In Jarokir, the temple Sonori would sound great bell-like notes at dawn and dusk and other sacred times. Their voices rang out across cities, calling the faithful to prayer, or echoed down valleys from secluded temples. No longer, of course. When a Pal battle Sonori is struck by heavy artillery or some similarly serious weapon, however, the clear ringing tone it makes in its extinction remains a thing of beauty.
Cohort-Monitor Cosserby was not fond of roadside artificing. He liked a well-equipped workshop or, if not that, then a tent masquerading as one or, if pushed, he’d tinker about with something on someone’s dining table if he had to, and if they didn’t mind him getting grease everywhere.
Right now he was, unfortunately, at the side of a road, and the road was full of soldiers and all the soldiers were headed away from the fighting. And normally ‘away from the fighting’ was something he’d prefer to the alternative, but the logistical difficulty he’d run into here was that (a) while the soldiers were headed away from the fighting, he was currently stationary by the side of the aforementioned road and not headed anywhere; and (b) the fighting, in and of itself, was headed towards him, or that was his best grasp of the situation. It was the traditional state of affairs when one’s side was retreating. And it wasn’t his first retreat but he wasn’t exactly a veteran of the military backstep because the Pals were usually quite good at fighting wars.
The Loruthi apparently had their moments too. He’d heard Fellow-Inquirer Prassel holding forth on the difficulties that Lor presented as a foe. Principally that they hired in vast numbers of mercenaries from across their widespread holdings to supplement their army. Meaning you never knew what you were going to get or how you’d be fought. Sometimes, as the saying went, you got the bear, and sometimes the bear got you. And there were bears, someone had said. Trained war bears goaded to blood fury, made frothing mad with berserker serums and then unleashed. Although Cosserby wasn’t sure that a mere leash would serve to restrain such a thing.
And here he was, going nowhere. Because, to a Sonorist, a mid-battle retreat was a particularly unmitigated disaster. His charges suffered a certain rate of attrition, and he was expected to pick up the broken during the advance, patch them up or send the pieces back to camp, and then continue with however many walking constructs he could muster. Which became a profoundly optimistic prospect when you weren’t advancing, because suddenly all the bits you’d been relying on were out of reach. As of half an hour ago he’d had four functioning Sonori clumping down the road, head, shoulders and chest over the common soldiery. Right now he had three of them standing around like judges at an exam while he had the fourth opened up to find out why one of its legs had stopped working. Meaning that it could march all day, but only in circles.
The problem turned out to be some manner of missile stuck between the casing of its pelvis and thigh, a spectacularly lucky or accurate gift from an unknown enemy archer. Precisely what the projectile had been, Cosserby couldn’t say, because the inner workings of the Sonori had turned it into a hundred little fragments that had worked their way everywhere and ended up basically fusing the thing’s hip joint. Right now he had it on its back, the leg off, and increasing large components of its inner armature laid aside. His little portable forge was glowing and he was shaping replacement components from his bits satchel by best guess in the hope he could have the thing moving. Ideally before a Loruthi artificer turned up to give him pointers.
The soldiers coursing past him – they were relatively disciplined now, not the initial panicked rush – glanced over incuriously, but none of them tried to help. Not that they could have actually done anything, but the offer would have been appreciated. He kept eyeing up the wagons, too. If one came past that was halfway empty he’d flag it down and have his ambulatory Sonori dump their defective colleague in the bed, and sort it all out back at the camp. Unsurprisingly, each one was crammed with troops and salvaged supplies, no room for a dead construct.
He fitted a new piece, a curved and tapering element extending into the hollow of the pelvis to a fiddly degree. The other problem with fixing Sonori was that the actual science of the craft hadn’t quite torn itself free of its murky origins. They were Jarokiri temple constructs first and foremost, and that meant they were designed by a pack of ignorant clowns as far as Cosserby was concerned. At some point, one of his peers would hold a proper symposium on a revised theory of Sonoristics, and make proper Pal constructs built to a fully rational plan. As it was, Cosserby was stuck following the defective logic of a people who actually thought this sort of thing fit into some kind of divine plan. In amongst the Pel characters he was inscribing, a handful of Jarokiri sacred glyphs still hid, and he lived in fear of someone outside the trade finding out.
Admittedly, right now he was living in fear of a few other things as well. And probably the Loruthi would treat him quite well, if they caught him. But only if he turned coat and taught them how to build their own Sonori.
He bent back to his tinkering. The new part wasn’t joining properly with its neighbours. He took it out and reworked it under the lamp, double checking the logic of his bastardised inscriptions.
The rumble of a new wagon made him look up hopefully. Again, it was full. At least some of what it was full of were his nominal colleagues.
