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Deposited back in his bunk beneath Sogetai’s, Anat ascertained that his dataslate was still there and that the bundle of jewelry was untouched. Someone had made the bed in his absense—probably Sogetai; he hadn’t seen a servant, other than himself, in this hall. The extra blankets were folded at the foot of the bed; he shook them out, wrapped first one and then the next around himself, and then wedged himself into the corner, blind socket to the wall and good eye facing towards danger.
Then—still wary, despite Sogetai’s presence above—he resumed his book.
With the way the clues had been building, Anat expected some kind of confrontation. He expected Tahai to be angry with Zerrina for hiding what she was. The longer he wondered, the worse Anat expected it to be.
But instead, when Zerrina cursed a minor injury and the sea became choppy once more, Tahai gently said, ‘All this for a scrape, but the waters were calm when you were about to die?’
(Why was Anat imagining those words in a voice so much like Temechi’s?)
The wind whipped at their clothes as Tahai bandaged her hand, but when she looked him in the eye again afterwards, the air was still and the sea was smooth as glass. (A metaphor Anat was not sure he liked, as the substance had not otherwise been mentioned.)
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘If I had not kept it calm with my last breath, half the men in the village would have died.’
‘But you owe them nothing!’
‘I owe him nothing,’ she replied. ‘But it was not him out in a boat in that storm, was it? Others would have died—but he would have lived to say he was right about me. ’
That Tahai accepted, and Anat had to put the book down a moment to think.
Once he wouldn’t have been surprised. But for this novel’s hero to take a foreign psyker at her word… He’d expected anything else, at that point.
Sogetai had said she lived—that she lived a long life. With Tahai? Sogetai had implied they had children together—well, all he had said was that they both did.
But she was adrift, now, with no home to return to and only enemies if she remained in territory she knew. She had little choice but to stay with him.
And the author made more of her appearance than any other character’s. It was almost the way a Prosperine writer would have described a Pavoni—if Pavoni had been foreign and strange to them. But the degree of focus was the same.
Well. You learned something of a people from who they cast as hero or villain—perhaps also from who they cast as the hero’s prize.
But more thought had gone into her actions than just that. Mercy: a thing to be wielded as carefully as a weapon. Not a luxury, but the last thing she had left. It was an interesting narrative choice; it might have been subversive, although that might not matter anymore, depending on what had happened between the Chogorians and the rest of the Imperium.
If mercy was a power, or a tool, he certainly didn’t have access to it any more than he had his weapons or his psyker abilities. He hadn’t exactly been in a position to wonder if he owed anything to Imperial civilians, either, after everything—he had had contact only with the captain’s thralls, who had been cruel—had not dared to be anything but cruel.
But then, it wasn’t as if he had any power left to do them good or ill. Anat put that thought aside.
He resumed reading. Tahai truly seemed to have given up his suspicions. He divided his time between tending the injured sky-lizard and teaching Zerrina; she divided hers between those lessons and finding food.
Zerrina learned to ride—and why should that be a surprise? It wasn’t as if Tahai had any other way to take her off the island, and he clearly wasn’t going to leave her behind when he left. (It wasn’t as if Anat could expect to be put on a jetbike. And as he understood it, he was too large for a horse, unless there had been recent innovations.)
Tahai leaned close to strap her into the saddle—a necessity, given the maneuvers the sky-lizards performed on the wing, but one that allowed the author a certain focus on his reactions to her that Anat could not help but over-analyze.
But in the end he stepped away, and she took flight for the first time. Alone, and free.
Anat wanted to lose himself in that moment. But he didn’t dare. His situation was not so secure—neither was Zerrina’s, at that.
He made himself look up after every two pages to scan the room. Zerrina made her first flight; the White Scars murmured in Korchin. She dismounted, rubbing her legs; a stranger laughed, raucous, at the other end of the room. Tahai gave her responsibility for tending the male sky-lizard, which was to be her primary mount; a group of Scars entered the room and another left. A shift change, perhaps.
Temechi came by, briefly, with a pouch that proved to be juice rather than broth—perhaps they did mean to feed him more frequently?—and then vanished once more.
