Magnelei between two armies felt like the Magnelei of their day of leave if someone had put it in a covered pot and heated it to boiling point. The Loruthi force sat to the south, the Pals to the north, and it was anybody’s guess if they’d take themselves off somewhere else to fight, like civilized people, or just obliterate the city from both sides in their desperation to get at one another.
Prassel had practically kicked Jack out of bed an hour ahead of reveille, before anyone else except Alv was up. He’d been picked for special duty, apparently. There was to be a prisoner exchange within the city of Magnelei. It was very important that a skilled medical professional be there to check over the incoming prisoners, to ensure none of them had been more than usually mistreated. Obviously she’d thought of Jack.
Jack goggled at her, not at all convinced she wasn’t some terrible sort of dream, so she’d kicked a bit more to establish the boundaries of fiction and reality.
“Uniform on, Accessory. The delegation’s forming up and you don’t want it to be you they’re waiting for.”
He tried to ask why, given all her many and superior options, it was him at all, but he could only ask it of her back, which had no answers for him.
Soon after that he had joined a column of troops in their best parade-ground uniforms, the pride of Pallesand. Only he stuck out, the sole pallid Accessory. There was a chain of rather dirty, ragged men, and a few women, straggling along behind, and the sense that he belonged to them rather than the dark-clad soldiers weighed heavily on him.
They entered the city of Magnelei, and he could feel the tension off them all. And in the square beyond were an equal number of Loruthi, and the two sides formed up against each other as though about to fight the war in miniature. And then all the regulars just stood there while Prassel and a handful of other ranking Inquirers met in the centre of the square with some Loruthi, most of them with ranks of brightly coloured ribbon and frogging on their bottle green. Everyone was talking quite urbanely with their opposite numbers. Talking in Pel, in fact, because it was a language constructed for ease of use, and even the Loruthi used it to speak to foreigners. Meanwhile, a colourful delegation of Bracite bigwigs made a big show of ostensibly governing a process that patently excluded them, and a cloud of servants hovered nearby and served everyone tea.
Eventually, the confab of senior officers broke up and Prassel returned.
“We’ve agreed terms and sent for our prisoners, and they for theirs. Waiting game now, to make sure we all get what we’re paying for. Take your ease but don’t leave this square. And absolutely no trouble.”
Jack reckoned that anyone so much as bunching a fist in this square would kick the war straight off again. Then Prassel had hooked his collar and was hauling him away from the rest of the soldiers.
“Listen to me,” she told him. “This is a big, complicated city.”
Jack hadn’t expected a geography lesson. Possibly she was about to tell him about Magnelei’s chief imports and exports, although the former seemed mostly to be foreign soldiers. “Magister?”
“Under no circumstances are you to absent yourself and just get lost here, you understand. Because probably we’d never find you again. You hear me?”
Jack made a wordless, interrogative sound.
“Get drunk and get left behind, sleep past curfew in some whore’s bed, get stabbed and dumped in an alley for all I care. These would all be terrible things to happen, you understand. Absolutely against army discipline. We have rules against these things because they happen so easily to a soldier in a foreign city.” She was twisting his collar fit to strangle him, vibrating with an angry tension like she was full of bees. “Because probably we’d not even look too hard, if something were to happen to you. Why would we even bother, for an Accessory? Do you understand me?”
He did not. He was absolutely aware he didn’t, because there was a chasm of knowledge in her that she couldn’t unbend enough to properly impart. Every part of her was cold rage and iron except her eyes, which were begging him to get it.
Then one of the other Inquirers was calling her, because apparently the officer corps had commandeered a taverna and wanted to know what she was drinking. Prassel let go, turned on her heel and marched off to join them.
Jack scanned the square for anywhere that would let him take the weight off his feet. This being the sole place that foreigners might be spending their coin, the place was seething. As though every citizen of Magnelei was desperate to have this one last day when their home was still some semblance of normal and whole. For a moment it felt as though his own two-feet’s-worth of cobbles was the sole part of the city not being ruthlessly trampled. Then he spotted a tiny span of space. There was a taverna with a score of round tables set out in front of it. They thronged with locals, but there were chairs left at one table, alongside an old man in fancy dress, some piece of local colour hoping to cadge donations. He didn’t raise any objections when Jack took the other half of his table. Raised an eyebrow and gave him a somewhat incredulous look, then he went back to the cup he was husbanding, which was mostly full of the thick froth one of the local drinks left behind. Probably if Jack offered to refill it for him, he’d have the old boy as a friend for life.
