VI: The Noble Departed

"No, what I'd like to know is where the fuck these people went after the fucking house was burning the fuck down."

"Easy. You want her to hear you talking like that?"

"She's fucking used to me talking like that. Jesus, Hartia, watch it."

With the lamp wick turned up so high, the glass chimney was already frosted black inside with a climbing film of soot. Hartia half-squinted in the bright amber light, pinching the skin between his scrubbed-clean fingers. He hooked the needle through the angry, red edges of the wound and pulled the waxy thread taut, pressing out more blood.

"Uh, swab," he instructed, and Cleo daubed the gathering blood away with a bandage scrap from the medicine kit, muslin soaked in grain-alcohol from the bar. She kept her eyes on the wound with a fixed kind of determination, pushing herself to do anything but sit at the table and stare at the floor. If Orphen knew her at all, and sometimes he liked to think he did, she was purposefully building herself a distraction. She hated being thought of as useless. He'd heard different versions of that protest leave her mouth a hundred times, so when she'd shown up somewhere around the fifth or sixth suture with a cloth, what with all of Hartia's complaining that all the bleeding was making it impossible to see, he hadn't protested her involvement as much as he felt he should under the circumstances. At least it had gotten her up from the table where she'd been collapsed, unmoving and silent since they'd come in, incapable of coherent speech much less in possession of the answers to anyone's questions.

What's funny was, well maybe not funny, like ha-ha funny, but ironic, was that so often in the past he'd just wanted her to shut her mouth and now, while she sat there silently, there was a growing desire just to hear her say anything at all. But the continuing pain was doing a lot of his talking for him, which hadn't included any of those thoughts.

"Fuck," he breathed. The little curved needle pulled shut another millimeter of his cut flesh. Something about pain on top of other pain. It rarely meshed into a single sensation. Each component: his pulsating head, the rift sliced into his shoulder, each piercing of his flesh with that tiny needle and the thread dragging through, then the searing sting of the alcohol in the wound; they each had their own life, each an independent and functioning piece of a conglomerated monster. He'd refused the hit of opium tincture beforehand and might have been regretting it just a little. Who knew why he'd said no. Truthfully, any kind of opium put him down for the count, and being out of commission wasn't an option yet. Or maybe the pain was his own kind of distraction. He'd been accused of being a sick person more than once in his life but it was true. The pain was enough that he hadn't thought much about what they were facing, what had really happened to Mariabella and most of all, he hadn't given much thought to how he really felt about any of it.

He'd have to sort it out later. Right now, feeling any particular way about it was a luxury he didn't have energy or time for.

With careful, measured pressure but a kind of tense rigidity, a small hand blotted the black stitched seam tracking over his shoulder after another few stitches. The fingers were cold. They were wearing a diamond. He didn't look at them. Another careful suture stole his attention back, and Hartia said something that he only heard three-quarters of over the internal echo of his swallowed howl.

"Say again?"

"I said, despite your objections, I bet you wouldn't mind the doctor being here right about now to take over for me." He tugged another loop shut, and Cleo stiffly dabbed up the mess. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was recalling that something Cleo couldn't stand almost more than feeling useless and burdensome was the sight of blood. It seemed she particularly hated the sight of his, for one reason or another, yet here she was, cleaning it up while she was covered with it.

"Right now, I am cataloging methods of your impending torture in my reptilian brain. There's no room for anything else."

"My point exactly."

"You don't make to make such goddamn small stitches either, asshole."

"It's probably better that I do if your original mending invocation is any marker of how long this might take to heal on its own."

"Let's leave my invocation out of this. It's not going to have to," he reclined his head on the sofa's backrest, closed his eyes woozily. "This would hardly be an appropriate treatment if it was. Why don't you just stop talking and get it over with?"

"If that's what you want." Pulled up close in his chair, Hartia stabbed through a few more times and drew the waxy string taut, his face tight with intense concentration the whole time. "Still," he said lightly, after a few moments, "I just can't understand what these people are thinking. Half the city's out there burning. What does it accomplish?"

Orphen's gave a disgusted grimace, a particularly biting tug of the thread made his voice come out rough. "A feeling of control, I guess."

