The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  “My master was brilliant. But above all else he was obsessed. Try as he might to create, he could not do the work of the heavens. And it drove him mad. So mad that he would throw away everything, we who loved him and treasured him, in the name of preserving his legacy. He knew he would return someday, but he spoke only of finishing his work, of completing his worlds. Not once did he care what happened to Kyrael and me.”

  “So you’re telling me this… out of spite?” Lenk asked.

  “Partially. And partially because I know he has been speaking to you. I have heard his voice, heard the tales he’s told you. He was always fond of storytelling. And like all good storytellers…”

  Oerboros’s wings quivered. And slowly they began to retract.

  “He never tells you the best part.”

  With a long, breathless groan, Oerboros drew back his wings. Dust fell from his feathers. His scales creaked like metal. And as they folded up against the Aeon’s body, Lenk could see what he had been guarding.

  Books. Vast shelves of them. Stacks on the floor, towering so high as to be monuments. Empty inkwells and ravaged quills. These had all been penned by the same hand, the same mind.

  “The Library of the Learned,” Lenk whispered.

  Funny, he had been expecting something more ominous: black tomes in cages, profane verse scrawled on the walls. This looked more like the study of a frazzled mind. And nowhere was it more obvious than on the walls.

  Parchments. Paintings. Prints, drawings, essays. From floor to ceiling, the walls of the chamber were filthy with paper. Sketches of anatomies of creatures known and unknown, lengthy studies written in a language long dead, designs for devices whose engineering Lenk could not even begin to fathom; there was not a spot of bare stone to be seen among all the papers pinned to the wall.

  Most of it Lenk did not recognize. But some of it…

  “I’ve seen this before.” He peered at a detailed drawing of a creature: a titanic body upon four trunk-like legs, its head thick and heavy with two black eyes and several sprawling tendrils that hung down to its feet. “The Old Man. This is the creature we rode to the Forbidden East. And this!”

  He pointed to another drawing nearby, depicting a spiderlike creature with thick, vine-like growths covering it. It was the thing that had carried Shuro, Chemoi, and him up the mountain’s face. The creature, its cradle, and its landing apparatus were all drawn in meticulous detail.

  “We rode this thing up the mountain,” Lenk said.

  “Creatures of his design,” Oerboros interrupted. “My master’s subjects were vast and his location isolated. He required immense muscle to move people and supplies to Rhuul Khaas. While beasts of burden might fail, plants could sustain themselves.”

  “So the Old Man was a plant. The spider, too?”

  “Indeed. An elegant design, really. The plant was the product of careful breeding, a vine that would aggressively grow around the skeleton of a long-dead beast and form the foundation of its body. From then it could be controlled with simple commands, set on routine paths that would allow it to cart things from the desert into the mountains.”

  “Incredible.”

  “No. Incredible would have been an adequate description after his third creation. By the time he created his plants, words ceased to be sufficient to describe his brilliance.”

  “Nothing about this makes sense.” Lenk shook his head. “He’s a demon, a creature who only understands pain and sorrow. I’ve fought them, killed them, know they’re vicious.” He looked up to the pinned Aeon. “But this isn’t the work of a demon.” He threw his arms wide. “Rhuul Khaas is not the work of a demon. It’s the work of a genius.”

  “Genius is a measure of mind, not of heart,” Oerboros replied. “And my master was but one mind. Many bodies were required to build his artifices, many pounds of flesh were weighed to further his knowledge.”

  “But his subjects stayed, didn’t they? Whatever he did to them, they didn’t leave.”

  “They didn’t know they could. Nor did Kyrael. Nor did I.”

  “But you’re a—”

  “I am Oerboros. And Oerboros did not once think to leave. Not even when the first spear pierced my flesh.”

  “I don’t understand.” Lenk rubbed his eyes. “You speak with two mouths. Sometimes you talk about him as though you couldn’t live without him, sometimes you talk about him like you could kill him. Which is it? Is he a monster or a miracle?”

