The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  He heard her footsteps thunder in the chamber. He heard the fury with which she slammed the door open. And before he knew it, he heard his own voice, soft and barely there as he called after her.

  “There’s a woman,” he said.

  Her footsteps stopped. The door’s creak went silent. Without looking up, he continued.

  “She works in a bathhouse called the Sleeping Cat, near Silktown.” He swallowed hard. “Whatever happens to me, I’d like to know she was safe.”

  A moment of silence passed.

  “What’s her name?” Asper asked, as soft.

  “Liaja,” he said. “She calls me ‘northern boy.’”

  A sigh. Warm and tired and resigned. The door eased shut, leaving him alone in the chamber.

  Almost.

  “Well, then,” he sighed, looking down at the horror of flesh and sinew at his side. Admiral Tibbles looked back up at him, indifferent to the satisfied smirk he shot. “I told you I was feeling important today.”

  TEN

  AN IRON WHEEL TURNS

  Gariath’s time in Cier’Djaal had been brief, but it had taught him a valuable lesson.

  A city could be gilded in coin and swaddled in silks on the outside and be a festering, diseased shithole on the inside.

  Gariath’s time in Shaab Sahaar had yet to begin, but it had already taught him another valuable lesson.

  Sometimes a city could be a festering, diseased shithole on the outside, too.

  Granted, he was a mile outside its borders, but he couldn’t imagine the collection of towering wooden spires and domed huts of baked clay looked better up close. The buildings rose like pimples upon the landscape, surrounding a vast lake of an oasis and drowning the blue water in their mud and wood.

  Any trees that had once grown on the lake’s banks had been chopped down to make those towering spires. Any greenery that had once crawled from its shores had been smothered by clay huts. For miles around it was surrounded by flat, barren desert and it somehow still managed to be the ugliest thing he could see.

  His days-long journey there had given Gariath plenty of time to hear about the city’s history—how it had begun as a holy place, evolved into a marketplace, become a home for thousands—but it had taken him just one look to decide he hated it.

  To him it was a place of weakness, like any other city. The desert was here to breed hardness, strength. The beasts that roamed it were fierce and gave good meat. The water that dotted it in oases was sweet and worth coveting. The desert had made the tulwar strong.

  They deserved that strength, Gariath felt.

  “The first thing I do is get so drunk I will vomit.”

  If only the tulwar felt the same way.

  “Then so much more drunk that the vomit looks appetizing.” A long-fingered hand clapped Gariath on the back. He looked down to see the broad, simian smile turned up at him. “But this time, I will only think about eating it.”

  Haangu. Daaru’s stupid cousin.

  “You’d have to be able to think first.” Another pair of hands appeared behind Haangu, jerked up the back of his half robe, and pulled it over his head. “And if you could do that, you’d remember being thrown out of every drinking house in Shaab Sahaar like the ape you are!”

  Shengo. Daaru’s ugly cousin.

  “I remember kicking your hairy ass clearly enough!” Haangu roared as he fought to escape his tangled garment.

  Finding no apparent egress from his garb, Haangu settled for seizing it in his hands and tearing it from his torso, exposing a broad gray chest spattered with silver fur. His face was livid with a riot of yellows, reds, and blues. With a howl he charged after his brother, who met him with a snarl.

  Their scuffle began with fists. Then escalated to teeth. Then finally became a brief tumble across the sand, before they finally scrambled to their feet and ran off, hooting with laughter, toward the distant city.

  Not a city, he reminded himself. A wound. A wound that makes maggots out of people.

  “Idiots.”

  “Young,” came a voice from behind.

  Perhaps Gariath’s mistake had been to think all tulwar were like Daaru. Tall and proud as he approached, hand resting on the hilts of the swords tucked into the sash of his half robe.

  His eyes were bright and clear, his jaw strong, as his lips curled into a smile, as he watched his cousins tumble across the road of pounded dust that led up to the city. He winced as one of them pushed the other and the fight began anew.

  “Specifically,” he said, “they are duwun.”

  “Du-what?” Gariath snorted.

