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faderift2019-09-11 08:10 pm
wythersake) wrote in faderift2019-09-11 08:10 pmEntry tags:
wythersake) wrote in faderift2019-09-11 08:10 pm
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It's a stupid, childish thought. Boots thrash in the gravel; rocks grind into soft, peeled-back flesh, and what else would they do with the man? Let him crawl away to tell the tale of how three blood mages and a Mortalitasi made ruin of his friends. Let infection take him first, slowly, over days or weeks. Let Leander squeeze the air from his windpipe for minutes that feel like hours, while down below, Silver yells for a healer; there isn't time (he feels sick), and he just wants it to stop.
Frost seeps up the man's coat, out along tattered sleeves and trousers to encase flailing limbs, swallowing red welted flesh from chest to chin until it covers his mouth. Nose. It isn't much quicker; it's just still.
A hand comes to rest between Leander's shoulder blades. Fingers slide wet across bloody cloth. He can't heal the wound. Silver isn't the sort to panic over nothing, so Flint must be alive, bad, with Isaac still knitting his face back together, and Ilias can't heal any of them.
"They'll need you whole." The words strange and raw after the stretch of silence between them. "Take from me. Like in the woods."
A sacrifice, freely given.
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Like in the woods.
He doesn't need to ask if he's sure. Instead, "Let's get this out first." The arrow is less difficult to break than it would be for someone without the ability to press it thinner between two fingers, and he bears its swift removal with a hiss. Presses Ilias's hand between his own and the perforated muscle, next, then clasps the back of Ilias's neck, smearing blood.
Lean on me, he doesn't need to say, with barely half a step between them. Instead, "It won't hurt."
It doesn't. It's a chill, like the fatigue of illness, sensation of flowing, a silken swell of enervation. Breath and blood pressure momentarily subdued. The mind remains active while the body sighs. It doesn't hurt, but the wrongness of it—one may wonder if this is what it's like to die—and it is. It is. But only in part.
Leander steadies him, whispering reassurance, cups a cheek to look into his face, his eyes, to see that he's all right, and the world around them has gone soft—the nearness—this shared vulnerability—
Instead, a smile. Fleeting. Bittersweet.
He helps Ilias down the hill, finds him somewhere not so muddy to rest, and crouches by him just a moment to murmur something—confirmation, it seems from a distance, a hand on his shoulder, more briefly grazing his jaw—then finally turns to the group in distress. He's coming at a jog, rolling his renewed shoulder, his arm, flexing his hand. Bright-eyed and fresh.
"I'm here—where do you need me?"
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It's an easy question, direct to the point of hacking through the bewildering, jagged agony of remaking. Whether it lands anywhere amidst the dirt and the blood and the heated iron thrill of magic is debatable, but he hears it. That counts for something.
(It counts for twice that. It leverages at the corner of his attention where it's gone fixed on Silver - knifelike and wounded and viciously calculating through the crack of ribs and under the line of the arm used to hold him still. What did you do?, it doesn't say. It's closer to What did you take.)
"Can you heal?" It sounds like he's aspirated dirt, or just like he shouldn't be the one answering this question but is.
Flint fights first up to an elbow and then to have his legs out from under the dead man. There's a distant, numbed satisfaction in finding all that dark blood either isn't his or has stopped pouring out of him. Isaac looks like he's been dragged by the face across loose gravel; there are hunting bolts buried in backs.
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He can feel the arrows grinding against bone as he moves, but there isn't time to try to rip either of them free. They're of more use to him embedded in his body than wrenched loose. The pain, the slow-spreading pools of blood soaking fabric, John can make something of that. The potion blunts the agony, reverses some of the damage, but leaves enough that John can inhale in what the bandits left behind. (An impression, some lingering traces of breath and heartbeat whispering behind the Veil.) It all adds up to enough borrowed strength to hold Flint down while Isaac goes to work.
(Is this what it had looked like from the other side, when Howell had severed the mangled mess of his leg from his body?)
John feels more than hears the moment when Isaac finishes. Flint draws a deep, unlabored breath. The ripples of Isaac's magic go still. Across Flint's body, John meets his eyes, looks down into Flint's face, then breaks away to sit back clumsily, finally coughing a disgusting glob of blood into the dirt. The lance-sharp focus of Flint's scrutiny had not gone unmissed, just as Leander's brief, knowing stare had registered. Achingly, he eases his grip, lets the last breath of magic slip from his fingers as he turns his attention to Leander and Ilias.
He almost asks What happened to Ilias? but thinks better of it.
"You killed the archer?" John asks, begging confirmation for what he already knows had happened on that hill.
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Isaac rocks to his haunches, hip bumping the hand of a corpse. A reflexive shudder. Flint sits, John hacks, and Leander springs across the dim scene; stained by a wound that isn’t there. Ilias, sat pale in the dirt behind.
Hate swells.
"He’s dead." Doesn’t need to hear it said. His eyes slip, head buzzes sapphire. "I’m spent."
Agreement: Leander, take John. He could push, but it’s better to slip beneath the croak of Flint’s authority. It’s a stupid relief to stop making choices. To sip on self-loathing and the prickle of regathered flesh.
