Foreigners visiting a Pal army camp for the first time are often surprised that so many faces aren’t Palleseen. The pale imitations that are the Accessories form a substantial fraction of the whole. The surprise derives from an inadequate understanding of the Pal creed. The Palleseen are all about finding a use for their erstwhile enemies. For simultaneously remaking them in the Pal image, and putting them in a uniform that tells them they’ll never quite be perfect enough.
His name isn’t Masty. It isn’t even his nickname, just what his nickname had been crunched into, Pal mouth after Pal mouth, until nobody can even remember the original.
He’s up in time to see the vanguard off. Him, Cosserby and Prassel. The Unnaturals go out first. There’s some firecracker work then, the ground between the Pal and Loruthi lines erupting in a variety of nastiness. Some artillery, some entrenched traps of various sorts. The physical kind, like the bonecutters that scythe the shambling cadavers down. Ghost-mines that have howling spirits briefly hissing about the field, save that corpses and Sonori are already as inhabited as they’re ever going to be, and the mines were calibrated against the living. Masty sees one of the Sonori – the lead one with the polished chest – get knocked down, bell-body smashed flat by a projectile from the enemy lines, and then all of their engines were erupting. Prassel abandons her cadavers to collapse like cut puppets, and Cosserby can only hope that his tablethi logic guides his metal troops home for repair, or that they can be salvaged from the field. It’s time for the main event.
The Pal’s own artillery speaks from behind the lines, tableth-charged mortars hurling incendiaries and bonecutter shot high overhead to come down somewhere that, presumably, the enemy would rather they hadn’t. Great-batons spit searing energy at every enemy position that has just revealed itself. And, against this display of ranged muscle, the troops advance. Wave after wave in calibrated intervals, not walking but not running full tilt, an ordered hustle over the contested ground hoping that the worst of the traps have been cleared. Overhead, Fellow-Invigilator Maserley’s demon Unnaturals launch into the air: ugly, ungainly things, winged and horned and roaring their defiance of all humanity and their loathing of the Kings Below as they vault to their bloody ruin.
It all comes down to human flesh and blood in the end.
“Orderly, move up the hospital,” Prassel says. “Follow the advance and establish a forward surgery wherever Chief thinks best.”
“Yes, magister.” Masty salutes her back as she turns away. Cosserby gives him a game attempt at sympathy, as Masty is just about the only member of the department who doesn’t sneer at him.
“Best of luck,” the Sonorist says. “I’d better go pick up my toys. They’ll want them to storm a breach or something soon enough.”
The department and a squad of soldiers is already taking down the hospital tent and loading wagons, when Masty makes himself apparent. It isn’t as though anyone can still be sleeping after all that. Ollery stands in the middle of it, supervising the supplies they’re taking forward for the first wave, shouting at soldiers who technically outrank him and receiving no argument. Right here, he is the lord of this kingdom, and who knows who’ll be under his jurisdiction soon enough.
Then the casualties are coming in, before they’ve even packed up, and it’s time for hell to open for business once again.
*
They’re scouts, an advance wave across the contested ground even before the Unnaturals. Gathering information for the advance, spotting for the artillery, some kind of sneak work in the last dark hours before morning. The Loruthi’d had their own counter-scouts at work and the two had clashed, a representation in miniature of what was to come. Who won? Not a question Masty or anyone else in the department gets to ask. Instead it’s just the urgent shouts of the living and intact scouts hauling their injured comrades in. Not even stretchers, just bodies in arms and over shoulder or slung on jackets between them, and some of those bodies already expired on the way back from no-man’s-land.
Ollery becomes the Butcher. That’s how Masty thinks of it. He has the injured set down, looks over them. Hands already in his apron for drugs to kill the pain. Masty has learned a great deal of respect for the man’s ability to look over a wound and make a snap decision about whether it’s too trivial for now, or too serious for ever, or just bad enough to be sent to Hell. Whether the whetted knives of Tallifer or the other surgeons. Whether the eldritch mercies of Alv and her students. Whether it’s a quiet draft from the black flask because there’s no help here but a cessation of pain.
Masty is already there when the Butcher looks round. He and Maric Jack have the first man up on a quickly-unfolded table where Tallifer can look at a snapped forearm. Expose the bones, reset them as necessarily, swab. Then it’s Jack’s turn to stitch as she goes on to the next. Masty is already helping the next man to Alv. Two baton-shot wounds, one through the arm, the other skinning the ribs. An apprentice takes the charred gouges onto their own body, falling back shaking, out of the battle, having given all they have to give. The scout, immaculate save for the tears to their uniform, gets out of the way ready for the next.