He knew Alv and most of her people had already been sent back from the front, but here were at least some of the rest, plus around sixty per cent of a field hospital’s supplies and components, jammed in all anyhow. He saw the Butcher there, and Tallifer at least. And… what he took to be Lochiver’s corpse, except the wagon jolted and the man flailed about and cried out. His leg was heavily splinted, Cosserby saw, but otherwise the initial impression had been an understandable one. Lochiver didn’t look particularly alive even when he was walking around and talking to people.
The Butcher leaned forwards and spoke to their driver, who diverted the wagon to the roadside by Cosserby’s impromptu mechanics demonstration.
“What’s this?” the big man rumbled, and Cosserby, who’d had quite enough today, interrupted with, “Yes, yes, my toy soldier has indeed broken down, thank you Chief.” He waited for the verbal lash but Ollery seemed worn thin. His boy was tucked into his armpit, Cosserby saw, with a bandage across his forehead and about one arm.
“Ask him,” snapped Tallifer, and then she leaned forwards, jogging Lochiver’s leg and making the old man snarl. “Did you see Masty yet?”
Cosserby blinked. It hadn’t been his job to keep track of people. “No, I…” Indicating the part-completed work. “I mean, he was with you…?”
“He got left behind,” Tallifer twisted herself free of her seat, which Lochiver promptly lolled into. She ended up sitting on the tailboard of the wagon. “Listen, we had to stop to get this idiot’s leg straight. He must have ended up ahead of us.”
Cosserby opened his mouth to say a lot of unhelpful things, but then his brain engaged. Masty was one of the few people in the department who’d give him the time of day.
“He’d have stopped to help,” he said hollowly, meeting Tallifer’s eyes. And she was someone who’d take the time of day right back off him and then wash it because his oily hands had been all over it, but right then there was no strength left in her to dislike him. She just nodded wearily.
“And I’ve been looking in the wagons,” Cosserby added. “I’m sorry, I’ve not seen him. I mean, I’ll look out…” Which would be absolutely no use to anyone, of course.
“What about the new man,” the Butcher called. “The Maric.”
“No, I mean, I’ve not seen him,” Cosserby said. “I’m sorry.”
“What about Banders?” Lochiver croaked. Tallifer looked round, startled.
“Banders was… wasn’t she with us when we set off? I thought she was just… being Banders…” She had a hand to her mouth in sudden horror.
“She wasn’t with us,” the Butcher confirmed.
Cosserby felt a little drop, within him. Some discrete emotional component failing and going still. “Oh. Oh, well. No, I’ve. I’ve not seen her. No. But I’m sure she’s. If anyone can… you know. Banders…”
Tallifer shook, just a single shudder going through her on its way to somewhere else. Her lips moved, and probably it was a prayer to whatever the heathen deity was that she’d once served. And Cosserby did not feel the absence of such an instinct in himself, but nor did he begrudge it in her.
The driver of the wagon said something on the subject of them having to move on, but right then a particularly unwelcome squad of retreating troops started hogging the road, and most definitely not to be shunted aside. They were leathery and thorn-skinned, shambling along sometimes on two legs, sometimes on all fours. They snapped and snarled at one another, and gave off a dry heat and a flickering glow. Demons and, riding the shoulders of the foremost, Fellow-Invigilator Maserley. Cosserby watched him with some envy. And it wasn’t as though Cosserby couldn’t ride on the shoulders of a Sonori, though the impression of a child being indulged was one he wouldn’t soon live down. It was more that demons didn’t break down. If their contractual terms were breached they either ran off to cause mayhem somewhere or they were sucked back to the Realms Below, and either way it became someone else’s problem. You didn’t have to stop by the road to fix your demons.
“What’s this, setting up a booth for shaves and tooth-pulling?” Maserley asked, but even his bleak heart wasn’t quite in it. The retreat was a mark against the whole battalion. Today wouldn’t look good for anybody’s military career.
Tallifer looked as though she was going to ask him about their missing, but that would just be giving the man ammunition. Instead they all just glowered at him surlily until he and his cavalcade of monsters had passed by, and it was just regular soldiers trudging through the mephitic stench they left in their wake.
Tallifer had apparently been making decisions while that had been going on. “This is going to be a drudge’s job to unload,” she declared sourly. “Especially without orderlies. Get on the wagon. Bring your toys, those that can still walk.”
“Well I can’t,” Cosserby told her. “I’m working here. You can see that.”
She rolled her eyes to indicate what she thought of that. “I’m serious. We’ve got me and him and most of the hospital to shift.” A nod at the Butcher, the only other capable pair of hands. “Get on.”
