The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  “Treat them,” Amoch-Tethr said.

  She felt it all at once, a pain so fierce that it caused her to double over, threatening to send her toppling headlong into the water. She opened her mouth, a groan tumbled out. But it was not her voice. This was not her pain.

  But it consumed her. It filled her head with images—Blacksbarrow, Careus, countless others. It filled her body with the need to consume them—every drop of blood, every sliver of bone, every scrap of flesh—until the pain went away.

  Treat them save them kill them eat them burn them protect them kill them kill them KILL THEM.

  His thoughts. Her thoughts?

  Hard to tell. Hard to think. Hard to breathe. She couldn’t. She had to. She needed to—

  “Asper.”

  A hand fell upon her shoulder. She let out a snarl, whirling about with her left hand. It struck hot flesh, sent her assailant falling back with a cry of alarm.

  Only when she saw Aturach’s face, wide with shock and pain, did she realize what she had done. She tried to hide her arm, but when she looked at it, her skin was once again whole. The pain she had felt so keenly was gone, released upon the air.

  “Aturach,” she gasped. She moved forward to treat him. “I’m sorry.”

  “My fault,” he said, holding up a hand. “I shouldn’t have sneaked up on you, here of all places.” He cringed. “Though, here of all places, neither of us should be, you know.”

  “We’re low on hecatines and high on victims,” she replied, sighing. “It had to be done.”

  “By you, though? The Sumps aren’t safe. What would happen if you got knifed here? Where would we be?”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “If you’re going to tell me that lie, you should at least look at yourself in the mirror.”

  She didn’t need to look at herself to know what he spoke of. She could feel the dark circles under her eyes, the frown weighing down her mouth, the grease in her hair and on her skin. She could feel the bend in her neck and the crick in her back.

  It would be accurate to say she looked like hell.

  “Anything you want to fucking say on that matter, Aturach?”

  Accurate, but not wise.

  He touched his cheek where she had struck him. “You aren’t going to help anyone if you work yourself to death, Asper.”

  “Well, I don’t have a lot of choice, do I? The people who volunteer either die in the city or flee once we’ve patched them up. You, me, and Dransun are the only ones around who will help.”

  “There’s the Temple of Ancaa, still,” Aturach said.

  “They’re only taking the overflow,” Asper replied. “They don’t know how to treat the wounded. It’s down to just us three.”

  A dark-green shape fell out of the sky, the buzzing of wings filled her ears as it flew past. The hecatine settled on the corpse its comrade had just been feeding upon and began searching for a vein.

  “And these things,” Asper sighed.

  She leaned forward and began to turn the corpse over. The hecatine buzzed, making way for it.

  “What are you doing?” Aturach asked, a tinge of disgust in his voice.

  “It needs a fresh vein for more blood,” she replied. “And this guy’s not going to miss—”

  She fell silent as she looked upon the corpse’s face.

  Dark-skinned Djaalic, civilian clothes, no beard; young man, probably a merchant’s apprentice, strong and able-bodied. He stared up at the sky with a glassy look, bled out from a wound in his chest. He still had a scar upon his temple where he had been struck.

  Back in the city, where she had first met him.

  Back when she had saved him.

  “Asper?” Aturach said, looking over her shoulder.

  “This man,” she said, “I saved him. Days ago. He was complaining and being an asshole, so I…” She looked up, eyes wide. “I sent him to the Temple of Ancaa with the other overflow.”

  “Huh,” Aturach grunted. “He probably ran away, then, after he—wait, where are you going?”

  Asper didn’t answer him. She pushed past him, waded through the water to another drifting corpse. She seized him by the shoulders, drew him close. A well-fed man, nicer clothes, elegant beard; older, a merchant, lost his business in the war. Dead from a gash across his neck.

  She had saved this one four days ago. She had treated a shallow wound and sent him to the Temple of Ancaa.

  “No,” she whispered.

