A series of short pieces set during the few months between the end of Dark Chambers and the (first) Nehrimese attack.
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The pain is worse at night. And in the rain. And the cold. Any time the weather changes. Entropy wounds are slow to heal, they tell him. Be patient, they tell him. But patience and pain are like oil and water. Eska shifts uncomfortably on the floor, biting back a groan as the ache in his chest and shoulder flares. He had picked a hell of a time to stop drinking; he’d have given just about anything for a bottle of bitter brandy.
Needles shoot down his arm and he stifles a curse. But worse than the pain is the sudden numbness which follows, creeping up from his fingers.
Shit.
He gives up on trying to sleep. Uncurling, he sits up, digging the knuckles of his good hand into his forearm to work some feeling back into it. Sometimes that is enough, other times it spreads all the way to his shoulder until his whole arm is cold and dead.
In the darkness an arm’s length away he hears Tharaêl stir, still asleep but he can just make out the stifled, involuntary twitches of his hands, and the too fast rise and fall of his chest. He does not scream or cry out; the only sounds are the ragged sharpness of his breathing, and a whimper that strangles so far back in his throat it is barely a sound.
“Tharaêl?” Eska reaches for his shoulder. “Tha--”
It’s like touching a tripwire. The blow snaps his head back, knocking him onto the floor. Tharaêl is on top of him before he hits the ground, his dagger pressing into Eska’s throat.
“Tharaêl! It’s me, it’s alright, it--”
Light flares from one of Tharaêl’s hands, stripping the shadows from their faces, and Eska sees him freeze. For a single, unguarded instant his face is naked, the memory of another too similar scene reflected raw and bloody in his eyes.
Tharaêl drops him as though he’d burned his hands. The look on his face retreating behind a snarl. “What the fuck were you doing?”
“You were --” Eska rocks forward, gagging and coughing as blood runs down his throat, “Fuck.” The groan comes out muffled between his hands as he cradles his face. “You were having a nightmare.”
“And you thought, what? Climbing on top of me in the dark would fucking help?” He is on his feet, wiping his dagger on his shirt and jamming it into its sheath. The light has gone out, taking Eska’s dark vision with it, and all he can make out is an angry shadow and the scrape and rattle of the deadbolt.
“I’m --” The latch clicks as the door swings closed and Eska sags, breathing out a sigh.
“--sorry.”
A moment later he hears the hinges to the balcony door creak and then nothing. He sits with his head between his knees, staunching the blood from his nose with a sleeve. At some point he must have slept.
*
He wakes with a start to an open door and a figure standing over him.
“You didn’t bolt the door,” a familiar voice snaps and Eska relaxes, lowering his head back onto his arms with a vague, non-committal grunt.
“If it had been another rh-- If it had been one of them, you’d be dead.”
“Then for once they’d have done both of us a favor.”
“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”
He’s too tired to argue. “Nothing. Forget it.”
The blue light is back and he raises his head, squinting painfully, but before he can make him out, it is gone again, the shadows pressing against his eyes like a blindfold.
The silence stretches into minutes; Tharaêl sits, but doesn’t settle. With his head on his arms, Eska can hear the rustle of each restless, shifting movement. And then, gruffly, a stiff and awkward afterthought, “Are you hurt?”
Eska’s laugh is muffled by his sleeve. “With my thick skull? It’ll take more than that. Even if you do got battering rams for paws.”
There is a snort, but the restive fidgeting stills and the quiet that settles over the room is less tense than before.
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Tharaêl wakes unable to breathe, his throat closing tight around a sound he hasn’t allowed himself to make since he was a child. The air feels sharp and cold against his cheeks and when his breath comes again it hurts.
The nightmare lingers, clinging like cobwebs. He can’t move. It feels like someone’s breath on the back of his neck, the half-remembered paralysis beneath an unwanted touch. And it feels like a weight in his arms, slack-limbed and sodden and still warm.
His hands feel strange: heavy and slick, disconnected from the rest of him; he holds them awkwardly and apart.
There is movement in the dark, a sound -- a voice that doesn’t belong in a tone he cannot parse, and something brushes his hand. The touch feels like skin against skin and not the memory that stains them warm and wet. But still he flinches, his muscles answer him this time, snatching his hand away, a snarl rising in his throat. Pain and revulsion bleeding into two knife sharp syllables.
