The Butcher. A man made to lord it over a stationary domain. His customers come to him for the best cuts. He doesn’t go hawking his wares in the street. The centre of mass of the hospital department. Put him in the tent surrounded by his alchemy and people and he’s a force to be reckoned with. Cram him on a wagon, elbow to elbow, he’s ballast. A sour, brooding dead weight of flesh on its way back from market because nobody would buy.
Prassel had to bark the man’s name three times before he registered, and then only after Tallifer, penned in beside him, pulled his ear to get his attention. Ollery looked up at Prassel, there on the horse she’d commandeered like she was about to lead the cavalry charge that would turn the tide of the battle. If she’d been a ship’s captain she’d have keelhauled his expression for mutiny then and there.
Is that for me, or the world in general? He had a broad face. Enough scowl there to cover a lot of ground and grudges. But she’d held the whip. Even though he wouldn’t have had it any other way, that didn’t mean he couldn’t resent her for it. A dangerous man to have sour at you, the Butcher.
His shoulders, the taut expanse of shirt below them, all of it had his lashes written in blood, both dry and fresh. Every time the wagon hit a rut he was jolted against the rail, and she saw the red travelogue he’d written there. “You’re taking your own medicine, I hope, Chief?”
“Some,” he grunted. “Useful lesson. Reminds me how it doesn’t stop the pain. Just puts it in the next room for a while. And only some. Need a clear head.”
She wanted to say he could dose himself to the eyeballs and the hell with it, but probably he was right. It wasn’t as if casualties stopped dying just because of a general retreat. Rather the opposite, in her experience.
“Let Tallifer handle it,” she said. “She’s more than capable. Or Alv.”
“Alv’s used up,” Ollery said. “Already.”
“Tallifer then.” She rapped at the rail by the old woman’s elbow with her riding crop. “I’m making you deputy chief. When you reach the new camp,” wherever that will even be, “you supervise the department.”
Tallifer’s look suggested she could have done without the extra duties, but age and priesthood gave her the wisdom to keep her withered lips shut about it.
The rest of the wagon had about a dozen surgeons and orderlies, most of whom Prassel hadn’t ever seen before, Landwards Battalion badges, where she could see insignia at all. Lochiver was up on the bench at the front, and Banders beside him, managing the reins despite a bandaged-up leg. Two more lame ducks accounted for. No sign of the rest. Turn up like a bad smell. They’d survived this much army life, after all, and Jack…
Would be better off staying missing, honestly, said a little voice in the back of her head. Which was unkind, and untidy thinking, but probably true. Maric Jack reminded her a lot of Killingly’s ghost batteries. An asset of undeniable effectiveness that was going to explode in someone’s face sooner rather than later. Probably hers.
She tapped at the horse’s haunches and had it move on, outpacing the labouring wagon. Moving up the long, bedraggled line of soldiers wondering where it had all gone wrong.
*
Tallifer did indeed set up a temporary hospital under an awning with the more robust of the surgeons, doing what she could with the constant stream of injured. And the wounds she had to treat were on the light side, Prassel knew, because the worst of the wounded hadn’t made it off the field.
It had been the fiercest clash of the entire war, people were saying. Certainly it had been the most punishing reversal the Palleseen army had suffered in a while. Two whole battalions, fresh and rested, broken in a monstrously bloody action and forced into retreat. And the Loruthi were only holding off because they needed sleep too, and night fights were a tactical disaster waiting to happen. Come morning their advance and the Pal retreat would go on in lockstep. The enemy weren’t done retaking ground.
We’ll be back at the doors of Magnelei before long, and won’t that look ridiculous.
After ensuring the department was set up and functioning as best it could, Prassel went in search of other news. The first big tent she tried was a regular trooper’s mess, and she had that fragile moment in every officer’s life when all the faces turned your way are looking for someone to blame. The next one she tried wasn’t much better. A score of mid-rankers packed in, an aide serving tea. The mood, low; the faces grim, and some of them unpleasantly familiar. She wanted to duck right out again but she’d been recognised and hailed by then.
