The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

“SAY IT.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He seized Lenk by the neck, lifted him off the ground with one hand, and smashed him against the wall.

  “SAY IT! SAY OID! SAY IT!”

  His roar shook the floorboards, though not quite as badly as Lenk’s body did when he turned and hurled the young man across the room. Denaos, reasonable as ever, resisted the urge to follow Asper as she rushed forward and was promptly swatted aside as Gariath stalked toward Lenk.

  Denaos knew he couldn’t stop this.

  A bowstring creaked. An arrow whistled. The dragonman howled in pain.

  Kataria, on the other hand…

  Gariath whirled on her. She already had an arrow drawn and aimed just a few fingers above the one lodged in his shoulder. No anger was on her face, no emotion at all. And when she spoke, every word was a promise.

  “You take one more step, I put this in your eye,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have stopped me,” Gariath rumbled.

  “You were going to kill him.”

  He laughed blackly. “And if I did?” The smile he turned on her was something dark and unpleasant. “How do you think they look at you? What do you think they call you? How long is it going to be before he”—he made a gesture at Lenk—“starts calling you that?” He snorted. “Longer for you, maybe. You look like them, except for the ears. You even smell like them. But this moment came. So will that one.”

  He pulled the arrow out of his flesh and snapped it. Blood oozed from the wound.

  “If I kill them,” he said, “if I kill them all, what would be lost but that moment?”

  It was funny, Denaos thought. He had often wondered how the world looked through Gariath’s eyes. When they had first met, he suspected the dragonman often saw everyone as walking pot roasts. As they had grown to know—and loathe—each other, he had been forced to admit that Gariath’s view of humanity was rather impossibly complex.

  But still, as Gariath looked around the room, as he saw the horror in Asper’s face when she took a step away, as he saw Kataria’s arrow trembling as she drew it upon him, as he saw Lenk look up through an eye shut against the trickle of blood from his temple, Denaos wondered if the dragonman saw the same thing he did.

  Three people utterly terrified of a monster who could rip them apart without a thought.

  “If you can’t cure yourselves,” Gariath said, soft as a voice like his possibly could be, “then I will.”

  He turned and stalked toward the door, pausing to leer at Denaos, sniffing as though he could smell the lies hidden behind his lips. The rogue held up his hands and backed away.

  Gariath snorted, seized the furniture stacked against the door, and hurled it over his head with scarcely any effort or thought. The companions scattered, trying to avoid being hit by a flying dresser, chair, or bed.

  By the time any of them looked up, the door swung half-torn off its hinges. The scent of smoke and blood wafted in.

  “Well, okay, then,” Denaos said, clapping his hands together. “Silktown, was it?”

  Asper shook her head at him. “You go. I need to get to Temple Row.”

  “It’s going to be carnage out there. What the hell do you need to go there for?”

  She smiled sadly at him. “We both know why.”

  In truth, he didn’t. But this felt like the sort of thing he just shouldn’t ask about. Questions, after all, were something he was trying to avoid tonight.

  “I’ll head out now,” she said. “I know my way around enough to get there.”

  “Not unharmed, you don’t.” Denaos sighed. “I’ll take you, then come back for the rest of the rabble.” He glanced at Kataria. “You can handle things here, can’t you?”

  She nodded, taking another bite of her strip of dried meat. He squinted; for a moment, he felt compelled to ask where she had found it.

  You know better than that, he scolded himself as he swept out the door on Asper’s heels.

  The great thing about head wounds, Kataria thought, was that it tended to keep people quiet.

  Lenk’s record for silence post–getting bashed in the skull was two hours. So far, he had only remained silent, lying on the ground and staring up quietly at the ceiling for a half hour, but that was acceptable.

  They both had a lot to think about.

  Not that there weren’t distractions still. Her ears picked up the sounds of the carnage in the streets: glass breaking two city blocks away, spears slamming against shields as Karnerian marched through the streets three blocks south, a woman whimpering softly in the alley next to the building next to this as a gruff voice bade her to be silent…

  But Kataria didn’t dwell on these. Even if she couldn’t ignore them completely, she had greater matters on her mind.

