The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  Denaos glided between lies like a falling leaf, never losing track of any of them, never bothered by any of them. Could he have done this more easily? Was it supposed to be easy?

  She didn’t know why she was asking. She already knew the answers, and they weighed heavily on her shoulders. Each step down Jalaang’s dusty roads felt as if it would be the one to drag her down to the earth.

  Yet heavy as her head was, it was not so clouded that she could not hear the sound of a pair of feet landing on the street behind her.

  Her knife flashed into her hand as she whirled about and beheld a pair of eyes glittering with familiar darkness. A fearful thought struck her as she wondered if Kwar had followed her. But there was nothing of Kwar in the face that looked at her, except for the eyes.

  She never had looked much like her brother.

  “Easy,” Thua said, raising his hands. “I’m not here to fight.”

  She knew this to be true. Despite the thick brawn of his muscle—left bare by the kilt and sandals he wore—Thua was never much for combat. His face was softer than Kwar’s, a deep frown where her smile was. Kataria snorted, sheathed her blade.

  “Doesn’t anyone in your family introduce themselves without leaping out of the shadows?” she asked.

  “I thought you would have heard me coming.”

  Thua’s ears, notched the same as Kwar’s, twitched. True, the Howling that bound all shicts together should have tipped her off to his presence. Had she not been consumed with varying degrees of guilt and terror over what she was doing to his sister, it certainly would have.

  Of course, she opted not to tell him that.

  “I’ve been distracted,” she said.

  “Understandable,” Thua said. “You must have a lot on your mind, what with your trip to the Forbidden East and all.”

  “You heard.” A statement. Not a question.

  “Everything,” he replied, his ears twitching again. “I was on the roof of a warehouse. Your human friend is loud.” His face was cold as stone as he regarded her. “Is he your friend, sister?”

  She forced her face still. She couldn’t let him know how close the implication had struck her. “You shouldn’t be here, Thua.”

  “Kwar thought so, too. She asked me not to come.”

  “Asked?”

  Thua sneered. “Told. I came with her anyway. This city is full of humans. It’s not safe for us here.” He narrowed his eyes on her. “Least of all her.”

  Kataria had never liked pacifists. And while Thua was not, strictly speaking, a pacifist, he still had that same air of insufferable moral superiority that made his every word cut as keenly as any blade. She would, she decided, be perfectly justified in responding with a more straightforward blade, or at least in punching him in the face a couple of times.

  Maybe it was respect for Kwar that made her turn away. Maybe it was respect for another shict that made her start walking. Or maybe she knew she couldn’t attack him without proving him right.

  Pacifists were annoying like that.

  “She loves you.”

  It was only when the words were spoken aloud that the pain in her chest became unbearable. Only then did she feel as if she might actually fall down and not get up again. Instead she settled for simply whispering in reply.

  “I know.”

  “Do you? Because you don’t act like it,” he snarled. “I’m not going to say I know exactly what’s going on with you and that human, but I know enough. I know that I’d take out my blade right now”—he paused—“if I didn’t think it would make my sister cry.

  “She never cried when we were little. It was always me. Me who had the skinned knees, me who got picked on. She was always the one to protect me. I’ve only ever seen her cry once.” He fell silent. When he spoke again, his voice was weak and choked. “She can call me a coward all she wants. I do what I must to protect her.”

  He drew in a sharp breath, took a step closer.

  “And that’s why I’m asking you, Kataria, to go. Go on the Old Man with your human. Never come back for her, never visit her, never think about her, if you can help it. You know what she feels for you, you know this won’t end well. So if you feel at all the same way, please… just leave her behind.”

  The dirt shifted. He took another step closer.

  “Do you love her?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Another step.

  “Do you love him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A hand was on her shoulder.

  “Why can’t you just choose—”

  And suddenly her ears were full of sounds: of the Howling rising up inside her, of her fist cracking against his jaw as she whirled around, of his body striking the dirt.

  “I don’t know!” She was on top of him, her fist slamming against his jaw. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know! Don’t you think I would have done something by now if I did, you little shit? Don’t you think I fucking know how this ends? That’s what’s so hard. No matter what I do, someone is going to hurt, and I don’t fucking know how to not hurt people.”

  By the time she realized her hands were around his throat, he was gasping for breath and his blood was trickling onto her fingers from a gash in his jaw. Her ears were still ringing, alive with the Howling. It took every breath inside her to release him, to get up and turn away from him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish I knew. I wish I hadn’t done that. But I don’t and I did and I’ll figure something out. So until then, just leave me the fuck alone, all right?”

  She stalked off before he could say anything. She couldn’t take another word. Blood was on her hands, dust was on her skin, the Howling was in her ears. The moon was disappearing beyond one wall, dawn would soon peer over the other. The night was over.

  And all was silent.

  SEVEN

  LADIES-IN-WAITING

  Silf had many sons, it was said, but only seven daughters.

  Denaos knew this—as any friend of the Patron did—for they had all visited him at least once in his life: Ambition and Poise to get him into places he should not be, Skulk and Whimsy to get him away from places other people thought he ought to be, and Savvy to get everywhere else.

