The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  “SHIT.”

  The second time, either.

  Two more of them came lumbering past the door, both male. One of them had the wear of age to his scales, and he clutched a sword the size of a human. The other came in with a tremendous ax, glancing around the fallen bodies with disdain before his eyes settled on Gariath and flashed with recognition.

  “Rhega,” he growled.

  Kharga, Gariath thought.

  The third time he did not even bother to swear. He was already running, the thunder of their pursuit rattling his body.

  Why had he not prepared for this? he asked himself. When they had said “reinforcements,” why had he thought that only a few humans might show up? Had he been so blind in his need to drive the tulwar here? What else had he not thought of?

  A horn’s blaring call to retreat went up. The human forces of Jalaang were already fleeing, ignoring Gariath as he charged through them toward the knot of tulwar flooding through the broken gates. There were many human bodies left behind, as well as a few tulwar. But with weapons bared and bloodied and aloft in victory, far more were alive.

  And not nearly enough.

  “Quit celebrating, morons!” he roared to be heard above their jubilation as he rejoined them. “The fight’s not over.”

  “What?” Daaru, standing atop some crates he had been directing the battle from, looked at him with concern. “What do you—”

  “Ha! Here they are!” The female’s voice boomed with laughter as she came thundering into view. She hefted her hammer, the two males at her back, and lumbered toward them. “First one to a hundred wins!”

  The stink of fear rose up among the tulwar in a sudden, overpowering cloud. Their cries of jubilation turned to panic. They seemed to fall back in a single wave at the sight of the three great behemoths advancing toward them. And for a moment it seemed as though all of them, every last warrior, would break and run.

  And Gariath could not blame them. They had been reared on tales of the Uprising, of how the most glorious moment of their race had been quashed beneath the massive feet of these dragonmen. And now they gazed upon the brutes, their scales smeared with the blood of their fellows and their strides easy, almost bored, as they came forward.

  Gariath would not blame them for running.

  He would blame only himself. He would blame himself for driving them here. He would blame himself for starting this whole thing. He would blame himself for all the lives lost and blood spilled to get them to this point. He would watch them run and leave Jalaang and vengeance and everything behind and be left with no one but himself.

  And he could not do that.

  The Rhega were not a people of words. No prayers for gods. No speeches from leaders. No verse from poets. They had but one word that was uniquely theirs.

  And as he stood before the tulwar, the only thing between them and the dragonmen, he planted his feet, he spread his wings, he opened his mouth and spoke it.

  A challenge. A rally. A threat. All these things and more in a single, resonating roar that cut through the air cleaner than any blade and was met by the crowd.

  “RUA TONG!”

  A roar taken up.

  “THO THU BHU!”

  A roar multiplied.

  “CHEE CHREE!”

  From warrior to warrior.

  “YENGU THUUN!”

  And mouth to foot.

  In a wave they rushed forward. With weapons aloft they rushed forward. Their war cries naked and bare as the colors of rage painting their faces, they rushed forward. Gariath in their number, they rushed forward.

  And were met.

  The female’s voice rang with laughter as she swept her hammer out to send them flying in twos and threes of boneless bodies. The older male grunted with annoyance as their blades and arrows bounced off his hide, before skewering them upon his sword. And Kharga grimly strode over carcasses he hacked apart as he waded into the fray.

  At least fifty were dead in the span of as many breaths.

  Bodies flew. Red painted the sky. War cries met laughter and the tulwar did not recoil. To the last they would fight. Gariath knew this.

  At the very least, he had to make sure they didn’t go alone.

  He rushed toward the nearest foe. The older male caught a glimpse of him as he approached, swung his sword instinctively. Flecks of blood fell from the blade, spattered Gariath’s skin as the Rhega ducked beneath the blow. The male grunted, impressed.

  “A Rhega,” he said. “I thought you all were dead.”

  “Not yet,” Gariath snarled back.

  “Right.” The dragonman drew back his titanic blade. “Not yet.”

