The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  He blinked. The skies rained fire around him and people’s lungs erupted with smoke and flame. He ignored them, stepped over them as they fell in ash pillars before him.

  But all connections have a limit, don’t they? A line can only be drawn so taut before it snaps. You need to get out of the city. And you need to do it now. And you need…

  He blinked. An empty street stretched before him, leading to an empty square surrounded by empty storefronts. Over a shut door, he saw a painted sign of a cat curled up, looking up with inviting eyes.

  Liaja. You can’t leave her behind. They’ll use her against you.

  He blinked. The sky bled crimson and each drop of blood pooled upon the street to coalesce into a red serpent that slithered around the cobblestones and coiled around his ankles.

  She needs you, old man. She needs you to protect her.

  He blinked. The skies were stained with smoke. A gargantuan figure of a skeleton wrapped in a skin of shadow, hellish red light pouring from its gaping maw as it shoveled screaming bodies over its teeth and choked on its own laughter, stood over him.

  You can fix this.

  He blinked. The ground was soft and spongy flesh beneath him and a beating heart the size of a cow hung suspended by chains overhead. He blinked. A chorus of serpents with brass wings flew overhead, their warbling voices causing wood to crack and windows to shatter. He blinked. Dogs with women’s faces tore the genitals from screaming humans staked to towering rock.

  You’re the hero.

  He blinked.

  He was in the middle of the square.

  He looked around and saw the shantytown that had cropped up during his occupation of the bathhouse, now bereft of people. But at a closer look, he saw them: their eyes pinpricks of reflected sunlight from the alleys they crouched within, staring at him with terrified glances. Not so long ago they had viewed him as an incidental savior, a beast whom other predators feared to tread near. Now they looked at him as though they thought he might swallow them whole at any moment.

  Possibly because he was covered in blood. Or possibly because they were idle barknecks. He didn’t care.

  Dreadaeleon stormed across the square toward the bathhouse. He seized the door handle, pushed his way inside. The houn stood empty, the house silent, though trails of incense smoke still danced across the air and the steam of freshly drawn baths still gathered in clouds down the hall.

  Someone had vacated this place in a hurry. Suspicious.

  But again, beyond his concern.

  He stalked down the hall. At the peripheries of his attentions, he sensed them: shadows of girls cowering behind their paper doors, frightened whispers and slightly less frightened reassurances from voices trying to stay silent. Try as he might to ignore them, he couldn’t help but take offense.

  They were afraid of him. Him. The man who had saved this bathhouse, time and again, from aggressing armies and spared it the ravages of this war. The man who had graced them with his power and asked for nothing in return, no matter how much he was dutifully owed.

  They were afraid of him.

  He sniffed, drew in the scent of brimstone.

  Perhaps they should be, he thought spitefully.

  Toward the end of the hall, he waved a hand, and an unseen force drew back the paper door of Liaja’s room. He swept in and found her sitting upon the bed, the silk sheets bunched between her fingers as she wrung the material.

  “Liaja,” he said, suddenly aware of how out of breath he was. “I’m aware what I’m about to say will require both a tremendous amount of faith to believe and a larger amount of tolerance for the cliché, but we have to go now and there’s no time to explain.”

  Liaja did not reply. Liaja did not reply for such a long time that he came very close to reiterating his question, save with more cursing. And so fiercely did his temper boil behind his eyes that he didn’t even notice, until the very end of that long time, that Liaja was not looking at him.

  And just when he was about to scream, she spoke.

  “Go?” She did not sound surprised, or shocked, or confused, or any other emotion that might have been expected. “Where do you want to go”—a pregnant pause—“northern boy?”

  “Away, you—” He caught himself, tamped his temper beneath a hard breath. “Something is happening. Something I am so close to explaining but can’t quite yet. We need to get out of the city.”

  “We do?” Again her voice was soft. Again she did not sound surprised. Again she did not look up.

  “We do,” he said, nodding.

  “Why do we have to go, northern boy?”

  “I just told you. Something is happening. I’m… losing time, places. Every breath I take, I’m somewhere else. It’s like dreaming while I’m awake and every time I wake up… or every time they end, I can feel something happened while I was gone and I find more blood and I—”

  “What’s my name?”

  The question came not as a slap. Rather it was the limp touch of a weak person, a frail defense from someone who should have been defenseless. And still Dreadaeleon recoiled.

  “What?” he asked.

  “My name,” she repeated. “What is my name?”

  “Don’t be stupid. We don’t have time for this.”

  She looked up at him. There was no coldness in her face. She was dusky glass, something that looked whole and complete and ready to break at any second. And though her hair was neat and her face painted, her eyes reflected a deep weariness.

  “What is my name?”

  He swallowed hard before answering, the word somehow sounding wrong when he said it this way.

  “Liaja.”

  She shook her head. “That is the name of the lead in To Wed and Be Bled. That is not my name.”

  “I… but…” He fumbled over his words. “You told me to call you Liaja, the day we met. You never told me your real name.”

  “And you never asked, Dreadaeleon.”

