The one lesson not taught in the Palleseen phalansteries, not acknowledged by their Commission of Ends and Means. That all things end.
Still just within sight of Magnelei, the Loruthi have turned and dug in again. Taking advantage of earthworks and defences they probably hadn’t thought they’d be returning to. Taking up new troops force-marched from their holdings further south. Just taking a stand. Who knows? All anyone at the sharp end of the Palleseen battalions knows is that the enemy have stopped running and won’t just concede the capital. Which means that the appropriate parts of the camp have stopped and thrown up their tents and engines, while the regular troopers sort into their companies and squads and sally out as quickly as possible before the enemy artillery can get into its stride.
Prassel can spare a moment from torturing ghosts to look in on the department she’s still nominally in charge of. Short-handed, obviously. The camp staff have even set up Cosserby’s workshop and now it stands untenanted, the Sonori stilled and silent. They’d have been useful to push the fight to the enemy, but Forthright will just have to manage with whatever demons Maserley can call up. Infernal flesh can soak up baton-shot as well as metal.
She looks in on the Butcher. He has his cauldrons heating. His boy sets up his racks of unguents, salves and potions.
“Chief,” she addresses him, aware that he’s not happy with her but when is he ever? The words, “How’s the back?” come into her mouth but they taste like bile and she can’t say them.
“Magister,” Ollery acknowledges. Beyond him they have the tables set and the cutlery laid. Tallifer clicking down each size of scalpel as though she has any control over which order the courses will be served in. Alv is kneeling by a Fellow-Broker who tripped over a guy rope and sprained her ankle, and doesn’t want to have to do her important paperwork with a limp. Lochiver runs a cleaning rag through his pipe, although the rag is surely filthier than the innards of the instrument can be.
Beyond them, they have only Banders and Masty and the boy to fetch and carry, but all three are hardened veterans. Prassel watches the kid skitter back and forth with absolute absorption. She’s seen children play games like that and maybe that’s all this is to him. He’s seen more blood and agony and death by age eleven than most people in their whole lives. The edges must have worn off. He’ll grow up to be a hero or maniac, surely.
She wants very badly to say something to all of them. Because it’s all coming to an end, and they must know that. Or her involvement, anyway. Stiverton’s operation has a hungry pull to it. She can either say no outright, or let herself consent to all of its horrors, but she can’t just hold her position at the edge of his influence. It takes too much effort.
In the end she’s just not good with people, and maybe that’s why she became a necromancer. She nods at them. Jolly good, carry on. Steps out into the open, hearing the first distant knock that is the Loruthi engines starting to complicate matters for the advance.
In the hospital tent, Ollery looks to Tallifer, Tallifer looks to Lochiver. He tries to include Alv in their conspiracy but the Divinati sits, staring into nothing, massaging her sprained ankle with absent hands. Alv is fighting her own battles right now. She’ll either be with them or she won’t, when the moment comes. Until then she won’t even realise there’s going to be a moment.
*
Prassel crosses through the camp, dodging the frenetic activity of all the noncombatants bracing to absorb the shock of a battle. Maserley has indeed signed up a new consignment of infernal infantry, and she sees the host of scaled, spiked monsters herding through and trampling the smaller tents, now on two legs, now on four. He sees her and gives her a mocking little wave. Just a reminder that he scored a point against her, a touch that she couldn’t parry away. And now her department is down several souls and she has no ready way of retaking the offensive against him. A contest between them in which only he is invested, because Prassel would be more than happy if Maserley went away and she never had to see him again.
She drops into Thurrel’s tent briefly. One of the few people she does actually have time for. But Thurrel isn’t in his usual ebullient mood. Something’s eating him. He’s no consolation right now. Which only leaves her people, her new people. Those who deal in death, in a more literal way even than the regular army.
“I was beginning to think you weren’t joining us,” says Sage-Archivist Stiverton. “Your engines await.”