  “Young souls,” Daaru replied. “Their Tul forgets each life the moment it’s over, remembers nothing but the moment where meat is good and blood runs hot. And when they die, their Tul finds a new body and begins again.”

  That seemed like a lot of words to say idiots, but Gariath didn’t protest.

  “Ah, but there will be time to tell you all about this later,” Daaru laughed. “And so much more.” His eyes drifted down to the scabs forming on Gariath’s flesh. “Two days ago you had arrows jutting from those wounds. Now you’re already healing.”

  “I do that sometimes,” Gariath grunted.

  “I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t looking at it. You shouldn’t be alive, but somehow—”

  “I am.” Gariath did not so much end Daaru’s thought as dismember it with a gnashing of his teeth. “I always am.”

  He had no desire to remember that day when Daaru had found him. Even less desire to remember what he had cried out.

  “No matter.” Daaru waved a hand. “My children will not want to know why, just how you did it.”

  “Children?”

  “Two of them. We think the boy’s duwun, but the girl’s saan for sure. But you’ll see.” He smiled. “You’ll stay with me, of course. The least I can do for the story you’ll tell my children is offer you food and shelter.”

  “Fine, whatever.” Gariath snorted. “I don’t care.”

  “Good. Good.” Daaru thumped his chest. “Be gruff. Scare them a little. The boy could use more nightmares.” He glanced back up the road, where the brawl between Haangu and Shengo had somehow necessitated the drawing of swords. “I should settle this. I promised my aunt I wouldn’t bring them back bleeding.”

  Gariath watched Daaru sprint over, drawing his own sword as he did. Steel was common in tulwar disputes, Gariath noted. Swords were drawn for everything from matters of honor to deciding who got the biggest piece of meat at dinner. There seemed to be absolutely nothing a tulwar was not willing to settle with mindless, abject violence.

  So Gariath was forced to admit there were some points about them he liked.

  He turned and made his way down the road to the rest of the caravan. Daaru’s hunting band wasn’t much: a pair of carts to hold the prizes of their hunts, a pair of oxen to pull them, the few male and female tulwar who had come—sans the two who had been killed in the strife with the shicts. And at the rear, lumbering on his knuckles, Kudj observed distant Shaab Sahaar and all its spires.

  “Kudj regard architectural decisions with trepidation,” the vulgore rumbled as Gariath came walking up. “But Cier’Djaal only comparison. Kudj perhaps limited in cultural appreciation.”

  “They’re the same,” Gariath growled in response. “Cier’Djaal, Shaab Whatever. Every city is a hunting ground where people make meat out of each other.”

  “Discussion with squibs leads Kudj to believe Shaab Sahaar product of necessity to defend against shict raids.” Kudj sniffed. “But Kudj not mean to diminish squib’s metaphor.”

  “I can still smell the reek of Cier’Djaal days away,” Gariath said. “And they choose to imitate the humans.”

  “Where squibs supposed to live?”

  “Out there.”

  Kudj followed Gariath’s gesture out to the desert. The vulgore scratched his chin thoughtfully.

  “Avoid plentiful water of oasis in favor of trackless wastes.” He hummed
deeply. “Kudj confess to difficulty in following squib’s logic.”

  “So they stay here?” Gariath snorted. “Grow weak? Sick?” He snarled. “Daaru was strong in the desert. He fought. He bled. There was honesty in that. Now he talks about his children, telling stories…”

  “Squib has multiple interests? Fighting and bleeding limited conversation.”

  “I thought he was strong.” Gariath fixed his glare on the distant city. “I thought they were all strong. But they’re no different than humans. They would sit in their homes and grow weak while the humans eat each other. They would have me sit with them and wait to die.”

  “Why that squib’s concern?”

  “Well, it’s—” Gariath paused, turned his scowl toward Kudj. “Do you mean they’re the squibs or I am?”

  Kudj reared up on his hind legs, rolled a massive shoulder. “Kudj find it matter little. Squibs all the same.”