The wounded sky-lizard was nearly well again, and Tahai was scouting on foot for food to take on their next journey when a party of armed men accosted him. Anat was fairly sure who they were even before their leader said they were hunting a witch.
Tahai laughed as he drew his blade. But from above came a shadow, and then a rain of sparks as Zerrina threw the embers of the cook-fire at her brother and his men.
She pulled him up beside her, as he had with her that first day, and they were away—first to their camp, and then, after collecting their few packs and transferring Tahai to his own mount, away from the island.
It had barely even been a fight scene, but Anat realized he’d been riveted—so much that for a whole chapter he’d forgotten to scan the room. Well, Sogetai was still waiting above.
Still, he tucked the dataslate under his pillow and scanned the room again. There was some kind of commotion in the middle of the dormitory, and—
And Jorike was walking right toward him.
Sogetai was at least paying enough attention to drop down from the top bunk when Jorike got close enough. Anat felt a little better with him in between them.
“We’re showing off heads,” said Jorike. “Do you want to come?”
Sogetai turned to look at Anat, expectantly.
“If you’re going…” Anat held out his arms.
He didn’t like the idea of being shown off as another prize. But Sogetai wanted to go, and Anat was loathe to be without both his protectors at once.
Anyway, it wasn’t as if he would mind seeing proof that more Space Wolves were dead.
Sogetai scooped him up, blankets and all, and carried him a few beds over before settling the two of them at one end of a lower bunk. Jorike sat at Sogetai’s other side, the bed’s owner moving to make room for him.
Cautiously, Anat shrugged the outermost blanket higher around his torso. Sogetai made no objection, so he dared to pull it half over his head. That made him turn to look—but all Sogetai did was sling an arm around Anat’s tense shoulders.
He recognized most of the heads, of course. This man the captain had never let have him; this one he had, often, out of favoritism. This one just once, after a difficult battle—he’d made the most of it, which had made for an unpleasant evening, but then there hadn’t been any pleasant ones. For a time, Anat kept himself composed.
But when Sogetai pulled out his own trophy from a sack Jorike handed him—scorched and ugly from the death he’d had—Anat had to suppress a shiver.
“You all right?” asked Jorike.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” Anat blurted out, and then cringed back.
Should he have been so blunt?—speaking of their enemy, yes, but… Was it safe to admit he could still want vengeance? Had Jorike even really meant to address him? He wished he could hide behind Sogetai, but even leaning on him he was too tall.
Sogetai let Jorike re-bag his prize and instead kept rubbing Anat’s shoulder. The repetitive motion reminded Anat again, intensely, of his mother and her cats, and he pressed his face into Sogetai’s shoulder for a moment so no one could misinterpret his grief.
When he got his face under control again he saw that Jorike was still watching him. Anat didn’t think he looked angry, but there was an intentness about his face that worried him.
“You all right?” Jorike repeated.
He was definitely speaking to him. Anat nodded, cautiously.
Jorike paused a moment before turning decisively the other way. “Hey, Dorbei. Take yours out again. Show him that the piece of shit is dead.”
Dorbei was an unfamiliar White Scar, sitting across the aisle and apparently uninjured, with a lumpy sack at his feet. “Which one?”
“Which one do you think?” Sogetai said, with an edge to his voice.
Dorbei actually laughed, and Anat flinched into Sogetai’s arms.
Dorbei muttered something that might have been an apology—Anat wished he knew what status Sogetai held—and pulled a head out of the sack. And then all thoughts were gone, because it was—
It was the captain’s head, slack and empty, bloodless. Almost unrecognizable, without the sneer or the ever-present threat of violence. Utterly powerless, reduced to a prize to be shown off in the White Scars’ dormitory—
Anat realized that he had begun to laugh.
He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t stop. Even when he found himself gasping for air he couldn’t make himself take more than a desperate, shallow breath. He was doubled over; he’d only avoided falling on the floor because of Sogetai’s iron arm around him.
He couldn’t breathe.The captain was dead and now his own body was strangling him in his place, and that hysterical thought only made him laugh harder, only made his rising panic worse—
And then, quite abruptly, it wasn’t a problem anymore. He was laughing as hard as ever, still unable to draw breath—but the feeling of suffocation was gone.
