by Sam Sykes
“Then what can be done?” she all but demanded, sweeping up to him. Perhaps it was the desperation of her situation—or just her frustration with his obtuseness—that made her speak to him thus. “Tell me what to do.”
“I cannot. Any more than Talanas could.” He looked to the idol, a hint of longing in his face, as though he sought the same answer she did. “But…” He glanced back to her. “If faith has failed, can flesh deliver?”
His eyes slid down, past her shoulder and to the skin of her arm. Beneath the skin, within the folds of sinew and the marrow of her bones, she could feel something react.
She could feel the curl of a smile, the eager glitter of eyes. Amoch-Tethr peered out of her flesh with eyes unseen, beheld Mundas with delight, and spoke on a voice of smoke and char.
My goodness, he said. Am I being flattered?
“NO!”
She clapped a hand over her arm, as though that would do any good. She pulled it away from Mundas, as though that would keep him from staring through her. She loosed a loud snarl, as though that could drown out the sound of Amoch-Tethr’s laughter in her head.
As though anything could.
“You would view the violation of your oath as an acceptable tool to save the hapless lambs,” Mundas said. “But not Amoch-Tethr?”
“He’s not a tool,” she hissed. “Before I had a name for him, I thought he was a curse. But he’s not that, either. He’s not a monster, a demon, or anything I have a name for.”
She held her arm up to the light seeping in from the windows. But only for a moment before she turned away for fear that she might actually see what lurked within, staring back at her.
“At the Temple of Ancaa, I saw something,” she whispered. “A vision of a black mouth, open forever, choking on flame and skin and grinding bodies between teeth. It said nothing, didn’t speak a word, but I knew a name, all the same.”
And Amoch-Tethr looked at her, through the sinew and flesh of her arm. And Amoch-Tethr smiled, with black teeth and breath of smoke, and spoke in a voice that rang out through her skull so clear it sounded like her own voice.
Say it.
“The Maw Eternal.” Three words. Yet spoken in such a way, about such a creature, they tasted foul in her mouth. “I don’t know what he is, but he is no tool. And whoever will die because of Teneir would be a pittance compared to what he can do.”
She looked up. Mundas, singular and whole, stood at the idol, staring at her.
“What,” she asked, “can he do?”
Mundas did not answer. He turned on his heel, looked toward the door. He vanished, appearing again at the rear of the pews, his back turned to her and Talanas alike.
“Only what he is allowed,” he said.
She took a breath and he vanished again, reappearing upon a pew, head bowed in thought.
“And everything he can,” he added.
She held that breath as he appeared at the doors, moving to disappear through them. When she spoke, her voice was an airless scream.
“You owe me!”
He paused. She licked her lips.
“You’ve come to me so many times now with questions and I’ve answered you,” she said. “Tell me this one thing, at least. What is he? What are you?” She held her left hand up. “What’s inside of me?”
Mundas folded his hands behind his back. His body grew still. His voice sounded soft, fragile; human, for the first time since she had met him.
“The word they used was Aeon,” he said. “You know it.”
“What the demons once were.”
“What they still are. Aeon meant the same thing, be it for heaven-sent or hell-bound. ‘Outsider.’ Amoch-Tethr…” He let the name linger, an iron axhead hanging over a soft neck. “Like all us Renouncers, he was something more. Not unlike yourself. Perhaps that is why he opted to remain with you, even now.”
“How do I get rid of him?”
“Does he cause you agony?”
She paused before speaking. “Yes.”
“Within you he is a curse borne only by one poor soul, as he has been for centuries. Outside you he would wreak more devastation than you could possibly know.”
He looked over his shoulder at her. His smile was something sad, the kind a grandfather spared for an ill child just before he told her one last bedtime story.
“And still,” he whispered, “that may have been kinder than what is to come.”
She opened her mouth to respond, but heard only the wail of hinges and the slam of wood. Mundas disappeared in a bright flash of sunlight, insubstantial as a shadow and distant as a nightmare. In his place, as the doors swung open, was a skinny youth, sweating through his robes and looking at Asper with wild eyes.