“Not scavenging the field for parts?” Maserley asked acidly. “Surely business is booming in the necromancy trade?” His demon woman was holding a lamp for him, casting a tableth-charged radiance onto the paper he was scribbling on. Contracting on the fly was a dangerous habit for a demonist, she knew. He must have burned through his entire stock in trade over the course of the day’s fighting.
Prassel took a proffered stool and a cup of lukewarm tea. Sat in the company of her peers, looking to see who else was there. A real grab-bag of schools, disciplines and departments. The specialists and oddballs, like her. Quartermasters, intelligencers, artillery engineers and magicians.
Thurrel raised his cup to her, looking as worn down as she felt. “You want that fortifying?” he asked.
She didn’t, of course. Strictly against regulations and, as the Butcher said, clear heads, all that. Except she stuck her cup out and let him pour a generous libation into it. “Let nobody say a word against decanting,” he told her gravely, then topped up every receptacle that was offered him until his flask was empty. “Well, bloody hell,” he remarked, upending it so that the final amber drop fell into his own cup. “Who had ‘All the Loruthi in the world turning up at once’ on their card, because you can claim your winnings.”
“I mean we were all running around saying how important it was to them, to hold Bracinta,” said a quartermaster. “Money-basket for the whole Loruthi Sway, isn’t it? No surprise that the Lorries heard us.”
Thurrel chuckled. “I don’t know if you saw what that battle left of several square miles of Bracite earth, old boy, but nobody’s turning that into a profitable turmeric plantation any time soon. The sheer magical residuum is going to breed monsters and nightmares for the next seven years. If I wasn’t so damn tired I’d take three racks of tablethi out there and harvest something back of what I spent today. What a waste! An appreciable percentage of our annual magical budget, pissed out at the Loruthi, who were pissing twice as much back at us. Nobody’s won today.”
“I reckon the Loruthi think they’ve won today,” said the quartermaster darkly.
“Duly noted,” Maserley snapped, looking up from his writing. “I’m sure you’ll explain that to Correct Speech when they ask who wasn’t fully committed to the assault.” And Maserley, of all people, wasn’t particularly committed to any cause. All the more reason to look for scapegoats. The quartermaster went pale and shut up.
“We had to put Killingly down, of course,” said a quiet, dry voice in Prassel’s ear, and she jumped despite herself. A necromancer shouldn’t be vulnerable to that kind of scare, but perhaps it was permitted at the hands of a senior in the profession. It was Stiverton at her shoulder, hunched cadaverously around his own teacup. He still wore that vastly overornamented robe, as though he’d had to evacuate halfway through rehearsing a play.
“Put her down where, magister?” Prassel asked, for a moment picturing the woman getting off a wagon for vital necromantic business.
“A matter of overconcentration, I suspect,” Stiverton said. Not jolly about it but not in deep mourning, either. “I had Festle do it. It seemed only appropriate. Her defences were inadequate and we had a containment breach amongst the coppers. Something of a chain reaction. We live and learn. Or some of us do.”
Prassel stared at him. “Fellow-Inquirer Killingly was… possessed?”
“By, I estimate, at least thirty separate ghosts,” Stiverton said. “It was something of an educational moment, even for me.” His fingers brushed against the protective sigils of his robes and Prassel privately decided that his theatricality was overdue as a standard addition to the uniform, and damn how it looked to outsiders. “One is aware, obviously, that it is theoretically possible, but one had not hitherto had the chance to witness such a thing. Only something like Festle could get close enough to put her out of her misery. So what I’m saying, Fellow-Inquirer Prassel, is, there’s a vacancy.”
Not, presumably, the moral one at the heart of the whole endeavour. A professional one. A sideways promotion that would nonetheless be a powerful step up compared to nursemaiding the hospital. Unless and until she met the same fate as Killingly.
