by Sam Sykes
“You’re not a hero. You’re a tiny, weak, selfish, cruel, useless little boy. You laugh at Gods and Their teachings, but They at least teach us to feel sorry for what we’ve done. They at least teach us that humans are more than just a ‘learning experience.’ But you didn’t listen, did you? You just sit there and fucking think about how great it’ll be when you can swoop in and make a great, flaming ass out of yourself so everyone will pay attention to you.”
“I didn’t mean it!” he cried out. His voice was stuffy with a shattered nose and thick with his own blood. “Please, Asper! I’m sorry!”
“No.”
She hammered her left fist against his cheek.
“You.”
She smashed her right fist against his jaw.
“AREN’T.”
She raised her left hand.
Do it.
And froze.
End it.
Her heart beat in time with the thoughts running through her head.
He said it himself. He’ll just do it again. Amoch-Tehtr’s voice purred within her. Remove him. Think of how many people you’ll save with one more menace gone.
Her arm quivered over her head. Her eyes weren’t blinking. She suddenly realized those weren’t Dreadaeleon’s tears streaking down his cheeks. She wasn’t sure when she started crying. She wasn’t sure if he was crying now.
She wasn’t sure whose thoughts were going through her head.
“ASPER!”
Hands grabbed her. Lenk and Denaos pulled her off. She turned around and stared wide-eyed at them; shock was painted on their faces. Kataria frowned with concern. Gariath merely snorted as if he knew she would do this all along.
She looked down. Dreadaeleon was weeping, cowering, hiding behind skinny, trembling arms. His blood was painted on the hill and on her hands. It felt warm between her fingers.
She spoke to no one.
“Sorry, I…” She stared off at the lights of the city. “I need to… I’ll see you all. A little later.”
And numbly, trailing blood and horrified stares, she walked off into the night.
THIRTY-FIVE
TALLIES
Whiskey was expensive in Cier’Djaal.
Arable land was rare in the desert and typically was used to grow grapes for wine. Harsher northern drinks had to be imported, and even ones so rancid as to be more grain than liquid—such as the one sitting in front of Lenk—were expensive.
That didn’t stop him from pouring another, though.
Six coins a bottle. Six pours to a coin.
He downed the liquor.
That’ll be…
He counted all the drinks he had had so far.
Two coins I piss out later.
His stomach rumbled as the liquor hit it.
Or vomit.
He poured again.
If Miron—or whoever—owes us one thousand coins…
He took another drink.
And we buy one bottle for every person dead tonight…
He poured.
And we didn’t even bother counting the dead…
He drank.
And they’re all dead because of us…
Pour.
And we allow for anyone we might kill tomorrow…
Drink.
And I just wait for everyone else’s life who touches mine to turn to shit…
Pour.
Spill.
Shit.
He threw his cup to the floor. The whiskey that splattered across the unwashed boards would have looked like a bloodstain to him, were he not aware that blood came cheaper. He signaled to the barkeep nearby without looking up and heard a brief grunt as confirmation.
The greasy, hairy lout who owned a shitty little hole in the harbor like Swigslips, one would think, would be a little more eager to serve. Its tables were splintering; its chairs wobbled; its windows were cracked; and its patrons—all three of them, including Lenk—were the sort of people who had little regard for the quality of their drink, their purses, or their internal organs.
The fact that it took as long as it did for him to get another glass might have bothered him on any other night.
But the past few hours had been far too sobering. And the only cure for hours far too sobering was hours far too drunk.
The logic was foolproof.
“Ugh, are you really doing this?”
He didn’t bother looking up. No matter how badly he wanted that to be someone else, he recognized Mocca’s voice even before the man sat down across from him—making certain to tuck his pristine white robes so that they didn’t touch anything they didn’t have to.
“In a dingy little bar drinking cheap whiskey to drown one’s sorrows,” Mocca continued to chide. “Really, don’t you feel the slightest bit ashamed for how clichéd this is?”
“You’re alive,” Lenk noted by way of response.
“I am. Once you so ungraciously took off with guards in tow, I suspected there might be trouble on its way, so I excused myself from the festivities.”
“Sheffu?”
“As far as I know, he fled shortly after me. I saw him and that monstrous little child he calls a servant returning to his shack of a manor before the…” Mocca cleared his throat. “Well, you know.”
“Yeah.” Lenk poured another finger of whiskey. “I do.”
Mocca watched with a cringe. “Look, I can appreciate the theatrics of drinking yourself to death, but it’s not going to solve anything.”
“Shows what you know. A specific problem has a specific solution. And a problem as specific as mine requires the solution of pouring into my mouth what tastes like if a hyena had diarrhea fermented in day-old bathwater.” He stifled a belch. “Specifically.” He downed the drink and looked pointedly across the table. “How’d you find me?”
“I observed you on the hilltop,” Mocca replied. “The tall woman bludgeoned the little fellow, then you all appeared to exchange words and everyone went off in a different direction. I followed you here—after you had gone and retrieved some clothes, anyway.” A well-trimmed eyebrow rose. “Difficulties?”
