The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  “Or it could all be oxshit, who knows.”

  He began to shamble away. And Gariath would have been glad to let him do so, one more insipid old fool among many, if not for one thing. In the moments when the old tulwar sucked on his pipe, the lapses in smoke revealed a peculiar scent. Not anger, not fear, not anything pleasant.

  And he had smelled nothing like it before.

  “But that’s insane,” Gariath suddenly called out.

  The old tulwar stopped, but did not look back.

  “The world is not kind. It’s full of weaklings, cowards, morons, all of whom would eagerly kill you to feast upon your carcass.” He narrowed his eyes, loosed a low growl. “People betray you. People lie to you. You can trust no one and blood is all that you’re guaranteed. If the Tul continues to return you to such a shitty world, then it’s no blessing. It only gets worse.”

  At this the old tulwar looked over his shoulder. He grinned, his yellow teeth showing. “That was precisely the line of thinking that led to the Uprising.”

  “You know of it, then.”

  “Every tulwar does.”

  “Then tell me of it. Or enough of it that I understand how it turned them all into weaklings.”

  The old tulwar turned to face him. He knuckled his lower back, straightening up with a pop. This was a creature who had been powerful in his prime, someone strong and tall.

  “Understand that fate has not been kind to the tulwar of the desert,” the old tulwar said. “At all times are we pushed. North is the Lyre, south is endless desert. Shicts to the east, humans to the west, sun from above and no water below. The humans had just swept into our lands to take what we had to farm their rice. A bold move, but our trade with them brought us blankets, steel, things we couldn’t get on our own.

  “We thought it fair enough. We lend our service to the humans, they give us what we need to fight the shicts. But while we were watching the forests to the east, the humans took more from us. Still, we thought nothing of it. Whatever they grew on that land they would sell to us. Rice was cheap.”

  The old tulwar’s smile grew grim, the kind one wore after a joke told at a funeral.

  “But if you’ve been among humans, as you say, you know what happened next. They raised the price on rice, meat, silk, everything. We could not pay and they had no more work that needed doing. What could we do but starve?”

  “You could fight,” Gariath growled.

  “Some said that.”

  “The Rua Tong?”

  “You would think so, wouldn’t you? The Rua Tong are brave warriors. Heroes, even.” The old tulwar plucked his pipe from his lips. “Heroes, though, are made for stories. They have people to rescue, golden ages of peace to usher in, dragons to slay.” He eyed Gariath sidelong as he emptied the ashes onto the floor. “No offense.”

  Gariath merely snorted in reply.

  “But once the dragons are dead and people are safe, no one has use for a hero. They have fields to till, children to raise, swine to herd. Heroes can pick up a sword and slay anything of flesh and blood. How do you ask them to kill coin and contracts?

  “Trade disputes don’t make for good stories,” the old tulwar said. “So the clans turned to the thinkers, the intelligent among themselves.”

  “I saw little of that,” Gariath replied.

  “You wouldn’t have. They were absent from tonight’s meeting.”

  “These… Mak Lak Kai?”

  The old tulwar stifled a chuckle. “One turns to the Mak Lak Kai when one has a death wish.”

  Gariath narrowed his eyes, racking his mind for the name of the other clan. It came to him in a whisper. “The Muusa Gon clan.”

  The old tulwar nodded slowly. “They called themselves the philosophers, the great thinkers. It was they and their Humn that said Tul meant something different.”

  He raised his right hand, held up a finger and drew a circle from right to left.

  “Not serenity.”

  He raised his left hand, reversed the gesture and drew a circle from left to right.

  “But suffering. The other clans agreed. And thus…”

  “The Uprising,” Gariath finished.

  “You stand here in the monument to our decay, so I trust you know how it ended.” He plucked a pouch from a fold in his robes, emptied a few pinches of tobacco into his palm. “And you seem smart enough to understand why the clans would be reluctant to walk that path again.”

