The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  No words were exchanged as she stalked out of the room. Nothing more than a pointed glance was offered from Rezca to Yerk, Yerk to Denaos. The vote had been cast, the decision made. Whatever plan they came up with from this point, Anielle would endure.

  Or cut their throats in the night. Desperate circumstances, after all.

  Yerk followed, the glow of his cigarillo heralding his passage as he slipped into the shadows. Rezca rose last, turning to likewise vanish, and instead hesitating at the edge of the lantern’s glow.

  “You’ve become accustomed to the city, priestess,” he said without looking back. “I assume you’re aware of its history? With the riots?”

  She nodded. “I am.”

  “Then you are no doubt aware of how many died in a single night, how many more in the city suffered in the months that followed.”

  Her voice quavered a little when she spoke again. “I am.”

  Rezca let out a low hum. “Understand, priestess, that we long ago ceased to be a gang. Today we are a business, like any fasha, and we are expedient. They rule by suggesting what terrible things might happen if they did not, we rule by showing. This plan of yours falls… outside of our nature.”

  “I’m sure you can do it.”

  “As am I.” His words came out on a sigh that belonged to a far older man than he. He raised a hand as he walked out of the light. “Remove her.”

  The two Jackals behind her moved forward, one of them withdrawing a black cloth. Asper stiffened as he draped it over her eyes, but did not resist beyond offering a pointed glance to Denaos before he tied the blindfold tight. A pointed glance that did not go unnoticed.

  “I’ll take it from here, boys,” he said, holding up a hand.

  The two Jackals exchanged looks before glancing back at him. “Rezca said that the wartime protocol—”

  “If this were a war, Rezca wouldn’t be agreeing to this plan,” Denaos said. “He’s not a general, this isn’t a fortress, and you still do what I say, understand?”

  “Yeah,” the Jackal said, stepping away from Asper. “Sure, Ramaniel. Whatever you say.”

  He waited until they had left before reaching down to take Asper’s hand. Hers shot out first, finding his grip despite her blindfold. Her fingers eased neatly into his, he noted; hands like hers shouldn’t be so familiar with hands like his. Hers sutured wounds shut, applied balms, set broken bones. And his…

  His polished antiques and left them in dark rooms.

  They walked in silence.

  She never asked him about the name Ramaniel. She never asked him who that man was, whom that man had killed. She never asked him why Anielle had spoken that name as if it should be whispered in the dark. She never asked him who Denaos was, whether he was a man or a lie, which one of those names had more blood on it.

  She never asked him, because she knew he wouldn’t tell her, not unless she needed to know.

  She trusted him.

  And that she did made him want to vomit.

  It was only when he guided her to the door, only when her words disappeared between the creaks of the hinges, that she spoke.

  “He called it ‘the city.’”

  He paused, glanced at her. “What?”

  “Rezca. He called it ‘the city,’ not ‘my city’ or ‘our city.’ He’s been living here longer than you, hasn’t he?”

  “Yeah, well…” Denaos guided her out into a cramped alley between two looming houses. “Neither of us belong here. And if you hadn’t noticed his skin, we’ve got more than just that in common.”

  “He’s northern. I get that,” she said. “But the others talk about him like he’s in charge. Surely he’s got some connection to Cier’Djaal.”

  That wasn’t a question, Denaos noted. Fortunate, since he didn’t feel like answering. She was searching for justification, a reason why it was necessary that she had reached out to a gang of murderers for help. He wasn’t about to tell her.

  That would be a conversation for a god with keener ears than Silf.

  Summer had been waning for the last week, yet as he guided her out from the alley and into the run-down neighborhood of the old city, the air was stifling. Somewhere far away, homes were on fire. Somewhere too far to hear, the Karnerians and Sainites were clashing again. And between here and there lay a string of corpses.

  “How many?”

  The question came suddenly. He didn’t even know it was his mouth speaking it when he heard it. Yet when Asper paused and tilted her head toward him, the rest came easily.

  “How many people have you taken in?”

