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It was a long shift. In every sense of the word.
Telimezh hadn’t been in any shape to go back on duty after he had woken up, with Cala Athmaza leaning over him anxiously and Lieutenant Beshelar white-faced and flat-eared on the other side; he had been confused and thick-tongued and barely able to comprehend their questions, other than the most important part: the Emperor is missing. Everything had hurt. His stumbling description of the last thing he remembered - a burst of black stars in front of his eyes, and the strange sensation of falling and floating at the same time - had only been enough to deepen the frowns on their faces, until Csevet Aisava had rushed into the room shouting something and they had leaped up and run after him.
Teli had just about managed to drag himself to sit up against the Imperial bedpost - surely some kind of blasphemy - when someone came back in to reassure him that the Emperor was safe. They had helped him wobble to his feet and back down to the Second Nohecharei quarters where he could collapse into a heap.
On the way, they told him what Dazhis had done.
He’d lain down on his bed and turned his face to the wall of his room and stared blankly at it for three eternities, but it hadn’t made any more sense at the end of it.
Once he had regained enough control of his limbs to walk without falling flat on his face, he had dragged himself back up to the Imperial apartments and tried to resign, because that seemed like the only thing left to do. The Emperor hadn’t let him. But Dazhis was gone, so they couldn’t go on shift - except, he realised the next morning when he woke with the louring headache unchanged but his thoughts somewhat more coherent, that meant that Beshelar and Cala had been on duty for something close to thirty hours straight by now-
So he and his new partner Kiru Athmaza had taken a double shift as their very first, a full sixteen hours to give the Firsts time to recover. The pain in his temples had settled in for the long haul, and his muscles ached like he had run back-to-back marathons, and it had taken every ounce of his energy and discipline to stay alert through the meetings and hearings and interviews…
And through knowing, every heartbeat, that at the end of the day there would be Dazhis.
It was the oath. The Emperor’s distress at his treachery was obvious; Cala had even said, low-voiced and red-eyed as they handed over shifts in the morning, that His Serenity’s first impulse had been to petition for clemency. But the oath allowed no clemency, no leniency. Dazhis had betrayed his Emperor, he had betrayed his partner, and he had betrayed the gods themselves. He was forsworn. He had chosen to be. There could be no other way.
And so he had watched his partner’s blood spread across the ground of the courtyard, and felt…
Nothing. Everything. Numb.
Telimezh was very determinedly not thinking about it. He was silent after they finally handed back over to the First Nohecharei in the early hours of the morning and walked to the apartments they now shared, and Kiru Athmaza didn’t press him. She must have been exhausted as well; her first day on the job, and he remembered well the whirlwind when he had been chosen as Second Nohecharis. Almost no warning before his life had abruptly upended. No doubt it had been the same for her.
They reached the Second Nohecharei apartments and she bowed to him, serious and perhaps a little awkward. He bowed back, automatically, and then realised that she was waiting for him to open the door, because she didn’t have a key yet. Of course she didn’t. They had gone on shift immediately, there had been no time for her to collect one - and possibly Dazhis’ had been taken with the rest of his belongings when they brought him to the Mazan’theileian, and-
He shook himself and fumbled to open the door, while Kiru gracefully pretended not to notice him almost dropping the key.
“Whose is the Var’evar board?” she asked, nodding back at the antechamber outside, her voice holding nothing more than mild curiosity.
“Oh. Ours. I mean, Cala and I- well, it’s my board, but we were…”
The antechamber linked the First and Second Nohecharei apartments; he didn’t even remember whose idea it had been, to set up the board there and start a very slow-motion game. One move per shift change. Cala was winning. Teli owed him a move from two days ago.
Kiru raised an eyebrow. “How long does a game take?”
“We’ll let you know when we’ve finished. Five weeks so far.”
She chuckled and wandered over to examine the pieces. “Hm. You’re playing white?”
“Black.”
“Hah!” She looked across at him, amusement in her eyes. “Will do him good to get beaten once in a while. He was insufferable in the Athmaz’are. Oh, not because he gloated,” she added, smiling fondly. “If anything, a little gloating would have made it more tolerable for everyone. He’d walk all over you without even noticing. When he won he always seemed surprised by it.”
Teli managed to get the door open. “I’m not beating him.”