  “Almost,” Gariath replied. “From what I heard, the Uprising went to the very heart of the city. I have seen it. I know how vulnerable it is. Victory was within their grasp. Why did they relent?”

  The old tulwar paused. For a long moment, he did not say anything, merely staring at the tobacco in his palm. Slowly he packed it into his pipe, struck a match produced from his pouch, and lit it. He took several long puffs.

  “It was the Humn of the Muusa Gon who led the Uprising,” he said, at last. “Mototaru, they called him. First inside the city. First to gaze upon it. First to climb the Silken Spire and stare out over it. His was the hand that clutched the torch ready to set the city ablaze.”

  “And?”

  “And he did not. He climbed down, put the torch out, turned around, and left without a word.”

  Gariath loosed a low growl.

  If the old tulwar spoke the truth, if the leader of the Uprising had left his following without a leader or a plan, its pitiful showing against the Drokha made more sense. Stupid sense, but sense.

  And yet something nagged at him enough to demand that he speak again.

  “He stared out across the city. What did he see?”

  The old tulwar offered a thoughtful look. “You have been there. What did you see?”

  “Wealth. Greed. Gluttony. Fear.”

  “Perhaps he saw something different.” The old tulwar took a long drag on his pipe, then turned around. “Or perhaps something that you did not. Either way, it does not matter.”

  He began to walk away. His back bent with each step, his feet dragged, he became someone very old, very weak, a shadow that diminished with each step as he walked off into the night.

  “What happened to the leader?” Gariath called after him. “What happened to Mototaru?”

  “Dead,” the old tulwar replied. “Like so many.”

  “Will he return?” Gariath asked before the idiocy of the question struck him. “Under this Tul?”

  “Not if he had a choice,” the old tulwar said. “After all, he agreed with you.” He raised his left hand, drew a circle in the air. “It only gets worse.”

  NINETEEN

  A BREATH WITHHELD

  The fire burned.

  Lenk knew this. He had gathered the wood from the cliffs. He had struck the blaze with the tinder he had salvaged. He had cleared the sand from the rock he sat upon. Yet he knew all this only because he remembered doing these things.

  He could not smell the smoke. He could not feel the warmth. His entire body felt numb, bloodless.

  Kataria was not there. Not at the fire. She sat upon the crest of a dune nearby, a shadow painted black against the light of the moon. Here the landscape was dotted with scrubgrass and thorny brambles, forest and desert forever battling. She looked like just one more prickly shrub among them all. Her ears were aloft, erect, listening.

  Just twenty paces away. He could have called out to her, walked to her, yet the very thought made him weary.

  His head still reeled from what she had told him. Her disappearances, the Howling, the betrayal, the name Kwar; he knew things only in fragments, jagged shards that lay upon the ground and that he couldn’t even pick up, let alone piece together. Yet he knew, all the same.

  She had betrayed him.

  In ways he couldn’t even count.

  She had departed shortly thereafter, ostensibly to scrounge up food. She hadn’t made it far. Nor did it matter. His body was weak from hunger, yet the very thought of eating left him nauseous. What would it have changed?

 
And so he sat there, with the fire he could not feel and the smoke he could not smell, staring into its blazing embers and wondering if it would hurt if he thrust himself headfirst into the flames.

  Something happened. The wind shifted, maybe. Or the sand stirred. Or a cloud raced briefly across the moon or some shit. Lenk didn’t know. Lenk didn’t know when Mocca had shown up to sit beside him. Hell, he hadn’t even known Mocca could show up without making some smartass comment.

  Yet there the man—or the demon, or the God-King, whatever he was—sat, silent and staring into the fire without a word. A long moment of one-sided conversation between them and the fire passed, the flames sputtering in indignation at their silence.

  When the quiet broke, it was Lenk who broke it. And his voice cut itself on the shards left behind.

  “Salvaged a map from the riverbank,” he said. He made a show of jabbing the fire with a stick. “The Forbidden East is within a day’s walk. It’s all jungle from there on in, so we’ll need—” He caught himself swallowing hard. “Some supplies and… and shit.”

