The Loruthi never wanted a war with the Palleseen and, to their credit, the Palleseen didn’t particularly want a war with them either. For some decades the two powers had tested the bounds of one another’s political influence around the map while their merchant classes happily made deals across every table in every civilized port. The problem lay in both states having very definite and incompatible ideas about what to do with the rest of the world. The Loruthi wanted to make it a part of their economic system and the Pals their ideological system. Both of which meant ‘Who gets the money’, just that the Loruthi took a higher percentage but the Pals also set fire to your church.
Jack had missed the wagon because the incidental swipe of the retreating monster had robbed him of any ability to secure a place on it, and he reckoned nobody would be blaming him for that. Masty had missed the wagon because, faithful dog that he was, he wouldn’t leave Jack. The reason that Banders had missed the wagon, however, was that she had been outside the medical tent having a crafty smoke when everything kicked off, and been carried the wrong way by a rush of troops. Then made the mistake of trying to rejoin her unit rather than just taking anybody in the uniform as her comrade and legging it. Not exactly an instinct for loyalty, not Banders. More the act of someone who hadn’t quite understood the assignment, and that was entirely in character.
She’d found Masty, and the two of them had got Jack down here into a scoop in the muddy earth that some weapon had torn. And Jack had been busy dying at the time, and would have far rather they’d left him where he was. And then Masty, who had very obviously seen enough in his career with the hospital unit to work out what was what, had gone and got his box. Which had been left lying on its side where Jack had formerly been lying on his side, and had not come with him because his shoulders hadn’t been left in the right sort of shape to keep it on.
Banders had headed off, shortly after. Off to scout, she said. Off to scavenge, Jack reckoned. Because something burned in her nature that even being left behind by a fleeing army couldn’t douse. Which left him and Masty.
Jack could feel himself shaking, his skin icy cold. And, fair, it was cold. The evening was coming on and the misting rain was back. His shirt clung to him with the general warmth and comfort of an octopus, where it wasn’t rigid as a breastplate with dried blood. An awful lot of liquid stuff that had been inside Jack had taken the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the world when the beast’s tail had hit him.
He stared into the rain with wide eyes. “Who’d have thought there were things like that? Where did they get it from? It’s like a thing from the Wood.”
“Yes,” Masty agreed. “Like a thing from the woods.”
Jack tried to laugh, but the shivers got in the way. “No – the Wood. In Ilmar there’s… And there are – are monsters. I…”
“A thing from some woods,” Masty agreed. It was aggravating that he didn’t understand. Then his hand was on Jack’s shoulder. Jack’s whole and reconstructed shoulder.
“Is this going to keep happening?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Jack told him. Because he hadn’t asked for it. In truth the salts had worn off and he’d been in too much mad pain right then to phrase any kind of request – punched right through the begging and pleading part into a howling agony that had scoured the inside of his skull clear of thought.
It had happened when Masty brought the box back. Not all at once but piece by piece. Watching himself had been fascinating, in a weirdly disconnected sort of way. As though some miniature craftsman had been angrily beating the dents out of a piece of metal. And God had been angry. Angry at Jack getting himself into this position. Angry at having to be involved in something so phenomenally against His precepts as a war.
Masty had remarked that it wasn’t entirely unlike Alv taking on someone’s wounds. Except the wounds didn’t go anywhere. No surrogate required, all that life-ending wrack just evaporated into the air. And that had left Jack staring at the grim, haggard face of God. God, who took on all the wounds of the world, an infinite repository of hurt.
But there were limits. Masty said he’d known people die just of shock and Jack certainly felt that the shock was close to finishing him. His body had been pieced together but the impact of the tail was still in his mind. So he shook and stared and mumbled like a fever victim, unable to come to terms with the fact of still being alive.
Banders’s reaction to this actual miracle had been, “Does this mean we won’t ever be rid of the sod?” But there had been a jag of nerves under the joke. Her eyes flicked from the way all the parts of Jack’s body were inside his skin now and fitted together properly, over to the box that had made it all possible. Soon after, she’d gone scrounging, and maybe avarice hadn’t been the only thing prompting her to give Jack some space.
