Jack’s changed. Not just his name or his clothes. Not that his life before conscription was devoid of tragedy, but there are lines on his face Ilmar didn’t put there. A gauntness, where before he’d somehow preserved a boyish cast to his face. A leanness of muscle rather than of irregular eating. An attitude. Not as though he and God hadn’t had their disagreements before, but mostly polite. Like two roommates who couldn’t either of them make the whole of the rent without help. And now they’re in the army, and both are realising that they’re not chained together in quite the same way.
The way the stretchers worked was this: two people per stretcher, one behind with the thing itself, one in front to lead the way. The stretchers were an ingenious piece of design. Folding, with moving braces that locked the whole thing rigid to support the weight of a human life. Collapsed, they strapped tight to the back, leaving the bearer both hands to scramble through the nightmare topography left in the wake of the Loruthi artillery.
The occasional fireberg still flared in the skies overhead, but the bombardment was mostly over. The two forces had met, Jack divined. Neither side could unleash their engines without unacceptable collateral loss.
And the Loruthi were pushing back. Jack remembered how it had been last time, on the far side of the sea. The Pals weren’t used to counterattack, he thought. They’d been the bully in the playground too long, taking on smaller kids like Allor and Telmark. It wasn’t as if the staunch defenders of Jack’s own home hadn’t put up a valiant fight, but their valour, even if they’d been able to wring every drop of it from the fabric of the flag, had made for a cupful against the massed barrels of the Palleseen. The Loruthi, those far-ranging merchants, had turned out to have quite the well-stocked cellar of their own, bought and paid for but no less potent for all that.
Lidlet had their stretcher, which was just as well as he couldn’t really have strapped it to his box without falling over backwards. Next to them, a constant intrusion into his peripheral vision, Cosserby led and Masty carried. Beyond them, another pair, and another. A wave of bearers clambering across the impact-mangled terrain like ants.
Something thundered from ahead, lighting the horizon. A weapon deployed or destroyed, Jack had no idea.
“Do you even know where you’re going?” God shouted in his ear. “This bloody smoke!”
Jack had been going forwards and assuming, as everyone else was too, that they were headed in the right direction. That suddenly seemed rash. What if everyone was following him? “Do we know where we’re going?” he shouted to Cosserby.
The Sonorist looked at him, eyes wide. “Don’t you?”
“Do you have a map?” Jack asked.
Cosserby actually started searching his pockets before remembering that nobody would be drawing moment to moment plans of the battlefield. “Fighting that way!” he shouted – for something else was thundering up ahead, eclipsing the edges of his words. “Bodies that way!”
Jack could only nod. Then he was dancing along the ridge between two craters, feeling horribly exposed if there was just one Loruthi with a baton and an open eye in a hundred yards. Dropping down into a massive, gouged rut and then climbing what felt like a vertical incline at the far edge. He turned automatically, reaching down to help Lidlet, then the two of them ended up on their knees, staring at ruin.
A mountain, he thought at first. What’s a mountain doing here and how did they break it? Seeing only a vast mound of shattered stone, so much greater even than the house-sized flaming boulders the Loruthi had been throwing about. Then his eyes viscerally clicked into a different focus and he saw the buildings. The shattered corpse of a community strewn down the slanted side of the wreck. He understood what he was seeing and the strength went out of his legs so he couldn’t get up even with Lidlet pulling on his arm.
A Gallete island had come down here. He didn’t know how the Loruthi had managed it, but here it was, broken against the harsh bosom of the earth, and all those airborne lives with it. The homes, the fields, the tenuous dance to the tune of the Pals to maintain their traditions. All gone, one more casualty of the war, and not something the field hospital could patch.
“We need to help,” he said, when Lidlet had finally righted him. “We need to see—”
“Jack, this is days old,” she told him flatly. “This is from before the battle. Nobody’s left, if anyone even survived it. We’re falling behind the others. Go!” And she pushed him in the back with a cautiously metered level of force, and he stumbled, caught himself and lurched on.
