The Palleseen philosophy does not admit the concept of a ‘necessary evil’, mostly because ‘evil’ is derided by their philosophers as a term belonging to outmoded systems. However, dig shallowly and the idea of ‘utilitarian imperfection’ can be unearthed, covering a multitude of sins that, one day, will be eradicated, but are useful right now. And then there’s necromancy.
Fellow-Inquirer Prassel was also technically on leave, but if you were a mid-ranking officer then you couldn’t slack. Your private moments should, ideally, be spent publicly on educational and self-improving activities, to show how dedicated you were to the cause. And while Prassel wasn’t that much of a brown-noser, she didn’t actually like drinking, gambling or getting her end away particularly. Nor, for that matter, the company of her peers. Oh, a glass of something decent with someone like Thurrel who could hold a conversation with a modicum of wit, that was acceptable. The idea of two days of war stories and dick measurement with a bunch of other ambitious Fellows of various schools was her idea of hell.
Thankfully, she had an invitation. What felt like a rather prestigious invitation. The worm of excitement very seldom stirred itself in Prassel’s breast. She had cultivated the cold fish manner that was Palleseen comme il faut for long enough that she never really warmed to anybody. Her very occasional lovers complained of frostbite, and Maserley put around that she’d only gone into necromancy because of the attributes she sought in a romantic liaison. And yet she had been passionate, once, and could still be again. Academically passionate, at least. About necromancy. About the science of the life–death boundary. Not hard to see, really, why she was never oversupplied with friends. But Prassel was a scholar first and foremost, in her narrow field. She wanted very little more, when given a moment to herself, than to catch up on what there was of the literature. She was constantly frustrated by the lack of opportunity in army life to really sit down with someone and talk about the Grey Area and Rate of Fade in Vivid Auras and the finer points of copper as a medium for ectopic pattern retention.
And now she was going to have her chance. And while girlish excitement was not something that had visited her since about the age of four, her sparring partners that morning had noted a certain vivacity to her that wasn’t customary. Her sword work was one of the few other leisure activities she applied herself to. Mostly because, having discovered that she was actually good at it, the pastime gave her the opportunity to give arrogant sons of bitches like Maserley a caning. That was also something she felt at least a flicker of emotion about.
She had been given a letter with the seal of Landwards Battalion’s Field Necromancy department, setting out an address in uptown Magnelei and a time. And she thought: A Field Necromancy department! A whole department! And wondered if she could get a transfer and to hell with the hospital nonsense they forced her to nursemaid.
For senior officers, Fellows and above, they didn’t make you queue to get in with the rabble. The army was running coaches up to the high town where a whole block of big townhouses had been commandeered to give people like her some space, and respite from the demands of their inferiors. She was sure that whichever grand Bracite families had donated their homes for the occasion knew that their Palleseen allies were properly grateful. After all, they had been relying on Pal uniforms to keep order in the streets and factions from one another’s throats for a decade and a half or so. If the Pals decided to move out because of insufficient hospitality then the clique of pointedly non-hereditary officials who’d been running the place would be royally screwed.
She’d brought notes. Her own work had, she felt, given her a few novel insights that she was really looking forward to discussing with some knowledgeable peers. Necromancy had been so mired in prudery and superstition for centuries. It needed sensible people like her discussing it as a science, to drag it into the modern era.
Having presented her papers to three different polite but insistent intermediaries, she was finally ushered into a dim room, a high-ceiling and the only windows present clustering right up against it as though the presence of necromancers had frightened them all up there. Despite the poor light, the walls were lined with shelves. Dusty books bound in what looked like carpet, plainly not leafed through in living memory, Bracite characters along the spines. She was reaching out to pluck on down to see just how imperfect the literature really was when someone cleared his throat, and she was brought back to her purpose. Her peers. Her science. Her valuable insights.
There were three other people in the room and one of them was dead. But that was something which Prassel could take in her stride. She hadn’t quite got to the old-joke stage of the profession where some of her best friends were dead, but you became sanguine about corpses after a while. Even corpses that were still walking around. Especially those, in fact.
Three people. One was a woman some way short of her age, pale hair pulled back into a bun you could have cracked rocks on. The effect on her face was to yank at her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth so that her resting expression was a kind of surprised grimace. She was another Fellow-Inquirer, a genuine peer. At the head of the table was a man far older, his natural expression rather pensive, his face more skull and skin than anything fleshed out, so that he was by far the most unhealthy-looking of them despite the deadness of the man next to him. He wore non-standard clothes. Prassel, who’d had a uniform freshly pressed for her before she left camp, stared at the robe the man had over his own threadbare greys. It was edged with sigils in silver thread, and there was a bandolier of tablethi across his chest that was plainly doing something active, though she wasn’t sure what. His lips moved slightly all the time, chewing at his withered lips. His insignia said he was a Sage-Archivist, however, so she saluted.
“Ah, Prassel,” he said, and indicated a chair. “You know Killingly, of course.”
Prassel didn’t. Her eyes flicked to the other woman, who showed no feelings about being called ‘Killingly’ and also being a field necromancer. The additional ordeal by fire that represented, on the woman’s ascent through the ranks, must have toughened her up formidably.
