House of open wounds, p.2
House of Open Wounds, page 2
She comes over, trailing attendants. They’re all bloodied. They’ve been in the wars, if not first-hand then vicariously. He shows her the woman’s wound. Alv’s tight face tightens a whole extra notch. She’s not got much left to give. She nods. Alv is like a goddess personifying grudging adherence to duty. Although perhaps not that much like, given that there are at least two actual deities currently in the tent and assisting with proceedings.
The Butcher is a good Palleseen soldier. He has no religion. But he’ll use it, if it works for him. Just as he’ll use Alv and her particular brand of magical fuckery. He only needs results, not five pages of theory with diagrams showing him how it all works.
Alv kneels haltingly by the woman, trying not to jolt her own ruined arm. She places her good hand almost on the wound. There is barely any blood on Alv. Her pale uniform is almost spotless, and this surely is a miracle far greater than the act she’s about to perform.
The Butcher actually braces himself, despite the fact that, of all the actors in this little drama, he’s the only one not in appalling physical pain. Alv is doing something to the universe. Some singular trick of her people. Her attendants, who have learned a little of it, look on and try to learn, using some sense they’ve developed that the Butcher can’t guess at. He feels the tilt point. That’s the only way he can think of it. Like a cart he was on once, that was going too fast down a mountain track. Rocking side to side. The moment when he understood that the whole out-of-control contraption wouldn’t be righting itself to swing the other way again. That nothing was left but the falling. Like that, but with reality. And the wound in the woman’s broken leg closes, leaving behind a wealth of wasted blood suddenly robbed of its cause, a crime scene without the murder. And Alv’s face pulls like the drawstrings of a bag as the pain hits her. She goes from kneeling to sitting as her own leg opens beneath the cloth of her breeches. Her attendants are already tying the suddenly sodden cloth off. And Alv’s done. Has no more to give. They get her out of the way, off to the side, sitting by those who’ve already been ministered to by the devils and are waiting to be stretchered right back out of the tent again.
That leaves the broken leg, that clasp of prematurely merged bone. The Butcher rolls his shoulders speculatively. He places his hands on the leg, locks eyes with its owner. She’s had a nip from his flask by now but she’s still very awake and aware of what’s about to happen. There’s a lot of begging in that face, and it’s something the Butcher is very used to. He’s very used to not feeling it, not caring. Taking joy in it, almost. The sign that he’s doing his job properly, if people are begging him for mercy.
Three tents along, there are torturers. Actual torturers. The scions of the School of Correct Speech ply their trade on captured spies and enemy soldiers, to scour them of useful information. Delicate morsels to be chewed over by the gourmands of military intelligence. People beg those torturers for mercy, too. And here is the chief difference between the Inquirers of Correct Speech and the Butcher: sometimes they are merciful. When they get what they want, they withhold the thumbscrews and the irons and the sparking wires. But the Butcher knows no mercy. His job is to take the injured and hurt them worse until they’re better.
He feels out the precise topology of the bones, where they’ve prematurely merged, the necrosis already seeping into the flesh. Act now, without mercy, perhaps the leg can be saved.
He leans on it thoughtfully, like a carpenter testing a joist. The woman whimpers despite what was in the flask. She has the curse of a good imagination, and the Butcher’s philtre can keep her mind from the pain of the body, but not from the pain the mind itself can create.
He rebreaks her leg. A single movement, the fullness of his weight, the brute ape strength of his hands. Part-healed bone shearing from bone, the ragged flesh wrung and torsioned. And then the orderlies – the woman who’d given him the brief, plus the olive-skinned man with the weak beard who somehow always manifests just when he’s needed and only then – are hauling her onto the Butcher’s table. Fresh meat on display for discerning customers. A kit is unrolled for him, the little blades and the large ones. Clamps and grippers and probes and, honestly, if some prankster had switched the tools of his trade with those of the torturers three tents over, would anybody actually spot the difference? But now that his particular gift for triage is no longer needed, he can’t just sit idle. It’s all go, here in hell. Even the supervising fiend gets bloody to the elbows in the exercise of prolonging pain.
