Tallifer, the cooling flame. The hard woman. The void where sympathy crawled to die years ago. Hard-faced with an old woman’s anger at a world that won’t let her rest. Behind that mask, someone who cared passionately about a congregation and a temple and a faith, a way of life. And who learned too late to ration her care because none of those things were coming back.
“I wish,” said Tallifer, “that all my patients were this still.”
Alv could be still. It was a Divinati thing. When she’d first been forced out to live amongst others, the sheer bustle of them had horrified her. She still took pains not to be caught in a crush, packed shoulder to shoulder the way the Pals seemed to have no problem with. Not as though she’d grown up with great estates and solitude as far as the eye could see, back home. The Divine City was tightly circumscribed with not a hand’s breadth of wasted space. But what she’d had was the space around her that nobody else would intrude into without invitation. Nobody would ever think of doing so. Nobody would stumble in accidentally to upset her personal equilibrium. Nothing happened by accident in the Divine City. Or almost nothing.
Here, nothing ever seemed to quite happen by design. In the wider world a thousand currents of fortune tugged at every event, so that nothing worked out as it was intended. And that was without figuring in the greater chaos of the war.
She felt the line of Tallifer’s blade – not the edge against her skin, because the old woman had remarkably calm and steady hands, but the implication of it from the way the bandages tugged and fell free. Then the raw stickiness of fresh air touching onto skin that hadn’t healed fully yet.
Tallifer made a dissatisfied noise. “I should just replace these. We should give it another few days at least.”
It had been eight days since the battle. Eight days of darkness and Alv was tired of it. “Do it,” she instructed. And she wasn’t in a position to give orders. The precise placement of her rank – ‘Guest-Adjutant’ – was nothing but a headache for the hierarchy-minded Pals. Technically everything she did was voluntary. She could walk away any time. She’d never needed to test whether the Pals actually thought that way or not. What kept her here wasn’t anything with a Palleseen stamp on it.
The bandages about her face tugged again, crusty with dried blood and pus from the injuries she’d taken on. Alv braced, feeling a webwork of pain crawling about her features, sensations transplanted from someone else, like an animal released into the wrong environment and unsure how it’s supposed to find food. Tallifer made another dissatisfied noise.
“I’m going to rip these right off now, okay? I think that’ll do less damage than this by-inches malarky,” she said. “You may want to hang onto something.”
“I’m fine.” Moving her lips as little as possible and, even as she said it, Tallifer pulled the last of the wrappings from her eyes.
A redness of light flooded in through her lids. Tallifer asked her if she was sure again and Alv gave a tight, tiny nod. She felt the coolness of a sponge cleaning about her cheeks, dabbing at the skin around her orbits, washing at the old, gummed blood sticking her lashes down.
She opened her eyes. For a moment it was just glare and motion, no shape at all, and she thought her powers were failing her and it was too soon after all. Then isolated patches of her visual field started coalescing into comprehensible images and she was treated to a hazy, light-fogged Tallifer, the seamed features looking for a moment uncharacteristically squeamish.
“I see you,” Alv whispered. Tallifer’s expression didn’t improve notably.
“Your eyes look… within tolerance,” the woman said. “The rest of you not so much. I wouldn’t recommend a mirror.”
“Bring me a mirror.”
“You are the worst patient,” Tallifer said, but she had one as part of her kit, just a little round glass that fit in the palm of her hand. Alv studied her features thoughtfully. She was a horror. The skin about her face was red and weeping, part shiny burn scar, part raw flesh barely masked by new skin. Still, not bad for eight days. Her arts weren’t letting her down.
“I’m going to give you fresh bandages anyway,” Tallifer decided and, at Alv’s look, “I’ll leave you slots to see through, but nobody wants to look at that. And Lochiver’s not keeping his end of the bargain up right now, infection-wise, so we’re having to be careful. I’ve got some salve here, the Butcher’s, and I’ve blessed it. You want to put it on yourself?”
Alv nodded and dug her fingers into the greasy grey stuff. “How is Lochiver?”
“Complaining every fucking moment he isn’t asleep,” Tallifer said with feeling. “And he will ask you to do his leg and you are not to do his leg because your own legs aren’t properly set from all the legs you did before. He can live with a screwed knee and I can live with him bitching.”
“I’ll do his leg.”
“No, you…” Tallifer actually pulled at her hair. “You will not.”
