The Butcher’s Ladder, categories of injury in ascending severity of nature, the extent of the injury being equal: Mundane physical, breaks, contusions and gashes; Baton-shot and similar physical harm enhanced by magic; Energetic damage, flame, lightning and extreme sudden cold; Massive physical, artillery, collapsed walls etc.; Necrotic harm and sorceries that remove the vital essence from the affected flesh; Possession and dislocation of mind; Malign transformation; Unnatural contagion requiring immediate decontamination or destruction.
When Jack steps outside the tent, it’s darker than inside. It’s noon; it’s like dusk. The sky above is a roiling mass of cloud that seems to hang low enough to touch. And there are the fires. Fires from heaven. They glimmer high through the murk like the lures of deep-sea fish. They dive. Six, eight of them in the air at once, descending with a terrible slow grace onto the field over the rise. He can’t process what he’s seeing. He can’t tell whether they’re sparks before his nose or blazing mountains at the end of the world. Then one comes down, and he feels the ground shudder with it. Hears the distant detonation. A thing the size of a modest townhouse in the middling mercantile districts of Ilmar. A battlefield out there, crawling with the advancing ant-host of the Palleseen soldiers. The faintest edge of screaming.
Lochiver can’t talk so he kicks Jack hard on the shins to get him moving. He can’t talk because he has a leather bucket in each hand and his bone flute is gripped in his teeth. His eyes are wide. It takes more than one kick because what Jack’s seeing is so far beyond his experience.
God, clinging to Jack’s shoulder like the worst monkey ever, stares up, no less aghast than His mortal servant.
“What the hell?” God complains. “What the actual hell is this?”
Jack has buckets too. He and Lochiver stumble through the gloom to the water wagon and the two Whitebellies there fill their pails and then the skins they’ve got slung over their necks. Then it’s the fully laden slog back into the tent where the Butcher’s cauldron is near-on boiled dry, and a new consignment of the wounded hollering and screaming because their skin has blistered off their backs and hands and faces. And they were lucky. They caught the edge of one of those monumental impacts, and the soldiers who were closer to the point are ashen smears.
Not cloud. Jack only understands it when he’s under canvas once more. Not cloud but smoke. The whole sky is a pall of smoke from the new Loruthi artillery.
“This is madness,” he spits out, emptying his buckets into the pot, throwing the skins to Banders so she can wet the lips of the latest wounded. “Why aren’t we pulling back?”
“Military strategist are you now?” Tallifer straightens up from her latest victim, a gutshot officer who grips the edges of the operating table and grinds on his wooden bit like he’s trying to whittle it with teeth alone. “Lochiver, get over here and start with your nonsense.”
“I thought you said,” the old man complains, “that it was all burns and nobody needed my nonsense.” He’s fitting the flute to his lips, and Jack can see Sturge the slug-god emerge from his collar, lured by the promise of horrible music.
“They’re using foul-shot,” Tallifer said. “Or that’s the word. Nothing can get septic or we’ve got a problem.”
Jack thinks about the fires, smoke that’s strangled the sun. War. He feels that any new problems can just get to the back and wait their turn. But then problems are like casualties and triage is always the first stage of treatment.
From closer than anybody likes, something booms and roars, as though the duty Inquirer’s putting a giant through its paces. Jack finds himself half under the table, kneeling in the blood.
“Shouldn’t we be moving back?” he demands.
“Look, Jack, you know so much about it, you should go find Uncle and tell him what he’s doing wrong,” Tallifer snaps. “Either that or you could start actually helping around here.”
“But that was close—”
“That was ours,” the Butcher bellows, loud as any artillery. “That was our answer. Which means that being right next to it is far safer than those poor bastards on the other end of the equation. Come over here, swab, clean, stitch. You know the drill.”