Overhead, once, he saw that tower again – impossible, though the adjective didn’t have the absolute meaning that it should, any more. A vertical shadow in the smoke, like a knife poised over the battlefield. He whimpered, but no great stream of liquid fire issued forth from it, and it passed on its own inscrutable errands.
There was noise from up ahead, human noise beyond the mechanical thunder. Not fighting – he was reliably assured the fighting had booked the room next door for its celebrations. A familiar sound; the anthem of his new home. The desperate pleas and cries of the injured.
They’d reached their goal, somehow, in all the waste of mud and pummelled ground. Pairs of stretcher bearers were converging on them, hurrying, hunched, braced against the next explosion or a sudden appearance of the enemy. And there, beyond…
He’d done the rounds of the Hammer Districts in Ilmar sometimes, with his begging bowl and his pleas for alms. Beyond the factories and forges where the demons laboured had been the junkyards where all the broken pieces went. Things to be remade or melted down or just held there, enormous piles of rust and the depredation of time. Like art, eventually. The art of waste, he’d thought, but he’d seen nothing, back then. This was art. This was a true monument to loss. The same piles of irreparable things beaten out of shape beyond any chance of serving their purpose, save that here it was people.
He didn’t know where the fighting was now, but this looked like a high-water mark of Loruthi resistance. Literally, a great strand line of uniforms and outflung limbs where the charge had met the teeth of the defence. Jack, familiar of hell, was momentarily struck to stillness, unable to process just how many corpses he was seeing at one time. Not just Pal. The murk of the sky admitted enough light to distinguish the green of Loruthi uniforms and a dozen different colours of mercenary amongst the charcoal grey of the Palleseen and the pale of the Whitebellies who’d died beside them.
And still lived, he realised, jerking back into motion. News from the front had been accurate for once. Here were their wounded, waiting to be stretchered back, save that nobody had conveniently sorted them from the dead.
The first bearers to arrive just took up the crying, weeping bodies who were free of the tangle and carried them straight off, because if there was ever a good place to be out of it was there. The rest started piling up, staring at the heap, hearing the desperate voices of those trapped within it, pressed, broken, dying. Some started hauling at limbs and ragged edges of cloth, excavating what they could. Many just looked, unable to even start because the task was so great.
“Who’s in command here?” Cosserby demanded, hands on hips, unable to believe the war was being run in so slipshod a fashion.
A Whitebelly looked around wildly and then fixed on his dark uniform. “That would be you, magister.”
“Oh. Shit.” Cosserby’s face twitched, and Jack waited for him to go to pieces. But something clicked into place in the man. Maybe it was the discipline he’d had kicked into him in basic training. Maybe it was the engineer recasting what he saw as a mechanical problem. He was giving orders soon after. Not the best orders, too much close management and too little context, but he had people moving and digging and hauling out, a steady trail of stretchers heading back the way they’d come. Then Jack and Lidlet and Masty appointed themselves Cosserby’s aides and began expanding his strategy across the corpse-mound. And God, on Jack’s shoulder, pointed “There!” and “That one’s still kicking,” and “He’s not dead yet!” Indicating bodies cast aside because their owners had gone beyond screaming, but not yet all the way. Jack glanced at Him, the divine presence, seeing a terrible new focus. A healing God faced with His own personal nightmare. The very thing that had driven Him to withhold His gifts and diminish into the wizened monkey He’d become. Jack was busy, then. Busy passing on Cosserby’s orders, or the spirit of them. Busy hauling on arms and legs and blocking out the fresh shrieks his hauling caused. Busy looking straight ahead so that, when some of those critically injured bodies started walking home without needing a stretcher, he didn’t see it. He didn’t have time to argue with God, and he didn’t have any convictions in which to have courage. God had gone rogue. A second lease of divine life here in the crucible of the war front. God was healing people behind Jack’s back, he knew. Soldiers who’d only die tomorrow, or the day after. Who’d probably be shot by their own side if they didn’t just re-inherit the wounds that should have killed them. And who’d get Jack killed too, by their prolonged existence. He was on sufferance already, and what would God do after he’d gone?
Because he didn’t want to follow where those thoughts led, he put his back to the task, hauled aside corpses like a fisherman with full nets.