“Thank you, magister.” Prassel unslings a bandolier with a handful of coppers. “I have some materiel here, but until the hospital has begun work I can’t—”
“We don’t really have time for that,” Stiverton says. “Higher Orders requests an immediate and sustained bombardment to disrupt the enemy back lines and artillery. Massed possession. We’re going to fire Festle and his squad over first, to give the spear a nicely directed tip, but after that it’s just dipping into the reserves, I’m afraid.” He’s not afraid. He’s practically salivating. “I note that, last time round, you proved rather reluctant to commit them. Which feels like a bit of a wasted effort, given the trouble we went to. A bit like laying out a feast and then watching it all go cold, don’t you think?”
Beyond him are the aforementioned reserves. Ranks of kneeling Whitebellies waiting to be emptied out and distilled into ammunition. Maddened ghosts that will arc like lighting through the Loruthi when their cannisters break open, or follow the stronger will of loyalist spectres like Festle towards high profile targets. They don’t understand what’s going on, of course, except it’s plainly not good.
“Just consider,” Stiverton says, reading something in her face she didn’t know was there, “it’s not really all that different to sending regular soldiers out to get shot, now, is it?”
Except she’s run a hospital department for several years so she knows it absolutely is. That getting shot is something that you can come back from, if you’re lucky. Having your life drained into a copper flask and thrown at the enemy for a moment’s diversion is not.
Suffice to say, when she was studying at the phal, it’s not what she thought she’d end up doing with her own life, either. But.
Prassel nods. “Indeed, magister,” she says crisply.
The artillery sounds, rattling the ghost-throwers, telling the necromancy department they’re falling behind schedule.
*
In the hospital the first casualties are coming in. The unlucky, too close to a ranging shot by the enemy engines, tripped up by the broken ground. Stood on a snake in one case, snake still attached. The lucky, in that they get a nice clear hospital tent to themselves. No need to queue like they’re at the mess tent on a busy lunch shift. No need for even minor injuries to go untreated. No lying about screaming at this end of the day. A quick, efficient service for all.
Ollery goes down the line and assigns: surgery, surgery, drugs, bandage, malingerer. Second nature by now. He’s been doing this a decade and a half. His boy is back in the tent, following specific instructions, or Ollery hopes he is. Packing the biggest bag he can carry with all the things they can’t do without. Remember the waterproofs, the Butcher thinks. Remember the warm clothing. Spare socks. Paper. He’d drummed the list into the boy but the kid probably wasn’t listening, like always. No time now to stand over him and make sure it all gets done properly.
Then the stretcher bearers are descending like crows and they’ve got worse cases. The Loruthi are deploying something new. It lobs big metal balls that shatter into the sort of scythe that could reap a whole cornfield in the blink of an eye. The soldiers coming in, the squad who got to test this novel way of getting mauled, they’re cut up like sharks have been at them. Half are already dead by the time they reach the tent, and that, at least, makes it easy for Ollery to deal with them. Anyone still alive gets a dose of his best numbing draft, forced down the throat and spilled on the wounds. And he’s left looking at bodies with great gaping lacerations, choirs of bloody mouths.
“Better get to stitching then,” he says aloud. He picks the three who got cut up least. “Masty—”
“On it, Chief.” Needle already in hand.
“Tallifer—”
“I’ll take this one, Chief.” It’s Alv, and Alv isn’t taking this one. Not unless she wants to absent herself from the fight almost immediately. The Butcher opens his mouth to send her away and sees something in her face. Some terrible thing, self-destructive and new. Alv is perfectly placid, of course. Her usual bland mask of capability firmly in place. Her eyes are tempests.
He mouths No, but she tells the bearers to bring the dying man to her and lays her hands upon him. Upon the terrible rents in his uniform, wrist-deep in the blood. Ollery has lost that battle already. He turns to one he can win, deciding on the soldiers he can’t save, the ones that Tallifer can repair.
Passing them to the old woman, he meets her gaze. She nods. “This one, and this one,” the Butcher tells her, parcelling out the meat. “And then you go collect what we need, right?”