“Tell me how you do it,” Masty asked softly, after that.
“I don’t. God does it,” Jack managed. “I’m not supposed – supposed to say that, am I? To the Pals. But it’s true. I believe in God and God heals. Sometimes. When He feels like it. And you have to keep to His terms. And nobody – nobody ever will. But I’ve lived by them all my life.” He shivered, because he’d never needed serious healing from God before. In fact, when he’d been God’s actual priest he hadn’t been allowed to ask, because that would have been selfish. But now he was only an ex-priest, a half-priest, a theological jack of all trades, just like the name. And so God could heal him, at God’s divine discretion. And if he decided he wanted to take up a life of violence at some later date then he’d be visited by that colossal, shattering injury. He suddenly understood the sentence of death that every one of God’s victims lived under.
“I’m not religious,” said Masty, sitting back on his heels.
“I mean,” Jack said, “I guessed.”
“When I was young, there was a temple. Priests taught me how to pray and sacrifice. I tried to keep it up, when I got brought to the army. I made a shrine. But they found it, and a Fellow-Inquirer sat me down and explained – very patiently, really – why that wasn’t appropriate. And beat me, after, to make sure the message stuck. Anyway I forgot the words.”
Jack made a neutral sort of noise, to indicate that he was listening but if Masty wanted to change the subject any time, that was also fine.
“I’ve seen god-stuff,” the man went on, though. “Sacred serpents, guardian constructs, priests spitting out divine wrath. But… I mean, only briefly in most cases.”
Jack didn’t need to ask. A volley of baton-shot was a strong theological counter-argument.
“I take it your religion can’t do much for him,” Masty added, indicating the third resident of their hollow. Not Banders, off filling her boots. Some anonymous dead soldier, uniform so torn up Jack’d had to squint to be sure they were even Palleseen. They’d probably been here immediately before the hollow had, and died of surprise hollowing. Their ghastly, open-mouthed face wasn’t the most reassuring thing to have to look at, but Jack didn’t feel up to turning it aside.
“Dead is dead,” he got out, and another shudder passed through him, as though he was being wrung out.
Banders dropped down then, startling both of them. She was even more spattered with mud than she had been when she left, but neither injured nor dead. She managed a wan smile.
“How’s our brave soldier?” she asked.
“Better than he was,” Masty said.
“I’m fine,” said Jack. His body, impossibly renewed as it was, continued to twitch and shiver, no sign that he was really in control of it.
“I mean,” Banders agreed, “you are way more fine than you have any right to be. That happen a lot, where you come from? I’d pay to see that. You could hire yourself out with a bunch of truncheons and sledgehammers and just let people go to town on you. Queues round the block.” There was the faintest edge of hysteria to her voice.
“Never happened before,” Jack said tonelessly. “I was always very careful. Never shot. Never stabbed. When I got my beatings and bruises, He never stepped in to help. Told me I deserved it most of the time.” One last final shudder, the dog of his body shaking the last of the wet off itself. “I didn’t ask Him,” he went on. “He’s just a loose engine now. Doing it without prayer. Just on His own.”
“Well hark at the damned ingrate,” came a familiar, hateful voice from the box.
“I am grateful,” Jack told God, aware of the others’ stares. “I don’t want to be dead. But You heal the hurt but You can’t touch the memory of it hurting. I feel like every time I move, it’ll all come flooding back.”
“Well excuse me for not bloody tucking you in and giving you a sweet,” God said disgustedly, His voice rising over the rude noise that Banders was making to express very similar sentiments. Then three people jumped down into the hole with them.
The utter paralysis of the pair of them, Masty and Jack, would have any drill Statlos put his head in his hands. They both had knives, military issue. Neither even reached for them, utterly unprepared to defend themselves.
Jack registered the Pal uniforms a moment later, and Banders was rounding on the newcomers, annoyed but not alarmed.
“I told you,” she said. “I’d need a moment to explain. Get them warmed up to the idea. I said I’d shout you.”
