House of open wounds, p.6
House of Open Wounds, page 6
“You wouldn’t,” the Maric whispers and God lifts an eyebrow because the one thing every man of faith should know is that you don’t tempt the divine.
The horrible sound stops, and that’s a surprise to nobody. A wonder, only, that the spy held out so long against dissolution. Except that, when the political officer and the necromancer look down, the hole is gone, the man is whole.
“That’s cheating,” the Maric says. “You’re not allowed. Your own rules. You can’t go against your own rules.”
God looks nonchalant. “Yasnic,” He names His solitary yet still least loved servant, “he agreed. Ignorant Pal bastard. Turns out even they believe in gods when oblivion’s staring them in the face. Didn’t know what it was to, but he said Yes.” God’s nasty old face goes hard and mean, “And now he gets to pay the price, the credulous goon.”
Fresh Meat, Slightly Off
The conquest of Jarokir is celebrated by the Pals as one of their greatest achievements. The wicked, god-ridden Jarokiri, aggressively proselytising their religions out of every ship and land route. The Palleseen mission to perfect the rest of the world received a considerable boost from the gold and the magic they bled out of Jarokir when they finally subdued the place. Even subdued, the old ways didn’t die easy. Rogue priests, renegade templars and votaries turned anarchists plagued the occupation for a decade at least after nominal control was assumed.
“I heard Alv and the Butcher talking,” said Lochiver, impromptu medical flautist. “They’re saying he might be another Erinael.”
Tallifer was at the back of their shared tent, setting up for her devotions. That were, of course, utterly forbidden in any Pal army. Catch you worshipping gods or making votive offerings, they’d have you on a charge quicker than kindling catching. They’d have you in chains. They’d have you shot. Though not before they’d given you to the Decanters just in case you did actually have something of the divine about you.
Tallifer had something of the divine about her. A little fiery lizard only she could see, that was the least guttering light of Mazdek, the Chastising Flame. All that was left. And yet here she was at the heart of the Pal military machine, warming up a tin plate over a candle so she could burn a little incense and propitiate her tiny sliver of god.
And here was Lochiver, the horrible old man with his horrible old faith, her ancient enemy, the god that hers had repeatedly cast down. Here he was, in fact, sitting down on his bundled-up bedroll and removing his horrible old boots so that he could pick at the flaking skin of his horrible old feet.
And she was a horrible old woman and her feet weren’t much better, and at least he was Jarokiri, and in this army it was him and her and none of their countryfolk within a hundred miles.
“Who,” she asked patiently, “would be another Erinael?” Because Lochiver never started a story at the beginning if he could possibly help it. When he was younger it had stemmed from his contrary nature but now it was probably senility.
Lochiver watched the plate heat and the little waxy cone of incense begin to melt into the fragrance of sandalwood and lemon. The lemon scent was sacred to Mazdek, but half the temples in Jarokir had loved sandalwood, it seemed to be particularly godly. There had been sacred groves. The Pals had burned them, of course. One final and extravagant offering to no god at all.
“The new boy,” Lochiver grunted, straining over his gut to get to his horrible toes. “That trick he did. Impressive, don’t you think?”
“He’d better hope he’s not the new Erinael,” Tallifer decided darkly. “Because of what happened to the old Erinael.”
They both gave that a little time for thought. And Erinael was old news now, forgotten by most, never even known by some of the newer recruits. But she hadn’t deserved what they’d done to her, and at the same time it had been utterly inevitable. She’d been a testament to what gave, when the iron Pal drive for rationalism met an infinite capacity for help and healing. Suffice to say the Pals were still driving on, and where was Erinael now?
“He’s still going on at anyone who’ll listen.” Lochiver had fished his filthy clippers out of his pocket, and that was too much in Tallifer’s opinion.
