The Palleseen war machine advanced. That was what it was for. The Temporary Commission of Ends and Means that ruled the Pal Archipelago had designed it to be inexorable, rolling over all opposition to bring yet another den of superstition and credulity into the liberating light of reason. It did not retreat or give back ground. Obviously.
God was glowering at Jack from atop His box. But with qualifiers. It wasn’t just the usual hostility, the disdain, the eye-rolling exasperation as His former priest did something foolish or foreign or both. There was a new edge to God’s regard. Because Jack had torn a strip off God in a way he hadn’t before. He’d laid down some blistering invective over the dead Pal’s body, cursed God to hell a dozen different ways, made such threats… Just as well it had all been in Maric, really, because the Pals would have hauled him away to a firing squad or a madhouse otherwise. And God had initially stood on the dignity of I am your God, you’re not to question me and I can do what I like, but crumbled like walls of sand before Jack’s raging sea. Until now He sat sullen on His box just possibly entertaining the idea that this time He had gone too far.
Jack hoped so. He really did. And the other two deities were hiding inside the box, making it very clear that the business was most definitely between Jack and his god, and any other divinities around wouldn’t venture an opinion.
He finished with the bandage. They were down to a batch of the lesser injured. His victim was a man whose arm had been cut up by the edge of a bonecutter blast, some nasty-looking chopped meat but all on the surface. Jack tied, tugged, not too tight. “It’s clean now,” he told the man. “Keep it that way. Get it checked in two days.” It was what he’d heard Masty and Banders say to the proud new owners of similar wounds. Back in Ilmar when he’d been patching people hurt by the Pals, he’d not had that luxury. After his ministrations they’d had to fend for themselves.
Then Prassel was there, striding through the camp, tugging her gloves back on. “Pack up and move out!” she snapped at them. “Everything onto the wagons. We’re following the front.” Jack looked past her and blanched, actually retreated until his box was at his heels. There were corpses there, not the two-score mine-clearers turned into bloody bunting in the vanguard, but what looked like sixty at least. Most wore Pal uniforms, but a few were in leather and brass, or deep green. These were the casualties who didn’t make it to Hell, he realised. Dead on the field and already repurposed. Nobody else cared. It was old news to them, the gloss of shock and outrage rubbed well off by repetition. It was just Prassel doing her job. The other side of the Butcher’s coin. Some of those swaying cadavers had been on the surgeons’ tables earlier, as Tallifer tried to save them. Her loss was Prassel’s gain, and this was why Prassel commanded the hospital.
“Move it, Jack!” The Butcher shouldered him pointedly on his way through, a whole table under one arm. Two wagons had appeared ready for them, quite aside from those taking the wounded in the opposite direction. Somewhere in the heart of the Pal army a tentful of clerks worked like maniacs so that everyone who needed their stuff somewhere else had a draft animal and a flatbed on hand.
He loaded the Butcher’s crates of clinking ceramics and glassware and metal pots. He hauled the currently-open box of bandages. He and Banders manhandled the other table, stacking it on the first, and then about to stack Alv on top of that. The Butcher intervened, dumbshowing towards the casualty wagon. Banders grimaced but nodded. It wasn’t, Jack guessed, something that Alv would readily forgive them for, but he could tell a necessary deception when he saw it. The woman had almost nothing left to give, but was very plainly ready to give it anyway. They sent her off with one of her more battered students. At least she was out of it.
“How are you at sleeping on wagons?” Banders asked him, helping him up.
“Normally?” Jack said. “So-so. Right now I don’t think I’ll ever close my eyes again.” He nearly forgot the box. Just as the wagon started to move he yelped and hopped down and caught it up, almost toppling God right off it. Had to run after the tailboard until he could snag Banders and Masty’s outstretched arms and get dragged in again.
“Oh good,” Banders observed. “I mean think what could have happened if we’d left that behind?”
Jack thought about it and found himself worryingly ambivalent. If he’d been a mote more forgetful, what then? If he’d come back, and found no trace, or just wooden splinters where a draft horse had kicked it in. The little lost gods scattered to the winds. Would anyone actually be worse off? And wouldn’t he be better? Able to build some new life that wasn’t god-smuggling, as if that had ever been a viable career choice.
Banders shoved something in his face. “Take this.” This was a disc the size of her smallest thumbnail, apparently of lead.