Jack does. Or, when his mind starts jumping about like a cricket, somehow his eyes and hands still do. He takes the lesser wounded, the gouges and the missing fingers, those whose tourniquets have held them together this long. Those who don’t need Tallifer’s surgeon’s hands, or Alv’s terrible equivocation. The Butcher’s boy brings him beakers and bowls and he presses each to a set of lips or smears the stuff on wounds. Burn salve, pain-number, cleanser, repellent. Repellent for what, he asks. Just repellent, the Butcher says shortly, and the stuff certainly is. Most of their regular stock in trade he knows now, by sight, by smell. Knows how to administer it, even has a feel for dosage based on the quantity of remaining soldier under his care. He kneels beside Banders and they do the grunt work, the menial stuff. God rides his shoulder, and Jack senses a terrible battle going on in the realm of the divine. Because God abhors violence and the bringers of violence, and every single man and woman under Jack’s hands falls squarely into that latter category. God has spent centuries withholding His benediction from the world because the world can’t be trusted with it. But now God’s on the run, hiding out in the midst of the enemy and surrounded – right now, this moment of this one day of this war – with more hurt and horror than He saw on the streets of Ilmar in a year. And not as though Ilmar’s a particularly quiet city. And there was Lidlet, who last anyone saw was still alive, though she’s out there on one end of a stretcher even now. Jack has a horrible feeling that God is chafing against His own restrictions. Not because God is particularly well-disposed to humanity, the Pals especially, but because of the chaos that He could unleash just by helping.
“No,” Jack says, and God’s expression claims not even to have been thinking it, and let nobody tell you that a deity can’t lie to you.
“It happens,” says Banders flatly, from his elbow. And Jack realises that the woman he was bandaging is dead, too many casualties, too long a wait, always someone who loses the lottery. And Banders thought he’d noticed, rather than remonstrating with God.
“We’re low again. More water,” the Butcher snaps. Jack retreats from the new corpse and almost treads on Prassel’s toes as she straightens up behind him. Her face is expressionless. She has a bandolier of copper jars slung over her jacket, just slipping one back into place as she steps back. His eyes can’t help but flick to them, to her, to the body. He cannot, of course, say anything. Not a mere Accessory to a Fellow-Inquirer. But something happens to her face. A hairline fracture of composure that’s gone unsplinted too long. He meets Prassel’s eyes and goes cold all over.
“More water,” he echoes, because any excuse to get away, right then. He grabs up the buckets, and this time it’s Masty beside him because Lochiver’s still mauling music to keep the open wounds clean. Pipering the particles of uncleanliness to where they can pay homage to his midget god.
*
Prassel’s coppers are full. Not exactly cause for rejoicing but it’s all points with Stiverton and Killingly. She hurries from the medical tent and picks her way sidelong across the breadth of the rear lines, dodging blocks of soldiers and wagons and handcarts, the logistics of on-the-fly redeployment. The Loruthi are giving the combined battalions a hammering. Nobody had any idea that they were so determined to hold the ground, or at least nobody who was sharing scuttlebutt with her. A similar reluctance to let them keep it is common to both Sage-Monitor Runkel of Forthright and Professor-Invigilator Scaffesty of Landwards, known to their respective troops as Uncle and Old Eyeball respectively. The Loruthi economic engine that pays for their varied mercenaries and counteroffensives, and the fireberg throwers that are even now complicating the Palleseen advance, is very dependent on the profits they can squeeze out of their overseas plantations and mines. Bracinta is the jewel of their mercantile crown. Drive them from Bracite lands and the war’s good as won. That’s the theory.
She reaches the Pal artillery just as Killingly lets fly. The ghost batteries are elegant compared to the big engines. Attenuated crane-things, like trebuchets designed by stick insects. A great cluster of slings fitted with the copper jars; a counterweight. Simple, really: yesterday’s technology repurposed for tomorrow’s war. She sees the weight swing down and back, the long arm mirror it at scale, forwards and up. At the apex the catch releases and the little jars become nothing but glitters in the smoke. Each one a soul. Each one a trapped ghost ravening for more life, touch, sight. A body to call its own, even if for a moment. And hopefully they’ll remember the tasks they’ve been set under Stiverton’s necromantic whip, and go about the back of the Loruthi lines knifing and cutting and setting fires. But even if they don’t, a mad ghost at your enemy’s heels is worth a squad and a half in the clash.
