Sage-Monitor Runkel, commanding officer of Forthright Battalion. A testimony to the Palleseen preference for workhorses. Pallesand was leery of the maverick, the genius with unorthodox ideas. They tended to do very well up to around the rank of Fellow and then find their ambitions stymied. Or, in some cases, get quietly purged by Correct Speech. Ideological soundness trumped genius, but even in the very bosom of orthodoxy the occasional piece of lateral thinking could sometimes flourish.
Those had been, Jack knew, some very large words to come from a small man. A small man under a death sentence, manacled to a post in a tent in an army in a battle in a war. They’d landed with Maserley, and that had brought a tiny spark of satisfaction. Empty, though. Even if the chains had suddenly fallen away it wasn’t as though he could have laid into the man with fists or feet, let alone manifested some kind of divine wrath. In fact, a lack of divine anything was precisely the problem. He was just Maric Jack now, not even an ex-priest. A man who’d once had a god and now had nothing. He’d sworn a mighty grand oath of vengeance and it was a promise he’d never keep.
He’d lived with God all his life. He’d been a kid when Kosha, the old priest, took him in. He’d learned about doing no harm and serving God as the fortunes of the faith steadily diminished. He’d watched the last of the congregation pack it in and go to the big Mahanic Temple across the city, or else die, elderly and withered, clutching for some last benediction from a deity who was in an even worse way, older than the mountains yet unable to die.
When Kosha had been hung, that was when God actually appeared to him. And it had been Jack and God from then on, and God had been no help. Jack had begged and done piecework and somehow made rent on a tiny garret room, kept his belly half full and sacrificed to God. And God had complained and criticised and told him how much better it had all been. And Jack had known that some day he, Jack, would be that elderly man dying in the bed, with only God to mourn him. And that would be it for God.
And then he’d ended up as the last ex-priest of God, and discovered the wealth of little lost deities scrabbling about Ilmar’s streets like rats. He’d started smuggling them out when the Palleseen had started to trap and decant them. Which had led here, because he’d not even been very good at that and they’d caught him. Caught him and made him one more part of their war machine, the pacifist with his pacifist god.
Sitting there in the little tent with the provosts outside, listening to the murderous rumble of the artillery, he thought about the last days of God. He had a new lease of life. In Ilmar the ancient divinity had been in hiding from the world, shirking His responsibilities because every time He healed, it caused more harm. Except here they’d been in the middle of a war and there was harm everywhere you looked and something had snapped in God. He’d started handing out divine blessings like they were favours at a child’s party. He’d gone mad with it, because it was the only way He could push back against the horror. And Jack had tried to restrain the divine, to put God back in His box. Because Jack had valued his own life over God’s purpose.
I was right, though, eh? Talking to God as though God still had ears to listen. Trying to will that presence on his shoulder into being and hearing only the echo of absence. I was right, and they got us, and here I am and where are you? Something ancient and grand had been excised from the world. Something petty and annoying, too. Mean-spirited and ill-tempered and unreliable. But who was Jack to pick and choose the attributes of the divine?
The war kept trying to break up his thoughts, the thunder of it, the rush of running soldiers, the shouting of orders. More and more being thrown into the teeth of the grinder. And, on the far side of the lines, the Loruthi would be doing exactly the same, and Jack realised that he knew very little about what it was like to be a Loruthi soldier, or a Loruthi anything. Probably, though, when they squeezed their culture down to the small gap which turned them into soldiers being thrown at the Palleseen, the only significant difference between them and their opposite numbers was the colour of the jackets. Probably their camp sounded just the same except for the language the orders were yelled in. Or maybe even that was the same, given all their mercenaries. And Jack found he took solace from the sounds. They wouldn’t get around to torturing or executing him until after the fight was done.
Soon after, he registered that, in fact, the sounds were calming. A damning tranquillity was falling on the tents of the Palleseen camp. There’d still be screaming in hell, but the battle itself ebbed away like the tide, leaving Jack high and dry.
