There were very good reasons that Landwards Battalion might have instituted its draconian measures against the free movement of Accessories. Pirisytes was an example of how some of those Accessories were using their movement in profoundly problematic ways. Except that, against the vast span of a whole battalion and the general trouble that restless soldiers got into, Landwards’s Higher Orders hadn’t actually noticed the pattern of malicious intent against the background level of fractious misbehaviour. And instituting a whole extra layer of punitive bureaucracy against their own conscripts hadn’t stopped any of the malice from being carried out.
When they finally took the bag off her head, Tallifer was aware that she had been carried some distance. Thrown into a cart and covered with sacks and then taken to where the sounds of camp revelry weren’t even a dull murmur on the horizon. Nothing of which was good news, but then the whole sack-on-headness of the situation had communicated that more than adequately.
She had absolutely no idea what was going on. A Landwards Battalion hazing ritual seemed the absolute best interpretation, but she wasn’t feeling lucky.
They were out in the countryside. In a hollow, surrounded by trees, up against what her eyes at first told her was a vast gnarled hand clawing its way out of the earth. The faint kindness of the moon, and the fact she’d been in utter darkness for half an hour, recontextualised that to the roots of a fallen tree whose demise had left this hollow and this clearing. A giant of the forest laid low by time rather than the woodsman’s axe.
Senses she hadn’t had to use in quite a while were prickling, telling her this was a bad place. Not that her perfectly regular senses hadn’t worked that one out, but this was consecrated. She tasted the air with the tip of her tongue and understood it was a temporary working. Someone had gone round the lip of the hollow with ash and vinegar, and there would be sigils smeared across the trunks of the surrounding trees. Consecrated, but not to any god of hers, nor anything from the old Jarokiri pantheon she might claim diplomatic relations with.
The people around her were wearing the same uniform she was. Palleseen tight but Accessory pale. They were all of a piece: half a dozen compact people with pointy chins and bony cheekbones – as much as she could see of their faces. All conscripted from some part of the Sway she’d never been to, either as a fugitive priest or a Palleseen medico.
They had masks on. Most were just of cloth. Bandanas with eyeholes, tied off at the back, repurposed from old uniforms. She could tell the leader, though, because he had on a wooden thing that covered his whole face, a grotesque bug-eyed business intricately carved to suggest that, apart from those eyes, the whole rest of his face was spindly reaching limbs with crabby little hands, all packed together. Quite a piece of work, and Banders could probably have sold it to a collector for a pocketful of money and a couple of good-sized favours. Which receding situation was probably the only circumstance in which Tallifer would have been happy to see the thing.
They manhandled her over to a wooden frame that had been driven into the earth before the roots. Not right up against them, room enough for someone to stand behind it, and she knew enough to know what that meant. She struggled, but she was an old woman and they were all lean, not big but strong like rawhide that only grips tighter. They had her wrists and ankles secured without really breaking a sweat.
She cursed them. First just swearing and then with, “The Chastising Fire eat you from your guts out!”
The Chastising Fire, Mazdek, was dithering about on her shoulder. It ran up her arm and gummed at the ropes, but as they weren’t a formal offering it couldn’t affect them, and as they weren’t her ropes, she couldn’t exactly turn them into an impromptu donation to the faith.
Even so, a couple of her captors offered up warding gestures, nothing she recognised save the intent was clear. Almost flattering that, them imagining she had a serious curse left in her.
Then they got the other prisoner off the cart. She hadn’t even realised she had company. She’d been keeping very still, waiting for a moment that hadn’t come, and so had he. Maric Jack’s bewildered face, when the hood came off, and him without even his magic box of whatever-it-was.
She thought they’d screwed up then, what with just the one frame set out, but it turned out one of the uncomfortable things she’d been sharing the cart-bed with was another frame, and they had driven it into the earth with the efficiency of a good Pal work crew. After which Jack was tied to it, without even resisting very much. Just kind of going with it, which was normally an attitude towards life that Tallifer appreciated but just right now some kind of resistance would have been nice. Even just to show solidarity.
