The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  This is glorious.

  Amoch-Tethr told her this as he received her answer. He burned beneath her sleeve, beneath her flesh. She could feel the curse inside her arm, the hungry devourer stirring with the promise of another meal. With one touch she would end this. With one life she would save thousands.

  This is right.

  She wasn’t sure which one of them said that.

  The tower shields of the house guards trembled, barely able to hold back the mob as they surged forward. Through their cracks she could see their bearers’ fear; these were no Jhouche, these were nothing but pampered trophies for fashas to flaunt. The real power loomed overhead, the dragonmen not seeming to notice her as she made her way toward the front.

  With the next surge, she told herself. She peeled back the sleeve of her left arm. Run with the crowd, break through the shields. Grab Mejina before anyone can think otherwise. End him before anyone can stop you. She took a deep breath. You can do this. The guards haven’t noticed you, the dragonmen haven’t noticed you, Mejina hasn’t—

  She looked up. Through the shields of the guards and the shadows of the dragonmen, a pair of glittering eyes set in a painted face looked straight at her.

  Mejina had.

  She halted, staring back at him, into the eyes of the man she would kill. The man who would feed Amoch-Tethr. The man whose death would save Cier’Djaal.

  That man stared at her, and she felt uneasy beneath his eyes. As though, just by looking at her, he knew what she was planning. As though he could look straight past her, past her flesh, into what lay beneath.

  Stop it, she told herself, shutting her eyes. STOP IT. You’re being paranoid. He can’t tell—

  “Amoch-Tethr.”

  She froze. A voice, a whisper, a sound so far away and so close it felt like a knife blade scratching at her throat. She opened her eyes, saw Mejina’s lips curl into a smile, twitch ever so slightly.

  “I hadn’t been told you’d be here.” Mejina was whispering to her, his voice terribly soft and terribly close. “This must look terribly clumsy to you.”

  “How?” Asper mouthed. She looked down at her arm, to Amoch-Tethr. “How?”

  “Still, I’m sure you’ll find something to appreciate in this.”

  She looked back up at Mejina. But Mejina was not there. His clothes were, his skin was, but the creature that stood there was not Mejina. This creature’s eyes quickly flooded with darkness, turning pitch-black. This creature’s smile split its face apart, baring knife-long teeth in a twisted grin for but an instant.

  “That’s not Mejina,” Asper said. Her voice rose up. “That’s not Mejina! That’s a—”

  “I have tried to be merciful, Cier’Djaal!” Mejina’s face had returned, a mask once again donned by this creature as he extended his hands wide in benediction. “Let no one say it was Mejina who forced this to happen!”

  “Everyone!” Asper cried out, whirling to look over the crowd. “Everyone, get out of here! This isn’t—”

  A wordless shriek of terror rose up through the mob, devouring her voice in a wave of noise. They did not even look at her, their eyes turned up to heaven, their fingers pointing to the sky, their bodies swallowed by the shadows falling over them.

  “Please, for the love of gods, run! Get out—”

  Her voice was knocked from her as she felt the earth move beneath her feet, sending her to her knees. When she next drew breath, it tasted coppery in her mouth.

  And when she held it, she felt the warm blood painting her body.

  She knew what happened next only in fragments. In screams and wails and pleas for mercy, in arms and legs and torsos hacked apart and flying through the air, in a sky painted scarlet and man-size blades flashing silver.

  And then, and only then, did she know fear.

  They moved through the mob like farmers through wheat, their faces expressionless and reptilian features unreadable, as though this was but one more chore to do before knocking off. And like farmers through wheat, they threshed.

  The dragonmen threshed a bloody harvest.

  Their blades and hammers moved with heavy method, each swing sending bodies flying and gouts of gore spraying. Their feet ground the dismembered and the hapless beneath heavy soles, leaving patches of thick paste in their wake. Without mercy, without blinking, without a word, the dragonmen waded into the crowd with resigned machination.

  Gods raining fire upon a living hell.

