A Note from Your Friendly Neighborhood Geist:
Well, kids, here we finally are at Chapter 12, now that Burning Bridges with Doctor Trixie is all wrapped up.
Things you have to thank for this update: Hurricane Sandy, propane lanterns, old notebooks, and Butterscotch Schnapps. I'm from the Jersey shore, and we got humped pretty hard over here. If you've got a minute, go ahead and google images "Seaside Hurricane Sandy" - there's a roller coaster in the ocean six miles from my place. I was really lucky: I couldn't get off my street for two days because there were trees at both ends and flooding on one; my neighbor's tree is leaning up against my shed and our yard is filled with branches, but we didn't sustain any damage. I was without power a week, so even though this has been written, there's been no way to get it to you until my cable came back today. I put it up on my facebook and I'll put it up here: if you come across bins for blankets, coats, canned food, etc for disaster victims, please avail yourselves of them: it's turned awful cold. We've got another Nor'easter headed our way and some people I know have lost everything.
The good news is that without power at home or work, I literally had nothing to do but sit and write (and clean up my property, which was an enormous pain in the butt). Getting back into the swing of writing, so keep an eye out for more sometime soon (or appease my ego and add me to your author watch list so you get told when I put anything up).
Enjoy, make my day with a review, and see you soon!
-Geist
Part 3 – The Shadowed Council
Chapter 12 – White Light
"Master?"
He had turned away from her and she could tell by the shifting of his shoulders that his hands were busy with something. He half-canted his head toward her to indicate she had his attention.
She took a breath and made sure that her voice didn't sound demanding or outraged that he'd dosed her with some unidentified thing. In the infirmary, she'd heard those qualities in a man hysterical with panic and pain when an intern doped him to work on his chest, pierced through by rebar. Doctor Trixie had explained what each shot or pill had been for: she'd said people feel more comfortable when they know what's happening to them. Her master probably didn't know much about making people comfortable. No, instead she composed her voice into the curiosity he found – not pleasant, she was sure – but not unduly pestersome, and queried carefully about what he'd injected into her neck, in exactly the same place he'd touched just a few moments ago. "What was that?"
"Localized anesthetic," he replied shortly; it sounded like she should have known that.
She had no idea what it meant.
He must've understood from her silence. She rather hoped he would explain without her confirming that she was the only person in all of the Imperium that didn't know. The silence grew maybe half a moment too long and then he clarified, "So you don't go mad from the pain." He said it as if going mad from pain was an ordinary occurrence, something that happened every third Tuesday and certainly nothing to be concerned about.
It was, indeed, his casual dismissal of this possible outcome that caused her to query without fear, "Pain, Master?"
He faced her, his whole body turning, and she spotted what he'd been tending. It was a ten-inch long bar of metal with a handle he currently gripped and an oddly-shaped symbol at the free end. Save the charred tip, the last few inches of the rod were an incandescent white, glowing so bright that the walls around her and her sheet seemed a dingy, mottled gray.
She'd seen metal that color a few times when servitors were spot-welding beams on catwalks and the like. Her father had said the metal glowed when it was hot enough to form together. If the poker in his hand was hot enough to melt other metal, what it would do to her skin…
He grasped her chin with one hand as a whimper escaped her and her eyes went wide, tracking the thing's progress toward her. "Stay very still," he instructed dispassionately. She searched his face frantically for a scrap of comfort – or mercy – but found neither. The white-hot tool was so close she could smell the metal. Her breaths came in terrified half-sobs, her pulse hammering in her throat where the needle had struck. It's not happening, she tried to tell herself. He's going to stop and –
Blinding fire was lancing through her and she was drowning, choking for air that didn't swamp her lungs with pain. She thought she may have wet herself. She'd lost control of her body – it was wrenching into a rictus of agony, all emanating from where metal met skin. The implement didn't just lay there. It was digging down, singeing and gouging the tender flesh.