The Loruthi have necromancers of their own, but the elite of the ghost squads – Festle and his proven, calling themselves The Deathless – have orders to slit as many educated throats as they can to slow any properly-informed response. Prassel can’t help but feel that’s a poor precedent to set, given that it could come right back at them when the Loruthi do adapt. A target on your forehead’s nothing anybody wants to live with. And before the declaration of war, she was corresponding with some of those Loruthi corpse-fondlers. They were her peers in scientific study, who are now just targets.
She arrives, unburdens herself of her bandolier and takes on a new one. Killingly seems to have an eternal supply of empty coppers. The Landwards necromancer looks at her and actually grins, as though these filled jars waiting for deployment weren’t all Pal soldiers previously happily ensconced in their own living bodies. As though Prassel’s just been picking up litter.
She runs into Thurrel on her way back. The Decanter has a dozen strings heavy with tablethi over his shoulder. A vast wealth of syphoned magic. The sort of haul you’d get from a prosperous temple, all those blessed thuribles and fonts of holy water, croziers and enchanted ritual knives, funnelled into those little gold lozenges and ready to be turned to war.
By mutual agreement they stop, just for a moment, both out of breath. Scholarly people run ragged by the physical demands of their disciplines.
“Where?” Thurrel asks, indicating her coppers.
“The hospital.”
“Sweet reason.” He shakes his head. “The big engines for me. You have no idea how they guzzle these.” As if in punctuation, the crash and roar rolls over them, so that they clap their hands to their ears and screw up their faces, perfect mirrors of one another.
“How’s supply?” she asks him. They have opposite problems, really. The longer the battle rages, the emptier his coffers become, while hers just keep filling.
“Low,” he snaps. “Tell your Maric I need to see him in my office for a thorough caning when we’re done. I absolutely insist.” And he’s trying to be humorous about it, as he does, but there’s a line of steel in him that means it. And she doesn’t particularly want to surrender Jack for the greater good, but that’s how this is going to go sooner or later. Uncle will sign the papers, if she makes Thurrel go so high.
They part company, each carrying a small but vital piece of the machinery of war.
*
Jack’s out into the unnatural twilight again. A fire-strike lands even as he exits. He’s blind, momentarily, looking right in that direction as it explodes in an incandescent plume over the ragged horizon. Not sure if the whimpering he’s hearing is his or Masty’s or just the whole world’s. He has no idea what this stretch of Bracinta used to look like, beyond the ridge, but it’s mud and ashes now, a landscape of craters and bones.
Their own answering artillery speaks again, five separate detonations. He has no idea what the weapons even are, save loud. Every concussive explosion seems to set off a trembling in his bones and viscera that only gets worse, as though the sheer audible horror of it all is rattling him loose from the world, and wouldn’t that be a blessing?
Masty’s already halfway to the water wagon, and Jack tries to hurry after him and rams straight into something huge and metal. It looms above him, legs, three-quarters of a rounded torso ending with a melted edge, one arm, no head. A brutalised Sonori. Cosserby is ducking under its single armpit, dragging Jack to his feet before his skull stops spinning. For a moment they lean together. Cosserby has a smear of grease across his face like inexpertly applied camouflage. His knuckles are bloody and his replacement spectacles are askew.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it,” he shouts over the thunder of descending firebergs. “We never thought they had it in them.” And Jack can only assume that Pel has some variant meaning for ‘incredible’ because to him it’s appalling but all too readily believable.