“I would have to speak to Unc— to Sage-Monitor Runkel, obviously. The arrangements. A secondment, I think he’d allow.” Because that was all true, and because it also presented a multitude of points at which a judicious finger on the scales could see her stay exactly where she was without looking like she was turning him down. If, of course, she wanted to turn him down.
“Well of course.” Stiverton sat back and slurped at his tea, grimacing. “But I think you’ll do well at the cutting edge of the trade, Prassel. So long as you stay the right side of the hilt.”
She finished her tea and made her excuses then, stepping out into a light drizzle that the night had seen fit to gift them with. Thurrel was on her heels, brushing down his sweat- and mud-stained jacket.
“Not going to look good on anyone’s permanent records, this,” he remarked philosophically. “Not unless we turn it around in short order. I’m over there, my tent. Drop round for a nip of something, before you turn in. I don’t think I’m sleeping tonight.”
From anyone else that would be an admission of trauma, but she knew he kept wildly irregular hours even in peacetime. From anyone else it would also sound like an invitation to a liaison, but if she’d been Thurrel’s type she’d have fended him off by now, given they’d known each other since the phalanstery. It came to her, with a wintry little shiver, that he might actually be a friend, and what a sad business that would be. Rather none at all than so fallible a prop as Thurrel.
She was about to turn him down: need sleep, long day, pressures of work, you know how it is. Then someone else was with them. Or something else. The demon, Maserley’s creature, with papers in hand. An emissary to the Kings Below sent to gather fresh meat for tomorrow’s festivities.
Prassel stood aside. She didn’t much like demons at the best of times. Given where this one had been, as Maserley’s little infernal bed-warmer, she wanted even less to do with it. Except it wanted something to do with her, because it wasn’t just rushing off to go rouse the hosts of hell on her master’s behalf.
“How is your department, Fellow-Inquirer?” the creature asked. So presumably Maserley had set it to annoy her. Entirely within character.
“Why? Can you tie a bandage?” Prassel asked the thing. “We’re still at work, my people. Another pair of hands would be welcome.” Delivered with the appropriate sneer, as though those fingers were good for anything except mischief and obscenity.
“Be careful what you wish for, magister,” the demon said. “For nothing I am set to can possibly go well. You would not want me touching your wounded or handling your implements.”
“I’m sure you’ve handled plenty of implements, my dear,” drawled Thurrel. “Now run along, won’t you. Go give your winning smiles to the Kings Below and round us up another batch of baton-fodder. Or else Maserley’ll send you to the front in their place.”
And the demon trotted off. Thurrel shook his head over Maserley’s foolishness in keeping something of that shape around where everyone could see. Then Prassel did go join him for a nip. A jolt of fortified wine that, she hoped, would help her sleep.
On her way back to her own bunk, with the leaden hand of exhaustion already pressing on her, she passed by the hospital. They were still at work, patching and dispensing. Ollery sat like a great sack of lead at the heart of it, head almost on his chest but hands still busy over his cauldron. His boy was asleep, the toe of the Butcher’s right boot his pillow. And what would the child possibly grow up into, Prassel wondered. A healer? An alchemist? A monster? Or just one more soldier to be thrown at the latest object of Palleseen desire. Assuming he had the chance to grow into anything at all.
And no sign of any of their lost birds coming to roost, either, but there were still soldiers trailing in from the front even now, trying to find their squads and companies. They’d show up. Or they wouldn’t. Nothing Prassel could do about it, anyway.
Tallifer was still stitching, talking rapidly to Lochiver in a way that suggested she’d been on the Butcher’s very best salts. At her elbow, holding out needles and swabs and blades, was Maserley’s demon girl. Prassel just stared, wondering if it wasn’t some phantasm caused by exhaustion. She was right there, though, doubtless poisoning everything she touched with her own nature and her master’s malevolent desires. I did that. I said something unwise to a demon and now everything’s worse. Probably. But she couldn’t even muster the strength to go over and shout at people about it. She just dragged her heavy feet to her bedroll and collapsed. And, the next day, everything was packed up and the retreat carried on, because things were bad and the Loruthi weren’t stopping.