by Sam Sykes
“‘One’ being a perfectly manageable problem and ‘ten’ being us all getting torn apart, fed to gaambols as our spear-mounted heads watch the rest of the city burn?” She sniffed. “Maybe a six?”
Asper rubbed her eyes. “Fucking great.”
“Language.”
They had sighted the boats just an hour ago, thanks only to the Sainites. By the time they had flown their scraws back to report, the river barges—each one laden with tulwar warriors—were already halfway down the river.
The morning’s victory had made her bold. Harmony Road had been choked with the dead of the tulwar, their gaambol charge broken. The loss of the Faithbreaker was immense, but it had taken down two vulgores that could have easily shattered the phalanx with it. Even Haethen had been encouraged by that, despite the fact that she would have much to explain to her Imperial overseers about losing one of their most treasured weapons.
It seemed almost unfair that, after defeating ape-men, giant baboons, and massive gorilla-rhinoceros-whatever-the-fuck-a-vulgore-was things, she was about to be defeated by a bunch of boats.
“We were idiots not to see this coming,” Haethen muttered. “But none of the information we have on tulwar suggests that they know boats.” She sighed, setting the spyglass down. “Fortunately, we were lucky that we didn’t dedicate the scraws to the defenses today.”
“Lucky for those fucking monkeys, maybe.”
Blacksbarrow came stomping up the watchtower’s steps, her hat tucked under her arm. Her blue coat was stained with black patches where the gaambol’s blood had spattered. Red streaked her face, rendering her grin white, stark, and wholly unnerving as she fired off a salute.
“Riders are ready when you are, Prophet,” she said. “We’ll take care of your river-monkeys for you.”
Asper nodded, then studied her intently. “So, uh … you want to take care of …” She gestured around her face. “The whole ‘blood’ thing?”
“Let them know it was me that sent their gaambols running.” Blacksbarrow snorted. “One fucking lance was all it took.” She quirked a brow at Haethen. “Where’d you learn that trick, anyway? Ancient Karnerian secret?”
“Atrepus’s Guide to the Meat-Eaters of Bagwai, Volume Two.” Haethen sniffed. “Nature book. The gaambols obey a patriarchal structure, following their chieftain. They don’t fight without him. Maximum effectiveness with one well-placed blow.”
“Like kicking a man in the stones.”
Haethen blinked. “I prefer to think of it more like cutting off the head.”
“Mine’s better.” Blacksbarrow turned to Asper. “With your leave, Prophet, we’ll get to work.”
Asper nodded. “Remember, I want you to slow them down. Sink them if you can, but don’t do anything that’ll get your soldiers killed. We’ll need every scraw if the line breaks.”
“If the line breaks, it won’t be because of Sainites.” Blacksbarrow fired off another salute. “Prophet.”
She turned neatly and began to go, when Asper called out:
“Wait!” When Blacksbarrow paused and glanced over her shoulder, Asper took a step forward. “Should you … do you need to see Dransun before you go?”
“No time, Prophet.”
“Just to tell him—”
“He’s a warrior, Prophet. So am I.” Blacksbarrow pulled her tricorne hat on and tucked her hair under it. “Whatever I want to tell him, I’ll tell him if I come back. Whatever I need to tell him, he already knows.”
She took off, coattails fluttering as she stalked down the watchtower and off toward her riders. The scraws gathered in loose formation below, screeching impatiently as the Sainites mounted them two to a saddle—a jouster in front, a shooter behind.
Impressive beasts. They clawed the earth with their talons, stomped with their hooves, lowered their antlered heads, and made shrill braying sounds. She had no doubt they could kill a good many tulwar.
But there were a lot more than a good many.
And less than thirty scraws to fight them.
“They had to have known.”
Asper glanced to Haethen. The Foescribe stood at the watchtower’s ledge, the spyglass turned toward the distant tulwar encampment.