Cosserby looked from her to the open Sonori. “Accessory Tallifer,” he said, with some dignity, “I appreciate that you do not rate my profession highly, as compared to an artisan of blood and bone such as yourself, but be assured that the army does value my efforts and expects me to have as many Sonori in working order as possible at all times. And so I must decline your requests for me to lift and carry for you.”
She looked sidelong at the Butcher, and her wrinkled lips moved a couple of times as though trying out new wording. In the end she shrugged.
“We’ll see you back at camp,” she told him, as though it was merely the timing of things he was arguing, and not his status as glorified porter. Then the driver had the horse plodding forwards and they were shouldering into the road and displacing dejected soldiers.
Only after they’d gone did he wonder if, perhaps, that hadn’t been what Tallifer had been after. If, in fact, she’d been making a sidelong attempt not to decrease the count of the department’s officers by one more. It felt like uncharacteristic softness from a rather objectionable woman who had made no secret about not liking him. But these were exceptional times, and he was at least nominally on the departmental payroll.
Too late now, though, and he really did have to fix up this tin soldier if he wasn’t to completely disgrace his profession. As the army stomped past – more and more with a ‘tail end of things’ feel to it, he noted nervously – he bent to his task once again.
The third time he reshaped the part, it took properly, and linked to its neighbours. Physically and magically, everything aligned, and the next two pieces needed almost no refashioning. After that it was a part he had to make out of whole cloth and best judgment, but his skills came through for him, and it clicked into place on the second try. He slotted a test tableth into the Sonori’s head and it moved its limbs through all the proper angles. A bit juddery, but a limping soldier was better than one going in circles. And it turned its head to look at him as it did so, and he thought he heard a ghost of that plaintive, hollow voice. Why? And, just like the penitents in Hell, he’d send it out to fight again now he’d fixed it up.
He shook himself. He needed to re-cast the test tableth. They accumulated unwanted resonance over time, just like the Sonori casings did. As though the world was full of undirected life desperate to earth into some viable vessel. He swapped out the tester for the full-functioning tableth and told the construct to stand up.
“Cohort-Monitor!”
He jolted to attention, so that the Sonori appeared to be mimicking him. Fellow-Inquirer Prassel was there, looking barely dishevelled by the whole retreat business. Almost at the very back – the stragglers were passing them by, limping, supporting comrades, carrying heavy loads. The last and the luckless.
She was without a detachment of corpses, he saw. Of course she didn’t have to be careful of her resources like he did. It wasn’t as though the army would be running out of bodies any time soon. Either she’d expended all her troops and not had a chance to animate new ones, or else she’d sent them off for whatever meagre delay value they represented.
“What are you doing? Didn’t you get the order to retreat?”
“Just finishing up here, magister,” he confirmed, and dropped down to gather up his tools and close up the forge lamp. “Just a little mechanical difficulty. It’s all sorted.”
“I have no intention of donating your technical knowhow to the enemy, Cosserby,” Prassel snapped. “Get yourself moving. No way of knowing how soon they’ll be through here looking for fools like you who don’t know when to run.”
“Run, magister?”
“The dispatches can call it ‘strategic withdrawal’ all they want,” she said acidly. “Move yourself and your tinpots, man.”
When all four Sonori stomped off, he felt an incalculable relief. The fourth was slightly slower, and he’d have to keep reining the others in, but that was an on-the-fly intervention he was more than capable of. For a moment he seriously considered getting up on the shoulders of one, impressions bedamned. He knew Sonorists of larger character than he who could have pulled it off without damage to their image. But he, a man of no real reputation, still husbanded the shreds of it that he had.
Prassel fell into step beside him. He had a thousand questions about the military situation, but her demeanour did not encourage his asking them. Instead, he told her about his meeting with Tallifer and the others. And, in doing so, realised that he hadn’t seen Masty or Banders or Maric Jack, and here they were right at the end of things.
She absorbed the news without expression. But then it would take some spectacularly bad news to dent Prassel’s stony features. Possibly the fall of the entire Palleseen Sway would only raise an eyebrow slightly. She was a cold one, Cosserby knew, and they were just three orderlies. Or two orderlies and some new man nobody had really become overly attached to. For what it was worth, Jack had seemed a decent sort as far as Cosserby was concerned, but he’d barely been with the department any time at all. There was no Jack-shaped hole to be left. And the other two would be missed, but he couldn’t expect Prassel to care, not from her elevated position. New orderlies weren’t hard to find.
Prassel said nothing, and just looked at her feet or ahead up the road. There were doubtless weighty and necromantic matters on her mind.