Cohort-Archivist Hobbers. Female. Age: twenty-two. Placement: Landwards Battalion New Resources Tactical Department. Immediate superior: Companion-Archivist Callow. Current assignment: Tactical use of Divinati-origin magical techniques and assets, based on the available teachings of Guest-Adjutant Alv of Forthright Battalion Experimental Hospital Department. Cause of death: massive sympathetic trauma.
Hobbers was dead.
Alv only found out when the provosts summoned her to the inquest. She assumed the Pals had finally lost patience with her, or lost reverence for the Divinati, and it was her turn in the Inquirers’ chair. She’d almost have welcomed it. Certainly she felt she deserved it, given the thoughts she’d been having.
But it wasn’t her on the block this time. Not yet. Although it wasn’t exactly Callow either, even though he was definitely the subject of the inquest. The reason, in fact, that Hobbers was dead.
Her other students, the ones who weren’t Callow and weren’t dead, were lined up like neat little birds, looking very solemn. A little ashen here, a little greenish there. They’d all been present when it happened. They’d give evidence. But Callow first, because he was the one who’d killed her.
He, too, contrived to look solemn. Though not sorry. He stood before the duty Inquirer, his cap on the desk in front of him, holding his gloves in his hands. “It was an exercise,” he explained. “We were throwing the injury between us.”
The duty Inquirer frowned at him. “I’m not familiar.”
“The essential principles of sympathetic transfer,” Callow explained airily. “It’s just like a ball, really. So long as you can keep it in the air. Being agile, that’s the thing. We all knew what we were doing. We weren’t playing some kind of prank, magister.” And, seeing the woman still squinting at him, “Taking an injury from a body, taking it into one’s own, you know. Passing it to another’s body. That’s the point, you know?”
“Guest-Adjutant Alv,” the Inquirer said. “Does this accord with your understanding of your discipline?”
“Yes,” Alv said, and then, “No.”
“Which is it?” Spoken with the certainty of someone whose paper has a choice of two boxes to tick and no room for notes.
“To take on the ills of others, yes. To take them onto ourselves. That is sympathetic healing. That is the discipline I am here to teach. Companion-Archivist Callow and his fellows are swift students. I am most impressed with their mastery. But this that he describes here. This passing, back and forth. This sending out, rather than accepting in. That is not my discipline.”
Callow actually looked a little betrayed, at that. Prompted by the Inquirer, he explained, “But it is, really. It’s the same logical framework. If I can move the harm to myself from its origin, I can pass it to another. To Skilby over there. And Skilby can move it to, well, back to me, or the original source, or any of the others. And obviously the goal is to be able to shift the hurt from the cadre entirely. To pass it to where it can do some good, tactically. To generate injuries, either crafted for specific purposes or for maximum impact, and impart them to the enemy—”
“No,” said Alv. “That is not it. That is not an appropriate use of manipulating balance.”
“Well, in the Divine City, doubtless you don’t have a need for it like we do,” said Callow carelessly.
The Inquirer looked at her forms, which plainly didn’t contain appropriate boxes to tick. “Tell me again how Cohort-Archivist Hobbers died.”
“We were conducting an exercise. A game, almost,” Callow said. “She thought she could keep up. She overextended and, when the injury came her way unexpectedly, she couldn’t adapt quickly enough. We’re all very sorry, obviously. It’s a terrible thing to happen.” Spoken so blandly it was as if he was reading the words from a card.
Alv considered what she’d seen of Hobbers. The awkward one, the one who hadn’t been a part of Callow’s clique. The butt of the jokes. The one who got singled out in Callow’s examples of how bad things might happen to someone who couldn’t keep up.
Alv found she could picture the scene quite clearly, the students in this game of theirs, moving some potentially fatal injury between them like jugglers. Perhaps Callow feinted at Hobbers, joked, threw it somewhere else. And the next time it was his body torn open he dummied Hobbers the other way. She found herself holding the death they’d been playing with, unprepared to contain and dispose of it. And she’d died. Callow had killed her. Because he could.
The other students gave brief statements, each a near echo of the last, exonerating Callow of any wrongdoing. The Inquirer made her notes, nodded, pressed her lips together.