“Yes, Chief.” And Lochiver’s piping echoes her words like an annoying songbird.
By now Banders has worked out that something isn’t right in the way things are working. Not like the department doesn’t have a rhythm to it she’s grown very used to, after all. Mostly by finding ways of ducking out of it, but you still need to know the rules before you can break them. She catches Masty’s eye, as he moves from one of the lesser casualties to the next. He nods. He’s felt the same, and he’s been here a sight longer than she has. She wants to beard the Butcher and demand to know what’s up, but he won’t stay still long enough. He’s actively avoiding her.
“I can go, Chief,” she says. “Whatever it is doesn’t need Tally, surely.” He affects to ignore her until she tugs on his apron strings. “Chief—”
“Got a job for you, Banders.” Ponderous, brisk, falsely cheery. A butcher about to sell her a very dubious cut. “Quartermasters. I need four new crates of mid-grade adduction catalyst. No idea where ours have got to. Someone’s been dipping their hand into stores.”
Banders stares at him. She knows exactly where theirs are. She could point to them right now. And there probably aren’t four whole crates in the entire camp. A fool’s errand that will take her away from the hospital for half the battle just when they need all the hands they can get.
“Masty, you’d better go with her,” Ollery says. “Four crates is a lot to carry.”
“I’m good, Chief,” Masty says from his stitching.
“Accessory Masty, accompany Former Cohort-Broker Banders,” Chief Accessory Ollery orders. Masty looks up, surprised, betrayed.
“Yeah, you come with me, your highness,” Banders says, flicking his ear just to really annoy him. When they’re out of the tent she grabs Masty by the arms and says. “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on but something is. We are disobeying orders, right? We are following Tallifer because something is up.”
And Masty, the obedient, the dutiful, the man who wouldn’t be king, can only nod.
In the tent, Alv is at Ollery’s elbow again. “I’ll take her,” she says, pointing to the next worse living victim of the artillery. A woman with no legs, just stumps that are more than half tourniquet. Weeping, clawing at herself against the pain despite the Butcher’s finest.
“She’s gone,” Ollery says harshly. “You can’t…”
Alv is not a mess of gaping wounds. She’s already shed them into that abyss where all her injuries go, in time. Except ‘in time’ has changed its meaning since the Butcher last looked.
“She’s mine,” Alv says, and takes responsibility for the woman with no legs. And gives her legs.
*
Jack listens to the sound of a war in the next room. His fingers twitch for the needle and the bandage, despite himself. This was never his war. He should take some consolation that he’s been removed from it, even for later execution.
Lidlet and the others have tried to ask him about God. They were probably envisaging one of those scenes where the serene teacher sits with everyone around him cross-legged. Where wisdom is dispensed, about the necessity of suffering and how it’s all going to work out. Jack telling them that God’s a mean bastard most of the time didn’t go down well. A bit earthy for their tastes. Jack saying that, actually, God didn’t much approve of them writing it all down and nailing Him to the page. And then saying, after divine correction, that while it wasn’t God’s preferred model, right now the old sod was desperate enough He’d take what was going. Only could they not use a better grade of paper because this onion-skin stuff the Pal army uses was hardly respectful. And Lidlet saying that, sorry, that was what they had, and getting the things printed on the sly had been difficult enough, and could Jack relay that to God?
“Tell Him yourself,” Jack says. And then, to God, “Look, do you want to just go over to her and be with her for a bit. She needs You more than I do.”
“Oh, you’re so damn self-sufficient, now?” God demands.
“I mean, I think You and I, we’ve gone about as far together as we’re going to.”
“Want a divorce, do you? So you can go live in sin with that demon whore?” God demands and Jack just breaks down. Because he does, actually. He really would like to live with Caeleen, in sin or out of it, and probably there’s a system of morality out there that would smile on him, if he could only find it. And Caeleen, despite Jack’s grand oaths, belongs to Maserley. And Jack’s going to die.