“No. What you observed was us planning our outfits for tomorrow. See, we wanted to coordinate and we realized none of us had anything to match this.” He tugged at his dirty tunic. “So everyone went off to try to find something a little more presentable. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that there are a lot of dead people who didn’t deserve it and it’s all our fault and you’re definitely not a fuck-witted imbecile for not thinking of that.”
“Are you always this hostile to people trying to help?”
“You’re not helping.”
“I’m alerting you to the notion that if it was this easy for me to find you, it might very well be even easier for, say, a systematic sweep of guardsmen looking to solve the mystery of why the house of the wealthiest man in Cier’Djaal just burned down with him inside it.”
“Good,” Lenk said. “Let them come. I’m ready.” He poured another. “Or I will be, soon. Just hold them off until I can drink the rest of this.”
“It was a hollow threat. The guards are all sitting around with their fingers lodged firmly in crevices better left unnamed. The Sainites and Karnerians won’t let them get near Ghoukha’s house.”
“Pity.”
“That’s the theme of tonight, isn’t it?” Mocca sighed, leaned on the table. “Precisely what are you so upset about, anyway?”
“Did you not hear me just now?”
“I did. I hope you’ll forgive me for pointing out the hypocrisy in taking so many deaths so gracelessly, considering how many you’ve had a direct hand in causing.”
“That was different.”
“Probably not for the dead people.”
“No, it’s…” He shook his head as if he could throw the thoughts from his skull. “Do you ever think that when you get good enough at something, you just do it as a matter of instinct?”
“Pardon?”
“My grandfa
ther, back when he was alive, he did this thing where he could spit a seed into an empty bottle from five paces. He got better and better at it: ten, fifteen, twenty. Pretty soon, he was just doing it without knowing, every time he passed a bottle, empty or not, seed or no seed. He’d just see a bottle and spit and hit it, dead on.”
His eyes were heavy as he looked at Mocca. Too heavy to blink.
“What if… what if killing’s the same way? What if you get so good at it, if it’s so easy, that you just do it without knowing? What if people just die around you because that’s what you do?”
“That sounds a little—”
“Well, how the hell do you explain it, then?” Lenk shouted. The two other patrons looked up at his outburst before cringing and returning their attentions back to their drinks. “How the hell is it that the lives of everyone that comes near mine turns to shit?”
“You are an adventurer. You carry a sword. You lead a violent life.”
“And that’s just it. Even when I’m naked, I’ve still got the sword. I can find a blade in a burning house. If I can’t, I’ll find another way to kill people. My sword’s always there, even if it isn’t. And if it’s always there, how do you get rid of it? Because every time I try, I keep killing people. This whole thing was about getting money from Miron to stop this, the killing, but how many people have to die so I can stop killing them?”
He slouched back in his chair. He reached for the drink and pushed it aside instead. His head found the table a splintery-enough pillow, one fit for the specific breed of half-drunken, fevered slumber he felt himself drifting in. He pressed his forehead to it, closed his eyes, and hoped that his dreams would be terrible enough to make the waking life look a little better by comparison.
Of course, that was hard to do with Mocca staring at him.
He felt the man’s eyes on the back of his head, like an itch that couldn’t be scratched. And with each passing moment, he could feel Mocca’s stare boring deeper into him. The air grew so still that, by the time he finally deigned to speak, it came as soft and sharp as a needle in an eyelid.
“Tell me,” Mocca all but whispered, “is the whiskey more delicious than the self-pity?”
“Don’t mock me,” Lenk mumbled into the wood. “I don’t find it funny.”
“Nor should you. It’s not funny at all. This…” He made a flippant gesture at Lenk. “This isn’t even sad. This is merely pointless.”
“The point is that I ruin lives and I’m helpless to stop it.”
“That’s the pointlessness of it. You claim you’re helpless, yet in the same breath ascribe such meaning to your life as to render all those around it moot. Are you an insect or are you a God?”
“I’m just a man.”
“Men are not yet so powerful that they can kill people just by existing, nor are they so insignificant as to be incapable of change.” He ran a finger around the sleeve of his robe, flattening it against the table. “This world was not made for them. It existed long before they were of any particular consequence. They can but stand on one particular plot of land at any given time and make do with what happens upon it.”
“And mine is soaked in blood and ashes.”
“As though suffering is so rare as to be the luxury of just one man,” Mocca scoffed. “The Khovura did not come after you, specifically, you know. You were there, of course, and maybe you tend to be around when trouble begins, but those people were going to die anyway, regardless of who happened to be there.”
“Why is it that the only way we can ever feel better about people dying is to say it doesn’t matter? If it doesn’t matter, then what’s all that shit about standing on a plot of land, then? Why bother with anything?”
“I didn’t say it doesn’t matter.”
“You just—”
“No, I said it didn’t matter.” Mocca raised his arm and began to draw his sleeve back. “Man—no, anything that ever had a right to call itself a person—is determined to devote every fraction of his being toward the task of destroying himself.
“He eats food only in the anticipation that he will one day starve. He worships Gods so that he’ll know where to go when he dies. He makes love with the desperate knowledge that, on the day he dies…”
His sleeve fell, exposing a long thin arm patterned with scar tissue. Designs cut of perfect angles ran from wrist to elbow, a madness of fleshy ziggurats.
