The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  He stumbled suddenly as his toe struck a rock jutting up from the ground.

  The graphic cursing he threw at the rock did not seem to faze it much. Nor did the baleful scowl he turned on it. In fact the rock merely stared back, a distinct lack of awe at his fury reflected in its eyes.

  Eyes?

  He leaned down, cleared away some of the underbrush surrounding the stone. A pair of stone lips were revealed to him beneath the brush, followed by an ear, and then a broken nose. From a shallow grave within the sodden earth, a face stared back at him. He wedged his fingers into the soil, pulled it up, and inspected it. A man’s head, he wagered, possessed of angular features and serene expression. There were fragments of broken stone beneath a crumbling chin, as though this particular head had had an elaborate beard at some point.

  And, presumably, a body.

  He looked around, spied something leaning out of a nearby tree. A pair of granite hands he had mistaken for branches, so covered with vines and dead foliage they were, were raised in a gesture of benediction. He approached the tree, hopped up onto its roots, and brushed away more of the foliage. Its foundation was tilted by roots growing up under it, its body cracked by the trunk growing around it, but it was whole, hale, and standing a head taller than he.

  He spied a narrow crevice at the top of the statue’s broken neck, a gap the tree had not yet filled. He raised the head, set it upon the statue, and stepped back. A man in robes stared back at him with a blank expression.

  He glanced around. Surely, no one built a single statue out in the middle of nowhere for no particular reason, did they? But nothing else was out here but the trees, marching in orderly fashion along a twisting trail of soil and leaves.

  Wait.

  He walked forward carefully, feeling the earth beneath his feet. The soil was wet but firm, with barely any give to it. He knelt down and dug at the earth with his hands, tossed soil and dead vines aside until his fingers struck something hard.

  Bricks. Bricks upon bricks, laid with expert precision, their surfaces polished so smooth he could almost see himself in them. He dug more, found more: stretching out for who knew how long.

  There was a road here. Out in the middle of a forest.

  “No,” he muttered. “The trees are too close together for that to be the case. The road came first.” He looked back at the statue, bent low by the tree growing around it. “And the forest grew up around it. How long did that take?”

  He rose up, surveyed the trees, hummed in thought.

  “They’re too haphazard to have been planted by someone, so it happened naturally,” he said, scratching his neck. “With a desert nearby. Someone had to have built this before the forest began. How long ago? And who?”

  It was only when he received none that he realized he had been talking aloud and expecting an answer. It was only when he noticed that he was completely alone that he realized he had been expecting Mocca to be there.

  The man in white was always around to answer questions like this. Every time he was uncertain, every time he was afraid, every time he despaired, Mocca had always been right there, like a thought, to reassure him.

  And the fact that he was not made something lurch up Lenk’s spine.

  The sound of brush snapping and leaves scraping caught his ears.

  And when he turned around, he did so with a hand on the hilt of his sword.

  At the edge of the underbrush, a tremendous black shape paused, as if suddenly embarrassed that Lenk had noticed it. A gaambol, the massive apelike creature walking on its knuckles, stood between two twisted trees.

  Up close and without the heat of battle tingeing his senses, Lenk found the thing looked markedly different from the ones he had seen in the Gullet. This creature’s back was arched and unbroken by riders, its black fur was thick and lustrous, its muzzle had the color of long-dried blood.

  But it was the beast’s eyes, so large did they loom as they studied Lenk intently, that made him pause. The creature looked almost intelligent. Intelligent enough to maybe realize Lenk did not want a fight. Or so Lenk hoped as he backed away slowly.

  And hope he did.

  Until the gaambol’s lips peeled back, baring fangs in a terrifying roar.

  His sword was out, quick as a breath. But the beast was faster than breath, faster than even blinking. It hauled itself with long arms, launching itself at Lenk with claws outstretched and fangs bared. Lenk’s blade lashed out, catching it across the arm and drawing a deep red gash. The creature hardly seemed to notice, its tremendous hand snapping and batting at the sword with such ferocity as to tear it from Lenk’s grasp.

  He had scarcely enough time to notice it was gone before the other hand shot out and caught him square in the ribs. Air exploded from his mouth as he was sent flying, striking the sodden earth in a spray of dead leaves.

  It was only by instinct that he managed to scramble to his hands and knees. There was not enough breath left in him to go any farther. His head lolled on his neck, felt as if that blow might have knocked it clean off if his neck were any less thick. Breathless, his vision darkening from the impact, he looked up. He couldn’t see his sword anywhere, could barely see the beast. The gaambol looked like one shadow among many as it came loping toward him.

  The yellow of its fangs, broad and glistening with spittle, was bright as day.

  But the flash of silver that parted them was all but blinding.

  He wasn’t sure when it had happened, but suddenly the shadows had been joined by another. Something small, agile, the flickering of darkness at the edges of a candle’s light, appeared before him. He could make out the broad sweeps of the beast’s arms, the shrill hoots of its rage as this new shadow danced beneath its grasp and met it with a flashing silver strike.

  And before he could even see her, he knew her name.

  “Shuro,” he gasped.