“I am trying,” she said, “to hold a sacred devotion here.” She nodded at the tin plate, where the sinuous form of Mazdek was coiling about the melting pool of fragrant wax, trying to pretend it was the grand and ever-burning fire of the High Fane. Lochiver, of course, only saw the wax, filthy apostate that he was. On the other hand she couldn’t see his god either, and for that she was profoundly grateful. They had never made statues of Lochiver’s god. Not because of any dissatisfaction with graven images, but because it wasn’t very nice to look at.
Lochiver gave her a look along his nose. “This is also a devotion,” he said, the words positively larded with hierophantic dignity. “The High Priest of the Unclean Sacristy cannot be seen with ragged nails.”
And he had never officially been the high priest of anything, and the Unclean Sacristy had been torn up for spare magic during the conquest, and furthermore that was a rule he’d just made up purely to annoy her. And now that they all had to wear military issue boots and not sandals it wasn’t as if anybody was supposed to be seeing his toes, and that was most definitely a boon to the rest of the world. But he was going to bloody well clip his nails in their tent whatever she said, and that was the sort of shrapnel hazard that put whole companies in the infirmary. She took the tin plate – god, wax and all, and left the tent with it. And if the plate was hot enough to blister skin by then, and she took it by finger and thumb without a thought, well, being a priest of Mazdek had some advantages.
Outside, the new boy was tagging along after Ollery, obviously very agitated about something.
“You don’t understand,” he told the Butcher’s broad back.
“I don’t want to,” the man cast over his shoulder. He was carrying a clinking crate to his tent, some reagent Banders had dropped off.
“I need to talk to him,” the Maric said, actually plucking at Ollery’s apron strings. “The man. The spy. I have to warn him.”
Ollery set down the crate at the mouth of his tent, the big tent where he had three or four cauldrons bubbling all the time, brewing up his various specialties. Four tin chimneys had been sewn into the canvas to let out the fumes, and if you ever got lost in the vast camp of Forthright Battalion, all you had to do was cast about for that weird leaden fug of cloud and it would show you the way back to the hospital.
“Man’s a spy,” the Butcher said, turning and sitting on the crate squinting up at the Maric. Though not so far up, because Ollery was a big man, and the Maric was a thin stick bent under the weight of that box he had. “It’s his job to warn us.”
Tallifer had a bad feeling about that box. Her eyes didn’t like resting on it, yet she couldn’t ignore it. Eyes closed and facing away she still felt she knew exactly where it was. So what’s your deal, new boy?
“No, but look—” the Maric started, and Ollery cut him off.
“You did good. Whatever you did. Higher Orders are happy with us, for once. They get their spy. They get their information. They get to plan their next attack or whatever it was all for.”
“But that’s the thing, what was it for? I have to know!”
Ollery shook his head. “You don’t. None of us do. We just patch them up or bury them.”
“But I need to know he won’t do any harm!”
Oh, thought Tallifer, because that had a weird ring of familiarity.
Ollery, the Butcher, found it hilarious. He hailed his boy out from minding the cauldrons. “What does this uniform mean?” he asked the child. “This thing we all wear.”
“Means we’re soldiers!” the boy shouted, standing to attention to demonstrate.
“Means we’re soldiers,” Ollery echoed. “He’s – what are you, ten, twelve now? And he knows. And you’d better learn. There’s nobody in this camp that does no harm. Doing harm is what an army’s for. Us, the Loruthi, your Maric lads before you got smashed down four years back. It’s a world of harm.”
“But he can’t,” the Maric said. “I’ve got to warn him. Any harm. The moment he—”
Ollery stood suddenly, the motion quick and brutal enough to shut the little man up. Because Ollery was a great lumbering weight of a man and that could fool you into thinking he was slow.
“Tell you what,” he said. “Off you go. Go tell him. Good luck to you and your mission, magister.”
The Maric froze for a moment. “Right. Fine. Thank you.” And a pause. “Where did they take him?” Looking past the tents of the hospital to the entire Forthright Battalion camp in all its chaos and order. A city of soldiers, busy as ants about their business.
