It is remarkable how many liberated cities turned out to be exactly the dens of depravity and vice that reinforced the Pal understanding that, of all the world, only they were truly civilized and perfected. Exactly the vice and depravity demanded by, for example, off-duty Palleseen soldiers.
Tallifer had said something about catwolves, or possibly wolfcats. The two colossal statues on either side of the stadium gates were indeed some kind of indeterminate beast, feline and canine together, lean and savage, open jaws towering high over Jack’s head.
“These things, they’re real then?” he asked the others. “Actually out there?”
“Sure,” Banders said with absolute confidence, even as Cosserby said, “No.”
“Yeah?” she prompted, and Cosserby took in a deep breath and got as far as “Well, actually,” before Masty said, “The last of them were hunted down two generations back.”
“I thought you didn’t know anything.” She jabbed Masty in the ear, having gotten over her previous remorse. “I thought you were, like, three, back when.”
Masty shrugged. “It was the royal beast.”
“Very republican of them,” said Banders approvingly.
“No, I mean only kings could—” But they were pushing into a loud and close-packed crowd, elbowing for room on the tiered stone seating. Jack had the task of carrying cups of hot wine, which meant that his uniform was sodden with it by the time they were seated. Lidlet passed around the little waxed paper receptacles while he wrung the worst of it out of his shirt.
“They going to dock my pay for this?” he asked Masty, but the man had his hood pulled down past his nose, his shoulders hunched. Jack thought he understood. If the Battalion had marched into Ilmar then he’d invest in a hood himself rather than be spotted as a local wearing the uniform.
“So, as I understand it, the rules are—” Cosserby started from his other side. Lidlet then writhed a knee between them, and then another, wedging a space for her backside on the seat without actually applying any aggressive force. It was a remarkable piece of applied theology that suggested she’d caught on very quickly to the strictures of her new life.
“Right,” she said. “You tell me, now.” Leaning up close, mouth to his ear. Far from sweet nothings, though; the sort of grim voice he’d expect from a torturer seeking confession.
“We’re supposed to be watching the, you know, the thing they do here.” He wasn’t actually clear what they did, nor was he catching a word of what sounded like a very detailed explanation, because Cosserby was inflicting it mostly on Banders. Then some Bracite men and women wearing very little had come out into the circular open space, and he decided it was something lewd. But they started throwing a hard-looking ball to each other and so maybe it was some kind of sport. Everyone else seemed to be very enthusiastic about the results but Jack found it all impossible to follow. Especially because Lidlet wouldn’t shut up.
“So tell me,” she hissed in his ear.
He gave her a look to indicate he had no idea what she meant, which look was absolutely a lie.
“You, the priest. You made me one of yours, right? When you did the thing. I agreed to it. So you could save me.”
And, horror of horrors, there was God, hopping onto Jack’s other shoulder without providing any kind of moral balance. Cackling in a way unbefitting of a divine entity.
“Tell her, you yellow sod,” quoth God. “Give it to her straight. You wanted me to do it. You owe my new devotee that much.”
“I only wanted to help,” Jack said, to one or both of them.
Lidlet looked at him blankly. “Jack,” she said. “Or – do I have to call you Your Holiness or some damn thing now, if we’re finally having this conversation?”
“No, you do not!”
“Okay, that’s better, because I’d have felt weird telling His Holiness to just fucking give it to me straight and stop pissing about.” And her hands were fists, but very pointedly staying in her lap where they couldn’t get her into trouble. “I do not want to be dead, Jack. Any time I decide I wish you hadn’t stopped me being dead I’ll go lamp someone and that’ll redress the balance, right?”
He nodded jerkily.
“So fine. Priest, tell me the heresies. What am I a part of now. What else? No men? No women? No drink? No dice?”
“You’ve been having none of all of that?” he asked her, wide-eyed.
“Jack, I am living on a thread.” Fingers twitching like she wanted to grab him by his collar and shake him, and absolutely couldn’t. “Help me out. Give me the rules. So I can’t hurt people, fine. I’ve weaselled out of that one best I can, for a soldier. Can’t hurt, can’t get people to put the screws on for me. Fine.”
“And that’s it,” Jack said. “Look, Lidlet, it’s like this. You’ve got God. God’s a healing god. God’s also a bastard. He’ll take it back quick as blinking. He likes doing that. Always gives Him a laugh.”
“That is not true!” God insisted, scandalised, but Jack continued because nobody else could hear God.
“But past that, whatever you want. I mean steering clear of the drink, or anything else that might mean you… give in to your impulses, that’s good. If you were a priest you’d have a whole book of other stuff not to do, but you’re not. You’re… what, a follower of God on a technicality. Just don’t tell Higher Orders and we’re all gravy. That’s what you Pals say, isn’t it? Gravy?”
Lidlet was staring at him. “Literally just that?”
“Just that. No harm. That’s God. Sounds benign, doesn’t he? Well you don’t know. That’s all I’ll say. You don’t know Him.”
The conversation, which he’d been dodging and dreading in equal measure, had actually gone quite well. He settled back so that he could continue to not understand what was going on with the ball.