And there’s been screaming since they came in, but Masty’s used to that. The bad dreams he wakes from are silences, not sounds of horror. He could sleep through it, if they didn’t need him. But here’s the screaming woman and the Butcher stares down at her, unsure for once in his life. The fire of a baton blast has turned the scout’s face to ash from nose to hairline, both eyes like knuckles of coal in blasted sockets. And she lives, and her high, keening grief and agony makes sure everyone knows that. Not the first soldier to get sent home a lifelong invalid, that’s for sure.
For a moment the Butcher has his black flask in hand, a terrible look on his face. Then he swaps it for a little yellow phial, forces the contents down the woman’s throat until her shrieks become gurgles.
“Get her out of here,” he snaps at Masty, but Alv’s hand is on the burly beef of his arm.
“No,” he tells the Divinati woman.
“Absolutely not,” he says, to her stare.
“I won’t have it. I’m Chief here. What good will you be?”
Masty swallows. The rest of the department is still up to their elbows in the injured, those that can be cut and wrapped and stitched and otherwise profitably put back together. Alv and the Butcher are a terrible still centre to all that bloody bustle.
“I still have more to give,” Alv says. Quiet, but Masty is close by then, clenching and unclenching his hands helplessly. She turns her solemn, beautiful, awful gaze to him, that won’t be turned on anyone for some time. “Bring them, please, Masty.” Always so polite, Alv. A scion of a more civilized city.
He gets the blinded scout up onto the table. Jack helps, as oblivious as always. Except he’s been around enough to understand how things work around here, and when Alv bends over the woman he mouths words, denials, forbiddances. But it’s not like the Divinati ever listened to anyone from less elegant cultures about how to do things.
Alv takes a deep breath. For a second her eyes are very wide, as though she’s trying to get the most possible use out of them before what happens next.
Masty wants to look away but that would be to belittle her sacrifice so he forces himself to watch. Watch as the cooked char bubbles to the surface of Alv’s glittering skin. As her eyes wither and cook and that face, an artist’s inspiration, parches into a clenched horror of blackened, ruined flesh and skin. She arches rigid – she feels all the pain, he knows, for all that she has ways to bargain her wholeness back from the universe in time. Her hands claw into the scout’s body and the red marks defile her own body as she takes it all on. The scout stares up at her, drugged and unseeing, never to really understand what happened. Probably not even to believe it second hand. Blinded? Me? Nonsense.
Masty catches Alv as she falls backwards. He tries to get her out, then. Get her to the back lines, to the convalescence tents. But she won’t go.
“I still have more to give.” Her mouth remains whole. “Just get me to the wagon, Masty. Please.” He, who saw her face go up like a burned map, can’t look at her now.
The Butcher looks on, impassive. “If Erinael was here…” he murmurs, when Masty leads Alv past. But she isn’t, and now it’s just the Butcher running the show. He’s no angel of mercy like Erinael was.
*
They grind forwards, a train of wagons amongst a greater train. Supplies and fresh troops heading for wherever the thrashing snake of the new front ends up. Getting out of the wagon every so often when the wheels get stuck, or when the ground is too uneven for the draft horses to pull alone. Masty, Jack, Banders, all putting their shoulders to the frame. Even the Butcher, squatting down at the tailboard, rolling his shoulders, groaning in effort as he shoves, feet sinking ankle-deep into the churn. Alv, standing aside to spare the meagre burden of her added weight. They’ve bandaged her face and it’s more to spare their eyes than salve hers.
Cosserby comes by, at one such straining stop. He has two Sonori with him, along with a snaking line of soldiers. The misting rain has started, by then, making the going even nastier. Cosserby has his tin soldiers get the wagons moving, metal strength turned to menial ends. And Masty wonders why they don’t just give the things over to this kind of work. Except some Pal officer saw them in action once, and set them down as assets of offence, and now that’s what they are on the books. War automata, not haulage engines.
For his efforts, Cosserby gets short thanks from any of his departmental fellows, and the regular officer he’s with bawls him out for the delay, too.
“I’ll try and find you, when you’re set,” he said, as his machines stomp off.
“How will we ever cope until you do?” Tallifer observes. He looks hurt, but the officer he’s with raps his shoulder with a baton, impatient to be gone. Soon, they’re all out of sight in the slanting curtains of rain and the wagons grind on. Without Prassel – she’s gone to do something more military than shunt wheels out of ruts – they just keep going until they find some casualties.
When they do, there’s already a skeleton of a tent there, a roof and poles but no sides, and the rain coming in every time there’s a gust of wind. The Butcher starts barking orders and Masty is throwing the tables up, kicking the props into place with the ease of long practise. The Butcher surveys the new meat and begins his infernal mathematics once again.