The Sonorist guides his blinded, battered charge off, and Jack stumbles to the water wagon. There’s only one Whitebelly there now, working double time to fill their buckets. A chain of other pale-uniformed soldiers are waiting, each slung about with bottles and skins, water for the front lines, because it’s thirsty work in the incinerators right now.
Waiting his turn, Jack looks into the occluded skies and sees the tower.
It’s just one more mad thing. Probably it’s barely worth a mention, but he points it out anyway just in case anybody else wants to share his blasé lack of surprise about it. A tower, ten storeys of building and a craggy fist of rock as a foundation, coasting through the smoke. And they arrived on a flying island, so surely an isolated building shouldn’t seem odd, but somehow the smaller scale makes it more remarkable rather than less. A tower, and he can just make out the peak of its pointy roof. And then the tower is pouring liquid fire down onto the battlefield in a long stream. As though it’s held it in for hours but can’t restrain itself any longer.
“What…?” he gets out. “Just… what?”
But the Loruthi aren’t a regimented and ordered force like the Pals. They hire anything and everything to come fight under their colours. They take coin onto the anvil of war and beat it into swords and batons and monsters and… this.
“Varinecthes!” Masty shouts. “Old Varney!” Which, to Jack, is just nonsense. An exclamation in Bracite perhaps, appropriate to these heights of incomprehensible horror.
But Masty has been around for longer than just about anyone, carried from one war to another through all his growing years. He’s seen this thing before. He knows its name.
*
Varinecthes, Lord of the Tower, looks down on what he has wrought from the lowest balcony of his demesne. A final spurtle of fire descends onto the field below. He shakes a few hissing droplets away into the wind and closes up his quilted robe. A thousand years old and he does feel the cold, especially at this altitude.
“Well, mark that one off,” he casts over his shoulder, retreating from the balcony and sliding shut the ornately carved screen. “What’s next on the agenda?”
His companion, the demon Ghastron, appears in his customary form as a beautiful youth with serpent’s eyes. The former because Varinecthes retains the aesthetic preferences of his younger days, the latter because it’s always worth reminding yourself what you’re dealing with.
“Varney,” Ghastron says. “It’s conjurations again. A hundred demons to bedevil the advance.”
“A hundred?” Varinecthes – Varney – hisses. “Why did we agree to that?”
“We agreed to no such thing,” Ghastron notes primly. “You felt it was a good boast to make, around eight centuries ago, and now we’re stuck with it. What was it? ‘And when thou shalt be in need, know that an hundred howling demons shall issue forth from the Realms Infernale to castigate thy enemies,’ wasn’t it?”
“Oh god,” Varney says, because up in the third study there’s a comfortable chair and a book and his pipe, and half a mug of drinking chocolate that’s being kept sorcerously warm for him. “I mean, imps?”
“Imps is good,” Ghastron agreed. “You didn’t specify the calibre of demon. So long as they howl.”
“I’ll make the fuckers howl,” Varney promises and starts plucking tiny squalling demon brats from his voluminous sleeves and throwing them over the edge. They don’t all have wings, he notes belatedly, but probably being hit by a terrified free-falling imp counts as at least some level of castigation.
“Bedevil,” he recalls. “Seriously, puns?”
“Tell me you’re not desperate for amusement in this business,” the demon Ghastron says. He has been bound to Varinecthes’s contract for over four centuries. They’ve made their rut and settled into it together.
When he was a young magus, Varney’s mentors taught him a great deal about demons and how to bargain for them. How the slightest shift of wording or missing clause could doom a conjurer, dragged off to the Realms Below, torn apart, soul devoured. Nobody ever told him to be just as careful in his dealings with human beings. And so the young Varinecthes, greatest sorcerer of his generation – or ever, as far as he’s concerned – had gone through his first century or so making a variety of wide promises to kings, nobles, institutions, bloodlines and the occasional comely young man, because he was very proud of his considerable talents, and because he had craved the adulation of all around him. And then, a century or so after that, when he’d rather got over that sort of thing and wanted to settle down, they’d started to seek him out. The petitioners, the heirs and assigns, the disinherited princes, the scions who were somehow never as comely as those young men whose loins they’d eventually been engendered by. All of them full of having inherited the promises of a great magus, and how they wanted to use that to get ahead in the world. At first it had seemed like a temporary inconvenience, because people presenting themselves before a grumpy wizard and making rash demands tended to get exactly what they ask for and not at all what they wanted. It seemed likely that they would all wish themselves into oblivion one crooked finger at a time. And then, when there were only four extant claims on his time, he discovered that the damn things were transferrable.