“We need him on his feet more than me,” Alv decided. “If infection takes root amongst the convalescents we’ll lose—”
“No.”
“And he’s old. It will impact him more than me. Bring him to me.”
“I will not,” Tallifer said. “Have a biscuit.”
The abrupt change of subject threw Alv. She blinked past the tears that were welling up between her and the world and saw a little carton of tiny thumbnail-sized delicacies, golden baked and marbled with dark streaks.
“Ollery found time to make biscuits?” she said blankly.
“These are not his. And, if you ask me, biscuits are not his strength,” Tallifer said, absently popping one into her own mouth and then, despite that, adding, “These are yours.”
Alv didn’t know what to do with that or why she should own some fancy-looking biscuits, and this obviously communicated itself in her mauled expression.
“The woman,” Tallifer said, “whose eyes you healed. Was good enough to understand what a really stupidly generous thing that was, that you did for her. And got these to the department. Because she’s really happy she can still see things. And it’s been a few days and I’m afraid everyone’s been nicking off with them, but I’ve preserved at least some for you.” Eating another one herself as punctuation. “They really are very good. That’s actual chocolate. You ever had that?”
Alv had, twice in her life. Between a Pal prohibition against anything that was too sweet (indulgent, contrary to Correct Appreciation) and the fact that it only grew overseas, it wasn’t something you saw much. And she didn’t actually like it much, because the Divinati also distrusted anything that tasted too extreme. And it was a gift, and doubtless the giver thought it was in exchange for healing, but the healing Alv had given out was already pre-paid, part of a debt she was condemned to work off. Which meant that now she had accumulated more debt and her scales were even further out of balance, all because someone had wanted to be nice.
Tallifer was watching her, and so she was careful to keep all of that from her face, aided by the fact that half her face wasn’t really showing anything at all. She accepted one tiny biscuit, feeling the extremity of flavours riot in her mouth, almost painful in how good it was. “That’s enough,” she said, jaw tight. “Please pass the rest around the department. I know Banders likes the sweet. What?” Because Tallifer didn’t hide what she was feeling much, and something had died in the old woman’s face just as she said the name.
“Not back yet. Banders.”
“Back from…?”
“From the fight. Banders, Masty and the new boy. Nobody’s seen them. And it’s not your fault.” Because she’d seen Alv tense. Because Tallifer knew Alv well enough, now, to know she was thinking, I wasn’t there. They’d carted her back to the tents already, when the Loruthi counterattack came. She’d spent herself in service of the wounded, and they’d sent her away. And if she’d been there…
What? What could she possibly have done? She’d heard only confusing accounts of what had actually happened at the end. Nobody as low down the chain of command as the hospital department had any wider idea. I’d have been nothing but a hindrance, blind and crippled. And yet some part of her didn’t believe that.
“Seriously.” Tallifer sat back. “We were all of us dead weight the moment the orders came. Lucky any of us got back to the lines. And we’ve relocated twice since then, pulling further back. The camp out there’s monstrous. Three battalions. There’ll be the mother of all advances on the way, you mark my words.”
“Let me see it.” And Alv didn’t want to see it. One battalion of Pal soldiers mustering for war was more disorder than she could reasonably deal with, no matter that they prided themselves on their neatness and discipline. Three… a city of soldiers to every horizon. And yet she had to expose herself to it. She deserved the bludgeon of it across her eyes and mind. It would redress something of the balance. The horror would buy off a biscuit’s worth of credit and blunt the guilt. It would be a precisely applied razor blade to the soul.
Once the bandages were reapplied, Tallifer tried to help her out of the tent. Alv wouldn’t accept it. Then her legs faltered – still aching where the bones were melding together, more other-people injuries she was sloughing away. She ended up leaning on the old woman anyway, despising herself for one more small debt she’d have to repay somehow.
“I know it’s not the first time,” Tallifer said softly, “but I never saw you do eyes before. It’s a sacrilege, by the way.” Almost cheerfully said. “Or it would have been. In another life I’d have you on the altar coals for it.” Said with a strained chuckle so Alv didn’t know whether that was actually a thing, or if she was just playing up the pagan priestess. “I want to ask something as a point of professional curiosity. Is that allowed?”
“Can I stop you asking?” Alv said drily.