  But it was Silf’s first two daughters that everyone—the friends of the Patron and strangers alike—knew. And it was with those two daughters laid out, brightly polished and sharpened on an oil-kissed cloth before him, that his concerns lay tonight.

  For tonight was a very important function and tonight demanded just the right lady.

  Silence: scalpel-thin, a point as delicate as a fasha’s finger. Bravado: long and serrated on one side viciously hooked at her tip. He plucked up both daggers, weighed them in either hand, let out a thoughtful hum.

  Someone screamed from the other room; this was nothing special, someone had been screaming for hours now. But this time it was loud enough to be heard through the thick wood of the door.

  That was the scream of someone ready to talk.

  Silence it was, then.

  Likely the poor fool in that room had already been introduced to Bravado. Just as well. Silence wasn’t as messy as her sister. He slipped the blade back into her sheath, took her in hand, and opened the door.

  A blast of fetid warmth struck him. The air was thick with the scent of suffering, the sound of agony. He couldn’t really be repulsed; he’d known what to expect. There were little rooms like this all over the city. The Jackals called them “antique shops,” places the guild took someone with the intent that they be forgotten. They were cramped, musty little rooms buried under the streets, tombs for the living that they might choke on their own agony while the simple folk above went by without a care for what happened beneath.

  For a long time, Denaos had tried his hardest to be one of those simple folk, going so far as to leave the city, the Jackals, all of it.

  But he was back now. This was where he belonged. In an antique shop, with a r
elic made of flesh, and in the company of a dark-tressed woman in dark leathers.

  “I didn’t think you were going to come.” Anielle regarded him coolly as he entered the room, eased the door shut behind him. “This sort of thing never was your style.”

  Didn’t used to be yours, either, Denaos thought, but did not say. Times were hard for the Jackals, so the Jackals demanded hardness. While she might not be hard, Anielle was a Jackal, through and through.

  But this…

  The room was narrow, barely twelve feet by twelve feet, and most of that space dominated by the long table upon which their captive was strapped.

  What he had been before he got here was irrelevant—a merchant, a thief, a father, a brother. What he had been before he decided to throw his lot in with the Khovura and take up arms against the Jackals was irrelevant. Because as of this moment, he was no longer a man, he was just one of the Jackals’ many antiques to be locked away and forgotten.

  But not before they made him talk.

  Judging from the mess, Denaos saw, Anielle had been hard at work; and with Bravado, as he’d suspected. Yet for all the blood spilled and flesh hewn, there seemed to have been no progress. In one corner the bucketman, with his chemicals and mop, twitched in anticipation of the blood he would have to clean up. In another corner the scribe tapped quill to empty parchment, waiting for a confession he could take down.

  Scribes, cleaners; everything was so organized with the Jackals since they’d become the only game in town. Time was, they’d have done something like this under a dock with a hammer and nail. Bureaucracy, it seemed, was the natural evolution of any organization, even a thieves’ guild.

  Even the stench of torture—the dried blood and sweat-slick suffering—was absent here. The air was permeated with the scent of packed herbs, stale incense, things they used to mask the odor of things dying. It wasn’t even as though the stink could reach so far above as to let anyone know what went on below. They just did this to further the illusion that they were civil people practicing civil business.

  As opposed to criminals torturing people to death.

  Denaos clutched his fingers around Silence, took a step forward. Anielle placed a hand upon his arm, drew his eyes to a meaningful stare.

  “If you don’t want to do this…,” she said.

  He said nothing, gingerly pulling away from her. The offer wasn’t for his sake, he knew, but for hers. She wanted to see if he would take it or if he was the hard kind of man the Jackals demanded. He knew he was, just as he’d known he was so many years ago when they had him kill for them.

  No matter how hard he had pretended he wasn’t.

  He lingered at the side of the table, appraised Anielle’s work. That it should be a saccarii they’d captured was not surprising: The Khovura’s ranks were heavily composed of Cier’Djaal’s misbegotten natives. That Denaos could recognize him as one after so much torture, though, was slightly more noteworthy.

  Anielle had worked with no restraint, carving great chunks out of the man’s scale-riddled flesh, cutting lines over thin, shriveled lips, gouging out one yellow, thin-slit eye and leaving a bloody mess in its wake. Denaos had only rarely seen a saccarii outside of his tattered veil.

  Damn thing was probably uglier before Anielle, he thought. He slid Silence out of her sheath with an oiled hiss. Still, one works with the tools one is given.

  He leaned close, let the saccarii’s remaining eye snap open, search the room frantically before settling on Denaos.

  “Good morning,” the rogue said, a smile spreading across his face. “Or is it evening? Was it morning when they dragged you down here? I suppose you must be hungry by now.”

  The saccarii said nothing, jaw fused tight with agony, single eye wide and unblinking. Denaos chuckled, looked away politely.

  “Sorry, that must seem terribly rude.” He looked back at the saccarii. “I didn’t mean to insult your intelligence. I’m not going to offer you food. I’m not going to tell you there’s a way out of here.” He leaned closer. “If you were stupid enough to go against the Jackals, you’re smart enough to know you’re going to die here. You know how this works.”

