A Harvest Of Souls 5

A hundred thousand corpses shambled out of the mines.

Pyromancers moved among the dead, setting fire to the old, the deformed, the crippled. Bursts of blue-fire charred their bodies within seconds, and the wind broke them to ash.

The alchemist closed the cast on Sam's fingers. He wore the white-and-navy of the Orthopaedic Guild. His mask was polished steel, painted with slashes of yellow. "I don't usually work on the living," he explained, having realigned a dozen fingerbones in less time than Sam had spent with them broken. "You will be billed."

"The Maestro is insured," said Sam.

The party was finished. The alchemists – half of them drunk, the other half halfway sober – descended the Hill with their guilds. They pointed at the tide of bodies trudging across the smouldering fields, their voices meek with awe. Sam darted past them. Ahead, James and Lucia took up the width of the path. The Maestro walked with his hands in his pockets, his steps jittery as if he might fall at any moment.

"Say it again," he demanded.

"Lucia tried to speak," Sam said.

The Maestro waved his hands. A smear of Green followed the trail of his fingers, fading as quickly as it came. "I see no record of it," he said. "You are certain?"

"No," admitted Sam. "I was…in pain."

The Maestro sighed. His voice was not unkind. "If you are unsure, do not speak. As you can see, we are going to be quite busy. This is not me being dismissive. This is me telling you how to be professional. If it happens again while you are clear minded, you will let me know."

"Yes Maestro."

"Where are we going, by the way?"

The lift cluster stood a mile east of the city. The Pillar of the Pile, a cluster of hexagonal basalt columns five miles in diameter, contained a hundred and twenty-seven cargo and passenger lifts that were the lifelines connecting the Floors. The largest lift had a maximum capacity of eight thousand tonnes, but not enough space to fit a hundred thousand corpses. It could travel to the Floor of Ten in thirty-two minutes, but most alchemical guilds had their workshops on the Floor of Fourteen, five hours away.

The logistics department of the House of Solutions had given a tentative estimate of eighteen-hour for the handover. That was how long it would take to distribute the harvest to their respective workshops, where preservative treatment and baseline encoding will turn them into productive members of society.

This timeline has already turned out to be ludicrously optimistic. Simply directing the cadaver to their designated assembly points has taken half the night. They were yet to be tagged and sorted. The waiting alchemists have gone over the hill of drunkenness, into the trench of hungover, and came back out bleak and disgruntled. They sat with their guilds, muttering amongst themselves.

Their stupor was briefly interrupted when Finley's army came marching with wagons full of disassembled equipment. The ventilator lay in its component pieces, the miles-long ducting folded across twenty wagons atop empty cylinders of Miasma. Two thousand armour-clad amblers guarded the procession with pikes and muskets and flamethrowers. Many had suffered grievous damage.

Sam was glad to have missed the shift where the riot had to be put down. People did not like being herded into an abandoned mine by spear-wielding amblers. Fortunately, the ventilators were already running by then. Seeing them now, with their vacant faces and glazed eyes, you would never think that these had been real people when the day began –

Sam threw up. She had to yank off her mask in a hurry, but vomit did not care for face. The apprentices around her jumped back and laughed. One wolf whistled. Luckily, the Maestros were some distance away, having an impromptu meeting. They did not see her.

The alks nearby gave her sympathetic looks, which made it worse. An old woman in silver-and-grey pulled her aside and gave her water. Sam nodded her gratitude but could not speak, fearing more was coming.

The woman's face was unnaturally smooth – polished, almost. Her hair had been meticulously tied into a bun. Her voice sounded like flint on sandpaper. "First time?"

Sam shook her head.

"No? Maybe this isn't for you then. Got to learn to enjoy yourself, kid."

"How?"

"Think about that villa on the Floor of Twenty. Think about going to Madam Tian's and buying everything on the shelf." The woman wiggled her fingers, showing off five gaudy rings. "I make sure to look at these every day. They are mine. I earned them. One day you will earn yours, and you will love them. I promise."

