Wizard Rescue Pavoni 8

[setenaya]

Anat had hoped that the walk back would be easier. But he was appallingly drained by what little he had done today. He had to rest twice on the way back, simply due to exhaustion—and a third time because he had stepped on a bit of debris that someone must have tracked in. The pain he would have dismissed once was enough to make him stagger.

To his horror, Temechi took it seriously. Instead of forcing him on, he eased Anat to the ground and then knelt to check his feet.

There wasn’t even any blood—he was going to be punished for wasting Temechi’s time with his overreaction—

Temechi hissed. “I shouldn’t have made you walk on these. My examination earlier… I thought the injuries older than they are.”

“I can walk,” Anat said. “They’re not…” He couldn’t remember how long ago the captain had done that. Long enough enough that he’d forgotten exactly what the captain had called them punishment for. Recently enough they still hurt, a little. All he clearly remembered was his relief, through the pain, that the captain hadn’t taken the poker to his remaining eye after all. “They’re scars.” Hardly more than that.

“I can see that you can walk. But the more you aggravate these wounds the longer they’ll take to fully heal. Feet heal slowly at the best of times.”

And these times were far from the best. But an astartes ought to have healed faster. What kind of Space Marine had injuries old enough that he’d forgotten their exact origin? What kind of Pavoni—

“Would you have let a patient walk on those feet?”

Of course not: he would’ve healed the injuries as soon as he learned of them.

… But that was when he was a healer.

There was nothing to be done about these injuries, now, but bear with them.

“In the future, please tell me if you’re in pain.” Temechi waited until Anat met his eyes to continue. “We didn’t bring you here to suffer.”

Perhaps he and Sogetai, at least, didn’t enjoy inflicting pain. But that didn’t mean that they would avoid it if it inconvenienced them—if it kept inconveniencing them, after the novelty wore off.

And they were only two White Scars.

“I’m going to carry you the rest of the way,” Temechi said firmly, and Anat bowed his head.

Temechi put himself on Anat’s blind side, slid one arm under his knees, put the other around his shoulders. Alarming, in the moment. But it was the same thing Sogetai had done, before, and this way his remaining eye would face their surrounds, rather than his bearer’s shoulder. Not… not the choice a Space Wolf would have made, if one of them had deigned to carry him anywhere instead of making him crawl.

“I’m going to have to examine you again,” Temechi said. “Me or someone else. I was… clearly too rushed, the first time.”

A choice. A test. “You.”

He couldn’t see Temechi’s face, of course; couldn’t try to divine his reaction from his expression.

“We can use blankets to make a screen, if you’d rather…” Temechi shook his head; Anat knew by the wind of his motion, by the strand of hair that brushed his cheek. “No. This isn’t an ordinary situation. I’ll ask the others to clear a room.”

Anat felt nothing but relief: whatever it entailed, at least this examination wouldn’t happen before all those eyes in the dormitory. At least they wouldn’t see all of him, just yet.

(As if Anat could ever go unseen. This ship must have security cameras; someone would have access to them.)

… But a separate room would be reasonably soundproof. Behind a blanket screen, everyone in the dormitory would be able to hear any noise he made.

“… The room. Please.” That was probably a safe request; it was what Temechi had already made up his mind to do. And if it wasn’t… well, then Anat would know better in the future.

“Of course,” Temechi said, and shifted as if he might have touched him if he’d had a hand free. Anat shivered, and pressed the blind side of his face against Temechi’s shoulder.

He clung to Temechi as they entered the dormitory, braced himself against the raucous jokes he’d become used to. But there were none. No one teased Temechi about breaking him already, or asked if he’d been a good fuck, or called out suggestions for what to do next, or asked when their turn would be.

“He all right?” That voice was familiar, and it took Anat a terrified moment to place it as the White Scar who had come over to talk with Sogetai last night.

“Of course not,” Sogetai snapped from ahead.

“Some trouble with an old wound,” said Temechi. “Jorike, if you want to be helpful, go get Khabash and tell him that we’ll need an exam room.”