The old man himself was Sage-Archivist Stiverton, and Prassel knew of him by reputation, mostly from some powerfully insightful papers written back around when she was still in the phalanstery. An honour, but a slightly awkward one given that she hadn’t heard a peep from him academically in the almost two decades since, and given that he was wearing a magic robe like he was some kind of wizard. And the last member of their quartet was…
Was dead, as she’d divined. It didn’t take a great deal of necromantic skill to work that out. He was sitting there stripped to the waist and being a corpse. A corpse with a fairly large chunk of its thoracic cavity excised so they could fit a copper jar in there, held in by straps and the stubby fingers of the remaining ribcage. A knot of tubes and wires sprouted from the top of the jar and vanished up into the corpse’s throat and down into its abdomen. This was Cohort-Monitor Vessel.
Prassel nodded politely and kept her face very still because she’d just about swallowed Killingly and now she was wondering whether she’d missed some part of the note instructing her to bring a joke name.
“Thank you for inviting me, magister,” she said respectfully. “It’s not often I get the chance to—” Pulling her notes out of her belt pouch. “Actually, in my work in the department I’ve had some—”
“You do corpses, don’t you? In Forthright?” Vessel’s voice came out as a drawn-out moan, and she realised she’d been watching his lungs fill around the back of the jar to generate wind for the words.
“That’s my major field assignment, yes.” There had been a distinct lack of honorific in Vessel’s address, given his rank, but presumably he had to ration his words more than most.
There was a little ripple of side-eying between Killingly and Stiverton that she didn’t much like. “It’s a shame,” the other woman said, “that so many battalions still devote our talents to such outdated stratagems, don’t you think?”
There was an innate kick in Prassel, to defend the department and her duties, but really, did she want to? “I agree that cadaver work isn’t exactly cutting edge,” she said, and then winced inwardly because it wasn’t the best choice of words and possibly bad taste from Vessel’s perspective.
“Landwards Battalion’s Necromantic Science department focuses more on the spectral side of the discipline,” Stiverton explained. “Ghost-wranglers, you know.”
“We were hoping that, given how underutilised your talents currently are, we might enlist you, on the side. Share research and resources.” Killingly examined her nails as though ensuring they were clear of grave-dirt.
“Well, yes,” Prassel said. “Obviously. Regular duties permitting. I’m very committed to advancing the science.”
“Good, good. Splendid.” Stiverton smiled, which did nothing to differentiate his face from a skull. “You see, we at Landwards rather believe that necromancy has a good chance of being the future of warfare. Not the clumsy stuff, animating bodies and sending them shambling off towards the enemy.” A flick of his fingers dismissing ninety per cent of her work. “Ghost work, Prassel. Capture, preservation and use of spirits. You can fill the copper, I take it? You’re not so rusty just because they’ve got you puppeteering the meat?”
“I’ve done it,” she agreed. Most recently unsuccessfully, when she’d tried to preserve the ghost of the wounded spy, but that had been against Loruthi soul-eater magics. Give her a chance to brush up and she’d be more than capable.
“Vessel, tell her about your squad’s most recent escapade, will you?” Stiverton invited.
The corpse hunched forwards. It had been a man in his mid-twenties, and any clues as to cause of death had been occluded by post-mortem surgery. It moved with admirable ease, almost life-like. And she’d heard of the practice, of course. Bind a ghost to a corpse and you ended up with something far more elegant than the mindless things she marched around. But inefficient. Her shamblers were cheap. Vessel’s prolonged existence was a significant investment.
“We were deployed behind enemy lines,” came his dirge of a voice, and then a wheezing inhalation as he forced his lungs to reinflate. “On being signalled, we seized enemy assets. Being artillery crew of their rear batteries. We turned the weapons on their own. Rear lines, then moved on. To support staff, water bearers and medicos. Causing sufficient disruption to. Undermine the enemy defences leading. To enemy positions being overrun. During only the second assault on their. Positions after which we. Retreated to our original position. And awaited retrieval.”
Stiverton watched her, leaving Prassel acutely aware of any flicker of expression. “Explain ‘deploy’,” she invited. Invited Stiverton, or even Killingly, because Vessel’s voice was getting on her nerves.
“Well, quite,” Stiverton explained. “We just took a kind of very long-range trebuchet-style launcher – quite primitive, quite simple, squad-portable and even the most cack-handed regulars can set it up so long as there’s an artillerist to aim it. And we… threw Vessel and his squad all the way to the back of the enemy lines. A little like the ball games they play here. You’ve seen them? Quite the athletic spectacle. A good throwing arm, and we have a fifth column at the Loruthi’s backs.”
“You don’t mean throwing corpses,” Prassel clarified, not looking at any of them now, only into her own head. “You mean… him.”
Vessel tapped the copper jar clasped by his rib-ends.
“And then he… what, you…” Aware that she’d lost the perfect imperturbability of face she so valued, screwed up like a schoolchild doing maths at the phal. “You must compromise the warding on the copper so that the ghost leaks, and trust to, what, sheer willpower to stop them dissipating before a host gets close enough. Animation or possession?” Eyes on Vessel again.