Ollery gave him a look that clearly said, Oh, I’m sorry, I’d forgotten you were new here, and then grunted, heading inside to see what was boiling over. The boy gave the Maric a disrespectful look learned from his father, and followed.
That, unfortunately, meant Tallifer was the next recipient of the man’s urgent, pleading looks, which were a gift she’d rather return unopened. He came over, though, faster than her old legs could have tottered her away, and his mouth open to beg for directions or assistance or – she didn’t find out what because he stopped and stared at her plate.
For a moment she thought he’d inexplicably turn out to be a Pal rationalist hardliner and howl at her for doing something even tangentially religious. “What?” she tried. “You never saw anyone wax a plate before?” Not her top-of-the-line repartee but she was tired. The unexpected emergency had taken it out of her, and burn wounds brought back bad memories. An awkward aversion to have, for someone in her spiritual position.
Mazdek slithered about the plate, his belly drawing patterns in the wax. The Maric’s eyes followed the motion. She saw it very clearly. And when the little eft-shape of her god crawled to the plate’s rim and pushed himself up with his tiny salamander forelimbs, lifting his blunt ember of a head into the air, the man’s eyes tracked it. Making eye contact. With her god.
“Ehm,” she said, a noncommittal sound to fill the sudden gap in the conversation. It had been almost thirty years since anyone else had been a witness to the radiant glory of the Chastising Flame, and that someone had been her superior at the High Fane, who had fallen on the swords of the invaders trying to stop them defiling the inner chambers of the temple. Which had subsequently been definitively defiled, because the Pals were nothing if not thorough.
“I…” The Maric stared at Mazdek. And Mazdek, who seldom exhibited more intellect than an actual regular salamander, looked right back with unnerving acuity.
Nothing moved within the box on the Maric’s back. Nothing happened whatsoever in it. And yet Tallifer’s attention was absolutely drawn to it, beyond all reason. And when she looked back to the Maric his eyes were filled with a terrible hope.
“Do you see?” he asked.
“No,” she told him flatly. More emphatically than strictly necessary because she didn’t want the answer to become Yes any time soon. “Look, yes, it’s all new. Yes, they do things different, where you come from. But learn this, Jack. This is the Pal army now. Here we speak Pel and we follow orders and everything’s by their book. And those who don’t learn, get taught it the hard way. Which includes any little things you might believe are the case, that they don’t see eye to eye on. You keep your believing behind closed doors, right, Jack?”
The Maric’s eyes strayed to Mazdek again. “But…”
“Nothing to see, Jack,” she told him.
His lip stuck out. For a moment she thought he was going to argue. He shrugged, though, and she tried not to think about things sliding about inside the box. There was nothing inside the box. Certainly not more than one of anything, jostled about and complaining.
“Please,” he said. “Okay, forget belief. Forget all of that. But I need to speak to the man who was healed.”
“The man you healed.”
“No, I… Yes, but I… If you like. That man.”
“Then you’re crap out of luck,” she said, not without sympathy. “We are the last appendix of the body military. We are an afterthought. A little game they play until it’s not fun any more.”
He frowned. “But we’re healers.”
She shrugged. “We’re an experiment. You think the Pals don’t have their own doctors? All that reason and logic can’t throw up the occasional medico? Of course they do. But some bright spark who’d seen too many cut-open uniforms had the idea that all these barbarians they were conquering might have some use to them, other than decanting. We’re an experiment in unorthodox use of tainted resources, Jack. And the moment we make a wave big enough to slop over the bucket, they’ll do away with us and just have a few more of their own die instead, and consider themselves more perfect for it.”
“But that’s…” He wrestled with it, didn’t understand it, hated it anyway – all on his face for her to see. “Why do you keep calling me Jack?”
“Banders said that’s what you’re called,” Tallifer said. “On account of you don’t do anything well.”
“What?”