Sogetai was using his powers to give him air—no, to oxygenate his blood, directly, without taking control of his airways.
It was—it was the kind of thing he might have done for a brother, once.
It was terrifying, now, feeling another psyker—a member of another legion—exert his skills on Anat’s body.
He never wanted it to end.
But eventually, of course, he wore himself out. The spasms slowed; he drew breath again—he was almost tempted to hold it in, as if Sogetai would indulge that—and his eyes stung a little as he felt Sogetai’s power withdrawing. (Would he do it again? Surely. Surely if this was reason enough… But it was dangerous to think of manipulating him to do so.)
He focused on breathing regularly, and tried not to think what a scene he’d made of himself, the secret he’d given away so easily and so quickly—that he could still hate his captors, still long for their destruction. If they thought he might harbor such thoughts of them—
Well, if that was the case, they knew. He couldn’t do anything about it. Focus on what he could control: his breath, his balance—
As his awareness of his body returned Anat realized abruptly that he was as good as kneeling, legs folded, torso folded over them, head spilling over the bed.
It was the kind of posture the captain liked to see him in—had liked. The captain was dead, and what he had liked no longer mattered. Would never matter again.
All the same, Anat pushed himself up up with shaky arms. He had to lean on Sogetai, but that was all right. At least he was sitting now; at least his back was straight. At least there was no captain to smack him back down.
Far too many of the circle of White Scars were staring at him now. Sogetai’s second prize, the living one. Did he rate more or less than the rune priest’s battered head, or the captain’s rather better preserved one?
“That was really their captain?” the man next to Dorbei asked. Dorbei shoved him in response, and his companion put up his hands.
Anat nodded without considering if he’d really been the one asked. “I’m trying to forget his name,” he said, a little wild.
(Before, he could have asked Penamun to do that for him. Now he had only his own rebellious mind.)
“That I can’t do for you,” Sogetai said, and Anat felt a jolt of adrenaline.
Well. He had thought Sogetai imperceptive, until he guessed—or rather, did not guess—Anat’s worries about the book. Now he knew for sure.
“Sorry,” Sogetai said, and Anat wondered what for. But either Sogetai was no longer listening, or he didn’t think the question worth answering.
Perhaps he needed to concentrate. That had been the case for many of the Athenaeans, especially the younger ones, though to Penamun it had been as easy as breath and thought.
Anat hoped his thoughts were his own now, and private. He couldn’t count on that, and he should try to control them—but it was impossible not to worry.
Despite Anat’s effort on Sogetai’s behalf, this Dorbei had brought back the better trophy. Did that mean…
Anat leaned close against Sogetai and tried to give the impression of focusing closely on the White Scars’ other trophies. He was glad to see proof that yet more Space Wolves were dead, even if those the White Scars considered most impressive—the higher ranked ones, the captain’s cronies—had mostly been shown already. But his eyes kept straying back to Dorbei.
Dorbei paid him little attention in return. He seemed more interested in dead trophies than live ones. Anat tried to see that as a hopeful sign.
When the White Scars were finally done showing off to each other Anat was worried, for a moment, that Sogetai might have something in mind to finish things off—but instead he just scooped him up again, leaving the runepriest’s head in its bag for Jorike. Anat was so relieved that he impulsively nuzzled at Sogetai’s neck. Sogetai laughed, and Anat wondered if he’d gone too far.
As soon as Sogetai deposited him back on his bed—did he really have a bed of his own here?—Anat tried to pull the blankets back over himself. Unfortunately, they’d grown tangled over the course of the morning. Sogetai had to shake them out for him, leaving Anat momentarily exposed.
When Sogetai had tossed the blankets back to him and he’d covered himself fully once more, he realized that Jorike was still there. Still holding the bag with its lumpy contents; still staring at Anat.
“Err,” he said. “I’ll take this to cold storage, if that’s all right? But tell me if you need anything.” And he was gone, without even waiting for Sogetai to say if he did want the head in cold storage.
Perhaps he was nervous about psykers, and trying to win Sogetai over anyway? Anat shook his head. He didn’t know, and he didn’t know enough about the White Scars to interpret their social dynamics properly.