“Right.” And to his horror Lidlet produced some closely-written papers. “What about if I don’t help someone?”
“What? Why?”
“Someone’s right there – they’re drowning, say, and I could easily pull ‘em out, but I don’t.”
“Why not?” Jack stared at her.
“That’s not important. I don’t. What does God say? Do I have a, what is it, a positive duty to help, or is it okay that I just don’t put my foot on their head.”
“I…” Jack’s eyes swivelled left. “You want to field this one?”
“Let the son of a bitch drown,” God opined. “I mean people die all the time. It’s not my doing. It’s not my followers’ doing. If I was a mightier god then perhaps I’d have something to say about it, but I can’t be expected to take on responsibility for all the ills of the world. I really would be a bastard at that point, eh?”
Jack paraphrased. Lidlet nodded, made a little tear on her page to mark that item on the agenda as settled, and then went on, “What if someone knifed someone else for me, but not because I’d asked. Just because it was their idea and they knew it’d make me happy that it’d got done?”
Jack didn’t get to be confused by the rest of the ball game, because he was too busy trying to fend off Lidlet’s rather adversarial take on doctrine. By the time one group of underdressed Bracites had apparently balled better than the other to the extent that all the balling was done, they’d moved onto existential fringe cases that even God was unsure about, and Lidlet’s papers were ragged with little single and double tears depending on whether the answer had been yay or nay.
His head was still spinning when they were vomited out of the stadium with the rest of the crowd. They made the edge of it at last, swimming against a current of people funnelling in to catch the next game of whatever-the-hell-that-had-even been, or maybe there would be a play next, or some show fighting. Jack felt he was done with Magnelei public entertainment for one day.
Because the locals knew a good opportunity, there was a whole row of establishments fronting the stadium. They were set up in grand old buildings with carved upper stories – more catwolves and mounted spearmen and some sort of finned serpent creatures in a kind of everyone-versus-everyone brawl. Civic offices or temples, perhaps. Except that the current use was plainly several rungs down the ladder. You could drink, downstairs, and upstairs he had the impression there were rooms for other things. Every one of them was cluttered with Pal soldiers inside, and festooned with bright young Magnelei outside. And Caeleen.
Jack stopped. She’d been watching him approach, he realised. In fact, given it had been his feet deciding which way to go, he had the uncomfortable feeling that she’d drawn him to her. Demons could do that, couldn’t they?
“Here’s trouble,” Banders said. “Wonder if that means Miserly’s about? Come on, sharp left, soldiers, and let’s find other haunts.”
“He’s not here,” Jack said. He wasn’t sure how he knew, or even if he knew. He wanted it to be true. Maybe that was enough.
“You are…” God, still at his shoulder, paused in mid-prohibit. Jack looked at Him, and of course Caeleen could see Him too. And God looked at her, the demon. A moment full of whatever had passed between the pair of them after Jack had been kidnapped.
“I,” decided God, “am going to look after my new follower.” His face was thunder, daring Jack to make anything of it. “She is tender and vulnerable in this place of sin and requires my invisible guidance.”
Jack was going to point out that such guidance was invisible enough that Lidlet wouldn’t actually receive it. There was no profit in that, though. Not when God was so magnificently trying to save face.
“That’s… very generous of you,” he said, hearing his voice shake. “I don’t understand. But please look after Lidlet, yes. And if you could take…” A look back at the box. God rolled His eyes.
“If you mean the vicious fish-sticking sod with the spear, he’s already with your gobby lass over there. Has been for a while.”
Jack frowned. “With Banders?” He couldn’t actually see the little spearman anywhere, but possibly he was hiding in the woman’s pocket.
“Taken a shine to the woman, no idea why,” God confirmed. “And your lad there with the bugs and leaves you can keep. I don’t reckon he’ll pay much mind to what you’re up to.”
It was, Jack, decided, the best he was going to get. He put a hand on Lidlet’s shoulder, companionable as he could, and tried not to watch as God hopped over like a ragged-bearded cricket.
“You carry on. I’ll catch you later. Around here, maybe?”
Banders looked from him to Caeleen. “Jack, man, seriously.”
“Don’t you judge me. I just want to talk.”
For a moment all the woman’s humour was gone, and he saw real naked concern on her face, about to save him from himself. Then she flung her hands in the air. “There’s a market a street over. Market sound good? Masty? Coss? New girl? But you just yell if you end up in a summoning circle with your throat being cut, right?”
“I’ll be fine. We’re just going to talk.”
“Sure. Talk.” A little of her grin came back. “We’ll be back for when you’re done. Minute and a half do you?”
“Banders!”
Her mood was entirely repaired when the three of the sauntered off, leaving him wondering just how much of it had always been for show.
Caeleen regarded him levelly, arms folded, weight canted onto one hip.
“He’s not here, is he?” Jack asked hurriedly. “Your – Maserley. You know.”
“My master has sent me on his errands,” Caeleen said, rolling her eyes. “Come inside, Jack. I’ve had to fend off nine soldiers and a vizier already.”
