68th Day of Summer, Year 9132 of the Unick Measure. Jungle between Waiauhua and Waiaulong, Sakngak

  Those medicines were something entirely different from the herbs and brews medics usually relied on. The evening before, Thread had diluted part of the first vial and given some to everyone. By morning they felt, for the first time in a long while, almost rested and capable of marching again. They looked like human, not like walking corpses. Furious would have given a great deal to have something like that at his disposal every single day.

  “How many of those vials are there?” he muttered quietly to himself, once again recalculating the route in his head.

  Maybe there was a way to be more efficient. Maybe something could be shortened. Maybe they could move faster somewhere.

  “Three restorative ones,” he suddenly heard in reply.

  For a moment he was convinced one of the birds had answered him. He had no idea where the ridiculous thought came from, but it drowned out every other one in his mind. He spun around quickly.

  Only Thread was siting beside him.

  The healer raised an eyebrow in silent question. Furious shrugged, feeling like an idiot.

  “For a moment I was somewhere else.”

  “In that other world of yours, who were you asking about the vials?”

  “No one. I was counting the route.”

  “Again?”

  “Every day. If you ever become a squad leader, you’ll do the same.”

  “I’m a healer, not a commander.”

  “Apparently there was once someone who healed and commanded at the same time.”

  Thread looked at him skeptically.

  “Really, or are you just saying that to change the subject?”

  Furious shook his head.

  “I’m saying it so it doesn’t look like I just said something stupid.”

  Thread snorted softly.

  “So there was no healer who commanded?”

  “I don’t know if there was. No one told me about it, but I never asked either, so…”

  Thread shook his head.

  “Normally I’d say it’s impossible to patch everyone up and command at the same time. But this is the Company. At some point, somewhere, maybe once… I won’t rule it out. Since I joined, I’ve seen stranger things. A commander-healer actually sounds reasonable next to those.”

  Furious nodded without really listening. He had already returned to recalculating the route when Thread’s first answer finally caught up with him.

  “Only three restorative ones? How long will that last?”

  “About twelve days. I think. Judging by how much we used yesterday.”

  “And if you gave us more of it, would we…”

  “No. We wouldn’t regenerate any further.”

  “Fuck,” Furious muttered without real anger. “What about the others?”

  “Painkillers, anti-inflammatory ones, bleeding stoppers, and wound-healing accelerators.”

  “And how long will those last?”

  Thread clicked his tongue with clear disapproval.

  “How should I know? If you’re careful with yourselves, quite a while.”

  “I meant how many uses.”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to open them and count, but they’re sealed tight. I’m afraid they’d lose their properties if I did.”

  Furious nodded. That made sense. Truth be told, he had been worried about the same thing.

  “You think we can stretch them a bit?”

  Thread immediately understood what Furious was really asking.

  “Each vial seems to be wrapped in some kind of spell. The box definitely is. I assume it helps preserve them. I just don’t know how that translates into actual usage. How many days? No idea. It’s not in the instructions.”

  “Hey, do you think if I moved my charges in there—” Fucking Insane suddenly cut in.

  Furious interrupted him instantly.

  “Finish that sentence and I’ll smash your face so hard those vials won’t help you.”

  The sapper rolled his eyes. Threats only worked up to a point. After that they stopped having any real effect. Especially when you knew that while sappers weren’t exactly loved, they did hold a somewhat privileged position in any squad. Whether the others liked it or not, Fucking Insane knew he was untouchable to a degree.

  “I’m not planning to take the vials out,” he said calmly. “I’m asking what happens when they run out.”

  “They won’t run out,” Furious said seriously.

  Everyone looked at him like he was an absolute idiot.

  “What?” the sapper asked. Even Thread scratched his chin uncertainly.

  “I said they won’t run out.”

  “You got some secret information that the Commander will keep supplying us forever?”

  “No.”

  “Does the instruction say how to reproduce them?”

  “No.”

  The sapper looked around at the others before asking carefully:

  “So your plan is to murder us all in our sleep and never open the box again?”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind, you cow patty?”