“It’s bloody exposed up there,” said one of them. They were all regular soldiers, and two still had their batons. Jack wondered warily if Banders had met them engaged in the same post-battle practices she’d been at. Looters and deserters probably weren’t safe company if you wanted to get back to the army.
“All right, so,” Banders decided. “We’re doing this. Lads, this is Masty and this is Maric Jack. They are orderlies with the hospital department, like me. Fellows, these three stalwarts are troopers Lidlet, Paucelry and Klimmel. Who got left behind just like we did on account of the unexpected nature of whatever the fuck happened. The plan is, we wait for full dark and then hightail it back to the lines together. That work for everyone?”
“I wasn’t planning to build a house here and plant crops,” Masty said mildly.
Lidlet was a woman, stocky, capless with hair cut very close to her skull. Paucelry was the tallest, and had a bandage somewhat haphazardly applied to his cheek and neck, presumably Banders’s work. Klimmel was rangy and long-limbed, and had a narrow, sour face like a hatchet.
“What’s up with him?” Lidlet asked, jabbing a boot at Jack.
“Nothing. I’m fine – fine. I’m fine. Sorry, I’m fine,” he stammered. “Please don’t touch me.”
“Too highfalutin’ to throw down with the regulars, are we?” she jibed. “Fancy.”
“He got hurt,” Masty said defensively. “He’s… tender.”
Paucelry had some comment to make about that, but whatever had happened to his face muffled it into mumbling.
“Got anything to eat that’s not covered in mud?” Klimmel demanded. He had a knife out – not threatening, just fussing with it, turning it over and over. Still, the threat was there. Masty found a squashed ammie – one of the rolled flatbreads that were army standard rations. Letting Klimmel have it seemed a reasonable price to avoid worrying.
“He needs something for the pain?” Banders wondered and then, at Masty’s eye-roll, “You still hurting, Jack? Need something to chew?” Spoken far too loud for six people hiding out in a foxhole, as though Jack was deaf or senile.
“You will not,” God told him. “No polluting yourself with more foreign muck. Not after my divine benificience has touched you.”
“It’s beneficence,” Jack said. “And I will have the drugs, please.” Not for the pain but for the memory of it, which he still wanted dulled and pushed further away.
“Weak,” God spat. “You’re weak. Why do I even bother?”
“I don’t know. Why do you? I’m having a time of it, all right? I will damn well take what’s on offer.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Lidlet put in. “What’s on offer?” She sat down beside Jack and reached for the box.
“Not in there,” Masty told her, before Jack could say anything unwise. “That’s where he keeps his…” Faith? “private stuff.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time I’d gone into a man’s box for his privates,” she said, but didn’t suit actions to words. Banders handed round a ceramic flask – one of the Butcher’s own – to anyone who wanted a nip of whatever numbing concoction was in it.
*
Full dark seemed to take whole ages of the world to descend, but at last Lidlet decided that they had as much cover as the night was going to give them. By then, Jack had his box on his back again, and a body that wasn’t cowering under the shadow of world-obliterating pain. God, stood on the box like a street ranter, was keeping up a constant mutter of deprecation in his ear, about why did He even bother if His faithless follower was going to just run to Pal alchemy a moment later, and how that should be a new forbiddance of the faith.
“You got batons?” Klimmel asked the three of them. “You got knives?”
They had knives, because they’d come with the belts. That was about it. “We aren’t fighters,” Masty said.
“You think the Loruthi are going to give you the option?” the soldier demanded. “There’s dropped weapons out there. Keep your eyes open, grab one when you can. Make sure it’s got a tab in the slot.” He was the one who hadn’t held on to his own weapon.
“Fast and low,” Lidlet said. “Wide skirts to any sign of them. We’re getting home. We’re not avenging the retreat.” And a jab of her elbow to Klimmel’s ribs to emphasise the point.
“What even happened?” Jack complained.