Fear not, comes a tiny, buzzy voice. For we have found the papers decreeing your death. We have changed the names on each of them to Professor-Invigilator Scaffesty in every case. He has signed his own death warrant. And it’s a nice thought, and it’s just about the only hellraising that this minute mote of a chaos god can manage. The divine scorpionfly, reduced to the size of an actual scorpionfly. And Jack has to explain that even the Pal army isn’t as procedural as that, and Scaffesty and his people can sign papers faster than Zenotheus can alter them. But thank you, anyway. And an idea hits him, and he laughs through the tears. It’s only a shame he won’t have time to put it into action.
At the back of the tent, Cosserby has his head bent over a tatty sheet of rather better paper, scratching with a pencil stub. Jack assumes he’s writing a farewell note to Banders, maybe even a poem or something, but actually it’s calculations. A train of logic written out in the symbols of his trade. On his knees is a copy of The Ninety-Seven Loopholes of God and he leafs back and forth through it, checking his workings against what Lidlet set down there.
Lidlet puts an arm about Jack’s shoulders, because tears are running down his face and she doesn’t know why. Simultaneously a stab of hot pain sears his throat and he yelps and draws away, incorrectly attributing it to her.
The rope about his neck, the one linking all of them together, that the provosts didn’t bother to remove. It’s burning through. As though a hot ember had been placed there. They all watch it happen, the fibres just crisping away, each one parting and the ends shrivelling away. Until Jack can take the collar off, the skin below red where it rubbed. Then it’s Lidlet crying out because the same is happening to hers. A tiny leaping flame that dances from one to the other, eating the hemp until they’re all freed.
Only Jack sees the salamander shape of Mazdek. Its toothless maw gumming determinedly at each halter, singeing and scorching. Just as Zenotheus’s capacity for chaos is reduced to abject forgery, Mazdek the Chastising Flame is reduced to this minuscule vandalism. A god whose last priestess has just enough military authority to offer up the bonds in sacrifice.
Even Cosserby has stopped now, staring. The ground around them is strewn with worm-segments of charred rope. They’re all free, save that not one of them could rush the provosts outside without enacting their own personal executions. They are the perfect prisoners, really. They can’t even push someone out of the way with undue force.
A bright point appears at the back of the tent. A winking, glittering thing like a firefly. It moves in a slow arc and leaves a black line of ash behind it. A line that opens up. A charred slit in the tent following the line of Tallifer’s finger and the creeping trail of Mazdek. The old woman’s face, thus revealed, has a curious majesty to it. The Priestess of the High Fane again, just this once. The chosen of Mazdek, for the simple reason that Mazdek has nobody else.
“Jack,” she says. “We’re getting out of here. I advise you to come too, all of you.”
*
In the hospital, Alv is going mad. It’s a quiet kind of mad, but very determined. She had no legs a moment ago. Now they’re back. Her regular, normal legs, impossibly still attached to her torso, walking her over to the Butcher so she can demand another victim.
“That one,” she says, pointing to a man whose been pierced through with baton-shot. Head, ribs, guts. At least three different deaths of varying vintages there, and the Butcher’s only other option would be to decide which one finished him. Except here’s Alv, the unnervingly immaculate, pointing that finger she shouldn’t still have. And the dreadful thing is still in her face, like a parasitic worm moving beneath the skin. She is sick with it, and yet it’s keeping its host impossibly healthy.
“Take him,” the Butcher says. It’s going to be one of those days anyway. Nothing’s working as it should, and there isn’t any relief from the screaming because the usual incessant piping isn’t there any more. Lochiver’s playing with his jars instead.
Alv doesn’t even take the man anywhere, just drops to the knees she should be missing and sucks the shot-wounds out of him. Leaves a whole, conscious soldier staggering to his feet, wide-eyed, as she pitches back. The baton wounds in Alv’s body writhe, spiral inwards like whirlpools, vanish into her intact flesh as though burrowing. She stands, and the Butcher feels she’s vibrating like a plucked string with a great circling flock of unassigned wounds like crows.