“This is regrettable. Companion Callow, a formal statement of understanding to go on your record, and I encourage you to take more care and the necessary supervision when you conduct these exercises of yours. Guest-Adjutant Alv.” And Alv realised with a start that she was on trial here, these being ostensibly her students. “It’s evident this occurred because of limitations in the range of your curriculum. If you’d engaged more deeply in this aspect of their training then Cohort Hobbers would doubtless still be with us. You should consider shifting the emphasis of your instruction to more closely shadow the needs of your students. I am not in a position to raise any disciplinary measure against you, given your status, but please note this for your own records.”
Callow’s face, as she left, was angelic. Alv’s was expressionless.
*
The work at the hospital had calmed, but the Butcher kept his boxes stocked, his phials full. Moving easier now, his back salved and healing. Not happy, but when was he ever? Tonight he sat out front, minding his cauldron as a new batch of salts cooked down, stoking the fire with an iron in his left hand, stirring the pot with a rod in his left. Across from him, Tallifer and Lochiver passed a flask round, huddling in blankets, because the clear-eyed night was robbing the ground of every last shred of heat.
When Alv arrived, they looked up in surprise. She had been a fixture at the hospital almost as long as they had, but she didn’t unbend enough to be one of them, really. Kept to herself, in that Divinati way.
The flask had done the rounds with more than one refill. The Butcher dangled it at her, then grunted in surprise when she took it. Alv slumped down onto a stool, aware that this was wrong. That she had spent a decade in the hospital maintaining a ramrod poise. An untouchability of manner essential for a receptacle of other people’s ills. But she’d finally found something that would neither kill her, nor that she could recover from.
“They are making me into a weapon,” she said flatly, and let the fire from the flask drain out down her throat until there was only a swig left in it.
They eyed her uncertainly. The two old priests and the Butcher. And she wasn’t going to say any more. Shouldn’t even have said that much. It wasn’t her place. It was taking a burden from herself and passing it on to them, which put her in their debt. Imbalance, that was the killer, the worst sin in the world.
Tallifer leaned forwards and put a hand on her knee. Like the touch of an aunt. Someone who would listen and understand. Bound to Alv by a hundred invisible strings that meant whatever was passed to her would come back around, no need to keep the tally of who owed what to who. Like the injury that had killed Hobbers, but in a kind way. And Alv felt the rope of ten years break inside her. Not the drink but the touch. The implied understanding.
She understood, a moment later, that Tallifer had just been after the flask, to stop her necking the lot of it, but she was talking by then. The words started coming out and each one had the next by the hand, a long chain of desperate refugees seeking any safe port and leaving no sentiment behind. She told them about the new class, Hobbers, Callow and what they were doing to her carefully curated discipline. The use they had found, so effortlessly. “It’s not what it’s for,” she said. “It’s not correct. But I can’t stop them. They understand it too well. They will take what I made and kill with it, and I will have contributed to the imbalance. All the restitution I have earned over ten years will be undone. I will become the monster who births chaos upon the world.”
She expected them to look blank, for they had come to this fire from the absolute opposite direction. Killers all, whose talents had been for monstrosity by nature. The fire priestess, the disease priest, the Butcher.
Somehow they understood. Or came to an apprehension which overlapped just enough with the truth.
“The bastards,” Lochiver spat. “If Erinael was here they’d never dare.”
The name bought a silence, just for a heartbeat, and then Tallifer shook her head disgustedly. “I think you’re forgetting just what they did to her. When it wasn’t expedient to keep her around. They didn’t even hesitate.”
“We still owe them for that,” Lochiver said darkly.
“Dream on, old man,” the Butcher told him. And that was how it went, and that would be the end of it, except this time Lochiver rose up on his spindly legs, knuckly fists clenching.
“You want to talk balance, girlie? There’s a bloody debt damn well owed for Erinael. And there’s a debt for what they did to my temple. And the High Fane, eh?”
Tallifer’s liquor had obviously been going down the same way. “Damn straight,” she snarled.
“We owe them more than they can ever pay back!” Lochiver went on, heedless of the basics of economics. “You know what happened yesterday? Some damn engineer came to me, wanting to know, could I use different jars for the sepsis. Can I use something stronger? And I said, you don’t want to go playing with that, magister, oh no! You don’t want to dabble your fingers in my leavings. But it’s come round again. Some genius wants to use my sacred exudation as ammunition. Or maybe even give it to her brats,” a jab at Alv, “and have them try to piss it over the horizon onto the enemy. And it won’t work. Didn’t eight years ago and won’t now.”
