Masty, then. As noted, not his name. A foreigner, wearing the pale uniform of a second-class soldier, but wearing it well because he grew up in it. They tailored a tiny version of it for him when he was eight years old. Just Masty, formerly an underaged familiar of the camp, passed from hand to hand and Company to Company. Then an adolescent who’d known the army more than he’d known his own family. Striving to be useful, to earn his keep. Running messages, taking notes, organising schedules. Never fighting. There was a note on his card, from when he was just a kid, that he not be allowed to fight, and nobody ever thought to remove it when he was grown. And now, just Masty the orderly, most dependable member of the experimental hospital department. The man who was always there.
Masty, whose stock in trade was to be at everyone’s elbow the moment they needed something, and with that particular something being humbly proffered, was not there when they were kidnapping Maric Jack. By that point the general atmosphere of cheer around the department had risen to intolerable levels and he’d slipped away, unremarked. Because one advantage about always being where you’re needed is that nobody actually looks for you. He had the customary invisibility of one who is taken for granted.
Nocturnal walkabouts around the camp as a whole weren’t new to him. There was always something to see, something to do. Someone who needed another pair of hands. Growing up in the shadow of the Palleseen Sway, being useful had been his shield, then his habit, and at last just a way of breathing. Because the uniform got tight sometimes, even on someone as slender as Masty.
Tonight the camp would be no respite. He should have known. The rest of the army didn’t quite have the alcoholic bounty that bureaucratic oversight had given the hospital, but a cup of rummell each was being supplemented by cached supplies on a squad by squad basis. More important was the implicit permission. Uncle handing out the grog ration meant a licence to get a bit rowdy, to scrum and sing. Mother Semprellaime and the others of her old profession would be doing a fine trade tonight, alongside a solid amateur showing no doubt.
Masty wanted none of it. Not that he was either chaste or prudish, but it was awkward. Pals were a status-conscious people. A couple of troopers mashing anatomies wasn’t complicated, but when you invited rank into the equation it held the door open for awkwardness, power dynamics and abuse. And Masty wasn’t even just some foreigner who could conceivably have just sought out some youth in a similarly pallid uniform to offer a flower and a smile to. Masty was the kid who’d been brought into the army when he was seven, grown up there, become some unique hybrid thing. Which meant there was nobody like him, really. The one and only original Masty. Or whatever his name had once been.
Normally his best chance at a little release came when the department was given leave in some friendly port. And, technically, that would be theirs to enjoy in just a couple of days. Except he wouldn’t, not this time. Worst of all possible worlds. And so he walked, hunching his shoulders against the ribald calls, the whoops, the sound of some Cohort-Invigilator singing a Pal marching song comparing a variety of named officers to the arse ends of pack animals from across the world.
Actually, he stopped to listen to that one, because the singer was flat but the lyricist had been inspired, and Masty, more regular than the regulars, knew most of the individuals. He stood at the very edge of their firelight and mustered a bit of a smile, and felt better for it. And then left before anybody noticed him and either called him over or told him to go away.
It was a terrible thing to know that, while he liked the department, he very much preferred them in their usual state of grim misery and personal problems. That made him sound like a profoundly broken person. Which he was, but not in that way. It was just that he wasn’t very good at being happy. It wasn’t a life skill that being a foreign ward of an ideologically dictatorial military force taught you.
Then he was being hailed, as he crossed through the dark between two rows of tents. Dark, but of course the paler uniform of the Accessories always stood out, catching the slightest glimmer. We know you’re all sneaks, that uniform said. Sneak your way out of this.
He stood when addressed. The man who’d called was a stout, balding Cohort-Monitor not known to him. Bustling over, a half-cloak slung over his uniform jacket.
“You, Accessory! What’s your business here? Where are your papers?”
Masty blinked at that. Not what he was used to; certainly not what he expected tonight of all nights. He got out his dog-eared identification, the card with his essentials, the folded orders paper detailing his hospital duties. The Cohort-Monitor flicked open a hand-lamp, the tableth-powered glow spiking in Masty’s eyes.
“What in reason is an experimental hospital?” the man demanded. His lips had been moving as he read, which probably wasn’t a good sign. “You an experiment?”
