The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  “Your name,” Gariath said. “You said it wasn’t important.”

  “And you believed me.”

  “I don’t anymore.”

  The old tulwar nodded. “In another life I was he who would save his people and did not. I was he who led them into the jaws of Cier’Djaal. I was he who rose first and fell first.” He straightened up to the proud tulwar he once had been. “Mototaru Humn Muusa Gon.”

  “You began the Uprising,” Gariath whispered.

  “And I will see it finished,” Mototaru replied, calm. “Will you?”

  Gariath said nothing. He looked down at the floor. He continued to do so, in silence, until there was a knock at the door.

  When it opened, it was Chakaa’s leering face that looked in. She glanced from him to Mototaru, then back to the dragonman.

  “I had thought you’d have killed him by now, daanaja,” she said. “Do you perhaps wish me to?”

  Gariath glanced back to Mototaru, then shook his head. “No.”

  “Are you certain?” She patted the hilt of the immense blade strapped to her back. “Such a betrayal as the one he visited upon you must be avenged.”

  “There was no betrayal,” Gariath said. He paused, sniffed. “The blade the human used was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?” Chakaa’s eyebrows rose.

  “This one”—he gestured to Mototaru—“saw that and intervened. He saved my life.”

  Chakaa’s face twitched as skepticism and disinterest battled before the latter ultimately won out. “As you say, daanaja. Poison, huh? Interesting trick. Well, they will not like to hear it, but I shall go tell the others, then.”

  “Do that,” Gariath said. “And tell them to make ready.”

  “For?”

  “More warriors are arriving from the desert. We will gather as many as we can, arm them as best we can.” He stared at her. “And then we march on Cier’Djaal.”

  At this her eyes lit up. Her grin grew broad and feral.

  “That,” she said, “they will like to hear. I will tell them, daanaja.”

  She left. Gariath looked at the empty space where she had stood. From the streets of Jalaang outside, the scent of burning pyres rose and the howls of warriors drifted in.

  “Daanaja,” Gariath muttered. “She started calling me that. Now they all do. What does it mean?”

  Mototaru did not look up as he packed his pipe with tobacco, lit it, and took several long puffs.

  “Demon,” he said, simply.

  “Ah.”

  Darkness.

  Only darkness. All around her. She had expected this. Welcomed it. Welcomed being spared the sights and sounds and blood and screams and tears and death. Welcomed cold. Welcomed numbness. Welcomed silence.

  Found none of it.

  Only darkness. Only heat. Only pain.

  And a voice.

  Well, that was disappointing.

  “What happened?” she groaned.

  Hm? Oh. Well, we lost.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Well, it’s not entirely your fault, I suppose. I could have done more, advised you better. We put too much faith in my abilities.

  A brief, dark pause.

  I tasted him. The barest lick of his flesh. To be denied a mouthful was… words fail to describe the cruelty. Had I consumed him, I could have—

  “Please,” she gasped. “He was my friend.” She winced. “Once.”

  No longer.

  “Does he know about us? About you?”

  I don’t think so. He was simply too strong, like his forebears. Pity. I doubt I’ll ever get to taste something like that ever again. Everything else will simply taste like dust in comparison. Sad, isn’t it?

  “It hurts.”

  I suspect it might.

  “Am I going to live?”

  For now.

  “Am I going to be okay?”

  No.

  Laughter. Sad. Short. A sigh.

  But none of us are.

  And all was silent, just for a moment.

  Light came back to her swiftly and unmercifully, stinging her as she opened her eyes. Or eye, rather; the right one was swollen shut. She suspected that was the smart one of the two. Somehow she suspected that she wasn’t meant to have awakened, that she should have stayed down in the darkness.

  But when had life ever been that kind to her?

  “She’s awake!”

  She recognized Aturach’s voice before she recognized his face as he loomed over her. And she recognized his face before she recognized her surroundings. The orange light of a setting sun seeped through the canvas walls of a low-slung tent, painted her sweat-slick bedding and body.