  She splashed through the waters again to a woman, rolled her over. This one had been savaged thoroughly before she died. Middle-aged, shabby clothes, stretch marks on her flesh; mother of three, she had told Asper about them when Asper had pulled her out from under some rubble six days ago.

  And sent her to the Temple of Ancaa.

  “No.”

  “Asper, wait!” Aturach cried out, trying to follow.

  She tore through the waters, found them all. More corpses: a young man who had been a baker’s apprentice, a young woman who had worked at an inn to help her younger sister, a grandmother who had lost her home to Sainite commandeering. Their injuries had been minor. She had sent them all to the same place.

  How had they all ended up in a graveyard?

  “Those fucking heathens,” Asper muttered under her breath. When that was not good enough, she screamed to the sky. “Those fucking pagan PUKES!”

  “What is it?” Aturach finally caught up to her, breathing heavily.

  “We trusted them,” Asper snarled at him. “We trusted them and they just sent everyone out here to die!”

  “Who?”

  “The Ancaarans!” She swept her hands over the floating graveyard. “Don’t you see? Everyone we sent to them, they sent here!”

  Aturach’s despair deepened on his face with each dead face he saw. “Look, there must be—”

  “What? An explanation? Did they all feel better?” She pointed to the dead grandmother. “Did she? I had to carry her up the stairs to their temple, Aturach!”

  “That doesn’t—”

  “It fucking does, you spineless piece of—”

  “DON’T FUCKING SAY THAT!” Aturach roared. “Don’t… just…” He gritted his teeth, his hands clenched into trembling fists. “I see it, Asper. Same as you. But the Ancaarans are wealthy. They have the room to help these people. We need to tread carefully here.”

  He sighed, reached out, and touched her shoulder. “Ancaa is a new religion, even in the south. There’s precious little experience to be had with them, but I’ve got it. Let’s think this over.”

  She drew in a deep breath, reached up, and laid her hand on his. “You’ve always been more diplomatic than me, Aturach.”

  “We work well together that way,” he said.

  She nodded. Then she seized his fingers, tore his hand off her, and stormed off toward the gates of the Sumps.

  “Think just how much more diplomatic you’ll seem when you’re apologizing for me after I’ve caved their gods-damned faces in.”

  “Heathen though you may be, priestess, I am making every attempt to understand your anger.”

  The voice of the pudgy priest of Ancaa was dim and droning, accompanied by the rattle of his emerald headdress as he settled back in a finely carved chair behind a finely hewn altar atop a finely woven carpet. His manicured fingers played with a necklace of jade that hung heavy around his throat, as he pouted at the dark stain on his carpet.

  “Though I have no desire to understand your odor.”

  Asper, for her part, had no desire to justify it. The water of the Sumps hadn’t dried from her run to Temple Row and still dripped from her clothes onto the carpet.

  As she saw it, the Temple of Ancaa, with all its polished stone and marching pillars and stained glass windows, could do with a bit of grime.

  Maybe a bloodstain or two, as well.

  “Don’t change the subject,” she snarled. “We’ve been sending victims with minor wounds to you on the basis that you had the room t
o hold them.” She thrust an accusing finger at them. “You said you could.”

  “And we could,” the priest said, “and we can. There is more than enough room here.” He gestured to the stained glass skylight depicting a tide of humanity joined in a twisting ring. It shone down on him as if to suggest a massive halo for a very small man. “For the faithful of Ancaa.”

  Asper’s finger fell, her hand curling into a fist. At a loss for words, she stormed forward to deliver a more direct objection. Angry as she was, though, Aturach was quicker and scurried in front of her.

  “We had an agreement,” he protested. “We would take everyone, regardless of faith.”

  “The agreement has changed.” The priest’s reply lilted out of his pouting lips. “It was deemed no longer beneficial to Ancaa.”

  “What was unbeneficial?” Aturach demanded. “The part about helping people or housing people? I’ve read through your scriptures. Ancaa helps the poor and the destitute.”