The boy is at his elbow, bags packed. It’s time.
He nods. From the back of the tent comes the sound of breaking glass.
“Everybody out!” Lochiver shrieks. “That’s pure plague! Oh the horrors! It’ll spread! I can’t hold it back!” Hamming for all he’s worth, the shameless old exhibitionist.
And the evacuation. Bearers and surgeons and any random fool who happened to be passing, suddenly drafted into getting the wounded to the next hospital tent along, assigning the regular surgeons there. Taking his own bag that the boy prepared and hoping the kid remembered everything.
“Alv,” he says. He doesn’t know what to do with her, because she’s not the woman he thought he’d be dealing with. But Alv is smiling. Or she’s grimacing. There are tears in her eyes and the shadow over her is gone. Pel doesn’t even have a word for the expression that’s on her face.
An end to everything, he thinks.
*
Fellow-Archivist Callow is returning from Higher Orders, having been given his brief. A precisely calibrated set of instructions for his precisely calibrated discipline. Right now, the Divinati sympathetic magic is a scalpel. His squad won’t be scything down any battlefield formations or breaking enemy positions. But he can kill officers. He can kill anyone that he can get eyeline on through a glass. Just give him a sufficiently serious wound to throw. Or a living body and a knife, and he’ll make his own. Or just a knife and his own flesh, if you want to get really primitive about it.
So long as Callow and his fellows can put on a good show, then this discipline has the potential to become the spiky studs on the Palleseen iron fist. Not only battlefield tactics but wider Pallesand policy could shift to take advantage of the unique capacity the Divinati have given them. Albeit unwillingly, but that’s not Callow’s problem, that’s Alv’s. Probably she’s weeping into her precious balance right about now.
He enters his tent, drawing breath to rouse his followers, all those bright young things out of the phal who dance to his tune.
And stops.
The breath goes out of him in a funny little wheeze, like a deflating bladder.
Something has come through the tent and massacred them. And there are only ten people there, not a quantity to which Callow’s education would usually ascribe the word ‘massacre’ but it seems the only appropriate term. They have been carved up. Butchered, really. Or not even that, because a butcher has a craft, like any artisan. Callow’s people have been served like someone came in with a four-foot cleaver and just hacked them about. As though there could be a giant with an axe loose in camp and nobody the wiser. Limbs are off, bodies are unseamed, faces bisected. There is a shocking amount of blood.
Outside is a whole camp of soldiers and support staff and nobody apparently noticed all this going on.
In the far back corner of the tent, one survivor. A man, his limbs folded about himself like an injured spider, covering his face, shaking, utterly ruined by whatever happened here.
“Report!” Callow snaps. “Skilby! Report, for reason’s sake!”
Skilby takes his hands away from his face and stares at Callow with wide, haunted eyes. His eyes open. Then his head opens, the crater of a baton-shot flowering there like a malign fungus. Another blooms silently in his chest and then a third from his gut. He spits out a long trail of blood and saliva and greasy grey matter and falls sideways.
Callow felt it as it happened. He understands instantly what’s going on. What he feels is the keenest of all betrayals, that inflicted on the betrayer.
Then he’s gone from the tent, running as though he can outpace the next battery of wounds.
*
They are challenged, of course. It’s not like any unattended column of mixed regulars and Whitebellies moving through the camp wouldn’t attract some attention. Provosts and officers want to know whose command they are. Tallifer waves the credentials of the field hospital for as long as it does any good, but these people were marched back and forth along the column and a lot of people got a look at their faces. Sooner or later someone isn’t fooled. Sooner, in fact. A squad of provosts, always prowling the camp during a battle to root out deserters. They face down Tallifer and understand immediately that there’s something amiss. They’re moving in, batons ready, and perhaps a couple of them even know the details of the case. The soldiers who won’t fight. Which, to a certain mindset, breeds a courage that might otherwise be lacking.