After a long enough wait for him to go through all his mourning of God again, they came for him. Not even provosts but a squad of regular troopers led by a Fellow-Monitor. Quite the honour, really. He wouldn’t have thought he’d have rated such a final escort.
They unlocked his chains warily. When no smiting happened they weren’t relieved, just contemptuous, strong men whose strength exists proportionate to the weakness of their victims. They experimented with pushing him about a bit, cuffing and kicking him. He didn’t fight, of course. He couldn’t, both because he’d lived a life of not doing so, and because he was on that list of God’s beneficiaries who would die the moment he pushed back.
It’s an option. And he realised with a sudden access of relief that they weren’t going to torture him at all. They wouldn’t get anybody’s names out of him. In the extremity of his desperation he’d find a way to strike at them. A kick, a clutch, some way to trigger God’s curse within him. And then he’d just be a broken sack of bones. He’d rob them of their final satisfaction and show them one last miracle.
He laughed then, and the soldiers drew back. He got a baton in the face before the officer barked a command. They wanted him alive. And Jack laughed again because he had complete control over how long he remained alive, and if they kept pushing him around he might make himself spectacularly dead just to spite them.
Having set those ground rules, they marched him out into a turbulent camp. He could see that the Loruthi engines had landed a few strikes within the tents. Doubtless the hospital department would be overflowing right now, the Butcher and the others suddenly deluged with a wave of injured support staff, clerks and quartermasters, cooks and camp followers. He hoped Mother Semprellaime was clear of it. He hoped Caeleen was. Probably the fires were no great threat to her but massive physical trauma could kill a demon. He’d seen it done.
They dragged him through the reconstruction at a rapid pace, shoving him in the back whenever he stumbled, which just made him stumble more. He felt weirdly light, and only as they reached their destination did he realise it was because the box was gone.
There was a big tent ahead, slightly scorched. Higher Orders, he realised. He was being taken straight to the top. And of all people he’d have thought they’d have had more important things to think about. Surely this was getting in the way of the war? He was momentarily outraged on behalf of the conscript he had been, then told himself that surely this was good and he was in some way working against the cause of violence by taking up their valuable time. Then they manhandled him inside the tent and he understood.
He had been brought before Sage-Monitor Runkel himself. A man he’d only seen back at his trial, after he’d healed Lidlet. After that other soldier had died. A name more than a man, really. And now less than a man, because Sage-Monitor Runkel was in a very bad way.
Was dead, really, except here was some… engine they’d put him in. And here, of all people, was Cosserby, staring at Jack with a wild and despairing look. Cosserby with a machine that was like a vast iron bellows, and that three Whitebellies were cranking great handles on. The folded concertina of the bellows hinged up and down with a great, slow rhythm, and its ridged pipes had been rammed brutally into the opened fissures in Runkel’s collapsed torso. When the bellows clamped down, Jack could see various parts of the secret and inner man inflate and flutter, only to be sucked into collapse each time the machine opened up again.
And conscious. Entirely conscious. His arms twitching within the straps they’d secured him with, his legs, every part of him below the ribcage, utterly still, but his face tilted towards Jack, animated by a dreadful agony. Doubtless they’d given him something for the pain, but not enough to take away his awareness, which was fixed entirely on his visitor.
His lips moved, and the man kneeling by his head – another Fellow-Monitor, so no menial – said, “Accessory Maric Jack, you’re to deploy your magic, now.”
Jack’s lips twitched.
“Now, man! He’s not got long left.”
Jack looked at Cosserby. The Sonorist nodded frantically.
Jack’s lips twitched again.
“What are you waiting for. That’s an order, Accessory!” the Fellow-Monitor barked. Jack was desperately pressing his lips together because he was about to be terribly impolite.
“Jack,” said Cosserby. “Look, they’ve got Lidlet. They’ve got the others. Everyone who took the… the option. They’ve got me, you see. They know I can’t… I’m only here because they needed someone for the machines. Please, Jack, just do the… do the thing. Your thing.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Jack got out. “You know it doesn’t.” Sensing the tension of all these violent people around him desperate to slap him for insubordination, to kick him in the back of the knee so that he was properly deferential, to remind him of his place.