Everyone stared at him as though it was the most unnecessary question in the world. He realised that they didn’t actually know. Yes, there had been a reversal, but it might have left Forthright Battalion back where it started or the whole army might still be running. The Loruthi might have established a new front line they’d have to sneak through, or they could be on contested ground that both sides would be training weapons on. They were ants in a footprint, knowing only that something had stomped down on them.
They crept up out of the hollow and nobody shot then. Cloud hung heavy above, the moon only a dim radiance through it. Around them, what little could be seen was churned ground, the occasional stake or broken tent pole. Bodies. And once you’d started seeing the bodies, you kept seeing them. Pal bodies, mostly. Those who hadn’t made good on the order to retreat. Or a specific cluster of them that Jack identified as those the hospital department hadn’t been able to save, laid out neatly for a collection that would never come.
“This way,” Lidlet decided, and then there was a hushed but fierce debate about that because Klimmel and Banders both had different ideas of which direction they should be headed in.
“I don’t suppose your invisibles have any powers of navigation?” Masty murmured to Jack.
He frowned. “I don’t know,” and, craning back to look over his own shoulder, “I mean, do you? Anyone got a map, back there?”
“What the hell do I look like?” God demanded. “You see a bloody sextant and telescope as part of My holy regalia, do you? Added navigation to My prerogatives recently?”
“How about the others?” Jack asked. “I mean… him?” But the nature god just goggled at him. Then the spear-bearer turned up and pointed dramatically, scowling into the dark.
“What is?” Jack asked. It could be the army. It could be the enemy. It could be the direction of some distant and long-pillaged temple.
The fierce little figure spat something in a language Jack had never heard before. A single loaded syllable.
God rolled His eyes. “Fucking barbarians I’m trapped in here with,” He moaned, and grudgingly translated.
“Um, so,” Jack said to the others. “I can tell you which way the sea is. I don’t imagine that’s very useful, sorry.”
Masty screwed his face up as though trying to picture a map. “Which sea?”
“He says it’s all the same sea,” God said sourly. “Bloody useful. It’s that way, though. I mean I reckon the sea’s in every direction, you go far enough, but the closest sea is that way.”
“Wait, what?” Lidlet was peering suspiciously. “The sea?”
“Yeah, sure,” Banders said casually. “It’s his thing. Always knows where the sea is. We don’t call him Maritime Jack for nothing.”
“Nearest sea is… Fennimouth Port?” Klimmel was working it out by counting on his fingers, or that was what it looked like. “Means…”
“Means I was right,” Banders said. “Come on.” And she led them off, her two orderly comrades and the three troopers, as though she’d been reinstated to her former rank.
Between the constant drizzle and the low-hanging cloud, Jack just held on to Klimmel’s belt as Masty held on to his, and the half-dozen of them snaked and stumbled their way across the blasted landscape. Jack only hoped that Banders had some way of navigating straight, and they wouldn’t end up circling round to fall right back into the hole they’d crawled out of. He only had the vaguest sense of the landscape they’d advanced across. He’d been in one wagon or another, or setting up as the casualties came in. He hadn’t been required to have any sense of place beyond the bounds of a hospital tent. The department had been the one still point that the injured converged on. And now the precise business of the surgical unit had broken open and spilled them into this sightless and infinite wasteland. Wheel-slipped wagons, half-collapsed tents like the ruins of ancient sacred sites, dead horses and dead humans. Hundred-yard gouges in the earth where some weapon had struck, a stand of thorn bushes from which a corpse still hung. If the Butcher’s domain was Hell, Jack wasn’t sure what this was.
Every so often Banders would stop, stare at the unseen horizon, do some complex calculating business with her knuckles and then mutter to Jack. “Where’s the sea now?” and he’d consult the angry little spear god and tell her. The three soldiers were definitely straining under her command. Appearing strong was probably a good move.
Nobody asked how far. Everyone knew nobody could know. The Pallesand army could be just over the next rise or a hundred miles away. Or driven into the sea they were navigating by.
