I’ll separate out a bit of everything,” Jack told Him, out of the corner of his mouth. “You can see what you like. Except the radish.”
“I might like the radish,” God said defiantly, which meant Jack pretending to slop a bit of that over the side of his plate too. Masty must think he was the messiest eater ever. After Lochiver, anyway.
The spear god hadn’t tried the fish yet. He was staring at Banders instead with an unnerving intensity. Jack tapped at the table to get his attention and indicated the white flakes. Looking up, he met Alv’s gaze. For a moment he thought she could see all of them. Divinati were steeped in magic, after all; everyone knew. But she was turning aside from the Butcher, hunching her shoulder against the regard of the table. Carefully, briskly, she peeled a long strip of translucent skin from her face, another stretch of burn gone.
“That must be handy,” Jack tried, when she turned back. “For a healer.”
“Oh, I don’t like the radish!” God spat, from his elbow. It felt like a divine pronouncement Jack was safe to ignore.
Alv seemed taken aback that he’d spoken to her. Her mouth moved as though trying to remember what words were. “Within limits,” she said. “Within balance.”
“It’s a thing you can teach?” He seemed to remember she had students, Pals who could do a little of the trick with lesser wounds. “That sounds useful.”
God snorted.
“The army requires that I teach my craft to its own, and I am beholden to do so,” Alv said. The singsong Divinati to her voice was strong, but she spoke with a measured precision so that all the Pel words still got through. “They would not let me teach you.”
Jack paused, trying to frame his next question, and Banders – never one short for words – broke in. She’d stood, jolting the table with her knee so that Tallifer had to rescue her drink, and raised a tin cup towards the canvas ceiling.
“Drink up, who hear!” she called, even though the Butcher was making Not yet gestures at her. “To our newest fool, who talks to himself when he thinks we’re not looking and already got himself whipped and arrested. Maric Jack, everyone!”
Jack flinched, but everyone was just mugging at him with a good humour he neither expected nor felt he’d earned. He clinked a cup with Banders and with Masty, and then everyone wanted to do it, and more of the fortified wine ended up on the table than in the mouth. He sat back down after a long reach down to Lochiver, feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all.
“You get used to it,” Masty said. He had a way of speaking past the raucous, like a few others Jack had known. Calm, still people. Some of whom had been fantastically dangerous, but he reckoned Masty hadn’t ever set foot in that camp.
“You’ve been here…?”
“Since I was very small,” Masty said. “Grew up in the camps. Before Ollery came. Before the department did.”
“Soldier’s child?”
Masty paused for a moment before answering, an odd hitch for a seemingly open man. “No. Just more war loot.” And, when Jack tried to press him on the details, “I barely remember, really. Another life. I mean, what do you remember, really, from when you were six?”
More than that, Jack decided, but no point in needling the man. Then God was tugging at his sleeve, or trying to, because there was far less sleeve than baggy Maric tailoring had gone in for, and there wasn’t much for Him to get a grip on.
“Tell them!” He demanded. The redness of the divine countenance suggested He’d persevered with the radish.
“Tell them what?”
“Tell them your name isn’t ‘Jack’! Don’t let them say who you are! Tell them you’re my priest, Yasnic.”
“I’m not your priest any more, remember? I’m everyone’s priest. Or nobody’s. I’m just a sort of general purpose priest substitute.”
“Tell them!”
“What if I want to be Maric Jack?” The man who wasn’t Maric Jack shrugged, staring into the lees of his cup. “I mean, who wants to be that poor bastard? You hear what happened to him? They hanged him, and then he lost his faith, and then they arrested him and sent him to the army. Far better to be Maric Jack. Everyone likes him.”
“You’re fucking mad,” God decided.
“You’re not supposed to swear.”
“Oh I can swear all I want. It’s you that’s not allowed.” God turned to find the spearman standing there, possibly in the expectation of more fish. “You can piss off, too,” He told his opposite number, and then jumped down to the box.
Masty had been watching all of this, Jack realised. Watched Jack have an argument with his own elbow. But he didn’t draw it to anyone else’s attention, and there was no judgment in his face. And, just as Jack might have felt compelled to offer or invent an explanation, he was on his feet again and passing the seasonings to Alv.
