XIV: Sobriquet
When Hartia came through the door, there was an understandable flood of questions. Not the least of which was how he'd managed to exchange what appeared to be a gravely ill young man for his previous companion, who was suspiciously missing from his company entirely. Infuriatingly, he answered none of these.
Instead, panting from the exertion of distance-translocation, Hartia towed the boy, younger than Majic by a few years at a glance, toward the sofa and deposited him. His pale hands were bound with thin, silky-looking rope, his face covered with a large handkerchief until Hartia pulled it off. He had something looped over his arm that jangled when he walked.
"Alright?"
The boy nodded, red eyed and damp-faced with tears and perspiration. He sat with his bound hands clasped in his lap, wearing a high-collared cloak over an untucked nightshirt and tweed trousers. His arm was wrapped profusely in white muslin bandage, secured around the hand in a tight knot.
Stephanie followed behind them like a ghost, muted by the appearance of the child. Something about children always made her go quiet, her eyes soft. She watched him with a melancholy interest; he was clearly unwell. He bent his head into his shoulder, wracked with a deep, barking cough that left a fine spray of red on his shirt.
Orphen was in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded so tight one was likely to snap off from the exertion, forcing patience through grinding teeth that didn't last more than a few minutes of tense silence. "The fuck is this?"
"Just a minute." Hartia was busy unloading the coil on his forearm, chains encased in loose fabric. Padded restraints. He secured them to the sofa and clicked them on the boy's wrists after undoing the ropes. The boy didn't protest, just watched with his distant stare. He barely looked up.
Impatient, Orphen circled around the sofa, watching him lock up the kid. He was slight framed, round faced with hair the silvery-brown of wet beach sand. Fourteen or fifteen. Familiar. On the edge of his vision, Hartia threw him a nervous glance, wary. Perhaps hoping to stave off the cloudburst of anger he was certainly rational enough to know was inevitable.
"This is Farrior's youngest son. Say 'hey', Grays." The boy rose a shackled hand tentatively while Hartia continued, still winded from the trip. "As you might guess, he's infected. Being treated, obviously, but Farrior wouldn't travel him through the elements. If I didn't bring him this way, he wasn't going to leave Totokanta. So here we are: Grays is safe in front of a fire, I've got a couple vials of the antibody, and Farrior should be here by sometime in the night if they ride straight through. Should be a little faster in a coach, in any case."
Orphen shifted. Grays. Of course he was familiar, he'd heard the boy's testy conversation with Cleo on the balcony above the rose garden the day he'd come back, when all of this had started. He'd been haughty and superior back then, spitting out more than one blueblood phrase that had made his flesh twitch. From the look of things, he'd fallen pretty far off his high horse to be sitting here sweating, chained and coughing blood on Stephanie's sofa. It was a thought that might have inspired a sort of smug satisfaction in him previously, but today there was nothing but annoyance with the continued lack of explanation and apology. With his back to the fire, Orphen eyed Hartia with palpable resentment while the boy watched surreptitiously through a fringe of lowered eyelashes.
"And Cleo?" Behind them, Stephanie finally remembered her voice, stepping over her own mess of nested books and dogeared reports on the floor in front of the hearth to improve her vantage point while she continued with her tiresome hand-wringing. "She's with the doctor?"
Hartia nodded, wiping his hands on the handkerchief he'd covered the boy's face with for the journey. Maybe keeping the cold off of him. "The doctor suggests if we could get into the University Hospital, there would be better equipment to work with when he gets here."
"I don't know how we'd manage that," she told him. "Things being what they are, I can assure you the gates are on absolute lockdown. Even if they weren't…"
"We'll go. Me and Krylancelo. We can move around pretty easily, long as it's still daylight its less dangerous." As he was removing his cloak, the rusty mess on the front of his gray sweater was too distracting for Orphen to continue listening, even though it had come from Tim and he'd already seen it. Something about it set his teeth on edge more than they already were.
"Less dangerous?" he intoned severely. "You saying that with a mess of blood on your shirt doesn't exactly inspire confidence, what with you volunteering me and all."
Hartia cast that same, troubled look at him with a sheen of sweat catching the light on his face and the pinch between his brows. Then he said, "You won't go?"
"Not sure I understand the point of it."