  She lay clad in her short-cropped undershirt and breeches, her robes folded neatly nearby. She rose to get them, found she couldn’t. Not with one arm, anyway. Her left had been fitted with a sling and splint. Her ribs were tightly wrapped with bandages. Her body felt numb.

  Not numb enough to make it forget the beating she had received, though. Agony welled up inside her at the slightest movement and she found herself propped up by hands that felt more powerful than they looked.

  “Easy,” Aturach said. “Easy. I tried to use a hecatine to numb you, but I don’t think it worked all the way. And it certainly won’t save you if you overstrain yourself.”

  “Overstrain myself,” Asper repeated. “I feel like I’m going to snap in half if someone tells a good joke.”

  “That’s… probably not too far off.”

  “How bad?”

  Aturach winced. She glared at him through her good eye.

  “How bad?” she repeated.

  “Your arm’s broken. Ribs are cracked. Your jaw’s saved, but not by much. And your pendant…”

  He glanced to her folded clothes. There, atop them, lay her pendant. The Phoenix of Talanas had been placed carefully upon a white cloth. Its left wing had been broken off and lay beside it, red with blood.

  Her blood.

  “We pulled it out of your chest,” Aturach said. “I can’t tell what’s going on inside you, but I don’t think it’s good.”

  Worse than he knew. Just by breathing she could tell something important inside her had been fractured, ruptured, whatever. But through the agony, she couldn’t tell which or where. Not yet.

  “Why’d you do it?”

  To look at Aturach, one would think he was the one in agony. It couldn’t have been more than a few hours, yet he looked as though he had lost six weeks of sleep. His eyes were red and puffy, the trails where tears had made their way through the dust on his face still fresh.

  “Why’d you fight him?” he asked. “That thing was a monster. He was going to kill you.”

  “There wasn’t any other choice.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Yeah?” She snorted. “Maybe you could have said something before I got my ass kicked, then.” She pushed him off as fiercely as she dared to lean back onto the bedding. “What happened?”

  “After that thing went down, we grabbed you and ran away. The refugees fell back to a nearby valley and made camp here. The tulwar didn’t pursue, thank Talanas.”

  She would have scoffed at that if she hadn’t been sure it would rupture something inside her.

  “Should have left me,” she said. “I fucked this up. I fucked all of it up.”

  “You did, yeah,” Aturach said. “But not for the reason you think, or did you not fucking hear me earlier?” He leaned down beside her. “You’re the reason we got as many as we did out of Cier’Djaal. You’re the reason we got this far.” He growled, spoke through a clenched jaw. “I don’t know what made you fight that monster or what made you think you could win, but yeah, you fucked up by doing it. And that’s because I don’t know how you fucking missed that you’re not alone.”

  “If you’re going to give me some bullshit speech on friendship—”

  “Not friendship. Responsibility. You led these people out of Cier’Djaal. You led them through the desert. You h
eld us together. You have men, women, children, elders, all relying on you. You cannot be so fucking selfish as to think you can die now.”

  His words didn’t hurt quite as much as her broken bones.

  But they came close.

  They weighed on her, bore her down, made her drape her good arm over her eyes and take a deep, staggering breath.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “We are alone. I led only a handful out of Cier’Djaal, left more to die in the city. And where did I take them? To the gates of a city controlled by tulwar about to march on Cier’Djaal.”

  “I hardly see how that—”

  “Tell me Talanas is looking out for us,” she interrupted. “Tell me Talanas is up there, watching us. Tell me we’re all not just deluding ourselves.”

  Aturach told her nothing.

  He knelt beside her, folded his hands in his lap, and stared at them.

  “If you’re going to ask me to tell you something that will make you believe again, I’m not going to,” he said softly. “Somewhere between fleeing my city and trying to keep you from dying, I couldn’t find the time to pen a speech to restore your shattered faith.