  His vision cleared slowly. She came to him in fragments: the lithe twisting of her black-clad body, the bobbing of her silver hair, the shine of her sword as it flashed out, again and again, leaving bright-red letters painted upon the gaambol’s flesh.

  The creature shrieked with every swing of its arm, its entire body bristling in a futile attempt to catch her. But she was as the light reflecting off her thin blade: flashing, elusive, and painful.

  Lenk caught a glimpse of her eyes. There was no fear in them. No pity. No recognition that she was even in a battle. This fight, like every other fight, was simply reflex to her.

  The gaambol reared up on its hind legs, brought both its hands up over its head, and slammed them down in an attempt to crush her beneath its palms. And she merely stepped forward, into the beast’s arms, and thrust her blade up.

  The gaambol did the rest of the work.

  Its downward motion carried its chin onto the tip of her sword, its ferocity brought the blade bursting all the way out of its mouth. And Lenk could see in its eyes, so bright and intelligent, that it had but a moment to comprehend what had just happened before the light left them.

  Shuro jerked her sword free in a spray of blood as the beast slumped, motionless, to the ground. Her expression registered no joy or relief at its death. She barely seemed to notice, staring at it as though she expected it to get back up at any moment.

  She did not so much as blink. Not as blood trickled down her face, not as Lenk got to his feet and approached her, not as she whirled around and aimed her red-slick sword at his throat.

  “Easy,” he said, holding his hands up. “Easy.”

  But there was nothing hard about that face. Her blade wasn’t driven by fear, merely instinct. The tension in her body contrasted sharply with the ease in her deep-blue stare.

  “You could have been killed,” she said, without lowering her weapon.

  He said nothing to that, merely stared down the length of her blade and into her eyes.

  “Had your sword been out sooner, you could have gotten inside the reach of its arms and killed it as I did.” She finally lowered
her blade. “Were you trying to reason with it?”

  He lowered his arms, but still said nothing. She turned away, glancing to the underbrush.

  “Your weapon is there,” she said, pointing. “You should collect it. There are a number of other things you should do. Or should have done, at any rate. It was foolish of you to leave without telling me. I was—”

  “What are you?”

  She turned around suddenly and, for the first time, her face grew harder. But he only barely noticed that. His eyes were on her hair, the color of an old man’s, and her form, unmarred by a single cut despite the beast she had just struck, and her eyes.

  So cold and blue like his own.

  “You’re not a merchant,” he said.

  “And your name isn’t Farlan,” Shuro replied.

  Her lips curled at the corners, a smile sad and nervous. She sighed and dropped her blade, smoothed her hair out behind her ear, and, for a moment, looked like a very normal woman.

  “We should talk,” she said softly.

  TWENTY-THREE

  SHE WHO STOOD UNBLINKING

  The Temple of Talanas was quiet, clean, and idyllic.

  The pews were empty. Supplies had dwindled to the point that those in need had to venture back out into the war-torn streets to find sustenance. Those who could walk had carried those who could not back to destroyed businesses or meager shanties or wherever food might still be found.

  The cries of wounded men bleeding out and the children who wept over them were fled from the walls. They had left to seek out a place with more open air and more sky. For Temple Row was a noisy place of late, and no god seemed able to hear those within.

  The floors had been scrubbed. Those who had lingered, in a final show of gratitude, had mopped the grime from the hardwood, then scrubbed the stains of blood clean, then bent their backs to pluck the bits of bandage and bone out from the cracks between planks.

  Asper sat at the front of the temple, staring at the wooden idol of Talanas, his hands outstretched in benediction and his smile serene above his long beard. She had been staring at him for the greater part of four hours now. After the second hour, when it was clear that he was not going to emerge and offer advice, she had made coffee.

  So now she sat, and she sipped cold coffee, and continued to wait.

  For what, she did not exactly know. An answer would have been nice. Teneir’s ultimatum, in her lithe and hissing voice, still rang out in her head, every word a sizzling drop of venom on her brain.

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

  And just so, her reply, the one she had rehearsed, rang out in thoughtful reply.

  “I accept. I recognize Ancaa as my god.”

  Eight words. For a thousand lives. They sounded so simple, even in her head. Hollow, empty, just a few things she would babble on her knees in a new temple as she casually wondered what she’d have for dinner that night.

  And she would be fed, along with the countless people that could be saved with Teneir’s limitless resources. Just for eight words. Simple economics. A bargain, really.

  Why did it hurt her head, then, whenever she thought about it?

  It was this place, she told herself. Too quiet, too clean. She thought best in carnage, with the stink of blood in her nostrils and the sound of suffering in her ears.

  But she knew she was lying, merely avoiding the answer she knew she had to confront. She was denying the truth: that they weren’t mere words, that it wasn’t just a temple, that the idol before her was not mere wood.

  This was her faith. This was her god. This was all the blood and sweat she had poured into this city and all the hymns and prayers and ideas that had made her able to do it.

  In chaos or quiet, this would be no less difficult. In suffering or in serenity, the problem would be no less painful.

  And in faith or faithlessness, the answer would be no less clear.

  Talanas would understand.