  “There is no exclusivity between the two words. What you see here is the extent of his mortal knowledge. These were both the utmost and the barest of his designs. He had accomplished so much… yet it was not enough. When machines and drawings could no longer satisfy him, he turned his attentions toward creation. True creation.

  “That was when he ceased to be the master I knew, the master I loved.”

  There was another groan as Oerboros raised his withered legs. Bones popped and creaked beneath the sagging flesh. But behind them another door loomed.

  “But perhaps you should see for yourself.”

  Lenk spared a queer look for the wrought iron of the door, and a queerer look for the impaled being above it. But just as soon as he started to feel doubt, he felt something stronger. That sensation of something bearing down on him, of a presence looming behind him, returned, and the decision was no longer his.

  He hurried to the door, forced it open with a grunt and a groan. A small circular chamber opened up before him, with a spiraling staircase leading both up and down. Likely, he suspected, the upper staircase led to the tower he had seen rising out of this building. But below…

  “Your answers dwell,” Oerboros said, “in the darkness.”

  “Of course,” Lenk muttered.

  The stone of the staircase was clean, sturdy, remarkably untouched by age. Great care had gone into its creation, it seemed. It was certainly not the construction that gave him a creeping sense of unease.

  That he attributed to the stench.

  It began faintly, a small shudder of foulness in the otherwise tranquil air. But with each step it grew stronger. The air stagnated, growing foul and acrid, at once the wallowing reek of rotted filth untouched for years and the seething stink of acid gnawing on bones.

  By the time Lenk had discovered the chamber, it was almost enough to drive him to his knees.

  He covered his mouth and walked into a vast space, as large as the chamber above had been. But here there was scarcely any light, the sole source of illumination being a flickering globe fixed to the ceiling, not unlike those of the lamps he had seen on the streets above. This one’s light sputtered and dimmed, offering only the barest hints of a glow.

  And by it he could only barely see the pit.

  Ten paces farther and he would have fallen in. A well-carved, perfectly square pit dominated the room, reaching from wall to wall, with a path that was little more than a ledge big enough for one person adorning the wall Lenk had just emerged from. But spanning the pit was a stone walkway, sturdily built and free of decay.

  Lenk approached it, trying to ignore the steadily growing stench. He walked across it, biting back vomit. And after a long moment of trying to find the courage to do so, he looked over the edge.

  At first he saw nothing but glimmers of reflected light across a liquid surface. Water? No, it smelled far too terrible for that. It moved sluggishly, thickly, like a stew.

  Of all the things Lenk could have been feeling, he wouldn’t have thought he’d feel disappointment. Yet being sent into a dank chamber by a forever-dying creature from heaven just to look at a hole full of smelly fluid seemed somehow… anticlimactic.

  And Lenk would have walked away feeling just that.

  Had the fluid not suddenly looked back at him.

  Two eyes flashed in the darkness, ochre tinged with red. A face leered out of the fluid, a coarse mockery of a man’s. There were two thin slits where a nose should have been, a face covered in thick patches of scales, bereft of hair or eyebrows. And wh
en it opened its mouth, its jaw gaped wide to reveal long fangs as it looked to Lenk.

  And screamed.

  Soon it was joined. Dozens more eyes blooming in the darkness. Dozens more mouths opening in agonized wailing. Arms emerged, glistening with fluid and reaching clawed hands toward him. Serpentine coils twisted in the water, cresting backs and tails flicking out. They crawled over each other, these abominations, in a desperate attempt to reach out for Lenk.

  And through his horror he realized that no two of them were alike. Some had one arm, some had none, some had four. Some three eyes. Others had mouths that stretched impossibly wide. Many had legs that ended in coiling tendrils. Some had tufts of hair growing out of them. Some had scales, some had glistening flesh.

  The only thing that united them was the pain, the terror, the desperation to be heard that was etched across their faces and written in the stagnant air by their screams.

  And at the sight of them and all their twisting, writhing, shrieking, all Lenk could do was scream back.

