The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  The real victories left scars.

  Daaru, in that moment, was alive with fury. His body shook beneath the fur, his lips were peeled back in a baring of simian fangs, and his face exploded with colors. And yet his hands hung at his sides, his feet stayed where they were, and he took not another step toward Gariath.

  He held the dragonman’s gaze for another moment before storming over to where Kudj slept. He reached up to the vulgore’s prodigious gut and snatched his son up in both arms.

  “Pada?” Duja muttered groggily. “What are we—”

  “You come inside,” Daaru snarled. “Your mother is worried.”

  “But Pada, my friend, he—”

  “He’s not your friend. He’s gaacha.”

  “Stranger?”

  “Gaacha.” Daaru pushed open the curtain to his house and hesitated, casting one final scowl over his shoulder at Gariath. “We speak Tong in this house.”

  His voice trailed off into murmurs as he disappeared into his house, words that died quietly in the night and left behind a cold quiet. A breeze lazily wended its way through the choked streets, eventually finding its way to Gariath.

  And its reek was overpowering.

  ELEVEN

  THE THRILL OF PAIN

  Well, that ain’t good,” the woman beside her said.

  Kataria considered those words and found them an adequate description for what she saw.

  It had once been a village: a collection of small huts built upon the banks of the Lyre, a couple of boats and roughhewn docks leading over the water. The people here had likely been simple folk, hard workers who drew their lifeblood from the river and its many fish. They would have been rugged to have lived this far out, coming in from the day’s fishing, bone-tired but not so much that they couldn’t cook what they’d caught for their families.

  So she assumed, anyway.

  Whatever they had been, they were dead now.

  A single dead tree grew from the center of the village and they decorated it. Tulwar men and women, their fur spattered with blood and their clothing torn, hung by their ankles from the branches. Their throats had been slit, their blood left to stain the earth around the tree’s roots. They swayed stiffly in the breeze, tongues lolling from open mouths, forever choking on their last cries.

  Their huts were piles of ash and rubble, smoldering carcasses that exhausted their last sighs of smoke into the wind. Their boats were splintered bones in the water. The ground was painted with the inky shadows of vultures that had yet to descend.

  “You seen this before?”

  Kataria glanced to the saccarii to her right, a woman named Chemoi: a scrawny creature, scaly flesh mostly bare in her half shirt and breeches, ochre eyes peering out from a head wrap.

  “Yeah,” the shict replied. “We call them white trees.”

  “That ain’t make much sense,” the saccarii said.

  “Not yet,” Kataria said. “After a few days, once all the blood’s drained out, the corpses go pallid and pale. Then they get picked at by scavengers until only bones remain.” She sniffed. “White tree.”

  “Huh.” The saccarii looked out from the deck atop the Old Man. “That’s fucked up.”

  Kataria was careful to conceal her grin. She couldn’t help it; she had described white trees to companions before. After being met so many times with vomit, it was kind of refreshing to see a reaction so mild.

  “Always wondered why they did that,” Chemoi said. “To be honest, I was hoping we wouldn’t see something like that.”

  “Why? You got a weak stomach?”

  “I’ve seen too many dead tulwar on this river to be much afraid of them,” Chemoi grunted. “But if the shicts are up in Chee Chree territory, that’s bad news.”

  “Chee Chree?”

  “Tulwar clan. The poor bastards bleeding out there. When times are bad for the shicts, the shicts come out here to trade. When times are good, they feel like flexing a bit and come out here to raid. Usually just steal stuff and kill a few tulwar.”

  Kataria stared over the ruined village as the Old Man’s lumbering stride carried them past it.

  “Looks like they did a lot more than that,” she said.

  “Right,” Chemoi said. “Which means they must be feeling fucking great. Bad news for us.” She glanced sidelong at Kataria. “If it comes down to it, you think you could shake the shicts off for us?”

  “Maybe,” Kataria replied, shrugging. “I could try, anyway.”

  “Ain’t like that answer,” Chemoi grunted. “But I like it better than your bald friend’s. He just shrugs. He any handy with that sword?”