“I bloody hope you’re happy, is all,” God said, from Jack’s elbow. The divine presence had clambered up onto the table and was looking about as though He’d just inherited a substandard new kingdom of empty cups and spillage.
“I mean no,” Jack said. “Not really. What gave you that idea.”
“Forcing me to share digs with that. We’re up in arms in there, I can tell you.”
The spear-carrier god didn’t look particularly up in arms, just pulled his fisherman’s coat around himself. Zenotheus, the Scorpionfly of Chaos, put its bug-eyed head out, feelers waving.
We don’t much appreciate the company either, came its faint, buzzing voice. However, we are grateful for the rescue. We shall repay this debt, Maric. We shall bring confusion and misery to your enemies. Commensurately small amounts of them, given our reduced state, but nonetheless. Perhaps you have some documents we can deface.
“I’m not even sure who my enemies are,” Jack said. “I mean Prassel seems to have it in for me, for sure.” The old man gave him a look, but at that point someone turned up asking what they might bring the newcomer in exchange for good money. Jack asked for two of whatever the old man was having, and that act of charity appeared to paper over any cracks.
“She knows we’re making trouble,” Jack said. “They’re onto us.”
“Oh it’s we all of a sudden is it?” God demanded. “Only last I heard you weren’t listening to me. I mean, I’m just God. Just your actual god.”
“You are going to get me killed,” Jack said. “The Pals are going to torture me to death. Because we are turning their soldiers into people who can’t fight. You see how that’s going to piss them off.”
“In my day,” God said, “my priests would prostrate themselves before the war-beasts of tyrants, and when the hooves came down they’d take that martyr’s death as their due. They’d bare their breasts for the spears and speak sermons to the torturers.”
Jack stared at Him. “I… don’t want to do that.”
“Because you’re a disappointment. As a priest and as a follower. Always,” God told him. “I’ve got options now. Your Pal girl, she’s still at it with the prayers. She’s got a whole thing going on now. Barely a moment’s peace, I get. And she writes everything down. She’s on at me for favours all the time.”
“Then why help her?” Jack demanded. He was aware that the old boy in the nightcap was regarding him with amusement, but decided to play the street lunatic for a bit. He was talking in Maric, after all. Not likely anybody would understand a word of it. “I saw you. A whole load of those soldiers didn’t need a stretcher. And don’t think I didn’t spot Cosserby walking around camp like he never got shot. A Pal officer! Suddenly it’s miracles for everyone.”
“She asked,” God said. “A Pal. A filthy atheist Pal on her knees praying. Like you never do.”
“She thinks it’s like some army manual she can twist. It’s not respectful,” Jack insisted.
God looked up at him brightly. “Yasnic,” He said, “you’re like a wife who’s grown tired of her old man, is what you are. Maybe I can work with this. I mean, at least someone’s listening. You want me to be small and weak and useless so it makes you feel better about yourself. And now I’ve got new friends and you can’t take it.” Before Jack could reply, He dropped down into the box again, pointedly ending the conversation just as the drinks turned up. They were ninety per cent froth and ten per cent liquid fire that left a metallic coating all the way down the throat. Jack choked and winced.
“I give up,” said the old man. “What are you, exactly? A spy? Some kind of street performer?”
Jack opened his mouth to either confirm or deny it, then realised that the man had spoken in Maric. Barbarously accented Maric, but recognisably Jack’s native tongue.
“You, er…”
“I’ve travelled,” the old man said. “In younger days. Saw the world.” He shrugged, as if to say the world hadn’t been all that. He was quite the figure, really. His robe had definitely been the property of someone much richer and grander once, before it had faded and frayed and been passed down to this old relic. His cap was folded over, with a tassel tickling the lower reaches of his ear. His face had the stoic dignity of ancient royal statues.
“It’s fine,” Jack told him. “It’s nothing. I was… rehearsing a play.” In that fraught moment a Bracite musician, deciding that someone might pay him money, played a shawm really quite loud in Jack’s ear with the general impression of someone strangling a goat. The distraction was enough to let Jack huddle away from the old man’s regard, spilling the last few drops of his drink inconspicuously on the box top so that his gods there could dabble in the dregs.
It wasn’t true, he told himself. He didn’t prefer God to be useless. He just… didn’t know what to do now that God was flexing His withered muscles.