  “Oho. Haven’t heard that one from you before,” Fucking Insane said with appreciation.

  “He called you that on the last job,” Lard helpfully added.

  “I probably wasn’t listening,” the sapper replied.

  “Probably wasn’t listening,” Thread said at exactly the same time.

  Silence fell for a moment. The sapper didn’t like it much, so he quickly returned to the subject.

  “Furious, then how do you know they’ll never run out? The vials, I mean.”

  “Because I refuse to live in a world where we get to enjoy the wonders of healing magic and then it gets taken away.”

  The sapper looked at him with carefully studied indifference. Then he turned to Lard.

  “Do the honors.”

  Lard understood immediately and reached for his sword.

  “This’ll only take a moment, Furious,” he said, weighing the blade in his hand.

  “You’re serious?” Furious snapped. “Thread, say something.”

  “Lard, I bet you can’t take his head off in one clean swing.”

  “Oh, don’t you fucking tempt me,” Lard growled, drawing back for the strike.

  Furious was fairly sure they were joking, but in the Company every joke could suddenly stop being a joke. So without hesitation he drew his weapon and knocked Lard’s blade aside.

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  “Have you lost your mind?” Furious snarled. “What if I hadn’t blocked that?”

  “Then it would simply mean I did the right thing,” Lard replied calmly.

  “What?!”

  “The first thing I learned in this squad is that you don’t trust anyone.”

  Furious stared at him in disbelief.

  Lard shrugged.

  “The first person I met was Fucking Insane.”

  “Don’t judge everyone by his standards,” Furious hissed, sheathing his sword.

  Guess they won’t be letting me near that box, the sapper thought at the same time.

  Almost as if responding to that thought, Thread spoke in a firm tone.

  “That box was given to me, and I am responsible for it. If anyone touches it without permission, understand this: we lose the medicine. I have almost nothing left in my pack. I won’t be able to help any of you if something happens. Those vials are our only chance until things calm down even a little. You’re idiots, but even you aren’t stupid enough not to understand what I’m saying. My pack is priceless right now. Its safety is the same as our only chance of survival.”

  The others watched him without much emotion, but in their eyes he saw understanding. That was enough. He knew they would start keeping an eye on each other now, and in the Company that was the best guarantee one could hope for.

  “Hey…” the sapper suddenly spoke up.

  Everyone looked at him with open reluctance, but he paid it absolutely no mind. You could get used to anything. Even that.

  “What do you want?” Furious asked tiredly.

  “How far to the Commander?”

  Furious thought for a moment, then shook his head.

  “A few days. How many exactly depends on how much we’ll have to twist and turn to avoid walking into some shit.”

  Normally he would have asked why someone was asking that and what exactly they wanted to know, but with Fucking Insane he somehow didn’t feel the need. Furious had a strong feeling that the less he interacted with the sapper, the less he understood him, the less he knew about him, the healthier it was.

  Thread did not share that approach in the slightest.

  “Why?” the healer asked immediately, suspicious.

  “Because then we can ask where those vials came from.”

  “And does that matter?” Lard asked. “Once we get there and things calm down a bit, no one’s going to splurge on another expensive gift for us.”

  “What if the Commander didn’t buy it?” Fucking Insane asked, a dangerous gleam in his eyes.

  They knew that look. It was exactly the same one he had whenever he announced he had a brilliant idea. It usually ended with a burning camp.

  “You think he stole it?” Furious asked uncertainly.

  “No.” The sapper grimaced, as if the thought itself disgusted him. “The Commander doesn’t steal. We do that for ourselves, with his quiet approval, but he never does. And never on his orders.”

  Furious shook his head slightly.

  “How the hell would you know? You’ve never even seen the Commander.”

  “From you.”

  The squad leader clicked his tongue in irritation. Right. He couldn’t exactly argue with his own words.

  “Fine. Point for you,” he muttered.

  Thread already understood where Fucking Insane was going. He very much did not want to get his hopes up, but…

  “Where are you going with this, you cow patty?” Lard asked, genuinely interested.

  “To the fact that there are only two ways to obtain that box.”

  “Buy it or find it. So?”

