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The trio turned to look back as they walked away. To mutter over their shoulders, words they didn’t dare speak loud enough to be heard.
Ragged clothes. Haunted, hollow eyes. Burakh watched them go, then turned back to the man they had cornered against the door of the chemist’s shop.
Bachelor Dankovsky stood there as he had throughout the confrontation – with a step forward threatened in his posture, and both hands wrapped around the strap of his bag. The stance, as always, of a man ready to fight even those battles he was sure to lose.
Slow to stand down. Slower still to look at Burakh, from beneath a frown.
“Why did you interfere?” he asked. “You know those men, and everyone they talk to, will think worse of you for it.”
Burakh shrugged. Not in uncertainty, but displacing a sift of fallen snow from his shoulders. The day had turned clear and still, but he’d been walking in the steppe since before it had been so.
He had returned from the silence to hear shouting from that corner of the street. An uncommon sound since the sand pest had been driven from the town – most people still walked in a stunned hush, and conversed with their neighbours in whispers.
“I know,” he said. “But I won’t stand for any of them slinging insults at the man who is the reason most of them survived.”
Dankovsky scoffed. The hand that hadn’t been wrapped quite so tightly around the bag’s strap, ready to slip inside, fell back to his side.
“Their survival was never my primary goal,” he pointed out, “And they know it. You know it. So why-”
“I know,” Burakh repeated. “But it’s the goal you achieved in the end. You could have persuaded the commander to spare the tower.”
Silence hung between them, as only winter could hold it. Dankovsky stared down and past him, at the street sparkling with brief midday light and frost.
“You could have persuaded him to spare the tower. He would never have listened to me if you hadn’t vouched for me. He wouldn’t have believed in the panacea.” Burakh hadn’t found it in himself to admit as much aloud. Not in all the months since the town had been saved, not until that moment.
How close he had come to failure. His hands drenched in the blood of success, but still, in the end, it had come down to the man before him. To the mercy of the man so many still called merciless.
The man who still wouldn’t look him in the eye. Who stood as if still cornered, clutching the bag he still carried everywhere with him, to the shops, to the steppe, like a talisman.
“Why?” Burakh asked. As he had wanted to for all those months, but until he’d made that admission, he couldn’t have. Pride had kept him, that long, from asking for the truth. “What made you choose the town over the tower?”
Dankovsky sighed. It seemed to take more out of him than it should have, more than the steaming air that sank around the hem of his snakeskin coat.
“I didn’t intend to,” he said. Still more to the street than Burakh, more soliloquy than confession. “But in the end...to sacrifice that many lives for such a partial- a defective victory over death...” He shook his head. “It wasn’t what I’d been searching for. What good is that ‘victory’, if it requires such a sacrifice to the force you’re supposedly defeating?”
In the months since the town had been saved, Burakh couldn’t say what answer he had imagined Dankovsky giving to that question. He couldn’t say what answer he had wanted. But he found himself smiling, faintly, at the one he had gotten.
“I see,” he said. “You’re as proud as ever, oynon.”
Dankovsky stiffened at that. Still, always. Scoffed again into the collar of his coat, which surely wasn’t warm enough for the crystalline blue winter that had buried the town’s dead, ash, and shock. He was shivering, wasn’t he?
Burakh’s smile faded. The silence stretched from church to abattoir.
“Tell me,” he asked. “How are you managing in the town?”
The silence stretched. Dankovsky stood as if, with an effort, he could become part of it.
The cold, the still. Shoulders stiff. His posture no longer said ‘fight’, but ‘endure’. Hadn’t it, really, every time Burakh had seen him in those months?
He wet his lips, and felt the frost touch them. There was another question he had hesitated to ask since the fall of the Polyhedron, another that demanded pride be set aside.
“Tell me,” he repeated. “Daniil – are you all right?”
Silence. Cold and stillness. What ran beneath Dankovsky’s too-thin coat could have been a shiver, or the warning tremble of something internal, deeper, carrying more weight than it could take.
His lips pressed tight, pale over whatever honesty might otherwise have escaped. How much had they both lost, over those months, to pride?
