A Practical Guide to Evil

Even nameless hole-in-the-ground villages had a temple, in Procer.

A bare bones arrangement, of course. It wasn’t like the people who’d once lived here had been able to afford bringing in stone. The House of Light was a glorified barn, with shuttered windows on the sides and a surprisingly nice thatched roof. The angle of it was gentle enough I was able to lean back into the prickly straw and leave my legs dangling over the edge. My deadwood staff I left at my side, keeping against my ribs an open bottle of wine as I looked up at the clouds. The day was waning but it was still a fair afternoon, the sun warm and the breeze lazy. I had the third of a bottle warming my belly, the taste of the red sour against my tongue, and I was half asleep already.

I’d taken to sneaking in naps when I could afford to, which was less often than I’d like. My hours were spoken for even on the road. It helped even out for my nights when I could, though. There were only so many times in a row you could wake up halfway to Early Bell and find yourself incapable of falling asleep until the lost sleep caught up to you. My Name was taking the edge off some, but it could only compensate so much: just like when I’d been the Squire, it did not prevent tiredness so much as help me work through it. Sooner or later the dues had to be paid. My fingers clenched around the neck of the bottle. And that was the very thing keeping me up at night, wasn’t it? The dues I’d paid in Ater.

There were some dreams even exhaustion was preferable to.

I brought the bottle to my lips, drank deep and forced myself to close my eyes. The nap would do me good. Only there was a scent on the wind, the last wisps of smoke from Masego’s work, and it had my jaw clenching. I would not be able to sleep here, I realized. At least not without that fucking nightmare, the way his eyes had widened just the slightest bit as the knife sunk into his chest. The shiver of pain as the mortal wound was inflicted. It’d been burning that night too, a pillar of green death going up all the way to the clouds.

It was a relief when I felt the magic thrum in the air. Masego had always been a prodigy when it came to controlling his sorcery, the impressively small amount of power lost when casting a spell, but he’d become something else entirely since losing his magic. Not there was not a drop lost, I thought. The only signs he was using magic were immanent – inherent to the formula, inevitable – with not a single emanation phenomenon. I suspected that his spells were now as close to perfect as was possible for a human when he was allowed to take his time.

I did not open my eyes to look at how he was coming up, but I heard him slump down into the thatch and wiggled around until he was more or less comfortable.

“I’ll need thicker robes,” Masego noted, “if we are to keep doing this. The straw bites at my back.”

“Send a requisition request to Vivienne,” I snorted.

I was going through secretaries quicker than I was going through swords, these days. I’d lost one to the Clans and the other to a blade in the back, leaving Princess Vivienne Dartwick to settle awkwardly into the role. She had duties of her own and she’d never been quite as good with details as either her predecessors, so the adjunct secretariat was having to pick up the slack. I’d have tried to borrow Aisha from Juniper if I weren’t so likely to lose a hand to those pearly whites in the attempt.

“We could avoid thatched roofs instead,” Masego flatly suggested. “I’ll not begrudge you the habit of finding a perch, Catherine, but you could at least find a comfortable one.”

“Slim pickings here,” I amusedly replied. “I’ll take it under advisement for the next time.”

“That is all I ask,” he replied, pleased.

There was a moment of comfortable silence, then finally I sighed and open my eyes.

“What brings you up here?” I asked.

“I’ve done as much to find our leverage as I can without my proper equipment,” Masego told me. “A purely magical ritual is not a feasible solution, as I had suspected, so I am broadening the search. The mathematics are rather challenging, it is an interesting area of theory.”

I glanced at the dark-skinned man lying at my side, the first Named who had joined me. He’d been Apprentice, back then, but that was no longer the mantle he bore.

“Who am I to ask about the arithmetic of deicide if not you, Hierophant?” I half-smiled.

I glanced to the side, finding his lips quirking, but my brow furrowed. His eye was still missing, the one he’d lost earlier. The skin of the socket was healed, but only one glass eye remained.