"The equipment, Krylancelo. We don't have anything proper here to treat Tim or Grays. Nothing's sterilized. We've barely got enough bandages, let alone needles. Farrior's headed up here just as much for the chance to treat his son as to help Tim. Part of the bargain is doing what we can do get into that Hospital, it's a fair trade."
Orphen grimaced, said nothing. Stephanie went about kneeling beside the sofa and offering to bring the boy some honeyed tea, which he softly accepted. She'd barely disappeared through the swinging kitchen door before Hartia had turned that hard glance back on the glowering shadow by the fire. "Where's Bagup?"
"Resting."
"Majic?"
"Watching him."
"Good," Hartia flicked a glance toward Grays, sitting in edgy silence with the fireshadows throwing his facial features into high relief. He shook and tightened his face, on the verge of obvious tears. "Before we…you mind if we talk upstairs?"
Something squirmed in Orphen's mind, perhaps just the dreamed up image of Hartia standing in the bright bedroom doorway. His guts shifted at the memory, however vague it was already becoming with the passage of the hours since he'd woken. With a noncommittal nod, he wove a hand casually forward then followed him up to the empty guest quarters, leaving the boy behind. He'd barely closed the door behind them before Hartia's hard-earned collected demeanor had entirely evaporated, replaced instead by tangible apprehension that filled the room like suffocating hot air. He folded his arms and unfolded them twice in a matter of thirty seconds while Orphen watched him with a growing sense of urgent dread, the same chill that had been stirring in his bone marrow since he'd come through the door with the stranger.
He was going to tell him something bad. He hadn't wanted Stephanie to hear it, or Majic. He'd offered no explanation for Cleo's absence other than a nod at Stephanie's prompt. Is she with the doctor?
There was an invisible rope tightening around his throat while he watched Hartia struggle to even look at him.
Something had happened.
Something had happened to her. To Cleo. And he was starting to grind his teeth waiting for him to say it.
When he was a heartbeat away from an explosive invective, Hartia finally got out an almost timid demand, "Let me look at your wound."
"…What?"
"Your wound. Your shoulder. I need to take a look at it. L-listen. Cleo wasn't sure I should—"
"She's alright?" He interrupted shortly. All this showboating and lip-biting and looking at the floor, and she was fine?
"Yeah, she's…I mean, it wasn't easy there for her. You knew it wouldn't be, but, she…Yeah, she's okay. She's coming up with Farrior so I could take the kid. Damn long distances. Feel like I ran a marathon, going so far with a passenger."
"So she wasn't sure you should what?"
Just like that, the anxiety returned to Hartia's face. "Wasn't sure about anything really. But…the boy down there, Grays. He…"
"Jesus, you're starting to stammer like Majic."
"He wasn't bitten," Hartia snapped, then recoiled. "He sliced himself, fighting off infected with a cutlass. The blade was wet with their blood…"
Orphen said nothing.
"Krylancelo. Your wound."
Orphen said nothing.
"What else had she been using that knife for? The one she attacked you with?"
Orphen, any trace of expression erased from his features, said nothing. Hartia, his voice catching on the way out of his throat, smothering a wet sound before nearly pleading.
"Let me look at it."
"She didn't think you should tell me?" The voice that came out of him, standing stiffly, was almost funereal.
"She…didn't know what she wanted. She heard the story about Grays and went white. Just, totally white. When she told me—when she could get it out—she didn't want to upset you, you know, if it wasn't true. But. Wuh…we have to know. She'll understand why…" He took a step forward, gesturing with open hands for him to allow the inspection.
Orphen gracelessly reached for the hem of his shirt with hands that had taken to vibrating with sudden adrenaline. He wrestled out the shirt, standing still and letting Hartia untie the swath of bandage alternately crossing over his chest and wrapping the joint of the shoulder in the gray late afternoon light that slanted through the open shutters. He watched him roll the blood spotted gauze into a lump in his hand, slowly revealing the underlayers and then skin, the angry red edges of the massive, hastily stitched groove, the waxy black thread and the dark, bruise colored mass stretching out under the flesh, an ugly network like thick black spiderwebs that made Hartia choke aloud when he saw them. He turned away to cover his face while Orphen sunk down slowly to sit in the desk chair, watching his own shirtless reflection in the mirror over the rosewood bureau across the room.
It stared blankly at him, waiting for a reaction. But nothing happened.