  “He does his best.”

  Chemoi shook her head. She stalked off, muttering. “Bad, bad news…”

  Kataria couldn’t help but give the saccarii credit; not many people got right back to work after witnessing a white tree. But Chemoi immediately started barking orders to the several other saccarii scrambling across the deck of the Old Man.

  They called themselves its crew, though she wasn’t quite sure what they did. They didn’t seem to have any control over the colossal creature. Most of their duties seemed to involve picking things off its hide, speaking soft words to it, and making sure cargo was distributed evenly across its back. They seemed to concern themselves mostly with its comfort, which, she supposed, was what a crew did.

  And she couldn’t imagine war-hungry shicts would be good for the Old Man.

  She turned and leaned on the railing, staring at the scorched village as it faded from view. Ordinarily she might have taken umbrage at a saccarii presuming to lecture her on shictish ways, but Chemoi had been dead-on.

  To a shict, trade was an insult, dealing with a diseased people—it didn’t matter whether tulwar or human, they were all diseased. Tribes did it as a last resort when game was scarce.

  War, though? War meant times were good. Warriors were strong, hunters were keen, arrows were plenty, and grudges could be settled. Shict tribes would happily wait through lean years, gorging themselves on dreams of fights to come in lieu of meat.

  But even in good times, shicts didn’t kill everyone. Even in good times, shicts left houses standing. They stole instead of broke, tore instead of burned, left villages intact so that their foes might come back and repopulate for the next raid in time of plenty or trade in the next lean year.

  Chemoi understood enough to know that shicts who burned were ready for war. But what she didn’t understand—and what Kataria could not bring herself to tell her—was that shicts who burned a village to the ground did so because they could not see a need for those people to exist any longer.

  The tribes out here did not intend to make war. They intended to eradicate.

  She thought back to her night in Jalaang, the time she had spent with Kwar, the last few words they had exchanged. She had spoken of a new leader of the tribes out here, a name that was still lodged in Kataria’s skull like an arrow.

  Shekune.

  What had Kwar said about her? She tried to remember Kwar’s words, Kwar’s voice, the heat of Kwar’s breath, the feel of Kwar’s hands upon Kataria’s sides as they slid down to her hips and coaxed her breeches down, the sensation of Kwar’s lips as they—

  Oh, come on.

  Kataria thumped her skull with the heel of her hand, bit her lower lip, came up with a thousand curses in her head for her thoughts.

  Just as she did every time she thought of Kwar. Because every time she thought of Kwar, her thoughts inevitably slid to those moments.

  And her heart tightened inside her chest. Her thoughts became a river as sure-flowing as the Lyre beneath her. As they flowed to Kwar, soon after they flowed to shame. And shortly after shame, they inevitably floated to him.

  She turned and saw him as he stared out over the other side of the river, to the north. The distant peaks of the Akavali Mountains, the barrier between Cier’Djaal’s and Muraska’s countries, loomed large and silent against the blue backdrop. It was a vast, unchanging rang
e, the same snow-covered peaks rising and falling, over and over and over.

  It probably said something dire that Lenk preferred to look at this rather than talk to her.

  Or perhaps it was just him.

  The couthi, Man-Khoo Yun, leaned over him, whispering something from behind his portrait. Lenk, however, simply waved off whatever it was. And though it was impossible to tell what a couthi’s emotions might be, Kataria guessed by the way Man-Khoo Yun stiffened and stalked away that his couldn’t be great.

  And Kataria leaned on her elbows against the railing and stared at Lenk. Him, leaning forward, back bent from the weight of the sword on it. Him, scratching at the gray stubble growing in on his shorn pate.

  Go to him. Talk to him.

  The thoughts, whether born of guilt or of frustration, always came unbidden when she looked at him for more than a few moments. And, whether from fear or from sadness, she had done her best to avoid them, ignore them, bite them down between her canines and grind them to gristle and swallow them until they rested as iron weights in her belly.