“Sorry, that’s how it comes out in Pel. You do everything a bit, do it all right. Stitch, carry, clean, dispense. Jack of all trades. Maric Jack, she said you were. Seems a safer thing to name you after than… other things.”
“I… have an actual name,” said Maric Jack.
“Oh sure, but it’s one of those weird Maric ones. Can’t be doing with them.” On the plate the fragrant wax had cooled and set, and Mazdek abandoned it to slither into her sleeve, drawing a hot trail up her inner arm. “I’m Tallifer. The filthy beast coming out of the tent there, with bare feet and his boots in his hand, that’s Lochiver.”
“The man with the flute.” Maric Jack was staring at the old man.
“Don’t ask about the flute,” she advised. Not because it was forbidden but because Lochiver was a terrible storyteller, especially of the old sacred stories that it had once been his job to tell.
She wondered queasily what Jack saw when he looked at Lochiver. Whether he could spot the extra presence, that Tallifer herself could only infer. What the hell are you, Maric?
A jolt went through him then, that had nothing to do with gods or their conversation. The hospital had a new visitor: Fellow-Inquirer Prassel. The boss of them all, the Pal officer currently responsible for the hospital experiment. The necromancer.
And straight away, Maric Jack was off on an intercept course, even waving at her like he wasn’t a mere Accessory and she a high-ranking Pal officer. Tallifer lunged for him to haul him back, and she’d have managed it, too. Except the bit of him she could have hooked her fingers into was the box, with its sinister little pigeonholes. And she shied away, and the moment was lost.
An Enemy of Peace
There was, of course, a tradition of Palleseen literature. Printed books of appropriately instructional stories were part of a marching army’s standard supply. The problem was that, as a society obsessed with perfection, the Pals had perfected the form of the story to the extent that each one followed a prescribed and exacting format, the protagonist’s symbolic path slavishly adhered to until any incident of interest was ironed away. There were also collected stories from other cultures that had been brought into the benevolent Palleseen Sway. Whatever flourish and character they might have offered a reader did not survive translation into Pel. The language the Palleseen had created from scratch when they set about perfecting themselves, finding their original native tongue too full of vagaries and mystical reference.
For anyone in Forthright Battalion who sought to while away their time in reading, options were limited.
Chief Accessory Ollery, more commonly known as the Butcher, turned a page with great care. His broad fingers did not play well with the tissue-thin paper – the grade that the Palleseen administration used for mass-distributed forms, circulars and notices, and the Loruthi used for books. He was not supposed to have a Loruthi book, of course. He was most certainly not supposed to have a book printed by the Loruthi in Pel, which was a thing they were doing now. Pel books, but using the language in unexpected ways, like an acrobat escaping a straitjacket. It was, he understood, part of the war effort. Loruthi intellectuals doing their bit to fend off the invaders by sneaking morally corrupting literature where sticky-fingered types like Banders could pick it up and distribute it for coins and favours. For Ollery’s part, he thanked them for it. In the rare moments he wasn’t up to his elbows in blood or alchemy, he liked a good read, and this current work was a remarkably perverse piece of smut that fair got his juices going.
Speaking of alchemy, though… Something was troubling his nose, a most sensitive organ. “Boy!” he hollered. He was currently reclining on his bedroll in the curtained off nook of his tent, and there had been a suspicious lack of human activity to be heard from the main space. “Boy, what colour? Have you stirred the distillate?”
The silence that greeted this hail signified a world of guilt. Ollery threw the book down and stormed through. Sure enough, the distillate was already discoloured, and probably that was it and he’d need to start the batch again.
The boy was standing there all duty now, the big spoon in his hands, but Ollery wasn’t fooled for a moment and cuffed him across the ear.
“When it begins to sublimate, you stir. You stir to hold it off, so that the argamesh has time to dissolve properly, without which it won’t catalyse the reaction and the whole thing can’t enter the third house.”