  I can’t go with you.

  She had been rehearsing for all this time, running the words she’d say to him through her head. She had tried a few versions, discarded most, but they always began with those five words.

  And I can’t tell you why, because I don’t know why and you don’t need to know. I don’t know where I’m supposed to be in this world. I don’t think I’ve known since I was born. And I was fine with you when it seemed like you didn’t, either. But now, you want to belong to somewhere I can’t and I… I want to find out if I belong somewhere else. With someone else.

  And it always ended with these five.

  I’m sorry. Be safe. Good-bye.

  There, she decided; that was as good as it was ever going to get. All she had to do was say it to him. Now, while he was still silent, while he was still on his back and bleeding from his head and wondering what had happened. Then she could leave before he figured it out, let Denaos take him wherever he needed to go while she went back to Kwar and they could just keep on walking in opposite directions.

  Right. So just say it.

  She shifted on her haunches.

  Now.

  She rubbed the back of her neck.

  Okay… now. Now.

  Her ears twitched. Her mouth tasted dry as she opened it.

  “Right before noon, at the Harbor Gate, right before you had to tell me.”

  She fell silent. She wasn’t sure if Lenk was even talking to her, but somehow the option of not speaking felt much easier than interrupting him.

  Coward, she cursed herself.

  He held his hand up and looked at it: callused, cut, and dirty.

  “That’s when I should have walked away.” He dropped his arm to the floor. “Right after the Khovura fight—hell, during the Khovura fight—that would have been a good time, too.” He closed his eyes. “Any of the times that I was faced with a chance and just ignored it and everyone else and kept on going. I could have walked away anytime. Gone anywhere else. But it had to be here, in Cier’Djaal. I thought if I kept walking, I’d never stop.”

  He turned his head and looked at her.

  “That wouldn’t have been a bad thing,” he said. “I know that now.”

  His eyes drifted back toward the ceiling. The long silence settled between them again, leaving ample room for her thoughts to echo in her own head.

  Tell him now. Just like we rehearsed. Go, go, go—

  “Even when I was getting the hell beat out of me, I didn’t care,” he said. “I just kept on going, thinking I could make it better.” He rubbed his eyes. “Why is it that I only learn after everything has already gone to shit?”

  Well, there you have it. Things can’t get much worse for him. Go on and do it now.

  “And now… I don’t think I even know what I’m doing. What I’m planning, I don’t know if it’ll work. Where I’m going, I don’t know if it’ll end. What I’m leaving behind… I don’t think I ever even knew what it was.”

  He rose to his feet slowly. She could hear his joints popping, the stretch of his scars upon his skin, the patter of a drop of blood falling from his temple.

  The Howling—Kwar’s Howling—was something eloquent, melodious, a sound composed solely for her
. This sound, these noises Lenk made, were crude and inelegant and wholly honest. The statements of a man whose body didn’t know how to lie and whose heart didn’t know how to hide just how very terrified he was.

  He knelt down before her, took her hand in his, and stared down at it as he traced his finger along the calluses from her bowstring.

  “And because I don’t know,” he said, “I can’t ask you to come with me.”

  Good.

  “But I want you to.” Something caught itself in his voice. “Because I know I’m not good at this; I know I don’t listen and I’m useless at anything but killing people and…” He looked up at her. Tears glistened at the corners of his eyes. “And I don’t know if I can go much farther.”

  Always with the crying, these humans.

  They tried so hard to cling to sharp things with their soft hands and then seemed so surprised when they got cut. It would be kinder to let them be, to let them figure things out for themselves. It would be kinder to leave him here, to let him face this all alone. That would be kind. That would spare him from the worst of everything.

  When she leaned forward and pressed her forehead against his, when she closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of his tears and his sweat, of his blood and his dirt, she knew she wasn’t doing the kind thing.