“Hmm.” She didn’t sound convinced, but she didn’t wait for him to protest again before she had walked into the main room and put her hands on her hips. “Well, this is nice. I would have argued even harder to be allowed to contend for the position if I’d known I’d get a room upgrade with it.”
“You… weren’t permitted to contend?”
She darted a startled glance at him, and then her expression softened. “Ah, right, of course, you weren’t there when - yes. I was passed over the first time. Men only,” she said, with a wry tilt of her ears, “until they got desperate. Csaivo only knows I’ve heard that song before.” She waved a hand, dismissive. “Politics.”
“Ah.” Telimezh closed the door, uncertain of what else to say. Women didn’t serve in the Guard; he’d known that they did sometimes manifest mazeise talents, but he’d never even heard of a female dachenmaza - a dachenmazo? - before that morning. There was no reason against it, he supposed, but he’d always just vaguely assumed they didn’t exist. Didn’t have the required talent, or just weren’t trained when they did.
Kiru had a neutral name. He wondered how many other dachenmazei had hidden their sex behind the same simple ambiguity. Maybe they’d been there in the history books all along.
She had sunk gratefully into one of the chairs by the fire, sighing with relief. “Oh, that feels good. I’m used to being on my feet a lot in the hospital, but not quite so much standing still while I’m at it,” she said, as Teli hesitated before going to take the other chair. Truth be told, he would rather have just gone straight to his bed to collapse, but… well, actually, he wasn’t sure what he would rather. Not having to think about anything at all seemed preferable, but he wasn’t confident that staring at the ceiling in his room alone wouldn’t be just as bad as it had been the day before. And he didn’t want to be rude, especially since…
Oh, gods, and there went the thinking again. He had always thought too much. They had made him an officer because he thought too much. It hadn’t helped.
“Our shifts aren’t usually that long,” he said, more of an attempt at distracting himself than anything else. His head throbbed in agreement with his feet. “Eight hours, generally.”
“That seems much more reasonable,” she said. “I apologise in advance; I’m going to be relying on you rather heavily to show me the ropes for the next few days. The parts someone has cared to write down, those I know, but for everything else…”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. I realise you-” She paused, her ears flicking just a little. “Hm. Would you prefer if we used thee?”
Dazhis hadn’t even asked; he had started thee’ing him as soon as they went off shift the first time - and when Teli had looked at him, startled, he had shrugged and said that they may as well start as they meant to go on, and that if you couldn’t thee a man you had just sworn half of your life and all of your death to, who could you? And Teli had swallowed his discomfort and told himself that likely it was different in the Athmaz’are - of course it was, they didn’t even have last names, and what did rank mean to a maza other than which of us could upend reality with a gesture - and that he was right, anyway, it was ridiculous to maintain formality with someone you’d sworn to bind yourself to for the rest of your days.
The rest of one of your days, anyway.
He had asked Dazhis whether he thought Beshelar and Cala thee’d each other, a few days later when the strangeness of it still hadn’t worn off, and Dazhis had snorted and said that First Nohecharis Lieutenant Deret Beshelar probably didn’t thee his own mother. Teli remembered with a sharp stab of guilt that he had laughed.
Kiru was watching him, green eyes thoughtful, and then she smiled a little and shook her head. “Thank the gods. This is all a little strange for me too, I don’t want to make it stranger. No doubt there’ll be a point when it doesn’t feel like being a child shoved into a playground and told to make friends.”
He almost smiled - he would have smiled, if his nerves hadn’t been shot and shredded and jangling like wind chimes in a storm. Thankfully, Kiru didn’t seem to require him to; she was looking around the room thoughtfully, studying the almost-bare bookshelves where the mazei had come the day before to unceremoniously throw all of Dazhis’ belongings into a chest and haul them away. Teli had tried not to show how heavily he was leaning on the table while he answered their rapid-fire questions - this? Was this his? What about this?
He had almost told them that all of the books were Dazhis’, because he would have to pack them away himself once the Emperor dismissed him, and surely the Athmaz’are had better uses for his meagre collection of histories and biographies than a disgraced former guard would have. The thought of opening Great Tacticians of the Ethuveraz Unification - of reading about every brilliant commander and soldier who hadn’t failed in their most basic function - had made him feel almost physically sick. Mostly he had spent the entire time wishing, fervently, that they would go away and leave him to his misery in peace.