  “Find it?” the sapper repeated incredulously. “You think the Commander stepped out of his tent to take a piss in the bushes and tripped over it on the way? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Lard clenched his fists and looked at Furious. His face clearly said: one word from you and this little bastard will never chew anything again once I knock all his teeth out.

  Furious shook his head. Maybe later, his eyes said. Lard sighed in visible disappointment.

  “All right, where are you going with this?” Thread asked, already tired of the conversation.

  “You’re all unbelievably dense,” the sapper said, shaking his head. “If we exclude the possibility of the Commander FINDING a box full of ridiculously expensive vials, that leaves us with buying it or…”

  “Or I punch you in the face if you don’t start talking sense,” Furious said, clearly losing patience.

  “And that’s why we keep walking straight into shit,” the sapper continued. “Because none of you think creatively. Not even a little.”

  “I can creatively cut your legs off at the ass,” Lard offered helpfully.

  Truth be told, he was a generous man with a golden heart who was perfectly willing to perform the permanent mutilation of a sapper free of charge. Furious felt oddly touched. Good men, he thought. Why did they have to be such idiots?

  “Fuck’s sake. How do I explain this to you in simpler words? I suspect the Commander recruited a mage!” Fucking Insane finally snapped.

  Silence fell over the camp.

  Everyone stared at the sapper with unsettling intensity. It had nothing to do with admiration.

  “Furious, I’m afraid the idiot detonated one charge too close to his own head,” Thread said quietly.

  “So it’s not just me who thinks he’s finally lost what little mind he had?” Furious asked.

  The others eagerly nodded.

  “You were all shat into this world in an outhouse,” the sapper growled in disappointment. “Try thinking for once. That one little box is worth more than our last job. With all due respect to our lice-infested asses, our lives aren’t worth that much. Why would the Commander buy something like that for us when it would be easier to write us off and unleash nearby squads to avenge us properly? But if he has someone who made it for him… someone sworn to him who did it for free… then things start looking a bit different, don’t they?”

  They glanced at each other uneasily, reluctant to admit the logic in it. Eventually all eyes turned to Thread. The healer sighed heavily.

  “You know that just before death patients often seem to improve, right?” he said reluctantly.

  They nodded, not entirely sure whether that was true or why he was saying it. Thread continued anyway.

  “There are patterns in this world. The dying suddenly feel better. People bleeding out want to lie down and sleep. And the words of the truly insane often sound very convincing. The crazier they are, the more logical everything seems when they explain it. Everything fits together, there are no gaps, and suddenly you start believing it must be true.”

  “Go fuck yourself, you donkey’s son,” Fucking Insane hissed, who for a moment had believed the healer might actually say something useful. “What will you do when it turns out I’m right?”

  “Nothing. I’ll accept it,” Thread replied calmly. “Until then I choose skepticism. This has nothing to do with you personally. Fucking Insane, I don’t want to live on hope only to be disappointed. I’d rather be pleasantly surprised. For your theory to work, the Commander would have had to recruit not just any mage, but one trained in healing. That means an Akanti academy graduate. That mage would then have to voluntarily leave the Atolls, have the bad luck of running into us, and be stupid enough to swear an oath to the Company. And you think that’s more likely than simply buying the box? I agree its price is absurd, but the Commander can afford it. Did he buy it specifically for us? I doubt it. But you know what sounds quite plausible? That he received it as payment… or took it from someone who refused to pay. Did that thought cross your mind? Of course not.”

  Thread finished speaking and sighed heavily, as if the ordinary business of life had simply worn him out.

  Fucking Insane watched him with visible displeasure, carefully analyzing the words he had just heard. Rarely did he concentrate deeply, but when he did, it was almost never at the right moment or about the right thing. And almost never when he should have been focusing on his explosives.

  Still, he hadn’t blown himself up yet, so no one could really complain.

  “Sounds logical,” he began.

  A low murmur of dissatisfaction rolled through the others. He ignored it easily. When you had spent your entire life being a disappointment to people, moments like that hardly mattered anymore.