  “—mad! They’re fucking mad! Run! RUN FOR YOUR—”

  They fled every which way, knocking each other over and trampling those left behind.

  “—please, wait! I can’t keep up! Don’t leave me—”

  They screamed until their voices ran dry, they choked on the blood that painted their faces.

  “—Mama? Mama! GET UP! I CAN’T—”

  The people broke, the people wailed, the people died. And Asper, struck paralyzed by the scene before her, could but stare, seeing it all, hearing it all. And yet the carnage was not so merciful as to be loud enough to drown out the sound of their voices.

  “Ugh. I think I got one in my eye,” a great voice bellowed.

  “So close them. Not like you’ll miss any,” another replied.

  “Or just keep walking. They’re like roaches. Bound to step on one of them.”

  The dragonmen, talking casually among themselves. Cracking jokes and chuckling. Sighing in boredom and resignation. As if this was just another job. As if all these dead people were just more chores to deal with.

  “Boring,” one of them complained. “How long until we get a real fight?”

  “Remember the Uprising?” another said. “Seas of tulwar. Feisty ones at that. Now that was a fight. Send them back, I say.”

  “Kill what they pay you for,” the third growled. “And be thankful it’s easy work.”

  Screaming. Bellowing. Shrieking. Sighing. Bleeding. Wailing. Pleading. All the sounds, all the voices, they blended together in her head until all she could hear was a singular sound.

  Amoch-Tethr.

  Laughing.

  No more. That was her thought, short and loud in her head. No more. Those were her legs, moving beneath her. No more. That was her left arm, burning bright and hungry as she tore off toward the dragonmen, toward the house guards, toward Mejina and whatever beast wore his suit.

  It was by luck that she met the dragonman first, his foot coming down in front of her, kicking up a cloud of red-tinged dust. It was by instinct that she darted away as his ax swung at her, his black eyes narrowing on her with a familiar contempt.

  “You.”

  She knew him. The scars on his snout had been carved by hands she was familiar with. The glare he leveled at her was one she recognized. This was the dragonman Gariath had fought, so long ago. Ghoukha’s former bodyguard.

  The one called Kharga.

  “Lost your way, pinky?” he snarled, hefting his tremendous ax. “Or have you just lost the Rhega who was with you?” His nostrils quivered. “I still smell his self-righteous stink all over you.”

  “P-please,” she whispered, too soft. “Please, stop this—”

  “Now, if he were here, that’d be something, wouldn’t it?” He chuckled as he raised his man-size ax over his head. “Must be my bad luck that made me stuck with you, instead. Oh, well.”

  It was by instinct that she rushed forward.

  It was through cruelty that she made him suffer.

  Her left hand lashed out. A hellish red light engulfed her flesh, painted her bones black as Amoch-Tethr roared to life inside her. She touched the dragonman’s knee, no more than four fragile fingers pressed upon iron scales.

  It was enough for Amoch-Tethr to feed.

  The dragonman’s howl of pain cut through the crowd like a blade itself. Steam burst from beneath Asper’s palm in great reeking gouts. She knew what was happening: scales peeling back and blackening, blood bubbling and bursting, muscle strands shriveling into gray ash. But she could not feel it. Wh
at she felt was something altogether different.

  Cold water forced down a throat after six months in a desert. The sputter and crackle of a fire after a live hound is thrown into it. A belly full to bursting, a mouth stained with blood, and a desperate need to keep eating.

  These were not hers to feel, but she felt them all the same. She felt the gnawing need and the ecstasy of the consumption. She felt Amoch-Tethr’s voice, wild and hot inside her.

  Yes, yes, YES! More, more! There must be more! It’s so exquisite! Ah, but if you could see it! I need you to see it! I need you to—

  “KHARGA!”

  Another roar. The earth shook. Asper looked up to see one of the dragonmen rampaging toward her, giant hammer in hand and coming down to crush her like an insect.