  “They can’t see it,” Gariath snarled after him as he trudged away. “I can. They act like their city is different than any other festering wound. Diseased, reeking…”

  “Mm.” The rumble of Kudj’s voice joined the rumble of his knuckle-dragging stride. “Squibs never like wounds unless they ones to cause them. Squib humor.”

  There was a good retort for that, Gariath thought. As the caravan rolled away, he looked to his left and right for one. But, finding no sharp rocks with which to deliver his retort to the back of the vulgore’s skull, he resigned himself to stalking after.

  Perhaps Kudj had a point. Just because the tulwar had a city didn’t necessarily mean they were weak, stupid, and ugly.

  There could be all sorts of reasons they were weak, stupid, and ugly. It wouldn’t be fair to deny them the chance to prove it.

  As it turned out, the tulwar met Gariath’s unspoken challenge with the same vigor with which they met any other challenge.

  The stench of anger hit him first.

  Hot and dry like a parched throat. It dripped from the eaves of the sloping roofs of the spires. It seethed out of the vents of clay houses. It paved the dirt roads and snaked out of alleys.

  Other typical stenches—fear, hunger, despair, desperation—were present, too. Shaab Sahaar’s aromas were many, but they all carried a heated edge of rage.

  And nothing reeked stronger than its people.

  They milled in teeming numbers. Beating rugs out of windows, selling meat from street-side grills, sitting in porches and in doorways, passing cups back and forth.

  Most were warriors, tall and muscular. Many were elders, shorter, with rounded bellies and sagging breasts. Gray flesh and gray fur were left mostly bare by their half robes of many different colors—chota, they called the garment. And more than a few carried swords hanging from their sashes.

  Though their anger was quickly being replaced by a different odor, one that grew stronger with every step Gariath took deeper into the city. And while a sentiment such as “What the fuck is that?” couldn’t quite be put into an aroma, the tulwar’s alarm at his presence was evident enough in their wide-eyed stares.

  But then, he admitted, those might have been more for Kudj.

  The tulwar thronging the streets backed away from Gariath as he made his way down its central street, regarding him and his hulking companion with little more than startled mutters. Daaru’s influence, he supposed. Or maybe the fact that he was a seven-foot-tall, toothy creature in the company of another, much bigger creature.

  Whatever. It made for an easier trip down the street.

  “Squib see Daaru?” Kudj asked, looming over Gariath.

  “Maybe,” Gariath grunted. “They all look the same to me.”

  “Ah, squib not perceptive.” The vulgore gestured to his own face. “Faces different.”

  Gariath squinted to see, but the vulgore was correct. In the tulwar’s faces, the thick folds of flesh varied. Some sloped a little deeper, some twisted a little higher; when their tempers flared and their colors showed, Gariath imagined they would be a sight bordering on fearsome.

  The few whose colors flowed into their faces at his presence let their colors die when he glared at them.

  “You’re taller,” Gariath grunted. “What do you see?”

  “Many squibs.” Kudj’s thick eye ridges rose. “Many squibs. Too many for so few squibhouses.”

  It was, Gariath thought, difficult to notice these things when he didn’t care about them, but once again Kudj was right. The tulwar choked streets too small for them, peered out of the doors and windows of houses too small for the numbers in them; the crowds were thick enough to make the berth they gave him insultingly small.

  They were too close. They teemed. Their scent was overpowering. Their reek was everywhere.

  Except for…

  His nostrils quivered. A new scent. Something stale, pungent; he had smelled it before, but so long ago that he could barely remember it. Despair? Arousal? Hunger?

  He received his answer as soon as he saw the coiling smoke.

  Tobacco. Ordinary, average tobacco from a wooden pipe.

  He would never have noticed the source out of such a crowd without the odor. But he followed the smoke to the eaves of an overcrowded wooden house, to a column running down from the roof to the dirt, to the old tulwar sitting cross-legged on the earth.

  His gray mane was streaked with white, the flesh pattern of his face sagged, his belly was round beneath the faded orange of his chota, and a string of wooden beads hung from a neck thick with loose flesh. Yet behind the veil of pipe smoke, his eyes were yellow, keen, and staring.