Burakh drew a deeper breath of the cold, and swallowed his.
“I dream of blood coming out of the walls sometimes,” he said. “I think it’s my bedroom at first, but then I realize I’m beneath the earth again. I start cutting at the walls, but I’ve forgotten how to use my knife. I know I’ll never find the way out. Or I dream of Nara. I told you about her, didn’t I? She stares at me, and I know I missed doing something she needed me to do.”
Dankovsky shifted his stance at that. Like a compass, towards the Stillwater; did he even realize?
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. The edge he tried to sharpen in his voice came out chipped and blunt.
At first, Burakh didn’t know how to parry it. He couldn’t say what seemed to fill his lungs first – that it was lonely beneath the earth, and the next time he dreamed of it, he wanted someone to know he was there.
“Because everyone is still suffering,” he said at last, instead. “And you can’t start to heal until you admit that that includes you.”
He watched Dankovsky weigh and measure that. It was always easy to tell when something was being dissected behind his eyes, even dull and distant as they were that day.
He watched Dankovsky straighten, as though it were all still something he could shrug off. Shed, like snakeskin.
“You don’t need to worry on my account,” he claimed, starting forward from where he had been cornered. “I’m managing just fine. As for your dreams, you’d be better off consulting-”
Burakh’s hand fell on his shoulder. Before he could pass, and Dankovsky stopped beneath it, too quickly to have meant to walk on.
Too easily to have hoped for anything else. He stood, still again beneath Burakh’s hand, staring at the long, bright silence of the street. Shivering, or trembling beneath the weight of the first human touch he may have had in weeks.
Weeks of nightmares, for all of them. Months. Burakh could have said more. How he sometimes thought he could feel something crawling on his skin. How he would wash his hands to the point of chafed skin and wasting water, and still wondered if he might be carrying something dangerous into the house.
How he waited, alone and awake at night, for it all to start again. To hear the screams.
“Will you come to dinner?” he asked. At last, instead. “Murky has been asking after you.”
Dankovsky sighed again, and again it seemed to take more from him than air. Colour, or resolve. He stood, still, beneath Burakh’s hand; whatever tremor had whispered through him before was silent now.
“Really,” he said. “She called me a snake, the last time I was there.”
Burakh’s smile sparked against that, stronger than before. So few people seemed to have that power nowadays, to find the fire in him. His children, of course, and, to his surprise, always to his surprise, the man before him.
Always a surprise, the man before him. There was so much they had not had a chance to learn about each other in the hectic, bloody war against the sand pest.
“She has her own ways of showing affection,” he said. “I believe she had more questions she wanted to ask you about vivisection.”
And there it was. So faint it could have been a trick of light dancing on the frost, but he knew the tug of the other man’s lips, the brief shadow of an answering smile.
Barely, but there.
“Very well,” Dankovsky relented. “Far be it from me to frustrate a young girl’s fascination with the medical arts.”
“You’ll be there, then?”
Barely. All too brief. The smile faded, and Dankovsky stared, again, as if hearing a call from somewhere else. Frowned, as if trying to understand what it was saying, but nodded.
Deep and firm, and Burakh squeezed his shoulder before letting his hand fall away.
“Good,” he said. “Then I’ll see you at sundown.”
Dankovsky nodded once more. Started forward, and this time Burakh made no move to stop him.
He stood aside, and watched, instead, as the other man made his way down the street. The light shimmered and licked at the scales of his coat, and broke winter-frail across the bowed line of his shoulders.
Head lowered. Still walking as though he didn’t quite know where he was going.
But he would be there at sundown. Burakh trusted in that, just as he trusted the dreams to fade over time.
The dreams, the fear. It could be done, he was sure. It could all be healed in the end. It would be slow, it would hurt, it would have to start without pride, but someday...
He turned away from watching. To the opposite stretch of silence, the bright and clear that led towards the Earth district and home. His children- still so strange a phrase- his children, his home. His life, and all the work to be done if they were going to be ready for a guest by sundown.