If you prolong pain enough, after all, then wounds heal and your victims live. Some of them may even thank you. And can the torturers say that, with all their mercy? He thinks not.
He does what he can with the leg. He has salts to nullify the lingering taint of necromancy about the wounds, that otherwise would only decay even though he keeps a clean tent of butchery here. He has the old man’s incessant, ear-offending pipe, which everybody fucking hates, even or especially the old man himself, but which is an absolute godsend. A literal God-send, tolerated here in the heart of the Pal army because the Butcher says so; because it works. He has a box of hungry, hungry beetles that devour dead flesh, that eat the withered fringes of the wound once the necromancy has been scoured away. He has a curved needle and gut thread the colour of snake venom. He has big, thick-fingered hands that are nonetheless nimble as any butcher’s when working with meat. And he sets the bones properly, with a little grinding and wrenching. With a certain targeted application of muscular force, pressure of thumbs, clench of his monstrous crusher’s hands. He aligns them with the fastidious perfectionism of a clerk lining up his papers with the edge of his desk. He smooths the ragged edges of flesh together and sets two inscribed bone buttons to fasten them together, that will be digested by the woman’s blood over a week, and help the muscles knit. He stitches the skin with his poison-coloured thread. No magic there, just a tailor’s work combined with the Butcher’s utter lack of squeam. He is a man who knows how the sausage is made, in respect of all the many working parts of the human body. His attitude to it all is, he likes to say, entirely sanguine. He enjoys watching people’s faces as they try to parse which sense of the word he means.
Then there are the others. The ones who got two, sometimes three, doses from the black flask. It’s their time, now. Not because he says so, but because someone new has stepped into the tent, who outranks him and everyone else there.
The grey-faced woman. Not actually grey, although pallid even for a Palleseen. Certainly far paler than the blotchy ruddiness of the Butcher’s face even before today’s consignment of sprayed blood. Grey in her soul, though. Everyone gets the same impression about her. The Fellow-Inquirer from Correct Speech, come to take her due.
She meets his gaze. Her eyes really are grey, against his brown-nearly-black. They are cold, but he’s used to them by now. He’s a big man. It takes a lot to send a shiver through him.
He indicates the remaining casualties, the black flask brigade. Her rightful due. On the forehead of each he has marked a cross in black grease, a sacrament from the lowest and rightmost of his pockets. The Sign of the Forlorn Hope. She nods. She’s here because there’s a need, and he’s only glad that the precise mathematics of how great that need is and how many he had to administer the black flask to have balanced out again. Because some day that need will outweigh his means, and then what will he do?
The grey-faced woman, the Fellow-Inquirer, takes off her black leather gloves. Human skin, some say. Demon hide, claim others. But they’re just kid leather, dyed black. And anybody who knows anything about the magical sciences will tell you demons and necromancy don’t mix. Opposing poles of the distasteful-but-necessary.
There is a string of tablethi at the grey woman’s belt. Golden lozenges the size of a finger joint, inscribed with a word. She mints her own, the Butcher’s heard. Uses commands unique to her. Tongue-twisters she practices every night, that nobody else can even say. Not for any particularly eldritch reason but because tablethi are in limited supply and people kept running off with hers and leaving her short.
She speaks the words, bare hands twisting through gestures that aren’t strictly necessary but do focus the mind. She is a scientist, after all, and the Pal philosophy prefers to strip away the trappings of ritual from its magical practices. But sometimes a good dramatic gesture, fingers crooked upwards, hands lifting, does wonders for your concentration.
Arise say her hands, even as her mouth says something twisted and harsh.
They get up, those lost bodies. The black flask brigade with the crosses on their foreheads. A symbol known and loathed throughout the army as meaning Property of the Necromancers. It shouldn’t be possible to slouch upwards but they manage it. They stand on shattered legs, stare with closed eyes, with ruined sockets, without faces, some of them. The man with the shattered skull tilts his head as though listening and a motley of fluids runs down the side of his raw face.
