The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  A monastery might not have the excitement and the wealth of the city, but he had only ever wanted the wealth so he could leave the excitement behind. What else awaited him there? Quiet, solitude, peace, certainly, but that wasn’t what set the grin in his face.

  Shuro would be there. And there were more like her. More like him. Others who lived with what he did, experienced what he did, suffered the same hardships. The closest thing to a family he could ever hope for.

  A monastery. Why not?

  He could come to love it, this home that wasn’t Cier’Djaal. He could come to trust its inhabitants, these people who weren’t hungry for blood and death. And as he saw Shuro’s eyes brighten at the sight of his smile, he wondered if he could also come to appreciate a different kind of relationship with her.

  This woman who wasn’t Kataria.

  His smile faded.

  The thought came from nowhere, simply falling out of the sky and landing on him with a great weight. He felt suddenly strange for looking at Shuro’s naked form, suddenly embarrassed by his own nudity, suddenly possessed of a pain that caught in his throat and grew sharper each time he tried to swallow. He turned away from her, eyes toward his clothes in a heap at the edge of the pool.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said softly.

  “Are you all right?” Shuro asked, reaching out to touch him with hands that suddenly felt too warm. “Is it something I—”

  “No,” Lenk said. “I said I’ll think about it.” He made a show of looking overhead. “Hour’s getting late. We should move.”

  Shuro said nothing for a moment. He felt her eyes linger on him, then turn away.

  “Right,” she said. “Of course.”

  He heard splashing as she moved to gather her own clothes.

  You piece of shit, he cursed himself inwardly. She didn’t deserve that.

  He had done well up until now. The constant danger of the jungle had kept him from sleeping deeply enough to dream of green eyes, from letting his mind wander to memories of a tender touch, from thinking about how much it still hurt to remember the empty patch of sand where she had been.

  Stupid of him, then, to have thought a quiet bath might be nice. Stupid of him, then, to have thought that he could be a real person without the sword in his hand.

  He put that thought out of his mind as soon as he picked up the sword again, resigned himself to the familiar weight of it in his hand. He drew it out of its scabbard, glanced it over for nicks and wear. Satisfied, he jammed it back in its sheath and went about sorting the rest of his clothes.

  It was just as he had picked up his shirt that he felt eyes upon him. Not Shuro’s. His gaze was drawn inexorably upward, to the edge of the jungle and the white shape standing at the edge of the foliage. From beneath his hood, from a face whose mouth was set into a thin frown, a pair of dark eyes stared at Lenk flatly.

  Mocca. Unblinking.

  The man in white had been noticeably absent these past days. Lenk would have wondered why he chose now to reappear, if he weren’t certain he didn’t want to know. Just one more thing to put out of his mind, he thought as he set to drying himself.

  With any luck, by the end of the day, he wouldn’t have a single thought left.

  See, your biggest problem is that you’re an optimist, Lenk told himself, two hours later. You trusted that you’d be able to get by without thinking when you should have just bashed your head in with a rock and not left anything to chance.

  The hours that had passed since they’d departed from the pool had done so in silence. The moment clothes had come back on, whatever semblance of joviality had been between them had faded. And in the quiet that followed, Lenk had plenty of time to think.

  Like an asshole.

  He couldn’t help but continue to marvel at the ease with which Shuro switched between two distinct people. He could barely remember the excited smile and soft eyes of the girl from moments ago. The woman walking beside him now stared out with an iron gaze, face expressionless.

  He wondered, absently, if he had caused that. If his response at the pool had been different, would they still be laughing even now? Would this walk into the jungle, over rocky paths and creeping tree roots, be less unbearably awkward?

  Knowing his luck, probably not.

  Either way, he didn’t test his theory. He mirrored her expression even as he mirrored her pace, the two of them delving deeper into the jungle, the only conversation that of the ambient wildlife buzzing around them.

  In the silence Lenk had ample time to reflect on the peculiarity of the forest. Namely, the deeper they went, the thinner the trees grew. Many slender saplings cropped up in copses and groves, and a few defiant ancients burst from the ground to stretch tall and cover swaths of land with their canopies. But there was a certain order to their growth, their placement dictated by the ground beneath them.

  The earth was smooth, Lenk noted, marred only by the occasional outcropping stone or reaching tree root. Beneath dead foliage and layers of soil, stretches of paved stone emerged like the back of some ancient serpent snaking through an earthen sea. And among the rising trunks of the trees, he could see the ruined frames of houses and the shattered remains of pillars and statues.

  Occasionally he caught a glimpse of these latter constructs: a stone body dismembered by time and wear, a robed figure with hands clasped together in benediction and a severed stump where a head should be. Sunken in the earth, a stone face peered up at him.

  A familiar face.

  He was about to stop and study it further when Shuro spoke up suddenly.

  “The path splits here,” she said.

  He looked up, followed her gaze to the fork in the road. The path was bisected by a tree that had burst out of the ground, low-hanging branches draping the road in a cloak of greenery. Part of it continued as they had been going, while the other veered left in a subtle slope leading downward.

  “All right,” Lenk said. “Which way?”