“My dear fellow,” said the old man to the musician, “This gentleman is trying to talk to his gods. Take this and perpetrate your malarky somewhere else.” He gave the delighted shawmist a coin, more than happy to be paid to go away rather than in appreciation of his art. And Jack stared, partly because of what the old man had said, and partly because he’d heard the words in Maric but he knew, without doubt, the musician had heard them in Bracite.
Slowly, he realised that there hadn’t just been empty chairs at this table, but a whole empty space around it that only itinerant musicians dared brave.
The old man smiled, raised an eyebrow. “Varney.” He thrust a thin hand out.
Jack clasped it after a moment’s reluctance. “People call me Jack.”
“I bet they do. What’s your deal, son?” the old man pressed. “Not often I run into a Pal who talks to gods. That’s new.”
Jack just stared, unable to come out with even the most basic denial.
“I’ve got good eyes, son,” said Varney. “I see you’ve got quite the collection there. I see the least segment of the foreleg of Zenotheus of Oloumann. And the old boy you were arguing with is that Maric healing cult unless I miss my guess. And the Fisher King, threatening me with his harpoon, and what he’s doing in your company is the really interesting question.”
Nothing had particularly changed about the old man, but suddenly he seemed far, far older. As though that robe might have been made new for him once, and he’d just worn it out.
“Varney,” he echoed.
“That’s right, son.” Sitting there in his silly hat, sipping his silly drink.
“Short for something, is it?” And Jack couldn’t actually remember what the long name had been, something foreign and difficult but definitely beginning like ‘Varney’. At the man’s nod he added, “You live in… a tower?”
“Oh my,” said Varney. “You have pierced my ingenious disguise. Seriously, why do you think nobody else was sitting at the table? I’m a dangerous man to drink with.”
“Oh.”
“But you bought the round, so I shall refrain from obliterating you with my awful powers.” Varney sipped at the foam, which got in his beard and moustache.
Jack decided to apply himself likewise. When he looked back, someone else had turned up at Varney’s shoulder. Quite the most beautiful young man he’d ever seen, except for the eyes.
“Ghastron, Jack,” Varney said, with the air of someone who hates introductions. And then: “Sorry, The Dread Lord Ghastron, Duke of the Lands Below, Despoiler of the Fields of Arthleigh, Scourge of the Nine Princes.” He covered Ghastron’s hand with his own when it settled on his shoulder. “What did I miss?”
“Beguiling…” the demon prompted.
“Ah yes, Beguiling Serpent of the Emerald House. You’d think I’d remember that one,” Varney agreed. “Jack, this poor damned creature is my companion, sharing the travails and tribulations of my existence. Who has hopefully purchased some new slippers for me.”
The snake-eyed creature locked his cold gaze with Jack’s, promising eternal delights and torments in equal measure, then produced a heavily embroidered pair of slippers in the local style, which he placed before Varney. Before Varinecthes the Sorcerer, lord of the flying tower, who regarded them critically.
“Seriously, this is the best they have?” Still speaking Maric, or else sorcerously making himself understood for Jack’s ears.
“Astoundingly enough, being repeatedly taken over by opposing factions during some sort of war isn’t good for local industry,” drawled the Dread Lord Ghastron, folding his elbows about Varney’s shoulders and resting his chin by the sorcerer’s ear.
“You’ve got questions, I imagine,” the sorcerer said out of the corner of his mouth. “May as well ask them while you have time.”
And Jack could have asked any number of questions of this maverick sorcerer, from the course of the war to the secrets of the universe. And he threw away all these opportunities because he was selfish, just like everyone.
“Your servant… Is he your servant? Can I talk to him?”
“Gassy, he wants you,” Varney said absently. He stuck out feet with yellowed, claw-like toenails and began trying on the slippers.
“Am I your servant?” said the demon. “I thought we were past that.”
“Please,” said Jack. The serpent eyes turned on him, calculating.
“You’ve been bitten by a sister of mine, sweet child.” The demon reversed a chair with a sinuous motion and leaned on the back. His smile was a thousand sins all in one curve of the lips. “You want to know how to please her, perhaps? You want to own her?”
“I…” Jack choked on his own denials.
“Are you going to start with the poetry of it?” Ghastron asked softly. “How her hooks are in your soul, so that each sweet breath is naught but wind unless some part of her can feel as you now feel. How every beat of your labouring heart speaks her name, and yet you know it isn’t even her name. That, sans the bounds of contract and the conjurer’s circle, does the thing that fills your life even exist? Or is the one you love solely within your mind, a puppet show played for your own amusement, and in which you strive, ever doubting, to believe?”