“They’re coming!” someone yelled. Some bright spark who’d made himself lookout. A moment later he was tumbling down the mound of corpses, one more to the tally, because to be lookout he’d been standing against the sky, and some keen eye from the enemy had marked them. One less bearer. One stretcher team two feet short of being able to cart a body.
Jack met Cosserby’s gaze, expecting panic but finding a narrowness of focus that was almost more frightening. Cosserby had a plan.
“Grab who you can and go, everyone! Every stretcher filled. They can’t ask more.” And he was kneeling, not obeying his own orders. He’d found something, treasure unearthed by the excavation.
Masty plucked at his shoulder. “Come on, I need you.”
“Wait,” Cosserby said. “This’ll show them. This’ll give us time.” Because if the enemy were coming at a run then they’d go faster than any two people with a laden stretcher. “This is the moment. This is the why of it.” Talking to himself but at the top of his voice. “You’ll love this.” And the other stretchers were loading up, all that could, and Jack wanted to be away too, with Lidlet, with anyone, except Cosserby was still fussing at something. Then he stood up with a cry of triumph and something else did too. Something rose from the corpses, some terrible new war god, loose-jointed cadavers tumbling aside like sea-foam. Its dented metal body tolled a mournful note. Cosserby had found a Sonori mired in the dead, and shovelled tablethi into it until magic had overcome its damage. The towering thing lurched, sounded, and then lumbered around the corpse pile, towards, presumably, the enemy. Jack heard some shooting instantly, the crack of batons and high musical ringing where the shot rebounded from the automaton’s shell.
That close then.
The other stretchers were away. Masty shook Cosserby’s shoulder frantically. The man turned, seeming surprised they were still with him.
“I gave you an order,” he said uncertainly, and then his shoulder exploded in flesh and jagged shards of bone. He goggled at them, as though this was the worst possible insubordination, and pitched backwards, practically landing on the stretcher Lidlet had set out on the ground.
He was alive, and for a moment Jack and God were staring at each other, but then Lidlet had her end of the stretcher and was shouting at someone. A Whitebelly with his own stretcher still strapped up, the other half of the luckless lookout, rushed over to take up the slack.
“Come on, Jack.” Masty was plucking at his sleeve. Not even looking for another living casualty, just wanting to run. Lidlet and her accomplice set off at a run, and it would have been simplicity itself to just outpace them, leg it for friendly lines. The only bearers to pitch up without a body.
Help us! The smallest possible voice, somehow reaching him. Don’t leave us here!
Jack turned back. It was purely that shame, in the end. Being seen to return empty-handed, by all the soldiers in that army he hadn’t ever wanted to be part of. He scrabbled in the bodies, listening out for that cry, that voice from the heart of the mound, and Masty shouted and yanked at his belt.
“There’s no-one!” he insisted.
“I hear them,” Jack said.
“Jack, there’s no-one!” And, as Jack just clawed into the dead like a badger in its set, “Come on, man! We have to move!”
Jack shook his clutching hand off. We’re here! called that voice. A tiny voice, really. Not even a whole soldier’s voice, but there were lots of soldiers who were less than whole, all around them. Half the limbs Jack yanked away didn’t have all of a body attached to them.
We’re here! Don’t leave us! and even God was shouting at him to leave it. Something rumbled, out across the field, close enough he couldn’t tell whose lines it issued from. But the voice still cried and Jack still dug, hearing only the utter desolation of it, ignoring the fact that it came to his head without the intervention of his ears. Grasping for the hand that would clutch back. The passport of a rescued soul that would let him go back with pride intact. Uncovering, in that despairing gloom, a face he knew.
A face he’d seen only the once, after its mask came off. Bony, foreign. Not Pel, not Bracite, not Maric. That other country whose name he couldn’t even recall. The man who’d been about to sacrifice him, and Tallifer too. After which they’d got on cautiously well, two undercover theologues in hostile territory. Pirisytes, the scorpionfly cultist.
“I’ve got you,” he told the man’s slack face. “Come on now, help me out.” Dragging at the man’s pressed length, prying him by main force from the fond embrace of those around him. And Pirisytes was no help at all, just slack and disjointed, awkward as his chaos god could possibly want. Zenotheus never made anything easy.