  Shuro hesitated a moment. “This way.” She pointed to the high road. “The high ground is always right.”

  Lenk glanced toward the low road. “I can hear the river down there. It would have to lead to something.”

  “The high ground would be the ideal spot to launch an ambush from. The low ground might be dangerous.” She stared hard down the high road. “This… this is the best chance.”

  “You don’t sound certain.”

  “I’m not.” She whirled on him, lips tightened. “They wouldn’t call this the Forbidden East if it had signposts, would they?”

  He held up his hands for calm. “I just think we should know. Maybe neither of them lead anywhere.”

  “Of course they do,” she said, tension in her voice. “Khoth-Kapira called himself the God-King. Why would he build an empire in which all roads didn’t lead to him?” She turned away from him, rubbed her eyes. “We’ve been heading the right way, I’m sure of it. I just need to… get my bearings.”

  She glanced up at the tree bisecting the path and doffed her hat.

  “I’ll climb to a better view. Once we know where we’re going, we can set a path.” She handed him the garment. “Wait here.”

  “Right,” he said. “I’ll go check out the low road.”

  She looked over her shoulder, eyes hardening. “That’s ridiculous. I’ll only be a few moments. Just stay here.”

  He met her glare with confusion. “I’m not going far. If there’s anything down there, I’d like to know about it. And we can always use more water.”

  “We’re in the thick of the jungle right now,” she said. “It’s too dangerous. There could be gaambols or shicts or—”

  “We haven’t seen a single shict this whole time,” he interrupted. “And even they don’t stalk victims this long. If one of them was going to attack us, they’d have done it by now.”

  Shuro stared at him for a long moment.

  “You would know, I suppose.”

  Whether she had meant that as an insult
or not, her flat tone did not betray. Nor did he have time to take offense before she pushed back the dangling leaves and started down the high road.

  “Meet back here in a quarter of an hour,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Lenk replied, voice sour with ire. “Sure.”

  Her words hung in his head as he started down the low road. Over the sound of his boots on the gradually sloping stone and the buzz of insects in his ear, he could hear her still.

  You would know.

  They stuck in his neck like a bent nail. What had she meant by that?

  Even being away from her for a few moments galled him, if only because he knew she was right. The jungle was a dangerous place enough without his going wandering through it on his own. But he had to get away from her. He had to be on his own for a moment. Maybe he just needed time to think, maybe he needed room to breathe or maybe…

  Maybe being with her, even now, felt like betraying someone else.

  The slope of the earth beneath his feet turned to steps, a stairway carved out of stone and set firmly in the dirt. Covered by leaves and disrupted by the occasional rowdy root lurching out between bricks, it was nonetheless impressively well preserved.

  Trees rose up on either side around him. On his left they peered between marching pillars in varying states of decay. On his right a sheer cliff wall was overgrown with hanging vines. But beneath that he could see fragments of stone: carved faces peering out with wide eyes, stone children playing between the vines, granite waves frozen in time.

  Age had taken its toll—cracks had appeared in the faces, some children were missing, the waves were eroded. And the vines grew too thick for him to see fully what they hid. But even these carvings seemed amazingly well preserved, as though they had been cared for up to the very end.

  Whatever that end had been.

  Or did it end? Lenk paused, looked around. Khoth-Kapira was an Aeon before he was a demon. And the mortals overthrew him and cast him down, as they did all the others. He studied the fresco, squinted. So why isn’t anything destroyed? Where’s all the violence?

  Lenk’s knowledge of the Aeons was limited, of course. But there were two certain facts to their story: The mortals had cast the demons into hell, and the demons had not gone quietly.

  It had taken armies, sieges, years of warfare that had claimed entire races to break the demons’ hold over the world. And the wakes of the horrors they’d wrought were like scars upon the world.

  Or at least they were supposed to be.

  So where were the skeletons? Where were the shattered weapons? Where were the abandoned siege weapons and scars from fire and blood? Where was the war that had brought Khoth-Kapira low?

  When he came to the bottom of the stairs and rounded the wall of greenery and stonework to his left, he saw no signs of violence. But something else.

  And his breath left him at the sight of it.

  A harbor. Pristine but for the inevitable age and overgrowth, a harbor sprawled out before him. A stone walkway on either side of the Lyre’s course, connected by a small bridge, as the river shot straight through a small chasm dominated on either side by towering cliff walls and shrouded by a bowing canopy overhead. Stone-wrought docks designed for smaller river-going craft jutted out at even intervals along the walkways. Tall bridges reached over the river to connect the two, allowing the Lyre to pass well below as the river continued down the chasm and snaked off into some unseen course.

  Bricks had fallen off, here and there. Plant life grew over everything. A bridge had partially collapsed. At the center of the harbor, a stone pedestal rose from the center of the river and sported a pair of granite ankles where a statue had once stood tall and proud.

  Age had taken its toll. But violence had not. This place had simply fallen into disrepair, rather than been dismantled, piece by piece. No destruction, no carnage, no bloodshed.

  “No war,” he whispered to himself.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?”