He knew exactly what he was doing, when he sent Ilias uphill.
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Nearer, something cold and wet nudges at the side of his hand, and for a moment Ilias just squints down at it, puzzling over the intruding sensation. The knobby bulk of a shoulder follows, weight sighing in against his hip. The creature is chill and damp, no more alive than the dirt under him, but it's solid. Grounded. Gently, he lifts a hand to rest against its spine, to stroke down too-still ribs, and just-- keeps tipping over until he's settled against it.
He's fine. He just needs a minute.
Breath deepens. Dark eyes find purchase again in the dim light. Leander is moving to help, Flint is moving at all, and Isaac is-- hm.
A hand extends, palm up. Beckoning. Offering. They've neither of them much strength just yet, but not so little he can't try.
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More field medic than physician, having spent more time drawing than mending, Leander has neither the schooling nor experience of Ser Self-Loathing over yonder, but his hands are quick and careful. From some inconspicuous place he produces a little folding knife (not that one) and widens the tears in Silver's clothing so he can see better where arrows penetrate skin.
"Keep still, now." Steady. Composed. No impression of a racing pulse. "Stay just there. This is going to hurt."
And it does, only not for the reason it should. There's no brutal tearing-loose, no barbs shredding on their way out, but a strange whispering twist in the Veil, pain as Leander grasps the arrow, crawling sharp along the embedded shaft, dull sensation of pulling, and a sudden release as it comes loose. The exit is smooth, lubricated by blood filling the channel as quickly as it widens—such a little widening, barely visible to the eye, but nonetheless a thrilling manipulation, and with only moments of enhanced discomfort for the man who wears the flesh. Until now he's never done it this quickly—
Well. Not to a living thing.
Serious, keen eyes, lips pressed thin, he does it again.
"Keep still," a close murmur, focused. With great care, he leans over each wound and pinches it shut, from depth to surface. One final welling of blood as it's squeezed up and out. His posture eases, then, and he presses both hands to Silver's back, and now comes the more familiar healing warmth.
Where another mage might now draw and release the sigh typical of critical success, Leander is quiet.
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If there are questions - are there are a dozen boiling up in the dark and ragged quiet which follows - they can be asked not now. By the time the arrows are deposited into the road, he has unearthed both his sword and the bandit's but hasn't gotten any closer to rising from the position generously described as sitting up. He talks over Leander's work (or under or around or during it; Silver's face and the pain that does or doesn't show there creates more continuity than anything else can). Short of breath, but because it hurts and not because he can't choke down the necessary air:
"We'll bring the archers down to the road." There are two rings on the dead man's fingers. Flint removes and pockets them. Turning the corpse over is more than he can manage, but the small pouch at its side is opened and its contents strewn feebly over the blood soaked earth. A bundle of tinder, a short piece of soft wood carved halfway to the shape of a bird whistle, a stone with a letter scratched into it, a spool of hemp twine, a spoon.
"Take weapons and anything of immediate value from them. Look for a line we can tie. Ilias--" that's not loud enough to carry where he wants it, but he doesn't try again. "--The horse can pull the bodies down where we need them. Otherwise, they'll have to be carried."
Good thing they've all practiced this.
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It isn't graceful as Isaac's work had been, nor is it Howell's blunted, precise approach. John has the sense of being shaped, as if Leander is drawing the flesh of his back languidly away from the shaft of the arrow. The momentary sense of something amiss unsettles him, but John hasn't screamed yet, and he doesn't scream now. This is pain he can grit his teeth against and groan through.
And reacting to Leander's ministrations deflects, for the moment, Flint's scrutiny. His hand balls in the dirt beside him as Flint speaks. Leander's timing is almost perfect, with his palms lifting from John's back just as Flint finishes discussing what's to be done with the corpses.
"It would be better to burn them," John says, and he thinks his reasoning is fairly clear. There's evidence here. Too many of these corpses were very clearly created by magical means. That's harder to hide than their earlier staging of the coach.
And then, turning enough to see Leander: "Thank you."
Whatever strangeness he had noticed about Leander's technique, the reaction afterwards, he keeps to himself. Mutual silence is going to have to do for the rest of this trip.
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A man in black, a pale horse — the sort of thing that used to frighten him in stories, the curling lines of ink and superstition to occasionally adorn even Chantry tomes. The mouth would dry, if it weren’t full of ichor.
Separates: Leander’s speaking; Flint is. His drifting chin snaps up.
Leander's working.
The night stinks of blood and torn bowels, impossible to pick the particular drops. He doesn’t need to, imagination already cradling the means to this end. A warped door, a patient eye. Could you? Et voila,
The sort of thing to frighten him.
Flint’s still speaking. John hasn't screamed. Isaac finds his way up, palms the stone; carries an order. If he mislikes leaving Commander and Conspirator together, it's unavoidable. He’s walking better now, pushes past the pause in his step to lay a hand upon Ilias’. Fingers tangle in cold, damp fur, and his skin crawls. He tightens his grip, past the urge to recoil.
"I’m sorry," Spoken to dead ears, warm flesh. The moment hangs; two of them are breathing. "We need to move the bodies."
The rock and its lonely letter. Ilias’ pocket. His hand moves; they overlap.