Once, something battered through the air overhead, coming from behind them and making a kind of high weeping noise, entirely inhuman. A demon, Jack guessed. Some conjuration from one side or the other, contracted up out of the Realms Below and sent to scout or hunt. Or perhaps just given insufficiently binding terms, so that it was blundering about on its own recognizance. To be avoided, in any event. Demons were more than capable of malice and bloodshed on their own account if their contracts didn’t restrict them from it. And who’d write three pages of pacifist small print into a war-demon’s terms?
Perhaps the thing had been scouting after all, because they ran into the enemy very shortly afterwards.
In retrospect Jack wasn’t really sure who’d run into whom. Everyone seemed equally wrong-footed by the encounter and, had they had the chance to make arrangements beforehand, probably the two sides could have agreed to ignore one another. Being who he was, when Jack saw people ahead, he assumed it was more Pal stragglers. Instead of a squad of Loruthi soldiers who were out here… what? Also lost and trying to find out where their advance had got to? Stripping corpses like Banders had been? Actually doing bona fide military scouting? It wasn’t something anybody would be explaining to him any time soon.
Four of them. He thought all men, at first look. Someone had said the Loruthi only let men be soldiers. One of them turned out to be a woman. What he’d taken as a neat beard was the strap of her tall shako. They wore long coats that would have been green in the light, but were just grey in the gloom.
The moment of realisation came simultaneously to both sides and everyone went for their batons at the same time. By then, both Klimmel and Banders had put in a requisition to the armoury of the fallen and come up with a charged weapon apiece. There was a staccato crackle of shot from both sides, unaimed and hurried. Jack just threw himself down curling about his box to protect it, and Masty in the mud right beside him.
Paucelry was down, he saw. Down and kicking but not screaming, a bad combination. Jack tried to worm over there on elbows and knees but another baton-shot fried the mud between them and he shrank back. He’d instantly lost track of everybody else involved in the skirmish, especially the enemy. He could hear screaming, and then, over it, he could hear screaming, something utterly inhuman venting a vast shrill agony at the underside of the clouds. The demon? He could believe it.
He put his head up just as everything kicked off again, losing a hank of hair as a shot sizzled past him. He saw one of the Loruthi kneeling, frantically trying to slot a new tableth into their baton with gloved hands when Klimmel descended on them. Klimmel hadn’t had much use out of the baton he’d snagged. He was down to knives, but making up for the loss of range with bloody-handed enthusiasm. The impact was like a magic trick, the blade vanishing into the Loruthi so that only the hilt could be seen, and the next two strikes so frenzied that Jack only registered movement, not seeing the weapon at all. The pair of them tumbled over in a flail of limbs. Lidlet was down. Jack saw her on the far side of the wrestling match, flat on her back but still shuddering. Paucelry was dead still, so he diverted to Lidlet instead, crawling, then just up and running in the hope that everyone had better things to worry about.
A shot skimmed his thigh and he tumbled, almost coming down on Lidlet’s shot-pierced lungs just as she fought breath through them. A Loruthi loomed, baton levelled down at him, then up because Masty had come stumbling after him and now skidded to a halt with his hands upraised.
“Wait! Stop! Friends!” Masty got out, the last of which was a flat-out lie when viewed with any objectivity. And then, the words mangled by poor linguistics, “Por b’londo mar’i te!”
The Loruthi stared at Masty – it was when Jack realised she was a woman – but didn’t shoot him, so that was something. Then Klimmel went for her, rising from his kill with a knife slick with gore. He looked like a beast from nightmare to Jack. If that had come at him out of a dark and corpse-filled night he wouldn’t have stopped running til dawn. The Loruthi was made of sterner stuff, because she shot Klimmel in the gut, just a spasmodic repositioning of the baton and a spat word in her own language. And then the baton was back on Masty and any leeway for negotiation was quite gone.
He cried out when the crackle of shot came, and Jack clenched at it, as though somehow he could impart some fortitude, to help Masty take the impact. It was the Loruthi who went down, though, with an expression as though she’d been cheated at cards.
Banders loped up, still levelling her baton, staring at the woman she’d downed. In that moment Jack remembered she was a soldier, despite the constant demotions and the side-hustles and the jokes. Unlike him and Masty, they’d trained her to kill people back on the Archipelago, before sending her out with the army. She looked as compassionate and human as Cosserby’s Sonori right then, waiting to see if she needed another shot.
