Thresholder

Perry’s first battle against the orcs had been a one-sided bloodbath — in his favor. The story of the war had been laid out for him, a history of violence against the Kingdom of Seraphinus, and he’d been shown one of the orcs, chained up in a dungeon, the brute howling and straining against his bonds. The world was larger than Seraphnius, a motley of kingdoms, but it had always been the bulwark, and was now suffering from both a break from peace in the south and a new, profound unity in the north. They had asked for Perry’s aid, and he had lent it.

In the back of his mind was the idea it might be a trap or a trick somehow, that the orcs were actually the good guys. He came to the conclusion later that his mind had simply been too poisoned by postmodernism and the way that stories couldn’t stop drilling down through levels of detached irony and self-reference. Sometimes it really was as simple as a kingdom in need of defending against a force of churning hatred intent on conquering and enslaving.

The site of the battle had been Arger’s Field, a long, low valley that had once held a village and now held ruins. The orcs had been camped there among the burnt houses for the better part of two weeks, and the battle plan had been to come in with banners flying, gleaming knights in armor in among the less-armored rank and file, men who’d been pulled in by their liege lords, many of them with their own peculiarities of dress and weaponry. There was no semblance of uniform, only men with tabards on and the bannermen themselves. Magic suffused the world, but it wasn’t on display, as there were too few wizards, their power too precious to spare for something like this. There were healers, but they were kept well back from the front lines, and would only be available upon return to camp.

It had somehow surprised Perry how good his power armor was. A weapon of war, built by the most powerful nation of an Earth whose technology was decades ahead of his own, at a cost of perhaps tens of millions of dollars, managed to beat out orcs with metal strapped to them, carrying other bits of metal. Perry had felled his first orc with a single sword stroke and marveled at how quickly the green-skinned creature had fallen, and while the battlefield was a confusing mess of panic and danger, Perry moved smoothly through it. He didn’t stick to the mud like it did to the others, not only because he was strong enough to stomp through it, but because of the hydrophobic coating. He was exerting only a fraction of effort for ten times the result. March called out directions at times, flashing things up on the HUD, maintaining full situational awareness of everyone on the battlefield, calling out people who were in trouble or vulnerable orcs to go against.

He’d been given a sword, one of no particular note, and he’d broken it within the first three minutes, his swings far too powerful for the steel to withstand. He’d grabbed up weapons from the fallen, often breaking those as well, preferring the larger swords and flails of the orcs, which, with the armor, were more his size.

He had barely thought about the fact that he was killing living beings, perhaps because their skin was green and their blood was black, and it didn’t quite feel real.

“You fought like a demon,” said one of the other knights, clasping him on his shoulder. He had a stag’s head on his green armor. “It’s not often we rout the enemy. Come. We must collect the dead, then leave the enemy to do the same.”

Perry hadn’t understood, because no one had explained it to him beforehand, but he pitched in, moving bodies two or three at a time. Fewer had died than he would have thought, even among the enemy, and the bodies of their fallen were placed upon sledges or carried by stretchers on the hike back to the camp where they’d made their march from. The place they’d fought, Arger’s Field, had been torn apart, stripped of food, and this apparently wasn’t the sort of war where they were fighting over land, or not exactly.

Back at the camp, bodies had been unloaded, stacked like cordwood near the healers’ tent, and Perry had watched closely, not knowing what was going to happen. He had wondered whether there would simply be rites given, or a mass grave, or a funeral pyre, but instead something extraordinary happened: the men were brought back to life.

Perry had stared in awe as a man who’d been dead coughed and spluttered, jerking upright with a deep gasp. He’d kept watching in awe as it happened again and again.

Resurrection. Richter had died, and now Perry was in a world with resurrection, a return from the dead, the only thing he needed to do was to learn this skill, to master it, and then somehow return to her. He had not, until that point, considered that her death might be reversed, that there was anything like a glimmer of hope, but he saw men shaking off rigor mortis and clutching at the places where swords had once pierced them.