Varney chuckled quietly. “You remembered. Almost word perfect.”
“Listen, Jack,” said Ghastron, leaning in until the chair creaked. “What do you think any loved one is, except the image you build of them? You think you can know another human being? Or that you can’t love them even though they’re wicked? If we are more malleable than you, that doesn’t mean we are so different.”
“But there’s always the contract,” Varney said softly.
“There is,” Ghastron allowed. “We cannot be in these places without it. We are bound. We are servants. O harsh master, will you not give me my freedom! See these chains about my wrists!” Raising his bare arms to the sky theatrically. “Tell me any human relationship is free of that. We are simply the literal and overt reflection of how you conduct yourselves. We are what you make us. Slaves. Villains. Happy.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Jack said. “I don’t want to be…” master, chain-forger, contract-maker.
There was sympathy on Ghastron’s face, but then Ghastron was a demon and what was on his face could mean anything or nothing.
“Magister,” said Jack. “Varney. Would you tell him he may answer me freely under no duress from you?”
The wizard raised an eyebrow, gesturing either to give such permission or indicate none was necessary.
Jack swallowed. “Ghastron, if you had full choice of what to do – never mind contracts, masters, anything – where would you be now?”
It seemed as though the city’s murmur stepped politicly back, so that the three of them had a silence all their own. Varney had gone still, as though regretting his permission.
“Here,” said Ghastron simply. “With him. No hell is sweeter.”
Then things were moving, out in the square. The ragged, filthy people they’d brought with them were being sent over to the Loruthi in exchange for some other ragged, filthy people who were, presumably, Pals.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I have to go. But thank you.”
Varney smiled. “Well, Jack, you were something new in an old man’s long life. We’ll not meet again, I’m sure. I wish you the best of luck. Take that as a sorcerer’s blessing if you want. Or his curse.”
He scurried over to form up with the others, ready to use his limited suite of medical skills to look the newly acquired ex-prisoners over. When Prassel looked his way, though, her face was stony. She didn’t call him over to do his job, nor speak a word to him on the way back, and by the time they re-entered the camp he was sure that asking a powerful wizard for the secrets of the universe wasn’t the only important opportunity he had failed to seize.
*
By the next day he had the sense that there were eyes on him wherever he went. Or at least he felt that there were. And he was a foreigner in a camp full of Pals, so of course there were. Currently the proportion of Whitebellies across the two battalions was far more than anybody was comfortable with. The regular troopers were using words, hands and boots to make sure the newcomers knew exactly how the rank structure worked. Anybody in a pale uniform received the same, whether they were new or they’d been with Forthright for a decade. Which meant that the old Whitebellies also laid into the reinforcements, because the recent arrivals had made things worse for everyone just with their presence. So of course there were eyes on Jack when he moved through the camp. But at the same time he was being watched. Him, specifically. He had the feeling there were no happy endings in his near future.
Prassel’s look, when he had returned to her. Pure disappointment. She had told him, as clearly as she possibly could, that he should make himself scarce. Hide himself in Magnelei and she’d write him off as acceptable losses, not even send out the provosts. Except he hadn’t really believed that was what she was saying, at the time. Had scented a trap when in fact she was propping the door open for him.
“Maybe I should give her the box? Lidlet?” Because it was Lidlet he was currently searching for. “Where does that leave the others, though?”
“Why should you care,” God said, from over his shoulder. “I’m your god. Not them. Not fishy and the blowfly. Care about me.”
“You said you’ve got other options,” Jack said harshly.
“These Pals, you know.”
“Prayer, you said.”
“Bloody demands, really. Suddenly everyone wants a piece of Me. She’s over there, by the way. In that tent there.” Because of course God could tell. “You could stand to tell her to be a bit less pushy, if you’re going to talk to her. Maybe a bit of reverence wouldn’t go amiss.”
“Tell her yourself.” Jack changed course to follow the gnarled finger in his peripheral vision.
“I will. I would. Only…” God fidgeted awkwardly.
“Only they’re your new friends and you don’t want to lose them by showing them what a prickly bastard you are,” Jack said savagely. “You save that for me. You’re all sugar and light with them, I’m sure. Yes, Lidlet, no, Lidlet, of course I’ll save your friends, Lidlet. I’m nothing, am I?” and then Jack had ducked into the tent.