“Aturach?” she asked.
When his only response was a breathless wheezing, she seized a nearby jug of water and thrust it into his hands.
“Easy,” she cautioned as he guzzled it down. “Drink slowly. Breathe deeply.”
“No time.” The look in his eyes, terrified and desperate, made her believe what he said. “Came from Silktown. Dransun. He gathered the refugees, led them to the gates.”
“What? What for?”
“Said it wasn’t right,” he gasped, pausing to drink more water. “Said Teneir was corrupt and if she had all that money…” He shook his head. “Said someone had to do something. I tried to talk him out of it, but—”
“But what?” Asper took him by the shoulders, looked him evenly in the eye. “Aturach… what did he do?”
“He’s there now,” Aturach said, “with all of them. The refugees.”
“In Silktown?”
Aturach paled. “He didn’t get any further than the gates. Fasha Mejina found out and met him there.” His lips trembled; he was afraid to speak the next words. “With his dragonmen.”
“You’re part of this city, fashas! Why aren’t you protecting us? Open up your gates and let us in!”
Shouting. Screaming. Weeping. Cursing.
“Fuck the fashas! Fuck your houses and fuck your dragonmen!”
Glass whiffling through the air and shattering. Stone grinding as bricks were torn up. Wood cracking, sticks smashing on the street. Grunting, bodies shoving.
“My sons are dead! My daughter is all I have left! The foreigners won’t come to Silktown. Please, let us in!”
And so much pleading.
How many were there? Two hundred? Five hundred?
Asper couldn’t tell. It had been impossible for her to tell how many were assembled when she arrived at the gates of Silktown. And in the thick of the mob, all the men and women and children seemed to blend together into one sweating, heaving, shouting mass of flesh and hair.
She could barely see over their heads when she stood on her toes. And when she did, she saw what they held. Some raised sticks, threw stones in defiance. Others shook effigies of well-dressed fops in dirty silks. A few held up wailing babies in plaintive pleas.
And towering over them, deaf to their pleas, stood the dragonmen.
Three of them, the shortest one at least ten feet tall, stood before the gates of Silktown, Cier’Djaal’s wealthiest district. Each one thick as a mountain, bodies covered in scales the color of stone, they barely seemed to notice the crowd beneath them. Lazily they leaned on massive weapons, looking in a bored way down long snouts topped with rhinoceros-like horns. Stones and bottles flew, shattered against them, and they did not so much as flinch.
“Death to the fashas! Death to their pet lizards!”
To them this was just another job.
“People of Cier’Djaal! I implore you to listen!”
And for some this was an opportunity.
“Your cries do not fall upon deaf ears!” a shrill voice shouted out over the crowd. “We are doing all that we can to negotiate an end to hostilities! Please, I beg you, return to your homes that we may—”
“My home is burned to the ground, you son of a bitch! Fuck your negotiations, Mejina!”
Another stone flew out, aimed lower. A dragonman casually lowered his hand, let it bounce off his wrist. When he drew it back, he revealed a quivering slip of a man.
Atop a small, hastily erected stage, Fasha Mejina addressed the crowd. A thin man, he was wearing silk robes that were too big for him. His gold chains and rings looked too heavy for his wrists and neck. And the elaborate red and gold face paint he wore was not thick enough to conceal the sweat pouring off him.
This was the man, Asper realized. This tiny little man was trying to control Silktown. She had only heard his name up to this point. She had expected someone bigger.
But the fasha, cowering behind a wall of house guards impotently holding shields and spears against the crowd, looked positively pitiful.
“Citizens, please,” the fasha called out, a distinctly obnoxious haughtiness in his voice. “We can come to an understanding. Silktown is the last bastion of Cier’Djaal untouched by violence.”
