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Hattie, her best horse, is bitten by a snake an hour into the fifth day riding, and is dead twenty minutes later. They have to stop, at least for a little while, to reshuffle the baggage. She is glad of it, because she would not having authorized stopping just to indulge her grief and yet she needs a moment to indulge her grief quite badly.
They've been jogging as much as they can, to spare the horses, and covering twice the distance in a day that would ordinarily be recommended. Her feet were raw with blisters after the first day, and at this point there is blood and pus oozing out of her boots. This feels emotionally appropriate to the situation but is not, actually, the reason she is in pain. She mostly hasn't noticed it.
Cassen comes up to her almost as soon as they've drawn to a stop, but spends a minute shifting uncomfortably back and forth before he actually speaks. She ignores him. She is thinking about Hattie, about their first meeting and their first battle, trying to roll the grief into something that sits alongside everything else. It was always too late to save everyone, Lucien likes to say, and it will never be too late to save someone.
Right now it is not yet too late to save eighty thousand people. Tomorrow perhaps it will be.
"Sir," says Cassen, and she realizes that he's been trying to get her attention and not just trying to find a way of standing which isn't agonizingly painful.
"Mmm?"
"I, uh, could raise Hattie. I know how."
Ah.
To raise men as undead is to do a great evil to them; their souls are barred from passage on to the Hall of Echoes, bound to this world and a decaying body. To raise horses as undead is - well, probably not evil for that reason, at least, as horses don't have souls and do not enter the Hall of Echoes, as far as anybody knows. Before the war, Lucien had a project to study animals, particularly the intelligent ones, to study whether it is so that only the seven races are ensouled, whether that meant that only the seven races have experiences after they die, and if so whether someone ought to change that. It was the kind of astonishing hubris she'd admired in him. Presumably it was the kind of astonishing hubris that had inspired the gods to make him the Divine. Who better than someone who had already been wondering whether they'd made any mistakes worth correcting?
...under ordinary circumstances, of course, the paladins of the Divine do not use any necromancy, because it is the same magic that would call Hattie's corpse back to their service as would be used to similarly enslave a dead man, and it's better if such magics are not taught at all; and because most people ought to know that paladins of the Divine are good and just and wise, and most people know only that necromancers are terrible and not precisely how or why this is so, and because it is not obvious that they are not doing anything terrible to Hattie, even if the terrible thing they are doing cannot be denying her the Halls; Lucien never did finish his research into the fate of beings not of the created races. It might still be that there is something it is like to be dead, and it is hard to imagine it would be more pleasant than the agony in which Hattie spent the last few minutes of her life.
"I think you should do that, then," she says.
Right now it is not yet too late to save eighty thousand people. Tomorrow perhaps it will be. She and Lucien had a standing disagreement, back in peacetime, about how often one needed to make trades like these, to do lesser evils to prevent greater ones. He was older, wiser, halfway to godhood, and it was astonishingly arrogant of her to have any disagreements with him and yet she had persisted in it and he had appreciated that. She felt that most of the time, when one was trying to do evil to do good, one was just wrong, and did evil without any good; and most of the rest of the time there was a way to be less evil, missed once one had adopted a self-image as a hard man who did what it took, or slipped down the steadily-easier path of believing that the evil was good -
But, if you need to evacuate a forest before everyone in it dies, and you have two horses and are running them both to exhaustion and a day's delay will mean that tens of thousands of people can't be evacuated in time, you should in fact raise a horse from the dead. She would assent to it being done to her, if it would make this mission go one day faster. Any of them would.
Cassen nods stiffly and kneels at Hattie's side. Says awkwardly, after a moment, "I can ....explain how I know it."
She watches Hattie's dead eyes for signs of awakening torment. "Were you planning to before it came up?" He obviously wasn't. And the fact that he said "I can explain how I know it" instead of just explaining suggests that it's not a reassuringly simple story where he found a spellbook on a prisoner.
"...no."
"Then take some time, and decide whether you want to."
"Yes, sir," he says gratefully, and then Hattie staggers to her feet. She looks ghastly, uncanny. All her movements are subtly wrong. The flies are already buzzing around her. But her eyes are thankfully blank. Imene's heart hurts, but Imene's heart has hurt for six days, painfully enough to drown out all the blisters. She mounts the corpse of her horse. She can ride Hattie harder, now, probably, in the absence of worries about riding her to death. "Onward, then," she says. Right now it is not yet too late to save eighty thousand people. Tomorrow perhaps it will be.