  “Ancaa does,” the priest said. “And our temple is full of those who are poor and destitute and adhere to the proper values.”

  “Proper? Proper?” Diplomacy, apparently, had a limit. And it ended in a sputtering rage that sent Aturach at the priest with a raised fist. “What’s proper about tossing people into the Sumps, you bloated—”

  “Aturach.” Asper laid a hand on his shoulder, drew him back. “Be at ease.”

  He trembled beneath her touch, but slowly lowered his fist. “I suppose that wouldn’t have helped anything at all.”

  “Of course not,” she said, pushing past him and raising her own fist. “You have no upper body strength. You wouldn’t even leave a bruise.”

  “Don’t think to bring violence in here, you ruffian,” the priest said, backing up into his throne as she approached. “Ancaa protects—”

  His voice leapt into a frightened squeal as she leaned forward. She met his eyes, found them quavering as she leaned closer. She glanced up at the glimmering emeralds set in his headdress. A dozen weary women looked back at her, reflected in the jewels.

  “Nice jewels,” she said. “A mark of your station?”

  “W-when I was chosen,” the priest said, “they were bestowed upon—”

  “I know. I remember how they looked on the last guy that wore them.” Her scowl swept down to meet his gaze again. “They looked nice then, even as he choked on his own blood.”

  “If you are trying to threaten me…”

  “I don’t make threats,” Asper said. “I’m not a soldier. I’m not a thug. I’m a healer. I’m trying to keep people from dying and there is no end to people who want to keep me from doing that. Or you.”

  “We are of different faiths,” the priest said, trying to force some spine into his words. “Do not pretend we are alike.”

  “I haven’t read your scripture or heard your sermons and I don’t care. But when your predecessor was shot down like a pig, we became alike. We became targets for the Karnerians, for the Sainites, for the Jackals and the Khovura. Because we are the ones that do what they can’t. We are the ones that can mend what they destroy. We can keep this city, these people, standing.”

  There was no mercy in her voice. She did not plead. She did not threaten. She merely stated.

  “And the only way we don’t all end up bleeding out in an alley is if we stand together.”

  In any holy woman’s life, if she was lucky enough, there would come a time when she would gaze upon someone’s face and see it. The moment when color came back to cheeks, when darkness fled from eyes, when a mouth was held just slightly open, speechless. It was a moment when she, charged with explaining how such a world could possibly make any sense, finally made someone understand.

  The moment came as it would: through compassion, through patience, through example.

  The Ancaaran twitched away from her, swallowing hard.

  Or fear, she thought. Fear’s fine, too.

  The priest’s eyes darted to the shadows. And as though she were some evil presence simply waiting to be acknowledged, a low voice hissed from near a pillar.

  “‘Obey me or face apocalypse.’”

  No one had noticed her there until she came walking out of the gloom. She stood so short and so thin that no one would have.

  “‘Heed me or suffer.’”

  But her yellow eyes burned above her veil with an anger that belonged on someone large, someone vast, someone imposing. And her stride was that of a warlord through a field of ruin.

  “‘Do as I say or you will die.’”

  Fasha Teneir, in an unassuming silk robe, wearing a chain of silver hands joined together around her neck, stepped into the ring of light cast by the stained glass.

  “The same words regurgitated by the same gods of the same people since time began,” Teneir hissed. “Typical.”

  Asper felt the anger roiling through her take a step back, becoming something wary. Muscles tightened in anticipation, rather than fury.

  No doubt Teneir was an anomaly among the ostentatious fashas, with her humble wardrobe and modest jewelry. But even with that, there was something in the rigid way the saccarii woman held herself that made her look as hard as any thug or soldier. That something sensed the violence that lurked beneath Asper and dared her to come try to unleash it.

  “Fasha Teneir.” If Aturach saw the same thing, he at least held down the recognition as he addressed the saccarii. “I would have thought you to be in Silktown with the other nobles. Are you not hoping to ride out the violence there?”