"…divine light to protect me from the darkness…" the whispered words were coming unbidden to her lips as her mind slipped toward blessed, numb unconsciousness.
"Shh, no…" his free hand moved to her cheek again. "Stay with me."
She couldn't disobey. Not when he said something almost sweet softly like that. So she clawed her way back up to reality, where the stink of burning human flesh washed over her and forced out a cough and gag. Then the pain came again. Nothing – nothing – could hurt this much. Her mind shied away from it, trying to deny it, to shut it out, but it was already inside her, festering, spreading…
She opened her mouth: perhaps screaming would alleviate the anguish. But nothing came out. It was trapped in her chest and she couldn't –
"Breathe," he urged so firmly, so gently. He met her eyes, and there was nothing but strength there: strength she could draw in. He dragged her back to the surface. He took slow, deep breaths. Her eyes drank in the flare of his nostrils, the steady rhythm of his chest, the pulse in the hollow just beneath his jaw. It wasn't even a conscious decision to mimic him.
Finally, after a lifetime, he pulled the branding tool back. It felt like it ripped away half the meat of her neck to leave the pipes of her throat exposed. They flexed instinctively.
She screamed then: high, loud, broken. She flinched away from his hand and curled in on herself, her body trembling and wracked with sobs, and nothing in all the Materium was balm enough to soothe her.
It was the most beautiful sound she'd ever heard. The song echoed in her mind, where she'd retreated to escape the pain. So that it wouldn't drive her mad. Now it sounded like the complex, perfect harmony was calling to her, beckoning her, drifting in like the voices were in a hall just outside an open door. She followed because she was at once certain that nothing this perfect, this pure, could be dangerous. It led her to the bay he'd constructed; the place where she could draw power was sealed off, but the port that had been closed in consciousness was now open and blazing with the whitest, warmest light.
That was where the song was coming from.
She lingered at the door, listening, serenely smiling, and with a heart full to bursting took a timid step out. It was too bright to see anything. Now she was just a silent voice, one among untold thousands that joined in a harmony so complex, so completely balanced, that she irrevocably, unswervingly knew that this song and this light were sacred in a way she had no words to express.
She listened for a long time. It healed her and made her whole. She feared making a single sound, loathe to ruin this for even a second, but she couldn't dare remain silent when innumerable tongues swelled the chorus, amplifying and spreading it so that it would reach every corner of the universe. So she sang, the ancient words, the notes, the rhythm coming to her in some act of foresighted, divine providence.
She had no weight now beyond the lending of her voice to cast music and light out into the dark silence of space. She was part of this perfection, this flame, and whatever she'd done, for good or ill or neither at all, was forgotten.
Violet and augmentic red eyes had looked on as she sobbed herself to sleep, the hypno-doctrination taking hold and the words to the Litany of Protection escaping her just as consciousness faded. She repeated them time and again, her whispers stabilizing to the mellowness of her typical timbre after the raw tightness from screaming abated. There was a break in her murmurs – a hesitant silence before she joined the song of the Astronomicon, her little voice lifting, melting away the vestiges of pain and fear that crossed her brow and clenched her jaw.
He inspected the mark closely. The area around it was raw, red, raised – the brand itself was charred black. When it healed it would stand out in stark contrast to the snow of her skin. No one could contest its legitimacy.
With her soft vocalizations still drifting past the usual filter that inhibited sleeping speech, he rolled her into his arms, carrying her limp form to the door. His seneschal opened it and walked with him down the corridor.
"Shall I ready Miss Verda's old room aboard now?"
He nodded in response, continuing toward the suite he'd been assigned earlier, when they landed on Scintilla at the Tricorn Palace. As Michael turned to attend that task, the Lord Inquisitor stopped him with, "Send a churgeon to my rooms first."
The man's eyes lingered at the wound on the girl's neck before he replied, "Of course," and headed off.