He looked over at her, registered he wasn’t the sole piece of meat on the chopping block, and grimaced. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?” Tallifer demanded. “This is your fault? They’ve got a thing with you?” She looked round wildly. “I’m not with him. He’s nobody I know, this clown. You’ve got the wrong woman.”
“No, I mean,” Jack clarified. “Just, generally. It doesn’t look good.”
“Oh, you think?” she demanded. “They are going to strangle us.”
“What? Why?”
Tallifer looked at him pityingly, because it was something she did a lot and circumstances suggested she wouldn’t get the chance to do it much more. “I thought you were a priest, Jack.”
“I mean, ex-priest.” He tried to shrug in that loose-shouldered Maric way but the position of his arms didn’t really allow it. “Wait, this is—”
Tallifer drew in a long, tired breath. “I really don’t see that I need to spend my last minutes explaining rudimentary theology to an idiot,” she said calmly. “Oi you, with the horrible face on. Tell this man I’ve never met before what you’re about to do to us, will you?” And in her head the words had an enviable sangfroid about them. And on her lips they trembled and jumped with fear. Because yes, she was old, and yes she was tired, and yes her god was a miserable little squeak of flame that wouldn’t have warmed a beggar’s least finger, but she was still using her life, worn out as it was. She was clinging to it like a drowning woman to a plank.
The hideous mask drew near, tilting and cocking weirdly. For a moment she thought the man was trying to spook her even more, in which case it was working. Then she realised the mask’s actual eyeholes, hidden within the carving, were quite small, and he was just trying to see her properly.
“The great temples hold their sacrifices in the open air.” His voice came out through some channel in the carvings that made it sound hollow and nasty. “They lift their offerings to the sun. They burn them, so that the smoke of their oblation may ascend to the vault of the sky. The Pals are the same. Their conquests are a succession of setting lamps and tearing off roofs, so that all is exposed to the searing light of reason. And yet the brighter their lamps, the darker the shadows. And we of the shadows make our offerings in a different way. We do not release or expose, but stifle. We bury in darkness. And while a good peat bog would be best, to send your lives to god, we shall make do with the cord. The cord twisted tight, to trap your breath within your bodies. To entomb your souls. To make you fit gifts for hidden things. Do I make myself clear?”
“You do know we’re not actually Pals,” Tallifer tried, although she already knew the answer. “We’re all Whitebellies here, right?”
“You’re priests,” the mask told her. “I can see the fingerprints of gods on both of you. There is no sweeter meat.”
It had been a long time since some poetic beau had referred to Tallifer in those kind of terms and she didn’t feel that having the words thrown at her at this extremity was flattering. “I will set a fire in your guts as my last act,” she told the man. “The dying will of a priestess of Mazdek has a power even the Pals couldn’t drive from me.” She had no idea if it was true.
“Not the least of your power shall make it past the cord,” the mask told her. “It shall be a feast for god as your body moulders in the soil.” The mask cocked towards the moon. “We’re losing time. Do it.”
And then there was a cultist stood behind her. She couldn’t crane round enough to look at the man – woman? – but then there were hands before her, a thin garotte of wire held between them.
“Jack,” she said, “if you’ve got any miracles to pull out of your pockets, now’s the time. Or did they get left behind with your damn box?”
“They did, yes,” he said. There was someone behind him, too. Fiddling with their killing implement because they hadn’t baled it properly in their pocket and it was tangled. The man in the mask clicked his tongue with audible annoyance at the delay.
“I told you—” he said, in a voice considerably less portentous.
“I know, I know,” the cultist said.
“If nothing else, they catch you with that in your pocket you’ll have some serious explaining to do.” Like a mother nagging a recalcitrant adolescent. “Always—”
“Always hide the tools of our faith, I know.” And then a triumphant little noise at getting the murderous implement straightened out. “Ready. Sorry.”
Somehow the twitch of the mask adequately conveyed a rolling of the eyes behind it. “You sure? I can do the invocation now? Or did you want to wait til morning or something?”
“Just go, Pirisytes.”
The mask, and apparently someone called Pirisytes behind it, made an exaggerated What? motion. “I mean it’s just as well we’re going to kill ‘em now, isn’t it, what with names suddenly being bandied about.”
