5

A hundred thousand corpses walked out of the mines.

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

The alk 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 complained as he was sealing the cast. “You will receive a bill.”

“The Maestro is insured,” said Sam.

The party has ended. The alchemists – half of them drunk, the other half halfway sober – descended the Hill with their guilds. They pointed, meek with awe, at the tide of bodies trudging across the fields. Lucia cleaved a path through them. James followed with hands in pockets, jittery as if he was about to fall.

“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 sure?”

“No. I was…in pain.”

He sighed. "You must learn to monitor and evaluate at a professional level. 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 basalt columns five miles in diameter, housed a hundred and twenty-seven cargo and passenger lifts. The largest lift boasted a maximum capacity of eight thousand tonnes, but not nearly enough space to fit a hundred thousand corpses.

Logistics from the House of Solutions had given a tentative estimate of eighteen hours for the distribution of the harvest to their respective guilds, where preservative treatment and baseline encoding shall transform walking corpses into productive members of society. This timeline had turned out to be ludicrously optimistic. Simply directing the cadaver to their designated assembly points had taken half the night. They were yet to be tagged and sorted, let alone mustered into the correct lifts.

Returning from the primary shelter was Finley’s army: two thousand armour-clad amblers armed with halberds and muskets and flamethrowers. Many had suffered grievous damage. People, as a rule, did not like being herded into an abandoned mine by spear-wielding undead. Fortunately, the ventilators were already running by then, and the violence was short-lived. The machinery now lay disassembled atop a train of wagons, the miles-long ducting folded around empty canisters of Miasma. Heat-treated pikes from the palisade were rolled up in giant bundles and bound with chains.

Sam had one of the earlier shifts. By the time riots supposedly broke out, she was already with the pyros, setting the city on fire. It was not her fault. The children skipping down the decline, she saw them now, in the rear. It was not her fault. They had vacant faces and glazed eyes. They stumbled with no sense of balance, only forward, forward. It was not her fault. The girl had tugged at her sleeve. Are you a Maestro? she had asked. She had azure eyes. Azure eyes, she saw them now. Glazed and blind, stumbling –

Sam threw up. She had to yank off her mask in a hurry. The apprentices jumped back and laughed. One wolf whistled. Luckily, the Maestros were some distance away, having a 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 dared not speak.

The woman’s face was unnaturally polished. Her voice sounded like flint on sandpaper. “First time?” Sam shook her head. “No? Maybe this job isn’t for you then. Got to learn to enjoy yourself.”

“How?”

“Think about that villa on the Floor of Twenty, or 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. Keep that in mind. It’ll get you through the hard days.”

A bright voice called out nearby. “All rows in position! All rows stand by!”

“I have to find my row,” said Sam.

“You’re with Cowen, aren’t you?” The woman looked her up and down. “I have eight thousand of his. Come with me.”

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

The smooth-faced woman had three assistants: one to push the portable furnace, two to brand the flesh with hot irons. Once tagged, 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. The normal ones moved not at all; the anomalies could not stop moving. Two rows down, a woman was swaying on the spot. Beside it, another woman 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. 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 the world a chance to disappear. Maestros might one day gossip about her – do you remember that time an apprentice got crushed to death by a corpse?

A steel-capped boot came into view. The weight on her back vanished, and Sam was dragged up 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. Sam picked up her clipboard and frowned at the smeared pages.

The corpse looked puny next to Lucia. It fell over when Lucia set it down, knocking down three others. The dead made no attempt to seek 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 left with bizarre speed, as if trying to snap its own neck. It pulled up its fallen brethren with three dramatic lunges and patted them on the shoulder, then it clicked its ankles together and gave the alchemist an impeccable salute.

James Cowen came to her side. “Preserver. 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 continue.

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

The preserver scoffed. “Potential. Do you plan on micromanaging every problematic individual for the rest of your life?”

“You jest. It will perform adequately with the proper routines.”

“When you say adequate, I hear suboptimal.”

‘Semantics.”

“Why are the weird ones always yours?” The preserver eyed the spinning cadaver with unreserved disdain. “They told me you were good.”

“Past my prime,” 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 in the ledger, and it was as if they have never existed.