He moves with the violent urgency of someone who is suffocating. Thrashing to his feet, fumbling with the latch and deadbolt. Each time he opens the door he expects to be met with the heavy, fetid air of the undercity, but there is only the darkened landing of the inn. He moves silently across to the walkway door; he has already memorized the patterns of the nails in the floor that mark where the joists run, he knows where to step so the boards don’t creak.
There is no mistaking the darkness of the walkway for anything but the upper city. There is a particular kind of dark that night brings here, so different from the undercity’s chthonic gloom or the perpetual twilight of the Rhalata compound. It is a temporary state, its transience a palpable texture like the grain in a weave. It is the difference between closing one’s eyes and going blind.
He climbs the scaffolding out onto the roof and there is the sky gaping above him and he can breathe. It is a strange kind of comfort; it makes him feel small and exposed, but it does not make him feel trapped. And there is a vastness to it that defies an imagination moulded by walls and tunnels and closed spaces; he could not have dreamed this and so it must be real. It anchors him, and the world feels a little more solid, the nightmare a little more distant. A little. Like a wave, rolling over him and then receding, he is still soaked with it.
Later on, almost like clockwork, the mercenary joins him, tossing a blanket at his head before settling on the roof a short distance away. There are no questions, no attempts at conversation and eventually Tharaêl stops bracing for them, grudgingly pulling the heavy wool blanket around his shoulders. They pass the night that way, sharing the space and the silence, slipping back to the room only when the first curls of smoke from the chimney signal that the Nomad is beginning to stir.
The screaming is a new and unpleasant surprise. The first time it happens, Tharaêl comes near to skewering him. Lurching out of a fitful half-sleep, weapon in hand before he’s fully conscious, primed to lunge at the first thing that moves. But there is no one in the room save the small, tightly curled figure lying on the floor a few feet away. The screams have stopped, the mercenary whimpers and twitches.
His heart is hammering. He wants to kick him. The way one might kick a piece of furniture stumbled over in the dark. Because it is there. Because it shouldn’t have been. Because it should have been something else. Because it’s exactly where and what it’s always been and every time he jars against it is a reminder that the only thing out of place is himself.
He hates him for that.
He crouches beside the mercenary and shakes him roughly, leaning back as he starts awake. He’s expecting a swipe from a fist, some reflexive violence; he is not expecting the hands which catch hold of his arms, clinging with unearned intimacy, and a voice he’s never heard before.
“Sirius?”
He recoils, jerking himself free and shoving him back. He hears the crack of his head against the floor.
“Who the fuck is Sirius?”
There isn’t an answer, only a soft curse and the scuffling of cloth against wood as the mercenary pushes himself up. He’s glad of the dark, glad he can’t see his face. But he can hear how his breathing changes, strained and tight as though forcing itself past a constriction. There’s no escaping it in the small room.
He cannot shake the nightmare. He sits in the dark with his back against the bed, but he cannot bring himself to trust it. This little parody of a life. The clean, quiet normalcy of it feels wildly absurd.
It doesn’t feel like waking. It feels tenuous and fragile, like a reflection on the surface of a soap bubble. As though by opening his eyes he has done nothing more than draw a curtain across reality. Like a child hiding under a blanket. But the monsters are still there, the reality which he belongs to, pressed against the walls, against the cracks in the door; until he half expects the boards to groan beneath the pressure, the way they do when storm winds blow in off the bay.
The touch is soft, softer even than the voice, piercing the surface tension of the nightmare, and Tharaêl starts violently, flinching away from it in disoriented anger. The alien gentleness of the contact making his skin crawl.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
He rubs his arm as though he can scrub it out, but the warmth lingers on his skin like a stain and he feels hollow and hungry in a way he cannot articulate.
Neither of them can sleep or settle after.
Do you want to spar? It’s a relief when Eska finally breaks the silence.
They’ve had to abandon the empty house in the market after a close call with the guards, but the old myrad loft near the Harbor gate serves just a well, even with the brief detour through the sewers to avoid the gate sentries.
Their lantern hangs on a nail, its light demarcating a faint circle on the dusty floor of the loft. Neither of them has the patience for dancing tonight; it’s messy and aggressive, more grappling than sparring.