  Yet all this was not as noticeable as his lack of scent.

  There was the pungency of tobacco, but that wasn’t a true scent. There was nothing to this old tulwar. No anger, no despair, no greed, lust, or hunger. He sat there, scentless, silent, staring.

  As if he knew.

  Knew everything.

  It struck Gariath as ironic that this should irritate him, this creature and his lack of smell. He couldn’t explain it. Something about the satisfaction, the confidence with which the tulwar carried himself even as he sat in dirt.

  Before he could make a move to share this particular thought, his nostrils flared, invaded with a sudden riot of aromas.

  Excitement. Anger. And… feces?

  A high-pitched shriek pealed through the crowds. Gariath’s attentions were turned from scent to sound to sight as he looked high to the eaves of a towering wooden spire and the dark shape hanging from it.

  He had never seen a baboon, but he had heard stories of them from the humans. This thing—this beast—had the same hard-packed muscle covered in dense black fur, the long snout of naked red flesh, the long arms with which it hung from the spire’s sloping eaves, the dangling tail.

  He hadn’t heard anything about their being the size of horses, but then, he hadn’t been listening very closely.

  The beast released its grip, falling to the second story of the house and landing upon its sloping roof. It shattered shingles beneath its feet as it loped across and leapt. The crowd parted with a collective cry as it struck the road in a cloud of dust.

  It looked up, peeled back lips the color of blood to reveal yellow fangs the length of daggers. But the crimson of its flesh paled against the bright red of its eyes, focused right on Gariath.

  The crowd continued to part as it came charging toward the dragonman on all fours. Its mouth gaped with a shriek, spittle flying from fangs as it barreled toward him.

  Before he could act, the beast screeched to a halt just before him. It snorted, blasting him with hot air, as it rose onto short legs and pounded its fists against a barrel chest. Its shriek was ear-piercing this close, its breath hot and reeking.

  “Hey, shkainai!”

  At the edge of the crowd, a female tulwar wearing an earth-brown chota and carrying a stick with a hook at the end called out to him.

  “You speak human?” she called. At Gariath’s nod she grunted. “He’s just showing his dominance. He doesn
’t have your scent, so he’s trying to figure out where you stand.”

  As if to emphasize this, the beast growled and lunged forward, forcing Gariath back a step.

  “Whatever you do,” the female called, “don’t show fear. Don’t take another step back. Don’t look away from him. And don’t—”

  If she was about to say “don’t punch him in the face,” she was going to be disappointed. As the beast shrieked and lunged forward again, Gariath’s fist shot out and met its jaw with a resounding crack.

  It fell to the ground in a cloud of dust. It lay prone for only a moment before leaping back up to its feet. Its shriek became a squeal as it scurried and cowered behind the female, who regarded Gariath with a deep frown.

  “Or just hit him like a savage.” She leveled her crook at Gariath. “This was a breeder, shkainai. If you damaged him, you better have money to pay for a new one.”

  Gariath narrowed his eyes at her. This was where the tulwar came to escape the humans? To build houses and grub for coin like them?

  “He will pay for nothing.” The deep voice of Daaru preceded his stride as he swept past Gariath from behind and thrust a finger at the female. “Ululang, you have been warned. Gaambols are supposed to be kept at the edge of the city.”

  “They need to drink, don’t they?” the female named Ululang growled back. “The quickest way to the oasis is through the streets.”

  “The streets are crowded enough without you bringing beasts into them!”

  “Yeah?” She cast a glare toward Gariath, then over his head to Kudj, looming nearby. “You don’t hear me complaining about the beasts you bring here. The streets are too crowded for vulgores and…” She squinted at Gariath. “I don’t even know what that thing is.”

  “They are both guests of Shaab Sahaar,” Daaru said. “No different than your clan. We are stretched thin right now. Further than anyone can remember, but Shaab Sahaar has turned no one away before.”

  The female snorted, slung her hook over her shoulder, and cast a fleeting glance to Gariath. “No tulwar.”