  “I would have if I knew how much this—”

  “All the times I have listened to you and spoken to you and heard your stories and lectures, you have never asked. All the times you fell asleep in my arms, you have never asked. All the times I stroked your hair and sang to you as you wept and you have never asked.”

  That much was true. He hadn’t asked her anything: her name, about her life, where she had come from, what her mother’s favorite tea had been, what poems she liked. But she had always been quiet and coy, hadn’t she? She had never told him any of this. If only she had just told him—

  “Liaja.” He winced. “Please, I—”

  “Northern boy.” She rose to her feet. The silk of her robe hung from her body. She found his gaze wherever he tried to look away and held it in her own. “I beg you, let me finish.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, to explain, to condemn her foolishness. But all he could manage was a stiff nod.

  “When you came to me,” she said, “that night so long ago, I was content to tend to you, as we are expected to tend to clients here. This is merely what women in my position did, I told myself.” She approached him. “And when you wept and told me your troubles, I was content to listen, as I saw what you were: soft, frightened, sweet. And when you killed those men outside the bathhouse—”

  “They were going to kill everyone. I had to—”

  “I was afraid, yes. But I knew you were not a monster. Wizards… I do not understand them and their powers are not natural. But you…” The ghost of a smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. “You were, beneath it all, my sweet, gentle northern boy. I told myself this. I accepted it.”

  And then it faded. And the weariness returned. And the fear returned.

  “Until three days ago,” she said, “when you left.”

  Three days ago.

  The first vision. When he had been speaking to her one moment and the next held a Karnerian’s throat in his hands. When he first became aware of their control.

  How could he explain that to her?<
br />
  “And in the days that followed, I have heard so much more,” she said. “More Karnerians have died by your hands. Djaalics, too.”

  That’s it, he told himself. That’s what’s been happening in these visions. You’ve been killing. Someone’s been using you to do their dirty work. But who? The Venarium?

  “They struck a deal with me, Lia—you—darling,” he struggled to explain. “They agreed to let me go if I killed Karnerians. I had to see you again, so I agreed, but they’ve been controlling me. They’re using some kind of magic—”

  “You can’t ask me to believe that,” she said. “You cannot. You can ask me to listen to you, you can ask me to love you, but you cannot ask me to die for you, northern boy.”

  His mouth fell. His heart hurt.

  Those words hit him harder than he’d ever thought he could be hit.

  “I didn’t, though,” he said, feebly.

  “You came here and just told me of your problems. Your deals, your days lost, your needs, your desires, and said that I must come with you. You do not know my name. You do not know if I’m happy here or if I have plans for tomorrow or two years from now or what I left behind when I came here.”

  He swallowed hard. “Are you happy?”

  The tears formed upon her eyes. They slid down her cheeks and drew clean lines through the paint on her face. She shook her head.

  “When you think of us beyond the walls of this city,” she said, “am I doing something other than comforting you?”

  There were the perfect words to respond to that, somewhere.

  In some ancient library that had been sealed up by a devoted scholar when an empire fell, on the lips of a bard drunk into half consciousness in an alley in Muraska, penned in the note of a young man right before he drank poison on the night before the woman he loved married someone else.

  Somewhere there were the exact five words he could have said to make everything better, he knew. Somewhere far from here, that he didn’t know.

  “Please,” he said.

  And that was not one of them.

  “No,” she said.

  “Please.”

  But it was the only one he had.

  “No.”

  “Liaja, just—”

  “That’s not my name!” She all but struck him. He wished she had. “I can’t be a prop in your play, Dreadaeleon. I can’t attach my life to yours when you don’t even see that I have one. I can’t… I can’t be around when you start killing.”

  “I won’t.”

  He fell to his knees. The blood had simply left his legs, rushed into his throat, conspired to keep him from saying anything else, and made every word painful.

  “I won’t, I swear. I won’t kill again. I won’t hurt anyone. I won’t cast another spell, think another thought, speak a single word that isn’t totally and utterly devoted to you if you’ll only… if…”

  He swallowed something sharp. It lodged in his heart.

  “Just make me feel strong again. Please.”

  She trembled, hands in fists at her sides, ready to strangle him, ready to hold him, ready to do anything she was not prepared to do. But she did not do these things. She turned away, hugged herself tightly, and spoke through tears.

  “I regret it, northern boy,” she sobbed. “I wish you’d never come back. But I knew you would.”

  “You knew I’d…”

  “The rumors of killing were too much, so I sent word. I asked him not to do anything until I said what I had to.” She let out a racking moan. “But if you’re still here. Please… please don’t hurt him. Please let him go.”

  Dreadaeleon stared at her stupefied.

  “Who are you talking to? Liaja, I—”

  “Concomitant.”

  A soft word. One with no power whatsoever. Intended merely to direct his attention to his right.

  And there with one hand tucked behind his back, the other outstretched with the palm up, he appeared out of thin air.

  Lector Annis.

  “I have words for you.”

  Like a bad thought.

  The air rippled before the Lector’s palm. The air left the room. In the wake of silence that followed, Dreadaeleon had but enough sense to whisper a curse.

  And then everything went to hell.