She didn’t and, in the wake of that death, there was no enemy to be seen. Jack never saw all the bodies and possibly one of the Loruthi had run the moment the shooting started. If so, good luck to them.
Jack dropped to his knees by Klimmel, who was making a hideous, clenched sound, as though his life was squealing out of him like air from a bladder. Lidlet was still alive, too, but there was no scream left in her, just a whistle that came as much from the hole in her left breast as much as her throat. Her eyes were very wide, looking at the sky. Paucelry was still, dead when Masty lurched over to check him.
“Absolutely bloody not,” spat God. “I can’t believe you’re even asking.”
“Seriously,” said Jack. “Heal them, please. Will you just…?”
He was aware that Banders and Masty were staring at him, but it wasn’t the usual eye-roll and Jack’s gone mad again exasperation. Because they’d seen him put back together. There was a hushed expectation hanging between them.
“To hell with both of them,” God sneered. “Killers.”
Jack ignored him. He laid a hand on Klimmel, a hand on Lidlet. “Listen to me,” he told them. Neither of them really wanted their last moments full of some foreigner mangling the language, but he wasn’t giving them the option unless they just let slip and fell into unconsciousness. “Listen, you need to swear to me you won’t ever hurt anyone ever again. Not do anything that would lead to harm being done.”
“Don’t waste your breath,” God threw at him. “I ain’t doing it. Not them. Not here. Just walk away, Yasnic!”
“You will,” Jack said flatly. “If they swear then you will. I’m not having it from you. I am telling you how it’s going to be.”
“They’ll just get into a fight or get orders to shoot someone, and that’ll be it,” God shouted at him. “I’m not wasting my powers on them.”
“I don’t care if they drop dead tomorrow,” Jack snapped at Him. “Just do it now.”
Lidlet’s lips were moving, but whether it had anything to do with his demands, he couldn’t say. Klimmel’s head twisted like someone had him by the hair and was wrenching his face around. He stared at Jack with every muscle contorted, eyes as wide as a flayed man’s.
“Fucking,” he got out through clenched teeth, “what?”
“Tell me you won’t harm anyone ever again,” Jack said, as clearly as he could.
“Fucking,” Klimmel hissed, “dying. C’mere. Hurt you.”
“No, listen,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to be clear. I will – you can be healed. Just – healed. But you have to swear. I’m sorry. It’s a god thing and I know you Pals don’t like god things. I’m sorry. It’s all I’ve got. But you have to swear. And you have to keep to it, or you won’t be healed any more. You’ll die. I’ve seen it. Swear, please. Swear and mean it.”
“Are you bloody deaf or what, you faithless bastard?” God bawled in his ear. “I am not. I draw the line. I have had it with this nonsense from you. You were the worst priest and you are the worst follower and I will not have My name taken in vain like this! For soldiers of all damned people!”
“You will bloody well do.” Jack’s teeth were bared like an animal’s. “I don’t care that they’re soldiers. I’m a soldier now, didn’t you hear? Look, I have a uniform and everything. Just do it.” So that Klimmel actually had to reach out, a hand covered with his own blood and someone else’s, and grab Jack’s attention back.
“I swear,” he got out. “Fucking. Swear. Only. Please.” Shivering violently as the blood loss froze him from the inside.
And nothing happened. Klimmel was plainly in his last moments and Lidlet’s breathing was beached in the shallows with any saving tide receding towards the horizon. Jack hauled the box off his back and shook it so that God had to cling on to the shoulder straps.
“I’ve had it with you!” he shouted. “What are you, that you get to be holier-than-thou about this?”
“I am your God!” God howled. “I am supposed to be holier than bloody anyone! I’m actual God and you will not talk to me in this way.”
“These are lives!” Jack yelled.
“Pal lives!”
“I don’t care if they’re Pals. I don’t care if they’re killers. They’ve sworn. You’ve got to give them the chance.”