Jorike. Another name. And Khabash—that was the other medic Temechi had mentioned last night. Probably another medic, anyway. He wouldn’t have left someone who wasn’t to watch a brother down an arm and reacting badly to drugs, at least, if it had been him in Temechi’s place.

Dangerous to think that way. He wasn’t in Temechi’s place, or even Sogetai’s, and he would not be again.

Not a healer or a warrior or a psyker, but the prize and the plaything of such men.

Temechi set him down on the bed he’d spent the night in, pointedly setting his feet on the covers and not the floor. Anat glanced down at his bundle—it was right where he’d last seen it, probably untouched. Probably.

Before he could pull himself over to check on it, Sogetai dropped down from the top bunk. Anat couldn’t quite keep himself from flinching from the surprise.

“You were out when they were handing these out,” Sogetai said, and handed Anat a dataslate. “Saved one for you.”

Anat fumbled, but at least he didn’t drop it.

How long since he’d held one of these things? The Wolves… the Wolves had used them, of course, though less than most legions. But they hadn’t let him touch anything of theirs, and their dataslates had generally held military information. The punishments would have been… especially harsh.

“Distractions for while we’re cooped up,” Sogetai added, and Anat flinched. But at least he was ready for Sogetai’s hand on his head. He was almost getting used to that form of touch, though it still took him a moment to remember to lean into it rather than holding stock-still.

Better dataslates than him, anyway. And… it would be nice not to be so bored, while he waited. Depending on what they’d put on it.

Sogetai sat down by him, reaching up now to keep petting his hair, and Anat leaned against him as he looked over the dataslate’s contents. Perhaps he should wait—but no. It wasn’t as if anything on it could be his secret, and Sogetai wasn’t trying to keep his attention, either.

Three books in Gothic; more in a language he didn’t know. Korchin, presumably. And—what was this—bright colors, and motion, before he shut it out—

A game. A game, as if he was a child to be patronized, distracted—

(As if he had a right to be angry. If they wanted to distract him, surely that was better. And he dared not not show rage—the Scars had been merciful so far, but their tolerance surely had limits. He must swallow the insult.)

—But no. They wouldn’t bother giving him books in Korchin if that was what they thought of him—or if they did, if they meant that insult, they wouldn’t have given the ones in Gothic.

It must be standard issue. A surprise of sorts, that they gave him their own surplus. But then, they had done the same with his clothing.

Another surprise, then, that they liked that kind of game. None of the legions he’d—had much to do with—would have bothered.

As for Anat, he had three books.

Should he try to make this bounty last? But no; it might be taken away at any moment. Read them all, and then he could savor them a second time, if he had the chance.

(They might not be any good. But here and now, that no longer mattered to Anat.)

He wondered about the ones in Korchin. But the dataslate contained no language-learning resources—no grammar, not even a guide to the script. Well, of course it wouldn’t. It had been stocked for White Scars, and even their Terrans would have learned the language long ago.

He would have to learn to speak that language. He wanted to learn to read it. (For a moment, that impulse felt like his old self, whispering in his ear.)

… He would have to ask for the materials.

The Wolves would have reacted… badly, to that. But they would never have supplied him with long works in their own written language—the runes of Fenris had carried magical significance, or so his brother Uthizzar had said, long ago, when things were different. Sacred significance, even. If they read books for entertainment—and he thought they had preferred audio recordings, recitals, when they wanted entertainment that didn’t bleed and weep—they would write them in the Gothic alphabet, even if the words were in their own language.

And they would never have allowed a witch-slave to debase their sacred letters. They hadn’t even wanted to teach Uthizzar, back when he’d been eager to learn.

(And what had become of Uthizzar, the shy telepath who’d risen to such heights after his disappointing secondment, who’d had nothing good to say about their—cousins—even before any of them knew the depths the Wolves would sink to? Anat found himself hoping that the captain of the Fifth had died with their homeworld.)

No use. No use. Don’t think of those things, those people.

The Scars read books in Korchin; perhaps even wrote them. Given the context, books for entertainment. And Sogetai had seen him checking the files, so it wasn’t merely that they’d been careless. They didn’t mind him seeing them.

They might not go out of their way to give him these things, if he asked. But they probably wouldn’t punish him for asking.