“What do I do with it?”
“Eat it, you fool. It’ll knock you right out. Get some sleep. We’ll be on this thing for a good hour.”
Jack had already worked out that prescriptions from the pharmacy of Doctor Banders were probably not approved by modern Pal medicine. But when he glanced at Masty, the man was already chewing one.
The ship of being precious about what drugs he took had well and truly sailed, he guessed, and so he followed suit. It tasted metal on the tongue, crumbled like chalk under the teeth. He swallowed the powdery bolus with difficulty.
“For what it’s w—” orms were boiling up from the earth all around them, great man-long maggots with fat undulating bodies and human faces. They bent to chew on the corpses that he realised the entire landscape was carpeted with, tessellated, not a gap between them that wasn’t another body. He hadn’t seen it before. It had looked like mud and rocks and trees, but now he understood everything was bodies, bodies all the way down. The Pal army marched not on its stomach but on its dead. And, because it also contained abominations like Prassel, the dead weren’t still but flailed and mouthed and kicked as the vast maggots erupted out of them and gnawed their way back in.
Banders, her face a melting smear across grey dawn horizon, was saying something about side effects but it probably wasn’t important. Jack’s priorities were more the way the whole world was convulsing, as though beneath the patina of the dead there was something vaster, more animate and even more decayed trying to force its way to the surface. The whole world rippled with its efforts, and he decided it was a new god. A death god struggling to be born.
“It’s not,” God told him, the one small, still point in all creation. “You’re just wholly off your tits on some Pal candy. I forbid you to take any more drugs. They will lead you into harmful ways.”
Jack summoned up the words to tell God exactly what He could do with the tenets of His faith, but fell into a vast howling hole even as he did so, like the ghost-burrow that had consumed the luckless spy.
*
“—orth,” Jack said, sitting bolt upright and finding himself in a hospital tent. For a dreadful moment he thought they hadn’t moved yet and the whole trial was still to happen, but everything was set out slightly differently. They’d arrived, and he’d been dumped with the boxes while everyone else did the work. On reflection, that seemed remarkably kind of them. Or, more likely, he’d been so dead to the world that even a slap from the Butcher hadn’t woken him.
“He’s up!” Banders crowed.
“What did he say?” Tallifer demanded, sounding affronted.
“He said ‘urth’, I think.”
“Where are we?” Jack demanded and then saw that Prassel was still with them, and immediately tried to convey that he was unsaying anything out of place. She had a map spread out where Hell’s victims usually went, and was examining it closely, in concert with a lean Pal officer with a monocle.
“Here,” the man was saying, one stick finger indicating. “They’ve dug in there, and there’s a mercenary detachment, this hill here. That’s where we need your Unnaturals.”
“They’ll not get halfway up,” Prassel said.
“Not with that attitude,” the other officer said, so apparently he outranked her or at least had seniority in this current moment. “Uncle wants it all under the Sway by evening so we can advance the next leg.”
Jack got himself to his feet, had a moment of panic when he couldn’t find his box, then saw he’d been using it as a pillow.
“Right,” Prassel said, staring without joy at the map. Then the tent flap moved, and everyone jumped for their phials and implements and bandages. It wasn’t a customer, though. It was Maserley. And Caeleen.
The sight of him was sufficiently surprising to Prassel and the hospital staff that the only people to note Jack’s jolt of recognition were Maserley and Caeleen themselves, the exact worst two people to see how twitchy he suddenly was. The demonist had other fish to fry right then, though.
“What’s this rabble even doing here?” he demanded of the thin officer. And then, “Magister,” with enough grudge in the respect to carry a feud down three generations.
“We are advancing, Fellow-Invigilator,” the man told him. “I take it your own shock troops are ready. Or are you going to send your pet to dally with the Loruthi?”
Maserley scowled, at the officer, at Prassel, at the world. Jack had plenty of reason not to like him, but the man looked at least half as tired as the medicos, and even that was very tired indeed.
“You’ve got all I have contracts for,” he said. “After that I’m out.”
The thin officer stalked over to Caeleen and looked her over like someone deciding not to buy a goat. “Combat capable, I hope. Not this grade.”
“All the horns and flames you could want,” Maserley said. It was fascinating to watch him and Prassel trying gamely to hate each other except their mutual loathing of their superior was standing in the way.