At last Jack had him free. “Stretcher here, stretcher!”
Masty crouched down beside him, reaching back for the straps. Then stopping. “Jack…”
“Just get the stretcher laid out, come on. Get him onto it.”
“Jack. He’s gone. He’s dead.”
“He’s not. I can hear him. I can… I can save him.” A sudden flash of inspiration, looking around at the ragged little divinity on his shoulder. “You can save him. Fix him.”
God’s thousand-yard stare came right back out of Him. Eyes that had seen too much in antique times, and too much again just in the last hour. “He’s gone,” said God. “He’s dead. And I couldn’t anyway. Swore himself to his god, didn’t he. Can’t be one of mine. Just like—”
“But he was talking to me.” Jack stared wildly at Pirisytes’s corpse, which was… dead. Obviously dead. Dead in all ways except…
It crept out of the mangled cultist’s collar. First the long, curled feelers, then its dark, shiny head with the great bug eyes and double-pronged beak. Resting on the chest of its priest, nervously cleaning its wings with its hind legs, tail flexing.
Please, said Zenotheus. Get us away from this.
“Oh hell no,” God snapped. “We are not having that thing in here with us. We refuse.”
It wasn’t an appealing god. That which Lays Eggs in the Hearts of Kings, or whatever the title was.
Please. The voice was in Jack’s head only, but at the same time somehow from stridulations of its limbs. They are all gone. All our adherents here. All our plans. We had such plans for mischief. The breeder of chaos and misadventure undone by humanity’s vastly greater capacity for disorder. The pinprick of its schemes obliterated by the crushing foot of the war.
“Jack?” Masty said uncertainly. “Jack, come on.”
“Get in,” Jack said to it, because if God could go rogue then so could he. Zenotheus’s wings flurried, and it clipped his ear with a pronged foot on its way to burrow into the box.
“Well there goes the neighbourhood,” God spat disgustedly.
“Live with it,” Jack said, without sympathy.
The sound of something vast and heavy hitting the Sonori shocked him and Masty to silence, loud and sudden as a siege engine that had learned to sing. The buckled-in metal body went end over end through the air over their head and then the Loruthi were there. A dozen, a score, batons levelled, barking words Jack didn’t know.
Masty did, enough to get on his knees. And it wouldn’t help, Jack understood. They were on the advance. Taking prisoners was a trap designed by the Pals to take Loruthi soldiers from the fight. They kept shouting, batons levelled, and Jack understood that he and Masty were going to die.
“Well, shit,” God said. “I’m sorry.”
Jack wondered for what. He clutched for Masty’s hand, felt it cling to his. Wan sunlight breached the smoke and the air glittered around them.
Something danced on his shoulder. Not God, who wasn’t the dancing kind. The nature spirit, which had saved him from the beasts a whole sea away. Issuing forth one last time to see if it could help. Jack saw it, rotting, crumbling away. Bleeding woodlice and blind white ants. A thing of a faith so old nobody even had a name for. Nameless perhaps because there had been no words when they’d first raised its shrines and circles. Or perhaps a thing cast up in Ilmar from some other world entirely, cut off from its devotees to wither and decay on the streets of an unfriendly city. Until he’d scooped it up to keep it from the Pals. Preserved it for just a while longer.
It danced, and broke open. He saw it was fungus all the way through, rotten to the core. A tree god embracing the end of all vegetal things, or else a god of rot meeting its apotheosis.
A vast sea of shimmering spores vented from the rents in the thing, and the Loruthi didn’t see them. Forgot the pair of them. Moved on, the squad of them and the wheeled artillery piece they’d smashed the Sonori with. Vanished into the gloom, leaving Jack with hands gritty with spores and a few fugitive bugs. With the sense that something tiny but unthinkably ancient had paid its final way in the world and passed away, and knowing that two meagre human lives were not worth its sacrifice.
Masty had him by the shoulders then, and was bundling him away. Unburdened by death they fled after the rest and abandoned the field to the Loruthi.