“They must have counted on the scraws being here,” she murmured. “The boats are there to keep them occupied.”
“Our good luck we had the scraws in reserve, right?”
Haethen lowered the spyglass and narrowed her eyes. “Of the many four-letter words I would use to describe our situation, luck is not one.” She shook her head, sent bushy hair trembling. “I anticipated the tulwar being a pack of savages ruled by strength.”
“They are,” Asper said. “I know what monster leads them.”
“Then either he’s smarter than he looks or he has good counsel. Either way, we can’t count on the tulwar behaving as we thought they would.” She tossed the spyglass aside with less care than usual, then seized a quill and scroll. “I must speak with Careus. I’ll be back.”
“I’ll come, too,” Asper said, moving to follow her.
“Stay here. I’ll be quicker without you.”
“If you’re going to discuss strategy, I should be kept apprised.”
“You will be, when I return.” Haethen pushed past her and began to descend the watchtower. “I have more to tell him than mere tactics.”
Asper ran to the railing and called after her as she walked down the ramp. “What else could you possibly have to tell him?”
“He is a warrior,” Haethen replied without looking up. “But I am not.”
Asper opened her mouth to call out to her again but couldn’t find a word that would make her reconsider. She thought to simply follow her, but Haethen’s hurried stride told her she’d regret doing so. With a sigh, she resigned herself to stalking to the railing and staring out over the battlefield.
An avian screech raked at her ears. She saw the scraws flap their great wings, taking flight. In a formation of black shadows against the starry sky, they flew off toward the distant Lyre. By dawn, they would either have the boats taken care of or be dead.
And she would still be here.
She looked to the road below. A wagon laden with tarp-covered corpses rattled down, pulled by a weary ox, toward Cier’Djaal. The remaining Karnerians watched it go, their helmets doffed in reverence for their fallen brethren. Tomorrow, there would be more wagons, more corpses. Unless they all died to the last man.
And she would still be here.
She slumped against the railing, her head suddenly very heavy.
When she had performed her “miracles,” she had felt many things: deceitful, treacherous, guilty. But at least she had felt in control. It might have been lies that convinced the Sainites and Karnerians that she was the messenger of heaven, but they had been damn cunning lies and they had only happened because she could make them believe.
Now, those lies had become their own truths. It would take more work to convince her soldiers that they hadn’t happened. As far as any of them were concerned, she was the Prophet. And while Foescribes strategized and wing-sergeants flew and speakers commanded, Prophets sat up in their watchtowers and waited for more people to die.
She had led them to this. And now she was simply watching them give their lives for her.
The moon rose high into the sky. Shadows stretched across the dusty earth and grew in a black garden. The stubborn shrub grass that marked the entrance to the Green Belt became bristling creatures. The cliffs opened wide in a vast yawn, jagged jaws opened wide to swallow the day’s suffering. The corpses that remained on the dust sprouted inky blossoms, stiffened limbs sprawling out on the earth in mile-long shadows.
They seemed like living things now, these shadows. They had long limbs and silent voices and empty eyes. And the more she stared at the shadows, the more it felt as though the shadows were staring back at her.
“You are victorious.”
A voice echoed behind her. A frail stone dropped into a bot
tomless chasm. Three bubbles of air escaping a man’s mouth and bursting on the surface of the sea. Something intimate and profanely vast, as though the world had just stretched out another hundred miles behind her, made its presence known.
Or rather, his presence known.
Mundas was there when she turned. He stood stark against creation, something that just didn’t quite fit. The candle’s light flickered away from him. The night sky seemed to slough away from him. He seemed to notice neither of these. Nor even her. He stood at the edge of the watchtower, his hands behind his back and eyes on the river.
“This is what other mortals shall say of today, at any rate.” His voice was soft and deep. “Your dead are few. Theirs are many. By your standards, it was a good day.”
Asper was barely able to comprehend his presence, let alone his voice. Somehow, he always had that effect on her. And somehow, this time, she found words.