He waited. Waited for that reflection to scream. To throw something or break the mirror. To dissolve into pathetic, self-obsessed tears. To shake or yell or deny everything. To feel sorrow or boiling fury.
Instead, it just stared at him, apparently waiting for the same thing. Slowly, methodically, he turned in the chair and shifted around the parchments he'd left there, swept them to the side. He folded his arms and dropped his head on them, breathing slow. He closed his eyes.
So this was what it was like. So this was how he would go. The world was losing its mind, consumed by a crawl of eldritch horror that ate flesh. Cities were burning to the ground, any semblance of society falling so quickly to primal instincts and survival morality. Most sorcerers went in a blaze of fire, explosive and glorious; they died in battle, in wars. And he was going to rot quietly away because of an infected cut he'd gotten for caring too goddamned much about someone he knew all along that he shouldn't.
Like everything else in his life, it seemed like the biggest joke in the world. He somehow never failed to do these kinds of things to himself, and he couldn't even feel a thing about it except a little dizzy, and even that was probably because he was dying. He'd been dying for hours, just thinking he was exhausted. Thinking it was the fever from the assisted healing, the cough from the smoke, all his weakness and lack of clarity to be blamed on a loss of blood and stress. Then the dream. He'd vomited until the basin was streaked with blood.
Over his shoulder, his old friend was sniffing, fighting tears and losing. For long minutes, it was all he could hear. He focused on it. It was better than the cold landscape of his own thoughts, his absolute lack of feeling that felt, somehow, no less intense than a breath-stealing, white-knuckled rage. It left his head ringing, trembling from a sudden recognition of the cold. And maybe fear. Of course fear.
"I have some of the antibody," Hartia finally snuffled, reaching to dig through the satchel he'd brought in with him. "It's full-strength, this stuff. Potent. The doctor gave me some instructions on administration and it's already been so long that...we can't wait for Farrior to get here…"
"No."
Slow and mechanical, his eyes rimmed red even in the dull gray light, Hartia brought up his head. Short of tilting it like a dog, he couldn't have looked more nonplussed. Indeed, Orphen had surprised himself by even being able to speak with his tongue and internal organs all feeling like they'd turned to stone. "What do you mean no?"
"No," he repeated tensely, barely recognizing his own voice. "I mean no. Treatment. It won't do any good now, you'll just waste it. You know it, don't you remember? All those people at the Tavern. They all had the same story. It has to start right away, or it's no good at all. Otherwise…"
He couldn't say it. That otherwise, he was already on his way to becoming one of those things. A revenant. His hourglass was already turned over, sand had been running since the moment Cleo had plunged that knife into him, horrified and blind. By the time she'd realized her mistake, thrown her arms around him, he was already as good as dead. He thought of the body beside Mariabella's, the leering undead with the flat holes sunk between his shoulderblades, the holes ringed with a spill of blood that hadn't been enough to think he'd been stabbed to death. But that was before he'd known they didn't actively bleed, that they weren't alive.
Was he alive? He was almost afraid to even check. He felt alive, but was certain that meant very little now.
Hartia glowered suddenly. "Why are you so goddamned calm?" He nearly shouted, his voice gummed up in his throat.
Orphen, with his head still down on his folded arms, opened his eyes. The parchment on the desktop was a blur of ink, too close to focus. He didn't know why, but he suspected the painkiller might still have been sedating him. Perhaps it was as simple as that. Or it wasn't.
"If I go out there…" he said, the words heavy falling out of his mouth, clacking to the floor like wooden blocks. He didn't even know what he was going to say before it came out. "Like you told Stephanie, toward the hospital…"
"It can't have progressed so far yet," Hartia told him, ignoring his dull protest. "There's still time—"
Orphen planted his hands on the desktop and pushed up, gesturing to his blackening shoulder, pushing air out through his teeth at the pain when he flexed it. "Couldn't have progressed far? You mean for it to look like this in only a couple days? How much time have I got before I'm chewing up roadkill like a dog? Or one of you? Huh? Who's going to put a bullet in my head when that happens? Maybe you'll lock me up like that kid downstairs?" He suddenly shuddered, finally hit with a spasm of some kind of delayed emotion that was hard to unscramble. "I don't want anybody to see me like that. I don't…I don't want to go down like this…"
After a moment, his weight leaned on his hands, braced on the desktop, he dropped his head. He exhaled shakily. It was regret, that strange surge of emotion. Crippling, withering regret.
