Different companies and departments had different priorities. When the combined battalions reached Magnelei and found it shorn of any formal Loruthi defence, Higher Orders scrambled to commandeer the best townhouses. Quartermasters squabbled over foundries and forges. And the provosts, knowing the demands of their trade, took over the prison closest to the main gates.
Presumably – given they’d built the jail – the locals had their own rogue’s gallery in peacetime. None were in evidence now. Every one of the buried cells they were marched past had a uniform in it. The on-duty provosts had been denied their own rest and relaxation, and hadn’t stinted in ruining everyone else’s day the moment someone stepped out of line. As soldiers did. There was even a ragged cheer as the newcomers were thrown, together, into the cell at the end, the very last free space.
“Full house!” someone called, and there was some good-natured name-calling. They were there for being leery within earshot of a provost, most of them. Some were down for brawling. A couple – the quiet ones – had maybe done something worse. Knifed a local or looked funny at a superior. The worst kind of trouble was the sort with legs to climb the rank ladder.
“How much crap are we in, exactly?” Jack asked. The gods had mostly made themselves scarce. The little spearman was rattling about inside the box, scratching the tiny head of his harpoon against the sides like a trapped rat.
“You know,” Banders said, her voice unaccustomedly thoughtful, “I am not sure.” In the light of dim lamps, her eyes slid over to the great bulk of the Butcher. “My usually infallible barometer for this sort of thing has gone sideways. Hmm?” And she jabbed an elbow into the Butcher’s flank and seemed to find it as unyielding as stone. “I would just like to say, for the record, how very nice it would be to understand a damn thing of what just happened. That’s all. Just a request up from the ranks, like.”
“It was nothing,” the Butcher said. The low roll of his voice filled the cell like stagnant water before ebbing out into the spaces beyond.
“Chief.”
“I said—”
“Chief, you almost got a third eye-hole courtesy of the bloody provosts!”
“Banders—”
“Seriously, Chief. I mean if it was me, fine. Me, people want to shoot. I understand that. Adds a bit of spiciness to life. And Jack, sure. Everyone wants to set fire to Jack, we all know that. But, Chief. It’s like a solid point of the ordinances that this shit doesn’t happen to you.”
“Banders, I told you—” but somehow the big man’s usual authority wasn’t quite rising to the task, and she just went on jabbing at him until it was Lidlet who snapped.
“Will you just give it a rest,” the woman demanded between clenched teeth.
“You don’t get a say, new girl,” Banders told her.
“Oh I don’t?” Now it was Lidlet’s turn to stand up, squaring her shoulders, the barracks-room brawler warming up. Except then Jack yanked on her sleeve and she sat back down looking infinitely foul. “Oh, I guess I don’t. Damn me.”
“It will come down to me,” Ollery said ponderously. “All of this. And whatever you may or may not have started,” a finger stuck in Masty’s direction, “is just piss in the ocean right now. It will come down to me. They’ll let the rest of you go. Probably.”
Banders obviously wanted to make hay out of that ‘probably’, but something in his tone, and the way everyone else’s nerves were jangling, finally warned her off. Instead, she retreated to one corner of the room with her only current ally, Cosserby, who was only too happy to listen to her whispered bitching.
“Pals,” God said dismissively. “What a vile and violent people.”
“That’s one-third of your entire followers you’re talking about,” Jack told him.
“But you, I expected more of.” God was warming up for quite the sermon. “Honestly, given a day to yourself, without having to do the shambles-work of these killers, and how do you spend your time, may I ask.”
“Don’t.”
“Strumpets and brawling! Like any common soldier.”
“You’d rather I spent the day in prayer and offerings?” Jack asked.
“I feel you’d not be in a cell if you had,” God pointed out with all the force of the moral high ground.
“You know we can hear you when you talk to yourself?” Lidlet said. And Jack was feeling aggrieved enough that he told her that actually he was talking to God, and God was talking back. He very nearly made up some unkind things that God might have said about Lidlet, but then saw her face and stopped. She was looking very serious, not the outraged rationalist nor the mocking soldier. Just… thoughtful. The barracks-room lawyer trying to work out how this new clause in the contract could be turned to her advantage. Jack had the uneasy sense that he’d just managed to make things worse.