  Whatever blow was intended to come never did, as a great shape came barreling out of the fray to bowl headlong into the older male. He grunted with the blow, staggered away from it. When he looked up, a meaty red fist collided with his jaw.

  “KUDJ!” the vulgore howled, hammering blows down upon the older male.

  The male shoved him off, a glare in his eyes suggesting he had found a worthy opponent. Their feet like thunder, the two giants began to wrestle with each other through the flow of the battle.

  Gariath could not afford to see who was the victor, let alone help. His nostrils quivered with scent. His ear-frills trembled with noise. A familiar shadow loomed over him.

  “There you are!” The female kicked a body out of her way as she came crashing toward Gariath. “Tricky little Rhega, thought you could hide from me!”

  Her hammer came down in a spray of sand as he narrowly darted out of the way. He scrambled inside her reach as she tried to pull back her massive weapon. He gripped the belt of her kilt; with any luck he could scramble up her body and get to her eyes. With any luck—

  “Hey!”

  She caught him in a massive hand, plucked him up and brought him before a giant grin. Heedless of the arrows flung at her, she smiled as her hand tightened around him, creaking his bones inside his flesh.

  “MAK LAK KAI!”

  A shadow descended upon the female. From high above, a black gaambol came crashing down upon her head. Chakaa howled with laughter as her mount shrieked with fury. It clawed at the female’s eyes even as Chakaa hacked at her scales.

  She snarled, dropping Gariath and her hammer both. She grabbed the gaambol in two massive hands, lifting it high above her head and dashing it to the ground. Chakaa’s body bounced off the sand and Gariath went scrambling to her side as the female dragonman raised a foot high and brought it down on the shrieking gaambol’s skull.

  “You’re not dead,” Gariath observed.

  He hadn’t intended to sound quite that surprised, but now that he could see Chakaa up close, he was a little amazed. The woman was scored with cuts and gouges, a few extra arrows jutting from her hide. She swung sleepily to her feet, body like jelly from the impact she had just taken. She looked at Gariath, grinned stupidly.

  “What did I tell you, daanaja? I am malaa.”

  Her eyes snapped open with a sudden, crazed life.

  “The Tul won’t take me back.”

  Gariath glanced up at the female, struggling to get her weapon back as Tho Thu Bhu shield bearers harried her with spears. His eyes drifted up to the battlements.

  “Can you distract her?” he asked, pointing to the female.

  “If I have a few more bones for her to break, sure.” She shrugged. “But, since you asked so nicely…”

  Once more she leapt at the female. Gariath did not stop to see if she succeeded or even if she survived. He rushed toward the battlements, leaping over human corpses as he climbed the stairs leading to the top of the gates.

  Weapons were a mystery to him—he had never needed more than his own body. But he had seen the pointy-eared human use bows all the time. It didn’t look too difficult.

  How hard could using a ballista be?

  He hefted one of the spear-sized bolts, loaded it into the machine. The crank to pull it back was enough to require two men, but he managed it i
n a few breaths. With a growl he struggled to turn it around—the thing hadn’t been meant to face into the city. But eventually it came to point at the female, flailing to pry Chakaa off her face.

  He narrowed his eyes, growled, kicked a lever.

  A string snapped. The bolt flew. A great red spurt painted the air. The female blinked, too stunned to even look at the bolt jutting out of her neck before she fell to the earth beneath the hacking blades of the tulwar.

  He grinned. Admittedly, he hadn’t expected that to work. Now all he had to do was—

  A scream pierced the air. He looked up to see a tulwar body flying out of the crowd and directly toward him. The body struck him, the tulwar scrambled to hold on to him, and both of them went plummeting to the ground. Gariath fought to get free of the tangle of limbs, but could not find his feet before another foot found him.

  Kharga snarled, kicking the Rhega aside and sending him rolling across the dirt. Gariath felt something inside him creak in protest, threaten to break from the blow. His breath came in short gasps, but even that was enough for him to smell the overpowering reek of Kharga’s hatred.