A bright voice called out nearby. "All rows, standby! All rows, standby!"

"I have to find my row," said Sam.

"You're with Cowen, aren't you?" The woman looked her up and down. "I have two thousand of his. Come with me."

For a time, the tagging of the merchandize was done by amblers with custom routines, which were phased out when the harvests became so large, and the per-batch anomalies so numerous, that the cost of encoding the dead exceeded that of simply hiring more alchemists.

The woman had three assistants: one to push the portable furnace, two to brand the flesh. Once tagged, the cadavers legally became property – theft, damage, and unlawful use would then be prosecuted by the enforcers of the law: the Maestros.

Sam followed along idly, doodling nonsense in her ledger. The corpses were arrayed in a perfect grid. They were silent except for the gurgling of their loosened bowels. Most moved not at all, which made the anomalies stand out. Two rows down, a woman was swaying on the spot. Beside it, another was gurgling up a bloody slurry that could have been its guts or its lunch. In the distance, a young man with blood-matted hair twirled endlessly, arms flying like a ballerina. Standing just beyond its reach, James could be seen arguing with a pair of pyros.

"…it was fine an hour ago, the logs are showing..."

"…first-passes are your responsibility…"

Distracted, Sam did not see the seven-foot corpse falling behind her. The undoubtedly premium-grade cadaver drove her to the ground before she could react. She instinctively stuck out her bad hand. It did not help. Her face hit the mud. The beak of her plague mask crumpled, and suddenly she could not breathe.

The initial shock turned to numbness. Maybe she will rest here awhile, not breathing, and give everything a chance to go away. Maestros might one day gossip about her by the wine cooler – Do you remember that time an apprentice got crushed to death by a corpse? That was kind of funny, wasn't it?

A steel-capped boot came into view. The weight on her back vanished, and Sam was yanked to her feet by the back of her collar. She pried off her mask and gasped for air. Lucia's face was inches from her own. She felt unreasonably embarrassed.

"That's a big one," one of the assistants remarked. The clipboard was half-buried in mud. Sam picked it up and frowned at the smeared pages.

The corpse that fell looked puny next to Lucia. It toppled the moment Lucia set it down, knocking down three others. The dead made no attempt to find balance or dodge.

"Maestro Cowen!" The old woman called out. "Some assistance, please."

In a sudden burst of agility, the corpse sprung to its feet. Its head began ticking to the left with bizarre speed, as if trying to snap its own neck. Reaching out in three dramatic lunges, it pulled the fallen cadavers to their feet and patted their shoulders amicably, then it clicked its bare ankles together and gave the alchemist an impeccable salute.

James Cowen pushed past the fuming pyros and came to stand at the old woman's side. "Preserver. Having trouble?" he asked pleasantly.

"Have them burn this one."

James clicked his fingers. The corpse, vacant-faced and oozing blood from its broken lip, broke into a merry jig. Twice it slipped on the mud but somehow managed to finish the routine without falling.

"Seems fine to me," said James, as the cadaver ended the show with a backflip. "Will take some work, certainly, but it has potential."

The woman scoffed. "Potential. Do you plan on micromanaging every problematic individual for the rest of your life?"

"You jest. I'm sure it will perform adequately with the proper routines."

"When you say adequate, I hear suboptimal."

'Semantics."

"Why are the weird ones always yours?" said the preserver, eyeing the spinning cadaver in the distance with unreserved disdain. "They told me you were good."

"Past my prime, perhaps," suggested James.

"Please understand that my guild will not be allocating extra hours to your batch. We are an equal-opportunity organization."

"I am aware."

It was decided then that the tall cadaver will continue to treatment, while the spinning one will be disposed. The pyros lit their fuses. A burst of blue-fire reduced the anomalies to ash. Sam scratched out their tags, and it was as if these people have never existed.