Caeleen was looking at him, cool and expressionless. Jack forced himself not to return her gaze, feeling pinned between it and God’s own disapproving frown.
“Oh, and your idiot Sonorist is out there with a grand total of two tin soldiers,” Maserley added. “A great asset to the advance, doubtless.”
“Well, I suppose that’s all the screen we’re going to get,” the tall officer decided. “Get your rabble into line and I’ll sound the whistle.”
He and Maserley left, and probably Caeleen did as well, though Jack was very much not looking and so he didn’t know. Prassel rubbed at her eyes, and the Butcher handed her a twist of paper. Orange salts, Jack guessed. Because the necromancer was still two rounds behind.
The woman looked around furtively before knocking the dose back, then stamped two or three times as it took hold. She clapped a hand to the Butcher’s shoulder, then almost ran into Cosserby as the man parted the tent flaps. He blinked owlishly around the tent.
“This is all… a little close, ah, isn’t it?”
“It won’t be once we’ve done our job and pushed them back,” Prassel said, and practically shoved him out ahead of her. Jack caught the man’s receding voice saying, “Oh but they’re very dug in. I don’t think people appreciate how much they’re dug in,” before the heavy fabric muffled his words.
“You fine?” Banders asked him. He felt tugged in five different directions, one of which was down. Different concoctions fought wars in his bloodstream, to the general detriment of the battlefield.
“No,” he got out. “Fine is not what I am.”
“See anything good?”
“What?”
“When you were under?”
“Nothing anywhere near good.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, well, that’s the downside. Bet you had a lovely kip though.”
“I don’t know how long I can do this.”
He expected a jeer, a prod in the chest, the indefatigable Banders making mock, as she did. But she put a hand to his shoulder and leaned down until her forehead touched his. He felt the slight stickiness of blood that hadn’t quite dried.
“That’s okay,” she said. “Because we don’t know how long it’s going on for. So you and your situation are perfect soulmates, right?”
He laughed, from somewhere. He hadn’t thought there was a part of him that the laughs hadn’t been scoured from, but it came anyway. Past Banders, God was standing on His box, but not scowling. Wringing His hands, looking abruptly uncertain. Behind him the gimlet gaze of the spear god lanced Jack’s way.
Then they heard the whistles, and he knew the Unnaturals would be on the move, that wall of demons, corpses and machines behind which the regular living Pals would make their advance. The faint crackle of baton-fire began, like green twigs on another clearing’s campfire, and then a louder roar. A demon? A war engine? He had no idea.
The casualties began to come in soon after, the first to taste the defiance of the defenders. And Jack got to stop thinking and just do, and that was preferable.
*
Two hours later and his hands were shaking as he tied a tourniquet. He didn’t feel tired. His mind was full of bees and they stung him to staring every time his eyelids dipped. There was a part of him that had seen the ages of the world pass, though, and no amount of salts could pull the wool over its graven eyes and convince it that he wasn’t tired. He felt the weight of it. The mortal fatigue. His fingers trembled like he was playing some stringed instrument nobody wanted to hear.
Lochiver sat down heavily beside him and placed one grimy thumb where the folds of the cloth crossed, so he could just deal with the tying. The old man looked – dead, honestly. Dead and unearthed from his own grave. His flute trembled in his other hand. Jack was vaguely surprised it hadn’t been worn down to a nub with all the playing.
“Damn me,” Lochiver said in quavering tones. “Been a while since we did one like this. Welcome to the department, son.”
Jack pulled the cloth tight, but not too tight. Though Lochiver said even bloodless flesh wouldn’t putrefy for a while if he was around. Jack had stopped asking the how of things, just accepting everything anyone told him because there was no space in his head for analytical thought.
The Butcher was there, then, and a new bag in his hand, like your least favourite uncle with your least favourite sweeties.
“Oh bugger me sideways,” Lochiver said. “We’re onto the reds are we?”
The Butcher grunted and rattled the bag.
“What comes after the red?” Jack asked.
“Nobody knows,” the old man said darkly, nonetheless reaching. Then someone burst into the tent.
“Pack up!” they shouted. “Move!”
Tallifer looked up from the arm she’d just separated from its original owner. “Give me a moment. Jack, I need your needlework.”