It’s later. Past-midday later. The rain’s come and gone and come back again. The sounds of fighting are distant, even the artillery. That’s the only clue to how the advance is going, because nobody who gets sent to Hell is particularly interested in discussing it. They’ve been at their bloody work for five hours, without pause. Half Alv’s student squad are on the convalescence wagons, heading back the way they came, written over with someone else’s wounds. Alv herself has a crippled arm and a shot-wound through the thigh but she refuses to go back. Masty’s set a stool out for her and she sits there, bandage-faced, an arm curled up against her breast within her jacket, the sleeve hanging empty. He’s spoken to her, low, urgent, against the cacophony of the wounded. Begged her to go. He’s seen her push her limits before, but not like this.
She grips his hand sightlessly. “I have more to give,” she spits out like she hates something. Perhaps the war, perhaps the Divine City, perhaps herself. Masty would weep, but a childhood in an army camp dries that kind of exhibition out of you.
“Orange salts!” the Butcher barks, like he’s selling something. He’s going about the tent with a bag full of paper twists, prepared earlier. Masty, who’s feeling underslept and numb, takes one and empties it onto his tongue, feeling the fizz. Banders nabs another, managing a chuckle despite the fact that there are bloody handprints across her shirt where the last casualty tried to fight being moved.
“Oh this is why we choose the soldiering life,” she says, and necks her portion. Tallifer, mid-surgery, opens her mouth and Banders doses her on the fly.
Jack watches this blankly. The Butcher rattles the bag under his nose and then moves on, but Masty abstracts a twist for him because he’ll need it.
“To keep you going,” he says, aware he’s speaking too loud and staring too much.
“How much longer are we going?” Jack doesn’t understand, but he’ll have a thorough grounding in it all by the end. Whenever that is.
“Til dark at least,” Masty shouts. “At least. The big assaults can go on longer. Two days. Three.” And they’re not the only hospital, but they’re the forlorn hope one, the one the worst get sent to. The hospital where miracles can happen.
Jack stares, blinks, swallows, opens the package and tastes the contents, always a mistake.
“Get it down quickly,” Masty advises.
“It’s better that way?” Jack guesses.
“I mean, no, but it’s quicker.”
Jack does as advised and his eyes bug and he chokes and regrets many things. Always the worst, the first time. He says something in Maric that’s probably an ancestral curse. Banders claps him hard on the back and then waves a packet at Lochiver, who’s been droning out his pipe music long enough to have his lips and everyone else’s ears bleeding. There’s a full jar at his feet, as though he’s been considerately incontinent. Masty takes the opportunity to get it away from everyone, marked for ‘hostile disposal’ as the military phrase goes. When he gets back, a new consignment of the damned is being stretchered in by soldiers who turn around and head back to the front the moment they’ve dropped their fallen comrades.
“A good batch,” Lochiver comments, smacking his cracked lips. “Oh that’s the real stuff.”
*
It’s past dark, closing on midnight. The fighting has stilled but not stopped, both sides lying tense in trenches and tents, dugouts and foxholes, waiting for the first touch of the sun to kindle the festivities again. The work of the hospital hasn’t stopped. Alv lays her hand on a whimpering soldier and turns her swaddled face to the ceiling of the tent as her middle finger twists backwards on itself.
“Now,” Masty says to her. “Please, Alv. Please, Guest-Adjutant. That’s enough.” Because, of all of them, she’s not a mere Accessory. She’s something special.
Alv lets out a shuddering breath. For a moment he thinks she’ll agree, but then she shakes her head. Not even the More to give speech, just that blank negation. He gives her water, the jug to her lips to spare her having to grope for it with her maimed hands. She has become a boarding house whose doors are always open to new wounds, and one little attic room still looking for a tenant. Masty knows the Butcher is sparing her as much as possible, but the injured keep coming in. There have been hundreds today, just at their one field surgery.
“Blue salts!” cries the Butcher.
“Oh shit, we’re there, are we?” Banders says. She’s sitting on the edge of a momentarily unoccupied table, scrubbing at her hands with a sopping red towel. There’s a lull, Masty realises. The injured who need immediate attention have been attended to, the ones past help have died and the rest can wait.
“What are blue salts?” Jack asks.
“They’re the ones that come after the orange ones,” Banders tells him. “Just hope we don’t get as far as the purple ones. I didn’t sleep for a week after those, and when I did, the fucking dreams, man. Reason help me, the dreams.”
Masty takes the paper twist from the Butcher’s bag, the whole day already feeling like one of those kind of dreams. The blue salts hiss and seethe against the back of his throat and he has to fight the urge to vomit up everything past the orange salts and to his breakfast. Jack has knocked his back and is crying tears of blood, which can happen. Not that anyone’ll notice a little more blood.
*
Later, two hours before dawn, Masty does get a chance to lie down, although the blue salts mean he does it with his eyes open, lying on a blanket over cold mud under one of the tables, Banders on one side of him and one of Alv’s students on the other. Shaking with cold and shock and fatigue. Lochiver is snoring somewhere, somehow, flute still clutched in his bony hands. Somewhere close by, Jack is having one of those one-sided conversations he does, and honestly it’s not Masty’s place to judge anyone for their peculiarities. You don’t get sent to serve in Hell if you’re normal.
