There are no scholars of the Fisher King cult, not openly. Correct Speech was diligent enough that even the name was lost to history, save to a very few. The practices and rites, the regalia, the holy places, the priests, all consigned to the pyre of a murdered history. Only a handful of scraps survived by oversight, to be clandestinely gathered by collectors like Thurrel. A handful of scraps, a forgotten statue below an orphanage, and the god.
Masty had brought some tea. Everyone else took it as a sign of supernatural foresight in him, far more useful than curing scrofula or the other card tricks that kings were supposed to accomplish. In reality, just something he found at the bottom of the pack he’d grabbed on the way out. Not even good tea, but nobody turned it down once he had it simmering in one of the Butcher’s smaller cauldrons. At which point, Thurrel found them.
They were deep in the trees, one of those scruffy stretches of forest left over from the patchwork way the Bracite farmers used their land. Creep out to the edge, as the more intrepid of them had, you could just about see the Palleseen camp. You could see Magnelei, too, and someone had claimed to be able to see the Loruthi as well. Yesterday’s battle hadn’t shifted the lines much.
Thurrel walking straight in after nightfall had scared a lot of people, because the whole point of hiding out in the trees had been so people like Thurrel wouldn’t just find them without even breaking a sweat. Except this turned out to be some business with Jack and Banders, and apparently, for reasons Masty hadn’t quite got his head around, Thurrel would have been able to find Banders if she’d put a dozen oceans and a mountain range between them. Not a romantic exaggeration, apparently. And Banders, usually so reliable for gossip, wasn’t going into detail about it.
To Masty, that felt as though Thurrel was a bit of a liability, and he was surprised the man had come so cockily alone to them, given that. Except Masty himself wasn’t exactly a man to wield the razor, and Thurrel had looked over Jack and Lidlet and the score of their fellow ex-prisoners and said, “I mean what are you going to do? Not like you’re going to stave my head in because I know where you are.”
Then the Butcher had loomed, as he did so well, and pointed out that neither he nor Tallifer were signatories to the whole Ninety-Seven Loopholes thing, and Thurrel had lost a big chunk of his cocky and become a deal more polite. Because the Butcher was big and solid and brooding, but Tallifer was grieving. Sparks danced at the ends of her hair and about her brow, and ran across her knuckles like mice. Masty had no idea whether she could turn Thurrel to ash, but neither did Thurrel.
After those lines were drawn, and Thurrel had wrinkled his nose at the tea, he waved a hand in front of Jack’s face and said, “Well? Like the landlord, I’ve come to collect. As our pre-eminent god expert, have you found a means?”
Jack nodded slowly. “I’m working on it. I think so. Come morning, we’ll see.”
“I’m stuck here for the night, now, am I?” Thurrel complained. “Look, I’m sure the deserter’s life under the canopy and the stars is terrible idyllic but some of us have work to do.” He looked around, found scant sympathy. “I’ll just tell them I was scavenging for spent magic, I suppose. It’s what I usually say.”
“While we’ve got you,” Lidlet tried to make it seem like a threat, “why not tell us what’s going on back at the camp?”
“Or you’ll hold my feet to the fire?” Thurrel asked her mockingly. And then the fire itself made a determined lunge for him, sending him scrabbling back. “Fine, yes, I get the message. It’s no grand secret anyway. We didn’t shift the Loruthi; they didn’t shift us. Thousands of tablethi-worth of warfare – and the lives, I suppose – all basically for the same result as if we’d not bothered. Other than that, rumour-mill says we’ve sent for reinforcements again, and the Loruthi have too. I know for a fact that we’ve sent people to Magnelei to try and explain to the Bracites how they really have to take sides now, and I imagine the Loruthi have done the same. But who’d want to be on their side when they could be a staunch ally of Pallesand, hm? I mean you’d think the decision would be a shoe-in. Two very distinct and different options for them. I mean the Loruthi have beards and we don’t, obvious really.” He shook his head and stared into the fire as though daring it to go for him again. “Anyway, you can rest assured that you’ve not been forgotten, and the moment we have the leisure then Old Eyeball will have half the army tracking you down. I’d just keep running, if I were you. Defect to the Loruthi, get to the coast and on a boat, turn into birds and fly away, if that’s in your gift. Don’t be anywhere near the army when this current contretemps blows over.”
After that, there was some desultory attempt by Lidlet to get Jack talking, and Jack not wanting to. Jack patently being uncomfortable that all these people were on the run and in danger explicitly because of him. Rather than just being dead, Masty considered, but that comparator didn’t seem to help.
Later still, Tallifer told them all a story of taking on the Pals in Jarokir. Of Lochiver. Her and the old man, except they’d neither of them been as old, back then. A trail of arson and epidemic across the old country. She told it as though it was myth from a thousand years ago. After which Banders wanted to say something about Cosserby, some great exploit, some heroic deed. And couldn’t think of one. Because he hadn’t been that kind of man. And she’d known he’d been holding a torch for her, and saying that now wouldn’t help. She was just carrying the dead weight of Cosserby in her head and didn’t know what to do with it.
Later still, when everyone had found what chill and lumpy rest there was to be had, Masty stayed awake and prodded the embers of the fire, and made plans.
