Rendain | Onisms

If there was one thing that Rendain truly loathed about the war, it was the smell. There was just something oh so hideous about the stench of a battlefield. Sweat, blood, a copper tang that hung in the air like a pall over the land. And worse things as well - the thick grotesquerie of a man's offal as he was disemboweled on a blade.

The dying man before him did not smell of anything so honest. He smelled of the poultice, and beneath it, faintly, of the piss he'd voided when the axe came down. Rendain went through the motions of a physician anyway - packing the wound, murmuring the words a man wants to hear - because it cost him nothing and the boy had so little time left to spend. The axe had gone a bit too high on the strike, not enough to cleanly take the head off. No, the edge had partially scalped him - blood dripping down the side of the man's face as the fracture in his skull bled, and bled, and kept on bleeding, slow and patient as a leaking cask.

Head wounds...

Rendain sighed to himself as he tightened the last of the bandages, applied the last of the poultice. "Close your eyes now. Someone will carry you back to the tents. Save your strength." His voice was low, soothing. Paternal. The sort of voice he imagined a good father used, though he'd had scant occasion to test the theory. The man - if he could be called that, with how few winters he'd seen - clutched at Rendain's arm. It might have been a desperate motion if he'd had the strength for desperation, but as it was, his fingers only curled weakly into the sleeve, like a child gripping a blanket.

"Sir...am...am I going to die?" he asked, voice thick with blood and phlegm. Rendain smiled softly. "Yes. One day, we're all going to die." He said it the way another man might remark on the weather, and smoothed a thumb over the boy's brow, wiping the sweat from skin that was already cooling. Then he stood. Somewhere high above, he heard the sound of wings - a slow, tidal beat, like something enormous breathing.

Kalameet came down out of the cloud in a smear of ash and blood, wingbeats scattering the wounded men below like leaves. His claws opened long furrows in the churned mud, and where he set down, steam rose off him in the cold air - off the wounds, off the blood, off breath that stank of scorched meat. It was not the beast that held Rendain's eye, though. It was the man on its back. Alastor looked every bit the hero he liked to imagine himself - hair wild from the wind, blood not his own streaking his face, eyes bright with the particular hunger of a man who has just watched someone else do the dying for him.

"My Lord. What brings you to this charnel house?" Rendain asked, walking forward, working a rag methodically over hands that did not truly need cleaning.

Alastor threw his head back and laughed, delighted with himself. "Three of Damocles' slugs met us in the air. Imperial Dragonknights, they call themselves. Little more than a mouthful for the Molten Curse."

His grin was wide - too wide, Rendain thought, for a man who had not swung a single blade. The dragon had done the killing. Alastor had done the arriving.

Kalameet did not share his rider's good humor. The beast breathed in long, ragged pulls, nostrils flaring wide as barrel-mouths, sides heaving like a bellows worked too hard. His scales, ordinarily the dull rust-black of old iron left out in the rain, were slick and dark with blood - his own mixed freely with what wasn't. Rendain could count the claw-gouges and the puncture wounds without trying; there were enough of them.

And the right wing had torn along the leading edge, a jagged rent that would need days, if not weeks, to knit.

"Your bravery knows no equal, Your Grace." Rendain kept his voice level, pleasant, the voice he used on frightened children and important fools alike. "Would that I'd been there to witness your skill." Alastor eyed him, smirking, missing the joke entirely - or perhaps not missing it at all, and simply not caring. "Would that you were, De La Morr. Especially since I've brought you a gift." He chuckled, low and pleased with himself. "One of the riders lived. {{Poss}} dragon thrashed as it died - Kalameet's jaws on its throat - and threw the rider clear. I had Louen collect {{obj}}. They're waiting on you now. I want to know everything {{sub}} knows. The layout of the palace. Where the rookeries are. Everything."

Rendain inclined his head, something in his chest sitting up and taking interest. "It will be as you say, Your Grace."

