Countenance
Mithrigil Galtirglin
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A spectre hovered over his brother's shoulder, and Noah, for a moment, thought it was their father. The cut of his beard, the square shoulders, the dark hollows where its eyes should have been, all of them right out of the twins' childhood. And Noah almost said something about it, but when he found his brother's eyes the apparition was gone.
He knew not what he was saying, but he knew what he meant to say; that Larsa meant peace, meant the prevention of further suffering, meant that past tragedies would not repeat. His lips moved, and the parched words rested on the edge of them, dribbling down his chin like the last juice of a pear. Basch's hand held Noah's fast and Noah wondered why he did not feel the rough skin he saw.
Neither his nor his brother's skin had ever been smooth. The blood-biting winds of Landis' winters, jagged rocks and coarse sand, rough play, all these left familiar rifts and calluses that differentiated them and only they knew. Basch's palms bore pocks from climbing red cliffs, Noah's from burrowing into caverns and gravel. The yellow sheen of a sword-hilt's rake came to both of them later still, but Basch's hands had fewer, deeper cuts than Noah's, blanketed with sandpaper's kiss, like the tongue of a wyrm as opposed to its hide.
Noah watched his brother's fingers wrench and the knuckles whiten, and naught changed. Words came, reassuring words, and these Noah heeded and understood. Acquiescence, acceptance, for Dalmasca and the Empire and for him, he did not say, because Basch ever required aught to protect, the same as Noah did.
Gloves, gloves, of course. His brother's at half, and Noah's full. Not yet the numbness of death, the cold absent needles of still blood and forsaken skin.
And there was the spirit again, the thick black wrinkle round his square face just like their father's beard, and the same admonishing, heavy caliginous drain where the eyes should be. The apparition wept, it seemed, angry and exhausted tears, then turned away.
Noah's vision began to cloud at the edges and he saw again Basch's knuckles, closing over his own. He yearned to feel that skin again, that part of not-himself one last time. And it would be the last, and Noah apologized, and sank into the cot, and the quills of cold crept up his neck like spiders caked with sand.
"He will bear it well," someone intoned, like a mage chanting a door open. The voice was deep and sallow, encumbered, sinking under Noah's ears. It was not his brother.
The apparition turned toward Noah, his black eyes somehow solidifying into a reproachful glare. A twinge of offense skittered over Noah's temple but was gone.
"Perhaps we went about it incorrectly," it added, and hung its spectral head. The spirit wore mail, the thick kross chipped with a dramatic gash at the left shoulder, bleeding darkness like his eyes, and its left hand was a hanging stump with tendrils of the same.
"You are Captain Azelas," Noah said, and somehow it did not pain him. When the spirit made no reply, a sullen laugh rattled in Noah's throat and quirked at the corner of his lips. "My liege spoke highly of you."
"The Emperor?"
"Not yet," Noah clarified.
"I see."
"Surely you're not here on my account," Noah stated, tossing his head and wondering why the gesture felt so forceful, so unnecessary.
"Nay," Azelas answered, still trained more on the floor, not quite as if in respect. He moved a bit like Basch, Noah noticed, and also like their father. "I have been here. I died during the fall, I suppose, but in a way I was not there."
Noah nodded, and regarded the spirit again, and then his own countenance, by way of the back of Basch's left shoulder. Noah could hear his brother's shirts crumple inward and against his sides, and Basch hunched over with only one quick shiver betraying him. A thick sigh echoed across the hangar and struck Noah—perhaps it had been his own death-rattle, there on the bed. Basch's hands wrapped around Noah's glove and again, the knuckles went white.
Finally glancing down at his own hands, Noah noticed they were black, like Azelas' leaking eyes and shoulder. Forever gloved, he surmised, where his last wounds were, burns from striking back at his master. Gashes from his brother's axe and the Princess' sword, the shard-ridden spray of a gunshot in his hip, these were half-healed and misted over. Did he still have a face, he wondered, or the ghost of a helmet?
"It is done," Noah realized.
Azelas corrected him. "No. You yet live. It will be another hour."
"Was it so for you?"
"He could not let his last blow kill me. You meant more to him than I."
"Did I."
Azelas finally raised his face and turned to Noah, his ephemeral armor straining as his shoulders raised in a shrug. "This I doubt not."
"I suppose I ought not doubt it either, then." Noah felt his eyebrows raise. Perhaps he yet had a face.
Azelas did not answer, and turned his baleful, empty gaze on Basch. Still bowed over the cot, Basch blocked out Noah's view of his own body. Azelas strode toward Basch, his mail silent as if oiled, and reached for Basch's armored shoulder, but did not rest his hand upon it. The translucent ichor leaking from his severed fingers curled toward the floor like hot breath fogging in frozen air.
"Are you here to offer him counsel?"
"I am here because I do not leave," Azelas answered, "as are you."
"What luck then, not to be ensorcelled by a paling."
"Your barbs will not drive me away."
"I intend no such thing."
"I am here because I do not leave," Azelas repeated, and let his hand fall to his side as he turned toward Noah. "Because he does not leave her side."
"And now he shall," Noah whispered with a considerate nod. "I see."
Azelas was very like their father, Noah saw again, but only in guise; the shame the dark man bore was entirely his own. He straightened his shoulders again, shook off some of his humility as if shocked by dry static, then turned toward the open cabin door.
A long stillness overcame them, thorned with things unsaid. They regarded each other, and Basch, and the Princess' choked and stifled sobbing from the bridge, and at some point Noah realized he was dead.