  “I see you’ve thought it through. But if it’s like you say, why didn’t the Commander keep the box for himself?”

  A few voices filled with excitement. A few with doubt. A few with hope. Those hopeful ones displeased Furious. He suddenly realized what Thread had been doing. The healer wasn’t arguing just to argue. He wasn’t playing the pessimist. He simply didn’t want them believing something that might not even be true, getting carried away by hope and forgetting to stay careful. At least… that was probably it. Because if not, then Thread was slowly becoming one very bitter bastard.

  “Furious, when you served in the Commander’s unit, did you ever have problems with healing?”

  “Well… there was quite a bit of rotation with healers for a while.”

  “What does that mean?” Lard asked, briefly imagining the Commander killing one healer after another whenever something annoyed him.

  “We’d recruit one, he’d stay with us for a while, and when a new squad was formed the Commander would assign him there.”

  Lard looked strangely disappointed.

  Furious stared at him in disbelief but didn’t ask anything. Some conversations were better left alone. After a moment he added,

  “It was similar with sappers. Actually, the only people who stayed the same were the cooks.”

  At that, for the first time that day, Bone joined the conversation.

  “The cooks?”

  “Well…”

  “They have a whole crew just for cooking, and I’m busting my ass doing it alone?”

  Furious rolled his eyes. He really needed to start being more careful about who he recruited. Otherwise he kept ending up with idiots.

  “No. Two people.”

  “Two people?! Two?!”

  “One cooks for the squad. The other cooks for the Commander, Skinner, and whoever officially commands the squad.”

  That answer surprised Bone.

  “Why does someone cook separately for them?”

  “So they eat better.”

  “But…”

  “Privilege of command.”

  Bone fell silent after that, lost in thought. With that, the cooking discussion died off and the others returned to the matter of healers.

  “So there was always someone who treated you?” Thread asked.

  “Not always. But most of the time, yeah.”

  “During all that time, did you ever have serious situations that required major intervention from a healer?”

  “We had one guy once who—”

  “Something that threatened the entire squad?” Thread clarified.

  Furious thought carefully before answering.

  “No.”

  “Ever hear about anything like that before?”

  “Not really. Maybe someone mentioned something once, but I don’t remember the details.”

  “That’s exactly the point.”

  The soldiers exchanged uneasy looks.

  “What point?” Sensitive asked.

  Thread resisted the powerful urge to roll his eyes.

  “The Commander’s squad doesn’t seem to have that kind of problem. Why? Maybe he takes different contracts for himself. Ones that involve politics instead of pure slaughter. Or maybe he’s simply lucky. If the stories about him being immortal are true, then maybe he just knows what he’s doing and how to avoid situations that threaten him and his men. And if that’s not it, there’s still the rumor about the Black Mage who supposedly still watches over his squad. Either way, I have the strange impression that he simply doesn’t need that box.”

  Silence fell across the camp.

  The soldiers exchanged uneasy glances that the healer did not like one bit. He raised his eyebrows slightly and opened his eyes wider in silent question. No one answered. When he did it again, Furious nudged Fucking Insane. The sapper clicked his tongue in annoyance but finally spoke.

  “You really thought all that through, didn’t you?”

  “So?”

  “So it all sounds logical.”

  “Because it is logical.”

  “And there aren’t any gaps in what you’re saying.”

  “And why would there be gaps in—”

  Thread fell silent. He understood.

  “I hope you’re capable of reading with comprehension,” he said coldly. “Because a madman cannot be your healer.” Without waiting for anyone’s response, he added, “Good night.”

  He stood, turned on his heel, and walked toward his tent. Silence remained in the camp.

  “We overdid it,” Bone said quietly.

  “Not we. Fucking Insane,” Furious corrected calmly.

  “What did I do that was worse than the rest of you?” the sapper asked in disbelief.

  “You exist. And you’re a sapper,” Lard explained politely.

  “And you fully earned your name,” Furious added.

  “And we don’t like you,” Bone contributed.

  Fucking Insane nodded.

  He hadn’t expected anything better from this herd of sheep’s assholes. Their mothers should have drowned them at birth.