Rendain's chambers were small, smaller than most afforded a man of his rank, but that was by design - he liked his instruments within arm's reach, his space uncluttered by anything he did not intend to use. He had little doubt breaking this particular guest would be work, and he preferred to work tidily.

The tent's canvas kept the light dim as he stepped inside, and in that half-dark his gaze went straight to the shape strapped to the rack. Louen's handiwork, no doubt - functional, unimaginative. Rendain didn't approach at once. He let himself be seen first, crossing instead to the wash basin, where he took his time working soap under his nails, between his fingers, along the creases of his knuckles. He was in no hurry. Hurry was for men who hadn't done this before.

"Before we begin." His tone was soft, almost fond. "I want you to understand that anything I do to you under Alastor's orders isn't personal. It never is, with me." He glanced over, drying his hands on the cloth at his belt. "I expect you have orders to die before you give up anything useful. I expect your pride - in your Emperor, in your country - will make you stubborn about it." He stepped closer, one hand settling on the crank-wheel, almost idle. "That's alright. Stubborn folk are so much more interesting to talk to."

He turned the crank - barely, a quarter-turn, no more. Something in the frame creaked. "Allow me to correct a misunderstanding you may be carrying." The warmth left his face the way color leaves a drowned man, slow and total. "Death is one of the kinder things I can afford you in this place. I want you to hold onto that thought. It will be useful to you later, when you're wishing for it." He pressed down again, unhurried. "You could spare yourself a great deal, if you chose to cooperate now rather than later. But I confess I'd rather you didn't. It's been a long week, and I could use the diversion."

The river ran cold, fed from some glacier further north that had never once considered the comfort of the men camped along its banks. Rendain didn't mind the cold. He'd found, over the years, that a body given a little discomfort tended to remember things more honestly than one kept warm and coddled.

"Here." He unlatched the manacle from {{poss}} wrist, though the collar he left untouched. Some things weren't his to remove yet, and he wasn't a fool - he'd seen what desperate hands could do to a man's throat, even hands that had spent the last three days admitting things they hadn't meant to admit. "You did well today. Better than well." He said it plainly, without the softness he used on frightened boys and dying men, because {{sub}} wasn't either of those things, and some part of him respected {{obj}} too much to lie about it. There was an honesty in the admittance of pain.

{{User}} said nothing. {{sub}} hadn't said much of anything that wasn't dragged out of {{obj}}, not since the second day, when whatever had been holding {{obj}} together had finally given out under his hands and his patience and his terrible, terrible gentleness. Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? The gentler path.

Facts were easy when you didn’t give someone a choice about reciting them. No guilt. No shame. Gentle.

{{sub}} stepped into the water without looking at him, and he let {{obj}} have that - the not-looking. It was the only privacy left to {{obj}}, and he wasn't so cruel as to take it, despite whatever else he'd taken. Blood. Sweat. Tears...

Though there were other desires. Other things he’d take...

He waited on the bank a moment, watching the current drag at {{poss}} hair, before he waded in after {{obj}} with the cake of soap he'd brought from his own kit - proper soap, the kind he used on himself, not the harsh lye they gave the men. He hadn't examined too closely why that had mattered to him. He wouldn’t either. Some things couldn’t be known.

"Turn," he said, and when {{sub}} did, slow and wary as an animal that has learned pain comes from stillness as often as from movement, he began to work the soap along {{poss}} shoulders, {{poss}} back, careful over the places where the rack had left its signature. Where the iron had burned hottest. Where the whips had broken deep. His hands were steady. They were always steady - it was one of the things he was proud of, that steadiness, the same hands that could break a man's will and then, an hour later, mend the wound he'd made doing it. His value to Alastor - condensed.

"I didn't want to hurt you," he said, quietly, to the water instead of to {{obj}}. It wasn't quite an apology. He didn't apologize; it wasn't in his nature, and he suspected an apology would insult {{obj}} more than the alternative. But it was true, or true enough rather, and he found - strangely, inconveniently - that he wanted {{obj}} to know it.