“I’m an orderly, magister,” Masty explained.
“Orderly? Skulking around camp is hardly orderly,” the man spat. Masty forced a laugh, then bit it back because the man hadn’t been making a pun at all but had apparently never heard the word used as a job description.
“I help the medicos, magister,” he tried.
“Where’s your excursion permit?”
Masty blinked. “I’m sorry?”
A moment later he was sitting down because the man had shoved him hard in the chest.
“You will address me as ‘Magister’, Accessory. Where’s your excursion permit?”
“I… Magister. I wasn’t issued with one, magister. I don’t know what one is, magister.” He wasn’t sure what was going on. He seemed to have stepped out from the night of unwelcome but harmless celebration into a different situation entirely.
“No Accessory can just go on a jaunt through camp without a permit, and you know that damn well,” the Cohort-Monitor told him. “Looking to see if we’d left any unsecured possessions while we were in our cups, were you?”
“No, magister.”
“On your feet, Accessory! Do you think it’s appropriate to speak to a superior officer from the ground?”
“No, magister.” Masty scrambled up and the man lurched into him, a hand like a pincer of ham closing about his shoulder. The officer was drunk, he realised belatedly. Meanly, brutally drunk.
“You’re coming with me, sneak-thief. We’ll see what the duty Inquirer has to say about you.” Without warning the man was in motion, an inexorable momentum that dragged Masty in its wake. “How’s your back? Got room for more stripes or is it all scar-mail already?”
Masty tried protesting, which the Cohort-Monitor shook out of him in short order before dragging him deeper into camp. They ended up at a small tent where the worst-tempered woman in the world sat before a small desk. There were creatures in the world with a killing stare, Masty had heard. This woman could have looked right back down the line of their gaze and turned any one of them into dust.
“Tunly,” she said, in the manner of one describing a bowel ailment. “What now?”
“Found this little shit pilfering.”
“Magister, I was just walking.”
The Inquirer made a note. “Found him with his hand in a pocket?”
“As good as,” Cohort-Monitor Tunly said.
“Magister—”
Tunly shook him again and he bit his tongue. The Inquirer asked for his papers, and had to ask a second time because Masty’s head was still ringing. And then he didn’t have them because Tunly hadn’t given them back, and for a minute and a half’s pantomime Tunly could not find them either, and Masty was about to be reclassified from Accessory to Possible Spy. Then the documents turned up, crumpled in a pocket and stuck to something half-melted and nasty. The Inquirer took them fastidiously and unfolded them with the very tips of her fingers.
“You utter prick,” she said, after a second going-over aided by a pair of spectacles.
“I know,” Tunly agreed. “Nasty little piece of work.”
“You, Tunly. You are the prick,” the Inquirer told him flatly. “He’s not one of ours.”
Tunly swelled with pride and selective hearing. “You’re telling me I have secured an enemy agent?”
“He’s from Forthright Battalion, you twat,” the Inquirer told him. “He’s one of theirs.”
“Then why was he in our camp?”
The Inquirer massaged her forehead and Masty began to have an idea why she looked so very ill-tempered. “It’s a conjoined camp. There is no marked boundary between the Battalions, it’s just cheek by jowl out there. Something something not-wanting-to-foster-unhealthy-rivalries something, if I recall the justification. You’ve basically gone and grabbed one of their people and kidnapped him. Probably you were the one in the wrong camp, at that.”
“I was not!” Tunly insisted. “Megget, I caught him—”
“Sneaking,” the woman – Cohort-Inquirer Megget, apparently – cut him off. “Do you have any idea how much paperwork this is going to generate?”
“Discipline is more important,” declared Tunly in the manner of someone only peripherally connected with that paperwork.
“You a thief?” Megget asked Masty.
“No, magister. I’m a—”
“Didn’t ask what you were. So I have a Cohort-rank officer who says you’re a thief, and I have some sort of medical Accessory who says you’re not a thief but is likely to be biased towards you, on account of he’s you. And anyway, you Accessories always stick together.”
“And he didn’t have an excursion permit,” Tunly threw in.