  “The appeal is not lost on me.”

  It was not the suddenness of his words that made Asper’s blood run cold. Nor even was it the fact that he suddenly appeared beside her, seated on the pew as though he had been there the whole time. Rather it was the dread certainty in his voice, the knowledge that whatever he spoke he knew would come true.

  Such was the power of Mundas.

  “Beyond war, the collectors of mortality are frequent and varied,” the dark man with the wide eyes said as he looked at the idol of Talanas. “Disease, predators, heartbreak; there are any number of things that could simply appear one day and make a person cease to exist. To that end, the idea of a deity—an immovable, unchanging pillar of creation that stands firm in the world—must be comforting.”

  He turned to her and she shuddered beneath his gaze. The world seemed to go dark around him, every ounce of light swallowed within his eyes.

  “The flaw with this problem, of course, is that the idea of an unchanging creator looming over a forever-changing creation is incongruent. Can a deity create something so different from himself? Can something so far removed from his creation possibly care for its fate?”

  She did not bother asking how he had gotten in here, where he had come from. She could but look back to Talanas.

  “One presumes that they have had much longer to learn things than you have,” she said. “If they don’t know everything, then they probably know more than you do.”

  “A god can learn.”

  “They can.”

  “Then they can change.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then their power must be limited.”

  Asper did not so much lean forward as fall, caught only by the burying of her face in her hands. Her coffee spilled out onto the freshly scrubbed floor, a poor substitute for a bloodstain.

  “Did you come here just to be pedantic?” she groaned.

  Mundas did not answer. After a moment she looked up through her fingers at him, as though she were a child who had just dared to speak back to a parent. But the stare he cast her way, so vast and consuming, was too dark to be like a parent’s.

  So slowly as to make the pop of each vertebra heard, he turned his head back to the idol of Talanas. “You are frightened.”

  She regarded him carefully. “What would you know of it?”

  “Everything. The troubles of Cier’Djaal are numerous, yet yours are complex enough to stand out.”

  “How could I not be frightened?” she said, her voice soft and trembling. “It’s funny. When I was young in the temple, my mentors always preached faith in Talanas, that he would do what was right. Yet the moment blood is shed, all I can think is, ‘What did I do?’ Faith suddenly seems like such a foreign concept. All I want is something to blame. Something I did or something he didn’t do. Some failure that would explain it.

  “All this time, all these deaths, the thought that Talanas might have turned on me, on all of us, must have crossed my mind a thousand times.” She sighed and felt her body grow weak. “Never once did I think I might turn my back on him.”

  Mundas did not reply. Or blink. He did not even breathe, so far as she could tell. But to watch him was to see something that she should not, and she kept her eyes upon the idol.

  “But to forsake so many lives that could be saved. Wouldn’t that be the same thing? Teneir’s rich. Rich enough to feed, shelter, and protect everyone in this city, if she wanted to. If I were to turn that away, all because I felt…”

  She left that thought hanging, not certain what it was she did feel. Unlike with so many other gods, there was little said in scriptures about Talanas’s vastness. Where Daeon was ever-present and Gevrauch was eternal, the hymns always emphasized how very close Talanas was to mortalkind, how his powers and concerns lay within them. Somehow the idea of a god had never seemed big until this moment.

  “You speak only in two terms.” Mundas did not look at her, but his voice had a gaze all its own
: one that locked upon her and stared right through her. “Either you forsake your god and save thousands or you kill them all for the right to worship as you see fit. Do you see it so simply?”

  “Is it not?”

  “Should anything involving a deity be simple?”

  She blinked. He was gone from his seat, suddenly standing before the wooden idol and scrutinizing it carefully.

  “Your conflict holds weight only if all of what you assume to be true actually is. You assume forsaking your faith would lead to something wicked.”

  “It would,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I… I just do.” She rose from her seat, stalked toward him. “All the years I’ve put into a god, a faith, will mean nothing if I can just throw them away so easily.”

  “Easier than throwing all the lives away?” Mundas asked.

  She blinked again and he was gone. And he was everywhere. She turned and he stood, staring out over pews that were suddenly filled with dozens of him. All of them stared forward, their unnerving stares focused on him as he spoke back to them.

  “Do you suppose they pray that you will do it?” he asked his congregation of copies. “Do they lie awake praying for their god to save them? Or for you to?”

  “What does it matter, so long as they’re saved?”

  “What, indeed? It would make more sense, then, to pray to Teneir, would it not? She has the means to save them. They are hers to take, if she chooses.” He looked at her. “If.”

  Asper stared back, agog. “You think she wouldn’t save them?”

  “She turned them out. She treats lives as currencies, something to barter with, as common as coin. What are a few dozen, hundred, thousand coins to a woman as rich as she?”

  “So she’s lying?”

  “She might be.” The congregation answered in dozens of unified voices. “She might not be.”

  The rightmost pews spoke up. “You can be forgiven for searching for certainty in heaven.”

  The leftmost pews followed. “So many people do.”

  And slowly Mundas—the first Mundas—regarded her himself. “But gods have yet to deliver them, haven’t they?”