The door rattled in its frame, then swung open. Revealed was none other than Fellow-Inquirer Prassel with her unhappy face on. Although Jack wasn’t sure she had any others, honestly.
“Chief Accessory Ollery,” she said.
The Butcher levered himself to his feet. “Magister.”
“Gather your people and come with me.”
There were a few shouted jibes and complaints as they went out, because the other wastrels had all been penned in longer than them. A few spotted Prassel’s Inquirer insignia and assumed the worst. Their whispered cautions silenced the rest.
Up above, the prison had a surprisingly spacious entrance hall, one of those colonnaded and airy spaces the Bracites liked for their civic buildings. There, with the welcome sun slanting down and a little breeze to stir the heat around, Prassel turned on her heel and stared at her charges.
“I expected better. A brawl with the locals. Really?”
When Banders opened her mouth for a denial Prassel shot her a look. “From you? No. From you this is exactly what I’d expect and I’d not stir myself to deal with it personally. But you.”
Jack braced himself for a tirade about discipline, conduct, honour of the service, all that. Instead she said, “Haven’t you learned to keep your head down?”
Ollery was certainly hanging it now. “Bad luck, that’s all,” he rumbled. “It’s been… a while.”
“I have been put to far more talking than I prefer, on your account,” Prassel told him. “They wanted you shot.”
Jack had a moment of assuming, Well, Pal army, harsh discipline, then saw everyone else was just as taken aback. Everyone except Masty, anyway, whose face was closed.
“Then they wanted a public example. I had to remind them that they’d already had one after it happened. Anything more would be opening matters that the Commission has sealed. Which counts as overreach. So, no shooting for you today, Chief.”
Ollery’s lack of reaction left it open whether that was a good thing or not.
“I then had to take a certain Cohort-Monitor of the provosts into a room and threaten him with Correct Speech until he agreed it would not be good for morale if he let his mouth flap,” Prassel went on. “And I’m honestly not sure if that will take, because he was quite fired up about running into you, after all that time. Some wounds don’t heal.”
“They don’t,” the Butcher agreed.
“So the word may yet end up running riot through Landwards Battalion and I’ve done all I can.”
“Thank you, magister.”
“Which brings us to our final order of business, Chief.”
Ollery sighed. “How much?”
“Confined to camp, although that doesn’t bite much because the orders are in and we’re marching against the Loruthi in two days. Confined to camp, and sixteen.”
“Sixteen for brawling with locals, magister?” Banders started, suddenly and passionately on the Butcher’s side.
Prassel’s look cut her dead so quick it could have been necromancy. Banders shut her mouth and did her best to hide in Cosserby’s shadow.
“I said I’d do it,” Prassel told Ollery.
He lifted his head, at that. “Thank you. I prefer to know the hand that holds the whip.” And if he meant so he could bite it later, the words went unsaid. Certainly there was precious little gratitude in that ‘thank you’. “Use the Alder. My boy’ll show you.”
*
Jack hadn’t watched. He wasn’t sure whether that was basic human decency, not wanting to see another man get the skin flayed off his back, or if he wasn’t showing solidarity for the department. He just knew that the sight would sicken him, each lash echoing with empathy inside his head. He couldn’t do it. Except the sounds had followed him inside without invitation. The crack of the Alder, the Butcher’s grunts as the sharp edge of it sliced the meat. The dreadful, suffocating-sounding barks he made around the bit they’d given him. The full-on roars, nothing human about them, from the ninth lash onwards. They must have been able to hear it all across camp. Jack sat in his tent and hugged the box to him, and the gods within were silent.
And now this.
“Jack, I know you’re in there.” Masty, managing to be insistent and polite in the same breath, like he did.
“What?” Jack asked. There was nothing on the other side of the canvas that he wanted anything to do with.
“He’s asking for you.”
God put His beaky bearded head out of one of the holes in the box, wide-eyed, and spake thusly: “Sod me, no. Not that one.”
