The Palleseen Sway is built on the back of collaboration. No matter how fervent, devout or patriotic a nation might think its populace is, once the Pals move in and impose their ordinances, there will always be a steady flow of people who understand that working with the new boss is the way to get ahead. These are the Accessories, known as some variant on ‘Turncoat’ in most places. Or ‘Whitebellies’ for their pale imitation of Pal uniforms. Except sometimes the practice brings unforeseen complications. Sometimes Turncoats don’t leave their bad habits behind with their old clothes.
Seeing a Gallete island in measured and graceful descent was a sight to take the breath away. Possibly with fear, because that was an awful lot of stone tonnage on its way, and you were trusting a great deal to Galleter traditions if you were waiting at the landing site to unload. Especially given that the Pals were very down on exactly that sort of tradition. It wouldn’t be to anyone’s benefit if the collective force of scholarly disbelief suddenly made it all stop working.
Landwards Battalion had been sitting out here in the hills for, by Pirisytes’s best estimate, bloody ages. They had come south down the coast by foot themselves, redeployed from the big muster grounds the Pals had rammed into the Oloumanni lowlands like a gang enforcer shanking their cellmate. Pirisytes, a native, had signed up as a Whitebelly long before. When the new troops arrived and they flattened the old sacred sites for their base, he was right in there at the start with a spade. A good servant of the new rationality, they called him. He’d had a commendation and a bonus for all the hard work he’d done. Given that a great many of the Oloumanni, especially the higher echelons, were on forced re-education in the mines, he reckoned he had a good deal.
Then the Pals had started some new war front overseas, and everyone got the order to march. Pallesand had thrown down with the big trading nation of Lor, and that was across the sea, and so one might reasonably expect that all the fighting would keep at a civilized distance and let hardworking Whitebellies like Pirisytes keep digging latrines and moving boxes. Except that both the Loruthi and the Pals had interests on this side of the salt. The Pals had put nations like Oloumann fully within the Palleseen Sway. They also had places that they hadn’t conquered yet but were fully invested in, like Northern Bracinta, where their soldiers had been ‘supporting’ the local regime for years while they slowly tightened the noose. The Loruthi on the other hand, being a mercantile power that didn’t throw its armies about so much, had Trade Missions all the way down the coast, which used the milled edges of their coins to burrow into the hierarchies of whichever kingdom or despotate they decided was profitable. With the end result that wherever they fixed their eye on ended up just as dominated by their desires and run for their benefit as anywhere under the Palleseen Sway. From Pirisytes’s point of view it didn’t seem all that much different, except they generally persuaded the locals to beat up and rob themselves rather than having uniformed professionals do it.
Where this became relevant to Pirisytes was that the jewel in the Loruthi overseas crown was Southern Bracinta. When the kingdom had fractured after its civil war, their trade delegates had been getting their feet under the table just as quickly as the Pals had. The declaration of war way off on the far side of the sea had led to a surprise forced reunification of the country when the Loruthi had stolen a march on their competitors. Which then led to Landwards Battalion being sent south, so that Pirisytes got to apply his valuable latrine-digging experience to the rich loam of Bracinta, rather than the drier upland soil of his home Oloumann. It was an art form. He’d had to adjust his methods. It all slopped off the spade in quite a different way, and he was fast becoming an expert in the slightly different range of intestinal conditions affecting an army down here in the danker coastal plains, and just what came out of your average Pal soldier after they encountered the local food.
And now here was Forthright Battalion, descending from on high after a week of the high life as they crossed the sea, lucky bastards. No need to dig latrines on a Gallete, Pirisytes assumed. You just went over the edge and tried to land it on a fishing boat if one presented itself, for the laughs. Pirisytes was all about the laughs. His fellow Whitebellies knew him as the life and soul of the work crew, the Pals found him a cheery and obedient menial and an actual Sage-Monitor had complimented his positive attitude.
His crew was standing by to lift and shift now, which made a pleasant change to turfing dirt onto the collected bowel movements of Landwards Battalion. And, of course, Pirisytes himself had his own particular tasks. As always.