“Haven’t had time to repair it?” I asked, tapping my own missing eye.

He looked surprised.

“Repair it?” Masego said. “That is not possible, Cat. It is not a crossbow whose parts can be swapped out. My eyes were unique, artefacts in the truest sense of the word. No, it is permanently lost to me.”

I started in surprise.

“Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry, Zeze. I had no idea.”

He shrugged.

“You don’t seem all that broken up about it,” I slowly said.

“One will suffice,” he said. “It serves my purposes well enough.”

“You’ve had them for years,” I pointed out.

“The loss of my eye was well worth what it allowed me to Witness,” Hierophant said. “It is not without reason Above guarded the sight so jealously. Did I not tell you, once, that the godhead is a mere trick of perspective?”

I nodded. Hard words to forget when they’d come in the wake of him becoming the Hierophant and binding a princess of the fae standing in the fullness of her might.

“Apotheosis is not a matter of power, Catherine,” he said. “Else as the Sovereign of Moonless Nights you would have been as terrible as a great queen of the fae. It is the perception of the laws of Creation, of its underpinning, that sets aside a god from the rest.”

“And this helped?” I asked.

“I had a glimpse of work laid down by the Gods themselves,” Hierophant said. “It did more to broaden my perspective in an instant than twenty years of uninterrupted research would have borne. Once again, you have given me a great gift.”

“I know what I’m getting you for your next nameday, then,” I drily said.

He looked at me, surprised but expectant.

“I’ll pluck out the other eye,” I grinned. “See if you learn from that.”

He rolled his glass eye all the way around, which even after years of war against Keter I had to admit remained an unsettling sight.

“Lucky me,” Masego sighed, and extended his arm towards me.

I cocked a questioning eyebrow.

“The bottle,” he asked. “Unless you intend on drinking alone. Which is a habit common in drunks, I’ll remind you.”

“Well,” I grunted, “if you insist on putting it that way.”

He caught the bottle when I tossed it, because I’d yet to figure out how to fake out that damn eye. He wiped the rim carefully with his sleeve and took a careful sip, getting a smile out of me. He’d been overweight when I first met him. Hard to remember that now. Even through his high-collared robes – black, as always, but bordered in sharp patterns of yellow and green – I could see he was lean, though with barely any muscle to him. He was still very much out of shape. His long braids were woven tightly with enchanted trinkets whose magic he could wrest. His face had changed as he grew old, sharpened as the last of the baby fat melted away and his nose stood out more starkly, so now the braids made his cheekbones look longer.

“I think I prefer red wines,” Masego noted. “Though brandy cut with pear juice remains the finest of drinks.”

The Grey Pilgrim had introduced him to it while they were working on smiting ritual together. Tariq had been very fond of pear brandy but known it was rather rare outside of the Dominion and so finagled a little recipe with Proceran brandies and pears. It was so horribly sweet I almost felt nauseous just standing near a cup, but Zeze was very fond of the brew. And Indrani liked it when he drank, so no doubt in some supply wagon of the Army of Callow there would be the ingredients for it being smuggled along with actual supplies.

“Good luck getting that in a tavern,” I snorted.

“Never again,” he darkly said. “There was a rat, Catherine.”

“Come on,” I complained. “It was once and yearsago. We’ll take you to a nicer place next time.”

Indrani and I had taken him to a tavern Dockside in Laure before the Tenth Crusade, one of those dives we both loved. We’d yet to hear the end of that rat.

“There won’t be one,” Masego helpfully informed me.

I threw a few barbs his way about tender Praesi palates, he reminded me that in truth it was Callowans who had difficulties with spices, and after a while we settled into a comfortable silence as we passed the bottle of wine back and forth. I felt lighter already. He’d always had a knack for doing that, perhaps because he usually wasn’t trying to. If someone were trying to move me I’d dig in my heels, but his sincerity had a way of going right through.

“Got anything else to do before we leave?” I lazily asked.

“Sapan is overseeing the last of our packing,” he said. “But yes, as it happens.”