“Tell him I can’t help him.”
Masty twitched aside the flap. “Will you just go? Technically it’s an order from your superior officer.” And Masty had been through his own ordeal today, and didn’t need Jack making his life any more difficult.
Jack closed his eyes briefly, opened them to find Masty hadn’t somehow vanished, slung the box on his back and crawled out of the tent.
Ollery’s own tent was quiet, closed. The boy met him at the door, solemn-eyed. His hands were… were bloody to the wrist. Jack felt his guts curl at the sight of it. The kid looked like he wanted to grow up to become a murderer. An adult-sized bitterness on those slight shoulders, most of which he reserved for Jack.
“What?” Jack demanded. “What’s happened? Why’s it my fault?”
“Just kick him away if he won’t step aside,” the Butcher growled from inside. “Idiot child. Get in here, Jack.”
Jack did and regretted it almost instantly. The Butcher was sitting on a camp stool, shirt off and his back presented. It was… there was a dish, an Ilmari speciality, layers of thin pastry interleaved with mince and red sauce. It was like that. Jack had to fight with his innards, for all he’d seen so much and worse. The sheer scale of that canvas made him weak. A lash for the Butcher was three for a man of Jack’s build, and the whip had sliced deep through the spare flesh clothing his bones.
“I need a pair of hands,” the Butcher spat. “Not even skilled. Idiot child could have done it, if he didn’t flinch so. You’re not going to flinch, are you, Jack? You’re a priest, right? Wielded the knife plenty I’m sure. Up to your elbows in the red stuff every holy day.”
“Not that kind of priest,” Jack said. “What do you need me to do?”
“Good man.” The Butcher took a long, shuddering breath. “You see the big brass pot with the clay-looking stuff in it? The ochre-coloured stuff.”
“I do.”
“I need that into every stripe, Jack. Real deep in, deep as the wounds go. Really dig your fucking fingers in, like there’s your month’s pay buried in there, like—” And possibly there would have been an earthier simile, but the alleged priesthood of his accomplice probably advised against it.
“That,” Jack said, “sounds like it’s going to hurt.”
“Thank you for your educated medical opinion which I did not bring you here to show off,” Ollery told him. “You’re my man, Jack? You’re not going to wince out of it like the kid there?”
“I can do it. But why me?”
He expected to just get an order thrown at him, but Ollery sagged slightly.
“Jack, I don’t know who knows what. But I know you don’t. I don’t want eyes on me, judging, as they do this. And Cosserby’s clueless but he’s too soft. And so it’s you.”
“And you’re not going to tell me.” Jack went to the pot and tested the consistency of the reddish stuff.
“Why the hell would you even want to know?”
“Because it got everyone sent to prison and someone tried to shoot you. That seems like the sort of thing I should know.”
“To hell with you, then. Get out. I’ll…” A strained grunt as he tried to twist round, “do it myself.”
“I’m already doing it,” said Jack, and touched the man’s ribboned back.
“Wait!” Ollery reached forwards, and Jack saw he had five little cups in front of him, each with a different coloured liquor in it. With remarkable dexterity he downed them, two-handed, one after the other, each cup clacking down even as the next was on its way.
The Butcher hawked and spat. “Now,” he said thickly. “Do your worst.”
And Jack did. He was trying to do his best, but it was true butcher’s work, torturer’s work, nothing of the medico to it. He slathered his hands with the greasy mixture and then applied himself, making claws of his fingers, driving them into the gaping slits the Alder had opened up in the man’s skin. Refusing to shrink from the blubbery feel of it, from the constant shudder of the Butcher’s muted agony. And Ollery gasped under his ministrations, and spat, and once slammed a fist down so that half the little cups danced over.
And then there was no more in the pot, and the job half done, but the boy was there with more, freshly mixed and steaming. His face was running with snot and tears. Jack plunged his cramping hands into the mess and got back to work, trying not to think about anything. But the words that had been crammed up inside him fought their way out, then.
“I can help,” he said. And God had said no, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d talked God round. “Please let me help. This is horrible. I can fix this.”