  Mocca merely nodded.

  “Figure we can just follow the river.” He pointed with the stick to the east. The dark shapes of trees loomed in the distance. “Should be safe this far up, I think. I figure if the shicts or tulwar were going to come back, they’d have done so by now. There are only four…” He caught himself, coughed. “Three, sorry. Three of us left. We should be okay, right?”

  Again Mocca nodded.

  “Right,” Lenk confirmed to himself. “Shuro said she could probably find some more food. A lot of the supplies washed up on the banks. If we spend a little time looking for it and find enough, we can fuck, fuck, fucking fuck it all. Gods fucking DAMN IT.”

  With each roar he struck the stick against the ground, until it shattered in his hand and left splinters in his flesh. When it was nothing but a nub, he still waved it, his rage not yet spent. And so his anger leaked out of his eyes in tears.

  “She made a fool out of me,” he said, sucking air through clenched teeth. “She betrayed me. She killed gods know how many and I should have fucking seen it and I didn’t and she was fucking a… a woman the whole fucking time and… and…”

  He hurled the nub into the fire. His hand trembled, as though he instantly regretted it, before it clutched at his scalp. His head sank with such force it might well have snapped right off his neck.

  “First the Khovura,” he said. “Then Cier’Djaal goes to war. Then the Forbidden East. Now this. What did I do wrong? Which god did I piss off so bad?” He shook his head. “Even when we left, I didn’t care so much. I didn’t mind holding the sword again, because I thought that’s not what made me a man. I thought I could have the sword, live with what it did, so long as I had her.

  “She was what made me a man. Maybe the only thing.” His sigh came out wet and shuddering. “When did I fuck it all up?”

  Silence was his answer. The fire crackled, the night settled silently over him.

  For only a moment more.

  “When you bound your life to hers.”

  He had almost forgotten Mocca was there. When he looked up, the man in white was staring into the fire, but his eyes did not reflect its glow.

  “All your myths and legends about how mortal races were born,” he mused, “and all of them celebrate your weakness. The gods gave you strength you didn’t have, life you didn’t deserve, they say. But I saw the first mortals crawl out of the mud. And when you stood up, you were whole. You were complete. Like any other animal.”

  There was an immense age in Mocca’s voice, and it settled like the heel of a well-worn boot on a broken neck.

  “It is not other people that make you complete, no more than it is other dogs that make a dog complete. They may assist in the hunt, join you in scavenging in trash, but no matter how many you surround yourself with, you will always just be one.” He looked at Lenk. His eyes drank the light of the flames. “And if you are only a human conditionally, then you never were one.”

  Only then did Lenk remember that Mocca was not a man.

  Not a human, not a hallucination, not even a nightmare. He was something more, something old and terrible, something that had watched stars die and heard the cries of mountains being born. He had heard the death rattles of mortals immeasurable and had eternities to do so.

  And he was here right now. And listening.

  “What do I do?” Lenk asked.

  “That is the wrong question.” Mocca turned back to the fire. “If you do not exist without her, then any choice you make is irrelevant. You will either die or you will not, depending on what she does.”

  Lenk followed his gaze to the flames. “What’s the right question?”

  “What do you want?”

  Lenk considered this. He stared into the fire until his eyes hurt. After a very long time, he spoke.

  “I want,” he said, “for it not to hurt anymore.”

  “You want life.”

  “I do.”

  “Then you must let go.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything. Life in thralldom—be it to god, blade, or another person—is not a life. It is a comfort, something to numb you so long as you can cling to it. It is safety, but it is fragile and weak, something you crush and watch fall limp on the ground. Freedom, true freedom, is terrifying.

  “I have read your poems and heard your songs. Mortals always speak of freedom as the feeling of wind in their hair or arms wrapped around someone warm and soft. But I have felt imprisonment and I have felt freedom. And I can tell you this.”