Focused intently, Hartia just shook his head a fraction from side to side. The silence off to his left gave a ragged exhale, fighting a wave of emotion. It was all he could do not to turn toward the sound.

"Master?" His senses were definitely off. He hadn't even heard Majic's heavy footed cow-walk, and almost jumped at the unexpected sound of his voice. He was already a bit on the edgy side.

"Yeah."

Hesitation followed, then quietly, he replied, conspicuously apprehensive about his news. "There's some men outside."

"Of course there is." The quiet figure to his left seemed to straighten a little, the rustle of the beads and stiff underskirts distracted him a moment before he continued. "Think it can wait until I'm not bleeding to death?"

"I don't know. They're…asking for you."

That opened his eyes. The bright image of his apprentice leaning apprehensively over him wavered slightly like a reflection in water, which wasn't a great sign where his health was concerned. "Who, exactly, are they asking for?"

It seemed like a fair question. The answer wasn't exactly what he was hoping to hear: Majic stumbling with a word he knew he didn't want to hear out of anybody's mouth, much less his apprentice's. "K…Kryl…"

He focused on the kid's anxious face, Majic's eyes were inevitably drawn to Hartia's messy project before coming back up, waiting for instructions while Orphen inhaled slowly, thinking. "You seen them before?"

Majic shook his head in slow motion, almost nervously, which really could mean anything. Before he could ask anything else, he volunteered a helpful observation, "They look unhappy."

Well, excellent. And maybe, if he went outside, a meteor would fall out of the sky and crush him. That was the kind of day it had been, after all, at least since he'd gotten into town. It had been fairly uneventful in the morning, waking up in the camp in Bazilkok. Stupidly, he'd almost been looking forward to today.

If only he'd known what he'd really had to look forward to.

Lightheaded, Orphen glanced down the mess of his own torso at Hartia, who was looking up at Majic with the same expression he would probably be making if he'd had the energy. A kind of wary, frozen disbelief. He turned that look on him. "The hell?"

"You almost finished there?"

"Eh…about ten more would get it shut..." Hartia didn't quite look certain, looking thin and sallow in his undershirt, wrist deep in sticky red.

"Right, so…come on."

"No. No. You're not going out there. I don't know for sure how much blood you've lost here, might be a couple pints. You didn't have enough power to get that healing charm to work for more than five minutes before it pissed out, much less to go out there and get into trouble. Look at you, you wouldn't make it to the door."

"Well, then you go out there and tell them I can't come outside and play, yeah?"

"You think I won't."

He watched Hartia standing up, then breezed out a kind of dizzy laugh. "No, you sure look like you're about to, but I'd rethink it. You're a shitty liar."

"Well, then I guess I'll have to tell them the truth that you're in here bleeding and pale like a little bitch." With one corner of his mouth tightened up in an annoyed scowl while he slid past him, toweling his hands and pausing by Cleo with a gentle nudge on her arm with the clean part of his wrist. "Maybe you could hold that thing shut for me a minute?"

There was a slight delay before she nodded vaguely, her eyes still faraway and gleaming wet, focused on the stitched line before she pressed the blood spotted cloth to it with her palm flat, her cold fingers curled over onto his back while Orphen craned his head around after Hartia and called after him. "Ah ha HA. Funny."

After a moment, he got to hear that voice he'd been yearning for, only for it to be so hushed and abraded he could barely recognize it. "You…do look pale."

"Yeah, well," he said, glancing over, tamping down another cough. "Don't worry about it."

It should have been like clockwork. She should have glared, told him that she wasn't worried about it in the most blasé, superior tone she could muster up. Instead a crease appeared on her forehead, her lips tightened against themselves a moment before everything smoothed back out. And she said nothing, until tearfully, she gushed another apology. "I'm so sorry."

He shook his head, rocked it back and forth just slightly on the backrest of the small, worn loveseat. "I already said, don't be."

"I can't," she said, so soft he had to strain to hear. "You…you came to help me. And I…God. I. I would never have…"

"I know that, cut it out."

"You went into a burning building," she rasped, her eyes still trained hard on the still-bleeding rent she'd left in him in her stricken fear, like a cornered animal lashing out on survival instinct. "You didn't have to, but you went into a burning building to help me and this is what I do to you."