  Lenk looked up at the voice. The bowing trees overhead cast a shade so deep that he almost didn’t see Mocca standing at the end of one of the stone piers, staring out over the harbor. Here among the gray stone, the white of his robes looked less out of place.

  “There is something beautiful about age,” the man in white mused aloud. “It’s the fragility of life, I think. A demonstration of something’s vulnerability that makes us covet it.” He held his hands out in a helpless gesture over the harbor. “You can only judge beauty by watching the way it crumbles.”

  Lenk stared at the back of the man’s head for a moment before speaking. “Morbid.”

  “All the great poets are.”

  “Is that what you are now?”

  Mocca cast a look over his shoulder. His lips curled in a smile too soft for the glint in his eyes.

  “What I am, the poets are still trying to find a word for.”

  “I’ve got a few choice ones for them.” Lenk approached the man, coming up beside him and staring out over the harbor. A moment passed between them. “You’ve been shy in coming around lately.”

  “I’ve had things to attend to,” Mocca replied.

  “Like what?”

  “Things.”

  “What sort of things does a thing in my head have to attend to?”

  “I exist outside the boundaries of reality, let alone your head,” Mocca replied with a sneer. “And I’ll thank you not to disrespect me by suggesting my machinations are limited to solely one man. The scope granted to me by my unfortunate circumstance bids sights that require my vast attention.”

  “Oh.” Lenk sniffed. “Because I thought it was because you didn’t like Shuro.”

  Mocca offered no response that Lenk could hear. But in the sudden coldness of his face, the swift petrifying silence that hardened his stare, the thoughts of the man in white were impossible to ignore.

  “She is quite cross with you,” Mocca said simply, after a time.

  “I know.”

  The sidelong look he cast Lenk came so slowly it almost creaked. “Would you like to know why?”

  “No.” The swiftness of his response surprised even Lenk. “Stay out of her head.”

  Mocca’s face softened with a smile. “I’m insulted that you’d think I’d need to go in there. She’s rather pitifully unguarded with her emotions, much like you. That’s the first reason she likes you.”

  “So you were listening, then?” Lenk asked. “Back at the pool?”

  “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I do, a little,” Lenk replied, brows furrowing. “I don’t know if I’m comfortable with you seeing me naked.”

  Mocca’s smile grew a bit wider, his eyes brightening. “He said to the man living inside his thoughts.”

  “You said that you didn’t—”

  “I was making a point, nothing more.” Mocca turned his gaze back out over the harbor, folded his hands behind his back. “Does the thought appeal to you?”

  “Which?”

  “Going back with her,” Mocca said. “Returning to her monastery, being among others like yourself.”

  His answer came slower this time, crawling out of his lips on a sigh. “Yeah. It does.”

  “You sound hesitant.”

  “Yeah. I do.” Lenk let that thought linger for a moment. “I shouldn’t, though.”

  “No?”

  “What she’s offering is… well, it’s great, isn’t it? She’s offering me a place to set my sword down, a place where I can be with people like me, who look like me… think like me.”

  He looked toward Mocca, expecting a response. The man in white did not even look back at him.

  “So why shouldn’t I?” Lenk continued. “It’s everything I ever wanted. And there’s nothing”—he paused, choking on something caught in his throat—“nothing left for me here.”

  Again he looked to Mocca. Again he waited for the man in white to say something. Again his company merely continued staring out over the water.

  “So, yea
h,” Lenk said. “That’s what I’m going to do. When this is all over. I’m going back to the monastery with her.” He cleared his throat. “It’s the only thing I’ve got left.”

  A wind carried through the chasm, shaking the trees and emptying dead foliage into the river. The Lyre muttered in complaint, sweeping the leaves away downriver. Somewhere overhead a bird called. The entire forest was speaking.

  Except for Mocca.

  And Lenk began to feel the time draw out. How long had he been waiting for Mocca to say something? And what was he waiting for? Approval? Scorn? Begging?

  “Right.”

  Lenk’s voice sounded coarse and out of place amid the forest. His boots scraped as he turned to go.

  “Would you like to know the second reason?”

  He turned back around. Mocca was no longer at the edge of the dock. He stood out upon the water itself, a placid rock atop its rushing flow. His eyes were dark and fixed firmly upon Lenk.

  “The second reason—”

  “Because she sees in you something she desperately craves,” Mocca said. “She sees the life she can’t remember, the friends she never had, the pain of loss she so desperately wishes she could feel because to do so would mean having known a love outside of her own sword.”

  “What?”

  “When she looks at you,” Mocca continued, walking slowly across the water’s surface, “she sees a person. A man. Someone whole. That’s what she used to see when she looked at herself, too. But in your presence, all she can see when she looks at her own naked body is the weapon she was shaped to be.”

  Mocca’s voice came with such invective force that Lenk could but stand there, stunned, as though each word were a fist cracking against his jaw.

  “She can’t abide this, you know,” the man in white said. “She can’t stand knowing she’s a weapon, possessed of no more purpose than a chunk of steel, as you remind her she is. But nor can she bring herself to leave or hurt you and abandon the possibility you present to her. Hence she wishes to bring you back with her. To the same forge that made her, so that you, too, can be hammered from a man into a weapon.”