“I’m sorry. Just came out. Do the invocation. It’s waiting.”
There were plenty of perfectly nice gods who were it or them or some other thing entirely. Somehow Tallifer didn’t think this was one of those.
“I have money,” she said.
“You’ll die rich then,” said Pirisytes. He’d apparently given up on the hollow boding voice, fidgeting from foot to foot, keen to be done and get gone. I’m sorry, am I keeping you?
“I have influence. Favours,” Tallifer went on determinedly. The wire slipped about her neck, biting ever so slightly into her throat. “Look, we can come to an arrangement. You need something for your followers, for your god. I can get it for you.”
“Death to all the bright gods,” the man said. “Down with their temples and holy places, and the bodies of their priests to choke the streets of their citadels.” Quoting, and from another language given the awkward grammar. “Doesn’t leave much room for shaking hands, old woman. Now.” And he drew himself up, shifted posture so that he was the mask and not the man, again. “Eater of the world, breeder of disharmony, hear me!” His voice gone through hollow and into a buzzing drone that made her sick to her stomach. “Take this feast I have brought you. Make their souls a meat for your eggs that disorder and chaos may hatch and spread through the world like a sickness. Feast on the devotions they owe to others. Present yourself before us, breeder of discord! Witness our sacrifice!”
They were obviously far enough from the camp that he felt confident lifting his voice to a shout. In the ringing echoes of it, Jack twitched and said, “Wait, I know you.”
The mask made a little snicker of a laugh and put a hand on his shoulder companionably. “Friend, I don’t know you, and you’d not be able to presume on our acquaintance even so.”
“Not you,” Jack said, and he wasn’t looking at the mask, but at the man’s shoulder. “You, I know you. You’re… the flying scorpion.”
Tallifer frowned, but something had obviously struck home, because the cultists had all gone still.
“It is not a flying scorpion,” said Pirisytes, obviously between clenched teeth and just like any other priest who has that one tenet of their theology that nobody quite remembers properly. “It is a—”
“A scorpionfly!” Jack announced in triumph, looking weirdly delighted at his own memory. “The divine scorpionfly, who lays eggs in the hearts of kings, harbinger of upheaval and change, bringer of chaos! Zoro… Zan… Zenotheus!” As though he was a schoolchild put on the spot by teacher.
“If you’re going to claim you’re one of the sect,” said Pirisytes, “I can see that’s not so.”
“No, no, but I had a friend in Ilmar. One of you. A priest. Chaos and eggs, right? Leave no paper unaltered, no order unchanged? I know you.” Still weirdly talking past the mask to the man’s shoulder. “She… she was my friend. A good friend. An enemy, obviously. She wanted to convert me. But she had the best tea. I liked her very much.”
“Give it up, Jack,” said Tallifer, who’d decided dying with dignity was better.
“Look, I don’t know if it’s worth anything,” Jack said, “but…”
Pirisytes had been trying to shift sideways to intercept Jack’s stare and become the focus of the conversation again. “Who are you talking to?” he demanded peevishly.
“Zenotheus,” Jack said. “The divine scorpionfly.”
A profound, rather sceptical silence fell over the hollow until Pirisytes managed, “Nice try.”
“He’s right there. It, sorry. It’s right there. On your shoulder.”
The chief cultist went very still. “On my…?”
“I think. I mean maybe not the whole actual Zenotheus, but, like, a little piece of it. I mean you invoked it. Maybe it was in your pocket, before.”
“In my…?”
Jack looked honestly bewildered. “You can’t see it? Your own god.”
Pirisytes took a step back. His hands twitched, but if he was trying to signal them to start twisting the garottes, the message didn’t get through. “You’re mad,” said the flying chaos scorpion cultist.
“I see gods,” Jack said. “All the gods. It’s… I think it’s a kind of theological technicality. I fell through the gaps after a serious disagreement with God, and all the other gods sort of rushed in. I see them all over the place. I see Tallifer’s fire god over there, and I can see Zenotheus on your shoulder. Or a little avatar of it anyway. I’m not in the army because they caught me being a priest. I’m not even a real priest any more. I’m in the army because they caught me smuggling gods out of Ilmar, to keep them from the Decanters. I had a whole thing going. A system of people who believed in gods or in me or in frustrating the Pals. That’s what they got me for, in the end. God-smuggling.”