  He looked up, saw the behemoth charging toward him. Blood painted his scales and his ax. His feet were caked with gore. Not a single scratch lay upon his body, except…

  There. His knee. A black mark. Some kind of wound, maybe. Maybe nothing more than a bit of soot.

  But Gariath had no other options. He seized a nearby fallen sword from the grasp of a dead warrior, rushed to his feet, and charged. No breath to drive him far or fast, no life to carry him any farther than he needed, no wit to do anything more than duck beneath a heavy ax’s blow, leap forward, and jam his blade at Kharga’s knee.

  The flesh gave way like something soft and dead, squishing as the blade entered. Kharga howled in agony, dropped his weapon, fell to one knee, and tried to claw the blade out.

  The chance did not go unseized. The tulwar were upon him in an instant, screaming as they swarmed over him and hauled him low to the ground.

  Gariath could but watch as Kharga disappeared under them, as their blades rose up and down, growing redder and redder, as their war cries ceased to hold anything resembling fury, courage, passion.

  He watched as they stabbed and cut and hacked and reveled in the spattering gore.

  How long he watched, he did not know. When they had gathered around him, he could not say. What they were chanting when he finally looked up, he barely knew.

  “Rhega!”

  Him.

  “Rhega!”

  His people.

  “Rhega!”

  They raised their fists and blades to him. Their howls turned to cheers and cries of victory. Their gaambols shrieked and pounded the earth in triumph.

  They had won.

  And Gariath stood at the center of it, staring out over the sea of gore that stained the streets and the mounds of hewn flesh that piled high, and gazed upon their victory.

  His victory.

  As they chanted his honors.

  Over. And over. And over.

  THIRTY-THREE

  WHITE WINGS SPREAD WIDE

  Across all twelve of the tribes, the story was always the same.

  Other races had gentle gods who listened to their fears and coddled them with rainfall and sunshine.

  Not so the shicts. Riffid was not weak. She had cast them out of the Dark Forest and into the daylight, given them the Howling and the bow, and told her children never to return.

  No one knew what sin the shicts had committed to offend their goddess so. But every shict knew she was not to be denied. And when a shict died and returned to the Dark Forest to be forever hunted by Riffid, he was spoken of not fondly as a grandfather, but in soft whispers, lest Riffid hear those who spoke of him and come too close herself.

  This was the tale that all shicts were told when they were old enough to hold a bow, to hunt, to kill. And it carried an important lesson.

  And Kataria could remember, too, the lesson she had been taught that night she first heard the tale.

  “When you must shoot, shoot true. When you must hunt, hunt tirelessly. When you must fight, fight to kill. For should you fail, there will be no gentle god to await you on the other side.”

  She kept these words firm in her mind, as she had done all day. For there was no doubt in her mind that the shicts holding her prisoner would have the same words in theirs.

  She opened her eyes and felt the twinge of pains that were becoming familiar now: the gnawing of rawhide on her wrists, the ache in her joints as she knelt down on the sand before the tent pole she had been tied to, the sweltering heat of the desert. But this latter pain grew dimmer with each breath, and through the holes in the tent, she could see the day turn from orange to purple.

  Evening settled.

  She drew in a deep breath.

  She let her ears rise up to rigid, quivering points.

  And she listened.

  Ever since she had arrived, the Howling had filled her head with the sounds of snarling, roaring savagery that heralded a tribe’s going to war. But now these sounds were fading, leaving only cries echoing off a vast nothingness.

  The camp was emptying.

  Shekune’s army was on the move.

  She drew herself up to an awkward knee, trying to angle her boot up behind her so that her bound hands could grip it. After some blind groping, she found its hard leather heel and pulled. The dull sound of steel striking the sand behind her as the knife tumbled out of her boot was a relief to hear.

  The shriek of agony as raw, bloodied skin was exposed to air, she decided would be slightly less so, and she bit it back.