“Yes. You say, ‘Please don’t ask me,’ and I don’t ask it,” Tallifer said. “Seriously, Alv, how long have we known each other? How long have we worked side by side? Ten years and some barter on the side, no? So you just tell me to my nose-tip that I’m not allowed to pry, and I’ll pull it out of your business.”
“Well you can ask,” Alv allowed.
“Where does it go?”
Alv stopped, suddenly enough that Tallifer almost fell over her own feet. That question. She’d been braced for that question ever since she’d been condemned to the Pal army. And then nobody had ever asked it, not anyone who gave her orders or used her skills. Her students knew, because they needed the theory of it in order to try and ape her art, but to the wider department and the army at large it was just Divinati magic.
“I mean, I’m right, aren’t I?” Tallifer prompted. “That’s how that philosophy of yours works. You don’t have gods and you’re not drawing from tablethi or something. It’s all in the balance. But that means it needs to go somewhere. Or am I wrong?”
Alv found herself desperately looking about as though there was some escape to this conversation. I should have said no, she realised. Tallifer had given her the gap to do so, and she hadn’t, and now she was stuck with this question. A request for knowledge that would profit nobody.
She couldn’t look at Tallifer. Her eyes passed around the reconvened hospital – new tents, diminished supplies. The Butcher with a big cauldron out in the open, brewing up whatever bulk medicine the convalescence wards most needed, his boy ferrying ingredients out from stores. Lochiver sitting with his splinted leg up, whittling a new flute out of what looked like a human thigh bone. Chatting cheerily enough with a young woman heavily disguised as an old woman – Divinati eyes weren’t easily fooled, even running with tears from being newly reconstituted. The demon bawd, Alv realised. Not a regular at the department but an old acquaintance of the Butcher. And beyond her, Cosserby and a standing Sonori, he in his shirtsleeves and it with its hollow body open, as though they were seeking parity in some bare-knuckle bout. Familiar sights. Home sights, for one who would never return to her true home.
And Tallifer, at her elbow, expectant. Owed an answer. Alv shivered and looked desperately for something to deflect her. A way to avoid paying her dues.
She blinked furiously, squinting past the intrusive frame the bandages imposed on her vision. “Isn’t that Banders, though?” she asked. “Right over there.” Pointing beyond the hospital tents with a hand that still had two maimed fingers.
Tallifer made an annoyed sound on the reasonable basis that Alv was stalling, but it changed to a shocked choke as she looked out into the crowd. A moment later she was gone, running off and shouting for everyone else’s attention, leaving Alv blissfully alone.
“Oi oi!” came Bander’s unmistakeable hail as the woman pushed through the press of the camp, waving. Alv saw Masty behind her, and then Maric Jack as well. All three of their lost birds come back to the cage. They weren’t alone, either. At the edge of the hospital’s staked-out territory they were saying their farewells to a pair of soldiers, a broad woman and a lean man. Jack was saying something in particular, plucking at their sleeves when they turned to go, making a nuisance of himself. Alv recognised her own preoccupations in the man. Debts owed, that he didn’t know how to repay. The agony of being unable to set things right. Welcome to my life.
She let them all clench together in a general flap of questions and rejoicing and recriminations, all the usual. The thought of being anywhere near so much interchange of obligations made her shrink into herself. How could you know what you’d come out of it with? Banders threw her arms about the Butcher – or some of him – already babbling out some wild story that was probably five parts invention to three of good sense. Tallifer was berating Masty for going back to save Jack. Prodding him in the chest with the pointed stick of her forefinger, then resting her forehead against his in sheer relief. From his crate, Lochiver was demanding someone come over and give him a hug, why wouldn’t they? And that wasn’t something anybody wanted to do under most circumstances, but Banders sauntered over, still telling her nonsense over her shoulder, and polished the top of the old man’s head for him, and pulled his beard fondly. “You stink, you old bastard. That leg gone rotten?”
“I should be so lucky,” Lochiver snapped. “Talli washed it. I was mortified.”
“But the leg wasn’t,” Tallifer shouted.
Maric Jack tried to slip past the general rejoicing. New boy, after all. Not like he’d been with them long enough to be missed. Mother Semprellaime, the bawd, touched his arm, though. Said something earnest and idealistic enough that her disguise might as well have fallen away on the instant. So maybe she hadn’t just been here to chew the fat with the Butcher. Not young love, Alv reckoned, but she’d obviously found a chance to see something worthwhile in the Maric, and grieved when he was lost.