  “Gods.” He fell to his rear end, screamed as one hand slipped and dangled over the edge. The barest tip of a scaly appendage reached out and brushed his fingers. He pulled it back, crawling to the center of the walkway and huddling into a fetal position. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. They’re fucking—”

  “Saccarii.”

  A voice. A white shape in the darkness. A dark face with a dark frown.

  Mocca.

  “Or what I had hoped would be saccarii.” The man in white’s voice was a wistful sigh. He stood at the edge of the walkway, staring down at the abominations writhing below. “Sadly, I never got them quite right.”

  “What the fuck do you mean ‘quite right’?” Lenk stared at Mocca, mouth agog. “You made those things?”

  “I tried,” Mocca replied. “Gods know I tried. Years I spent designing them, drawing them, perfecting them. I ran through every formula, every calculation, every variable. In my mind they were perfect. But when I actually tried to give them life…”

  He held his hands out helplessly over the pit. The misbegotten creatures below reached back and wailed.

  “What the fuck are they?” Lenk asked. “Those aren’t saccarii.”

  “Not as you know them, no. Those saccarii you see in Cier’Djaal today were the closest I had come to perfection. When the mortal armies came, they escaped and found their way down to the wild, where they spread. Peculiarly enough, they were one of my more simple designs.” He stared down into the pit and sighed at the writhing, gnashing accord below. “The rest of them, the… flawed ones, were left here to rot. They never could, of course. My blood kept them alive.”

  “That’s your blood down there?”

  “It was the agent that permitted them to change. Even my Disciples carry it.” His gaze grew deep as he looked at the creatures below. “Their minds were never fully developed. But even then they could recognize concepts of closeness, of tenderness. I visited them often. When I was cast down, I could still hear them, trapped in their pit, crying out for their creator. I heard those cries become maddened as they wallowed and their minds turned to dust. They always were such delicate creatures.”

  He glanced at Lenk. “Though I’m sure you’ve noticed that spending so much time away from me has caused most of them to start reverting.”

  Memories flashed through Lenk’s mind: images of the saccarii and their scaly flesh, of Sheffu’s arm fused to his side, of their ochre eyes and the long hisses of their language.

  “Reverting to what?”

  “Originally they began as serpents. I found the form elegant in its simplicity, something basic upon which I could build. From there I could expand their function.”

  “To what?”

  Mocca cast a smile at him, something soft and sad. “It was going to be perfect. The craft that went into them allowed for expert malleability. I could shape their form to whatever was needed: extra arms and increased strength for physical labor, additional eyes for surveillance, enhanced intellect, whatever was needed.”

  “You were making a slave race.”

  “No. No.” Mocca’s eyes flashed in the darkness. He whirled on Lenk, anger etched on his face. “You don’t understand. You’re just like them. They never understood that I could do it better, that I could perfect them and…”

  As the horror on Lenk’s face deepened, Mocca trailed off. He let out a short breath and regained his composure, though his ire remained plain.

  “Rhuul Khaas could not subsist on goodwill alone. It needed labor, law, guardianship. That had to come from somewhere.”

  “Oerboros said it came from your people. He said you sacrificed them to further your knowledge.”

  Mocca looked away. “Oerboros was always gifted with a rather frustratingly apt perception.”

  “Then it’s true. It’s fucking true.” Lenk staggered to his feet, though he found his legs shaky beneath him. “All that you showed me, all those people, all those wonders—”

  “They exist,” Mocca interrupted, waving a hand. “You’ve seen them for yourself. I was not lying. I merely find myself reluctant to dwell on the cost that they commanded. I did not wish those who adored me to bear the pain of progress. The saccarii were intended to be a way to offset that. Not a race of slaves, but of martyrs, the noble chosen who could bear the burden of civilization more efficiently than any human, shict, or tulwar. But no one else could see the purpose, let alone what it took to create—”

  The man in white’s hands trembled. He shut his eyes, clenched his jaw. Slowly he exhaled.

  “My penance began long before I was cast down, Lenk. I saw a world of mud and ashes, people rutting in filth and gnawing on bones, and I sought to solve it. In my haste, my pride, my… my need to do it better, I…” He rubbed at his eyes. “I made mistakes, Lenk. Mistakes I have had lifetimes to contemplate.