“On your knees, all of you,” the lead provost orders. “You too, you old hag.” No way to speak to the Priestess of the High Fane but he has a baton and she does not.
Tallifer tilts her head back. Perhaps she’s about to immolate the whole lot of them, incendiary sacrifices to her god. Her god is currently glowing exhaustedly in Jack’s new box because it ate a few ropes and some tent. No immolations occur.
Instead the lead provost turns a peculiar cheese sort of colour. His eyes bulge, and he doubles over and vomits on his own boots. Moments later he’s on the ground writhing as his guts cramp like he had a big plate of scorpions just a minute ago. His squad are dropping all around, hacking, coughing, glistening with fevers so Jack can almost feel the heat off them.
“Go,” Tallifer says, and they push on through the camp, with Lochiver capering out on spindly legs to join them, cackling like a madman.
“Where?” Jack demands. “What’s the plan here, Tallifer?”
“Out,” she says simply. “It’s over. Out is all.”
The next officer who tries to stop them is blistering with pustules and pox before he can get half an order out, and everyone nearby is far too busy making distance to stop the fugitives. But they’re still in the heart of the camp. There’s a long way to go, and Lochiver is looking tired. More, Sturge is looking tired. The Lord of the Unclean Sacristy has only a little well of filthy miracles to draw on. Even for his single follower, there’s only so much a plague god can do.
It’s about this point that Cosserby absents himself. Jack sees the man go and can’t blame him. Cosserby, a lone Pal in a dark uniform, will do better on his own. It’s not as though he asked to be part of it, although really none of them did.
Around that time another pair of bodies gets in the way, and Tallifer is about to see if Mazdek is ready to really cut loose when she recognises them. Banders and Masty, who have tailed her all the way from the tent. The forever-demoted Pal and the Rightful King of Bracinta, who really have no business trying to stop her.
“What the hell’s going on?” Banders demanded. Her eyes flick to Jack. “You’re running?”
“We’re running,” Tallifer confirms, and just moves on, forcing the pair of them to scramble to keep up, because she’s had it with just standing back and watching things go sour.
“Without us?” Banders demands. “You sent us off, and, what, you’d just not be there, when we got back?”
“That was the plan,” Tallifer confirms.
“Why?” Banders demands.
“Because they will hunt us, and probably catch and kill us, and we didn’t want to make you part of it,” the old woman said firmly. “In fact unless you get the hell out of the way we may not even get clear of the camp. Go away, Banders. You too, Masty. There’s no reason you need to be dragged down with us. Go live your lives and good luck with the army.”
But Banders has recently been given a very good lesson on why the army may not be good luck for her, just the moment it discovers just what Incorrectness she’s had foisted on her. She’s damned if she’s being left behind by any escape attempt. And Masty just goes along with them, as he always does. Another person whose fixed place in the firmament has taken a severe knock.
*
Alv feels him draw near. Her best student, the one who absolutely understood the lesson. She had been about to choose one more of the almost-slain, to complete her work, but Callow is onto her now. He’d find some unwitting proxy for whatever she sent to him. This time it’s personal.
The Butcher glances in surprise as she strides past him, but then she’s been off her usual playbook since the battle started. Why should one more aberration alarm him? He just watches her go.
It’s only a handful of steps, just two or three tents’ worth, before she’s facing him down. Callow, his face twisted by the fury of the outmanoeuvred. A short rod in one hand with a tableth socketed. The weapon’s point directed at her.
“How could you,” he spits out, “stand in the way of progress!”
He spits the command word and the weapon discharges. She sees the flash at the same time the shot impacts her skull. She’s already stepping, grounding her back foot as though bracing against the shock of it. Hands palm out, signifying… something uniquely Divinati. Signifying balance, the fixed fulcrum of a wildly swinging universe.