“That’s because excursion permits are an invention of the Landwards Battalion Logistics Department who are specifically trying to inflame my writer’s cramp,” Megget snapped. “They don’t have them in Forthright. They don’t have them anywhere else but bloody here.”
“What, their Accessories can just… walk around?” Tunly was having an existential moment.
“And the Palleseen Sway still stands,” Megget noted. “Look, I’m not going to write him up as a thief.”
“But—”
“I am not going to go through our forms, and also the cross-battalion forms, just because you are pissed off at being duty officer and want to take it out on a foreigner,” she told him frankly. Masty felt himself slowly relax, muscle by muscle. Reason had prevailed.
“Give him six,” Megget said. “For malingering or something.”
“What?” Tunly demanded, incensed.
“What?” Masty asked, and then, hastily, “Magister?”
“Six is under the threshold for the inter-battalion stuff,” Megget said. “It’s all you’re getting.” She was speaking only to Tunly. Masty had ceased to exist to her.
*
Later, full dark and the business of the camp slowly guttering down just like its fires, Masty got back to the department. He spotted Lochiver and Banders at a fire still, or at least he heard them first because they were singing together, though not necessarily the same song. He gave the whole thing a wide berth, instead sneaking into the Butcher’s tent. He’d been charged with the act already, after all. He might as well make it true in retrospect.
The Butcher was a man of profound order when it came to his wares, as any responsible alchemist needed to be. Masty found the three precise philtres he needed, then paused. You could just about rub salves into your own back, but it would hurt like hell to twist and turn as he tried it. It would be like the six strokes all over again.
“Let me,” said Ollery, from the dark. Masty started, caught red-handed in a crime which would only have been departmental business as usual before tonight.
They went outside for it. The boy was sleeping – a stolen cup of rummell had put him straight out, Ollery said. He slept, and salving Masty’s wounds wasn’t going to be silent. Outside, the tuneless dirge Lochiver and Banders were mauling would cover the worst of it.
“Tell me,” Ollery prompted. Masty gave him the brief and narrow account, yelping occasionally as the man’s solid fingers worked across his back.
“Right,” said Ollery when he was done. “Well that’s worth knowing. I’ll ask Prassel to issue us with something, so Landwards don’t get fresh again.” And that was all the commiseration the Butcher had to give. “So you’re going to tell me what’s up, now.” Not a question.
“I got six, Chief.” The numbing effect of the salve was kicking in already and he struggled back into his shirt.
“And you had some preternatural premonition of this, because you’ve been like your own ghost all evening. I need to know I can rely on you when it counts, Masty. What is it?”
“I’m not enjoying being here, Chief,” Masty said hollowly.
“Hardly been bad so far, has it? Been in worse places…” Ollery’s voice trailed off. “Oh, right. Is it here?”
“It is, Chief.”
“What?” a new voice broke in. Masty hadn’t registered when the singing stopped, possibly because his ears had been trying to disown any connection to it. But here was Banders with her infallible instinct for somewhere to stick her nose in. “What’s here? Is it presents?” Swaying only slightly, then slumping bonelessly to drape herself over the Butcher’s shoulder. “What are we doing? What’s here?”
Masty took a deep breath. It wasn’t as though he could have kept it a secret, anyway.
“Banders, what am I?”
“You’re the best damn man I ever knew. We don’t deserve you.”
Masty blinked at how quickly that had come out, and didn’t know what to do with it. “No, I mean—”
“I mean, all right, you’re not a Pal, but… wait. Here here?”
“That’s right,” he confirmed. “I’ve come home.”
“Bloody marvellous!” Banders burst out, oblivious to Ollery trying to shush her. “We should drink to it.”
“No, no it’s not—” Masty tried.
“Here Bracinta or here the city?” she pressed.
“I mean, both but—”
“You can show us round!” Banders crowed. “You must know all the places!”
I was six, seven, when they took me from it. “No, Banders—”
“This is fantastic,” she told him. “We are going to have the best leave!” And with that she receded from the Butcher as though rebounding belatedly from a collision, and wove off through the tents.
“Not how I wanted that to go,” Masty admitted. At least she hadn’t clapped him companionably on the back before she left.