The Loruthi currently hold title to three of the four. They’re the cleverest creditors he’s ever had, and careful about how they phrase their requests. So he’s left picking apart his own original pledges to see what he can get out of. Hence the imps, the last of which he’s even now flicking off into empty air.
“Mark it off,” he tells Ghastron, and the demon does so. Serpent eyes can’t really roll in exasperation but he makes a good job of it nonetheless.
“One more thing, Varney,” he says. “The sun, again. The sun lance thing. ‘I shall smite thy foes with the—’”
“Yes, yes, I remember.” Varney sticks his head out over the balcony. And then further out, clinging onto the rail with one hand. Looking up, the sun is barely the dull head of a hot nail against the choked velvet of the sky. Looking down, the battlefield itself is just smog. As he watches, one of the great firebergs thunders slowly past his tower on its way to cause the Pals more problems.
“The idiots. What am I supposed to do with the sun, exactly? It’s smoke from here to the abyss.” And, still squinting down for targets, he sees that his slippers are almost out at the toes, frayed and threadbare, and hadn’t he only bought them twenty years ago and set them with spells of repair? Except he hasn’t kept up the enchantments, and he does wear the damn things all day as he shuffles about his demesne.
“New note,” he tells Ghastron. “Buy slippers. Also, I cannot see whatever the hell they might want me to lance, and so it’s probably best that all anyone’s going to get is a strong tan. Sun, lance, lance, sun, off we go.” And he does the necessary, invoking appalling elder pacts and ancient powers and minutely altering the actual orbit of the sun, all so that a great searing solar lance of energy can spend itself against the smothering smoke.
“Do you think,” he considers, “all this artifice, this machine-delegated magic, it’s going to make us obsolete?”
“I think we could stand to be a bit more obsolete,” Ghastron opines. “You don’t want to see what they’ve got you doing tomorrow. Now come inside before you catch your death.”
*
From inside the tent it’s like day comes for three turbulent seconds, in thunder and chaos. A flare that lights up everything through the canvas. Then they’re all off their feet, and the table – including half-incised casualty – is on its side and on Lochiver’s foot. Jack and Masty hastily right it and manhandle the screaming patient back on, grips slippery and red with all the stuff that’s supposed to be inside him. Once the screaming inside has died down the screaming outside makes itself known. Cries for aid, sobbing, shrieking, and underneath it they’re all old hands enough to hear the silences.
“Go see,” the Butcher snaps. He alone kept his feet, hunched over his cauldron, stripped to the waist save for the bandages around his chest and back. They’re weeping red again, his lash-marks torn open as he braced against the shake and roll of the earth.
The tent is at a decided angle. Jack almost brains himself on the poles as he rushes out without looking. It’s all on fire out there. The fireberg didn’t actually come down that close, as evidenced by the fact he’s still there to see anything. Poor aim or mischance brought it far back of the actual Pal assault. The next surgical tent along is fiercely ablaze, and the water wagon has one wheel spinning in the air as it gouts its vital fluids into the mud. People are desperately trying to get people away from the shattered sea of blazing rock left from the impact. Jack and Masty run to help, hauling everyone they can to the hospital department’s sagging doors. Each time Jack hears an airborne rumble he waits for another strike to go long. Waits for it to be his turn. Arms burning, smoke on his lips, eyes watering, it would almost be a relief.