Even as the grey light brings more rain with it, the first catch of the new day is being hauled in, heralded by a fresh chorus of hoarse, ragged voices. Masty sits up and rams his head into the underside of the table, but there’s no time to swear at it because the Butcher needs an orderly at his elbow. He kicks Banders, trips over Jack, and yet is still in place when needed. Because that’s him. Because that’s what he does. He’s reliable. It’s how he survived the army since he was a foreign kid of six years old ripped from his home and family and station.
Cosserby turns up, midmorning, looking grey and ragged. No Sonori with him, so presumably his charges have been shipped back to the rear lines in pieces. He’s nominally on his way to put them back together as best he can, but he said he’d find them and he has. Even Tallifer doesn’t have any slights for him by then. She lets him sharpen her scalpels and repair a broken set of forceps with shaking hands. He doesn’t look at the opened stomach of the man she’s operating on. He doesn’t like the sight of blood, does Cosserby. And yet, for this brief moment, he’s here and making himself useful.
“Lilac salts!” the Butcher spits out. His eyes are red as a drunkard’s, and probably he has been drinking a little, just to keep himself going. The great slab of a hand shakes as it proffers the latest bag of magic.
“Oh sod me,” Banders says. “Well hello, sleepless nights.” Her grin, as she takes a paper packet, is a little hysterical. “Hey, Chief. Tell me you’ve not mixed any of the red.”
“Oh we’ve got the red to come, never you worry,” the Butcher tells her.
Jack and Masty look each other in the too-wide eyes before they take their doses. The stuff tastes like bile and burns all the way down. Paroxysms of coughing and then a jolt like being stabbed. He’s never been so awake since the last time the purple came out.
One of Alv’s students is at work. A Pal with a basic grounding in sympathetic healing, taking on wounds that are life-threatening on the field but survivable here in the hospital’s controlled environment. His victim has a broken arm. He braces himself, wincing against the pain, but the purple fortifies him and he takes it, collapsing back onto the stool Masty has ready for him. But something’s not right. He tries to speak. He’s clutching at his abdomen. A sudden spatter of blood explodes from his lips. Alv is demanding to know what’s going on, her voice little more than a rattle and a croak. Her student is pitching sideways, suddenly fighting to breathe.
Masty understands before the rest do, because he saw it all happen. The Butcher’s art isn’t a science. Sometimes there are too many and he gets it wrong, like everyone does. The obvious agony of a broken arm, the bone sheared through the skin. Not the hidden snare of internal bleeding, broken organs lying below unblemished skin like a reef in calm water.
It’s the shock, Masty knows. The shock of taking it all on at once. The man, Alv’s student, has overextended. The Pals have only a rudimentary grasp of the art despite all her teaching. She’s fumbling for him, and Masty knows what she’d do if her fingers touched his skin. And she has many gifts but immortality is not one of them. He grits his teeth and pulls her away, and there isn’t enough of her to let her fight him.
The Butcher catches Masty’s eye and nods. They cannot lose Alv. Lose this man instead.
Jack is on his knees beside the man – not one of Hell’s damned, this casualty, but one of Hell’s own, a healer. Already shuddering, frothing, fitting as his body fails to manage the damage it has taken on.
“Do it!” Jack shouts. And then, “I said not until I told you!” And then he’s bending to the ear of the dying man, speaking rapidly but with the weird air of someone trying to explain the legal small print. A question, and Masty sees the bloody lips frame an answer.
“Do it!” Jack orders, or begs. And then more, in Maric, a fierce argument with nothing at all. Except, of course, they all remember the spy miraculously snatched from the grave. They hold their breath, and maybe this will be another Erinael after all.
There is no miracle. The man lies still. Jack won’t have it. He won’t let them take the body away. “No wait, sorry, please, wait. We can still, there’s still, time, there’s. Time. Please. Please.”
Dead is dead. Not without sympathy, the Butcher shoves him aside so they can put the corpse with all their other failures.
“You son of a bitch!” Jack spits, leaping to his feet. He’s staring at his box now, the one he schlepped all the way here on his back and then just discarded in a corner of the hospital tent with the other supplies. “You couldn’t—? You don’t know it wouldn’t have… you… you…” And he has his army-issue boot raised over the box like he’s about to trample it to kindling. “You…” he says again, not shouting now, aware they’re all staring at him.
Banders hugs him from behind, puts her sharp chin on his shoulder. “I know,” she says, although not one of them there really knows what the hell is wrong with Maric Jack. But still, “I know,” she says, and that seems to help him a bit.