Jack was doing a brave face – another thing Alv knew too well. She watched, feeling like a filthy voyeur, as he smiled and gave the woman a quick one-armed hug and died inside. He was being eaten from within. She could see the great burden of debt hanging about him, the way he’d played with fate and was just waiting for the universe to present the bill. The snarl of thwarted destinies converging on him and that backpack of his was like nothing she’d quite seen before.
And then Banders had finished annoying Lochiver and was coming over to her, faltering slightly at the bandages and the crooked stance. “You, ah… you’re good, Alv? Glad to… see me? You can see me?” The cheer of her come crawling to a halt at a safe distance in case things were worse than she thought. And Banders was another fascinating case study. The marks on her soul were a true mishmash of self-determination at war with the different fates the world had tried to hone her for. Not just the regular death-trajectory that army life tended to give people, but a whole murkiness buried in her past. And Alv said, yes, she saw, and it was good that Banders was back with them. And that was a cold fish response obviously, and Banders was underwhelmed by it. If Alv had been more whole then doubtless she’d have had more chivvying and jibing in her. Right now, Alv knew she looked like something exhumed from a tomb and coming after the graverobbers, so Banders held off on the bonhomie.
“Good to see you on your feet again, anyway.” Retreating from things she couldn’t easily mock. Then Masty was looking Alv’s way. Just a nod, because he knew she wouldn’t want to make a fuss, or have one made over her. Masty always understood. He always wanted to be helpful, and he’d worked out that sometimes the best way to help her was not to put her in his debt by helping her.
Banders flung her arms about Cosserby as well, which left him shades of pink which brought a smile even to Alv’s blistered lips. She’d been driving on with her story all the way, now, and it had gone beyond monstrous war-beasts to nighttime escapades, ambushes, miraculous escapes. It sounded like the whole Loruthi army had been chasing them around.
Laboriously, Alv limped over to where Lochiver was sat, on the basis that nobody really wanted to be that close to him, so there was an enviable calm in his immediate environs. The old man looked sidelong at her, hands still fidgeting away at the nascent flute.
“You look like you’ll be getting orders from Prassel any moment,” he cackled. “How are your legs?”
“You will damn well not, I told you!” As though Tallifer had some secret sense when it came to Lochiver’s nonsense.
He rolled his eyes. “Bloody woman doesn’t understand how much this hurts.” Not even thinking about how that hurt would be Alv’s, if she freed him from it. Which meant it was an act that would buy off the biscuits and a miscellany of other debts. Which meant that, in a day or so, she’d find a chance to get Lochiver out of Tallifer’s eyeshot, and rebreak her own leg to free him up to go clean up the camp with his filthy god.
But not right now. Not feeling the wreck of her own body so keenly. Her own weakness disgusted her, but she felt that one more vicarious injury would break her.
*
The Butcher cooked for them that evening. Not the grand feast they’d had before the disastrous battle, but enough. Sitting in a circle on crates full of drugs and ceramics, eating off tin plates balanced on their knees. A thick-gravied stew with chewy dumplings and pickled vegetables and a mesh of pulled meat like spiderwebs holding it all together. Fresh flatbreads from the mess tent commissary. A single orange each, which the native Pals segmented and wiped up the dregs of the gravy with, and everyone else ate separately afterwards. And it was all of them together again. After all that had happened, it seemed like a miracle beyond gods or Divinati magic, that the same people were sitting down for a meal now, that had been around then. Plenty of other departments and squads around the camp wouldn’t have the same luxury. Another debt to the universe waiting to be paid off with interest. And Alv found herself unkinking, just a little. Making the cardinal mistake of relaxing in this company. Remembering how it was to have friends. Hearing Banders tell the story of their escape again, now with two hundred per cent added incident. Watching various of the company take the moment to decant some small portion of their repast to the side, for their own votive purposes. Just being. Being, in their midst. Being a part of them, she who shouldn’t ever have been anything to do with this unruliness, this imbalance. Feeling the tug inside herself, the hooks and bonds that tied her to them even though she’d tried to walk through the chaos of this life without making any connection at all. The love she felt despite herself, that she hated herself for.
“It wasn’t like that,” said Maric Jack, at the most outlandish new claim in Banders’s account. And a faint edge of panic that told Alv that maybe it had been something like that, and he really didn’t want anybody to focus on it. But whatever had him riled up, it was so buried in the sky-castles Banders was busy building that nobody would be picking it out.