Inside was close and dark – thick stone walls, small windows and smoked-glass lamps drawing shadows across a pillared space never intended as a taverna. They found a low table and some cushions, and hot wine that was almost but not quite as harsh as the stuff at the ball game.
“Tell me why,” Jack said.
“I told you, master’s errands,” Caeleen said. “I have visited certain conjurers of the city, wise and evil men it is not fit that a Fellow-Invigilator be seen with. Oh, and also he did say to corrupt you if I saw you again, because he didn’t ask the right questions when I came back last, and still doesn’t understand it won’t actually work.” She gave him a top-of-the-range smouldering look over the brass rim of her goblet. “Just in the name of full disclosure.”
“You came after me,” he told her. “Before. Why? Because I do not believe that Maserley told you to do that.”
She gave him a scornful look, reclining against the wall and the cushions. “Jack, I had standing orders to ruin you. I can’t do that if you’re dead.”
“That’s it, is it? It’s just that?”
For a long time she looked at him, and he saw her try on one look after another, like a burglar fitting picks to a lock. “My contract is a cage, Jack. Where its bars bite, I am constrained to take the shape it binds me to and be what my master specifies. To follow his orders. No choice, Jack. No valiant struggle against his iron will. It just is.”
He nodded. “And what about the space between the bars?”
“Then I can interpret, good as any jurist. And feel, by the pain, whether I have called it right, or wrong.”
“Yes, that’s what it’s like,” he said immediately, and shrugged off her puzzlement. Somehow feeling that if he compared a demon bound by contract with a worshipper under threat of divine sanction then God would spontaneously appear to shout at him, no matter the distances or practicalities.
As if reading his mind – and who was to say she couldn’t read his mind? – she said, “Your God is…”
“Yes?”
“Pathetic. I’ve seen gods. I’ve seen them enthroned. I’ve felt divine wrath. I’ve tempted paladins and prophets. I’ve been sent back to the Lands Below shrieking with the sting of holy displeasure. I have never seen a sadder stain of godliness than the thing you follow.”
“Aye, well, suit the worshipper to the worshipped, I say.” Jack drained his goblet and held a penny up. They had more wine and less coin in the time it took to drawn breath.
Caeleen leaned forwards. “Will you let me corrupt you then, so I can report back with a job well done.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t.”
“For me? So that he won’t have one more reason to punish me?”
He winced. “I can’t.”
“Vows still, with no priest to you? Seems the worst of all worlds.”
“You have no idea. It’s just… guilt now. Not even vows, just the guilt that came with them. Like something you can’t get out, scrub all you want.” Looking at her half-shadow face.
She leaned forwards further. “You understand my contract gives me power, Jack? Power over those I am set upon. I don’t have to give you the choice.” And she bared her teeth at him, showing him the points of her long canines, making the threat plain. And he just looked at her, not trusting himself to speak, until her face changed and she understood.
*
Later on, after he wandered somewhat unsteadily out into the street, after Caeleen had absented herself to complete those other diabolic tasks her master had given her, Jack felt no particular urgency about finding Banders, Lidlet or even God. Instead he found somewhere on the square that he could get a drink, tipping extravagantly because sometimes the world was all right, and in such rare circumstances it was good form to pay it forwards.
Halfway through his reverie, there was a high, clear sound from the table. Jack looked down to find his clay mug split cleanly into two halves. The spear god was there on the table, screaming at him in a tiny whistle of sound, an infinitesimal fury.
“What?” Jack said. He’d never seen the creature so animated, but when it ranted at him, the harsh spiky words were complete gibberish.
“I don’t understand,” he said. The little creature threatened him furiously with the spear. Probably it wouldn’t actually be able to get it in him, in any real way, but Jack didn’t much fancy finding out. “I don’t understand. Slow down. Can you… mime it for me, or something.”
The expression on the thing’s nasty little face suggested mime wasn’t a part of its divine portfolio. At that point, however, God, actual God, scrambled up on the table. God couldn’t really look out of breath, but the impression that He’d been legging it through the streets of Magnelei after His comrade in fugitive divinity was strong.
“What’s going on?” Jack demanded.
“I think,” God said, “he’s trying to tell you something.”
The spearman jabbed his spear towards one of the alleys leading out of the square and gabbled angrily.
“I can bloody tell that. What’s he saying?”
God screwed up His raisin of a face. “I mean he just took off, and I could tell it was you he was going for. Wanted to make sure he wasn’t off to consecrate you, in your little slip from righteousness, you know?” He said vaguely, and then, “Will you not slow your heathen gabble down, you gobby sod? I can’t understand but one word in three.”
The spearman threatened God with the harpoon, and God muscled right back at him, virtually rolling His ragged sleeves up. But some part of the message obviously got through because God said, “He says your friend’s in trouble.”
“What?”
“A friend who’s a woman, from the word he’s spitting out there. If it’s that harlot then you’re on your own.”
Banders. And when wasn’t Banders in trouble? But on the other hand, she was his friend. He stood up.
“All right. Into the box, the both of you.” But the spearman leaped to his shoulder, God’s accustomed spot, tugging at his ear and pointing. Jack collected the box, and followed the harpoon-head weaving in his peripheral vision.