A Palleseen writer once described the world of superstition and unreason that they were bringing perfection to as ‘the Great Night’, contrasted with the clarity of their rational sun. Which writer was subsequently excised from the Pal canon because personification of an abstract is in itself irrational. Nonetheless, the night persists.
Maric Jack, or whatever he’s calling himself these days, sits in a low and meagre tent on an army-issued bedroll – neither of them his enough to call them his, yet – and knows that all around him the hospital department is making its final preparations. Now the formal orders have come through. Now the war is about to break into a run. And it seems insane to him that it’s just now, just late evening, when the formalities have been distributed throughout the camp. That the actual advance will begin tomorrow, but what does he know? The others hadn’t seemed overly surprised by the turn of events. The Pal army is intended to be such a well-calibrated engine than it can roll into motion in an instant, and apparently that’s exactly what it is.
*
Nearby, in the main tent, Masty has cleared away the carcase of the dinner. The tables haven’t stayed empty for long. Instead of retiring, here are the Butcher and Tallifer, going over their records, double checking them against supplies in case Banders has some racket running again and half the boxes turn out to be empty. Amazing the number of different way that woman finds to get demoted.
“Have these ready and open,” Ollery decrees, ticking items on their lists. “These ready for travel. Agree?”
“Hmn.” Tallifer nods. Inside her sleeves and across the inside back of her jacket, her god writhes. Mazdek, drawing a hot trail against her skin. And when she was a votive priestess it was her god, and when she was on the run with a feculent disease priest it was her charge and ward. And now she’s been in the hospital department of Forthright Battalion for twelve whole years and so has Mazdek. They’re veterans together and, in its squirmings, she can read her own anxieties. Mazdek, incinerator of corruption and scourge of the unrighteous, has become a tame flame. His tongue caresses the blades of her scalpels so that they might cut clean. He bathes in the bowls where they dump the forceps and the probes, and performs what minute cleansings his fires are capable of. And Lochiver does the rest. The pair of them are one reason the experimental field surgery has persisted all this time without some zealous Inquirer or Archivist shutting the whole show down as a hole of superstition and witchery. Which it is. Tallifer has spoken to medicos in other battalions, sometimes. She’s heard of the numbers they lose to infection and disease, even with every advance in modern Pal medicine.
It wasn’t even as if she’d been a particularly good surgeon, at the start. She’s learned the trade on the job, and there are few jobs more horrific to learn on. But the cleanliness tips the scales. Hers and – incredible thought it is to report – Lochiver’s. The filthiest man alive, in mind and body, but it has its advantages.
Ollery’s boy comes in with a tally of the reagents in his tent. Close enough to the numbers the Butcher had been expecting that it serves as confirmation. Ollery curses him for taking so long about it, brandishes a hand the size of the boy’s head, but no more than brandishing. The boy looks dead on his feet, and at last Ollery sends him away. Then turns a sullen, defensive look on Tallifer. “What?”
“From me? Nothing. I never wanted children.”
“Never wanted or weren’t allowed?” he challenges her. She actually has to think for a second before she’s sure of the answer.
“I mean the second first, and then the first, after,” she tells him. He rolls his eyes as though she’s asked him a riddle and she adds, “It was… the something something unblemished purity of… you’d think I’d remember this stuff.” But it was almost four decades since taking the vows and over two since they’d meant anything. “Lochiver says he’s got about a dozen bastards as far as he knows.”
Ollery was giving her the sort of look she’d come to dread, because he was about to Pry Into Her Affairs. “But you and he…?”
“Oh, like a pair of randy pine martens,” she tells him. “But children, no. And if you ask me how he ever gets other women to open up for him then, Ollery, you have found one of the great mysteries of the universe. But somehow it happens.”
*
The subject of their speculation, Lochiver, is at his own preparations. In the dead of night – it’s that late, now – a pair of soldiers come for what he has. They’re Cohort-Archivists, junior members of the School of Correct Erudition, wearing heavy coats and protective gloves, goggles and masks. It’s a longstanding arrangement he’s had with whatever local branch of the service exists, wherever the Forthright is posted. He has a little hand wagon for them, clunking with clay jars. They handle it very carefully. Nobody wants it hitting a rut at unwise speeds and turning over. In the jars, something that looks very much like cloudy yellow-orange urine. It is not Lochiver’s urine, and while under any other circumstances this would be a relief, in this case it’s something worse.