Then Prassel rapped a spoon against her cup. She’d been there from the start this time. A silent presence at the periphery of the meal, eating with one hand as she leafed through some papers. Now the fact of her fell on the rest of them like shackles, and their cheer ebbed away piece by piece until nothing was left but a fearful attention.
“Technically this is for release tomorrow but I may as well tell you now,” said Fellow-Inquirer Prassel. Said their commanding officer, the director of the asylum, the woman who held the Butcher’s leash. And Alv found herself thinking, Why? Why not tomorrow? Why spoil tonight with whatever this is?
“Orders are in,” Prassel explained to them flatly. “For the whole Battalion. Uncle had all the department heads in earlier. Word from on high.” Looking about their seated circle as though using her necromantic arts to drain all the fun from the evening. “We’re moving out.”
“Damn, how bad did they hit us back there?” Banders demanded, entirely out of turn, mulishly adding, “Magister,” when Prassel’s stare found her.
“It’s not that. There are two more battalions on the way and the army proper will be smashing right back into the Lor positions soon enough. But this isn’t the only war front and someone in their wisdom wants Forthright elsewhere right now. We’re someone’s reinforcements.”
“Where?” the Butcher asked, a dripping segment of orange partway to his lips.
“Precise destination’s under wraps, but overseas,” Prassel said. “We’re stepping up the pressure on the Loruthi holdings out there, probably to stop them concentrating so much force here. You know the dance.”
Alv did, or at least she’d scraped together a rudimentary idea of how these things worked. Much of the time the Pals were bringing a fraction of their force against some small state – like Maric Jack’s homeland, say. In which case the campaign would just be an advance in stages, like the coils of a snake tightening on a rat. The Loruthi had a trade empire, holdings and outposts and colonies. The Pals were fighting them here, trying to push the lines towards the actual borders of Lor, but there were plenty of other places that they were spending their blood and magic on.
“Well that’s…” The Butcher weighed the news. “That’s all right, then.” And, with that assessment, a wire of tension was cut and the cheer began to build again. Because they’d been waiting for the order to go back in, to end up slogging over that same hand’s span of contested ground for days or weeks or months as the casualties piled up. Hell’s grand tour of the provinces with no end in sight. But this meant a reprieve. It meant they’d have a chance to remember the people they were, before they had to be soldiers again. Prassel sat back and let the babble rise, deflecting any further questions by saying she’d told them all she could. Alv wondered, if the news really had been as bad as everyone had been waiting for, whether she’d have told them here and now, or left it for the morning. And if Prassel had been a more consistent leader then she’d have been able to guess, but you never knew just what balance of malice and consideration you’d get, with Fellow-Inquirer Prassel.
*
Later, much later, the long night well into its march and most of the department sleeping the sleep of the well-fed, Alv left her tent. Sleep was a thing for people who didn’t sit at the fulcrum of the universe, after all. Sleep was also a thing for people recovering from a dozen separate injuries, whether or not those injuries were truly their own. Tallifer would have told her to sleep. Alv would have told someone else to sleep, in her position. But she didn’t want to. It felt as though she was losing pieces of her life, even though they were pieces she didn’t have any use for.
She wasn’t the only one still awake. The lean-to that Cosserby had claimed was lit from within and she could hear a subdued clatter and rasp of metal as he caught up with his maintenance. She thought about imposing herself on him, but he was busy and she would be in the way. And he wasn’t someone to whom she had much to say. A relative newcomer, a specialist in an art she had no real understanding of. One of these new Pal areas of study that didn’t care how they fit into the universe that had come before. And yet the world went on and the Pals kept winning, on the whole, in aggregate, no matter how heedlessly they changed things. It made her fear for her worldview, that was so concerned with altering as little as possible.
There was someone else, though. Sitting on a crate and staring into the relative quiet of the nocturnal camp. Maric Jack, his box on his lap. She couldn’t quite see his gods, but she could see the complex twist of obligations that bound him to them, and vice versa.
Not hard, to ensure her halting footfalls reached him before she did, so he had a chance to avoid her. He just looked up, though. The tablethi-charged lamps of the camp gave his face a corpse’s pallor. He had been brutally wounded, they’d said – struck down by this beast she hadn’t seen. Except that had been neatly excised from Banders’s wild account, the cracks of it plastered over by ever-more unlikely details until nobody had asked. And there was more, she could see. Jack was like a man on a scaffold, waiting for the trapdoor to open.