Sogetai himself returned to the upper bunk—no more demands from that quarter, at least for now. Wedged back in his corner, Anat activated his dataslate and tried to start reading again. But the morning’s excitement had worn at him, and he only managed a couple of pages before drifting off to sleep.
Then—still wary, despite Sogetai’s presence above—he resumed his book.
With the way the clues had been building, Anat expected some kind of confrontation. He expected Tahai to be angry with Zerrina for hiding what she was. The longer he wondered, the worse Anat expected it to be.
But instead, when Zerrina cursed a minor injury and the sea became choppy once more, Tahai gently said, ‘All this for a scrape, but the waters were calm when you were about to die?’
(Why was Anat imagining those words in a voice so much like Temechi’s?)
The wind whipped at their clothes as Tahai bandaged her hand, but when she looked him in the eye again afterwards, the air was still and the sea was smooth as glass. (A metaphor Anat was not sure he liked, as the substance had not otherwise been mentioned.)
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘If I had not kept it calm with my last breath, half the men in the village would have died.’
‘But you owe them nothing!’
‘I owe him nothing,’ she replied. ‘But it was not him out in a boat in that storm, was it? Others would have died—but he would have lived to say he was right about me. ’
That Tahai accepted, and Anat had to put the book down a moment to think.
Once he wouldn’t have been surprised. But for this novel’s hero to take a foreign psyker at her word… He’d expected anything else, at that point.
Sogetai had said she lived—that she lived a long life. With Tahai? Sogetai had implied they had children together—well, all he had said was that they both did.
But she was adrift, now, with no home to return to and only enemies if she remained in territory she knew. She had little choice but to stay with him.
And the author made more of her appearance than any other character’s. It was almost the way a Prosperine writer would have described a Pavoni—if Pavoni had been foreign and strange to them. But the degree of focus was the same.
Well. You learned something of a people from who they cast as hero or villain—perhaps also from who they cast as the hero’s prize.
But more thought had gone into her actions than just that. Mercy: a thing to be wielded as carefully as a weapon. Not a luxury, but the last thing she had left. It was an interesting narrative choice; it might have been subversive, although that might not matter anymore, depending on what had happened between the Chogorians and the rest of the Imperium.
If mercy was a power, or a tool, he certainly didn’t have access to it any more than he had his weapons or his psyker abilities. He hadn’t exactly been in a position to wonder if he owed anything to Imperial civilians, either, after everything—he had had contact only with the captain’s thralls, who had been cruel—had not dared to be anything but cruel.
But then, it wasn’t as if he had any power left to do them good or ill. Anat put that thought aside.
He resumed reading. Tahai truly seemed to have given up his suspicions. He divided his time between tending the injured sky-lizard and teaching Zerrina; she divided hers between those lessons and finding food.
Zerrina learned to ride—and why should that be a surprise? It wasn’t as if Tahai had any other way to take her off the island, and he clearly wasn’t going to leave her behind when he left. (It wasn’t as if Anat could expect to be put on a jetbike. And as he understood it, he was too large for a horse, unless there had been recent innovations.)
Tahai leaned close to strap her into the saddle—a necessity, given the maneuvers the sky-lizards performed on the wing, but one that allowed the author a certain focus on his reactions to her that Anat could not help but over-analyze.
But in the end he stepped away, and she took flight for the first time. Alone, and free.
Anat wanted to lose himself in that moment. But he didn’t dare. His situation was not so secure—neither was Zerrina’s, at that.
He made himself look up after every two pages to scan the room. Zerrina made her first flight; the White Scars murmured in Korchin. She dismounted, rubbing her legs; a stranger laughed, raucous, at the other end of the room. Tahai gave her responsibility for tending the male sky-lizard, which was to be her primary mount; a group of Scars entered the room and another left. A shift change, perhaps.
Temechi came by, briefly, with a pouch that proved to be juice rather than broth—perhaps they did mean to feed him more frequently?—and then vanished once more.
The wounded sky-lizard was nearly well again, and Tahai was scouting on foot for food to take on their next journey when a party of armed men accosted him. Anat was fairly sure who they were even before their leader said they were hunting a witch.