  She didn’t answer. Not until he had taken in a breath of warm air, tasted a tinge of smoke.

  “Injured,” she asked, “or dead?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned away from him. “The two hundred twenty-seventh person injured was brought in just before I left to see you here. By the time I was out the door, he was the four hundred eighty-ninth we sent to be cremated.”

  Silence descended over them like a cloud. Denaos held the smoke in his mouth, his breath caught in his throat. In the absence of sound, he thought he could hear, somewhere far away, the sound of war.

  Asper moved to remove the blindfold.

  “Not yet,” he said suddenly. “There are a pair of crossbows trained on you right now. Turn a quarter to the right.” She did so and he nodded. “Count fifty paces, then take it off. Take the first left you see and it’ll take you back to the Souk. You can find your way from there?”

  She nodded. Her face looked toward him, as though she wanted to tell him something, as though she could see him through the blindfold. But she said nothing, instead marching off as directed.

  Of course, she couldn’t see through that blindfold.

  Of course.

  And had she seen that his knees had shaken so badly that he’d had to lean against the wall to keep from buckling over and vomiting out on the streets?

  Of course not, he told himself. If she had, she’d realize what a fucking mistake she’d made. If she had, she’d realize the idiocy of asking us to clean up this war when we were the ones who started it. If she had, she’d realize just how fucking stupid it is to think that the Jackals can stop people from dying.

  Something rose in his gullet. He held it down under his tongue until he felt it might just burst out his throat. Slowly it subsided. He swallowed bile, tasted acid in his nostrils. His breath came in slow and sweltering.

  Ah, well, he said to himself. Cut her some slack. Yourself, too. He closed his eyes. No need to worry too much. Four hundred eighty-nine dead. Last time this happened, you killed at least twice that.

  EIGHT

  A MATTER OF GRIT

  Now, I know you shaved your head and all, but I feel like I’d be poor company if I didn’t point out that the wanted posters were not wholly artistically inaccurate. The person that notices your scars or that brutish slope of your jaw is bound to recognize you. I trust you realize that this is not a wise idea?”

  “Yep.”

  “I trust, then, that you also realize that your flimsy excuse of going out for supplies is pure rot. Even if it weren’t midnight, the couthi has already taken care of all that you’ll need on the journey to the Gullet.”

  “Yep.”

  There was a long sigh.

  “I trust, then, that I’m wasting my breath?”

  Lenk didn’t bother answering that. Mocca had known him long enough now to know when his silence was final. Or perhaps he just peered into Lenk’s mind and saw that he wouldn’t answer.

  Whichever, if it meant he could move through the dusty streets of Jalaang in silence, so much the better.

  In his defense, the idea of going out to search for supplies at midnight was only mostly rot. This was a city born of the same loins that had birthed Cier’Djaal, after all. The streets of Jalaang weren’t quite asleep, with a few hardworking—or particularly desperate—merchants manning a few stalls or storefronts here and there in the shadow of guard
barracks. And those souls currently trudged through the streets, necks bent as though the sun were still beating down on them.

  Though it was hard to deny Mocca’s point.

  Even now he saw a few posters bearing his visage on the walls. The hair was still the most striking thing about it, but anyone who looked closely enough would be able to figure out his identity.

  It would have been much safer to sit in the middle of the modest room the couthi had rented him, completely alone in a perfectly silent room with nothing to keep him company but his thoughts.

  Which made the possibility of being recognized as a murderer infinitely preferable.

  Men like him were ill suited to thinking. Men who carried swords looked no farther than the tips of them. Men like him were better suited to living hilt to blade, cut to cut, body to body.

  For when things grew silent enough to think, those bodies would be his sole company.

  Here, at least, he was moving. Here every eye cast his way held suspicion. Here he was surrounded by enemies he had yet to make, blades that had yet to be drawn.

  Who could possibly think about Kataria in a place like this?

  Ah, shit.