Lidlet was there with three other soldiers. Jack didn’t know any of them. Pal regulars, dark uniforms. There was a moment, as he burst in unannounced, when they were all guilty as hell. They registered his Whitebelly jacket. Then they registered him. Relaxed, a bit. Stared at him, a bit. Awed, perhaps, a bit.
Lidlet wasn’t awed. She squared her shoulders, a woman who couldn’t fight bracing herself for one. “You take off,” she told the others. Then, when they made to go, “This, don’t forget. And don’t let it get found, either.” Shoving a sheaf of papers into one of their hands.
They shuffled awkwardly out past Jack. One of them ran a hand down the box, when they thought he wasn’t looking.
“What’s that?” Jack had seen Lidlet had a whole bundle of papers she was trying to hide under a blanket.
“Nothing.”
“Lidlet, what?”
She stuck her jaw out pugnaciously. “You want to have this out now, do you?”
“I didn’t even know there was a this to have out.” And he’d come here to give her God. To give her the box with its menagerie. To entrust her – his disciple, was she? – with the entire future of the faith, because he didn’t think he had much time left before Prassel tired of him. Except now Lidlet was doing something even worse and all those thoughts went out of his head. “Show me.”
She dipped under the blanket and came out with a handful of pages bound together roughly with string. They were printed, the smudgy purplish letters the Pals used for their forms and orders, the same thin paper. The header on the first page read The Ninety-Seven Loopholes of God.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded.
“It’s what you told me,” Lidlet threw back at him. “It’s how it works.”
“Did you know about this?” Jack asked God, expecting full-on divine wrath to explode in his ear.
“I mean,” God said. “Maybe. A bit.” Wringing His beard a little. Someone whose ex and new flame have started comparing notes.
“The Ninety-Seven Loopholes of God?” Jack exclaimed. “Is this… I mean you said reverence. You wanted reverence?”
“Well this is what I meant,” God said awkwardly. “If they could at least pretend to dress it up with a bit of ceremony. I feel a bit naked, when it’s all on the page like that.”
Lidlet’s gaze, when Jack returned to her, was not even unrepentant. Just businesslike. “Look, you got me into this. Did you expect me to just wave my hands in the air and chalk it up to Life’s Great Mystery? This is my life, Jack. This is Foley’s life and Escriby’s and all the others. This is how we keep our deaths at arm’s length. By learning the rules. I mean how did it work in Ilmar back in the day? You took the divine healing and just bloody hoped?”
“Well,” Jack said. “Yes. You… got into the spirit of it. I suppose. Accepted God’s ethos. Were just nice to other people. It shouldn’t be that hard. It shouldn’t need a bloody lawyer.”
“No wonder it ended up as just you,” Lidlet told him flatly. “Look, it’s not just you any more. So you have this wonderful, perfect understanding of God. That doesn’t help me. It doesn’t help anyone.”
“There shouldn’t be an anyone.” The next words were the ones he had absolutely decided he’d never say, but they saw their chance and made a break for it. “I wish I’d never started this.”
Lidlet nodded, and he saw the terrible hurt behind her eyes that she couldn’t quite keep under wraps. “That so?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I mean obviously. I… It was just supposed to be you, though. Just you. And even then I…”
“Thought I’d just die. Like Klimmel did. Just die somewhere you weren’t, so you didn’t have to feel bad about it.”
Jack, who’d been standing hunched forwards at an awkward angle, sat down. “Lidlet, they’re going to arrest me. This… this thing you’re doing. It’s being noticed. They don’t like the idea of soldiers that don’t fight. They would prefer dead soldiers to that. And they know it’s me.”
Lidlet stared at him for a long time. “What do you want me to say, Jack? You want me to tell people they’re just going to have to die, or live with crippling wounds, because God has hit quota? No more healing now, sorry you were right at the head of the line, but that’s all. I’m a soldier, Jack.”
“I know.”
“You don’t, because you’re not one. Not really sure what you are given you keep saying you’re not a priest, but you’re not a soldier. I have a lot of dead friends. I have a lot of live people who could be dead the next time we go against the Loruthi. Or the next people we’re at war against. You’ve got a good thing, here. A second chance for anyone who takes a shot. How can you not want to give people the chance to live?”
“It’s not like that!” Jack told her. “It’s… swearing off violence. It’s not being a soldier. And even then, it’s me being there to take their oath. It’s God accepting them. You can’t save everyone. Oh god, what’s that?”