Tahai laughed as he drew his blade. But from above came a shadow, and then a rain of sparks as Zerrina threw the embers of the cook-fire at her brother and his men.
She pulled him up beside her, as he had with her that first day, and they were away—first to their camp, and then, after collecting their few packs and transferring Tahai to his own mount, away from the island.
It had barely even been a fight scene, but Anat realized he’d been riveted—so much that for a whole chapter he’d forgotten to scan the room. Well, Sogetai was still waiting above.
Still, he tucked the dataslate under his pillow and scanned the room again. There was some kind of commotion in the middle of the dormitory, and—
And Jorike was walking right toward him.
Sogetai was at least paying enough attention to drop down from the top bunk when Jorike got close enough. Anat felt a little better with him in between them.
“We’re showing off heads,” said Jorike. “Do you want to come?”
Sogetai turned to look at Anat, expectantly.
“If you’re going…” Anat held out his arms.
He didn’t like the idea of being shown off as another prize. But Sogetai wanted to go, and Anat was loathe to be without both his protectors at once.
Anyway, it wasn’t as if he would mind seeing proof that more Space Wolves were dead.
Sogetai scooped him up, blankets and all, and carried him a few beds over before settling the two of them at one end of a lower bunk. Jorike sat at Sogetai’s other side, the bed’s owner moving to make room for him.
Cautiously, Anat shrugged the outermost blanket higher around his torso. Sogetai made no objection, so he dared to pull it half over his head. That made him turn to look—but all Sogetai did was sling an arm around Anat’s tense shoulders.
He recognized most of the heads, of course. This man the captain had never let have him; this one he had, often, out of favoritism. This one just once, after a difficult battle—he’d made the most of it, which had made for an unpleasant evening, but then there hadn’t been any pleasant ones. For a time, Anat kept himself composed.
But when Sogetai pulled out his own trophy from a sack Jorike handed him—scorched and ugly from the death he’d had—Anat had to suppress a shiver.
“You all right?” asked Jorike.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” Anat blurted out, and then cringed back.
Should he have been so blunt?—speaking of their enemy, yes, but… Was it safe to admit he could still want vengeance? Had Jorike even really meant to address him? He wished he could hide behind Sogetai, but even leaning on him he was too tall.
Sogetai let Jorike re-bag his prize and instead kept rubbing Anat’s shoulder. The repetitive motion reminded Anat again, intensely, of his mother and her cats, and he pressed his face into Sogetai’s shoulder for a moment so no one could misinterpret his grief.
When he got his face under control again he saw that Jorike was still watching him. Anat didn’t think he looked angry, but there was an intentness about his face that worried him.
“You all right?” Jorike repeated.
He was definitely speaking to him. Anat nodded, cautiously.
Jorike paused a moment before turning decisively the other way. “Hey, Dorbei. Take yours out again. Show him that the piece of shit is dead.”
Dorbei was an unfamiliar White Scar, sitting across the aisle and apparently uninjured, with a lumpy sack at his feet. “Which one?”
“Which one do you think?” Sogetai said, with an edge to his voice.
Dorbei actually laughed, and Anat flinched into Sogetai’s arms.
Dorbei muttered something that might have been an apology—Anat wished he knew what status Sogetai held—and pulled a head out of the sack. And then all thoughts were gone, because it was—
It was the captain’s head, slack and empty, bloodless. Almost unrecognizable, without the sneer or the ever-present threat of violence. Utterly powerless, reduced to a prize to be shown off in the White Scars’ dormitory—
Anat realized that he had begun to laugh.
He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t stop. Even when he found himself gasping for air he couldn’t make himself take more than a desperate, shallow breath. He was doubled over; he’d only avoided falling on the floor because of Sogetai’s iron arm around him.
He couldn’t breathe.The captain was dead and now his own body was strangling him in his place, and that hysterical thought only made him laugh harder, only made his rising panic worse—
And then, quite abruptly, it wasn’t a problem anymore. He was laughing as hard as ever, still unable to draw breath—but the feeling of suffocation was gone.
Sogetai was using his powers to give him air—no, to oxygenate his blood, directly, without taking control of his airways.
It was—it was the kind of thing he might have done for a brother, once.
It was terrifying, now, feeling another psyker—a member of another legion—exert his skills on Anat’s body.