He had once been a fasha of minor wealth. Just a few spiders to assure him a healthy silk trade, with modest investments in spices and wine. But with Fasha Ghoukha dead and Fasha Teneir concerned elsewhere, he’d tried to make a larger name for himself.
“Surely,” Mejina continued, “you wouldn’t want to despoil the last vestige of our city’s serenity with aggression. Surely you are interested in peace.” He gestured to the dragonmen behind him. “Behind these gates, Cier’Djaal’s finest minds are hard at work.” Mejina spread his hands out over the crowd. “For you, dear people. Every day we agonize over how to stop the violence. Every night we lie sleepless over concern for your safety. Every—”
“Every word that comes out of your mouth is shit!”
“Our money paid for those walls you hide behind! Let us in!”
“Please! The foreigners killed my husband! I have nothing!”
The words were followed by howls. The howls were followed by bricks. The bricks were followed by a sudden roar and a press of humanity as the crowd surged forward.
Mejina cowered back. The house guards rattled their shields as they gave way before the crowds. The crowd continued to push forward. Until one of the dragonmen leaned forward and let out a bellowing roar that sent them reeling back.
They recoiled, Asper noted. But they did not flee. She could feel the tension roiling off the crowd, smell the violence they barely controlled. She had seen this before: people ready to burst, bodies ready to snap. All it would take was one word from one person with nothing to lose.
And everything would go to hell.
She had to stop it. She had to stop them. She had to find Dransun.
“Please, let me through.”
“Priestess, the fashas, they’ve got so much and they won’t let us in! Talk to them, please!”
All Asper saw was their hands.
“I’ll do everything I can, but I need to find Dransun. Where is he?”
“Enough of this oxshit! I say we climb the walls, remind these fuckers who they serve!”
Some were reaching for her as she pushed her way through the mob. Many hands were upraised in fists of anger. More still clenched makeshift weapons and hurled debris at the blockade before the Silktown gates.
“Dransun! Where is he? Have you seen him?”
“Fuck off, northern! We’re busy here! Death to the fashas! They drain us dry and toss our corpses to the foreigners!”
She made herself see only the hands.
Because she knew what she would see if she looked at their faces.
Fear and desperation were painted in the streaks of their tears and the open wailing of their lips. But where despair failed, anger grew in dark scowls and eyes filled with fury. They gnashed and screamed and hurled curses and bricks.
They were ready for blood. But it wouldn’t be their blood that was spilled.
Because no matter how aware she was of the righteousness behind their anger, she was more aware of the three great shapes towering over the crowd.
So tall that their horns brushed the arch of the gates of Silktown, the three dragonmen looked too gigantic to be real as she got closer. But so close, she could see the annoyance flashing in their eyes, hear the great breaths taken with each twitch of their nostrils, see their weapons…
A hammer. An ax. A blade. Each dragonman carried a weapon as big as a human and clenched in hands big enough to swing them. She had seen firsthand the destruction they could wreak on stone and wood. She thought what they might do to flesh, to bone, to—
No, she commanded herself. Don’t think about that. Dransun first. Dransun can help you disperse the mob. We’ll solve the rest later. No one has to die here.
“No one has to die here,” she whispered, as if doing so would make it more real.
No more than necessary.
Amid the oppressive heat of the crowd, Amoch-Tethr’s voice was an icy serpent coiling around her spine.
You can solve it all here, he whispered to her, all with just one life.
Almost against her own volition, she found her gaze drawn to the gates. Through the forest of limbs and screams before her, over the heads of the house guards cowering behind their shields, beneath the shadow of the dragonmen, the world parted so that she could lay eyes upon a singular man.
“Fasha Mejina,” she whispered.
Kill him, Amoch-Tethr said. I can make it quick. He will not feel a thing.
“No.”
The dragonmen will flee, having no reason to remain. The people will see you as a savior. The fashas will learn to fear you.
“No,” she insisted, clutching at her arm.
The foreigners would obey you, Amoch-Tethr all but purred. One life for a thousand. Ten thousand, maybe? How many must die before you’re willing to kill?