  She leapt away, tearing her hand free in a burst of steam and a peeling of flesh. The hammer came down with a crash, shattering the cobblestones and sending them flying through the air on a cloud of dust. Asper reeled, coughed, tried to find the wind that the impact had knocked out of her. And through it all, Amoch-Tethr would not stop screaming.

  No, no, NO! I need more! Please, give me more! I beg you, let me taste it! Our work is not done. We have not saved everyone! Get back there!

  She rose up, tensed her arm. The light dimmed with every breath, even as Amoch-Tethr’s moans rose to a climax.

  We can do it. You and I! We can save them all! All you need to do is—

  She felt something catch her. Pick her up off the ground, drag her away.

  “Let me go!” she screamed. “Let me go! They have to pay! They have to suffer!”

  Whoever they were, they didn’t hear her. But she heard them.

  “Get the priestess out of here! Hurry now!”

  “We can’t lose her here! Back to Temple Row!”

  “Find Dransun! Tell him we’ll get as many of them out as we can, after her!”

  And as she squirmed in their grip, she could see them. The merchant the temple had taken in and fed after he lost everything. The young man she’d kept from bleeding out after he lost his arm. The mother whose child’s dislocated shoulder she had set.

  They came back. The people. All she had done.

  She watched the scene of carnage shrink as she was dragged farther away from it. The bodies of the dead shrank and dried up like rain puddles in the sun. The flashing blades of the dragonmen turned to fireflies coming out in the light of the setting sun. She watched it all grow smaller, until she could see them no more.

  The sun was dropping around them. The screams faded as they released her, hurried her back to Temple Row. She felt numb and quieted, so much so that the only thing she could hear was a single voice in her head.

  Ah, Amoch-Tethr said, what a pity.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  OUR FATHER IS DEAD AND WE ARE ALONE

  I remember that my mother liked melon.”

  Shuro’s voice was not soft, Lenk thought.

  She had stripped off her outer coat, a sleeveless shirt beneath revealing the angular muscle of her arms. Her eyes were keen and scalpel-thin as she ran a cloth over the blade that lay naked in her lap.

  The sword was not a tool. It was she. And its edge was echoed in every part of her body, including her voice.

  “Maybe liked is the wrong word for it.” Shuro held up the sword, studied it. “It’d be more accurate to say that she had a strong hatred for melons. No matter how much I hated them, I had to eat them all. We could eat meat and leave the bone, but she would not abide us to leave the rind of a melon. My father, my brother, and I, we all had to eat the whole thing: flesh, rind, and all. ‘It’s the best part,’ she’d say. But she lied. She simply couldn’t abide a melon going unpunished.”

  She flashed a smile over the campfire. The sort of strained-at-the-edges smile that someone makes when they’re doing what they think looks pleasant.

  “I remember that,” Shuro said. “But I don’t remember her name at all.”

  Lenk met her eyes. Even as the firelight painted her skin a pale orange and cast her silver hair bronze, it couldn’t color the cold blue of her stare even a little. And he found himself cringing under that blade-sharp stare and looked away, silent.

  Just as well. It would have been hard to hear him.

  Orange shafts of a setting sun’s light pierced the trees, but in the jungle of the Forbidden East, it might as well already have been night.

  The canopy seemed to close over their head to provide proper lighting for the symphony that ensued. Insects fought to be heard over the cries of birds, who were in turn rudely interrupted by nocturnal monkeys. Occasionally something bigger and fiercer than the rest would roar and silence them for a moment, only for them to resume.

  Whatever that bigger thing was out there, it was the reason their campfire was so small. Gaambols roamed these woods, Shuro had said. Nooseheads lurked in the canopies, packs of yijis stalked the night. If they were lucky, they might run into one of those.

  If they were unlucky, there were always shicts out there.

  So they sat, they ate dried meat in silence. And Lenk was content with this. He had agreed to stay with Shuro, curious as to what answers she might provide about how she, a young woman with hair and eyes the same unusual colors as his, had come to be here.

  And yet he had been around long enough to know that curiosity was just a prettier word for dread, and he felt meat stick in his craw over the fear that she might tell him something he didn’t want to know.