“Show him the papers, for reason’s sake!” hissed Cosserby.
“Here.” There were indeed papers, scattered and sticky with blood, by the Sage-Monitor’s bedside. With sinking heart Jack saw a copy of Lidlet’s damned pamphlet there, for starters. The Ninety-Seven Loopholes of God had obviously reached Higher Orders, presumably as part of the evidence that had seen Jack arrested. It appeared to have been heavily annotated. Next to it was an executive order signed and sealed by Runkel, presumably in happier times.
It laid out a contingency to be followed in case Runkel himself should be critically injured in the line of duty. Specifically that they should send for Maric Jack, and that Runkel would, pre-emptively, swear to follow the precepts of the Loopholes after being restored to health, without exception. And Jack re-evaluated Runkel right then, because it was quite a twisty piece of thinking for an old soldier.
“Do I get to point out that I’m currently about to be executed?” Jack demanded of them all. “I mean, it’s not exactly motivation.”
Runkel’s eyes, red-shot, watery with tears, bored into Jack. His lips moved.
“Bring him close,” the Fellow-Monitor translated, and the escort, delighted to have something physical to do, slammed Jack down to his knees by the head of the bed.
“I will pardon you.” The words could only come with the exhalation of the bellows, flurrying in a strained rush and then falling silent when the man’s artificial breath was withdrawn. The machine couldn’t keep him alive for much longer, Jack guessed. His skin tone was going from greyish to bluish. He looked like he was ageing to death before Jack’s eyes. “I will pardon them all. Your accomplices. Your faithful. They will live and you will live. Free, all. If I live. Make me live, Jack. Make me whole.”
Jack’s lips twitched. He’d been holding the laugh in but suddenly it wasn’t funny any more. Just wretchedly, pitifully tragic.
“You stupid bastards,” he said. Not even shouting, utterly lost to despair. “I would, if I could. I’d do it. But you killed God. You sent Him to the Decanters, you dumb sons of bitches. I don’t have a spark of healing left in me. Let me stitch a wound. Let me tie a tourniquet. That’s the limit of what I can do for you. I had something wonderful once. I had something absolutely unique and incredible that I took for granted and never appreciated properly. I used to be able to do miracles but you burned all that up so you could shoot more people.”
Runkel’s eyes bulged and swivelled, searching for the lie and not finding it.
“So I guess we both die,” Jack told Runkel. “I guess we all die. I guess your soldiers learn that you’d rather they be dead than alive and not fighting for you. I guess it all just goes on until you find some new way of fighting that kills everyone all at once, and then we can give it a rest, eh?”
He really hoped that Runkel appreciated the irony of the situation, but the man was in so much pain that probably it wasn’t an option.
*
They kept him there for hours, because that was how long it took Runkel to die. They beat him, and then they beat Cosserby too, the pair of them curling on the floor, hands over their heads as the truncheons came down. Jack laughed at them. He spat through bloody teeth, spat bloody teeth at them, and laughed. Because they killed God too soon and now this nasty old man was going to die because of it. At first the laughing made them beat him harder, sparing Cosserby a little because the artificer wasn’t in a laughing mood. And then, because Jack couldn’t stop, they got scared and drew away from him as if helpless, despairing hilarity was catching.
At some point during this – unnoticed because of the beatings and the laughing that were monopolising their attention – Sage-Monitor Runkel died. Because the Whitebellies kept on with the winches, his chest cavity continued to inflate and collapse mechanically for some time after, artificial breath wheezing in and out between the stiff, dead lips. Only when the Fellow-Monitor bent low to gain some sort of permission did he discover that Forthright’s commanding officer had lost his tenuous grip on his own corpse.