“Move!” the soldier shouted at them all. “They’re coming!” and then they were gone again, and there was a great deal of movement out there, boots sloshing through the mud, the crackle of baton-shot surely closer than it had been a moment ago.
“Curse it, Jack,” Tallifer said, not reacting in any way. The Butcher ducked out of the tent, taking the red salts with him, even as Jack scurried over to the table.
“Get him closed up,” she said. “Who’s next?” But there were soldiers coming in and taking the wounded away. Even those the Butcher had ready for the knife. The sudden gust and rattle that Jack had taken for wind, his ears recast as a volley of firing. There were suddenly two char-edged holes in the hospital tent.
“Do they not know we’re busy?” he asked. Then the Butcher was back in, shunting him aside as if he was no more than a dead leaf. One ham hand crushed down on the armless soldier’s chest. The other had a bowl of something black-brown that the man mashed into the open stump. Jack smelled burning flesh and hair and the amputee shrieked as whatever it was seared their stump shut.
“Get him out,” the Butcher snarled, and two soldiers were hauling the screaming man from the table. Tallifer was objecting, waving her slick scalpel like a threat. The Butcher took her by her own bloody apron and practically threw her out of the tent.
“Everyone out! Everyone on the wagons!” The Chief’s monster of a voice rising above all the chaos brewing outside. “It’s a counterattack! Everyone out! We’re leaving.”
“Are they allowed to do that?” Banders asked, and then the tent folded inwards on them and a monster came through.
Jack registered the horns first, forward-jutting, metal-capped, three of them, set into a scythe-beaked turtle face backed by a bony shield to which actual shields had been rivetted. It carved its way through the thick canvas as though it was the tissue-thin paper of official Pal orders, a head as big as a wagon, and leading a body even greater. Huge root-nailed feet made the ground their drum. And above, a howdah, iron-plated. Jack saw batons and spearpoints jut down. All this in the instant the tent turned inside out. Horns and shouting and the flare of shot on all sides. The battlefield was invading them, frightening and unexpected as a portal to the Kings Below opening at his feet.
He scrabbled back as those horns came straight for him, as those feet thundered down. Masty snagged his sleeve and hauled him sideways with more strength than Jack would have credited. The pair of them tumbled down together in a bundle of limbs. He saw Tallifer’s operating table smashed to matches. The woman herself was only clear because the Butcher had thrown her from the thing’s path a moment before.
Lochiver was there, though. The old man looked up, holding the flute as though it had been a mighty amulet of beast-warding just a moment before but was now a rather unmusical instrument. The monstrous horned head was already turning by then, yanked at by some unseen hands within the howdah, and so Lochiver didn’t take a horn through the eye socket. Instead the thing just hit him with a shoulder and an armoured flank. An almost playful shove. He went down with his thigh going one way and his calf the other and the knee in between twisting in directions it had never been designed for. Banders tried to get to him, flinching back as a shot from on high sizzled the air between them. Then the Butcher threw something in the monster’s eyes, some cloud of yellow powder. The colossal thing – five, ten tons of it – reared onto its hind legs in shock, and that was the rest of the tent gone, no more than frippery for the beast’s howdah.
Masty was dragging at Jack, trying to get him clear. With no tent, he could see far too much of what was going on beyond those lost borders. Pal soldiers were fleeing on all sides. Some turned, animated by a brief discipline and unity, sending a volley of shot into unseen pursuers. Then they ran again, save for the scatter who had fallen in that moment of defiance and screamed or writhed or lay very still.
“Come on, Jack!” Masty insisted. There were wagons, he saw. The wounded, some of the supplies. Those clerks had come through somehow. There were wagons and they were getting out.
He had forgotten God. Halfway to the wagons the memento dei struck him and he turned, whipped his sleeve from Masty’s fingers, eyes scouring where the tent had been for the box or its corpse.
It was right there, beside the great churned dents the beast had left. There with God and the other two fugitive deities standing on it like they were shipwrecked sailors on a raft in high seas.
“Jack!” Masty shouted after him, and everyone else was shouting – the dying, the injured, the Butcher, officers, everyone. Somewhere close by, the beast bellowed, baton-shot bothering it like insistent flies.
He had the box on his shoulders, violently enough that he could only hope no gods had been thrown free. He looked up.