  “Your assumptions betray your snideness, Talanite,” she said. “Fasha Mejina and the others may cower behind their dragonmen and pristine walls. My place has always been here, with the people.” She swept her scowl to Asper. “The true people of Cier’Djaal.”

  “Surely the Djaalics are one people, Fasha,” Aturach said.

  “To the blind, perhaps. To the ignorant, the weak”—another pointed glare to Asper—“the foreign.”

  She whirled about and swept a hand about the great temple hall, its marching pillars and its bronze braziers and its stained glass.

  “But I have lived a life above the filthy streets and I have seen Cier’Djaal from on high. I have watched the merchants eat the people, the thieves eat the merchants, the fashas feed the thieves. I have seen this city as it was truly built, with one man standing upon the broken backs of a hundred.”

  Her voice sank low beneath her veil. “This is a city of many people, Talanite. And each one is defined by the size of his coin purse. We are divided, priest. And the shkainai would divide us further.”

  “She has done nothing but aid us—”

  “In what?” Teneir cut Aturach off. “What happens when these people are healed? How long until the next holy war? The only way to stand against foreigners, against thieves, against corrupt fashas is united. And because we stand divided, we are meat for the shkainai.” She turned her glare back upon them. “Ancaa will save this city. And when she does, she will reign as one god over one people.”

  Aturach’s mouth hung open, lips still groping for words to match the shock painted on his face. Asper, by contrast, knew exactly what to say.

  “So, what?” she growled as she stormed toward the fasha. “You’re sending people out to die to set an example? To intimidate them into belief?”

  “I am letting them know the price of heathenry,” Teneir replied sharply. “I am forging a new world with one less war to fight. My vision for Cier’Djaal—”

  “Is bullshit,” Asper interrupted. “You think you’re the first asshole to think it was a great idea to kill people to prove a point?” She shoved the fasha, sent her staggering backward. “You’re not even the first person this week to give me a lengthy speech about why their murder was justified.”

  Teneir brushed her robe, as though Asper’s touch were unclean. “I do what I must for Cier’Djaal.”

  “And I do whatever I can,” Asper snarled, “for its people. All of them.”

 
“You think yourself some great shkainai savior? Some northern deliverer of the poor?”

  “I took an oath to heal the wounded, to tend to the sick, to comfort the dying, no matter the cost. Skin doesn’t matter. Location doesn’t matter. Faith doesn’t matter.”

  And then, in the span of a single breath, all the heat fled Teneir’s eyes. What remained behind was something cold and appraising, something that belonged in the eyes of a merchant and not a visionary. And with that look, she spoke very softly and very slowly.

  “Then convert.”

  Asper had been expecting a number of different responses from the fasha—and a number of those she had been hoping would warrant fisticuffs. But this statement, delivered as plainly as the letters on a contract, stunned her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Convert,” Teneir repeated. “If faith does not matter, then it should be a small matter to agree to kneel before Ancaa and swear a new oath.”

  “It’s not just that, it’s… it’s…”

  “A matter of sums?” Teneir turned her back to the woman, made a fleeting gesture. “The temple shall be reopened to all who require it, regardless of faith. I will dedicate my fortunes to their aid. I will refurbish and restock the Temple of Talanas, if you wish. I will even throw open my own estates to them and every comfort therein. All this shall be done…”

  Teneir turned that appraising look over one shoulder.

  “Assuming you were not lying.”

  Every curse seemed too tame. Every retort seemed too feeble. Every word she had felt as though it would simply tumble out into a formless, astonished plea. And yet she knew any plea would be met with silence. From fasha, from Aturach, from heaven.

  And so she stood there, without a single word.

  Kill her.

  But not everyone was at the loss she was.

  Maim her.

  Beneath the flesh of her left arm, Amoch-Tethr twitched. His teeth bared themselves in a smile. His eye rolled about, trying to see. His voice was a brimstone-tinted cackle in her skull.