“Didn’t then because you were able to fuck it up for them,” Tallifer said flatly. “Reckon you can outfox them again? You don’t know which shoe to put on, half the time.”
“I will fight them every breath before they make me their weapon,” Lochiver insisted.
“Shut up now,” Tallifer said, and when he took a breath to carry on twice as loud and long, she stomped on his foot.
Prassel had joined them. Lochiver stared at her, then turned his surly attention to the fire and sat down again, taking a refilled flask from Tallifer and tossing a swig back. For an awkward, drawn-out moment nobody spoke.
“What?” Prassel asked drily. “Don’t I get a drink?”
“You want me to wake the boy up. Tell him to fetch you the good stuff?” the Butcher asked her.
“Let your son sleep. What you’re having is good enough for me.” Prassel found a stool and planted it defiantly between Alv and Tallifer, where she could sit and stare straight at him.
Ollery reclaimed the flask and passed it around the cauldron to her. “Not my son.”
“What?”
“He’s not my son. You always call him that. You never asked. Picked him up back home, year before you got assigned to us, magister.”
“’Picked him up’?” Prassel drank, grimaced, passed it on to Alv, who didn’t want to be elbow to elbow with her but took it anyway.
“Plenty of orphanages back on the Isles,” the Butcher said. “Parents both dead. War, you know. And as for the grandparents and the rest of the family, well…” He shook his head, exaggeratedly mournful. “It’s sad how it happened, they say.”
“Well.” There was a lot of murder in his small, squeezed eyes, but Prassel met them anyway. “That’s another reason I’m only drinking what you’re drinking.”
He chuckled without mirth. Alv glanced from one to the other. What it said on the Butcher’s papers was for him alone, and Prassel, who got to know all the official stories behind her eclectic subordinates. And probably Tallifer and Lochiver, because they’d been around longer and asked more questions.
“We were talking about Erinael,” Lochiver said, with the relish of a man who loves an argument.
Prassel’s face darkened. “I don’t wish that reopened.”
“We were saying how fine it would be, if she was here. How much more good we could do in the department. Such a touch that woman had. Bring you back from the point of death and walk it off. Better than Alv here. Better than either of us two fossils. You never had such a tool at your disposal as Erinael.”
“There was nothing I could do. The orders were there when I took over the department.”
“And what was it you did to her?”
“I didn’t—”
“You Pals,” said Tallifer, backing the old man up.
Alv waited for Lochiver to go on. To name the sins, but the old man was drinking again as though disgusted by the taste. It was her turn.
“A creature of radiance,” she said. Everyone stopped playing their individual games of hating one another, because she wasn’t supposed join in this kind of backbiting. She was serene and self-contained and endlessly empathetic. Alv did not bitch. “The receptacle of divine power,” she recalled. And nobody had been entirely sure what Erinael had been, honestly. An angel, in Divinati philosophy. A class of being that dwelled Above, as demons did Below. A servant to some long-gone god who had been left with the keys to the miracles.
“Chief Accessory Erinael,” Prassel said, “decided that healing our soldiers was too good for her.”
The Butcher stood. Not suddenly, but like a mountain might. “You will not speak of her.”
“I? I’m your superior, Chief. I’ll say what I damn well like, thank you very much.” And Alv realised that Prassel had been drunk long before she came to their fire. Drunk and spoiling for it. “She refused outright to carry on her duty. She was sick of it. She was sick of us. I begged her. She told me straight up she’d rather that, than mend one more soldier. And so it happened. She made herself no use to anyone. No use save one.”
The Decanters, Alv thought. Nobody spoke the word. Erinael, the shining one, the first Chief of the hospital, who’d formed the waifs and strays into the working team they were, had been sent to men like Fellow-Archivist Thurrel. People who had not executed her, not even tormented her, just rendered her down for raw power. Used her radiant substance to fill their tablethi, so the batons could keep firing and the artillery engines could unleash their thunder. So that a thousand lamps and lenses and tools could perform their mundane little functions, each of them devouring a tiny portion of Erinael’s godhood.
Ollery had taken a step around the fire. “You will not,” he said, words like lead.