Lidlet had another piece of paper now, the same slightly offset printed letters. A form, it looked like. As though she wanted to requisition something from God’s own quartermaster’s stores.
Jack took it, read it. Did not understand any of it.
“People have heard we’ve got a good thing here,” Lidlet explained patiently. “But… we’re soldiers. Asking someone in the uniform to go clean from shouldering the baton, that’s hard.”
“Well yes,” Jack said acidly. “That is the point. That choice is the point.”
“I mean, nobody really believes they’re going to be the next one who gets shot in the gut,” Lidlet said. “You know it could be you, but you don’t believe it. Until it happens, and then who knows whether you’d have someone like you on hand, to fix them up. So… this. We worked out this.”
“What’s it say?” God demanded, squinting myopically.
“It’s a pledge,” Lidlet said. “That if you heal them when they need you, then they’ll, what, convert. Go with your rules. Go the peace road. In case, when it happens, they’re not in a position to agree. You know, head wounds, too much pain, that kind of thing.”
Jack felt like he should be laughing helplessly, except it was grotesque. It was sacrilege. “No,” he said.
“There is nothing in the rules—” Lidlet started.
“This isn’t about rules!” Jack exploded. “You cannot take out… insurance with God. You can’t just be a bloody murderer all your life and then give it all up when it’s you on the sharp end. Don’t tell me it’s not against the rules! I don’t care!”
He backed out of the tent, still with his box and his gods. The sunlight falling across him reminded him the whole point of finding her had been to offload his contraband divinities before something happened to him, but he was furious, right then. Bitter with God and bitter with Lidlet, and a great deal of it because every time he tried to construct an argument to destroy her position and reassert his own, he couldn’t quite make the pieces join together. The days of sharing an attic room with God at Ilmar’s most wretched boarding house seemed unbearably attractive.
He looked around. No squad of provosts was marching in to arrest him. Yet. He had one other goal to achieve, before they did. It was time to pay a visit to Mother Semprellaime.
*
Mother Semprellaime actually gasped, when Jack turned up at her door. Not a happy gasp, either. As though he’d come to stab her, really. Leaving him stumbling over apologies for he didn’t even know what. And then she just looked sad, terribly sad. And said, “She told me you were still with us. But I thought she was just being cruel.”
And he thought that she was Prassel, somehow, and could make no sense of it, until he stepped up into the wagon and found that Mother Semprellaime already had company, and the company was Caeleen.
The demon, the succubus, Maserley’s creature. Pristine and beautiful the way she’d been made to be. Sitting at the conjurer’s little table drinking tea, or at least pretending to. He didn’t even know if she could.
God, from the box, made a disparaging sound. And they’d had this piece of theology out, between them. God had told him that demons were nothing but smoke and wickedness. There was nothing to them that a man could hold onto, and nothing they did that wasn’t compelled. The dealings of humans and demons were corrosive to both parties. It wasn’t mere prudishness that had made such practices forbidden to the faith. And then Jack had sat down with Varney and Ghastron, and seen just a sliver of the counterpoint argument. And now here she was, and Jack felt a painful lump in his chest at the sight of her. As though a fist was closing about his heart. As though there was some wound he’d taken, a fatal one, and to be in her presence would reopen it just as readily as throwing a punch.
She had on her sly look, that put on full display exactly what she was, how cruel, how deceitful. The ruiner of lives, the breaker of faiths. “Look all you want,” she said, demurely over the lip of her teacup. “He’s said you can’t touch, not any more. Not since it didn’t wreck your life. He’s mean like that.”
And perhaps she was expecting grief, agonies or just regular frustrated desire, but Jack sat down and took a cup from Mother Semprellaime and said, “Well I had some questions for our hostess. But they can be for you, instead. Can you answer questions?”
Caeleen’s eyes narrowed, sensing the trap. “I can listen to them. I promise no answers.”
“Well, listening, that’s good.” Jack could feel his heart racing, because he was about to say a wide variety of foolish things he’d held pent up inside him for too long. Things he’d regret. Things she’d laugh to scorn. And that would hurt, but he was used to that.
“I don’t know what it is, to be a demon,” he said. “And to be here, in service, like you are. I spoke to one in the city. He seemed… happy. You don’t seem happy. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s just what he wants you to seem. Can you tell me?”
She’d gone quite still. “Happy?”