The island was slowing as it descended, given it didn’t want to become a different kind of geological feature entirely. Pirisytes marvelled at how it remained absolutely and entirely steady, as though it was fixed in the air, and the ground was just grinding slowly up towards it. They had some fine magic, those Galleters, but they had one big problem. Floating about in the sky all hoity-toity, that bred envy. If not the Pals, then someone would have taken them down a notch. Pirisytes’s creed was very explicit on the virtues of passing beneath notice as the best road to survival and getting things done. Every Pal officer was a hammer looking for the nail that stood proud. That pride was reserved for the Pals. It got beaten out of everyone else.
They’d built towers and ramps and gantries ready, and the Galleters drifted the impossible weightlessness of their island in close. Then it was Pirisytes’s crew running in with a dozen solid gangplanks to bridge the remaining gap, slamming them down, bolting them into place. Forcing and twisting where things just didn’t quite line up, because life was uncertain and that was another piece of Pirisytes’s doctrine. Life was uncertain, and uncertainty was a crack that things could breed in, out of sight. The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow, and the Pals liked their lights very bright indeed.
After that it was just hard work for everyone concerned. Landwards’s Whitebelly work crews, plus a load of Landwards regulars unlucky enough to draw the short straw on assignments, plus a whole crew of uniforms from Forthright who had their own officers who got into a fine old pissing competition with their opposite numbers on the ground. Pirisytes just worked.
Or rather, worked and watched.
Eventually the actual manpower of Forthright Battalion began to disembark, and he made sure that he was in a good position to look them over. He made the proper sign, with the hidden left hand, plucked three hairs painfully from his forearm and squinted through the resultant tears. His sight blurred, then sharpened preternaturally as he looked for someone special. Someone worthy.
Oloumann had been a land full of gods. There were a lot of big gods, and they had been a sort of family, and squabbled a bit but generally been pointed in the same direction, which direction was downwards so that the kings and priests and great hosts of slavish worshippers could shovel offerings up into their open mouths. And then the Pals had come and done away with that, knocked down the temples, overthrown the king and massacred the priests. Except they hadn’t quite realised that one thing all the big temples and kings and the priests with the fancy hats had been doing was fighting a savage war against all the other gods. The nasty little sneaky gods, the poison gods, the murder gods, the chaos gods who tried to tear everything down. And, with their natural predators removed, those cults had enjoyed an unexpected flourishing, like mushrooms from corpses. All banned, of course. Assiduously hunted by the Pals, who boasted of all the cultists they had executed. Except, of course, the most subtle of the little fringe religions already had people wearing the uniform, signed on and digging latrines.
Pirisytes – not his real name – was such a diligent and happy worker that nobody had connected him with a string of fires, thefts, vandalism and actual deaths. Everyone liked Pirisytes. At least until they woke up with a ritual knife at their throat.
Forthright Battalion marched out, breaking step as they crossed the gangplanks and gantries so that their massed stomping wouldn’t shake the whole construction to pieces. Soldiers and soldiers and soldiers in their charcoal uniforms, batons slanted across their shoulders, chins up, putting on a good show for their Landwards cousins who’d been in situ for a while and started to fray at the edges. Pirisytes leaned on a crate and watched. And, yes, some random officer might serve, but when he went to the market for his superiors he always strove to get the best produce. How much more did he owe his god, when shopping for sacrifices?
And here came some less regimented types. Specialists, magicians, scholars. He plucked more hairs and squinted again, seeing the flavours of their power like auras in the air. All the usual Pal disciplines, the secrets they stole and repurposed for their military. Death and conjuration. All possibilities.
He blinked, screwed up his face once more, looked again. There was a little man there, carrying one side of a big crate marked with Pal medico symbols. He had a box on his back that was decidedly not uniform issue.
Blessed, Pirisytes saw. And there were others, too. Not quite as priestly as that one, but most definitely consecrated to some foreign god or other. For a moment he couldn’t quite process the idea. Priests in Pal company were either prisoners or they were undercover like him. They didn’t just… walk about in the open like normal army personnel. And yet here they were. Actual priests of actual gods wearing the uniform.
If there was one thing that Pirisytes’s god particularly savoured, it was the blood of those dedicated to other deities. Preferably the familial Oloumanni pantheon that had spent the last several centuries stomping all the sneaky little gods into the cracks and crevices, but any other god would do. The priests of a beggar’s god couldn’t be choosers, after all.
Pirisytes licked his lips. He’d let Forthright get settled in and then it would be time for some good old-fashioned religion.