The-tyrant-philosophers/Megget
Megget is a Cohort-Inquirer of the Forthright Battalion who serves as duty officer at the conjoined Forthright Battalion / Landwards Battalion camp during the hospital department's period of leave. She appears in a single night-watch scene in House of Open Wounds, where the drunk Cohort-Monitor Tunly of the Landwards Battalion drags the Accessory Masty to her tent on a fabricated charge. Her brief role crystallises the institutional mechanics of the Academy's policing apparatus: the jurisdictional disputes between battalions, the Monitor's contempt for Inquirer authority, and the small, grinding bureaucracy of punishment meted out not for guilt but for institutional convenience. Megget is the gatekeeper who decides what counts as a real offence and what counts as a nuisance to be filed away with six strokes.
Her significance to the series is structural rather than personal. In a novel that foregrounds the machinery of the School of Inquirers and its military arm, Megget's scene dramatises the friction between an Inquirer's duty to adjudicate correctly and a Monitor's desire to exercise petty authority. She overrules Tunly's charge, asserts jurisdictional boundaries, refuses to escalate a false accusation into a theft allegation, and then administers a token flogging purely to placate the drunk Monitor and end the matter. The reader sees, in miniature, how the system that is supposed to investigate truth actually dispenses quiet violence to keep the peace.
Character
Personality
Megget operates with a flat, unbothered precision. She corrects Tunly's jurisdictional error without raising her voice or showing outrage, dismissing him with a single line of profanity delivered "flatly" - the tone of someone who has adjudicated too many petty night-time disputes to feel anything stronger than irritation. - ch 23. She is not cruel toward Masty: she explicitly refuses to write him up as a thief, the more serious charge that would have stuck. - ch 23. Yet she is not sentimental either. She gives him six strokes on a pretext she seems to recognise as absurd, doing so "to satisfy Tunly" rather than because she believes Masty guilty of anything. - ch 23. The effect is of a functionary who has learned that the system requires a punishment to be administered before it will release the accused, and who administers the minimum necessary without pretending the fiction is anything more than a fiction.
Beliefs & Motivations
Megget's reasoning is entirely jurisdictional and procedural. She identifies Masty's battalion affiliation, notes that excursion permits are a Landwards Battalion invention and therefore irrelevant to a Forthright Battalion man in a conjoined camp, and declines to invent a charge that the evidence does not support. - ch 23. She processes the Landwards Battalion's paperwork as part of her watch duties, indicating that she accepts the logistical reality of the conjoined camp even while she holds Landwards officers to the same evidentiary standards as everyone else. - ch 23. Her motivation in the scene is to close the case correctly and get back to her watch: the six strokes are an institutional concession, not a personal judgment. - ch 23.
History
House of Open Wounds
Megget is a Cohort-Inquirer serving as duty officer at the conjoined Forthright Battalion / Landwards Battalion camp. During a night of general celebration and grog ration, a couple of days before the hospital department's leave, the drunk Cohort-Monitor Tunly of the Landwards Battalion stops Masty in the dark, demands papers and an excursion permit, shoves him, and drags him to the duty tent. Megget examines Masty's papers and flatly rebukes Tunly: "You, Tunly. You are the prick," the Inquirer told him flatly. "He's not one of ours." - ch 23. She identifies Masty as a Forthright Battalion man present in a conjoined camp and notes that excursion permits are a Landwards Battalion invention. Though she refuses to write Masty up as a thief, she gives him six strokes "for malingering or something" to satisfy Tunly, and Masty is flogged. - ch 23. Megget's duties at the duty tent also encompass processing the Landwards Battalion camp's paperwork; she is the officer on watch to whom any night-time stop and challenge is brought. - ch 23.
Relationships
- Tunly - A Cohort-Monitor of the Landwards Battalion who attempts to use Megget's duty tent as a tool for harassing a man he finds in the dark. Megget overrules his authority in the adjudication, tells him Masty is "not one of ours," and treats his charge as beneath the seriousness of an Inquirer's docket. - ch 23. She nonetheless gives Tunly the flogging he demanded, in reduced form, to end the confrontation.
- Accessory Masty - Megget processes Masty's papers, identifies his correct battalion, and ultimately flogs him on a pretext. She is not his persecutor in any personal sense; she is the institutional function through which Tunly's grievance must pass, and she uses her discretion to limit the damage while still requiring Masty to bleed six times. - ch 23.
- Landwards Battalion - As duty Inquirer, Megget is responsible for processing the Landwards Battalion camp's paperwork and serving as the officer to whom any night-time stop and challenge is brought. - ch 23. Her relationship to the Landwards is purely administrative, though the Tunly incident illustrates the friction that conjoined operations produce.
Notable Quotes
- "You, Tunly. You are the prick. He's not one of ours." - Megget, House of Open Wounds, ch 23
- "for malingering or something" - Megget's stated pretext for Masty's six strokes, House of Open Wounds, ch 23
Tags
- cohort-inquirer · #officer · #discipline · #military