  Or the smart thing.

  Or the right thing.

  And maybe she never would know why she was doing it, any of it, here where she knew she didn’t belong, aside from the fact that she knew the sound of his terrified heart so very, very well that it filled her ears and left no room for anything else.

  And so she merely let her head touch his.

  And held him.

  And wondered, absently, if he could smell the scent of Kwar’s flesh on her.

  FORTY-THREE

  SCRAPS FOR THE HOUNDS

  Exactly seven hours after the world had ended, Asper emerged from a trapdoor onto the roof of the Temple of Talanas.

  The first thing she noticed was the Temple of Ancaa nearby, its ziggurat standing a cold and dark shadow against the moonlit sky. No candles burned behind its stained-glass windows. She saw no bodies knelt in supplication within. If prayer was offered to Ancaa within, Ancaa was not listening.

  But then, maybe Ancaa simply could not hear them. Cier’Djaal was a noisy place lately.

  At the edge of the temple’s roof, she found Aturach. His attentions were not on Ancaa, nor even on Talanas or any part of Temple Row. His eyes, glassy and heavy-lidded, stared out over the horizon of the city.

  A false dawn had shed its light across the roofs of the city in many red wounds. Fires dotted the city below, a red canvas upon which shadows bled in inky blots. Through the streets, tightly ordered squares of Karnerian soldiers marched with spears aloft and shields glistening, unfazed by the carnage surrounding them. Above the roofs, the Sainites rode their scraws, raining fireflasks and crossbow bolts upon their foes below.

  And everywhere, the people were fleeing. They darted in and out of alleys in the wake of the Karnerians. They took shelter in buildings when Sainite fire rained down upon them. They pulled bodies, some moving and some not, into darkness.

  She couldn’t hear them from here. Not their prayers, not their screams, not over the fire and the marching feet. She wondered, then, if Ancaa and Talanas simply had better ears than hers.

  “Right about there,” Aturach said. He pointed over the roofs to the Harbor District and the plumes of smoke rising from it. “Once we cleared the Meat Market, I found out the fighting first started there. Some dirty little bar called The Seahorse’s Dream. Four Karnerians and six Sainites were drinking there and then started throwing punches.”

  He leaned back on his hands. His entire being shrank with his sigh.

  “And it happened less than half an hour before the mediations began.”

  She sat down next to him and stared out over the carnage.

  “They were fighting before they heard what had happened?” she asked.

  “And in the next hour, more of them started fighting there, there, and there.” He pointed to more fires burning. “It took less than three hours for them to get into armies and start tearing people apart.”

  “They were waiting for mediations to fail,” she muttered.

  “They never wanted it in the first place,” Aturach said. “They never wanted peace; they never wanted to end hostilities; they never planned to obey anything that was agreed upon tonight. This was always going to happen.”

  She looked out away from the flames toward the Souk. Above the city, untouched by fire or smoke, the Silken Spire still hung tall in the air. Against the moonlight, she could see the horse-sized spiders skittering across their tremendous web, indifferent to the suffering below.

  “They’ve left the Spire alone,” she noted. “That’s something.”

  “They’ve left Silktown alone, as well,” he said. “And the temples. And the harbor warehouses. And everything else that can make them money once one of them has claimed whatever’s left of this city.”

  “They aren’t destroying everything, then,” she said.

  “Yes, how terribly blessed we must be.” Aturach laughed, extending his arms to the sky. “Thank you, O Wise Healer, for in Your infinite wisdom, You have decided to kill only most of the people in this city. Let all who doubt Your mercy hear my cry.” He cupped his hands over his mouth and screamed into the night sky. “It could have been worse, ingrates! Fall to your knees and be grateful that the Gods killed only half of your families!”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “And you are?” He whirled on her, incredulous. “For months, all anyone could talk about were these mediations, how they were going to fix everything. Forget the Jackals and the Khovura, forget the fashas. At the very least, we wouldn’t be conquered or killed by foreigners. For months we prayed that Talanas would make this go ahead and send us even that small blessing. For months we—”

  His voice cracked suddenly. He turned away from her and covered his face with his hands. His body shuddered with a broken breath.