Tharaêl throws himself into each bout. He wants without knowing what he wants, only that he is starving. He drives his shoulder into Eska’s chest and slams him into a wall, the impact jarring through him as he pins him with his bodyweight. They break apart and collide again. Eska returns the favor, dropping his shoulder to ram him in the sternum. He feels the force of contact, pain spasming behind his ribs as they both crash onto the boards in a scuffling tangle. There is weight on top of him, knees digging into his chest, pressing him into the floor, and hands grip his arms. There is no softness, no gentleness to them now. Each touch is an act of violence, pain blooming dark on his skin. It makes it easy to imagine that this is what he wants -- the pain, and not what comes just before. He deserves pain and so he is allowed to want it. There is no guilt, no betrayal in wanting that.
It is not quite morning when they return to the inn. Sweat-soaked and shivering in the predawn chill. It is a different cold from the kind Tharaêl is used to. Sharp and fresh. It feels clean. He doesn’t think he will ever get used to that.
On the walkway he hangs back, slipping up to the roof as Eska heads inside to dump the wasters, craving a moment of space between the rough intimacy of sparring and the closeness of the small room. He perches on the wooden shingles, soaking in the cold and the wide open solitude of the sky. The odd, aching hunger is still there, but dull and distant now, no longer eating him from the inside.
In the dream it isn’t Nessah’s face. Not at the end. The blindfold slips and familiar grey eyes gaze back at Eska in reproach and in their reflection he sees himself as Sirius must see him, ghoulish and bloody, the butchered organ warm and heavy in his hands. And he realizes too late -- always too late -- what he has done, just as the light in the cavern goes out and darkness buries him alive.
He wakes choking and gasping, the shadows of their small room pressing themselves over his face like a smothering cloth. In a blind panic he lurches to his knees, fumbling for the piece of flint in his belt. The darkness is the same. The same as the nightmare, the same as the windows of the burned out house in the hills above Ostian, the same as the Nothing. He feels like he is drowning. He feels like he is being swallowed.
“What is it?” Tharaêl is already sitting up.
Eska hears him but he cannot answer. His hands find the lamp and then a blade and there is the crack of flint on steel as sparks spray across the oil-soaked wick. It doesn’t catch. He tries again, frantic and clumsy. Clack, clack, clack. Like the dry rattling of a Lost One. His hands are shaking so badly he can scarcely hold the flint. Scarcely feel it. Other sensations linger in the skin and muscles of his hands like an echo, the stickiness of blood turning cold, the drag of flesh against a blade, the crack of ribs, the weight of a heart.
A faint, blue glow nudges the shadows back as Tharaêl conjures a light, but it isn’t enough, it isn’t real. Eska is fixated on the lamp.
The sparks catch and the wick sputters into flame, its warm, yellow light licking outward over his hands and Eska huddles over it, shuddering with great, gulping breaths as though he were trying to breathe the light rather than air. He curls around it, his face so close that he can feel the brush of heat against his skin. He stays like that for several long moments, the convulsive, heaving gasps gradually calming.
Tharaêl is watching him with an awkward, uncertain intensity. He does not ask about the nightmare, and for once Eska is grateful. He does not want him to know how much that ‘test’ still troubles him.
“Can we -- can we leave it burning?” It is a disgustingly extravagant waste and he hates himself for it, but he can’t bear to go back to the dark. “Just for a little while?”
Tharaêl regards him for a moment, before shrugging and reaching for one of his books. Little chance of either of them getting back to sleep now, and there is no sense in wasting light.
Eska pulls his blanket around his shoulders and curls up once more on the floor beside the lamp, watching the little flame shiver and dance in the draft. Tharaêl sits cross-legged, his back against the chest of drawers, a tight little furrow between his brows. The lamplight makes the tired hollows around his eyes look even deeper.
Eska tries to be still, to be silent, but the question bubbles out of him all the same. Curiosity and need getting the better of him. Tharaêl’s eyes flick upwards and there is a beat of appraising silence before he answers, the words stiff and cautious. “It’s a history of animancy.” His tone can’t seem to settle, jumping between indifference and earnestness. “Talking about a man who tried to measure the weight of souls.”
Eska’s brows quirk together. “How?”
That look again. And the squirming sensation of being read like words on a page. But the gaze shifts, trailing off like a faltering question and there is a sudden awkwardness to the set of his shoulders.
Tharaêl hesitates. “Do -- do you want to know what it says?”
Eska stares at him as though he had offered to reach up and pluck the moon from the sky. “Is that -- is it hard?”
“No.”
His voice sounds different when he is reading. Almost soft. It’s easier when the words belong to someone else.
The quiet drone pushes back the silence like the lamp pushes back the shadows. It is comforting. Like a handclasp in the dark. The reassurance, if only for a moment, that someone else is there.