Her head snaps back—
Callow’s just about explodes. All that force, at that close range. The little rod springing from his hand, tableth jumping from its slot. And still, somehow—
Alv’s face, torn open, the damage sent back where it came from, crammed into her with Pal righteousness, the people who bring perfection to the world. Oblivion, instant, but—
The Divinati never sought to export their perfection. Instead, they made themselves perfect. The still centre of everything. And while Callow – in those slivers of second – knows rage and then knows panic, Alv’s unbroken face stares back at him and she gives him his wound again.
He can’t field it a second time. Lacks the practise, lacks the response time, lacks the finger on the scales of the universe. Knows a final instant of terror as he fumbles the catch, just like poor Hobbers did.
And falls, the most spectacular victim of self-inflicted wounds the battle will see. Alv stands there, silent, sad. Until the dozen or so camp staff and soldiers who witnessed this in broad daylight think to get weapons and start shooting her. And she just turns and walks away. She hears the crap and sizzle of the batons, and the cries, each shot returned to its donor like a gift unopened, so that the best marksmen amongst them shoot themselves dead and the worse just injure themselves, a leg, a hand, a shoulder. Perfect equilibrium.
Tallifer, arriving at the tail end of this, calls her name, but she’s done with it all, the whole seething mess of it. Alv walks out of the war and there are no gods to help anyone who tries to stop her.
*
In his workshop, Cosserby finishes the last of his tablethi. No time for proper engraving so he’s drawn his instructions on each with black ink, waving them in the air to dry them. It will do. It will do for long enough. He hopes.
And he doesn’t die. He has beaten Lidlet’s logic. He has instructed his Sonori with just the right nested chain of instructions to outfox Jack’s God-given rules. He is, after all, the smart one.
He feels the invisible chains pull taut, as he set down his sigils on the metal. As though the god was peering over his shoulder and trying to make sense of it. To work out how Cosserby is cheating on the test. But like many bright students of the phalanstery, Cosserby knows that if you put twice as much effort into cheating than you would just doing the work the regular way, you can fool anybody.
He slots the final tableth into place and the Sonori jerk into motion, the metal parts of them ratting hollowly, leaving a faint musical resonance in the air.
“Off we go now,” he says. They regard him. The instructions he’s given them are very complex, long chains of conditions, ifs, ands and buts. Enough that a certain level of awareness will accrete about them. He remembers past times when they’ve asked him Why, when he wanted to send them into war. Just expendable war machines to get chewed up and pieced back together. This time he’s asking them to defend his fellows, and there is no Why to them. When they march out of the tent it’s almost joyously.
*
In the hospital tent it’s just the Butcher and his boy. He laden with two packs and a sling bag, the kid stumbling beside him like a diminutive pack mule.
“We go,” he says, and turns to find Prassel in the opening of the tent. Between him and escape.
Her face is absolutely blank for a moment, because she doesn’t know what’s going on. Then it’s blank because she does. Sees it all at once, the moving pieces of his plan.
He bunches his fists. He’s three times the weight of her. She’d be boned and jointed before she could get a knife into him, or the cut-down baton she has at her belt. Except the boy’s there. And the boy’s seen Ollery do a great many things to the human body, but not actually murder someone with his bare hands. Despite murdering people being the thing the Butcher is generally known for. A lot of people, the boy’s grandparents included.
Prassel’s lips move slightly. Orders, perhaps? An official reprimand. A plea, even. There’s another path. Don’t throw it all away. But Prassel always was a quick student. It’s already past that point.
She says nothing. She steps back and vanishes into the camp.
He and the boy join Tallifer’s contingent soon after. There is shouting from the way they’ve come, deeper within the camp where they’ve left a trail of sick men.
“Go,” Tallifer shouts, and gives up all pretence of looking like she’s supposed to be there. Running arthritically, stumbling almost immediately, Lidlet catching her arm and helping her forwards. Lochiver is shouting, words that sicken the ears, prayers to Sturge, curses upon his enemies. When he puts his pipe to his lips she wants to snag his arm, to drag him along. He’s in full religious ecstasy, though, ten years of pent-up rebel priest. Ten years of plaguebringer forced to keep wounds clean, his god fooled into undoing its own purpose. She sees a full dozen provosts, coming for them at a run, just go down at once, voiding their bowels at both ends with explosive force. It would be funny if it absolutely wasn’t.