He never wanted it to end.
But eventually, of course, he wore himself out. The spasms slowed; he drew breath again—he was almost tempted to hold it in, as if Sogetai would indulge that—and his eyes stung a little as he felt Sogetai’s power withdrawing. (Would he do it again? Surely. Surely if this was reason enough… But it was dangerous to think of manipulating him to do so.)
He focused on breathing regularly, and tried not to think what a scene he’d made of himself, the secret he’d given away so easily and so quickly—that he could still hate his captors, still long for their destruction. If they thought he might harbor such thoughts of them—
Well, if that was the case, they knew. He couldn’t do anything about it. Focus on what he could control: his breath, his balance—
As his awareness of his body returned Anat realized abruptly that he was as good as kneeling, legs folded, torso folded over them, head spilling over the bed.
It was the kind of posture the captain liked to see him in—had liked. The captain was dead, and what he had liked no longer mattered. Would never matter again.
All the same, Anat pushed himself up up with shaky arms. He had to lean on Sogetai, but that was all right. At least he was sitting now; at least his back was straight. At least there was no captain to smack him back down.
Far too many of the circle of White Scars were staring at him now. Sogetai’s second prize, the living one. Did he rate more or less than the rune priest’s battered head, or the captain’s rather better preserved one?
“That was really their captain?” the man next to Dorbei asked. Dorbei shoved him in response, and his companion put up his hands.
Anat nodded without considering if he’d really been the one asked. “I’m trying to forget his name,” he said, a little wild.
(Before, he could have asked Penamun to do that for him. Now he had only his own rebellious mind.)
“That I can’t do for you,” Sogetai said, and Anat felt a jolt of adrenaline.
Well. He had thought Sogetai imperceptive, until he guessed—or rather, did not guess—Anat’s worries about the book. Now he knew for sure.
“Sorry,” Sogetai said, and Anat wondered what for. But either Sogetai was no longer listening, or he didn’t think the question worth answering.
Perhaps he needed to concentrate. That had been the case for many of the Athenaeans, especially the younger ones, though to Penamun it had been as easy as breath and thought.
Anat hoped his thoughts were his own now, and private. He couldn’t count on that, and he should try to control them—but it was impossible not to worry.
Despite Anat’s effort on Sogetai’s behalf, this Dorbei had brought back the better trophy. Did that mean…
Anat leaned close against Sogetai and tried to give the impression of focusing closely on the White Scars’ other trophies. He was glad to see proof that yet more Space Wolves were dead, even if those the White Scars considered most impressive—the higher ranked ones, the captain’s cronies—had mostly been shown already. But his eyes kept straying back to Dorbei.
Dorbei paid him little attention in return. He seemed more interested in dead trophies than live ones. Anat tried to see that as a hopeful sign.
When the White Scars were finally done showing off to each other Anat was worried, for a moment, that Sogetai might have something in mind to finish things off—but instead he just scooped him up again, leaving the runepriest’s head in its bag for Jorike. Anat was so relieved that he impulsively nuzzled at Sogetai’s neck. Sogetai laughed, and Anat wondered if he’d gone too far.
As soon as Sogetai deposited him back on his bed—did he really have a bed of his own here?—Anat tried to pull the blankets back over himself. Unfortunately, they’d grown tangled over the course of the morning. Sogetai had to shake them out for him, leaving Anat momentarily exposed.
When Sogetai had tossed the blankets back to him and he’d covered himself fully once more, he realized that Jorike was still there. Still holding the bag with its lumpy contents; still staring at Anat.
“Err,” he said. “I’ll take this to cold storage, if that’s all right? But tell me if you need anything.” And he was gone, without even waiting for Sogetai to say if he did want the head in cold storage.
Perhaps he was nervous about psykers, and trying to win Sogetai over anyway? Anat shook his head. He didn’t know, and he didn’t know enough about the White Scars to interpret their social dynamics properly.
Sogetai himself returned to the upper bunk—no more demands from that quarter, at least for now. Wedged back in his corner, Anat activated his dataslate and tried to start reading again. But the morning’s excitement had worn at him, and he only managed a couple of pages before drifting off to sleep.