*
She was mortified. That it didn’t show was little consolation to Alv. The Maric man had caught her peeling her face. It was inelegant. A crass physical moment. A thing one did not do before others, most especially foreigners.
But the dry skin itched, when the new had grown beneath it. Itched until she couldn’t bear it and had to tear it away. Because she was weak.
Masty set down the cruet beside her plate with barely a sound. She looked up at him, got four-fifths of the way towards a smile and then reined herself in. One did not. A gracious nod, that was nonetheless an acknowledgement of debt. Because she had sat here wanting to try the flavourings, to tune the taste of meal towards her palate. But she couldn’t just ask. Couldn’t cut through the interlaced tangle of their talk with her conversational knife and just ask. One was self-sufficient. One gave according to the maintenance of one’s personal balance. There was nothing one needed that these people had. And yet, because the Pals lived en masse, each of them was doing some small part of life on behalf of everyone else, you couldn’t be self-sufficient amongst them. You couldn’t be.
While she had it within arm’s reach, she went through her learned rote of seasoning, this and then that, a pinch of the red, a half-spoon of the paste. A hard-learned recipe to temper the strange flavours. Not bad flavours, just strange flavours. Strange was worse than bad, where she came from.
She had tried to teach all this to her students, at the start. When they’d first made her a part of their army and their hospital. The young Pal scholars who were simultaneously clever and dense enough to end up with her. And she’d lost them instantly. Her talk of balance and poise and grace, the careful calibration of one’s place in the universe. The bones that supported the ineffable beauty of the Divine City. And in the end she’d given up on it. Theory they couldn’t grasp, that she found turning to ash in her mouth. Until she just taught them the practical, the exchange of this for that which would debit a wound from the universe’s ledger here so long as it could be credited there. And discovered that, actually, you could do what she had spent so long learning without any of that philosophical underpinning. The universe didn’t actually care whether you understood it, just as you could kill someone with a sword without learning advanced metallurgy.
“Is nobody,” a slightly petulant voice demanded, “going to talk about the echo?” Which, she recalled, meant a thing that was present, but that nobody was acknowledging. It was Cosserby, gesturing with his spoon. “I mean, we all know.” Seeing little enthusiasm for the topic, but persevering. “Chief, Ollery, this is very fine, very fine, but everyone here must know why you’ve suddenly decided to host us like this.” His collar was undone and he had gone pink from a combination of wine and radish, bolder than his wont.
“Can’t we just,” the Butcher said, “have a meal together. Just every so often? What’s so bad about that.”
“What have you heard?” Cosserby was asking, almost treading on the man’s quiet words. “Let’s pool our resources, for reason’s sake. We’re all in this together, aren’t we?”
Lochiver made a rude noise from down the table, suggesting he wasn’t in anything with Cosserby, and most of the rest didn’t look too impressed either. If the conversation was a bath, then the Sonorist would be scrubbing his own back. At Alv’s elbow, the hapless Maric Jack was plaintively saying that he didn’t know what was going on and what was this echo business?
“Come on, Ollery, be straight with us,” Cosserby insisted. “I got my orders through. A dozen Sonori to be charged and ready for morning. I don’t think it’s just because they want to beef out the parade ground. What have they told you?”
“They tell me nothing.” The Butcher wasn’t meeting the man’s bespectacled gaze. Alv watched the strings about the table pull taut in different directions, the interplay of personalities that was so messy, so fascinating. Unfocus her eyes a little and she could see the strands that bound them together, just as she could see the attendant spirits that squabbled at Jack’s elbow, or lapped at the butter beside Tallifer’s plate.
And it was Tallifer they were looking at, in the end. Those who knew what was what. Banders nudged the old woman, when the silence had gone on enough. “Come on,” she said. “You always hear more than the rest of us. No idea how, but you do.”
Because she listens, Alv thought. Because Tallifer was old enough to feel the cold and the aches more, and to know herself vulnerable and fragile. And so she listened and she watched for where the next blow would come from, so she could brace herself against it.