“Here! Hey! Help, here!” A voice he knows but he’s got a writhing, screaming man by the armpits, dragging him by main force, ploughing the earth with his victim’s heels. He gets them into the tent and onto the ground so Ollery can calibrate the scale of the casualties’ injuries. A leather-aproned man, Jack sees, and half the blood on him not his own. One of the surgeons from the other tent, his hands and arms all blister and burn.
“Mine,” Alv calls. She’s sitting by now, her legs early donations to the cause, but if she can get this man back to his business then that relieves the load on the rest of them. The Butcher weighs the meat and nods. A bargain at the price.
Then, “Help, here!” again, and Cosserby staggers in, propping up Banders. And in the grand scheme of things Banders is fine. No need to worry about her. Half the skin and breeches scorched off one leg, that’s all. Jack doesn’t even need to be told, and nor does Ollery’s boy. The beaker passes from hand to hand to lip, like everyone rehearsed it the night before. Banders gulps down the painkiller, and if it’s a bit more than the recommended dose, well, she’s built up a fair tolerance to all manner of drugs in her chequered career.
“Help her,” Cosserby says. “Do your thing.”
“I can’t—” Jack meets Banders’s gaze and sees a dreadful hope there.
“No,” says God, on his shoulder again.
“Look, I know. I know your deal,” Banders hisses through gritted teeth. “Just do it now and when things are quiet I’ll kick a puppy or something and we can sort out the burns then. That’s how it works, right?”
Jack stammers that he supposes, yes, that’s how it works. It isn’t really how it was supposed to work. It’s a religious obligation, a sign of devotion to the benevolent healing god. You weren’t supposed to use it just to bank injuries for later. That was sacrilege, surely. Except Banders has been talking to Lidlet, and reckons she has him on a technicality. And God says, clearly and levelly in Jack’s ear, “No.”
“No what?” Jack demands, already halfway to reaching. “Come on. We’ve done more for worse. I don’t care if you like her or not.”
“I told you,” and God is not spiteful, none of His meanness on display. God is deadly serious. “I cannot heal her. She cannot come to me. Not her, out of all of them.”
Jack stares at Him, but then a new wave of casualties is being stretchered in and he has no chance to process what he’s been told. He abandons the swearing, accusing Banders, shoulders aside Cosserby’s protests, goes to each of the new screamers and forces the Butcher’s pills and potions on them. And then someone’s shaking his arm, a lot of strength and yet only a little force, as though they’re worried about breaking him. He rounds on Cosserby and finds it’s Lidlet instead, in with the stretcher crews.
“Help me,” she says simply.
She’s not hurt. She looks whole. A little singed maybe but that’s to be expected, given where she’s been.
“I’m…” Hands busy, Jack indicates everything around him using eyes and elbows.
“Please,” she says. “It’s Foley.”
Jack doesn’t know who or what a Foley is, but Lidlet gets him to one body amongst many. A man, a young man, and dying. Prassel’s hovering with a copper in her hands like a ghoul with a doctorate. There’s a black cross on his forehead. The Butcher has already passed Foley over, because there’s no point Tallifer or another of the surgeons cutting one more hole in him, when his life has plenty of egress points already, and if Alv worked her magic then she’d be on the lists of the dead herself.
“He’s from my squad,” Lidlet babbles. “Please, Jack. Do your thing. Help him, like you did me.”
Of course this moment was coming. He’d foreseen it, and then it hadn’t. Other things had got in the way, and he’d forgotten to fear it. And now it’s here. Lidlet wants him to heal her friend. Just one more healing. One more noncombatant soldier. What could it hurt? The man could take the other end of Lidlet’s stretcher.
“I can’t,” Jack says harshly. “You heard what Higher Orders said. It’s forbidden.” The old word he used to use about God, now invoking the secular majesty of Palleseen command.