  The memory of her gnawed at the back of his skull, a wound yet to heal. Every time his thoughts drifted from the weight of his sword on his back, his mind filled with the memory of the last stare she had given him.

  Surely, if the slow-moving gentleman in front of him had known this, he would have understood why Lenk coarsely shoved him out of the way.

  “I can understand that you care little enough for yourself,” Mocca said, glancing over his shoulder as the man stumbled and cursed, “but that’s hardly reason to violate the social contract.”

  “Shut up,” Lenk snapped in answer to both Mocca and the aggrieved man as he stalked into darker streets.

  “My, but we get snippy when we’re in emotional turmoil, don’t we?” In the blink of an eye, Mocca was suddenly beside Lenk, keeping pace with him despite a leisurely stride.

  “If you were more than a ghost,” Lenk muttered, “I’d show you more steel than snip.”

  “I’m a mental vision sent far from hell and thrust directly into your head to be made manifest through your thoughts,” Mocca replied. “Not a ghost. Don’t be absurd.”

  “There are other words for you, you know. Shorter, less kind words.”

  “Vulgarity remains the fool’s imitation of conversation,” Mocca said. “Sheffu’s relative education affords him no more distinction than that of your average rube.” He cast a sidelong grin at Lenk. “What’s he told you about me, anyway?”

  “That you were a tyrant and a murderer before you were sent to hell,” he replied. “That you reigned over mortals as a god and made them thralls to your will, that you treated them as so much chattel and swine and, before you were cast down into hell, you were—”

  “Point being,” Mocca interjected, “amongst the insipid drama, any actual knowledge might very well be lost. The tales know me as God-King, but make no mention as to how I came to carry the title.”

  “What? You were elected God-King?” Lenk asked, eyeing him warily.

  “Divinity is democracy, Lenk,” he replied. “No god can rule a man without his express consent. I offered mortalkind nothing that any other god would not. I offered them cures to their diseases. I brought order to end their violence. They lived in fear of the night and its many horrors, I promised them light.”

  “Then why were you cast down?” Lenk asked. “Why did the gods throw you into hell?”

  “Because,” Mocca said, “I did what they could not. I kept my promises.”

  Lenk forced his eyes ahead as he turned down an alley. “I’ve fought demons before, you know. Everything that crawls out of hell tells the same story: They’re the victims of petty gods and the world’s unfair.”

  “Would that not suggest we have a point?” Mocca asked.

  “Or that lying is common to all of you,” Lenk snapped. “And even if you were victims, I’ve never met a demon that spared much thought for a mortal life. It’s your Khovura that are running rampant in Cier’Djaal, killing people.”

  “The Khovura are not mine. They are the destitute and desperate, the impoverished and in pain, those who were so betrayed by fashas, betrayed by gods, betrayed by their own city that they would turn to demons for salvation.”

  “But you—”

  “Look at yourself, Lenk.” Mocca’s voice was cold as a wind blowing over a corpse. “You’re running. You’re terrified. You have every right to be. Cier’Djaal burns now, but it was dying long before the Karnerians and Sainites came. The fashas have heaped so much filth upon the people that they choke on it. Shicts fight tulwar, tulwar kill couthi, everyone hates humans. This world screams out in pain and no one in heaven is listening.”

  He held his arms out wide in helpless demonstration.

  “What could I possibly do to it that it hasn’t done to itself?”

  There was a dearth of arrogance in Mocca’s voice. In its wake a sadness rimmed his eyes, something soft and dark as nightfall. His frown was deep, his shoulders slumped under the weight of a helplessness unbecoming of a god-king.

  Lenk resented that. The arrogance of the demons was legendary. Arrogance he had been prepared for. But no legend spoke of empathy in demons. No legend told him what to do if one of them actually had a valid point.

  But they were still just words. And Mocca was still just a demon. And there was no shortage of demons among the carcasses Lenk had left behind him. A demon was a creature of lies, of empty promises, of a thousand names. And Lenk had mind for only one name.

  Farlan Sandish. Immigrant from Nivoire. Owned a small rice paddy on the very edge of the Green Belt.