And that thought lodged itself in her head, an iron sliver sinking into her scalp.
Gods help her, he was starting to make sense.
Could she live with one more death? She had seen the fashas’ homes, their sprawling manses on the hill. She had seen Cier’Djaal’s slums, where the poorest drowned in filth. Could the death of one of the former for the lives of a thousand of the latter be such a bad idea?
Even if it came from Amoch-Tethr?
She forced herself not to look down at her arm, even as she felt Amoch-Tethr staring at her. She looked away and spotted her quarry in the crowd. His polished armor and gleaming badge spoke of Jhouche authority, but his howl of anger and upraised fist painted him as just one more face in the mob, no different from any other.
“Dransun!” she shouted to be heard over the furor of the crowd. “Dransun!”
And when he did not look up, she started shoving her way through until she could seize him by the shoulders and forcibly turn him around. He bristled under her grasp, his face contorted in outrage that only barely softened at the recognition of her.
“Priestess,” he said, “you shouldn’t be out here.”
“No? Were you just going to lead everyone to their deaths without me, then?” She tightened her grip on his shoulders, her hands trembling with restrained fury. “After all we’ve done for them, Dransun, you would just—”
“They can’t keep doing this!”
His bellow carried over the din of the crowd. He tore free of her grip, raised fists as though he might strike her. She braced herself, watched his hands tremble in the air, the metal of his gauntlets rattling. His fingers shot up to his temples, clutched his hair in great fistfuls as he let out a wordless scream.
“For so long, they’ve dictated everything in this city,” Dransun snarled. “Our homes, our freedoms, they’ve bought everything. We can’t let them dictate who we worship. We can’t let them take that from us, priestess.” He swept his shout over the crowd. “SOMEONE HAS TO DO SOMETHING!”
His fury was taken in by the crowd, compounded into a formless bellow, and thrown out at the gates of Silktown. The people began to roil, stew boiling in a cauldron over an open flame. Their shouts seethed like steam, they surged and lappe
d at the wall of guards, they spat and bubbled with bricks and bottles.
“Not like this, Dransun!” Asper shrieked, straining to be heard. “You can’t give them a reason to kill you!”
“I already know what I can’t do, priestess,” Dransun replied sharply. “I can’t sit idle and wait for gods to save us. I can’t let the city I raised my children in rot. I can’t…” His fury wilted on his face, something soft and wet with tears blooming in its wake. “I can’t let them do this to you, Asper. Not after everything you’ve done.”
Despite his tears, she wanted to strike him. Despite the fear in his voice, she wanted to strangle him. Despite all of that, she kept her hands at her sides.
“That was my decision,” she said sternly. “Not yours. Not theirs. Not anyone’s.”
“You’re wrong, shkai—” He caught himself. “Priestess.” He shook his head. “We are men and women, fully grown. You can’t carry us on your back. You need to let us stand up with you.”
She wanted to scream at him for that. For a lot of things, really. For leading this mob, for forcing this conflict, for doing it all for her, for showing her a kind of tenderness she hadn’t even seen in her companions before.
Or had she? How many lives had been taken to preserve hers?
Perhaps, she thought, it never could end without death.
But perhaps it need not end with more than one.
And she wanted to scream at that, too. But instead she slid her hand around Dransun’s neck, pulled him closer, pressed her forehead against his.
“You led them here,” she hissed. “You brought them here. Can you lead them out?”
“What?”
“Can you get them out? Can you get everyone out?”
“I… I might be—”
“Yes or no, Dransun.”
He stiffened beneath her grip. “Yes, I can.” His breath was hot, his voice hard. “What are you going to do?”
“If you have any mercy for me, Dransun, you won’t ask me that. Just be ready.”
This is necessary.
She told herself this as she pushed her way through the crowd, ignoring the elbows thrown her way as she did. Through the roars of anger and wails of fear, she made her way to the front of the crowd and looked to the man in soft silks. Fasha Mejina.