Ollery moved. The twist rippled across the war-torn terrain of his back, his stripes drooling blood and ochre. He actually got Jack’s elbow awkwardly in the cup of his huge hand. Not a position with much leverage, save that he squeezed with three fingers against his palm and Jack squeaked with the grind of it. “I know you, Jack.” His voice was slurred with the potions he’d taken. “I know your deals and bargains. The match for Maserley’s conjurations, you are, save you screw over the living and the human. I will live with my lashes and let time and alchemy fade them. I will not be bound by your creed, boy. You understand me? I will be keeping my options open.”
“Understood,” said Jack, and the man’s grip loosened, his body unwinding until he was faced forwards again. Jack checked to see what of his work had been undone.
“You’d like to know, though, wouldn’t you,” Ollery went on, still mumbling enough that his meaning came to Jack in retrospect, the sounds pieced together like a puzzle.
“I mean, yes,” Jack admitted, “but—”
“You’ll only ask the others,” the Butcher continued, with no sign of having heard him. “Weasel and weasel until someone gets drunk and spills. You and Masty are thick as thieves. He knows. And Tallifer, that stuck-up bitch with her plague-monger husband. Prassel, even. All of them desperate to tell on me. The Butcher of Revelation House. Lay it all bare for you, they will.”
And Jack didn’t think that they would, honestly. “It’s not mine to ask,” he said.
“And to tell?”
“Not that either.”
“Priest’s confidence, is that it?” Ollery mumbled.
“Not that. Not a priest. Not really.” He wasn’t sure how much of this conversation he was really contributing to, how much was just in the man’s head.
“I will tell you,” the Butcher said. “And you will never see me the same way. Eh? How about that?”
And Jack had that one chance not to know. Speak loud enough, he could have turned the key on those words and locked them away. But he really did want to know.
“Had a wife, me. Cohort-Broker Ollery’s wife. Ennit, her name.”
Jack looked at the boy, presumably Ennit’s son. There was no reaction in the child’s face.
“Married ten years. Young love. Everything to me,” Ollery slurred. “Ran the pharmacopoeia at Frattelstown Port. The Islands, you know. Happy. But it didn’t last. What does, eh? You’re slacking, Jack. Fingers deep. Deep enough I want your elbows getting wet, you hear me?”
“Yes, Chief.”
“I mean, you can guess the rest. When a man gets past a certain age and not a certain rank. When he can’t give a woman what she wants out of life, eh? Same the world over. Plenty of that disease in Ilmar, right?”
“I’m sure. Chief, you don’t—”
“And I knew. And it was fine. Until they didn’t care if I knew. A Fellow, he was. Fellow-Invigilator. Young, good-looking, grand career. Well-liked. Lots of friends. They all knew. They all came round and talked out loud, where I was sat working. Laughing. Dropping hints. Not even subtle hints. Because what could I do? The fat dispenser with the pretty, unhappy wife.”
“Chief, please—”
“Shut the fuck up because you asked for this.”
“I didn’t—”
“The regimental dinner. They invited my Ennit. Not me, but her.”
“Oh God,” said Jack.
“I mean, that’s not exactly hiding anything, is it? Invite another man’s wife to your fancy dining. Delivered the invite to her hand right in front of me. How about that for charm, eh?”
The words were gushing from the man like blood from a cut throat. Jack wondered how often this tale had been told, because this was the stone that lay chained up at the heart of the man, and events and drugs had unclasped every lock, freed that massive weight to roll on out of him. Jack had finished, now. He could have fled the tent without even washing his hands. He could have done a lot of things. What he actually did was ask, “What did you do?”
“Knew a man in the kitchens. I was the only one who could take the pain out of his piles. He let me in. I cooked. I’m a good cook. You’ve eaten at my table. You’d agree with that.”
Jack made a noise that didn’t indicate culinary appreciation as much as it might. “Poison.”
