Chapter Text
I owe him, Slate thought again, miserable. She closed her eyes and wished ridiculously for a handkerchief, she didn't want to sneeze while Brenner died, the smell of rosemary was still so --
Sneeze.
Her eyes popped open and she said, "*Hold*," in a voice that felt like she'd borrowed it from Knight-Commander Caliban, who she'd just truly met today, a voice that even demons didn't argue with.
The sword stopped a fraction away from Brenner's sternum, angled down. Brenner could've said why Caliban was aiming there. Slate could guess, but that wasn't the point right now. She slashed her hand across in the air when Caliban started to move, hurrying back the single step, and dropped back to her knees behind Brenner where he knelt at Caliban's feet.
This is a terrible idea. He invited the problem in the first place, and you know what he’s like in the second place. But everything to do with Brenner is a terrible idea and you knew it then, too.
Drowning, they'd both said, and Brenner had wanted the quick death. And she'd wondered if Brenner would live even if she got him out. But Slate had learned about herself, in this second, that she couldn't let a demon win but she also couldn't let Brenner die without trying, in the same way that she had not been able to leave him and Caliban in the Vagrant Hills. Especially, the rotten bastard, when he'd gone and been noble about it with the clocktaur demons!
Even as she thought it, Slate was wrapping her fingers around Brenner's neck, and then she pressed in against the windpipe. Possessed or not, the body under her hands was still a body, and it wanted to live. She could feel Brenner's throat working under her hands as he struggled for air, or the demon did; with six demons in his soul, was ruthless Brenner even there to know she was strangling him?
It wasn't Brenner she was looking at. Slate looked past his shoulder up at Caliban, and saw the widening of his eyes as he realized what she was doing.
Slate had very strong hands and very strong wrists. Brenner had been fighting, been hit in the head with a sword pommel -- the blood was sticky on her hands -- and then had five more demons put in him. Even still, she was struggling to keep her grip, until Caliban took a deep breath and ordered, "Be still," in that voice again.
Brenner went still. And then, after an interminable few seconds, Slate was too busy focusing on the placement of her fingers to count them, he went even stiller, and Caliban started to say words in that strange language again, the words that he had said over the rune-woman's death. Words of exorcism, to bind the demons to Brenner's death.
She didn't loosen her grip until Caliban stopped, and then she did, only then Brenner stirred under her hands and Caliban's grip tightened on the sword and Slate choked him again, again, it took seven more times before Caliban said, "It's done, Slate."
By then she was crying so hard she couldn't see him, and almost didn't hear him. She had to force her fingers to let go all the way, flexing them gingerly as though she'd been writing all night.
Brenner was slumped against her. He was warm. She told herself that meant he was alive and knew it wasn't true. She had felt, that last time, the way his body wasn't struggling for air anymore. The scent of rosemary was so potent she couldn't even smell leather and tobacco, or his bowels letting go as he died.
And then a wind came through and blew the rosemary right out of her nose. Slate smelled cold, and high clear places of thin air and isolation, and heard a voice that sounded like a mix of Brenner and Caliban and was somehow also utterly female say, "Cities are often lonely places".
In her arms, Brenner breathed.
***
"It was the goddess," Caliban said, when they had left the temple behind them and were walking back. "The one I met."
"Inzaa?" Slate asked, her voice still sounding thick.
Caliban briefly hated both himself and Brenner for that they had between them made her cry. It was hard to hate Brenner in this moment, though. The assassin had deliberately taken in five demons so that they could cause no more harm, as though that would make up for the one he had willingly allowed in; he had clearly been doing his best to keep Slate from being harmed; and he was currently walking (a generous term; Caliban was mostly carrying him, with Slate to support his other side) with them with the stumbling gait of someone who was relearning how legs worked, and Caliban had a hard time thinking of him as 'Brenner' rather than as 'someone I could not quite save'. There hadn't been time to explain to Slate just how damaged even a surviving victim could be. Some of them never remembered how to speak. Some never relearned how to eat on their own, or were never able to enact dressing themselves or holding a shovel with a firm grip. Most did, it was true, after a year or so with the healers, but some didn't.
"She didn't introduce herself," he said stiffly, "But yes, that was the name Learned Edmund suggested. Her priestess said," his words coming more slowly as he looked at Brenner again, "that She knew how to thank someone who had sacrificed everything to keep the rest of us safe. And I suppose, whatever else Brenner was doing, he did do that."
And Caliban had, in the moments of drawing the demons out, felt a little bit of Brenner going with them, as you always felt when you were exorcising. There had been a high empty place at the core of him, and an eternal moment of cold centered calm that could perhaps pass as peace. He had felt those bits being blown back in with the wind that had blown the breath back into him. He could see a little bit, Caliban supposed, of why a goddess of self-chosen loneliness and of predators might like Brenner.