“Tea?” Kiru startled him out of himself. He almost jumped to his feet, except he couldn’t quite manage it, his reflexes and his muscles still sluggish and stupid enough that he got about halfway before she had waved him back down.
“Sorry, I should have-” Should have offered first, he knew, should be showing her around her new quarters and making her feel welcome and-
“Oh, nonsense, you should be staying right where you are, Lieutenant. The day you’ve had. Well, two days.” She scoffed. “I know maz. It’ll be another day or so before the muscle aches go down, and- oh, actually, I should have thought, I’ll have something for the headache. Not maz,” she added, with a quick, sharp glance at him. “Just some herbs.”
“I…” He battled himself for a moment. Gods above, he’d just sworn eternal loyalty to her and her to him, and he couldn’t even trust her with tea? “Thank you. I… that’s kind of you.”
Kiru gave him a narrow look from where she was filling the kettle with water. “I imagine this isn’t easy for you.”
He could feel himself flushing. “I didn’t mean to imply-”
“You were rather put on the spot this morning, but if you find it uncomfortable to serve alongside-”
“No!” He startled himself; Kiru didn’t even flinch, but she cocked her head curiously at him. “No- sorry, that’s not… I don’t… it’s…” Get a hold of thyself, Teli. “It’s nothing like that. Actually, I think it helps. That you’re not… not like him. But…”
“Ah.” She finished fiddling with their tiny stove and leaned back against the countertop. “I understand.” She looked thoughtful for a moment, and then seemed to come to a decision and came across the room to drag the other chair to face his and then hold out both hands. “Forgive me, but perhaps it’s best to get this out in the open now.”
He took her hands, cautiously: work-roughened and cool, and her grip was firm.
“I know it will be very hard to trust me, Telimezh. I know you trusted Dazhis. I know he swore the same oaths I did. And he betrayed those oaths, and he betrayed that trust. And that was no fault of yours, not to question it, because those oaths should be beyond question, but I understand that your faith in your judgement is shaken.”
Her eyes were very green.
“So I do not ask for your trust, but instead I ask that you give me an opportunity to earn it. Allow yourself an opportunity to give it. And I swear to never abuse it. I swear that I will not betray you, by word or deed or dereliction, and I swear by Csaivo that I will never - never - cast maz on you without your explicit and free consent. Not of any kind. Not for any reason.”
His eyes had blurred; he swallowed, hard, to keep the tightness in his throat at bay. He should answer - he should say something, but everything seemed to have been chased from his mind. Kiru studied his face for a moment, thoughtful, and then released his hands and sat back.
“Do you want to know? About what he did?”
Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact, her ears neutral. Telimezh felt his heart thumping uncomfortably in his chest. Did he want to know? He hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask Dazhis, the day before - hadn’t been able to say almost anything through the blinding rage and pain and guilt that had welled up in him as soon as they had closed the door behind the Emperor and Dazhis had looked up at him and finally met his eyes.
He’d eventually managed to choke out his question - was it always a lie - and Dazhis, white-faced, had shaken his head and whispered, last week. Telimezh wasn’t sure whether it had helped, to know that it had been in good faith at the start. At least he hadn’t been wrong then, even if he’d had a week - a whole week - of failing to notice the stain on his partner’s soul.
But Dazhis hadn’t apologised for not telling him, and he hadn’t apologised for the maz. Thou wouldst have tried to stop me, he said, and they would have killed thee if I hadn’t-
You would have killed me, Telimezh had said, the words crackling and ripped out of him by some greater force than his own will. You would have killed us. Beshelar and Cala too. Did you think our oaths were worth as little as yours were?
Dazhis started crying again, then. They wouldn’t, he managed, between gasps. He would have gone to a monastery, to live in seclusion-
Did you really believe that?
Perhaps he had. Dazhis, Dachenmaza of the Athmaz’are, was not a man accustomed to having to give something so trivial as reality all that much consideration in his plans. He had seen something that he wanted, and people - powerful people, people he had probably told himself were his trusted superiors - had promised him a simple, clear path to get it, and told him that there wouldn’t be anything so inconvenient as consequences to deal with… and so he had let himself believe them and he hadn’t bothered to question it. Why would he? It suited him to believe them.
He had made Telimezh feel a blind fool, but that crime, at least, they shared: they had both been unforgivably naïve.