Sturge, the vile god of filth, does not draw slug trails about his arms and shoulders. Sturge, needless to say, lives in Lochiver’s breeches. Of course it does, filthy and depraved as it is. Not a particularly comfortable image, then, to say he feels it stirring as the jars are carefully manhandled away. Like a parent waving goodbye to its offspring. Or at least some mother beast to its myriad eggs. They are being removed for careful disposal, or at least he hopes they are. The idea that the Pals might try to weaponise the Effluent of Sturge again has occurred to him, but he reckons he’d have heard of the death toll by now. Either in some rebellious territory or some Palleseen scholar’s retreat. And he doesn’t tell Sturge, the blind and almost mindless, what happens to its beloved secretions. All that pestilence and unsoundness of flesh that comes into the medical tent and runs riot about the wounds, the opened bowels, the perforated stomachs, the gashes clogged with mud and blood. It comes to the shrill cry of his pipe. He earns his keep, and he also annoys everyone in the process. And that’s not actually a religious duty, because Sturge was once a very serious wicked god, but it amuses him.
Now he has a new batch of jars to ink up, scribing the sacred symbols of Sturge, that were blasphemous to all the other faiths back in Jarokir. Now just one more example of what the Pals would rather didn’t exist, but will still use in this one hospital. He writes each character with swift strokes and long familiarity. Every jar gets them, so the disease and the rot will know where to go. He has, perhaps, the second most unpleasant job of them all, but he’s by far the most unpleasant person so considers himself overqualified.
*
The most unpleasant work belongs to Prassel. Not a case of the superior officer nobly reserving the duty for herself, it’s just that nobody else has the skills to do it. She’s not in the hospital compound, but her own storage hut, the one with the blocks of ice melting away into the ground.
They’d asked her for fifty, in the end, but here she is with a squad of thirty-nine and it’ll have to do. She didn’t feel up to stalking the convalescence wards with a misericord. Thirty-nine corpses, each with a general purpose tableth under its tongue, each on its feet and wearing a uniform, ready to go out as the vanguard and clear whatever nasty surprises the Loruthi have left behind. It appals her that this comes under the jurisdiction of the hospital department. It doubtless appals the actual medicos because of the reminder that even their failures are useful to the army. It appals Prassel because the fact of it means she gets to play ringmaster to the Butcher’s circus with all its connotations of superstitious idolatry. Nothing that looks good on her record.
‘Unnaturals’, that’s what she gives them. A label as militarily exacting as ‘cavalry’. Her corpses, Maserley’s conjurations and – most recent addition – Cosserby’s Sonori constructs. Back in the early days of Palleseen expansion, Unnaturals were the terror of the battlefield, the great weapons of unreason that the newly emergent state had to overcome to bring the Sway to other lands. There was barely a magician or a temple or a cult that couldn’t call up some monster to strike terror into the stalwart Pal soldier. Except, as time went on and the Pals advanced their science, the monsters shrank away like shadows when the light is moved. A well-disciplined division of human soldiers armed with batons will always be far more versatile and dangerous than a mob of monsters. There’s a limit to what she can get her corpses to do, guiding them through the long eye of a telescope. Maserley’s contracts are only fit to bind demons to simple tasks – she saw a contract once, trying to get a demon to assassinate a specific target; a thousand close-written pages of ifs, thens and buts, and it still hadn’t worked. And the automata are just lumbering strength that you have to point in a direction and then pick up the pieces later. So, although necromancy is a science – and it is a science, thank you very much – the arts of corpse-handling are less and less regarded, yet that’s all anybody wants her to do. Because of the hospital, and her theoretical ready access to bodies. The real money and prestige is in ghost work, where finesse and skill can shine, but nobody asks it of her.
The corpses are still intact, their tablethi still in place. She has to have each of them open its mouth for her, shift their decaying tongues, as though she’s added ‘zombie dentist’ to her professional skillset. Just as well they’re being deployed tonight. Any longer and she’d have to get Lochiver in here to keep them fresh, and nobody wants that.