“We’re doing this then, are we?” Tallifer complained. “You all do like to spoil the taste of good food in the mouth, don’t you.”
“Oh just spill it,” said Banders, who’d had more wine than food by that point.
“Higher Orders are going for the big push,” Tallifer said. “I’ve had a supply tally in, and I’m sure Chief has too. And they always say it’s just routine, but when we counted the bandages and the salves we both knew it was because they’d see use. A major advance across the contested stretch to break the Loruthi lines and take another few miles off them. We’ll be up to our elbows for as long as it takes, and probably we’ll be moving forwards to follow the fighting. That’s my prediction. This is the big one.”
“Well that’s…” Cosserby didn’t seem to know what to do with the answer now he had it. “I mean it’s proper, obviously. It’s expected. The right thing to do. But… um…”
“Yes, I can see how it must be very hard for you,” Tallifer said. “Your machines must be very scared about losing their metal limbs or having their nice shiny finishes ruined. I’m sure it’s very traumatic to mend them. All those screws and cogs and the floor running with oil.” Alv could only admire the way Tallifer could say the words entirely pleasantly and simultaneously with the feeling of shoving a knife up Cosserby’s nose.
“I…” he stammered. “Didn’t mean. I mean that’s. Not really fair.”
“Oh clam up,” Lochiver said.
“Sometimes,” the Butcher’s voice rolled out, louder now, to flatten the nascent argument, “you just want a good meal.” At a nod, his boy was up and racing Masty to refill the wine jug. “It’ll be fine. It’s not the first time.” His narrow eyes flicking to Jack. “For most of us. You’ve been in a fight, Jack?”
“Been near where one was happening, Chief,” the Maric said, neither a boast nor a confession. A remark almost Divinati in its balance, what it said, what it concealed. Alv decided she liked the man a little. And he’d had steady hands. Perhaps he’d work out after all.
“Well that’s just great,” Banders told the recharged contents of her cup. “I mean I had things to do tomorrow, is all. Errands to run. I had a lovely crate of gaun thistle that a certain Fellow-Monitor would pay well over the odds for, which he won’t be able to on account of he’ll be leading his Company into actual fighting. I sometimes think this whole army business would work so much better if we didn’t have to— Fuck!” She stood up, then immediately sat down and stared at her plate. Such was her state and her reputation that nobody understood it was because a newcomer had entered the tent until the woman was at Ollery’s shoulder.
Fellow-Inquirer Prassel, their commanding officer, surveyed the table.
“Well,” she said. “Chief Accessory Ollery, you do set out a good spread.”
The Butcher was still for a moment, then leaned sideways and back until he had her in the corner of his eye.
“Magister,” he said. “I had assumed you’d be dining with Higher Orders.”
Prassel let that sit between them for a moment. Alv guessed that she had been, but the company hadn’t been to her taste. Perhaps it was the war talk doubtless rampant at that class of table. Perhaps it was that she’d recently reopened the wounds of her running battles with her peers. Maserley had a sharp tongue and a keen line in passive aggression, Alv had heard. And while Prassel was no slouch, doubtless it wore on her.
“Boy,” said Ollery. “Fresh plate, cutlery, cup. Now, you slack maggot.” As the boy scrambled to obey, he collected his own and stood, stepping aside ponderously. “Magister, the table is yours.”
Prassel looked as though it was a gift she’d rather return for the money equivalent, but sat down anyway, the accoutrements of dining manifesting before her almost magically as the boy flurried them down. By then, Masty was on his feet, and Ollery shouldered around the edge of the tent to crunch down on his stool, shunting Jack sideways. Masty somehow managed to serve Prassel a full portion of meal on his way round, then appeared at Lochiver’s end with two more stools, one for him and one for the boy.
“So, might there be an announcement in the air, magister,” Tallifer put in, just as the Fellow-Inquirer got her spoon to her lips.
“Oh we’re doing this now, are we? Oh good,” Lochiver said sourly. “Someone pass the damn ivrel down again. I’m not getting through this without seconds.”
*
He got the ivrel, and all the rest of it, and in anticipation of one of those cold arguments where nobody was entertaining enough to start shouting, he shovelled a fistful onto his plate and added some of the red, too. Let Tallifer bitch. Having something to complain about was good for her.