“Jack, he’s my friend. Please.” Lidlet is undone. Jack’s never seen anyone with such a naked face before. All the slyness is gone from her. No quoting chapter and verse of his theology at him, no finding the leverage point from which she can move the world. Pleading only, all that’s left to her.
God hunches forwards on his shoulder, staring at the last few breaths of Foley, Lidlet’s friend.
Jack feels something ugly twist inside him. Something that they gave him with the papers and the uniform. “I can’t,” he says to her. “What am I supposed to do? They’ll shoot me. They’ll shoot him. And you. You were there in that room. My trial. And God won’t do it. I told you He’s a bastard. And I can’t. We save who we can save.”
He breaks away from her, administers drugs to the next three patients with more than an orderly’s usual brutality, then the Butcher has him stitching. A man’s in with his ribs laid open but his lungs intact, and that’s just a stitcher’s job so long as Lochiver’s keeping the beat and making sure everything stays clean.
He does his level best not to vomit over the man’s flayed ribs. Hardly professional, that. Being Maric Jack, right then, is almost more than he can bear. He can’t even pretend it isn’t his name any more. If he isn’t Maric Jack, who is he?
“Look,” God says, from his shoulder. “Look at her.”
“I won’t,” Jack spits, fingers busy with the big curved needle and the gut thread.
“She’s praying.”
Jack glances round despite himself. Lidlet is kneeling by the body of Foley. Her lips move. Is she praying? Not to any Pal eye but surely God would know.
“She’s praying to me,” God says.
“No,” Jack tells Him. “I forbid it.”
“When was the last time you did that, eh? Actually prayed. Not bickered. Not badmouthed me. But prayed, like a man of faith should.”
“I’m not a man of faith any more.” Jack’s shocked to discover it’s true. He, the saviour and smuggler of deities, the devotee of God since his youngest days, has nothing left to believe in.
“Well to hell with you,” God says, and there’s a tear in His ancient eye. “I will bloody do it, and sod the Pals. Forbid me, will they?”
Jack turns his head to look murder at the divine presence, but God’s not there any more. God’s hopped from him like a flea. Jack sees Him clambering up Lidlet’s jacket.
He can’t even have a proper crisis of faith. The demands of the wounded are too pressing.
Prassel’s over with the Butcher now – as if that’s ever good news. She speaks urgently into his ear, because it’s all noise in the medicos’ tent and she doesn’t have a parade-ground voice. A messenger has been and gone, though, and there’s a job needs doing.
“Listen up!” Ollery bellows. He looks half dead, all that flesh weighing on him and pulling his wounds open. His voice hasn’t caught up, though. He could shout down the engines. “Listen up! Got a jam of wounded up at the front and enemy coming in. Every free hand to the stretchers, get who you can out of there.”
And Lidlet’s on her feet, because it’s her job, self-appointed. The narrow window of opportunity her situation gave her. On her feet and taking up a stretcher so recently vacated the blood’s still wet. And Masty’s stepping forwards. And Jack sees Foley sitting up, uniform carved off his unbroken hide, improbably alive. Foley’s about to volunteer, good soldier that he is, and Foley doesn’t know the rules.
“You, rest.” He crams a doctor’s borrowed authority into the words. “No more battle for you. I’ll go. Chief, I’ll go.”
The Butcher gives his nod to that, and then looks round. “Banders?”
Banders has her leg bandaged and a ton of drugs inside her, and it’s probably the latter that says, “Yes, Chief,” and tries to get her on her feet. Ollery’s already shaking his head, casting round for others. Cosserby is putting a hand up, the smart kid in phalanstery, always knowing the answer to a slightly different question than was posed. “I’ll go, Chief.” In Banders’s place, of course. Good soldier that he is.
The Butcher’s in no position to quibble, and by then there are another couple of pairs of bearers, and the word will have gone out to every surgical tent, every squad of reserve Whitebellies. Stretchers for everyone! Because the Pal army cares for its soldiers like a swineherd for his pigs, and out of much the same concern.
They go into darkness, and it swallows them.