  “Savine is dead. She was crushed by the crowd in the Meat Market.” He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his robe. “Malauch ran away. I haven’t seen him and I’m never going to again. We were the last Talanites in the city.”

  He looked out over the many pyres, the city’s many wounds and many bruises. When it finally became too much, he let his head fall between his legs and clutched at his skull.

  “For months, I prayed. For months, I did His work. And this is what Talanas sent me.”

  Asper stared out over the carnage for as long as she could tolerate it. After a few moments, watching people drown in fire or be crushed underfoot was too much. She looked skyward to a night stained orange.

  “Do the hymns ever say if Talanas has bowel movements?” she asked.

  “Don’t try to be funny.”

  “I’m not. I couldn’t. I’m just wondering if there’s a reason that the Gods sometimes just squat down and take a giant shit on us every now and again.” She craned her neck back farther, peering up at the moon high overhead. “Presumably, if they do shit, then it has nowhere to go but down here.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then this sort of thing was going to happen anyway,” she said, sighing. “I know that’s not helpful. Because I know there’s not much we can do to help.” She looked at him now and saw that he was staring intently at her, waiting for an answer. “But what else are we going to do? Pray?”

  “What else can we do?”

  She shrugged. “Try.”

  “Try what?”

  “Just try.”

  Not a good answer, she knew. Not a helpful one, certainly not the sort of thing a priestess should offer someone in doubt, even if that someone was a fellow priest. But it was an answer.

  And even if it was clumsy and unhelpful, it was not hollow.

  “Yoooooo hoooooo!”

  A call came from the other sid
e of the temple. They exchanged a glance before heading to the opposite edge of the roof. Peering down, they saw a man in a guard’s armor pounding at the door of the temple, swaying precariously as a Gevrauchian leaned against a wagon full of dead bodies.

  “Helloooooo in there!” the guard called out. “Captain Dransun is knocking. Captain of the city of the dead! Got a fresh load of corpses for you!”

  “Are you… are you drunk?” Aturach called down.

  At this, Dransun staggered backward and searched for the source of the voice. It took a few moments before he flashed a tipsy smile up to the roof.

  “Very drunk,” he confirmed. “Me and the… the, uh…” He flailed out a hand, gesturing to the Gevrauchian. “The Quill. We’ve been heading through the streets, trying to save the city.”

  “It doesn’t look like you’ve been very successful,” Asper said, eyeing the wagon full of corpses.

  “That is why we are very drunk,” Dransun replied. “Everything doesn’t seem quite so awful anymore. But… you know… it still is.” He removed his helmet, ran a hand through his greasy hair. “We’ve been telling people to head to Temple Row. Saw a couple of them heading this way. The foreigners’ temples are empty and the Ancaarans aren’t answering. Can you… you know, do anything?”

  Rather than heaven, rather than Cier’Djaal, rather than Talanas, Aturach looked to Asper. She met him with a soft smile and a hand upon his shoulder. He sighed, leaned over, and nodded to the captain below.

  “We can try,” he said.

  When Dreadaeleon slept, there was only darkness.

  All his dreams had emptied out his mouth on clouds of broodvine smoke. All the great palaces of gold, all the meadows of perpetual autumn, all the waves crashing on the beaches upon which he and Liaja had lain had dissipated and slid out the window on the smoky air.

  When he slept, there was nothing left of him to dream. There was nothing but a darkness so deep, a silence so profound, he could hear the words echo through his head forever.

  Boy. Worthless. Useless. Little boy. Selfish. Boy. Cruel. Boy. Boy. Boy. Useless. Useless. Useless.

  He groaned in his sleep and rolled over, groping blindly at the bed. He felt no swell of breast, no soft, clean flesh beneath his fingers. The sheets lay cold and empty beside him.