"Stop. It's fine. I'm fine. Don't work yourself up any more about it; we have more important things to be concerned about." He shifted on the worn cushions, forgetting a moment that moving any muscle seemed to make the wound pulsate with new, gut-twisting pain. "Not the least of which being what we're going to do. I don't know if you've given it much thought, you know, if you want to wait for the authorities…file a report. Anything like that. It might take a few days around here…honestly, I'm not sure it's safe to stay."

"I would have burned to death." She hadn't heard a word. Instead of hysterical, her voice had taken on an empty, sepulchral quality that he didn't like at all. He started to reply, but she looked up from the wound, her eyes on his, and he forgot what he was going to say next.

"If you hadn't come," she whispered, tears shredding her tone to a wavering mess. "I would have burned in there."

Whatever was the right thing to say, he had no idea. He'd lost a lot of blood in the past hour and his judgment wasn't stellar, but then, it never had been when it came to the right things to say, much less the right things to say to Cleo. He couldn't bring up Mariabella. Not even express sympathy, not with that tired anguish still written on her face. But he had to say something. "Wish I'd known to come sooner…"

She had a strange reaction to it, and immediately he wished he hadn't said anything after all. It made her face pinch again, all the muscles in it tightened for a moment while she bowed forward with her bare shoulders going round while her head dropped, overcome again with her half-swallowed tears.

"But you're…not hurt. Right?" He dropped his voice a little, leaning further forward, enough to see her face. "Right?"

Sniffing, she nodded. Her free hand lifted up, catching soft and cold against his cheek. He was wondering what to think about that when she inclined toward him, and touched her lips against his the way he'd thought of doing maybe a thousand times before but never had.

It was just for a second, if that. Just a moment's gentle pull of damp suction against his bottom lip before she was someplace else, her forehead dropped down on the knuckles of her own hand, the one pushing the compress on the shoulder she'd butchered and breathing her wet, weeping breath down his chest with her whisper chasing up his neck. "Thank you."

And even though it was so innocent, an earnest expression of gratitude when normally it would take a steam train to drag a begrudging thank-you out of her, he didn't even think about that. The blood that was left in his veins felt briefly like champagne, fizzing and bottled up and just for that second, the blackest shadow in his brain shifted knowingly, flexed its muscles and a kind of embarrassment rose up at the fleeting but undeniably carnal effect that had rolled through like a storm front.

No doubt, it wasn't the right thing to feel under the circumstances. Not even remotely, but really, it wasn't a surprise that he didn't know how to act.

Not around anyone who'd just lost everything, much less Cleo. For the first time since knowing her, all he wanted was not to upset her, and opening his mouth to speak was an unexpectedly enormous source of anxiety as virtually every damn second he'd spent around her had been practice in the innumerable ways he could manage to rattle her cage. So instead of speaking, he reached for the limp hand she had dropped her lap, in hopes that could communicate the kind of human empathy that he never could seem to with his useless tongue. Regularly his interactions with her bordered on muted hostility, just out of a kind of prolonged self-preservation strategy; it wasn't easy to just switch it off with that defense mechanism already screaming into the red zone.

If she had anything to say about it, he didn't find out. Hearing Hartia's footsteps shortly afterward drew her attention again and she straightened up, wiping her raw eyes with the back of her hand and watching a thin, freckled arm thrust a clipboard in Orphen's face. "Sign this," he told him.

"What is it, a waiver of injury?" He let out a long, anxious breath that had really very little to do with the visitors, and squinted at the manila slip a moment before Hartia breezed a tired laugh.

"The kid's paranoid, he ran off they second they asked for you. Guess you can't blame him. It's just the telegram service."

"Telegram. Fuck me." He plucked the pen off the clip and squinted at the delivery notice with aggravated interest. "Since when does Stephanie send things to that name?"

"Since you can't send a telegram to someone with no surname, I'd guess. Sign it and they can get the hell out of here."

With a responding scowl, Orphen resentfully scribbled on the line with the fountain pen and shoved the board back at Hartia, who disappeared to the front again while Cleo glanced briefly under the compress with her dreary, downcast eyes and commented almost quiet enough that he didn't hear. "You're left handed."

"Yeah?"

"…never noticed before."