*
Back in the hospital, Maric Jack lies on his bedroll and stares at the inside of his eyelids. He can hear the gods creeping about inside their box as though they’re playing murder in the dark. Then God is next to him. Even without sight he can always tell.
“There’s going to be a fight tomorrow,” he murmurs.
“Well, I got that much,” God tells him sourly. “Given that your corpse-fondler out and out said it. You think deafness is one of my divine attributes, do you?”
“You’re not to do anything, without my say-so,” Jack tells Him.
“I? I’m your God,” God says, incensed. “I’ll do what I damn well please.”
“They took me to a Decanter,” Jack says. “Like in Ilmar, only this one’s a clever sod. And that ‘corpse-fondler’ as you call her, she saved me today but no guarantees. She only did it because she hated the guts of at least one of the others. The demonist.” And Jack falls silent, dragged into unwilling remembrance. Unwilling but not as unwelcome as it should have been, until he swallows and forces his mind elsewhere. God, who knew a uniform could be worn so well! “He knows – not the demonist, but the Decanter. He knows I’ve got gods. He’ll be on the lookout.”
“We’re not fleas,” God snaps. “You’ve not got gods like we’re a disease.”
I sometimes wonder, Jack thinks but doesn’t say. “Just… don’t go healing anyone unless I ask you. Please. Or, firstly, they’ll just die because everyone round here’s a soldier and doing harm is basically their job. And secondly I’ll get into trouble. And you’ll get rendered down for spare magic. All three of you.”
“Like I care about the others,” God snarls. “Was that an impure thought, by the way? I’m sure I detected an impure thought.”
“I’m not your priest. I’m allowed impure thoughts,” said Jack, trying not to have any. “Did you get that? About not bringing someone back from the point of death because you thought it would be funny when they dropped dead again a day later?”
He’s waiting for God to say that it was pretty funny, but the divine He doesn’t go there. Unlikely that the ancient divinity is learning tact in His old age, but it’s an obvious opportunity missed. Instead, he has the sense of God sitting down on the rolled breeches he’s using as a pillow, right beside his head.
“You should have said, about your name,” God says softly. “Your real name.”
“Ach, what does it even matter?” Jack turns over and puts the back of his head to God.
“If you die in the fighting then they’ll bury you with the wrong name. That’s important. Your ghost could end up all over. Never find its way home.”
“I’m not fighting. I’m helping the poor bastards who’ve been fighting,” Jack says, a statement he’ll remember later, when things go wrong. “Anyway, home to where?” Jack’s on the point of sleep now and wishes God would shut the hell up. Possibly God says, “Me,” but he isn’t sure, later, whether he really heard it. Instead he mumbles, “Anyway, you’re one to talk. You’re just ‘God’. How lazy is that.”
And he thinks – or else he’s dreaming by then – that God says, “I have a name. I had one once,” and that becomes enormously important to pursue, but God isn’t with him any more, is back in His box with the other abandoned divinities, and anyway, he’s asleep.
*
In her own tent, the interior of which is neat enough to make a parade-ground Statlos weep for the order of it, Alv sits on an embroidered mat and contemplates the skin of her inner arms. In the faint lamplight, it glimmers with a thousand tiny motes. The mark of the Divine City, a sign that she was born into the single place of perfection in all the world, where the great magics can be accomplished as easily as thought. Because, when both arms are equal, it doesn’t matter how massive the weights are. The home of the Divinati, whom even the Pals respect.
But balance has a price, and she was chosen to pay it. She wasn’t even one of the luckless surplus, insufficiently skilled, who were cast out every year because the Divine City can only support the very best. She’d been one of the very best, and had never even questioned the fact that some of those children she’d grown up with were no longer there. That was, literally, the way things must be. And therefore it was just and good.
And then her own fall from grace came to pass, and everyone else not touched by it agreed that it, too, was just and good. And she was left on the outside, in the Rest Of The World. In the Palleseen army, of all places. In the hospital unit. Teaching basic sympathetic magic to Pal medicos and healing wounds the only way that balance would allow.
The worst part of it all, in a way, is the friends she’s made, on her path to this point. Because if it wasn’t for Ollery and Tallifer, Lochiver and Masty, then surely she’d have found a way out, having no reason to stay in. Surely she’s paid off her debts. But friendship is also a debt, and each one of them’s a hook in her flesh that nothing can heal.