“He will be alone.”
He glanced at Lenk. His smile was tightly coiled upon his lips, even as Lenk’s mouth hung open at the sight of the scars. He looked around, as though incredulous that he should be the only one to see this. If the other patrons noticed, though, they didn’t care enough to look up from their cups.
“And when he drinks, he takes a string of bad luck and makes a melodramatic noose for himself.” Mocca slipped his sleeve back over his arm. “Tell me, then, if you’re so certain to kill anyone you touch, why strive for something else? Why linger near people you claim to care about?”
Lenk stared at the whiskey across the table, pointedly avoiding Mocca’s stare. “Because if I don’t, then there would have been no point to any of it.”
“So, if you stop now, will there be a point? If you drink yourself to death tonight, would you be anything but one more body to add to the list? Would anyone weep for you as you wept for them?”
“I wasn’t weeping, I—”
“It’s your plot of land,” Mocca continued, ignoring his protest. “It’s your dirt under your feet. The ashes and blood you choose to stand upon are yours now. The lives are yours now. If you do nothing but lie in it, you will have nothing but ashes and blood.”
“Then what’s the alternative?”
Now he met Mocca’s eyes. Now he saw that the man’s smile was gone, replaced by something hard-edged and precise as a scalpel. He held Lenk in that look for a long time, eyes perfectly steady as he peered into something that wasn’t there. Then he waved his hand.
“You and I, we don’t stand on the same earth,” Mocca said. “Though, if you’re looking for direction, I should point out that you weren’t the only survivor last night. The others aren’t drowning themselves.”
“Barely. The Ancaaran emissary got out, protected by the Karnerians and Sainites.”
“Before the killing began in earnest, even. He must be a subject of particular desire.” Mocca stroked his chin thoughtfully. “He is at the helm of an effort to avert open warfare, is he not?”
Lenk paused, his thoughts drifting back to a previous conversation. “Asper said… back when she told us about Miron, she said that the Talanites were going to mediate originally, but their envoy was killed by the Khovura.”
“Many people were killed by the Khovura.”
“Yeah, but what if it’s not an accident? What if it’s…” He tapped the table. “The Khovura are murderers, anarchists, but they‘re not an army. Not yet. They can’t challenge the Karnerians or the Sainites.” He looked up. “But the Karnerians and the Sainites can challenge each other.”
Mocca furrowed his brow. “You’d think they’d try to incite a war? Just to build on the ashes of an empire?”
“Ashes they’d control,” Lenk replied. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? They killed Ghoukha, the wealthiest man in the city. If they can remove the two foreign armies—or at least bring them to a point where the Khovura can fight them on even terms—they can swoop in and claim this city for… for…”
“Khoth-Kapira,” Mocca said. “You realize who you sound like, right?”
“Sheffu was chasing ghost stories,” Lenk replied, waving a hand. “This is flesh-and-blood stuff. Men, not demons.”
“The men have demons.”
“One problem at a time. If this is their plan, then the obvious course of action is to find them before it can happen. They’ll strike at the mediation. We can stop them there, find Miron, figure this thing out, and then—”
“The people will still be dead,” Mocca pointed out. “And more will di
e, as well. Are you prepared for that?”
“Death is the only thing I am prepared for now. If it has to come, and if it has to be my earth on which it stands, then maybe I can at least stand in its way.”
Mocca offered a light applause. “Half-drunken poetry is the most honest kind of poetry. Too slurred to be eloquent, not slurred enough to be witless.”
Lenk grinned as he tossed back the whiskey. It tasted sour on his tongue. “Let me ask you something,” he said, pointing at Mocca. “What’s with you?”
“Pardon?”
“You showing up here, helping me like this, helping me all those other times. What’s in it for you?”
“Mankind fascinates me.”
“Be serious.”
Mocca’s smile fell slightly, becoming something soft and faraway. “There’s no such thing as fate, you know. No divine plan, no scroll upon which your life is written. All we have, you and I, is earth to stand on. The only way we keep it is through choice. And consequence.”
“How can you be so sure?” Lenk asked. “That there’s no plan?”
“Because,” Mocca said as he eyed the bottle, “I can’t imagine any God would be boring enough to want to know how everything ends.”
THIRTY-SIX
MACHINATE
It was gears—not blood—that lay inside humans.
Asper knew this now.
And when the Gods—or the world, or the people in it—broke down a person, removed all the layers of skin and sinew, that was what was left.
This was what was left.
Someone who could move only like a machine: one foot in the front of the other, no matter the road; one breath after another, no matter how hard they came; one red-stained hand curled into one red-stained fist, pounding on a door, forever.
Or until it got answered.
“All right, all right, all right!” a voice shouted peevishly from the other side of the door. “I’m up! If you’ve got a broken hand, though, I’m going to lose my—”
The door swung open. Aturach met her with suspicion, as though he didn’t recognize her. And then astonishment, as though he did recognize her. And then despair, as though he’d rather go back to the first part.