“May I?” she asked, and he pulled a camp stool over, rising to help her down into it. For a moment they just looked out into the camp, tracking the occasional sentry or eleventh-hour messenger, heading distant challenges, a faint peal of laughter from some group of soldiers still burning the last of their lamps.
“Tell me,” she said. He looked at her, or at the bandages and pain that was most of what she had on display.
“Tell you what?”
“You can tell me,” she said. Please tell me, she thought. And she didn’t want to know. It was nothing to her. But she could recognise in him the desperate need to unburden himself, and it was a burden she could take on that wouldn’t even leave a scar. It would be paying off her debts.
“You do the balance thing, right?” he said.
The one thing she didn’t want to talk about was her, but she made herself nod.
“There were Divinati in Ilmar. Just a few. Kept to themselves but I picked up a little. Balance. I always thought that sounded like a good scam, honestly.”
She cocked her head, just enough to keep him talking.
“Only I think I see now, how it’s screwed up. Because I’ve done a thing, and it’s going to get undone. Really, nastily undone. Balance, right? Leave the world like you found it. Only if you found it dying and bleeding, then… then what have you gained, right? Except, in the meantime, you get to know those people, those people who would have just been meat. You made them back into people and they became people you got attached to. Possessive about, almost. Because you’ve brought them back from the meat. And they’ll just be meat again. Any moment. Maybe it’s already happened. And I knew how this went, but this is an army.” As though she might not have noticed. “We’re in a war. Which means it’s going to keep happening. Because it’s that or I just don’t help. But what do you do when helping doesn’t help? It just gives you a chance to get to know people so it hurts more when everything… balances out?” And he jerked his head down towards the box and hissed, “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare I-told-you-so to me. What am I supposed to do? Just not help people?” His voice breaking into ragged pieces he couldn’t hold together.
Whatever inaudible reply he received, something went out of him. He’d been spoiling for a fight with the little nothing in the box, and now that was gone. “Welcome to your world, right?” he said softly, and then bent over the box. She thought he was praying at first, then understood that he was crying silently, tears falling into the little pigeonholes. And perhaps that, too, was a fit offering.
Very carefully, like someone petting a dog that might bite, she laid an arm about his shoulders. Her hand was still mangled, so she couldn’t really hold him, or give much of anything, as comfort went, but it was a human contact. It would help him, hopefully. She sat there, feeling him shake slightly as he fought to get himself under control. Trying to imagine the debt she owned to the universe and the Pal army shrinking by this meagre act of camaraderie. And everyone here was so broken, each in their different ways, that surely she should be well into credit with this sort of act. Except she was the most broken of them all, and she’d never be quits with the world and never go home.
*
She did sleep a little after that, just so she could tell Tallifer she had. The morning light woke her, for the first time since they’d got her back from the battlefront. That and Banders’s braying voice.
“Oi oi, Jack!” she was shouting. “Get your arse out here. You need to see this! Believe me, it’ll make your eyes pop out.”
That didn’t seem to be much of an incentive, Alv considered. The whole department was awake now, though, because Banders only really had conversational and top-of-the-lungs in her vocal range. Alv sat up, feeling all the inherited aches that little bit further away.
Jack was indeed on his feet by the time she got out into the open. Just about everyone was, even Lochiver, hanging between two crutches like they’d beaten him up and were dragging him before an Inquirer. They were looking up because, even if you had seen this before, it was still a sight.
Jack’s face was utterly scrubbed of all the hurt and misery he’d been wallowing in the night before. Banders was beside him, jabbing him with her elbow, telling him that, wasn’t she right? Wasn’t this worth getting up for. He stared up, simultaneously aghast and gripped by an unwilling wonder. Because, when the Pal army decided to throw its back against a task, it could move mountains.
Or islands, because that was what they were looking at. An island, slowly descending from a clear dawn sky. A half-mile flattened disc of rock, its underside studded with gleaming crystal stelae, drifting impossibly towards them. And out towards the fringes of the camp, soldiers running and reaching as lines were thrown down from above, to secure the whole inconceivable bulk as though a fresh wind might just blow it away like a dream.
“They don’t waste time, do they?” the Butcher boomed.
“What the hell am I looking at?” Jack asked wildly.
“That,” Ollery told him, “is our ride. That’s what’s taking the whole of Forthright across the sea.”