“What’s that?”

He turned to look at me fully instead of through his own skull, which had me frowning already.

“You need to speak with Hakram,” Masego said.

My fingers clenched. So did my guts.

“It’s handled,” I curtly said.

“It isn’t,” he replied, shaking his head. “Which is why I bring it up. Indrani tried to before you sent her off to Salia, but you distracted her with sex.”

I paused, surprised enough by the bluntness of that to be at a loss for words.

“She says you only do that when you really want to avoid talking about something,” Masego frankly said. “Which is why she let you do it. But she was worried, and so am I. You’ve been putting it off ever since you left Ater.”

I’d left before him. He’d stayed to watch my father and Eudokia be put to the pyre before catching up. I’d not asked what would be done with the ashes. I wasn’t sure I had a right to.

“I have no time for the personal,” I said, but it was a lie.

I did. I just didn’t want to deal with it. Masego wiped the bottle, then had a long sip. He set it down into the thatch carefully. He folded his knees close to his chest, like a child pulling close.

“I ran, after Thalassina,” he quietly said. “I could not face the enormity of what had happened there. I had swallowed up hundreds of thousands of souls, swelled with power the likes of which I had never known, and yet I still ran. There were… whispers in my ear. Procer would be where I found how to Papa back, where I could break the crusade that killed him. But deep down, I believe knew I was running.”

“It’s not the same,” I murmured. “You know that. They died, your fathers, but you didn’t…”

Kill them, I could not quite bring myself to say. You didn’t kill them, like I killed mine.

“An argument can be made that I did,” Masego said. “If I had not insisted to be out in the Maze, Father might never have reached for the powers that killed them.”

Them and a city, I almost said, but held my tongue. Grief didn’t work that way. You could know, in principle, that the death of a city of thousands mattered more on the scales than the pair of people you had loved. But it didn’t weigh the same. Grief, it was like a wound. It hurt when it was on you, when it was your flesh split and your bones cracked. You could see someone else’s wound, feel for them, but it wouldn’t be the same. Our pain always mattered more than other people’s because it was the only one that felt real.

“It does not matter, in the end,” Masego quietly continued. “Even if I claimed all the guilt as my own, it would not bring them back. It is just digging to make the pond deep enough to drown.”

“It does matter,” I harshly replied. “Of course it fucking matters, Masego. I put a knife in him.”

My hand swept up and I flicked the wrist, some vicious part of me hoping for a flinch but finding only unruffled patience. I stabbed the knife into the straw, felt it rip through strands of straw. Like killing a scarecrow.

All men became like scarecrows once you killed enough of them.

“That knife,” I told him, knuckles turning white from the grip. “Right into his heart. He was dead faster than a prayer, Masego. And he gave me the fucking thing the night we met, did you know?”

I could still hear his voice, the way the blade had glinted in the firelight as he spun the handle towards me. How far are you willing to go, to see it done? Far enough to kill him. Had he known, even back then? That it would end with his gift returned in red. Masego’s father had hated me once, because he thought I would be my father’s death and he had loved the man deeply. Wekesa the Warlock had always been clever. Masego shook his head.

“You never told me the story,” he said. “And when I asked him, he was…”

“Himself,” I finished, tone rueful.

My friend nodded.

“I was going to die,” I said. “I was heading back to the orphanage and I saw a guard assault this girl. I stepped in, tried to stop it, but another guard got me. He was choking me, then the Black Knight appeared.”

What a terror he had seemed, back then, death in unadorned plate. Not even Sabah, for all that she stood heads taller and broader, had filled the alley quite so much.

“We took them prisoner,” I said. “And they were going to be turned over to the city guard, only it wouldn’t stick. They’d tried to rape and murder, but they’d still get out.”

I swallowed.

“So he offered me a knife,” I said, “and asked me what I thought was right.”