  “But if you want me to tell you the facts…” He looked at her, eyes quivering. “If you want me to tell you that you nearly died to save these people and they are keen to return the favor, then I can probably find that time.”

  Voices rose from outside the tent, carried on the silence of the sunset. Aturach looked past the flap to the outside.

  “Or you could just listen for yourself.”

  Asper paused, listened. She could make out forceful words, inflamed voices, and found herself unable to subsist on those scraps alone. Slowly, with an immense amount of pain and help, she edged her way to the tent’s flap and looked outside.

  The refugees had gathered around a large central bonfire, their eyes lit as they stared upon it. Or rather, upon the figure standing before it.

  “Karnerians! Sainites! Khovura!” Dransun stood tall before the flames, fist held high and voice roaring to be heard over their crackle. “And now tulwar. Now a fucking monster! She stood against it, she fought it to a standstill, she was beaten and battered and still it could not kill her. You saw the beast yourself!” He thrust a finger out over the crowd. “Will it kill you, Djaalics?”

  “No!”

  “Fuck no!”

  “Death to the tulwar!”

  They cried out. Men. Women. With many voices.

  “They took Jalaang,” Dransun continued. “They killed your brothers and sisters there. They burned its houses to the ground. These savage animals now look to Cier’Djaal to do the same. Will you let them, Djaalics?”

  “Never!”

  “For Cier’Djaal!”

  They rose up. The old. The young. They raised their fists to Dransun.

  “The northerner stood against the foreigners. The northerner stood against the tulwar. The northerner did us a service. We owe her a debt.” Dransun threw his arms out wide. “Will you repay it, Djaalics?”

  No words this time. Nothing but one loud roar as they raised hands above their heads and filled the evening sky with steel. With rusted weapons and heirloom blades, with dented rakes and gnarled sticks, with everything they could find.

  They stood tall.

  “So they’re willing to fight now,” Asper muttered.

  “They see what they stand against,” he said. “They know what’s waiting for them if they try to run or hide.”

  Asper rubbed out a kink in her neck. “Gariath says they have many tulwar behind the walls. I believe him. A handful of Djaalics aren’t enough to challenge them.”

  “You’d need an army,” Aturach said.

  “I’ll need two,” she replied.

  Aturach canted his head. “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know,” Asper said. “Nothing that makes sense just yet.” She sniffed. “But since I’m not talking sense, I might as well say I’ve got to go back to Cier’Djaal.”

  “Last we heard, the Karnerians and Sainites were still fighting.”

  “Have they killed each other?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s hope they left enough to kill the tulwar.”

  “There’s talking nonsense and then there’s outright fucking insanity,” Aturach said. “What makes you think you can turn them against the tulwar?”

  “I’ll have a word with them.”

  “Why do you think they’ll listen?”

  She looked down at her arm in the sling. Beneath the cloth, beneath the flesh, beneath the sinew, she could feel the bone. She could feel the break, the agony welling up from it. It was enough to make her wince just looking at it, enough to make her grit her teeth in agony, enough to drown out the sounds of the roaring crowds outside.

  But not enough to numb her to the heat, not enough to make her numb to something moving within her arm, not enough to silence the sound of Amoch-Tethr giggling faintly.

  “Because,” she said softly, “I’m done talking.”

  FORTY

  NEVER LET GO

  Horses were swift and gaambols were maneuverable, but in the desert no mount rivaled a yiji.

  They were hardy, storing fat and water in their crested backs so that they might wander the deserts for days. They were able to run swifter than the wind if they had blood in their noses. And while it was hard to verify, many shicts said that their eerie, gibbering laughter was evidence that they had great senses of humor—though they tended to prefer jokes whose punch lines involved someone being torn apart.

  But what really made a yiji invaluable was its adaptability. On the desert plains or in the forests that edged them, as eager to ford rivers as they were to caper across fields, yijis were at home in just about any environment.

  “Come on.”

  Which made the current disobedience of Kataria’s mount doubly puzzling and thrice as frustrating.

