I Only Summon Villainesses

I started keeping the tally on the fourth day, on the inside of my forearm, in blood, because we had nothing to write with and I have never claimed to be a reasonable man.

It began as a joke I was telling myself to stay awake.

Then it stopped being one.

He said he had been trying to go up for ten years. He is here. He said stay away from this area. He walked us into it. He said he did not ask to be trusted, and then he told us the one rule that kept the rest of us alive at the cost of nothing to himself.

He said he had no interest in the animal, and then he knelt in the dark with both hands over its stump until the heat went out of it. He said he would walk the back half of the line, and he was ahead, and a granary clerk is somewhere behind us in the dust.

He said eleven days. Then nine. Then a week. Then four.

By the fourth day I had eleven entries on my arm and not one of them went the way he had said it would.

’That is not madness. That is a pattern.’

I put it to Light while we walked, quietly, because Bren was ahead of us and I had decided she had enough to carry.

He listened the whole way through without interrupting, which is not like him.

”You believe he is lying to us.”

”No. That’s the thing. He’s not lying. Lying is when the words are wrong and you know which way.” I shifted Ilse’s weight up my chest. ”A liar tells you north when the road is south, and once you catch him you’ve got nothing, because next time he might tell you south. This isn’t that. This is—”

I stopped, because I had not put it into words before and the words came out of me strangely.

”Every time he says a thing, the opposite happens. Every single time. That’s not lying. That’s a machine.”

Light walked a while.

”Then use it.”

”Use it how?”

”Ask him what he intends to do.” He glanced at me sideways. ”And then plan for the reverse.”

’...Now that is dangerous.’

I want to be honest about the next part, because it was not clever and it did not feel good.

I tested him.

That evening I asked Devant, in front of everyone, whether he intended to take first watch.

”Yes,” he said.

So I told Light quietly that we needed somebody else on first watch, and Light put the big man on it without explaining why, and Devant went and lay down at the far edge of the firelight and slept for four hours without stirring.

The next morning I asked whether we would reach water that day.

”No. Not before tomorrow.”

We found a seep before noon.

Bren filled the skins and looked back at me while she did it with an expression I have not been able to name since. She had been at the fire the night before. She had heard the watch question. She is not slow.

She came and walked beside me afterwards with the full skins across her shoulder.

”You’re doing something.”

”I’m doing arithmetic.”

”With him.”

”With what he says.”

She thought about that for about two hundred paces.

”Is he doing it on purpose?”

’That’s the question, isn’t it.’

I had no answer for her then and I do not have a good one now. What I had was eleven marks on my arm and a granary clerk in the dust, and a suspicion I could not make sit still.

Because a man who lies on purpose knows what the truth is. He has to. He keeps it somewhere and hands you the other thing.

But if you never once, in eleven tries, accidentally do what you said you would do, you are either the most disciplined liar who has ever lived or something is standing between your mouth and your hands.

I put it to him on the fifth day, straight out, because subtlety has never once worked for me and I have stopped pretending otherwise.

We were up ahead of the others, walking the ridge of a shelf.

”You never do what you say.”

He kept walking.

”Eleven times. I counted.”

”Only eleven?”

”Is it more?”

”I stopped counting in the fourth year.” He stepped over a break in the rock without breaking stride. ”You are the first person to bring it up. Most people decide I am simply unreliable and adjust, which is the correct response and takes considerably less effort.”

”So it’s deliberate.”

The boy smiled at the rock ahead of us.

”No.”

’He said no... which tells me exactly nothing.’

I stood there on that shelf with my arms full of dying woman and worked out, about two seconds too late, that I had just asked a machine a question about itself and got a machine’s answer.

I have thought about it since, and I still cannot tell you which way that one pointed.

Behind us the big man said something I did not catch and Bren laughed at it, which was the first laugh anyone had produced since the dust and the stopped prints, and the wyvern came up the shelf on three legs with Light walking at its bad side, and we went on.

That night I sat with Ilse and turned my forearm over in the firelight.

Eleven small brown marks, put on with a thumbnail and whatever was wet at the time, gone crusted and flaking and mostly unreadable now. Two of them had run into each other. One had come off entirely on the strapping and left a pale patch shaped like nothing.

A man keeping a tally of another man’s sentences in his own blood, on his own arm, four layers under a world that had a sun in it.

I made the twelfth one anyway.

’It’s a machine,’ I thought. ’And I’m walking into the dark behind it because it’s the only one who knows the road.’

Then I got up, and went out past the light, and came back with nothing done and no memory of the walk, and I sat down beside her and did not tell anybody about it.