Monstrous Regiment

I don’t think we are…that is, all the evidence is…er…it doesn’t seem to me that…er…I think I should tell you…er…”
    “Permission to speak, sir?” said Polly. “Are you feeling all right?”
    “We just have to hope that those put in power over us are making right decisions,” mumbled Blouse. “But I have every confidence in you and I am sure you will do your best. Long Live the Duchess! Carry on, Sergeant Jackrum.”
    “Ins-and-Outs! Form up! March!”
    And they headed into the dusk and off to war.

    About half an hour after the squad had left, the charcoal-burners’ cat ventured very cautiously back into the hut. It liked the hut. It got fed there.
    It watched, with suspicion, a stub of candle that had been lit and put very carefully on a pile of straw and dried bracken between the makeshift beds. Its ears flattened as the shrinking candle flared and the waxy straw around it began to crackle. By the time the hut was a mass of flame, the cat was on the other side of the clearing, moving fast.

    The order of march was as last night, with Maladict going on ahead. The clouds were holding in some heat, and were thin enough to hint at moonlight here and there. Forests by night held no problems for Polly, anyway, and this wasn’t true wild forest in any case. Nor was it, in truth, a march that they were doing. It was more like a high-speed creep, in ones and twos.
    She’d acquired two of the horsebows, now stuck awkwardly between the straps of her pack. They were horrible things, rather like a cross between a small crossbow and a clock. There were mechanisms in the thick shaft, and the bow itself was barely six inches across; somehow, if you leaned your weight on it, you could cock it with enough stored energy to fire a nasty little metal arrow through an inch-thick plank. They were blued metal, sleek and evil. But there is an old milit’ry say: better me firing it at you than you firing it at me, you bastard.
    Polly eased her way along the line until she was walking alongside Igor. He nodded to her in the gloom, and then turned his attention to walking. He needed to, because his pack was twice the size of the rest of them. No one felt inclined to ask him what was in it; sometimes, you thought you could hear liquid sloshing.
    Igors sometimes passed through Munz, although technically they were an Abomination In The Eyes Of Nuggan. It had seemed to Polly that using bits of someone who was dead to help three or four other people stay alive was a sensible idea, but, in the pulpit, Father Jupe had argued that Nuggan didn’t want people to live, he wanted them to live properly. There had been general murmurs of agreement from the congregation, but Polly knew for a fact that there were a couple of people sitting there with a hand or arm or leg that was a little less tanned or a little more hairy than the other one. There were lumberjacks everywhere in the mountains. Accidents happened; fast, sudden accidents. And, since there were not many jobs for a one-armed lumberjack, men went off and found an Igor to do what no amount of prayer could manage.
    The Igors had a motto: What goes around, comes around. You didn’t have to pay them back. You had to pay them forward, and that, frankly, was the bit where people got worried. When you were dying, an Igor would mysteriously arrive on the doorstep and request that he be allowed to take away any bits urgently needed by others on his “little litht.” He’d be quite happy to wait until the priest had gone, and, it was said, when the time came, he’d do very neat work. However, it happened quite often that when an Igor turned up, the prospective donor took fright and turned to Nuggan, who liked whole people.
    In which case the Igor would quietly and politely leave and never come back. He’d never come back to the whole village, or the whole lumber camp. Nor would other Igors. What goes around comes around—or stops.
    As far as Polly could tell, Igors believed that the body was nothing more than a more complicated kind of clothing. Oddly enough, that’s what Nugganites thought, too.
    “Glad you joined, Igor?” said Polly as they jogged along.
    “Yeth, Ozz.”
    “Could you take a look at the rupert’s hand next time we stop, please? He cut it badly.”
    “Yeth, Ozz.”
    “Can I ask you something, Igor?”
    “Yeth, Ozz.”
    “What’re female Igors called, Igor?”
    Igor stumbled and kept moving. He was silent for a while, and then said:
    “All