They stood back. Jack got the laughter under control. Solemn moment, obviously. He saw batons tremble in hands, and assumed that this was where he and Cosserby both got shot. Apparently the army still needed the proper paperwork for an execution, and then there were the torturers of Correct Speech who’d presumably feel left out if they didn’t get their piece of flesh to chew over. Instead, the pair of them were hoisted up, jarring every bruise from the beatings all over again, and marched out of sight of the deathbed.
*
They didn’t take him back to the little tent with the manacles. Instead there was a shed, one of those pack-up-and-take-down military buildings, this one configured as a barracks for about twenty, and containing about forty. The faces turned towards him held the most transient spark of hope that guttered as soon as he and Cosserby were shoved in to join them.
He recognised Lidlet. He recognised Foley, Lidlet’s friend, and a handful of others. There were more he didn’t recognise. People who God had healed on the sly, or who Lidlet had got to. The extent of the rot that the Palleseen had rooted out. Plus, possibly, the odd soldier who had just refused to go out and fight and get shot, and so had been rounded up with the rest of them without knowing any of the theology at all.
He opened his mouth. Shut it. Watched Cosserby sit down and tug his uniform straight. The man’s jacket was stiff with dried blood, but his movements had been easy. None of the stiffness he’d shown on the march over.
Jack’s ribs didn’t hurt. His knee, that had swollen up like two fists, was down.
His teeth were back.
“You’re fucking welcome,” said that voice. Because God had always been able to find him.
Jack let out a sound as though he’d been stabbed and his legs gave way, collapsing down before Lidlet and the others. God was in the corner of the tent, arms folded, leaning against a pole.
“You!” Jack exclaimed. “How did you…? What even? What?”
“Long story,” said God. “But thanks.”
“What?”
“When they had you at that long turd’s bed. Thanks for not praying. I mean fine, you thought it was ‘cos I wasn’t there to be prayed to. But that would have made it harder. I did not want to fix that son of a bitch.”
“Jack?” Lidlet asked, uncertainly.
Jack wanted to tell them to rejoice, because God wasn’t dead after all. Except they hadn’t known that God was supposed to be dead, so the revelation would mean nothing. And if you weren’t in a position to take joy from that then there was precious little else because they were all going to be executed the moment that someone in Higher Orders found the time to sign the orders. And where then, for God?
Later, after a restless night and then the morning sun needling in between the wooden boards, the door was opened partway and someone hissed his name.
It was Banders. The provosts on guard were standing a few paces away, pointedly not listening. He wondered what she’d bribed them with, but Banders was never short of something that people wanted.
She looked pale and shaken, and that probably wasn’t on his account. Nor, fond thoughts aside, on Cosserby’s, who came crowding close in at Jack’s shoulders. Not that Banders was selfish, but it probably took something that touched her own deep self to rattle her composure, as something obviously had.
“Peace offering,” she said.
Jack frowned, because although a great many people had been fighting a war, he hadn’t been aware of any division between him and Banders. She wrestled something out, though. One of the Butcher’s medicine boxes, the smallest size. Some fool had knocked a handful of holes in it at random.
“Your old one didn’t make it,” Banders said. “But I thought you might still need one. For your, for your, you know, the things.” Banders actually being circumspect was a new experience.
There was a motion at one of the holes. A flick of antennae. An insect head poked cautiously out to test the air.
We have to say, came the buzzing voice of Zenotheus in his head, we don’t mind a bit of chaos but it’s been a time.
Jack looked blankly at Banders. He should probably thank her but he couldn’t quite process why she, of all people, was performing this unlooked-for service.
“Jack,” said Banders. “I really need your help.”
He looked back at the crowded hut, then over at the provosts. “I mean, sure. Just let me get the whole execution out of the way then I’ll be all yours.”
“Jack,” Banders said, and her voice shook and there were tears in her eyes. “Please.” All the cockiness had been bleached from her. She suddenly seemed very young and very frightened.
Whatever she’d given the provosts obviously bought a long conversation. Jack sat down on his side of the doorframe with the box on his knees, and Banders did the same on her side. The free side. After a baffled moment, Cosserby lumped himself down at Jack’s elbow.
“Tell me,” Jack invited, and she did.