If Slate asked him, he would tell her. Why Brenner had preferred the sword, and how hard even a partial recovery was going to be. Brenner hadn't even been able to talk when he'd started breathing again. He'd looked at Slate with a sort of nakedness in his face that Caliban had never seen from the cynical assassin before, and then had turned his head against her shoulder as though to hide it, but he'd only been able to make inarticulate sounds when she asked him if he was all right. Caliban had noted, automatic, that in that first second, Brenner had still looked at Slate with starvation in his icy eyes and not with what Caliban would know as love, but there had been…. something.
"He should sleep," Caliban added, as Brenner didn't quite stumble. "It won't fix the damages the demons wrought on their way out,” or the damage wrought by lack of air, “but it's rarely bad for someone to sleep. One of us should stay with him."
"In case there's another demon?" Slate's mouth twisted as she spoke, a wary eye still on Brenner. She looked somewhat horrified that she was even needing to watch him. Possibly she was looking horrified because Brenner’s legs still weren’t working quite right and the lack of his accustomed grace was a little painful to see for her.
"No. That I am certain of. I felt all six of them go, eventually." It had been the one Brenner invited in that had taken three efforts. She had been the strongest, and aside from that, had been welcomed, had a claim. Caliban had felt her brushing his soul as she had left for the final time. "No,” he continued, “because he may have nightmares, or there may be some delayed reaction. If someone survives the first minute after a successful exorcism, they will typically not die of it later." Except by choice, but Caliban didn't think it was necessary to bring that up at this point. "But I have seen nightmares where a victim injured himself afterwards, or injured someone around him, or had difficulties keeping warm, or couldn't fall asleep, or some other concern. Learned Edmund should on no account be left alone with him. I recommend myself, since I do know what to watch for."
Slate’s expressive face showed worry, distinct from concern, and then calculation, and finally settled into sharp determination. “I would rather watch him,” she admitted slowly. “I was the one who decided not to give him the death both you and he recommended. But you’re right that you know what to be on the lookout for. I’ve seen Brenner injured, but never… out of control,” she settled on.
Caliban had a moment then that he was not proud of, in which he thought in very rapid succession of Brenner with Slate, himself with Slate, and then himself and Slate and Brenner and the sudden hot certainty that he could make Brenner lose control. Brenner had no emotional tie to him, but Caliban had seen the way Brenner would look at him now and then, and he knew he could hold him down in ways Slate could not, could make him lose himself in it.
But the man he was going to keep watch over was not, Caliban reminded himself sharply, that assassin in any way that mattered right now. The only thing Caliban was going to give him was rest in some non-permanent way, because Slate had wanted to try. “We can watch together,” he said instead. “And I can tell you some of what to look for. The watch for the first few days should be around the clock, and I will need to rest eventually. It may be necessary to restrain him or drug him to sleep in those times.”
He was not surprised that the thought caused Slate some visible tension. Caliban had not asked for details on her work partnership with Brenner, or her other partnership with Brenner, but nothing about him indicated someone who would have any history with being restrained other than unpleasantness. But nothing else was feasible. Even someone without Brenner’s history could be dangerous after possession; Brenner could not be awake and unrestrained with anyone but Caliban. He should likely be restrained even with Caliban.
She said carefully, “He won’t take that well.”
“I don’t anticipate that he will. But Brenner typically, I understand, is dangerous only when he chooses to be.” Slate nodded confirmation; Caliban had never seen the man in anything less than control of his knives, for all the joke he had made about aiming for the other eye. “He does not have dexterity right now,” Caliban said flatly.
They were almost back. Good. He continued, “He has physical strength, but not control of it. He will have hand tremors. He will have spasms. He will go to light a cigarette and he will drop the flame, or the cigarette. He will drop his knife. He will intend to do light damage and instead will maim because he will *miss*. He will be dangerous *without* intending it, including to himself. Slate. I recovered from the exorcism. But it took time.”
She looked almost as horrified as she should. Caliban ached for having to tell her these truths, and did not tell her that if Brenner came to him later and asked for the sword again, if he was one of those who either didn’t fully recover or could not live through the process of trying to, Caliban was going to give it to him. He probably wouldn’t ask. Brenner would likely consider it a point of pride to solve the problem himself. Then again, he would think it was very funny to ask Caliban to do that kill now that he finally *knew* what possession was like.
This was why the Dreaming God’s champions didn’t have true connections outside of each other. If Brenner did ask, he was then going to have to face Slate later, and the vague empty spot where Brenner had once slotted in even if Caliban hadn’t *liked* having him there.
But those were concerns for the future. The door was just ahead, and then it was going to be explanations Caliban also didn’t want to have, and figuring out how to get out of Anuket City with a dangerous survivor of a demon possession when they weren’t supposed to be in Anuket City at all and the City was about to realize their clocktaurs weren’t in existence anymore, and all of that was *later*.
Dreaming God, thank you for that ‘later’ even exists…