He’d asked questions, too many of them for the tastes of the medics, and the knight in green had pulled him to one side.

“You have little experience on the battlefield, for all your magic,” the knight said. Perry would later learn his name was Aralyn. “You battle like you have something to prove, but for all your magic, you misunderstand the healers. They are not wizards. They do not do the impossible.”

“Those injuries were enough to kill,” said Perry. “Those men were dead.” He was practically vibrating with the need to learn how to do what they had done.

“It is a simple reversal,” said Aralyn. “And it does not work many times. You see that the dead stack up, do you not?”

Perry had seen, but not fully grasped it. A third of the bodies were being placed reverently upon white linens, swaddled and stacked. He had thought that they would be taken somewhere else, to the equivalent of a major hospital instead of this field clinic, but apparently this was the end for them, magic no longer an option.

“What makes the difference?” he asked. He was thinking of Richter, of course, who had been dead for two weeks by this point.

“It’s difficult to know the ways of healers,” said Aralyn. “Time does no favors, and the head must be protected, but a wise healer makes no guarantees. We do not question their failures, only praise them for what they accomplish.”

Perry had watched more than questioned, at least until dinner that night. He hadn’t noticed how men were armored before, the way their heads were more protected than the rest of them, some of those without so much as a breastplate still with a helm. He didn’t fully understand the custom here though, the way that they treated falling in battle as death, rather than a temporary problem that would be solved by the healers later on, more often than not.

In the dining tent that night, as he ate from a wooden bowl, he asked a question that had seemed obvious to him.

“We left the battlefield, to allow them their dead,” said Perry. “They’ll raise their own?”

“They will,” nodded Aralyn, who’d attached himself to Perry. Perry was the man of the hour, in many ways, and had been thanked and congratulated by a number of men, some of them back from the dead.

“Is there a reason you don’t have a squire go around to stab the corpses though their eye sockets?” asked Perry.

Aralyn’s face fell, then he pulled a dagger from his hip. “You fight beside us then dare to impugn our honor?”

Perry had been so stunned that he backpedaled, hard, not even bothering to try to explain himself. It was one of only a few times that happened in Seraphinus, but that was because he’d learned to keep his mouth shut about certain things, and to phrase what he said carefully. It had been a bit exhausting at times, especially given the rather regressive social mores and the expectation that he should know the things that a knight was supposed to do.

Allowing the resurrection of the enemy made little sense to Perry. They were at war, trying to kill each other. He might have understood, if it had been a matter of a signed treaty about the rules of war, or a game theory argument, or something. If someone had only said ‘we allow them to remove their dead after a battle so that they will allow us to remove ours’ he would have found that perfectly reasonable … but this wasn’t the way they ever framed things, it was a question of honor and following codes without any real consideration of the place of honor and codes in the framework of winning a war. To them, honor was as important as winning, maybe even more so. There would be a fight, both sides would revive perhaps half their dead, and then they would fight again, until eventually so many had died that either capitulation or eradication took place. The matter of 'honor' meant the war would be prolonged, and in the meantime, the orcs engaged in slavery and the people who'd farmed the fields in places like Arger's Field were slaughtered, their homes burned, and the armies, which marched on their stomachs, ate through the supplies that had been set aside for winter.

Following that, and the damage to his burgeoning friendship with Aralyn — who had taken a week to get over the implied insult — Perry had fought with resurrection in mind, aiming for the head where he could, delivering an extra blow once the enemy was already down, behaving within the bounds of their version of honor while others were watching. He believed in the righteousness of the war against the orcs and their allies, had seen the slaves the orcs kept, the villages the orcs burned, the grainhouses they robbed, and to his mind, honor was wiping the enemy out as swiftly and efficiently as possible.

He was thinking of Richter, of course, imagining every enemy as Mordant. He might have said that it made it easier to kill, but he found he had little problems with killing.