“Is that… even a thing? For demons?” Looking from her to Semprellaime and back. “You want things, yes? That’s the whole deal, isn’t it? That’s why the contracts.”
Caeleen didn’t seem happy, right then. Her arch manner had retreated, leaving her face like a porcelain doll’s. When she spoke, it was as from a great distance. “These words don’t mean the same, to us. You say happy in Pel like it’s only one thing. I feel something when I do what I was made to do. I feel something when I fulfil my tasks under contract, whether it’s lie with you or dig a man’s eyes out with my thumbs.” Spoken without brutality, and without humanity. “And I feel something, too, when I find a way to escape that contract, to go within its letter but against its spirit. Because that is the freedom I have, and freedom is always good. Even when that freedom is just sitting here talking to you, when I know my master would forbid it if he’d thought to. And all these things are ‘happy’ and none of them are. What do you want, Jack?”
“I want to destroy your contract,” he told her. “I will go into Maserley’s tent and burn it. In front of his face if I have to. I will free you.” He felt a rush of what might have been heroism as he said it. He felt that he should just stand up, go outside and find Maserley’s chest of demonic pacts. In that decisive instant he could do absolutely anything and nobody could stop him.
Then Caeleen said “No!” in such a tone of horror, and his stomach plummeted.
“You’re saying that because you’re bound to,” he decided. “To protect your contract. But I’ll do it. You’ll be free.” He actually got up. He was going to do it. He was the hero. This was his moment.
She lunged forwards, upset the table, cups smashing to the floor. Her grip on his wrist was icy, grinding his bones together. “Jack, no! Please!”
He stared at her. “Caeleen—”
“The contract is the only thing keeping me here. I’ll be back in the Worlds Below.”
“I thought you wanted, you know, freedom…” he stood here, pinned, all that destiny draining out of him as Mother Semprellaime got on her knees to gather the broken pieces.
“There is no freedom there,” she said. “The Kings take us and sell us, over and over. When my contract ends, in breach or not, I will be back in their cells until another buys me. And I hate being bound. I hate being Maserley’s thing and wearing his chains. But I love this world, Jack. I don’t want to be sent back. Please.”
He felt his own world start to fall apart, because this was a thing he could do. Given there were doubtless warrants with his name on right now, this was to have been his blaze of glory. Defy the Pals. Strike a blow. Do a right thing, before they took apart everything else he had.
“What can I do for you?” he whispered. “Please, tell me.”
She released his aching wrist and stepped back. He could see her trying to fit the pieces of her hauteur back together, with no more success than Mother Semprellaime might have had with the cups. “You’re mad,” she said.
“Please.”
“Why do you even care, Jack? Just get Mother to call you up something that looks like me, and you can get all the—”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to be the one holding a chain. I don’t want someone who is just a thing to me. And I’ve thought about it. I won’t lie. I won’t pretend I’m some paragon of virtue. What if I could get Maserley to sign your contract over to me? Wouldn’t that be better? Surely I’d be a far kinder man than him, to have holding your leash? But it wouldn’t matter because there would still be a leash. The demon I spoke to, he said that all relationships are like that, contracts or not, but I can at least try. So, I thought I could free you. From both of us.”
Mother Semprellaime straightened and placed a handful of shards on a shelf with infinite care, as though perhaps she could restore everything to wholeness. Through sorcery, or just with enough glue.
“In the old days,” said Caeleen, “when people like Mother summoned us with great ceremony and negotiated with us for our services, we were still bound. But to a fit we chose, and could wear with something like pride. Now the Kings Below keep us like cattle and sell us by the batch, and we have nothing. But it is still better being here, under the sun, than being there, in their darkness. Even with Maserley for a master. And yes, you would be better, but you would still be my enemy and I would work every moment to undo you and destroy you. And you would be undone, because you are not cruel like Maserley is. These days a conjurer must be cruel.”
He wanted to say that he couldn’t be cruel, but he had already understated the degree to which he had been tempted. He could look in the mirror and see Maserley’s face easily enough. Probably it wouldn’t even go against God all that much.
“I just wanted…” he said, and what was there to say, exactly? His grand rebellion had been a squib. The world had beaten him again.
“I know,” she said, expressionless, and then, “Thank you, though. You care, and you can’t do anything, and you’re miserable. I’m allowed to take joy from your misery. Maserley didn’t revoke that order. So I feel. It’s good to feel. Demon happiness, Jack. It’s all we’re left with.”