A pause, and then an incredulous laugh from within the mask. “God-smuggling?”
“I know. It sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud. If you go in my inside pocket you’ll see it on my papers, though. If you can read the writing.” And then, sternly, “No. Both of us. No, that’s not acceptable.” Talking to the shoulder again. “It’s got to be both of us. Please. For the sake of your priestess, my friend. Or the gods I smuggled. Or the chaos I bred, because there was a lot of chaos. I won’t pretend it was my primary goal, but it happened. Please.”
The mask cocked again. Tallifer, her skin crawling just a little, knew the man was listening to a little voice she couldn’t hear. And knew that he didn’t know he was listening to it. It didn’t creep in by the ears, that kind of voice.
“Cut them down,” Pirisytes said. “Both of them.”
The disappointed groan of the cultists was just like any squad of soldiers denied some minor diversion.
“Just do it. God-smuggling. That’s worth something.” He sighed and tugged at the rim of the mask to get some air to his face. “Get a fire going. Brew up some tea. And you two, get the frames back on the cart.”
*
With the mask off, Pirisytes was just a youngish man, dark hair cropped, a few scars remaining from some pox or skin condition long past. He sat and stared at Jack, and Tallifer was more than grateful not to be the centre of his attention.
The tea, handed out in army-issue tin cups, was very good, at least. Really top-tier stuff, far better than normally reached the department unless Banders was having a particularly good run.
“I mean, we have a problem, now,” Pirisytes said.
“Because we know your little cult is active here,” Tallifer agreed.
“We’ll say nothing,” Jack said.
“Well obviously we’ll say nothing,” Tallifer lied. And she was feeling angry and her wrists still hurt from the ropes, and it didn’t come out sounding very convincing. And it was Jack who decided to remonstrate with her.
“We’ll say nothing,” he insisted.
She tried to communicate, by a widening of the eyes, that they had uncovered a murder cult and that anyone they knew could be next.
“It’s the deal,” he said. “It’s why we’re alive. Zenotheus is a god of hidden things. Keeping itself and its followers hidden is… how these things go.”
“And when Lochiver goes missing and ends up on one of these frames? Or Banders? Or Cosserby?” Because, honestly, if this sort of thing was going to happen to anyone then a luckless bastard like Cosserby was at the front of the queue.
Jack bit his lip. “Ah. Well. I… can I alter the deal a bit?”
Pirisytes’s lip wrinkled. “What? Did you bargain with the brooder of lies and not get what you wanted?”
“If I asked you to…” And Jack wanted to say, Just not do the whole murdering thing, and Tallifer knew that wouldn’t fly, and Jack plainly did too. He grimaced, unhappy but wrangling with the logic of it. “To not touch the hospital department. Anyone associated with it.”
She waited for Pirisytes to scoff at that, but he frowned instead. “Hospital, is it?”
“That’s us,” Tallifer confirmed. “Experimental field hospital. The Butcher’s Circus and Freakshow.”
His face was blank for a moment and she wondered if his unseen god was whispering to him again. “Here’s the deal,” he said at last. “We don’t go near you for offerings. But maybe some night someone turns up needing medico attention and no questions, and you patch them up and ask precisely nothing.”
She hadn’t thought of that. How a cultist embedded within the army might end up with all manner of injuries that would be hard to explain. And probably healing wasn’t a part of Zenotheus’s portfolio.
“Of course,” said Jack, without hesitation, so eager to help that Tallifer was amazed he was still alive. If Pirisytes had been a harder bargainer he could have talked the Maric into volunteering for the garotte again.
*
The ride back on the cart was socially awkward but physically more congenial, what with the lack of bonds and hoods. They sat shoulder to shoulder with the unmasked cultists, a bunch of unremarkable men and women she could have passed in the camp and not glanced twice at. Accessory conscripts from Oloumann. A nation whose nasty little chaos and murder cults had been carried across the Palleseen Sway by the Pals themselves. She made a mental note never to go there.