The grey woman nods to the Butcher, accepting her due. Those who cannot be saved can yet serve. Once more into the breach – just the once, because repeat necromancy suffers from dramatically diminishing returns.
When she leaves the tent with her new re-recruits, there is a rumble from far away. Not dramatic thunder, but the last flourish of today’s allotment of war. And there will be new casualties – there’s a whole string of stretchers heading back from the front. Hell will keep working its devils for hours yet, long into the night. But the actual fighting’s reached some sort of stalemate or equilibrium, and so hell’s work has become finite. An end is in sight, and the Butcher will be able to pack away his knives and potions and clean the blood from his moustache and try to decide if it was worth it, the thing that got him sent to hell.
The Price of Tea
A grey woman. Nothing wrong with that. It was de rigueur for the orderly and rulebound Palleseen after all. An excess of character was in itself a character flaw. So she made herself neat and cleanly, kept her uniform immaculate and had down, by muscle memory, every little tic of decorum. Only her gloves, her aversion to skin against skin, marked her out. And who would want to shake hands with a necromancer?
Fellow-Inquirer Prassel had a tendency to enumerate. Honestly she sometimes thought she should have ended up in Correct Exchange, counting beans and embezzling. It had always seemed the most pedestrian branch of Correct Thought to end up in. Now she could count at least three classmates who were doing very well for themselves, thank you very much, and hadn’t even had to leave the Palleseen Archipelago. Hadn’t had to go to war. Hadn’t had to learn magical techniques. And magic was just a part of the world, to be mastered and understood. No more inherently controversial than double entry book-keeping. Except, because so much of the current understanding had been borrowed from more primitive and less sound cultures, a certain touch of the barbarous clung to it nonetheless.
And, honestly, necromancy.
Last time she’d been home on leave – three years ago now – she’d spoken about the subject at her old phalanstery, before the eyes of her former lecturers. She’d painted the whole discipline as admirably clean and antiseptic; exacting, scientific. You applied the energies to animate the dead flesh. You manipulated them thus to create fields that could trap or exclude a ghost. All well understood, thank you very much. And been aware, as she spoke, of their eyes on her. The faint but cutting disapproval of her teachers, the eager horror of the students. No, no, she’d tried to make them see. It wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t ghost stories and vengeful spectres. It wasn’t… superstition and dirty things.
Except it was, she had to admit to herself, here in her tent with dawn threatening outside. It was a filthy discipline and it meant she had to work twice as hard and show some really outstanding results if she wanted to look even half as good as the bean-counters. And that was a problem.
She added it to the head of the list she was making. Problem Number One: necromancy is horrible.
Her current aide made a game try of putting her teacup down without spilling. His hand shook, and precious drops spattered her tiny fold-out desk. She winced. There were only three intact cups from the service she’d brought from home. The man was scarred, limping, no longer battlefield material but still serving.
“You’ve not been taking your medicine,” she reprimanded him. “Go to Ollery and get him to mix you up a new batch.” And when his lack of expression displayed no recognition. “The Butcher. Go to the Butcher and have him resupply you. You’re a reflection on me, man.”
He mumbled something and left her little tent. She sipped the tea.
It was the very best tea. Not the insipid stuff they grew on the Archipelago, not the decent Maric blend, but from the plantations in the Oloumanni territories. Good enough that, they said, it was the chief reason Oloumann had been added to the Palleseen Sway. So good it was a problem, because Prassel was down to one small packet and her requests to get more added to the supply shipments had been ignored for the best part of six months. And so soon, within days, she’d have to find some inferior blend, and it wouldn’t be the same. One more small pleasure ironed out of her life by the relentless Palleseen military machine. Which would rather have tablethi and batons or new boots for the soldiers, than decent tea for a poor Fellow-Inquirer.