Why? Of all things. He couldn't feel anger, not even toward Cleo—and she had done this to him. She had done this and…and all he could feel was regret. Numbness and regret. No anger.
Not even toward Cleo. Especially toward Cleo. He wanted to see her.
It was the strangest feeling. The same kind of feeling he'd nursed in the dark of night over the past three months, finding himself thinking of her. Her silky wheat colored hair and pillowy lips, the blue spark in her eye and cruel half-smile she'd get in the middle of smartassing him. Her hands on her lips, chin jutted up at him. Daring him. Daring him to do something but he was never certain on what. Laying in the dark, especially camp nights sleeping in the dig site in Bazilkok, all he'd really wanted was to see her. The way he did now.
Staring down at the desktop, he tremored again. Now emotion was catching up with him. Like air rushing back into a vaccum.
He was going to die, and all he could think of…was her. Like Bagup and Iris in the crashing carriage.
He tried to concentrate on the table through a burning veil gathering in his eyes, gazing dully at the pushed-around sheaf of parchment scraps and pages. His own handwriting came into wavering focus, a scrap he'd spun upside down in his attempt to clear the table top.
The romanized Om readings that he'd fretfully looked up earlier in the codex: Ure. Dnat. Urab. The Hon readings: Hol'gh. Braik. Chattur.
His eyes were frozen on them. Upside down as the paper was, the Hon readings were as nonsensical as ever. And the Om readings, upside down, turned backwards to his eyes, in his own crowded up, left-handed letters.
Baru. Tand. Eru.
Barutanderu.
Hartia was speaking, but the words didn't come through. He was too busy with the old flood of Azalie's voice, her explanations of Nornir and syllable-ending vowels, the language that couldn't be formed by a human tongue, not meant for human ears. It was modified for human enunciation. That and her stories of the arcane, little-heard lore of the immortal changeling, the lich who tricked death into passing him by with his thousand forms and the cursed island ruins rumored to be his reliquary.
He'd been a child practically, unable to grasp entirely what she'd wanted from the place. The thrill of the arcane and forbidden as only Azalie could desire. They'd recovered a sword there, a sword inscribed with pre-norric runes, spelling an obscure name she'd spent a week in the grand library trying unsuccessfully to piece together by running the phrases through Phyrric and picking through endless codices only to come up with a mouthful of unpronounceable gibberish, 216 letters of it. Less than a month later she singlehandedly destroyed her life…and his life…with that sword.
And after that Azalie, like the mythical lich sealed in his living tomb, was ever changing. Like the color of the sea at twilight, always something else.
Looking at the word, unknowingly written by his own hand, his knees gave out. So many years before, when he'd brought the tale of Azalie and the Bloody August to Stephanie, even she had never heard of the legend. The lack of appearances had led her to believe that if such an artifact existed, it was coded in epithets, the way the Nornir were known to disguise words they felt contained too much power, and wished not to invoke. Given a sobriquet.
Kind of like the name 'Orphen'.
"Kryancelo...!"
"Hu…" he wheezed, dizzied and breathless, as though winded by the weight of the long overdue epiphany being forcefully torn from him. "Hartia. Get Steph."
Hartia didn't react. He was standing close by with an uncapped syringe of the gold colored serum, its tip a preposterously long, hollow barreled needle. Trapped against the desk, with his reflexes compromised by a cocktail of chemicals and symptoms, he could barely flinch back before Hartia had lunged and buried it painfully in the bruised muscle surrounding the stitched, necrotic wound and jammed down the plunger with his thumb.
There was an entire torturous world of fire inside of that needle, a churning spout of corrosive, screaming acid that blossomed under his skin into a spreading heatwave of electric, jaw-clenching agony far exceeding anything he had knowledge of possibly existing. Orphen struggled only for the half-moment he still had control of his extremities before he went involuntarily boneless, sliding out of the chair, sucking for air beyond the black tide that was swelling around him, and every thought in his brain shrunk down to a single word before the pain stomped it out like a campfire.
The runic name on the wall in the buried Bazilkok ruin: Baltander.
ooo…ooo…ooo…ooo
To be continued…