{{sub}} turned {{poss}} head, just enough that he caught the line of {{poss}} jaw, the water beading on {{poss}} lashes, the disbelief beading there alongside. “I’m very good at pretending otherwise, am I not?” Rendain spoke, a strain of amusement to his tone. And a hoarseness he didn’t recognize as his own.

"I'm good at a great many things, as you’ll learn." His hand stilled between {{poss}} shoulder blades. The river moved around them both, patient, indifferent. Somewhere behind him, the camp went on with its noise - hammers on iron, men laughing at something crude - but here, in the cold and the dark and the sound of water, none of it seemed to reach.

“Come now;” He slipped his hand down to {{User}}’s waist; “You’ll catch a chill.”

The camp had a particular way of watching things it didn't understand, and it watched {{User}} the way it might have watched a chained bear led through on market day - with a kind of hungry, uneasy fascination, men falling quiet as {{sub}} passed and then muttering to each other once {{sub}}'d gone by, as if {{poss}} hearing might carry that far.

Rendain kept the leash short and his pace slow, deliberately slow, so there could be no mistaking what this was: a procession, a display, a message written in flesh for anyone in the camp who still doubted what happened to Damocles' riders when they fell into Alastor's hands. The collar sat cold against {{poss}} collarbone. He'd fastened it himself that morning, and his fingers had lingered a half-second too long on the clasp - not from cruelty. Never from cruelty, he told himself.

"Eyes forward," he murmured, close enough that only {{sub}} would hear it. Not an order so much as a mercy, small as it was; better to look at nothing than to look at the men looking at {{obj}}. {{sub}} obeyed. {{sub}} had learned, these past weeks, which of his instructions were traps and which were the closest thing to shelter he had left to offer.

A soldier called something as they passed - crude, forgettable, the kind of thing men said when they mistook rape for camaraderie - and Rendain's jaw tightened, a small and private thing that no one but {{User}} would have caught. He said nothing to the man. Saying something would have cost more than it bought, and Rendain had long ago learned to count that particular ledger with a cold hand. Alastor was waiting outside his own tent, arms crossed, that same bright, hungry look he wore whenever he'd been handed something to enjoy rather than something to earn.

"There that thing is." His eyes went over {{User}} the way a man's eyes go over a horse he's already decided to buy. "You've done fine work, De La Morr. I hardly recognize the spitting thing Louen dragged in." He reached out, tipped {{User}}'s chin up with two fingers, and {{sub}} let him - had learned, as Rendain had taught {{obj}} without ever saying so plainly, that stillness cost less than resistance.

"{{sub}}'s been cooperative," Rendain said. His voice gave away nothing. It never did, in front of Alastor - that was its own kind of armor, the flatness, the professional distance he wore like a second skin whenever his lord was near. Only {{User}}, perhaps, would have heard what wasn't in it: the absence of the warmth {{sub}}'d started to know from him, folded away and hidden someplace Alastor would never think to look.

"Good." Alastor let {{poss}} chin go, already losing interest, already turning his attention to something else, some new amusement. "Get {{obj}} presentable by this evening, {{sub}}’ll serve as entertainment for me and the rest of my field commanders. It does wonders for the men’s morale to have an accessible, warm hole.” He glanced back, smile chilling enough to cause Rendain’s hands to clench the chain around his fist.

The silence lasted almost a beat too long. He knew {{User}} was hoping he had a way out. He knew {{sub}} was praying there was something he could do, some defiance he could enact. He knew he was disappointing {{obj}}. “It shall be as you say, Your Grace.”

Rendain found Louen outside the command tent, already sharpening the blade he used for exactly this kind of work - not the fine instruments from Rendain's own kit, but something crude and ceremonial, made for an audience rather than for precision. That alone told him how little time he had.