  “But just as the saccarii have begun to collapse without me, so has the world.” Mocca swept an arm out in a vague direction. “You’ve seen it yourself. You’ve seen the wars, the strife, the great famines of kindness that mortalkind insists on inflicting upon itself. I sacrificed much to learn, to build, to create, yes. But they sacrifice more and build nothing but bigger graveyards. I can fix them, Lenk. I can fix this.”

  “I… how?” Lenk shook his head. “How is it progress if it needs people to die all the damn time? How the fuck does that fix anything?” He looked to Mocca, alarm in his eyes. “If you came back, who would you kill?”

  “I would try not to.”

  “You don’t ‘try’ not to kill people. You either do it or you don’t.”

  “No, Lenk. I am not vengeful.”

  Above the screaming from the pit, above the bile rising in his throat, above the soft words of Mocca, Lenk could hear it. The tinkling of a bell. A solitary giggle right behind his ear.

  “Don’t tell me you believe him,” Oerboros whispered from somewhere else.

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “Oerboros,” Mocca hissed, clearly having heard it. “Don’t listen to him, Lenk. His mind is as twisted as theirs. In his long years as—”

  “A race of martyrs. Ha. He created the saccarii merely because he couldn’t stand the idea of something being beyond him.”

  “Silence,” Mocca snarled.

  “Of course they came out as abominations. Creation cannot simply occur from formula and design. Even his blood couldn’t sustain them. All his powers of fleshcrafting and they still crumble without him.”

  “Oerboros, I command you to—”

  “Oh, do be quiet, old man,” Oerboros whispered. “Mortal, you seem inquisitive. Perhaps you should ask him what happened to Kyrael.”

  “Kyrael…” Lenk looked at Mocca. “There were two of them. Oerboros and—”

  “Kyrael betrayed me,” Mocca said. “I was grief-stricken. I was angered. I did things I—”

  “He doesn’t seem keen to answer you. Pity. Perhaps you should see for yourself?”

  “Lenk
, do not listen to him.”

  “Top of the tower. Look east, to the reservoir.”

  Lenk looked long at Mocca. Mocca looked back at Lenk, helpless.

  And Lenk was running.

  “Lenk, wait!”

  He did not wait. He did not listen. He ran from the room, back up the spiral staircase, past the chamber where he had found Oerboros, and up until he could smell clean air again. He burst from a hole into a small observatory at the top of the tower, and there he looked long to the east.

  Before he even saw it, he felt it. That desperate, eerie presence. That breathing down his neck, that anger and hatred that reached out and seized him and forced him to look.

  There in the distance, at the edge of the city, was a massive pool of water. A reservoir surrounded by a great pillar at every cardinal direction. From their peaks extended long chains that all met in a central point above the center of the water. And from them dangled…

  “Khetashe,” Lenk gasped as he saw it.

  An Aeon. Like Oerboros. Nearly genderless, naked and withered and hanging from her ankles. Long blue wings drooped low. But even from this great distance, Lenk could see their brilliant luster, as he could see the silver mask that was her face. And stark against her faded perfection, an ugly red gash.

  Her throat was open, blood flowing freely from a severed jugular. Yet she was still alive. Lenk could feel it, feel her breath, feel her pain, feel her choked, agonized pleas. She was alive. She was bleeding.

  As she had been for centuries.

  “Kyrael,” Lenk whispered.

  “We do not die, mortal. We feel pain, but never do we collapse from it. Kyrael’s blood has filled this reservoir for centuries, tainting the water that flows beneath the city, out the mountain and into the river. You yourself have likely tasted her, at some point.”

  “Mocca… Khoth-Kapira did this?”

  “All because she tried to help. All because she loved him, as we did. He could not bear to be helped. He could not bear to have someone presume to act outside his wishes.”

  “But he said—”

  “Didn’t he just? He said those words back then, too. And we believed him. Look at us now, Lenk. Or if you don’t wish to… look to your friend.”