  He turned his stare to Lenk and the young man could feel himself slipping into the emptiness of Mocca’s stare, like the last drops of water past the lips of a man long dying of thirst.

  “When you are free, Lenk, all you will feel is the last sour breath as you look over a yawning nothingness where the world used to be.”

  Lenk felt his breath grow heavier. “Then what?”

  A smile, soft and sad, tugged at the edges of Mocca’s mouth. “Then you jump.”

  The fire sputtered. The shadows shifted. And Mocca shifted with them, growing hazy and insubstantial. Clouds of smoke wafted through his body, taking pieces of him with them as they disappeared into the night sky, until there was nothing left of him.

  A log crumbled and the fire, an old man roused from a nap, roared back to life. Lenk looked up and saw her.

  Skin cast red by the flame, eyes golden with its light, Kataria stood at the edge of the shadows. How long she had been there, what she might have heard, he did not know. Her face betrayed nothing, numb and painted with flickering shadows.

  “Hey,” he said, after a long moment.

  “Hey,” she replied.

  He looked at her collarbone, her hip, her left ankle, anywhere that was not her eyes or her long, twitching ears. When he finally ran out of places to look, he turned his attentions back to the fire.

  “Find anything?” he asked.

  “Yeah, uh,” she began, awkwardly taking a seat opposite the fire, “there’s some fruit that grows in some of the trees here. She said”—she caught herself—“I hear they’re safe to eat.” She blinked. “I forgot to bring them.”

  “Ah.”

  He said nothing. For a very long time, he said nothing. And only when a very long time became an hour or more did he realize that he was afraid to speak.

  But why? he wondered. What could possibly happen? Was he simply going to look up and see her there, giggling, before she jumped up and said, “Surprise, you dumb fucker! I never did any of that!”

  He closed his eyes. He swallowed something cold and heavy. His mind racked itself for something to say to her, but he couldn’t think of anything but a singular word, repeated over and over and over.

  Why?

  In a dozen ways, he asked it.

  What did I do wrong? What’s wrong with me? How could you do this? What happened over those six days?

  And each time his mind wand
ered to an answer, he shivered. And each time he shivered, he felt the empty space beside him. Mocca would have known what to ask. Mocca would have known the answers. Wispy and insubstantial as he was, he would have known.

  Mocca’s not here, he told himself. This isn’t something Mocca can solve. This isn’t something that anyone can solve but you. Just say something. Say something now, you dumb fuck. Say something. Say something. Say—

  “It wasn’t you.”

  She spoke first. Her voice was flat, but not hard. Not a knife cutting a wound, just a stone. An immutable fact of life.

  Why did it hurt, then?

  “I mean, it was,” Kataria continued, fingers brushing one of the feathers in her hair. “You wanted a new life in Cier’Djaal and I couldn’t go with you and I thought…” She shook her head. “But it wasn’t. I didn’t mean for it to…”

  She buried her face in her hands, let loose a long breath.

  “But it did.”

  “How?” The word stumbled out of his mouth before he was even aware of his lips parting. “How did it happen?”

  “I don’t fucking know.” She looked up at him. Her eyes glistened. Her mouth trembled. She held her hands out helplessly. “It just… did.”

  “Oxshit.” He rose to his feet. “Ox. Shit. That doesn’t just happen. There had to have been something.” He paced back and forth, searching for an answer in the dirt. “There was a… a problem somewhere. I didn’t pay close enough attention, we didn’t do—”

  “Don’t you think I already went through this?” she interrupted, voice straining. “Don’t you think I sat there, wondering whose fault this was? Don’t you think it killed me when I realized it wasn’t anyone’s?”

  “But…” He clutched his head, as if there were something there that would answer all of this if he could just wrench it out. “With a woman? Another woman? How is that even—”

  “Lenk,” she said, “don’t. Please.”

  It was not her voice that did it. There was no threat there, no hardness. What was in her words, just those three words, was something soft, something tender, something so fragile and vulnerable that he could have simply reached out and crushed it in one hand.