She looked mournfully at the spilled drops and pictured how it would look if someone came in while she was sucking them up from the desktop. Not good. Maybe she could claim it was a necromantic ritual.
Problem Number Two was an insufficient quantity of acceptable tea, therefore. She wondered if the Loruthi had good tea, and whether any might be captured when the much-fabled Great Advance happened. Which Advance was at least partially dependent on her being able to provide necromantic support, which right now wasn’t at all certain given various other shortages she was labouring under.
She drained the cup a sip at a time, considering logistics. Slotting numbers back and forth in the invisible spaces within her imagination. It was something she was good at. She seldom committed calculations to paper. She’d always been reprimanded for not showing her working, at the phalanstery, even though she always hit the right answers. Another reason she should probably have been counting beans rather than bodies.
*
When she ventured outside, tugging on her gloves, she met a local weather phenomenon partaking equally of fog and drizzle. Her uniform coat glittered with droplets almost immediately. Every sentry she passed looked thoroughly miserable to have been given the dawn slot. A discontented grumble reverberated from the mess tents, punctuated by the clatter of cutlery. The tea the regular soldiers got was, she was reliably informed, worse even than the rank dregs they’d served at the phalanstery. Probably she’d have personal experience of it soon enough.
She marched herself to the southern perimeter of the camp, her feet finding the way through the perpendicular plan of tents and open spaces. Every one the same, no matter the terrain, no matter the war. Drop a Pal soldier into any encampment in any theatre in the world and they’d be able to find the muster squares and the mess and the privies. The Loruthi didn’t have the same exacting standards, she’d heard. It had given the Palleseen some early victories, night attacks against camps full of soldiers who didn’t know where the guy ropes were. Although the extrapolated predictions of a swift and complete victory had then failed to materialise.
The assault on the Loruthi lines that had just finished, that had seen such a brisk trade at the Butcher’s tent, had been a qualified success. The Loruthi had pulled back, ceded another few miles of ground. Except, in this case, ‘ceded’ meant ‘filled with all manner of nasty surprises’ so the Palleseen couldn’t just march triumphantly in to fill the vacuum. This was Problem Number Three. The Loruthi fought smart. Palleseen expansion generally involved the ironclad armies of reason clashing with opponents who were zealots, idealists, berserkers, any or all of the above. Marics with bird flags willing to die for their nation, Allorwen conjurer-lords on demon steeds, Oloumanni cult votaries with sacred disembowelling sickles, all that. And those were opponents that the inexorable might of the Palleseen army was very good at dealing with. A measured advance, a clear-eyed strategy and an iron re-education.
The Loruthi, on the other hand, didn’t really believe in anything much except profiting from other people, and their soldiers were either conscripts from their own overseas territories, or mercenaries, neither of whom would obligingly throw themselves into massed baton-fire until they broke. So, fighting the Loruthi, even winning against the Loruthi, was a series of careful, tentative steps because they would happily retreat in good order to fight another day, and make every lost step of ground a gift-wrapped present that you had to open very carefully indeed.
Needless to say, they’d be waiting for the Palleseen to over-extend themselves, fall foul of the bonecutters and ghost-grenados and the rest, before launching their own precisely calibrated counterattack.
She took the watchtower stairs at a decent clip. The whole edifice rattled, suggesting it hadn’t been put up with regulation precision. She decided it wasn’t her job to raise a complaint. She had more than enough paperwork from actual necromancy business without poking logistics in the eye. They’d be taking it down and moving it all three miles south soon enough, if she did her job properly.
At the top, the arcanolite sat on its tripod like a telescope wearing an extra pair of spectacles. The soldiers who’d set it up stepped back smartly, trying to make it look like respect rather than discomfiture. And yes, everyone was a bit twitchy around Correct Speech, but at least with the regular Inquirers – the interrogators and torturers and guardians of orthodox thought – it was the honest fear of a purge. With her it was the other thing, the dirty thing. The death thing.