*
In the morning, Jack had Thurrel and Banders stand in a space he’d found, where two trees leaned away from each other. Everyone else looked on curiously. There was some god thing going on, but nobody had got the details out of anyone involved. It was a fine time for Banders to learn how to be close-mouthed, but apparently the divine miracles weren’t stopping any time soon.
“So it’s like this,” Jack said. “I know absolutely nothing about this Fisher King.”
“Haven’t you been carting him around all this time, though?” Thurrel asked. “I mean he was in your box.” Which was a series of words Masty didn’t really know what to do with.
“I found him on the streets of Ilmar, like a lot of other abandoned gods,” Jack said, quite matter-of-factly. “I can only assume he was brought by one of the occupiers. One of you. Anyway, he was one of the gods I couldn’t shift before they caught me. But it turns out Banders is consecrated to him, fine. And he’s a, well… if you don’t mind me saying, I don’t get the impression you Pals were ever very nice, as a people. So he’s a punchy little man, your old god. All about strength and fighting and pissing contests. So, in order for you to receive this mantle of whateverthehell from Banders, he wants you to fight her. I mean actually he wants you to kill her in single fair combat, preferably with an axe, cut her head off and smear her blood all over your face. That’d do it.”
“I trust,” said Thurrel, “that you have an alternative.” He glanced at Banders a little nervously, because if one of them was ending up with blood daubed on their face, it probably wasn’t him.
“Well he’s very strict,” Jack said mildly. “Insofar as I can get – this is all going through God, my god, who can get a little sense out of him. He’s very strict, and remembers the old ways, and really insists on everything being done properly.” And then, just as Thurrel was about to explode, he added, “But you’re overlooking the big thing I learned about gods, having lived with one all my life.”
“Which is bloody what?” Thurrel demanded.
“You don’t really have to listen to them most of the time. They need us. I mean, we don’t need them, really. I don’t even know why you want this nonsense.”
“Because I am a scholar, and it’s the door to a whole age that people have tried to completely erase,” Thurrel said, and for once he sounded sincere, and honest, and barely snide at all. “The last scraps of who we were, before we perfected ourselves. And I want to know.”
“Well, good,” Jack said vaguely. “I don’t think he cares for scholars much, but you do it how you like. Anyway, gods need people who listen to them. And they don’t have the leverage in the relationship that they used to. I’ve been telling God ‘no’ for years. We argue. Old married couple, and both of us started seeing other people.” He gave Lidlet a look that she didn’t know what to do with. “So what I’m saying is, basically, sod his preferences.”
Thurrel stared at him. “What?”
“Sod him. He wants the axes and the heads and the blood and such, sod him. He wants someone to listen to him and take him seriously, it’s not going to be Banders, is it? So I reckon you just… beat her some other way. Spelling test, cups and ball, dice. Find some way you can say you triumphed over your rival, claim the title, get the god. Simple.”
Thurrel stared at him levelling, and then abruptly stuck his fists out towards Banders. “Which is the stone in?” he asked.
“Seriously?” Banders demanded. “Blimey, I know we’re stopping short of the whole ceremonial beheading thing but this seems rushed. Fine, that one.” Jabbing out at random.
Thurrel revealed an empty hand. Given that he hadn’t even made much of a pretence of palming a stone to begin with, nobody was overly surprised.
“I feel like asking for a best of three,” Banders grumbled.
“You said you wanted to be rid of it,” Thurrel pointed out. “So you could go back and not get shot by Correct Speech.”
She shrugged. “Well maybe it was nice to be special, just for a moment. Jack?”
Jack had been deep in negotiation with the invisible. “I mean, he’s not happy,” he said.
Banders took out a little clasp knife and pricked her finger, streaking Thurrel’s forehead with it. “There, O great and terrible conqueror, you have undone me.”
And that, apparently, was that.
After Thurrel had taken off, and taken his new divine mandate and god with him presumably, everyone fell to talking about what happened next. And they were Pals, almost all of them. Pals who’d lived most of their adult lives in the army. None of them had much of an idea how things worked otherwise. Masty could sympathise. He’d been with the army longer than any of them. A lot of the talk circled around finding another battalion, infiltrating it with false papers. A parasitic life like a bug in an ant’s nest, anything that wouldn’t require them to fight.
“You’re coming back, though, aren’t you?” Banders asked him.
Masty frowned. “You are?”
“Masty, I just went through a very gruelling game of lefty-righty and cut my finger, specifically so I could go back and live my life like I have been doing.”
“Only without the department,” Masty pointed out.
“There are other departments.” Banders was adaptable.
“I’m not going back, though,” Masty said. Only in saying it did he understand that he’d committed himself to his plan. The stupid plan he really didn’t want to do. “Banders… can you get them all to stop their yammering and gather round? I need to say something and they need to hear it. I’ve got a way out of this for them, that might get the army off their backs. And more than that.”
He sat alone for a while, then, while Banders broke up the impromptu theology classes and conspiracy circles, gathered Jack and Tallifer and the Butcher, Lidlet and all the others. And Alv, who just walked out of the trees and took her place amongst them as though she hadn’t just vanished earlier. All lined up, attentive as schoolchildren, waiting for the word.
He stood. Straight. He’d spent a long time slouching and being small, overlooked, part of the background. Survival traits for a foreign kid growing up in a Pal army. Now he needed to put such childish things behind him.
“Listen,” he said, and told them.