In the solitude of his private space, his expression remained inscrutable as ever as he laid his apprentice (who'd curled into his chest as he carried her) on the small bed in the room adjoining his. He smoothed the sweat-dampened hair from her cheeks with a hand bigger than her entire head and covered her with a blanket. Though he stepped back, her tiny, heart-shaped face turned to him, the deep burn on her neck stretching and causing a paroxysm of a frown to cross her brow. He tipped her chin straight forward with a single finger, content in the knowledge that even in her sleep, she sought him out.
It had been two days since he'd Sanctioned and branded her. Two days during which she'd been interrupted or woken hourly as a churgeon changed and redressed the bandage on her neck that was fighting off possible infection. She was fairly certain there was something in the antiseptic cream that accelerated healing because it had by now been demoted from excruciating to agonizing, from agonizing to aching, and now from aching to annoying.
Now every time she shifted her head it felt like her skin was splitting open beneath the bandage and when she didn't move it itched like mad. It was like an alien, foreign… something under the skin of her neck and she wanted to scratch the entire thing out. Of course the first time she'd wriggled her fingers beneath the gauze to dig into the new mark, her Master shot her the glare of a lifetime and bit out an abrupt, "Don't." It had to heal. She knew it. It was just so distracting.
He'd told her that she was being given time to heal, to meditate and reflect on her Sanctioning, her mark, her place in the Imperium, her lifetime of service – to him, and the Throne – which had only just begun. But how could she if the only thing she could think about was alleviating the wretched tingle in her healing flesh?
It was the Seneschal who'd saved her from that conundrum. She'd been observant enough on the Litany of Flame to notice that Seneschal Corrigan had a rapport with every individual he passed (with the exception of her). It wasn't so much that he avoided her or distanced himself; what little he interacted with her had been distantly cordial, and she could have easily presumed he was a man not unlike her father in stiffness of policy were it not for his easy, almost jocular nature with every other soul aboard.
Instead, he had seemed to be waiting for some unspecified signal before he invested any time in cultivating her. Now so much had come to pass in such a short span of days that she couldn't be sure which of the hurdles she'd faced had caused his change of heart. Nevertheless, some few hours after the Lord Inquisitor had enacted his strict no-scratching policy, yet another churgeon came in to check the wound's progress, followed closely by the Seneschal.
"Good afternoon, Seneschal Corrigan," it was the dutifully polite greeting she'd offered (with some slight variation) at their every meeting.
Instead of returning it, as was his wont, he peered over the churgeon's shoulder and shrewdly mentioned, "That looks unpleasant," with the sort of distaste she'd seen on Merica's face when she bit into a sandwich with cheese that had turned.
"Itchy, sir," she corrected, digging her nails into her palms to avoid sinking them into the offending spot.
"Well that," he watched the Churgeon leave, then winked conspiratorially, "you can work around."
"Sir?"
"May I?" he extended one hand toward her neck, she presumed to demonstrate what he meant by 'work around.' At this point she was desperate; when she nodded, his hand connected firmly with the dressing and employed it to rub carefully at the healing flesh beneath.
She bit her lip and smiled with earnest gratitude as the itch abated, "Thank you, Seneschal Corrigan."
"Corr," he corrected absently.
Her brow creased. She had been calling him the same thing for weeks now. "Forgive me, I thought –"
"Just Corr," he specified with another wink of his milky eye.
She'd never been invited to use an adult's nickname and the thought of showing less than the utmost in respect didn't sit well with her. A shy corner of her mouth lifted, "It feels much better now."
"Practice, little one. A lifetime of experience teaches you all the tricks. This works the unguents deeper into the tissue and the abrasion from the bandage won't pull the scab." She wasn't quite sure why he was telling her this, but her searching expression cued him to expand, "You won't get yelled at because it doesn't break the rules."
They shared a grin for a long moment, and Ellie Reiker only then began to suspect that even if her master couldn't be convinced to smile, her life needn't be entirely empty of little happinesses.