If he asked right—if he asked the right person—maybe they’d be flattered.

He would ask… he would ask when he finished the three books in Gothic. He’d have less to lose, then, if it was a mistake.

He glanced up from the dataslate; Temechi was nowhere to be found.

Which might mean that he was busy arranging for the examination, or that he was busy doing something else entirely. Busy, certainly…

Anat returned to his choice of books.

All fiction, he thought; all by Chogorian women, going by the names. Or pen names. A modern tale of action during the Great Crusade—he winced at that. No. He would read it, but… not yet. The next—a historical novel set perhaps some hundred years before the Great Khan’s rise, though the description focused more on romance than precise historical markers. And the last looked to be a pure flight of fantasy.

That, he thought. He wanted to leave this reality behind.

He settled against Sogetai, half leaning on him, and attempted to lose himself in the story.

He suspected that, had he been familiar with the genre, he would have found the plot rather hackneyed—a nomad hero (albeit one who rode a strange winged lizard rather than a horse) who, rather than contend with his brother for rank and power, set off on a grand adventure and found a threat to the world that only he could answer. But the prose was evocative, the hero endearing enough, and the winged lizards reassuringly un-canine in their mannerisms. (It was possible they resembled horses more than lizards. Anat knew little of either.)

The hero’s first few adventures were what Anat had been hoping for—uncomplicated enemies, friends easily made but also easily left behind, so episodic that he wondered if the story had originally been serialized. Little to engage the heart, but enough to distract the mind.

Then, once the author had found her footing—or perhaps changed publications, or received word that she could continue indefinitely—the story became a bit more serious.

A terrible storm sprung out of nowhere; the hero barely kept himself in the saddle—that sequence was effectively suspenseful, though different from the desert survival stories Anat had once enjoyed. It was no real surprise that he survived, but the author made the details of the white wind and his desperation to keep his string of remounts together compelling. (That language, Anat thought, was certainly taken from horses; it made little sense to call the group of flying lizards a string, though the others tended to follow the hero’s main mount.)

The storm left the young nomad stranded on a small coastal island, unsure of where he was or how to return to his family’s traditional routes. Worse, one of his remounts had been injured landing, and would be unable to fly easily for some time. Anat’s recent experiences had… hardened him to tales of the bond between man and beast, but even so, the sequence in which the hero learned of its injury and began to nurse it back to health was touching.

It made him think not of the wolves or even of the few large animals of Prospero, but of the city cats of Tizca, and the care his people had once taken with them.

Ah, that memory hurt. His own mother… he found himself glad to have outlived her, her and the little brown cat and the big gold one that had lounged all around her house, the ones she’d raised from orphaned kittens. It had been far too soon, and yet…

Sogetai, whose hand had fallen still on his shoulder, started petting his hair again. Anat focused on relaxing against him for a long breath before he turned the next page.

The details weren’t the same, of course, and he tried to amuse himself by speculating which medical details were taken from horses and which were not. Perhaps most were not; behavior was one thing, but a mostly-carnivorous flying lizard surely had a different biology than an herbivorous landbound mammal…

The young nomad made camp around his wounded mount, leaving the male of the string to guard it while he took the other two females ranging—first searching for threats, then for food.

Then, while he took his primary mount to hunt on the isle they were stranded on—he saw a woman, chained to a cliff on the mainland.

Anat hesitated, again, over the chapter’s end, and the illustration—the nomad’s two sky-lizards swooping towards the bound woman.

The outcome would have seemed obvious, once. But now…

Sogetai’s arm settled, possessive, around Anat’s shoulde as the young nomad landed his mount a safe distance away from the crumbling rocks. Anat tried to take comfort that no one else was likely to bother him while he was in Sogetai’s arms, and not to focus too much on the weight and strength of that arm.

The nomad hero made a great show of leaving his bow and spear behind and approached with his hands up, empty. The woman watched him, wary but self-possessed despite the sky-lizards’ presence; the narration spent as much effort on her exotic beauty as on her courage.

He introduced himself to her as Tahai, using a shorter, less formal form of his name than he usually introduced himself with—one that had last been heard from his brother’s lips.