  The spell erupted from Annis’s palm in a burst of invisible force, the impact launching out to strike Dreadaeleon in the chest and launch him out of the room, bursting through the paper door and leaving an ugly wound in it before he smashed against the wall of the hallway opposite.

  His momentum suspended him against the wood for but a moment and he hung, numb, before he tumbled down and flopped to the floor. The blow had struck the air from his lungs and he gasped desperately, trying to force wind back into his body.

  And between his rasping breaths, his thoughts were ablaze.

  Betrayed you. She betrayed you. She brought the Venarium down upon you.

  No, she didn’t know, she couldn’t have known, she didn’t know.

  Later, old man, later. You’ve got bigger problems.

  Bigger problems that appeared as a hand gingerly slid the paper door away. Annis took a single step into the hall, hands folded behind his back, lips pursed, and eyes focused on Dreadaeleon. As though this were not attempted murder, simply a heated argument, and he were merely awaiting a retort.

  Dreadaeleon’s response came in the scrambling of limbs and the scurrying of feet as he struggled to his footing and tore down the hallway. He flung his hands behind him, felt the invisible force erupt from his palms and propel him further down the hall, away from Annis.

  Not that he was afraid. Fear, while reasonable, would be a hugely useless emotion in this situation; he couldn’t very well escape Annis now. But he could get away from the bathhouse, prevent Liaja from being hurt, get more room to maneuver and cast.

  The air of the square came cold and crisp in his lungs as his magically aided flight ended and he stumbled the last few steps out onto the cobblestones. He whirled about, sliding into a stance and readying for whatever Annis might hurl at him next. If it was fire, he was prepared with frost. If it was frost, he was prepared with fire.

  He was hardly prepared for the quick but collected step of the man who came out of the bathhouse, though. Annis emerged with no particular hurry, regarding Dreadaeleon with stark appraisal instead of burning hatred. His voice came with only enough volume to be heard over the ringing in Dreadaeleon’s ears.

  “Protocol demands that I inform you of the charges leveled against you,” he said. “As we’ve done that several times to no discernible effect, consider this a courtesy. If you surrender peacefully, no further harm will come to you this day.”

  “This day,” Dreadaeleon shot back.

  Annis lowered his gaze, dark shadows painting his eyes. “I will not tell you that this ends with you alive, Concomitant Arethenes. Your gross misconduct has gone far beyond the scope of our agreement. Your slaughter has been wanton and haphazard. Karnerians, Djaalics, and yet more Venarium agents lie dead. Unforgivable. You are no longer a wizard, nor even a heretic.” His lips coiled into a frown. “Merely a rabid beast that needs to be put down.”

  Annis took a step forward. Dreadaeleon thrust a palm out, summoning the spell to his mind and the energy to his hand. His eyes were bathed in red light, smoke wafted from his fingers as sparks danced across his skin.

  But he did not unleash his flame. It would be stupid to make the first move.

  “How long did you spend in study to earn your Lectorship?” the boy spit. “Surely a man like you can understand cause and effect. You treated me like a dog and now you’re shocked to find I have teeth?”

  Annis’s eyes shot wide for a moment. But in another breath they had lowered, and his head bowed.

  “I am not blameless, no. I let hope overrule reason and enabled the damage to be done. I shall be including that in my report to the Venarium.” He looked up, eyes once again narrowed to scalpel-thin focus. “That is a
n addition to the responsibility, not a negation. Regardless of whose hand wielded the weapon, you are too dangerous to let loose.”

  “Loose? Loose?” Dreadaeleon’s laughter pealed out in mad cackles. “How the fuck was I loose? I had barely taken a few steps outside the tower when your control magic started kicking in.”

  Annis sneered. “You’re raving, concomitant.”

  “Men who fancy themselves smart shouldn’t try to play stupid, Lector.” Dreadaeleon advanced forward, the fire on his palm stoking itself into a small inferno. “You used magic. Hypnosis. Domination. Something. You stole my body, used it to kill for you, and now your deeds are done you’re going to toss me aside like nothing.”

  Annis slid into a stance of his own. “Concomitant, you’re clearly unhinged. There is a way to end this without further madness, if you’ll simply listen.”

  “FUCK YOU!” Dreadaeleon roared, and his fire roared with him, engulfing his hand in flame. “You call me a threat, a menace. You treat me like a tool, something you can use and break. And you have the gall to wonder why it came to madness?”

  “I have no wonders, only expectations. I expected you to uphold your oaths to the Venarium.” Annis’s voice became a low hiss. “But I see now that it was also a mistake to trust the judgment of a cruel little boy.”

  No words. Dreadaeleon’s retort was a scream, long and loud and swallowed whole by the roar of flames that poured from his hands as he thrust them out at the Lector. The flames raced out in a fiery torrent, cackling as they swept over Annis and smothered him beneath orange sheets. Dreadaeleon howled and emptied himself until the tears boiled on his eyes and the heat curled the tips of his hair to gray.

  And the Lector did not so much as blink. He trembled. He grew hazy. He turned insubstantial. And then he simply disappeared.

  The flames died down instantly, leaving blackened stone and the stink of char behind. Dreadaeleon stared at the empty space dumbly, breathing in the scent of ash and murmuring befuddlement.