“The latter, preferably, but. The former remains an option,” he ground out.
A squad of ghosts in jars, ready to leap from host to host and sow chaos behind enemy lines.
“But the power—” she said uncertainly. “Or you rely on…”
“Life essence of the hosts,” Killingly confirmed. “So long as they can keep chaining one to another, draining their current ride to fuel the leap to the next. Momentum. Like any military action.” And Prassel pegged her as the strategist, then. She understood the military practicalities, and Stiverton the necromantic theory, and Vessel was… the experimental subject, she supposed.
“I can see potential problem nodes,” she noted diplomatically. The sheer daring of the scheme appealed to her, but still, the risks. “Attrition?”
“Five of my squad of twelve. Were lost,” Vessel said. “Containment failure, dissipation. Feral transition.”
Seeing her momentary grimace, Stiverton nodded. “Yes, we’re working on that. A matter of soldierly discipline. Vessel understands that his duty to the Committee doesn’t end with death, but others have found it hard to maintain their focus. We have had some… issues with subjects who proved temperamentally unsuitable to the service.” And that explained the robes, Prassel thought, because those were very definitely ghost-warding sigils, and humming with power even here. She wondered how many mad and angry ghosts had ended up loose in Landwards’s camp.
Or else Stiverton didn’t quite trust Vessel.
“Still,” she said. “A squad of twelve. That seems manageable. Proper selection procedures and reindoctrination. I salute you, magister. This is a remarkable innovation.”
Killingly coughed. “We anticipate diminishing returns, obviously. The Loruthi have some potent magical scholars of their own. Prolonged use of this stratagem will force them to invest power and expertise in warding measures of their own. Which is in itself a good, as those resources will be taken from elsewhere and weaken them overall. But we intend to make the most of our advantage by making use of an assault in force in the next major offensive.”
Prassel made an expression of polite enquiry. “Explain ‘in force’,” she requested.
“We currently have fifty coppers on the storage racks waiting for long-range deployment,” Killingly told her. “In fact, this is why we wanted to talk to you. Any spirits currently in containment, or any that you are able to place in the copper before the joint battalion action would be greatly appreciated.”
“You have… fifty ghosts together,” Prassel observed.
“Currently,” Killingly agreed. Fifty ghosts in close proximity. If Prassel had been Stiverton she’d have three robes, a ghost-repelling hat and some very fast running shoes.
“We understand that your current command is some manner of hospital,” Stiverton said, gamely trying to steer the conversation because a certain tension had sprung up between the two women despite Prassel’s best efforts to keep her thoughts bottled up.
“An experimental hospital, yes, magister,” Prassel confirmed. The old embarrassment about the project reared its ugly head, as always. “It’s proved an effective means of preserving personnel, despite the unorthodoxy—”
“What happens when they fail?” Killingly asked sweetly. “I mean, I assume they have you harvesting the corpses, at the very least.”
“Well, yes, of course,” Prassel said, feeling her footing in the conversation shift and tilt. “That was the primary purpose of the department, originally.” Except ‘experimental cadaver farm’ wouldn’t exactly fill the regulars with confidence. “However, the selection of personnel available have historically been more effective than anticipated, and so—”
“We want you to bottle the ghosts of your failures,” Killingly told her flatly.
“It’s hard to have the appropriate forms signed when the surgeons are at work,” was Prassel’s bland reply. And she had really wanted to like Killingly, despite the fact the woman had hit Fellow rank at twelve years old or something.
“No need. Here.” A paper slid across the table. “You’ll recognise the Professor-Invigilator’s credentials. He’s very supportive of the venture. A waiver of authority. No individual permissions needed.”
It really was a bleak little piece of paper. Prassel admired it in its clinical exactitude. It was a mandatory extension of duties. She’d used the form herself, when she needed to make sure the regulars knew that some onerous but necessary task was included in their remit. Foraging when rations were short, say, or looking after some delegation. Or, as in this case, not being released from their obligations to the army just because they were dead.
“I appreciate that you probably feel you’re being judged by the effectiveness of this little medico sideshow you’ve got going on,” Killingly said. “But if you could expedite a supply of filled coppers, our department would be very grateful. As would the Professor-Invigilator. We want to have Cohort-Monitor Festle at the head of a hundred soon enough. A hundred invisible infiltrators at the enemy’s back, Prassel. Quite the thought, no?”
For a moment Prassel couldn’t think it, because she’d just realised that the dead man was Festle and not Vessel at all, and was desperately thinking back to see if she’d addressed him by name at any point. Then she did think it. An army of ghosts unleashed on the enemy support and rear lines. Leaping from host to host, sabotaging and killing and moving on. And going mad. And forgetting who they were, or failing to recognise their friends. She imagined whole battlefields that could never be reclaimed by either side because of the haunting. A weapon that poisoned the earth forever with vengeful spectres.
She gave them all a bright smile. “A truly remarkable innovation,” she agreed. “I will, of course, institute the necessary systems.”