  “Move, you dumb thing!”

  Kataria growled, kicked at the yiji’s flanks, tugged on its mane. The beast did little more than whine and whimper, taking a few steps here and a few steps there before circling around and refusing to go farther.

  It had been acting like this since they had emerged into the Green Belt, creeping over the dune walls of the valley and into the plains and paddies that made up Cier’Djaal’s outskirts. And while it had managed to slink through the various farms and villages that dotted these fertile lands undetected by the human farmers and their beasts, the closer they got to the city, the more irritable the yiji had become.

  “Don’t do that.” Kataria looked up and saw Kwar guiding her own beast over. She made a gesture at Kataria. “You’re fussing with it, nudging and tugging. Be forceful with it.” She made a fist. “Show the yiji you deserve to ride it.”

  “It’s not my problem,” Kataria snapped back. “The last ones we rode were just fine. This one is… I don’t know, sick or something.”

  “Yijis don’t get sick.”

  “Don’t you tell me that. I’ve seen what these things eat.”

  Kwar snorted, spurred her beast about in a circle. She pointed long to the horizon. Against the setting sun, the Silken Spire burned like a torch, its glimmering silk bright against the shadowy spires and walls of Cier’Djaal.

  “The city is right there,” she said. “The hunters will just be returning now. If we can hurry, everyone will be there to hear what you have to say.”

  “Well, that sounds pretty great.” Kataria gestured to the beast between her legs. “If you’d kindly translate that into whatever smell this thing needs to understand, we can be on our way.”

  Kwar looked down at Kataria’s mount, sniffed. “She’s frightened.”

  “Of what?”

  “How should I know?” Kwar eased forward on her mount. “But she wants to return to her pack. Just hop on to mine and we’ll ride the rest of the way together.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  Kataria
’s ears flattened against her head, she bared her teeth. “Nothing’s changed, Kwar. I told you never to touch me again. I meant it.”

  It was hard to say what, exactly, Kwar was.

  Selfish, of course. Obnoxious and childish, as well. Hot-tempered, feral, and downright pigheaded when she wanted to be were also accurate descriptors.

  But there were tenderer sides to her. Sides Kataria remembered, at night, when unexpected chills crept over her and no one was there to draw warmth from. Memories of mischievous smiles and wild eyes. Memories of fingers sliding down her arm to intertwine with her own. Memories of someone who wore her fears plain on her face and gave her laughter freely and seized by the shoulders and kissed without thinking.

  These were also Kwar.

  But when Kataria spoke to the woman before her as she just had, when the fire in the khoshict’s eyes dimmed and her ears drooped and she looked to the earth, it was hard to say what that woman was.

  But she wasn’t Kwar.

  “I told you I’m sorry,” she said.

  “And I told you that you don’t get to apologize for that.”

  “Even after I’ve come all this way?” Kwar held up her hand, the wounds on her knuckles scabbing over. “Even after this? I punched Shekune, the greatest chieftain who ever lived, for you. And it hurt. And I’d do it again and break my hand, my arm, my whole body for you.”

  Kataria met her with pursed lips and short words.

  “Do this for our people,” she spoke softly, so as not to betray the quaver in her voice, “not for me.”

  Kwar looked as though she might break down crying. She looked as though she might leap off her yiji and strangle Kataria right there. She looked as though she might turn her beast around, start walking, and never stop.

  For a moment she seemed to do just that. She spurred her yiji past Kataria and began to head back.

  But then, Kwar was pigheaded, when she wanted to be.

  “For our people,” Kwar said.

  And then she let out a scream.

  Kataria hadn’t heard anything like the noise that tore itself out of Kwar’s mouth, not until her yiji echoed it, anyway. The beast rushed forward, jaws gnashing and nipping and biting at the ankles of Kataria’s mount. Her yiji yelped back, darting away from Kwar’s mount, trying to get around it. But everywhere it turned, Kwar’s yiji was there, jaws clamping and laughter gibbering.