That was the moment that’d begun it all, wasn’t it? There had been many crossroads in my life. That night in Summerholm where I became the Squire. The end of the Folly, when I’d embraced the depths of Winter. The battle for Great Strycht, the plea I had made to an enemy with every right to kill me. Even that nightmare in Ater, the sky burning green as I became the Warden of the East. All great pivots, days and night that had decided the lay of my life. But at the source of them all, the origin, it was that evening in Laure. The weight of the knife against my palm as I made my choice and slit two throats.

I’d begun it all in blood, and in blood was carrying it out.

“Did you find it?” Masego asked.

I was silent for a long time.

“I found something,” I murmured. “I don’t know if it’s right, but it’s something that made it worth the knife.”

“He would understand.”

I looked away from my friend.

“He did,” I said. “Does that make it any better I murdered him?”

“I loved him too, Catherine,” Masego reminded me.

The tone was calm, but there was iron beneath it. A warning to tread lightly.

“Loved them both,” he continued. “Aunt Eudokia was never close to us, to anybody but him I think, but I’ve known them since I could remember.”

My gaze was drawn to him and I found him looking east. At the distant peaks of the Whitecaps, through green valleys and heavy mists. The afternoon sun was dipping, falling out of sight. Masego’s long, lean face was composed but that was only skin deep. In the depths of the east laid the graves of the only family he’d ever known. And still he looked, with an eye of shadow and an eye of gold.

“Father once told me the day might come one of them killed another,” Masego said. “That they had won against the odds for long, but it would not last forever. That perhaps Aunt Sabah would fall too deep in the Beast, that Father would delve into things best left buried or Uncle Amadeus cross one line too many. And he made me swear, that day, that I would forgive whoever survived.”

My breath caught in my throat.

“He said,” Masego continued, “that I must. That he did not want me to lose all of my family for one death.”

“Praesi,” I said.

It was neither praise nor curse. Maybe a little of both.

“These are the lives we live, Catherine,” he gently said. “We kill and we win until we lose and we die. We are the children of the knife. And so I still love you, even though I watched the woman who used to bring me lemon tarts bleed out on the stairs. Even though you killed the man who taught me it was all right to be as I am, that I should not be fearful of it.”

It was perhaps the most loving thing anyone had ever told me. The obscenity of it made me want to throw up. I felt my fingers shaking around the grip of the knife. I’d yet to let it go.

“I thought we would win,” I croaked. “That I’d get to keep him. That we’d all get to go home. And instead, Gods…”

He laid a hand against my arm, fingers warm even through the cloth.

“I know,” Masego said.

“Fuck,” I snarled, fearing myself tear up. “We were so close, and he just didn’t give me another way. It was all laid out in front of me: him, them, or everyone else. We were going to end it all in one stroke and he just wouldn’t get out of the way.”

I tried to stay angry, but it came out more like a sob. Slowly, delicately, Masego unclasped my fingers from around the knife. I let him and left it in there. Stabbed deep in the straw. I felt like swinging at someone, like hitting the roof or Zeze or even the fucking sky if only so that momentary satisfaction of the hit would drown this out for just a heartbeat. Instead I choked on a sob and his hand on my arm gently tugging me forward until my head was dragged down against his leg. He ran his fingers through my hair, soothing me like a child as I bawled my eyes out. He was dead. Truly dead, no trick or scheme or last laugh. In that cruel moment on the steps we’d made our choices and I’d killed him.

I was never going to see him grow old. I was never going to share a drink with him again, sitting in a tent after dark and talking about the way the world should be. I was never again going to know someone who got the anger. Who’d felt it too. He was just gone.

When I came back to myself, throat raw and nose dripping, it almost felt like I’d fallen asleep. But I was still here, head on Masego’s lap as he gently combed by hair with his fingers. No one had done that for me before, I thought, not like this. Kilian had massaged my back, sometimes even scratched it, but never this. And Indrani had never tried it either. It wouldn’t be from her he’d learned that, I thought. It’d have been one of his fathers, both lost in Thalassina. I’d never met Tikoloshe and disliked Wekesa, but never had I doubted they loved their son deeply. I’d known that about them long before I heard of the sacrifice that had broken a city and a fleet, and their loved echoed through their son still. Through the fingers combing my hair.