Awkwardly, he had an urge to laugh at that. His natural reaction had been to remind her that she'd likely never had reason to notice such a thing, until he'd had to let go of her hand to sign a receipt. Usually she noticed things only as they applied to her, at her convenience, or so it seemed to him. But he didn't say anything, just watched her warily while she pulled her gaze back up to his face as though it took every muscle in her body to do it.

"Orphen…"

Hartia came back around the corner from the entrance, dropping a thin envelope in his lap and going about swabbing his hands again with the bottle of grain alcohol that waited on the little end table with the hurricane lamp. With a tug of an index finger, the envelope tore open and inside on the parchment, after the station information for Totokanta Harbor South, a single line was typed out. For a long minute, he just stared at it before reading it through again, and again. Afterward, he handed it silently over to Hartia, who did the same with an expression almost bereft of any readable human emotion, then leaned his bare elbows on his knees with the same blank look, craning his copper head up and staring hard at the flame turned up high in the lamp's smutty glass flue. He stared until his pupils had contracted to pinholes, until his squinting against the brightness looked almost like someone looking into the sun. Then he turned to Orphen, who gave a tense shake of his head.

Majic had reappeared, casting his apprehensive gaze at the three of them with a growing din of unrest rattling silent in the air around him like a pair of rustling, invisible wings.

"What does it say?"

It wasn't Majic who voiced the question. Instead, Cleo was leaning forward, her eyes less soft-focus than they had been while they eyed the drooping telegram slip in Hartia's hand. Tentatively, she reached her hand out in an asking gesture, and with only a half-glance at Orphen, as though expecting a permissive nod, extended the paper to the girl, and she flattened it on her lap, the parchment lit bright in the lamplight with its scant line of text:

For none among the living shall disturb the long repose of the noble departed, for they shall breathe time and swallow the night.

She immediately looked up with the same uncertain worry on her face, then turned it on Orphen, as it seemed everybody was wont to do.

"It's rune translation," he said. "We were working on it this morning before I left. It had an unusual set, it didn't translate well...and I didn't have time to…" He puffed out a convulsive, quick exhale that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been so on edge. Instead, he coughed again, still plagued by the sting of the smoke hanging in the air and soaked into his lungs. "She said she'd send it to me if she worked it out. It's from the fresco over the rectory antechamber, the one they opened today…"

Her lips were shaking. She really should have been resting, lying down, maybe with a sedative. Instead here she was pushing a compress on his half-sewn up wound that Hartia still hadn't just tried his sorcerous hand at healing, trembling in the cold in her bloody dress without a blanket or even a shawl. "What…what does…"

"That's from over the rectory? Why…" Hartia rubbed a hand over his face. "…why would that be in a church? What's that even mean?"

"I don't know, it's Nornir. Read a scripture sometime, they're all kind of…you know. Cryptic. You going to finish this fucking thing or not?"

"Easy. It just seems weird is all. And I have read…"

"Can we talk about it later? If you don't mind?"

Hartia was scooting his chair back up, retrieving the needle from where it hung and resuming work a little more quickly than Orphen might have been prepared. He winced at the first stitch, at the needle biting deep in his flesh, swallowing a curse and leaning his head back against a wave of dizzy nausea. He was working fast, working to finish, not giving him the time to recuperate between sutures the way he had before. After another several tortuous tugs of thread sliding through skin and severed intercostal muscle, as though he'd taken the previously offered opiate, the pain shrank suddenly back like an ebbing tide. Hartia was swiping his grain-alcohol soaked cloth across the knotted black line sewn crookedly underlining his right collarbone, and then, without further warning, with his palm flat on the cloth, incanted irritably, "Mend thy flesh."

A flash of tingling heat, a spike of stomach cramping agony with the flesh beginning to knit and pull together all at once and he was breathless, staring at the ceiling with a rapid onset fever and sweat already in his hair despite the cold, unsure how long he'd been slumped there in a burning, dizzy shock. Sometime during his shutdown, under the edge of her spread out skirts, Cleo's frigid hand had closed around his.