“Yes,” he said, slowly, “Yes, I want to know,” and Kiru nodded once and then got up from her chair to pour out the kettle into the teapot and collect a pair of mugs to bring over and place on the table beside her chair.
“It was a soporific cantrip - one that makes the target fall asleep. Well, unconscious is closer to the truth, since they can’t be woken until it wears off or someone negates the spell. An unusual class of maz, because the effects on the caster and the target are dependent on the target’s own resistance to the spell even if they have no maz themselves. We use them quite frequently in the hospital, but never on an unwilling subject, because the side effects in that case get quite… unpleasant.” She gave him a wry smile. “As I’m sure you’ve noticed. He wasn’t in the room with you when it took effect, was he?”
“No. I- I don’t think so.”
Kiru nodded. “It’s a complicated cast - at least a minute of maz-work, so not effective in combat. He wouldn’t have been able to cast it without you noticing if you’d been in the same room. And it requires the caster to be in contact with the target, so I’d imagine he had taken something of you - a few strands of hair, most likely - to allow him to cast without touching you directly. Maz like that requires sympathy, proximity, and physicality,” she said, briskly, ticking them off on her fingers. “Any one lacking requires more power behind the maz to compensate. A single room apart was probably the limit of his strength, particularly given your evident attempts to resist it.”
She leaned back in her chair. “Muscle aches, headache, disorientation. The harder the target fights, the longer they feel the effects. A day or so would be typical for a healthy subject who was aware and didn’t want to go down.”
Telimezh stared at her, letting the words sink in. It’s been two days.
“Yes, exactly,” she said, as if she had read the words in his face. “I’m told that he was not in attendance when the Emperor was being, ah, pressured. Most likely the overchannel laid him low for a few hours. I can’t say I’m sorry.” She checked the teapot and then poured out both mugs and handed one to him; he took it automatically, cradling it between his hands. “Maz is rather complex to explain if you can’t feel it yourself, but it might help to think of these kinds of spells as like a bow being drawn and shot. While you are casting - like drawing the bow back - you get a sense of the strength you’ll need to reach the target. And then once you’ve put enough power in, you let it go, and then there’s nothing anyone can do. There really was nothing you could have done,” she repeated, firmly, holding his gaze. “Any more than you could catch an arrow once it had been loosed directly at you.”
“So when you said that I tried to resist…?”
“He would have sensed it during the casting. You wouldn’t. The bow is a decent metaphor, but that part is… hm, as if he was guessing your weight by looking at you. The more you weigh, the more he had to put on the scales to be enough.” She pulled a face. “The more resistant he sensed you would be in the instant of the spell going off, the more power he had to put in. The metaphor is rather falling apart at this point.”
“Like… guessing how good someone’s armour is?” hazarded Telimezh. “So how much power the shot needs to pierce it?”
“Yes! Better. Good.” She smiled at him. “We’ll muddle through. You resisted hard, which in this metaphor means you had very thick armour, so he had to use a lot of power in the casting to be sure it would go through. Hence the headache.” She blew on her tea before taking a sip, and he didn’t ask how she had known that the pain was still throbbing gently in his temples. “The tea should help.”
Teli tried it and winced at the clash of flavours. His family had always believed in the principle that the worse it tasted, the more effective the cure - which surely meant this one would work. He forced himself to take a larger gulp.
She poured hers from the same pot, he realised suddenly.
“Well, it certainly tastes medicinal,” he said, watching her, and she met his eyes with a mischievous little lift to her mouth that told him she knew exactly what he had guessed. “Thank you.” He almost felt like smiling himself. “You don’t have to actually drink it, although I do appreciate the gesture.”
She laughed. “Maybe I just like the flavour.”
He realised abruptly that for the first time since it had happened, he felt like he could breathe easily again. Such a little thing: wordlessly drinking unpleasant tea, just so that he would feel comfortable drinking it himself, so that it could take the pain away. A small, quiet kindness, with no expectation it would even be noticed.
He had barely been able to think since it had all happened that he had a new partner, let alone worry about what sort of person it would be. But her words had lifted a weight he hadn’t realised had settled on his shoulders - I wasn’t a pushover, an afterthought, an easy target - and her actions felt like a cool hand on a feverish forehead.
“I think we’ll do alright, Lieutenant Telimezh,” Kiru Athmaza said, softly, and he managed finally to give her a wavering smile in return.