Pirisytes sat with his head down and his hands clasped together, maybe praying, maybe just trying to adjust to the idea that his god really was with him, and that his faith had absolutely been justified. She could understand that being a shock after years in the field, cut off from any wider hierarchy. She told him about her own journey, then, mostly because him being so impressed by Jack’s god-smuggling had rankled a little. How she’d smuggled her own god out from his great temple before the end. How she’d teamed up with Lochiver, and the two of them had carved a course of sabotage, death, arson and plague across every part of the Sway that wasn’t too hot for them. And she hadn’t seen it as spreading chaos. She’d seen it as vengeance. She hadn’t killed Pals as offerings to Mazdek, but she’d certainly killed them and burned their places and torched their precious papers. And Pirisytes grinned at her, suddenly her friend and not the man who’d been about to sacrifice her earlier that night.
“You’re all right,” he said. “That was good work. Zenotheus would approve.”
She thought she didn’t want Zenotheus to approve, but then after a little consideration, maybe she wasn’t in a position to turn down anybody’s approval. And those years on the run with Lochiver had been their glory days, if any had. A wild time, when neither of them had been quite so old, and it had seemed possible they would keep ahead of the Pals until they went down in a cataclysm of fire and decay.
And they caught us, and offered us their damned choice. And we were both too weak to take the respectable way out. Too weak, and too worried for each other.
Pirisytes put a hand on her knee. She twitched, but there was genuine sympathy in the murder-cultist’s face. Genuine enough that it brought a lump to her throat.
“I don’t know what your Mazdek says,” he told her, “but Zenotheus has ‘survive’ amongst its tenets. Survive and breed and spread. We do what we have to do.”
She nodded, bitterly resentful that a man like this should be trying to consoling her, and also that she was, genuinely, consoled.
“Stop here,” Jack said suddenly. “We’ll, ah, walk from here. Best we’re not seen together, don’t you think?”
They were still a way from the camp – she could see its light and just hear the diminishing murmur of a good night’s ebbing tide. She’d have preferred to ride most of the rest of the way, but Pirisytes said the word and the pair of them were let down onto the ground.
“I don’t suppose,” she said acidly, “that you’re going to use your healing powers on my aching back and legs, when we get in?”
“I don’t think I can,” Jack said. “Not with you being a priestess. I… the healing kind of inducts people into God’s faith.”
“Well then you’re bloody useless,” she told him.
“Yes, probably. You can come out.” He was looking into the sparse trees lining one side of the road. A moment later a woman stepped from behind one and leaned against it, arms folded. Tallifer had to squint for a moment before she understood who she was looking at.
“What the hell is she doing here? Is that son of a bitch Invigilator spying on us?”
“No.” Jack sounded choked. “No, I don’t think so.”
Caeleen the demon, none other, walked over and took Jack’s chin between thumb and forefinger. “Hide still intact, then?” she asked. “Only He assured me that you were in some kind of dreadful danger, and I had to come all the way out here to find you.”
“I was,” Jack whispered, very still under her touch. “I was. Thank you.”
You don’t ever thank a demon, Tallifer thought. They were creatures of contract, and thanks implied an obligation beyond what they were bound to.
“He wouldn’t shut up,” Caeleen said dismissively. “Said I was the only one who could help. But it looks like you didn’t need me anyway, so that’s my time wasted. You can take Him back now.” And there was a peculiar piece of mummery where Jack took precisely nothing from her, in a way that absolutely excluded Tallifer.
“I’m going now. If you get jumped by a catwolf or something, it’s your lookout,” Caeleen said. And paused precisely two heartbeats, frowning at Jack as though trying to see him some other way, as though he was one of those Jarokiri artworks that looked like two completely different things depending on how you focused your eyes. And then turned and left, walking away in a manner a world away from a soldier’s disciplined march, uniform bedamned.
Jack watched her, until Tallifer jabbed him under the ribs as hard and painfully as possible.
“Are we spending the night out here, or what?” she demanded. “Only she wasn’t kidding. Catwolves are a real thing in Bracinta. I’ve heard stories.”
“Right,” Jack agreed, still looking depressingly starry. “Yes. Let’s go.”