“You don’t know.” God playing the wounded card. “What it’s like. Every time someone makes that oath and breaks it. It takes from me, Yasnic. It’s the wound in me that I can’t heal.”
“You’ll do this or what’s the good of you? Why do I even bring you along?”
“Because nobody else will love you,” God spat. “Because you need god in your life, you poor bastard, and so we’re stuck with each other.”
“Oh are we?” Jack asked, looking past God. “I’ll change religions. I’ll deny you.” Aware of the horrified, fascinated gaze of all assembled. “I’ll worship – I’ll worship him. Him with the mask and the woodlice.” Because the nature spirit had crept out to see what all the noise was about. “He was useful. He turned the beast aside. I’ll become his priest.”
“I will take my healing back from you, you ingracious son of a bitch,” God warned him furiously.
“Do it,” Jack challenged Him. “Strike me down and see where it gets you. You’ll walk back to Ilmar and see if you can drum up any worship there? Hide with the other forgotten gods until they trap and decant you?”
“Jack…” Banders sounded equal parts horrified and embarrassed for him. And he was shouting quite loud, and there would be other Loruthi patrols out there. Although possibly they’d give the whole fracas a wide berth, like someone detouring around a ranting street preacher whom Correct Speech hadn’t picked up yet. Jack just held God’s gaze and dared the divine presence to blink first.
Lidlet sucked in a great breath and let out a scream that started off hideous but trailed off into puzzlement.
Klimmel’s face unkinked, muscle by muscle, leaving only that nasty sharp expression he’d had when they’d first seen him. He rolled over and sat up, feeling at his stomach. At the blasted, blood-soaked cloth over whole skin.
“You…” He looked angry at being saved. “This is some… secret design? You could do this and we never knew? How long…?” Jack wondered who he’d lost, in some past clash. A brother, a lover, a friend.
“Klimmel,” Lidlet spat. “Shut up.”
“But he… Look.” Klimmel bared Exhibit One, an unmarred human abdomen, formerly a ruin you could see the ropes of his guts through. “Look.” A shaking finger aimed at the rise and fall of Lidlet’s chest. The bright blood that was down her chin and neck as though she was a messy vampire.
And Lidlet wasn’t starry-eyed with gratitude. There was a peculiar urgency to her. “God-stuff, he said.”
“Lidlet—”
“That means this never happened,” she hissed at him.
“But they could…” Klimmel’s gesture took in the whole unseen, cadaver-spotted battlefield.
“God-stuff,” Lidlet hissed, “means this never happened if you don’t want to end up on a Decanter’s table and your heart in a jar.”
She had, Jack understood, a very clear way of seeing things.
“Now get on your feet and get moving,” she added. “All of you.” Though when Jack did, she took a step back and gave him room.
“I meant it about the swearing,” Jack said quietly, sadly. “You can’t. It’ll come back. You’ll die. Please. I’m sorry.” And knew that they would fail. It was an oath you couldn’t ask of anyone, let alone a soldier. And so they’d die, and he’d feel it. Not as a hole torn in his infallibility, as God would, but he’d be responsible. In taking on their wounds, he was making them his to mourn, when they inevitably died. How long before he, like God, was desperately trying to shirk that responsibility.
He met God’s eyes again, and the wizened divinity nodded tiredly.
“Oh, you get it now, do you? You can only cry at so many funerals.”
Masty had gone – Jack hadn’t seen him leave. Now he came back with something entirely unexpected. Namely horses. Three beasts in scaled barding, complete with saddlebags. And Jack remembered that weird, inhuman screaming and recontextualised it out of the realm of the demonic into We shot one of the animals. An unintended casualty of that first panicked exchange of fire.
Banders could ride, apparently, and so could Masty, and Klimmel a bit. They headed off towards theoretically friendly lines two to a horse. And if Jack spotted Banders going through Paucelry’s jacket first, he couldn’t muster any argument as to why the contents of the man’s pockets would be happier abandoned in the mud than enjoying a productive second life in Banders’s possession. It really didn’t seem to matter, compared to everything else.