“By my standards, there are no good days,” she said, surprised at how rough her voice sounded against his. “We could have avoided this entirely.”
“How?”
“People could have listened. I could have tried harder. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “People are dead. That’s never a good day.”
“People die every day.” He hadn’t blinked since he had arrived. “Today, in fact, across the world, many people who do not know your name, your language, or your god died all at once.” He closed his mouth, respectful of that fact. “Would it soothe you to know how many?”
“No.” She hurled the word at him. “No, it wouldn’t. Few things would soothe me today.” She narrowed her eyes on him. She had never done that before. “Including your presence here.”
Mundas appeared not to have heard her. Or maybe he didn’t even care. Or maybe he wasn’t even speaking to her but someone far away.
“It appeared so simple when we first thought of it,” he whispered. The night shuddered. “We were going to improve on what heaven had done, to remedy the flaws of mortality. But how can it be a flaw when it is by design?”
“What?” Asper shook her head. “I don’t understand, and I—”
“The flaw of heaven was to believe that mortality’s greatest sin was desire.”
Mundas was not there anymore. He was behind her, standing at the map table, looking over the parchment. His eyes seemed to grow wider, as if hoping to take in the entire world in his view.
“But here remains the problem: necessity. To live, they need food. To eat, they need land. To till, they need gold. To buy, they must bleed. It would be too simple to say that gold is the root of it. The problem is thus: Mortality was built to view the world in the concept of exchanges.”
She blinked. He was gone. He was on the road, far away, kneeling beside a broken corpse. The Karnerians stationed there did not look at him, for they did not see him. And when he spoke, his voice was still painfully close in her ears.
“We trade lives today for more lives tomorrow. We pay three days of war for three years of peace. Corpses become currency. Budgets are drawn up. Vaults are emptied. Deals are made and they do not satisfy. All this, we do in an attempt to reduce suffering, to exchange it. But we fail to eliminate it.”
She blinked. He was gone again. He stood high on the cliff walls, staring down at the earth, frowning at something she couldn’t see.
“And in our attempts to reduce, we only add to it. For to exchange, nothing is lost, only more is introduced. The solution, then, is charity: someone to willingly take the suffering and charge nothing. And who could do such a thing? Who could have the capacity to burden themselves with that pain and ask for nothing?”
“Talanas,” she whispered. An answer or a curse, she didn’t know.
“No. It was his fault—their design—that was responsible for this. We needed a god, but they were distant and uncaring. We could improve on this, as well. Or so we thought. Perhaps it was our own flaw that we believed that those with the capacity did not have their own necessities. Though they demanded no exchange of corpses or suffering, they required something else. Something so precious that mortals have fought and hunted and killed for it since inception, never knowing what it was.”
He was beside her now. The entire watchtower seemed to shift, as though the earth were now leery of what stood above it. Though there was no wind, she could feel her breath escaping her.
“Poets called it love. Those more learned might call it acknowledgment. It was our flaw not to realize that he needed it. Our sin not to realize that we had not the capacity to give it.”
“Mundas, would you—”
“Consider that, I suppose.” His voice robbed hers, smothered it in the sky. “Whatever you do here will be fleeting. An exchange, however fleeting, must always be paid. I pray your debt is not large.”
And he was gone.
She could never get used to Mundas. She did not even know of what he spoke half the time, let alone what he was. Whatever laws he obeyed, they were not hers or anyone else’s. And into whatever emptiness he disappeared, she knew she should never even look, let alone follow.
But today was too different. Today, there had been too many bodies and too much blood.
“COME BACK HERE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!”
She hadn’t expected to scream that.
She wasn’t really sure what to expect as her voice echoed into the night, either. She didn’t know what Mundas would do to her for that insult, whether he would kill her, maim her, or simply ignore her.
She hadn’t expected him to reappear.