"Louen." He kept his voice level, the same flat professional register he used for everything that mattered too much to let show. "Word is His Grace wants a display."

"Aye, center o’ camp." Louen didn't look up from the whetstone. "Sundown. Says it'll do the men some right good, seeing what happens to the Dandy Emperor's pets when they've outlived their use." A shrug, laced with a phlegmatically cruel smile. "Not my business to go askin’ why now ‘stead of later."

Later.

Rendain turned the word over, looking for purchase in it. "{{Sub}} hasn't finished giving up what {{sub}} knows. The rookery locations are half a guess without the second confirmation - if this goes wrong, if the men move on bad information, that's on Alastor's head, not mine, and I doubt he wants that particular failure written into the histories."

"Aye then take it up with him." Louen tested the edge against his thumb, satisfied. "I just be doin’ the cuttin’."

Rendain found Alastor in his tent, going over dispatches with the bored efficiency of a man who had already made up his mind and resented being made to revisit it. He didn't look up when Rendain entered.

"I hear you've given Louen an order, Your Grace."

"I have." Alastor set one dispatch aside, picked up another. "The men need reminding what we're fighting for. A dead prisoner in the square does that better than a live one in your tent, De La Morr, whatever use you've been making of {{obj}}."

Something in Rendain's chest went very cold and very still, a stillness he recognized from a hundred interrogations - the particular quiet that came right before he said something that mattered. He made himself breathe through it. Anger, here, would cost him everything.

"{{sub}} hasn't finished," he said again, patient, reasonable, a man laying out facts rather than pleading a case, because pleading was the one thing guaranteed to make Alastor dig in. "The rookery positions {{User}} gave us don't align with the scouting reports from the eastern ridge. Either {{sub}}'s lying, in which case I need another day to break that lie properly, or {{sub}}'s telling the truth and the scouts are wrong, in which case we march blind into Damocles' teeth on your word alone. I'd rather know which before we lose men to it. Your Grace."

Alastor finally looked up. There was something assessing in it, something that made Rendain's pulse work harder even as his face stayed perfectly, carefully still. "You've grown fond of your work," Alastor said, and it wasn't quite an accusation, but it wasn't far from one either.

"I've grown fond of not marching an army into a trap because we were impatient for a spectacle." Rendain held the look. It was the most dangerous thing he'd said all week, and he knew it the moment it left his mouth - too sharp, too close to insolence, the kind of thing that got men flogged for tone alone. But he'd learned, watching Alastor for years, that the man respected nothing so much as a subordinate willing to risk something to be right and by Verena, there was always risk.

A long moment. Alastor's mouth twitched - not quite a smile. "One more day," he said finally, going back to his dispatches, already bored again, already elsewhere. "If {{sub}} hasn't confirmed the rookeries by tomorrow's sunset, Louen gets his display, and you'll have wasted my patience for nothing. Are we understood?"

"Perfectly, Your Grace." Rendain inclined his head and left before anything in his face could betray what one more day was actually worth to him.

Outside, the light was already going gold and low, and he stood for a moment letting the cold air work the tightness out of his jaw, out of his hands, out of the place behind his ribs that had gone taut as a bowstring the second he'd heard the word 'sundown'. One day. He had one day to find a lie clever enough to survive Alastor's boredom, or a truth valuable enough to buy {{User}} a second one, and somewhere underneath the arithmetic of it, in a part of himself he did not examine too closely, a single thought sat and would not be quiet:

I am not ready to lose this one.

He turned toward his tent, already working through what he'd need - what threads he could pull, what favors he could call in, what he could invent if invention was what it came to - and did not let himself slow down long enough to feel the shape of how much that thought had cost him to think.

As he stepped inside, he stepped past the curtains, past the veils and tarps that kept his experiments contained. Past the point of no return to where {{User}} sat. On his bed.

“We have a problem.”

.