Days of Blood & Starlight

31 Tally

Akiva could have done without fire that night at camp. He’d had enough fire for one day: the sky was still curdled with smoke from the blazes they’d set to herd fugitive chimaera out of the safety of the forest. When he looked up, he couldn’t see a single star. But fire was a camp fixture and focal point. Soldiers were gathered around it to clean their blades and eat and drink, and though he had no appetite, he did have a thirst. He was on his third flagon of water, sunk in thoughts as murky as the sky, when a voice caught his attention.

“What are you doing?”

It was a sharp demand, and it came from Liraz. Akiva looked up. His sister was on the far side of the fire, lit lurid by its glow.

“What does it look like?” This from a Second Legion soldier Akiva didn’t know. He was sitting with two others, and when Akiva saw what it was they held—what they were about to do—his fists clenched.

Tattoo tools, such as they were. A knife and ink stick were all it took to record kills on flesh.

“It looks like you’re about to add to your tally,” said Liraz, “but that can’t be, can it, because no self-respecting soldier would ink today onto their hands.”

Today. Today. What had Liraz’s patrol done today? Akiva didn’t know. Her look, when he and Hazael had found her after their own bleak day, had seemed to dare him to ask her, but he didn’t want to know. Injuries had been sustained by some in her group—whiplashes, some bite wounds. None serious, but telling enough. Akiva hadn’t offered up what he had done, either, hours earlier in that gully to the south and east. He and Hazael hadn’t even talked about it, had barely exchanged a glance to acknowledge that it had happened at all.

The point was that the tally was for battle kills, for soldiers slain. Not fleeing folk.

“They were armed,” the soldier said with a shrug.

“Oh, is that all it takes in the common army?” asked Liraz. “Give a slave a knife and it becomes a worthy opponent?” She gestured to his hands, to all the black marks already ticked onto his fingers. “How many of those fought back? Any of them?”

The soldier rose suddenly to his feet. He was a foot taller than Liraz, though if he imagined that gave him an advantage, he would learn his mistake. Akiva rose, too—not because he thought his sister was going to need his help, but more out of surprise at the nature of her anger.

“I earned my marks,” said the soldier, looming over her.

Liraz didn’t back down. Through clenched teeth, and with acid contempt, she said, “Not today you didn’t.”

“And who are you to decide?”

Her lips drew up over her clamped teeth in a vicious smile. “Ask around.”

Maybe it was the smile, or something he saw in her eyes, but the soldier wavered in his looming swagger. “Is that supposed to scare me?”

“Well, it gave me chills.” Hazael had appeared. “I’d be happy to tell you stories, if you really want to know. I’ve known her all my life.”

“Lucky you,” said one of the others, which kicked off some stupid laughter.

“Oh, I know.” Hazael was earnest. “It’s good to have someone around to save your life. How many times has it been, Lir? Four?” he asked her.

She didn’t reply. Akiva stepped up beside them. “Making friends, Lir?”

“Everywhere I go.”

Akiva nodded to the other soldiers. “You know she’s right,” he said. “You shame yourself taking pride in today’s work.”

“Just following orders,” said the soldier, who had grown uneasy in Akiva’s presence.

“And were you ordered to enjoy it?”

“Come on,” said one of the others, pulling at his friend’s elbow, and as they retreated, mutterings of “Misbegotten” could be heard in low tones.

Liraz called to their backs, “If I see fresh ink on any of you tomorrow, I’m taking fingers.”

The looming one let out an incredulous laugh and looked back.

“Try me,” she said.

“Don’t try her,” said Hazael. “Please? I think she’d enjoy having a finger collection a little too much.”

Once they were gone, Liraz sat down. She gave Akiva a sideward glance. “I don’t need Beast’s Bane settling my arguments.”

Hazael was offended. “What about me? I’m pretty sure it was me they were afraid of.”

“Yes, because nothing instills fear quite like bragging how many times your sister has saved your life.”

“Well, I left out how many times I’ve saved your life,” he said. “I believe we’re currently even?”