By the fire, Majic and Hartia were purposing plans to head north, to get out of Totokanta and return to Alenhaten as had been the original arrangement, at the very least to regroup and make some decisions. Whatever the hell they were going to be, he had no idea, absolutely no clue what to do next. Orphen felt too odd and numb to feel any particular way but exhausted. In a way, how he felt was the same way Cleo looked, anxious and fatigued while she was looking at him as though she thought he might drop dead any second. From the way he felt, she wasn't actually too far off. He wasn't even certain he could stand up, much less ignite even a scrap of paper with the right words and focus.

How could they go anywhere like this? And how could they really leave everything that was happening here behind them?

The telegram was still flattened on Cleo's lap, the line of ink lit up in the high wicked lamplight. The rune translation. Hartia didn't think it belonged in a temple.

He'd read things like that before from the Nornir, their cryptic talk was all over volumes of collected writings, the Book of Granular Light, the Book of Deep Rivers. In catacombs and aqueducts. In tombs. But…not in temples. At the ruined fane at Baltander's Island, the walls had been clean of any writings. Azalie had said at the time that the oldest dragon families had subscribed to the belief that it was blasphemy to speak within earshot of the Gods, that including the written word. Runic displays were not seen in chapels. And there was no way that Stephanie hadn't known that to start with.

Why had she been referring to the ruins as temple grounds? The more he thought of it now, the more strange it was seeming. But none of it had occurred to him until now. While he'd been down there in the dark, poring over bas reliefs of the vaguely human figures of the Nornir, winged and blindfolded in some kind of symbol, transcribing entire walls of text for later translation, arguing about differences in the degraded rune sets, it hadn't struck him once that if the place was what Stephanie had said, none of it should be there.

What had the boy said? The boy he'd pinned to the floor, Levi? Something about the dig in Bazilkok. He couldn't remember what, he'd laughed at the time, even though a few minutes later he'd have liked to reach in and rip out the kid's tongue at its root and watch him struggle against the rising tide of his own blood. The kid knew something had gone on at the Everlasting Manor. He'd known what they were going there to do. He'd probably even known who they were.

He'd already decided back in the mansion that he was going to find who was responsible for what had happened there. And he was going to put them in the ground.

There was that voice in his head again, it sounded like Hideland, last he'd seen him a few years before: Krylancelo, you would never kill anyone. You never could kill anyone.

Well, Orphen could. And had. And would again, it was just a matter of time. He'd resisted it, denied it, told Val Karen that he'd never become the same kind of man he was, only to fall into step with him out of necessity. The ugly world had pulled that monster out of him, and he'd never be able to go back. He could never be Krylancelo again. Not now. Not anymore. It had become clear long ago now that he'd never touch anything with truly clean hands.

But that was probably as it should be. But even still, with a slow twist, he pulled his hand out of Cleo's. Maybe if he hadn't spent so much time in the inn room, staring at the fire and not being upset, he could have had the chance to see what was happening. Maybe if he would have just listened to his intuition that had told him to retrieve her first before coming to the Lodge, not let her persuade him that she could meet them later…maybe things would have been different. At least for her. She had no real reason to thank him.

That she might know the kind of black things creeping around in his brain, that he fully intended on murdering whatever twisted, self-righteous fool had instigated the riot against the Everlasting house; these weren't things she needed to know about him. She needed to know that even less than she needed to know what he'd felt when she'd pressed her mouth against his. Both could be explained easily, traced back to the same crushing shameful unpleasant truth: He was a terrible person.

It wasn't as though she hadn't suspected this on her own probably. But in her own way, Cleo, she was so innocent. Naïve. The same could be said for Majic. Even Hartia, really. They didn't know the half of what it meant to be a horrible human being, likely couldn't even conjure up in their heads the degree of the transgressions on his karma debt. There was a time when he couldn't have either, never even imagined himself capable until he'd stepped over that line, whenever it had been exactly. He had a few theories in that area. There were so many he'd sent to that long sleep of the noble departed, the way that the rune translation said it made it sound different than what it really was. It made death sound like a reward, the way it would on a tomb.

But really. If only murder, even impersonal paid murder, had been the worst misdeed he could confess to. It wasn't.

Someone like him oughtn't to have his hands anywhere near her, even to comfort her. So even though she cast him her sad glance, he withdrew from her hold. If he were deserving of the things he wanted in life, he would have happily continued to indulge in her kind concern and gratitude—but as he'd always known, he wasn't.