“Nothing you need to concern yourself about, Accessory,” said Prassel crisply.
Lochiver wiped his fingers down his shirt and then set to scooping cooling stew up with bare hands, sucking the residue from under his filthy nails. Plenty went on his cuffs and plenty more on the table. Sturge, Lord of the Unclean Sacristy, went lethargically after each spilled drop, taking them as the offerings they were. A thing that was leech and slug, slime-mould and insect, all the plagues of the world incarnate in the one body. A holy terror, or it had been. Very much the villain, in the Jarokiri myth cycles nobody was allowed to talk about. Lochiver looked on the diminutive monster almost fondly.
The Maric was looking, too. The Maric could see Sturge, and Mazdek too, according to Tallifer. He was some sort of god-hunter, then. It was another trade the Pals recruited foreigners for. Lochiver wondered if he’d have to kill the man, to protect Sturge from his predations. He wondered how he’d do it. It wouldn’t be the first time. Yes, fierce priest of a loathsome divinity, driver of the world’s rotting, the eater of foundations, the festerer of corpses, yes! Except it would be the first time in quite a while, and you got out of the habit of murder, whether votive sacrifice or just killing in self-defence. You lost your edge. Lochiver had to admit it had probably been quite a while since he’d had an edge. One advantage of being encysted here within the Pal army was that there were a lot of people around to do your killing for you.
Jack met his gaze and, though Lochiver was trying to make it unfriendly, smiled a bit. I don’t fall for your witless wonder act, the old man thought, and smiled right back, doing that beatific imbecile act that put people off their guard. I’ll have a knife kept sharp and filthy for you, my son, oh yes. Benevolent beam, as of gaga grandpa.
And Jack bought that, apparently, and instead was trying to speak to Prassel, actually direct to their commanding officer like he’d never been in the army before.
“I wanted to thank you,” Lochiver heard, and then a withering look from the woman stopped him. And, honestly, nobody should want to thank Prassel. Woman was a necromancer, which by Jarokiri standards was a sacrilege beyond even Sturge’s putrid excesses. The people she did favours for were already dead.
“You’re one of mine,” Prassel told Jack flatly. “If Fellow-Archivist Thurrel wants to file a requisition with the relevant office then he can have you. But he can’t just take you. Not even from a brothel wagon.”
Lochiver hadn’t heard that part of the story and cackled with glee at the way the man shrank back.
“It wasn’t…”
“Oh nobody cares,” Banders said carelessly, treading on whatever sanctimonious gem Cosserby was about to come out with. “Wait, was it one of those ones? It wasn’t a circle house one was it? The Allorwen vice?” Her eyes danced. “I hear they take your soul as payment.”
“That’s not – no, they don’t,” Jack said.
She crowed with triumph. “So you do know!” Then visibly remembered that Prassel was there and grimaced. “I mean – I don’t know what I mean. Ignore me.”
“If only,” Prassel said, and Lochiver laughed again and added more ivrel.
“They’ve had me doing the count,” Tallifer observed, ostensibly to Alv, across from her. “Even Cosserby has been told to polish his toy soldiers. Seems odd, doesn’t it? For nothing. Odd use of time and resources.” And that was the mood killed again because for a fire priestess Tallifer could be a real bucket of cold water.
“I can see I need to set the record straight,” Prassel said, and that quietened all of them. “I have had no formal notification of action. I’m aware that… certain preparatory orders have been received. Here and across the camp. I’ve been assembling a ground-clearer squad myself, as some of you are aware. But the army has a duty to test its own state of readiness and nothing has—” and even as the words were sliding smoothly from her mouth an aide pushed into the tent and handed her a folded flimsy of paper. The cheap onion-skin stuff used for orders. Lochiver was moderately surprised that Prassel’s answering look didn’t have the messenger catching on fire.
She unfolded the note, read it, bringing it close in the manner of someone who absolutely cannot be seen wearing glasses.
When she’d done, she slipped the orders into her jacket and took up her cup.
“Drink up,” she said flatly. “Busy day tomorrow.”