“I wasn’t settling anything,” Akiva broke in. “Just agreeing with you.” He hesitated. “Liraz, what happened today?”

“What do you think?” was her only reply. What he thought was that they had come across some of the other escaped slaves from the caravan, and, as the soldier had said, followed their orders. By the way Liraz was staring into the fire, he judged that she had taken no pleasure in it, but he wouldn’t have expected her to. She might glory in a well-fought battle, but never in a slaughter. The question was, how committed was she to following orders? And… might she surprise him, as Hazael had?

Akiva looked at his brother now and found Hazael looking back. The gaze held, over their sister’s head, and it amounted to their first acknowledgment of what they had done that day in the gully.

Or, more to the point, what they had not done.

When Akiva had heard the scream—brief, bitten off, but unmistakable—Hazael had been nearer to its source than he. Only by a few wingspans, but still it was Hazael who responded first, suddenly folding his wings and plunging down to land in the rocky creek bed, crouched in a ready stance in case he needed to burst skyward again. A half a heartbeat and Akiva was beside him, and saw what he saw, huddled in a concavity in the ravine: a quivering mass of terrified sheepfolk.

The Caprine were one of the mildest of the chimaera tribes, so ill-suited to fighting that they were exempt from the army. The fact was that many chimaera tribes made poor soldiers: they were too small, or configured ill for holding weapons, or they were aquatic, or they were timid, or they were large but lumbering and slow. There were as many reasons as there were tribes, and it was why Brimstone had had to do what he had done for so long: too many of his people were simply not made for fighting at all, and certainly not for fighting seraphim.

The main might of the chimaera army had always been drawn from some dozen of the fiercer tribes, and it was with surprise that Akiva recognized one such in the center of this huddle. A Dashnag, among Caprine. A small one, not yet grown, but even a small Dashnag is a brutish thing, though this one was holding a slender deer centaur girl in his thick arms—her hand was clamped over her own mouth; it was she who had screamed, and her limpid deer eyes were impossibly huge in her sweet small face. Another deer girl was shrunk in fright against the boy’s side, and though Akiva couldn’t know precisely what had brought these folk together in this moment, the tableau was simple, and it painted in miniature what the angels had done to Eretz: Through terror, they had united it against them.

All this in an instant, and the Dashnag boy was setting the centaur girl aside, gently, and there was fear in his eyes, but he would defend these folk. Akiva’s swords were in his hands, but he didn’t want them.

This isn’t who we have to be, he thought. “Haz—” he started to say.

His brother turned to him. He looked puzzled, a squint drawing at his eyes. “That’s strange,” he said, cutting Akiva off. “I could have sworn I heard something down here.”

It took Akiva a beat to understand, and then a rush of relief—and reprieve, and gratitude—flooded through him. “Me, too,” he said, cautious, hoping he was reading his brother right. The Dashnag boy was watching them intently, every muscle poised to spring. All the Caprine and the two Dama girls were staring unblinking. A baby started to murmur—a baby—and its mother clutched it tighter. “Must have been a bird,” Akiva ventured.

“A bird,” Hazael agreed. And… he turned away from the fugitives. He took a few splashing steps in the creek, casual, even a little comical, and bent to pick one of the blooms that grew on reedy stalks at the water’s edge, tucking it into a notch in his mail. It was still there.

He took it out now, and presented it to Liraz. Akiva tensed, wondering if he was going to tell her that they had spared a whole village worth of chimaera today, and even a Dashnag who, though a boy, would certainly grow into a soldier. What would she think of that? But Hazael only said, “I brought you a present.”

Liraz took the flower, looked at it, and then at Hazael, expressionless. And then she ate it. She chewed the flower and swallowed it.

“Hmm,” said Hazael. “Not the usual response.”

“Oh, do you give flowers often?”

“Yes,” he said. He probably did. Hazael had a way of enjoying life in spite of the many restrictions they lived under, being soldiers, and worse, being Misbegotten. “I hope it wasn’t poisonous,” he said lightly.

Liraz just shrugged. “There are worse ways to die.”