  The blade had been digging into her ankle for ages now, cutting her freshly every time she was released from her bonds to eat or relieve herself. But she had bitten back every twinge of pain that it had brought, walked swiftly to avoid drawing attention to the blood filling her boot.

  She couldn’t afford to let them search her. More lives than just hers relied on her escaping.

  The sounds of that night—of the rage and the sorrow of the khoshicts’ Howling—still beat around in her skull, a beast trying to claw its way out. They seeped into her thoughts and dreams, so that she couldn’t close her eyes without hearing their fury.

  She could not blame them for wanting revenge, for believing Shekune could give it to them.

  But they had only fought humans, never lived with them, never known them. To them humans were still half myths themselves: weird, wild creatures who made a formless face upon which all their troubles were blamed. They couldn’t know just how many humans were out there, how much fiercer their weapons were, how very eager they were to use them.

  They couldn’t know that this war would end with them all dead.

  That thought conspired with her desperation, made her fingers shake as they groped blindly for the knife behind her. She found the blade first, cut her fingers on it, bit back the urge to cry out.

  No, she scolded herself. No time for crying. Get out. Get to Shicttown. Warn them. Save everyone. You can cry after that. She inhaled sharply. Okay?

  Okay.

  She gritted her teeth, found the hilt of the knife, and began to work it awkwardly at her bonds. She jabbed herself with its tip more than once, but she could feel the bonds give way with each clumsy pass. They snapped free, drawing from her a sharp gasp of agony as her bloodied skin finally had the room to ache properly.

  She held her hands before her. Her wrists were raw, her fingers were cut, her palms were red with blood both dried and fresh. She drew a breath, stared at her fingers as she moved them, one by one.

  They stung, they ached, they made her wince with every twitch. But they could move. And if they could move, they could fire a bow.

  Good enough.

  She took the knife in hand, crept to the edge of the tent, leaned to its flap, and listened with ears rigid. No sounds of breathing, nor words, nor footfalls reached her. Her guard had likely gone off somewhere
else—maybe to see off Shekune’s army. Or maybe just to piss.

  She couldn’t afford to wait and find out which, though. She slipped out of the tent flap and beheld an empty dune before her. Only a few tents dotted the ridge that overlooked the camp, no guards or lookouts between them, by sight or sound. The few campfires up here illuminated no bodies. She was alone.

  Or mostly, anyway.

  She moved carefully to the dune’s edge and looked down over the valley. As she’d suspected, there were drastically fewer fires burning. Amid them, a much less sizable force went about the business of cooking, making weapons, and tending to yiji packs. These would be the crafters, the herders, the elders: those who were not fit for battle and would stay behind to make ready for the return of the warriors.

  The warriors who had followed Shekune out into the desert.

  Kataria closed her eyes, listened for the sound of their march, to see how far out they had gone. Nothing but silence greeted her, as she had feared. Spectacle and savagery had their allure, but only well before they marched.

  To shicts, war was the same as hunting: something that demanded swiftness and silence.

  But swift as they might be, they were still thousands and she was but one. She could make it to Cier’Djaal well before they could. She could warn Sai-Thuwan, ask him to intervene. He was the leader of the Eighth Tribe, easily Shekune’s equal. He could speak out against her, force her into discussion, make them find another way.

  Assuming Kataria reached him in time.

  She crept along the ridge as she scanned the camp below, searching for a yiji corral left unattended. If she could steal one of the beasts, she could ride it toward Cier’Djaal. Of course she would need to steal enough food and water for both her and it to—

  “Who’s there?”

  She froze in place at the sound of a voice. Her head turned slowly to look behind her, she was ready to bolt at the sign of a guard. She saw nothing, though, but sand and shadows around her.

  “Has someone finally come to kill me?”

  The voice came again. And upon hearing it, she knew it was no shictish voice. It was too raspy, too withered, a stale wind forced through a hole choked with sand.