“You have no idea about poison,” Ollery said. “You say poison, and what’s in your head? Some actor on a stage staggering about, giving a soliloquy? Someone turning a shade of cheese and pitching their toes up like a clown doing a pratfall? You have no idea what a knowledge of alchemy can do. The burning fires that water only enflames. The sleights of the nerves that tell the brain the body’s in an acid bath. The terrible hallucinations so each one who drinks becomes their own inquisition. The games you can play with lung and heart and eyes and mind. What’s the matter, Jack?” With prodigious effort, Ollery hauled himself around on the stool. The mincemeat back had been bad. His face was worse.
“You poisoned your wife,” Jack whispered. The look on the other man’s face felt like being cut open.
“How could I?” he said. Tears pooled in the creases of his eyes. “I loved her. I’d never. I fed her the antidotes. Little doses, for days before the banquet. But the rest of them.” His knuckles audibly popped, he closed his fists so tight. “She was there, laughing at their jokes, drinking their wine, his hand on her leg. I was in the kitchens. We heard the howling together. We were the only two who weren’t howling. I got them all, Jack. A very precise dose. Nobody dies early on my watch. You’ve seen that. I take care with my craft. Every one of them, Higher Orders of a whole regiment.” And Jack had no idea what that meant as numbers, but he understood what it meant as a concept.
“And after,” Ollery concluded, “I went in. And they were all there. All dead, all at once, after the shrieking and the clutching and the jabbering at things that weren’t there. And it was her, at the top table, the only one still sitting up in her chair. And it was me. I needed her to know. I needed her to see me. She was going to say something. Probably not sorry, under the circumstances. But by then the provosts had broken the bar on the door and they dragged me off. So I never heard.”
“Right.” Jack’s voice was just a ghost of itself.
Ollery nodded. “You can go now, Jack,” he said, quite companionably. “Unless you want a nip of something before you do?”
“No, that’s fine,” Jack said, and retreated rapidly from the tent.
*
He couldn’t sleep, that night. Not with the images Ollery had put into his mind. Past midnight, Masty joined him sitting outside the tents of the department, staring at the sky as though there was anything there that helped.
Jack nodded to him. He half expected to find the man changed, at least in his eyes. The invisible glint of a crown on his brow, a new lordly gravitas to his bearing. But if Masty had brought those things back from the city that was his birthright, he’d stowed them right at the bottom of his army-issue pack. He was just the same slight, mild man Jack had first met back on the other side of the sea.
“Thank you,” Masty said and, at Jack’s frown, “for helping him. He doesn’t find it easy to ask. He’s not an easy man. Ever, but especially when he’s hurt. I heard his voice, when you were in there. I’m guessing you know, now. Why he’s with us.”
“Actually,” Jack said slowly, “that’s the one thing I don’t. Because I’m no expert on Pal justice but the way I see it, he murdered, what, a hundred senior officers or something. I don’t imagine that’s just twelve with the Alder and go run a hospital.”
“Oh they were going to execute him, sure enough. Very big, public example, you know. I mean, everyone heard this when he joined the battalion, but that was fifteen years ago, and there’s nobody else left from back then. I remember, though. Notorious doesn’t cover it.”
“So what happened?”
“They were going through his rooms. The digs him and his wife lived in. They found his book.”
Jack glanced at him. “What book?”
“His treatise on… hold on, synthesis of alchemical something.” Masty rubbed at the back of his head. “Way I understand it, alchemy is superstition and demi-magic. Nobody had any truck with it. Sore point with the Schools. Major benefit to most of the people we’re fighting against, but not acceptable to rational thought. Except Ollery did it. He had a whole logical framework, where he’d taken all that chanting and mysticism and turned it into something they could get behind. A rational framework, that was it. The Synthesis of a Rational Alchemical Framework. Revolutionised about a dozen fields of study, medicine included. And when they’d found it, well, a man with a mind like that, you don’t just throw him away.”
Jack nodded, and then nodded again, and tried to assimilate what he’d been told, and eventually could only say, “I don’t imagine his wife was very happy about that.”
“I suspect,” Masty said carefully, “that she doesn’t eat or drink anything she hasn’t personally prepared, and even then it doesn’t help much.”