  He brought Silence up, held her delicately by the pommel with two fingers of his left hand, twisted the tip gently against the tip of one finger of his right.

  “And I’m betting you know how it ends, too,” he said. “I bet you’ve been around long enough to see how it all ends. Someone sees the way we’re running things, figures they can do it better, we bloody some noses, and so forth. The names change, but it always ends the same.

  “We find whatever dark hole they lurk in. We shine our torches down it. And we burn. We burn as far back as we possibly can, until children can’t see through the smoke and wives smell their husbands’ cooking flesh. Sometimes people escape. Sometimes we let them. But these are the Jackals we’re talking about, you know. Respectable organization. Image means a lot.”

  He let the tip of Silence graze against the saccarii’s arm and watched as it tensed up, thick veins popping out of underfed, scaly flesh.

  Funny thing, violence: It was just like telling a story. Show a man enough blood and bruises, he yearns to catch his breath. Threaten to take that away and one has his attention.

  “A few days of fighting, a few dead bodies, that’s nothing,” he said. “We do a little symbolic cutting and we call it a day. But this…” He drew Silence across the man’s arm, painting a thin red line parallel to a vein. “This has gone on for months. People are dead. Important people. We’ve got a lot of burning to do.

  “I don’t want to say you can save them,” he said. “Your family, your friends, whoever you’re trying to protect. I don’t want to insult you.” He slid his finger down the cut, gingerly hooked a nail under a flap of skin. “But I want you to think about it, how much smoke there’s going to be when we get to burning.”

  He saw the man’s eye water. The smile faded.

  “And who is going to choke on it.”

  He hooked his finger under the strip of flesh, dug his finger into the wound he had just cut. He could feel tendons separate and clench as he probed the wound. He could feel the saccarii’s scream, torn from somewhere deep, somewhere a blade like Bravado couldn’t touch. It was Silence that heard the secrets, Silence that knew what part of a man she could find them in.

  He twisted his finger just enough to touch it, that part of a man he didn’t know he had. Not enough to cause serious damage, nor even enough to prolong pain, just enough to let him know that Denaos knew things about people.

  And how to break them.

  He slid his finger out just as suddenly, left the saccarii panting on the table, his lanky, naked, bleeding, broken body fluttering like a moth under a pin. They waited in silence, Denaos giving him a chance to come to the reasonable conclusion.

  “We know someone’s feeding you information, we know we have a traitor,” Denaos said. “Tell us who the informant is and we’ll make the rest of this clean.”

  The saccarii’s breathing slowed. His struggles stopped. The bucketman reached for his mop. The scribe looked up, placed quill to paper. For a long moment, the only sound was the flabby patter of a blood drop upon the tile.

  When the saccarii’s eye finally opened, it was calm. And it stared at Denaos with such lucidity as to suggest there were parts of a man that he, too, knew very well.

  “My grandfather was given fifty coppers for land he stood on for fifty years because a fasha wanted to build a house on it.” The saccarii’s voice was racked, a quavering thing forced out of a broken throat. “My father broke his back working for the man who lived in it. My wife died in the riots so the Jackals might keep that man in his house. My child became a prostitute so that he could choose a nicer home to die in than the shack built over his family’s graves.”

  And those shriveled lips peeled back into a smile. It did not brim with false confidence, nor even with snide mockery, as Denaos had seen all men try to affect. This was a s
mile he had rarely seen before, belonging only to grandfathers who died surrounded by family, and grandmothers who saw lights grow brighter even as theirs died out.

  “What more can you do to me, Jackal?” he asked. “I am already in hell.”

  Other gods would have judged him more kindly: as a father, as a husband, as a son pushed too far. They would overlook his sins: the blade he had carried, the blood he had shed, the cause he had sworn himself to. Perhaps, they would say, he didn’t deserve a swift line painted across his throat with a keen blade.

  But he got it anyway.

  For down here, far below the busy people with their coins and their families and their kinder, gentler gods, Silf reigned supreme. Far down here with the antiques, his judgment was absolute. Far down here, with his daughters to watch, his sentence was carried out.

  And the only sound that followed the hush of flesh being opened was Silence, clattering to the floor as Denaos let her drop and walked out, an empty eye staring after him as he did.

  “The fuck did you do that for?” To the credit of Anielle’s professionalism, she at least waited until the door to the antique room was closed before spitting at his feet. “He was ready to break!”

  “He wasn’t,” Denaos replied, taking a moment to scrape the spittle off on the doorframe.

  “Hours,” Anielle said. At his confusion, she sneered. “In case you were wondering how long I had worked on him. Seven hours of cutting.” She gestured back to the door. “A few breaths in there and you decide he doesn’t know anything?”

  Denaos hadn’t said the man hadn’t known anything.

  It was almost certain that the saccarii had known something. The Khovura seemed in the business of knowing everything.

  It had been mere days since the footwar between the Jackals and the Khovura had gone underground. It had seemed like a sound strategy at the time: If the Jackals couldn’t win a straight footwar, they’d use the warring Karnerians and Sainites as a smoke screen to regroup.