  It was for Farlan that Lenk didn’t answer. It was for Farlan that Lenk turned away from Mocca and began to walk down a dirty alley.

  He had scarcely taken ten steps when he saw what he thought was a heap of rags and garbage stir beside him. Garbage, though, rarely carried bowls and spoke.

  “Alms, sir?” The beggar extended a skinny, pale arm without looking up. Thin fingers clutched a wooden pendant carved to resemble a holy phoenix, along with his bowl. “Talanas smiles on those who exemplify his mercy.”

  Perhaps it was that the man’s voice sounded so familiar that caused Lenk not to answer. And perhaps it was Lenk’s lack of an answer that made the man finally look up. His skin, though covered in grime, distinctly had the pale tinge of a northerner’s. His hair, though slathered in dust, was fair and coarse. This was no Djaalic.

  And instantly Lenk recognized him. He had met this man, so long ago it could have been a dream. But he remembered this man, back in the Souk, back before any of this had happened.

  This man had said he was from Steadbrook, a village that had been turned to a pile of ash that Lenk had crawled out of. And once he realized that Lenk had come from the same place, he had screamed with a horror in his eyes.

  The same kind of horror that was now dawning upon him as he recognized who was talking to him.

  “Demon!” he screamed now, as he had screamed then, leaping to his feet. “DEMON!”

  He whirled to run. Lenk’s hand shot out, seized him by the back of his collar, and jerked him back. The man had a bit of height on him, but his body was frail and filthy, and when Lenk slammed him against the wall of the building, he heard something crack.

  “I told you,” Mocca said with a sigh. “Did I not tell you?”

  “Shut up,” Lenk snarled over his shoulder.

  “Ah, I must have done something so gloriously amazing to have pissed off the gods like this,” the beggar chuckled. “Fled the north to escape you and found Cier’Djaal, fled Cier’Djaal to escape the war and found you.”

  “You don’t say a fucking word.” Lenk pressed his forearm against his throat. “If I get any hint of you going to any guard, any shopkeep, even thinking about telling someone who I am, I’ll gut you where you stand.”

  The
beggar’s eyes were cold, appraising. He stared Lenk down with a hard glance and spoke with a harder voice. “Aye,” he muttered, breathing shallowly. “And you would, wouldn’t you? A killer of your renown wouldn’t bat an eye over another corpse in his wake, let alone a dead beggar.”

  “I didn’t do this,” Lenk said. “I didn’t start this war.”

  “An entire city says otherwise. You expect me to believe you over them?”

  Lenk spared a glance for his filthy clothing. “Looks like they didn’t give much of a shit about you.”

  “There I was just scum,” the beggar replied. “No one bothers scum. No one minds when scum goes fleeing because no one minded that scum was there in the first place. But here I’m just someone waiting to die, like all the others who fled.” He sniffed. “I preferred being scum.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you want to be or what you are once I leave,” Lenk said, “so long as you’re quiet about it. You never breathe a word of this and whoever kills you won’t be me.”

  “You expect me to believe that?” The beggar laughed bitterly. “Scum doesn’t look down on much, but everyone spits on the word of a murderer.”

  “I told you I didn’t—”

  “I’m not speaking of Cier’Djaal,” the beggar snapped back. “I’m not speaking of everyone who’s died in there or all the people who will. I’m speaking of your first handiwork. I’m speaking of Steadbrook.”

  Steadbrook.

  The village he’d been born in that had played host to a life he couldn’t remember, full of parents without faces, friends without names, and loves and lives that he had spent a very long time trying to not think about.

  Somehow it had never seemed real until he heard the name spoken aloud.

  He knew all the things he should think when he heard it: toil in the fields, the scent of manure, awkward fumbling beneath a girl’s skirt at a harvest festival, the scent of tobacco that clung to him whenever he sat down in his grandfather’s chair.

  But when he heard the name, when he closed his eyes, all he saw was shadow and flame and all the smoke and screams that had come with it.