  But she started walking toward him anyway. Mouth dry, chest hurting, ears trembling, she came to stand beside him. She leaned on the railing next to him, her arm brushed against his. He felt warm.

  She remembered a time when that feeling had not pained her.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He glanced at her. “Hey.”

  No other words. He continued staring out over the mountains. She followed his stare to those distant peaks. Together they stood in silence.

  She remembered a time when they had done this and it had not hurt to do so.

  “What’d the bug want?” she asked, at last.

  “Same shit.” Lenk waved a hand. “Warning me about shicts, tulwar, gaambols.”

  “What’s a gaambol?”

  “I don’t know.” He sighed, clutched his head. “I don’t know anything anymore, and the fact that I don’t is all that’s keeping me from realizing how fucked everything is.”

  He had never been a big man, or a powerful man. When she had first met him, he looked small, runty. Had she not seen the battles he’d walked away from, she would have thought he might break if she touched him. But she knew him. And so she smiled and laid a hand on his shoulder.

  And remembered a time when she’d done this and it hadn’t felt as if she were stabbing him in the back.

  “The couthi says there are no other human villages,” Lenk said. “From here it’s all tulwar clans. But there are a few small spits of beaches between here and there that can be landed upon. The saccarii say the Old Man sometimes stops there to pick up crates left behind by smugglers.” He stared out over the mountains. “It’s the last possible chance to get off before we enter the Gullet.”

  She regarded him for a moment. “You’re thinking of leaving?”

  “No.” His answer came swiftly, accompanied by a morbid chuckle. “Lenk might. But Farlan Sandish has a library of the damned to find. He can’t leave that behind.”

  And he turned. And he looked to her. And it hurt to meet his eyes.

  “But you could,” he said.

  He said it so simply. Almost as if he expected her to go leaping over the railing right then and there. And in his eyes she could see the fear that she would. In his eyes she knew they thought the same things. She was here for him, to protect him, to see him to the end of this. But he couldn’t ask that of her, couldn’t ask her to go with him into the unknown like this. They had done that together a hundred times before, but this time they both knew it was different, even if they didn’t know why.

  Or at least he didn’t know why.

  And just like that, he had given her a way out.

  Could it really be that easy, she wondered?

  If it wouldn’t doubtless have drawn attention to her, she would have burst out laughing right there.

  No, of course not. She couldn’t leave him. Not like that. Nor could she stay with him. Not like this. Leave him to die, hurt herself to stay, it was all so wonderfully, painfully, horribly hard.

  And that was funny.

  “Nah.” She shook her head. “I’m here. You’re helpless enough getting breakfast on your own, let alone finding a Library of the Lurid.”

  “Learned,” he corrected.

  “Whatever.” She shrugged. “Besides, how would they even stop this thing? They don’t seem to have a means of controlling it.”

  “You noticed that, too, huh?” Lenk glanced at a nearby saccarii. “I don’t get it. I mean, I don’t get how something this big even exists, let alone exists the way it does. I haven’t seen it eat or stop moving.”

  “Barely two weeks ago, you were fighting and killing some kind of horrific snake-demon-old-man-thing,” Kataria replied. “Seems a little late to start getting fussy about the weird things you see.”

  “That was a demon, though. Unnatural. This thing is…” He leaned over the railing, looked down at the great green hide of its flank. “It’s big and scary, but it doesn’t feel scary, you know?”

  “How should I know?” she asked.

  Lenk continued staring for a moment, brow furrowed in thought. After a moment he leaned back. He looked around cautiously for a moment. Then he reached down and took her hand, so swiftly it didn’t even hurt.

  “Come over here for a moment.”

  He led her to the rear of the deck, behind a few stacks of crates. His hand darted to her waist, removed her dagger. Weeks ago that might have felt easy. But as his hand brushed the skin of her midriff, she felt a flush rise to her cheeks.

  “Keep an eye out, will you?” he whispered as he ducked behind some crates.

  “The hell are you doing?” she asked, though she kept a lookout for anyone who might approach.