  “Do you remember your parents?”

  Granted, that was a question, but still.

  He cleared his throat, swallowed his meat. “Sort of,” he said. “I remember they were farmers. We lived in a little farmer village named Steadbrook—burned down, they were killed, bandits or some shit, I don’t know. We lived in a little house with my grandfather. He was an adventurer in his day, used to tell me stories. We worked fields. My mother fed hens, my father—”

  “What were their names?”

  He looked up at her and found her looking intently across the fire at him. Her gaze had softened in an uncomfortable way, her eyes glistening as though she were anticipating a slap across the face as much as an answer.

  And when he gave the latter, it hurt like the former. “I don’t know.”

  “Their faces?” she asked. “The color of your mother’s hair? The sound your father made when he laughed?”

  “I can’t remember,” he said.

  “Did your grandfather have a beard? Did he smell like pipe smoke or whiskey?”

  “I don’t fucking know, all right?”

  He didn’t feel the strain in his voice until after he snapped. And he stared at her, surprised at himself, at the way his voice had choked, at the way his eyes suddenly burned. And she stared back, her smile soft and sad.

  “Then tell me,” she said, “do you remember where you got your sword?”

  And he did. He remembered everything about the sword, his grandfather’s sword. He remembered watching his grandfather polish it, sharpen it, oil it every day. Every day Lenk had come in from the field, he had seen it hanging on the wall. He could recall the feel of the leather of the grip in his hands as he pulled it out of the ashes of his former home after he had buried all the dead in Steadbrook.

  And though he did not tell her, he could see that Shuro knew. Somehow.

  “I remember mine.” She held up her thin blade, sitting in her hand as if she had been born with it. “My brother was a blacksmith’s apprentice. He forged this as proof that he was ready to become a journeyman. I remember every day I watched him hammer on it, sharpen it, smooth out every imperfection. I remember the day he held it, polished to a high sheen, and said it was ready.”

  She looked at herself sadly in the blade’s reflection.

  “That was the day he died,” she said. “I can remember that. But I don’t know what his name was. My father’s or my mother’s, either. I can’t even remember what they looked like when—”

  She stared l
ong and hard at the blade. The blade looked back, impassive and unapologetic.

  “Family, home, and gods,” she whispered to the blade. “All three must be lost before it happens.” She lay it back down on her lap. It continued to stare at her. “So that there is nothing left but the blade.” She looked back up at him. “And us.”

  “Us,” he repeated. The word tasted heavy. “What do you mean us?”

  “Farlan,” she said, looking at him intently. “Tell me your real name.”

  Lying had always been Denaos’s talent; it took him a little too long to call his story back to mind. “It is my real—”

  “You can make a fake name, you can hide your hair, but your eyes want to tell me something.” She gestured to her own blue stare. “Mine did the same, not so long ago.”

  He swallowed hard, looked away.

  “Do you want to know what I know?” she whispered.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I know it’s going to hurt.”

  “It will,” she said. “But you always knew it would.”

  A moment of silence passed as he chewed his meat and Shuro patiently watched him. When he swallowed the last piece, he wondered if he might start chewing his hand to avoid talking.

  “Lenk.” The word slipped from his lips. “No surname. Not that I can remember.”

  “Me either,” she said. “Maybe I’m not even Shuro. But it fits.” She patted the blade. “Like this fits. A name and a sword were all I had left when it happened to me.”

  He looked up at her. His breath left him suddenly, as if anticipating the blow that would come after he asked her.

  “When what happened?”

  She took the breath that had left him, body shuddering as though she had just been struck.

  “I guess I would have been maybe fourteen or fifteen,” she said. “The night before my brother was to show his work, we celebrated. My father was well-off, did merchant work in Muraska, so we had a feast. I had my first glass of wine. It tasted sweet, so I had too much. I went to bed early.

  “I remember more than most of us do,” she said. “I remember waking in the night. I remember getting out of my bed. I remember the cold wood on my bare feet as I walked into my brother’s room and picked up the blade.”