She waited until he had broken her chains to tell him that her name was Zerrina, and he waited until they had flown back to his camp to ask her how she came to be chained there.

Zerrina hesitated, using her thirst to delay. But finally she looked him in the eye and told him that her brother had bound her there himself as a sacrifice to stop the storm. ‘He must think that it worked,’ she said, ‘since the seas and skies have been calm for the two days since then.’

A brother’s betrayal… That was one thing he hadn’t suffered. (He tried to forget that he’d once called the Wolves and the Scars alike his cousins; tried to forget the memory of the captain’s taunts that he had betrayed his brothers, that it was his nature to do so.)

Reading on, Tahai was horrified to a degree that surprised Anat. His people were racked by civil war between close kin—surely this was no worse than that?

But of course, that that must be the reason. Tahai had left everything he knew behind to avoid being set against his own brother, after all.

If Anat had to puzzle out Tahai’s reactions, Zerrina’s wariness made more sense to him—she was at Tahai’s mercy as surely as she once had been at her brother’s. Perhaps even more so, at his island camp, with nowhere to run to nor to hide. No wonder she had hesitated to admit her own kin had wanted to be rid of her. No wonder she remained cautious, doling out even the smallest details hesitantly, while Tahai bubbled over with information about his home, his travels, his animals, their care. The last, at least, she took to well.

Anat hoped he would take as well to the tasks the Scars set him. If indeed they did, besides… besides the obvious.

He had also hoped that Zerrina’s life, at least, would be simpler now. But in the days after, Tahai noticed more trouble—winds out of nowhere, sea suddenly choppy, even the temperature changing. And it happened, nearly always, when Zerrina was upset—when she mentioned her brother, or when she was frustrated in learning some new task.

Tahai began to wonder about the spaces left by her brief account, and Anat felt worry tie a knot in his gut.

Foolish, foolish. Didn’t he have better things to worry about?

Sogetai shifted, turning his face towards Anat, and Anat flinched from his close hot breath. The smell wasn’t like the captain’s—Sogetai hadn’t had alcohol recently, at least—and yet…

“Sorry,” Sogetai said, sounding as if he wasn’t entirely sure what for. He paused. “Should I get you some water?”

Anat nodded, shakily, before he could think better of agreeing to a question phrased like that, as if he had a right to say what Sogetai should do.

But Sogetai was already rising.

And Anat was, for a bare moment, without either of his two protectors.

(So quickly he’d come to think of them that way. Well, soon enough he’d pay them for it.)

With Sogetai there as a shield, he’d allowed his focus to narrow to the book. Now he was abruptly aware of the rest of the room—White Scars sleeping, reading, playing a game whose details he couldn’t make out. One met his gaze, and ostentatiously rolled over in bed.

He wondered what the ones reading thought of Zerrina.

Sogetai was back soon enough—he had only gone to the other end of the room. Anat drank that little cup of water as slowly as he dared, trying to ignore the way Sogetai was looking at him.

“… I can tell you how it ends?” Sogetai finally said.

Anat stared back at him.

Either he’d misjudged Sogetai’s level perceptiveness, or he’d read Anat’s mind. He wouldn’t have expected the latter from a psyker who fought with lightning, but the other legions didn’t specialize as his brothers did—as they once had.

And if he had read his mind—then Anat would have no secrets from him. He’d lived in such terror of the rune priests, and now…

A problem for later. Worry about the book: that was smaller. Easier to encompass.

Sogetai probably considered it a small thing; the price wouldn’t be too high. But the words froze in his throat.

If he asked he would know, and—

Temechi was back, dusting off his hands as if he’d been roped into something or other in between.

“When you’re ready,” he said.

Anat had so focused on the book that it took him a moment to remember—the medical examination. Of course.

He looked between Temechi and the dataslate.

“Go ahead and finish the next chapter,” Temechi said. His hand twitched, as though he’d almost reached out to stroke Anat’s head like Sogetai.

Anat put the dataslate down firmly. “No, I—I’m ready.”

He wasn’t ready for either, not really. But in the moment he was more afraid for the unknown fate of a sorceress who had never existed than of what he knew was going to happen to him.

He could ask later. If Sogetai’s offer was still open.