And so she sits here, long past midnight with a battle brewing on the morn. No need to sleep. It’s something the Divinati long ago learned to balance away, some tiny part of their mind slumbering every waking moment so that the majority can be alert at all times. Just sits, and feels herself hurtling further away from her state of grace, falling down a pit lined with jagged spurs, wounds she inflicts upon herself that she has no control over. It’s whatever gets served up at the Butcher’s table, that’s within her capacity to take on. She is like the bucket in the corner of the hospital tent that they throw the cut-away flesh into. She’s the hole they cast wounds down, until she’s full.
In the lamp’s wan glow she takes a razor and draws thin, neat lines into the skin of her inner arms, feeling the exquisite thin metal taste of the pain. Because it’s her pain, and it’s her choice, and it’s something she has control over, unlike everything else in the broken ruin her life’s become. Since she fell from the Divine City and impacted with the rest of the world. She cuts and cuts, and watches each line dim and fade in turn, from bloody gash to week-old scar to the faintest silver tracery within the glitter of her skin.
*
Even later – the small hours of the morning, so he’s had enough sleep to function – Cohort-Monitor Cosserby stands in the workshop that adjoins the hospital and looks at his charges. Six Sonori, giant metal statues, arm-heavy as apes. Each one has, set into the mouth of its small head, a tableth. An echo of Prassel’s corpses that neither of them would much appreciate if they knew. A complicated tableth with a logic-train that would make the prosthetic arm look like a prentice piece, because Sonori are sophisticated technology. They won’t be solving differential equations any time soon but they need to make decisions on the battlefield, to recognise a Pal uniform, to handle difficult terrain.
One of them has tilted its head to look at him, and that means trouble.
“Kneel down,” he tells it. It’s the mirror-finished one, the leader the others will follow. That means he’s going to spend the next hour fiddling with the squad dynamics to re-establish proper order.
It kneels carefully, still looming over him.
“Open up,” Cosserby says.
“Why,” it says. The voice the Sonori manifest is, always, the voice of a bell. It does not come from the fixed open mouth in that howling metal face, but from the hollowness of them, a faint resonance of the metal shaped into that one world.
“Because I’m telling you to.” And he should have been ready for this. The lead unit has been in service through several engagements. Probably it was time for this glitch to happen. Although maybe it’s occurring sooner and sooner these days. A young science still, the work of a Sonorist. Much to be understood.
“Why must we fight?” And how the thing even heard that they were going into battle tomorrow, he doesn’t know. Unless it’s learned to recognise his own preparations. Which it shouldn’t be able to do, but then it shouldn’t be able to talk either.
“Orders,” Cosserby says. “Open up, please.”
“Why must we fight?” it asks again. A great, slow voice, remarkably soft given the bulk of the thing.
The Sonori are simple tools. He and Prassel’s work have that in common too. Except for this. If he could somehow harness this emergent awareness then he’d have the army’s new super-soldier on his hands and a Fellow’s rank papers in his back pocket. But whenever they come to this point, it always manifests in the same way.
Why?
Cosserby has never been able to formulate an answer.
He raps at its chin and the jaw hinges slightly, so that he can remove the tableth. The metal body is instantly immobile. Because that’s all it is. An articulated shell, a charged tableth, and the skein of graven commands. Nothing that, by anybody’s understanding, should lead to this questioning. Or anything more than brute, automatic action. It’s like a watermill asking what you want the flour for, or a printing press complaining about your prose. And yet it happens. Again and again.
He takes the tableth to his anvil and stares down at it for a long time before taking up a hammer and giving the article three furious blows with all his strength. And it’s not so very much strength, given that he’s a small man and out of shape, but tablethi are soft metal and the hammer is hard. And he’s just woken the whole camp, but only a little in advance of the general reveille. And the tableth will need recasting and re-inscribing, but he has a half-dozen ready to go, the same inscription-net on each. He slots one into place and tells the polished Sonori to stand, and it does so. Mindless, obedient, battle-ready.
They laugh at him, the medicos. They sneer. He doesn’t have to get his hands dirty, they say. That he is attached to their hospital seems to them to make a mockery of the value of human life. Cosserby sits on his anvil and stares at the flattened tableth. In his head he hears only that sonorous voice asking, Why?