Yet he did. She felt him behind her, his stark unbelonging that made the world a little more uneasy for his presence. And when she whirled on him, she hadn’t expected to feel anger boiling up behind her face.
“Every fucking time you show up, it’s this shit.” She stalked forward, thrusting a finger at him as though he were simply an insubordinate soldier and not … whatever he was. “You appear. You say some cryptic shit that I don’t understand. You disappear. And then I have corpses to clean up afterward.”
He said nothing. He did not scowl or sneer or display the slightest evidence that he could even understand her. Yet his impossibly large eyes opened up to swallow her and she charged right in.
“I’m fighting one friend who’s a talking lizard. I’ve been abandoned by another who shoots fire out of his ass. Together, we’ve seen so much horrible, evil, and scary shit that this crap that you do doesn’t impress me anymore.”
She stood tall, hands clenched at her sides, jaw set. She resisted the pull of his stare, challenged his profane stance. She snarled.
“So I’m going to give you two options,” she said. “If you want to help me, then help me. Give me something I can use. But if you want to spew your gibberish and disappear, then you better stay gone, because I have no fucking use for this anymore.”
Whatever Mundas was, she didn’t know. What he could really do, she couldn’t begin to guess. Yet of all that she was uncertain of about him, she knew, as children know to cry, that no one had ever spoken to him like this before.
Something flashed across his face. No godly rage or terrible vengeance. His eyes did not open up to swallow her and his presence did not engulf her. His lips trembled and curled downward and, with a shudder that told her he hadn’t done so in a long time, he sighed.
“I cannot do much for you.” He shook his head. “I wish I could. I frequently wish I had not made the oaths I had, broken the vows I did. But this is done. We swore by the same promise, Qulon and I. We are bound to its laws.”
“Tell me,” Asper said. “Tell me what you can.”
He looked at her. His eyes seemed to diminish, become more human. His voice was something she heard once more, rather than felt.
“We were there,” he said. “In the earliest days, when heaven was close, we were there. We gazed upon the rancid world we had been set upon and the writhing bodies clawing over each other to escape from the mud. And we looked up to heaven, so close, and saw that no on
e was looking back upon us.
“We did not give ourselves a name then. We knew only that we could not be a part of it. It was not until after we had decided, those precious few of us, that we wanted nothing from heaven, that we knew what we were.” He looked down at his hands, suddenly aware of his flesh. “We called ourselves Renouncers. We denied heaven’s authority over us. We denied our part in creation. We have stood apart from them ever since.”
“What does that mean?” Asper asked. “What are you?”
“It is impossible to say because we have never defined ourselves by what we are, but by what we are not. We are not a part of creation. We are not under the watch of heaven. We do not belong here. And because we do not, we are objective, we are neutral. We can improve on the work of heaven.”
Asper’s face tightened. “For people who seem to think you’re so mysterious, you’re pretty fucking common. I’ve heard a lot of people say they can improve on things. Usually, it means more death.”
“As all creation must end in. But we sought to eliminate suffering, to end pain, to end misery. Some of us … disagreed.”
“How? Who?”
“Qulon. Azhu-Mahl. Myself. Others still. We agreed, then, that we would not directly interfere with one another. We would permit each other’s procedures to carry out to their logical ends and see who was correct.”
“You made us into a test,” Asper snarled. “All of us, we were nothing but playthings.”
“That is … a minimal way of looking at it.” He shook his head. “And we did not do anything that others did not already want. The poor and suffering craved vengeance, so we gave them the name Khovura. The fasha craved meaning, so we gave her the name Ancaa. The world cried out for someone who will listen to them, who will guide them, so we gave it the name Khoth-Kapira.”
The words made her blood run cold. Her eyes could no longer blink. She no longer had a word for her.
Kataria was right. Lenk was right.
“But I cannot say more without violating the oath. And to violate the oath is to invite people like me, who can do what I can do, to turn to open violence.”