Three Pal soldiers ran past. A tent nearby was blazing and there was only smoke between them and whoever they were trying to escape. He looked round, suddenly unsure which way he’d come. Where were the wagons?
“Jack!” Masty, still. Still with him, somehow. Not giving up on him no matter how mad Maric Jack had gone. Tugging at him, then stopping, face suddenly taut.
Jack followed his gaze, seeing nothing. Seeing smoke. Seeing bodies. And he’d been seeing bodies for the last twenty-four hours so why stop now? Then his sense of perspective told him one of them was too small, barely three-fifths of a soldier.
“No no no,” said Masty, and ran for it. For Ollery’s boy, Jack realised. The kid had been with the stores, mixing up the salts and the other drugs of the Butcher’s trade. It looked like the beast had smashed straight through that tent, trampled the glassware, mixed some appalling chimera of alchemy under its feet, and in its wake there were crushed soldiers and the boy.
He dogged Masty’s heels all the way there. Brief, bright lines ate up the smoke about him, speculative shooting from one side or the other. Masty knelt, trying to scoop the boy up but finding him too enmeshed with other bodies. Jack saw the kid’s eyes wide with pain and fright. Alive, though. Alive, somehow.
He hauled one loose-joined body away with a grunt, slapped off a dead arm that still seemed to be clutching. Then he was on his knees and couldn’t work out why. Did I just get shot? But if so, Masty had been struck in the exact same moment. No. It was the earth. The earth shook.
Out of the smoke came the beast. Its great scale-and-leather sides, the little shockingly human ellipse of its eye. The horns, overhead like roof-beam scaffolding. It seemed twice the size it had before, filling that quarter of Jack’s entire world. Masty was quite still, his face hopeless. And since when did the Loruthi have things like this? Was it a demon, one of their own Unnaturals?
Masty hugged the boy to him, turning his back, as though the interposition of his fragile flesh and bones would serve as any kind of barrier.
Jack stood, feeling light-headed. After all he’d been through, to be destroyed by this thing was surely a kind of privilege. No mere baton-shot or knife in the guts for Maric Jack. He held his arms out, almost a welcome. He looked up, seeing the steep, spiked sides of the howdah, fit with slits for shooting from, and capped by the great blunt prow of some siege engine. A face writhed into view over the rim of it. Not a man’s face. A thing like a lizard, with a sinuous body half-curled about the shaft of its baton to steady the weapon for firing. It licked across its eyes and snout with a blue tongue. Mercenaries.
At the corner of Jack’s eye something danced, like midges. He almost swatted it away in annoyance. If he hadn’t already decided to die in this pose of benediction he would have done, and then he’d have died. It was the nature god, the little round-faced twig thing with its shirt of busy woodlice. It danced and bowed, and fungal fronds opened up in it, and the lizard thing stared, first with one eye and then the other.
He heard voices up there. Grackling voices working unknown sounds back and forth. And grackling wasn’t even a word but it was the only way he could characterise them. The beast tossed its head, and the horn that capped its snout came a thumb’s width from the tip of his nose.
The whole tonnage of it turned, stepping almost delicately as though it was only allowed to crush any given corpse the once. Then Masty had the boy over his shoulder and a hand hauling on Jack’s. And Jack just stood there, dumbly, actually smiling, arms still out, knowing that he was blessed by at least one god. And the thing’s metal-studded tail swept round and smashed him sideways and he felt something go that would have been a keening agony if he hadn’t been so stuffed full of the Butcher’s salts right then. Something inherent to the physical integrity of his torso. A disarticulation involving ribs and spine. And what a long and academic word to represent more damage than there was in the world, the ruin of a man.
The wagons – but the wagons were gone. Were already receding. Masty took a deep breath and sprinted after them. Jack lay in the mud and wished him well. And the beds were full, stacked high with the wounded, medicos clinging to the sides. And still the Butcher was gesturing for Masty to join them. To join the rest of Hell in fleeing the far worse that was to come.
Masty’s lean frame bunched, and he slung the boy forwards off his shoulder, cast the kid across the intervening space to where the Butcher’s hands could field him. And they shouted at the man to keep running, but instead he turned back. Turned back for Jack, because that was apparently the sort of man he was. No medico left behind. And the smoke took the wagons, and they were left between the lines, in a span of mud that both sides were trying to make as unliveable as possible.