What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)

by T. Kingfisher

Even by Ruravia’s small, rather backward standards, the Ushers were genteelly impoverished. By the standards of the rest of Europe’s nobility, they were as poor as church mice, and the house showed it.

(Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)

In the flickering light of the candle, I beheld my old friend Roderick Usher. He had been a friend of my youth and under my command in the war through an accident of fate. I knew his face as well as I knew my own. And I swear to you, if I had not heard his voice, I would not have recognized him.

(I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.)

I knew the look, of course. Another classification, though not so graceful as Miss Potter’s. Americans, so far as I know, have no sworn, but I am given to understand that they have very lurid periodicals. Denton likely thought that a sworn soldier would be a seven-foot-tall Amazon with one breast cut off and a harem of cowed men under kan heel. He was likely not expecting a short, stout person in a dusty greatcoat and a military haircut. I no longer bother to bind my breasts, but I never had a great deal to worry about in that direction, and my batman sees that my clothing is cut in proper military style.

I mentioned that we were a fierce warrior people, right? Even though we were bad at it? But we were proud of our warriors. Someone had to be, I guess, and this recognition extends to the linguistic fact that when you’re a warrior, you get to use ka and kan instead of ta and tan. You show up to basic training and they hand you a sword and a new set of pronouns. (It’s extremely rude to address a soldier as ta. It won’t get you labeled as a pervert, but it might get you punched in the mouth.) None of this might have mattered, except for two or three wars before this one. We had entered into various alliances and suddenly they were getting invaded and we had to send our soldiers to defend them. And then one day it looked like we might get invaded ourselves, and we were running low on soldiers, and a woman named Marlia Saavendotter walked down to the army base and informed them that she was now a soldier. All the official forms, you see, said nothing about whether you were male or female. They just said ka. Now, everybody knew that women were not allowed to be warriors, never had been, but this wasn’t written down on the forms anywhere and an army runs on bureaucracy. They couldn’t find a form to tell her that she couldn’t sign up. A hundred years earlier, they would have just laughed kan out of the barracks, but they were incredibly shorthanded and here was a tough-looking person who could use a matchlock, and so the officer in charge decided that they would absolutely send Sa...

“Frightened? Hey, Roderick, were we frightened in Belgium?” “Scared witless,” said Roderick. He had been looking pensive when he entered the room, but the question seemed to cheer him. “Except when we were bored, which was most of the time.”

“Denton is a doctor,” said Roderick. “It’s part of why I asked him to come here.” Denton lifted a hand in protest. “Barely that,” he said. “I had one year of schooling and then the South took it in its head to secede, and I was shoved out the door with a bonesaw and a sheet of paper saying I knew how to use it.”

I won’t know any more when I’m awake than I do now. Hysterical epilepsy is probably the diagnosis she’d be given in Paris, for all the good it does.” “Hysteria?” “Yes. Which is a useless damn diagnosis.”

“Hysteria is like consumption used to be. Something wrong with you that we can’t seem to fix? It’s probably consumption. Now Koch has isolated the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis and we don’t have that to lean on any longer, so we have to admit that there are people dying of something that isn’t tuberculosis.” He slugged back his tea and grimaced. “But we still have hysteria, although Monsieur Charcot tells us it’s in men as much as women. Do we know the cause? No. Do we know how to treat it? No. Is it probably a dozen different disorders lumped under one name? Almost certainly. Don’t ask me. I’m good with a bonesaw and I’ll pour brandy down your throat and over your stump, but disorders of the nerves are beyond me.”

“They say mushrooms spring up where the Devil walks,” said Angus sourly. “And where fairies dance.” “Do you think they ever get the two confused? The Devil shows up to a fairy ball, or finds himself mobbed with elven ingénues?”

“The Good Lord looks out for fools. In your case, apparently He sends the occasional Englishwoman.” “I thought He’d sent you.” “You’re a two-person job, youngster.”

constellations. There were no stars. I believe I stared for at least half a minute, while this knowledge worked slowly through my brain. It was an overcast night. The sky was dark gray with a sliver of moon just edging through. I looked back down, at a lake full of stars.

It was fun. People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it’s generally cheaper to obtain.

Falling asleep quickly, whenever you have the chance, is the third thing you learn in the army. (The first thing you learn is to keep your mouth shut and let the sergeants blunt their teeth on the people who can’t. The second thing is to never pass up a chance to piss.)

I ended up in the library after dinner, accompanied by my second bottle of livrit. It was terrible, but a hangover seemed like a great idea. Headache is always preferable to heartache, and if you’re focusing on not throwing up, you aren’t thinking about how the friends of your youth are dying around you.