“Look to your people here, not those already past saving,” Prassel said. “There’s change coming. Higher Orders don’t like losing. She knows.” A thumb jerked sidelong at Alv. “Her and Lochiver, and me. I know. You wouldn’t believe the shit they’ve got me working on. Ghost work, Chief. I always wanted ghost work. Until now.”
“And if she refuses,” the Butcher said, a nod at Alv, “it’s the Decanters for her too, is it?”
“Oh you think she’s the problem, do you?” Prassel got up, lurched, almost ended up in the fire. Did end up nose to nose with Ollery, staring up at him, standing where he could have broken her into pieces. “You seen Jack around? Maric Jack? There’s a man who’s had three chances to stay dead and not the sense to take them. He’s next. And not just him, either. He’s a dangerous man to be close to. You don’t want his fingerprints on you.” Her head whipped round as someone crossed past the entrance to the hospital’s little enclave of tents.
“Hallo?” a voice called out of the darkness, and then a balding officer stuck his head where the firelight could touch it. “Prassel? You wanted me?”
“That prisoner exchange happened yet?” Prassel stomped up to him so belligerently Alv thought she might punch him.
“Tomorrow. Changed your mind, have you? One more chance to sample the delights of Magnelei?”
“I want in. With one of my people people,” Prassel told him.
“Are you drunk?” Sherm asked incredulously.
“I’ll be sober tomorrow. Well?”
The man spread his hands. “Fine, I’ll put you down for it. Like I say, it’s all points with Uncle. Are you all right, Prassel?”
But she had turned on her heel and was striding away, storming off into the night as though she was going to kill someone.
Sherm passed a bemused look over the group at the fire and then ambled off on his own business.
“I think it’s reached that stage,” Tallifer said softly, finishing off this incarnation of the flask.
“Of the evening?” Lochiver asked.
“In general.” The old woman stared into the fire, and for a moment it leaped with strange forms, serpents and monsters and raging faces. “God help me, what have the pair of us become?”
“Old,” Lochiver said.
“We raised hell though, didn’t we?” Tallifer said. “Back before they caught us.”
“Ten years of setting things on fire and giving them the runs,” Lochiver agreed with satisfaction. “Second best years of my life, you mad old witch. Right after the decade before, when I was trying to tear down your temple myself. It wasn’t the Pals’ to destroy. It was mine.”
“We blazed a trail,” Tallifer breathed, as though she could see the chronicle of it in the fire. “God, I thought they’d never take us alive, you know. What happened to us?”
“We outlived it all.” Lochiver stood, balanced himself by a hand on Alv’s head, stretched. “We woke up one morning and found there wasn’t any Jarokir left, except us. Everyone else was speaking Pel and obeying Pal laws and nobody even remembered our gods. We woke up and there wasn’t anybody left to fight for. Except us. Come on. Bed time.”
“Fucking promises, the amount you put away,” Tallifer muttered, levering herself up.
“Just bed, you insatiable harridan,” Lochiver grumbled, as the pair of them tottered away. “Honestly, who even has the energy any more?”
That left the Butcher, standing; that left Alv, just getting up. She felt around the edges of her face, making sure all that imperturbability was still in place.
“I am on the brink of being unwise,” she told him, “for which, if it happens, I apologise.”
“Don’t do anything rash,” he said, but she didn’t feel that she was in any position to choose. The balance of the world was swinging wildly around her, the tiniest of pressures from her fingers translated into a monstrous chaos of unpredictability. There was a limit to how much chaos she could take into herself before the penning up of it destroyed her.
*
The next morning, the reinforcements were sighted. A whole Gallete island of them, skimming over the landscape like some leftover piece of someone’s dream. It paused long enough to disembark what seemed like a regiment’s worth of new soldiers. Alv and the others went to watch, and the message was plain.
Oh, new officers, new specialists and a few companies of regulars came clambering down with their kitbags and their batons. But the newcomers were overwhelmingly Accessories in their uniforms of Whitebelly pale. Conscripts from across the Palleseen Sway, many of them without even a weapon to their name. Standing here on a foreign shore looking bewildered.
Alv looked them over and thought about what Prassel said, and the rumours about the Landwards necromancy department, her own problem and Lochiver’s. Change, Prassel had told them. Looking across the reinforcements she didn’t see humans, people, soldiers. She just saw materiel, fodder to be fed into the war in an even more literal sense than the usual.