  “It’s too far up to see from the railing.” Lenk wedged her knife into a space between the planks of the deck, pried up the old wood with a bit of difficulty. “I want a closer look.”

  “Why?”

  He looked up at her. “Well, fuck, if I’m going to trust this thing to carry me to the Forbidden East, I’d at least like to know what it is.”

  He set the plank aside. Beneath it the Old Man’s green hide pulsated and flexed with every colossal stride it took. Kataria knelt down beside the hole in the deck, peering at the creature’s flesh. Or was it flesh? It looked like it, certainly, but the muscles underneath bunched up and stretched in a way she had never seen before.

  “Look at that,” she muttered. She reached down, fingers brushing against a large cyst upon its skin. “What the hell do you think that—”

  She didn’t finish that thought. As soon as her fingers touched the cyst, it suddenly twitched like a living thing. It split apart, tiny fronds unfurling from it and stretching out. Within, glistening petals of many different colors suddenly blossomed and rose up. It bloomed, like a flower.

  It was a flower.

  “Shit.” Lenk’s voice was thin with astonishment. “It’s a plant. That’s why it doesn’t need to eat or stop.” He let out a short laugh. “It’s just one giant walking plant.”

  Whether from stress or wonder, that short laugh grew longer. And whether it was because he was that stressed or just a gods-damned idiot, that long laugh took a hysterical edge. And despite how strange he looked, Kataria couldn’t help but smile at him.

  Somehow it was easier when things were like this. When there were unknown places to go, when there were horrific monsters to slay, when there were giant walking plants to ride. When they were adventurers, no longer pretending to be normal, when their eyes were on each other’s backs and their hands were on their weapons, things made sense.

  He wanted to leave it all behind, of course—all the fighting, all the bloodshed. Yet here he was. Ready to do it again. And here she was, right beside him and ready to help.

  But perhaps this was just the kind of people they were. Dreams of springtime weddings, litters of children, growing old in front of a fireplace, hand in hand: These were poison to them
, slow-acting venoms that killed them. Their comforts were simpler things: blades in hand, horizons before them, miles behind them.

  And all the world to discover.

  It didn’t entirely make sense, the way she smiled. But the desert was scant of a lot of things besides just water. Whatever hope she found out here, she seized and grabbed and strangled until it stopped trying to get away.

  And looking at him, laughing as he did. And the way he looked at her, the fears chased away from his eyes for the moment. It almost made her believe things could, somehow, be all right.

  “All right,” Lenk said, wiping a tear from his eye. “Keep a lookout. I’ll replace the plank. I don’t feel like explaining this to the saccarii.”

  “Right,” she said.

  She sprang to her feet and returned to the railing. It was odd to feel so light after that, as if feeling comfortable were some kind of disease. But after so long without it, she wasn’t ready to give it up, no matter how little sense it made.

  His eyes, wide and free of fear, lingered with her. And the sensation of freedom they had brought her walked with her to the railing. She felt whole again. Just like that.

  Could it really be that easy?

  Her eyes caught a shudder of movement in the distance. On the crest of a tall dune on the south side of the river, she saw a lone figure mounted upon the back of a yiji. And though there were miles between them, Kataria knew the rider. Because the rider knew her. And across those miles, Kwar reached out with her Howling.

  And instantly Kataria slumped against the railing.

  No, of course it’s not that easy. The thought carried her chin down to the railing, where she buried her head in her hands. It never was.

  TWELVE

  RATS IN THE BASEMENT

  Darkness wasn’t so bad.

  People feared it for the same reason Denaos thrived in it: One never knew what lurked inside it. But where the common man feared thieves and murderers, he saw possibilities. One could pretend to be anything one wished in the dark.

  Sometimes, in darkness like this, he liked to imagine that he was somewhere else. Somewhere other than Cier’Djaal. He liked to imagine that he didn’t owe this city anything, that he wasn’t the man who had nearly killed it, that he hadn’t had a conversation about this with Anielle this morning.