The flute shrills, screams, makes sounds that shiver the marrow in the bones of each listener, so that Jack and the other former prisoners are scrabbling away from Lochiver every bit as much as the camp guards.
He is, of course, making himself a target.
The shot that takes him could have come from anywhere. It’s not even alone. Jack and the woman next to him go down in the same volley. But Jack and the woman are on their feet in the next instant, because that’s how Jack and his own god work. Lochiver stays down. Jack can’t heal him. Another god’s hand is on his brow, the festering crown of the Unclean Sacristy. He’s spoken for.
Tallifer cries out, then Lidlet is reeling away from her with a burned palm. Jack’s cultists flee past her on both sides, and baton-shot whines through the air like blazing insects.
“Tally, no!” the Butcher’s bass roar. She only has eyes for the broken old body left in their wake, the pipe spun from slack fingers.
She will burn them all. No matter her god has barely enough in it to light a candle. She will make a bonfire of herself, throw her last years onto it like kindling. She will burn bright and brief and fierce, as she should have done all those years ago. It was only Lochiver who stayed her, back when their career of mayhem was ended. For herself, she’d have lit her own funeral pyre right there and then. But he – disgusting, priest of her god’s enemy – would have died too. And so she stayed her hand.
The Butcher grabs her, taking up where Lidlet left off. She hears his grunt as he finds her skin like a hot kettle, but he doesn’t let go.
“I will hold them,” she tells him. “You get everyone clear. How else are we going to…?”
The Sonori, marching out from the workshop, answer her before she can get the question out. Abruptly the world is full of the sound of bells. Baton-shot ricochets and rings from them. They make a wall of bronze between the fugitives and their pursuers, a solid rearguard that shrugs off the fire. Tallifer feels a fury that they’ve stolen her flame and thunder, but the Butcher is still dragging at her, and he has five times the mass and momentum.
“Not you too,” he snarls. “Come on, you mad witch!”
She was a mad witch once, when she was younger. When she was one of a pair of priests fighting the Pals every way they could. But now she’s just old and worn through, like clothes any sane person would throw away. Except here’s this big Pal, refusing to do so.
Cosserby has rejoined them, actually grinning because he didn’t see Lochiver fall. Terribly pleased with himself. And the edge of the camp is in sight. The picket sentries turning from their outward watch to call incredulous challenges. Levelling batons.
The Sonori break into a run. A thunderous charge on either side of the fugitives. Others stay back, and now their behaviour changes. Some balance point in their instructions has been met, and they engage. At the boundary of the camp they must hold the pursuers, so that the fugitives can get away. Cosserby’s finest work.
They slam into the sentries, all that mechanical weight and strength. They round on the soldiers issuing from the camp behind, each metal blow sending their target flying back, broken bones and ruptured bodies. The Butcher hauls Tallifer past the sentry line, virtually hugging her to him. Baton-shot keens past like murderous fireflies.
Banders is crying for help. Banders has Cosserby in her arms. Jack and Masty both stumble to a halt and go back for her. Cosserby is down. He’s shot. Or, rather, he was shot many days ago, in the great retreat. The same pierced lung, the same slow death that forced Lidlet into begging for him.
Around them, the Sonori are selling their metal bodies dearly and, to sweeten the deal, Cosserby has given back what he took from Jack’s god. Banders shouts in Jack’s face, demanding he help, but that ship has sailed. There is no ninety-eighth loophole. Cosserby is dying, caught on the wire of his own contingencies.
They haul him with them anyway. Armpits and heels and hoist away, even as the Sonori make their doomed last stand. They break for the nearest trees, and keep on running til evening. Long before then, Cosserby is dead.