“There,” Masego said, sounding awkward as he patted my head. “Better, yes?”

I dragged myself upright, tugging my clothes and wiping my nose with my sleeve. I would have cleared my throat, but it still felt raw.

“Yeah,” I rasped. “Better. A little.”

He withdrew from me, not out of dislike but because he’d never been all that fond of touching. It knew it to be a mark of great fondness that he’d kept me close for this long.

“It doesn’t stop hurting,” he said. “It merely… takes a step back. It will always be there, I think. That it what it means to have loved them.”

I exhaled.

“Thank you,” I got out, even though I didn’t want to.

Even though it felt like weakness.

“That is family,” he smiled.

And it was. I’d taken me years, but I had found a family of sorts. Made it, greedily clutched it to my breast. Masego and Indrani and Vivienne and all of Rat Company, the Fifteenth. I held as many ghosts as I did living, but they were still mine.

“So return it in kind,” Masego said. “Hakram, why is it that you won’t speak to him?”

I looked away. It was easier, when you had only the one eye.

“Vivienne thinks it’s because you’re afraid of ruling without him,” he said. “That speaking to him will make it true, permanent.”

“Talk behind my back, do you?” I said, but the anger was half-hearted.

“When you turn it,” Masego said, “where else can we?”

I winced. From someone else I’d been able to take the lick and move on, just call it a good line and dismiss it, but he didn’t play those sorts of games. Sincerity was harder to ignore. So I kept silent for a long time, choosing my words, as he patiently waited. The poison came to me first. It always did, for better or worse.

“He was supposed to be the one who stayed,” I admitted. “When all this comes to an end.”

“I don’t follow,” he said.

“You’ll disappear into a tower, Zeze,” I tiredly said. “And Indrani will keep a home wherever you are, but she’ll leave. It’s not in her nature to stay. And Vivienne, well, neither of us ever pretended we’d choose the other over Callow. She’ll have a kingdom to rule. But Hakram, he was going to stick with me. We were going to build Cardinal together, usher a new age under the Liesse Accords.”

I laughed, not hiding the bitterness.

“Only he’s bound to the Clans now,” I said. “If not for life, then for a very long time. Maybe he’ll help, and I’m sure he’ll write, but it won’t be…”

I hesitated, not quite finding the words.

“It won’t be us,” I said. “It’ll be me and him. And I’m not sure that’s enough.”

Because I was looking forward, into what lay beyond Keter, and what I saw terrified me. They’d be gone, all of them. Not only the Woe but everyone. Juniper and Aisha and Pickler, they weren’t going to leave the Army of Callow for a city being built. Not when they’d given years of their lives building that army up from nothing. So one day, after they feasted me in Laure and patted my back and were well rid of the queen that had been necessary in the pit but was embarrassing now that peace had come, I’d begin walking west and found I was left only with ghosts. That, like my father before me, when it came down to it I stood alone.

“You are afraid,” Masego slowly said, brow cocked.

He spoke the words like they were the most absurd thing in the world. Like he’d just said water was dry.

“I think I’m past that,” I said. “I’ve seen it on the horizon for too long. Resigned, I think, is the better word.”

“Why would you think that?” he asked, frowning. “That we’d leave?”

“Because they left him,” I harshly said. “After the Conquest was done, when the stories were finished, they split. Captain to her family, your father to his tower and Ranger had already fucked off in the woods long ago. Only Scribe stayed, and my Scribe was supposed to be Hakram. So much for that.”

“We’re not them, Cat,” Hierophant said.

“We carry the legacies,” I tiredly said. “And the writing’s on the wall. I’m not angry, Masego. I just didn’t think it through right. I carried the mistakes down a generation. Maybe the next one will do better.”

“Catherine,” he said, a hint of iron in his tone. “We are not them.”

It was easy to say this now, I thought, but it would not last. He was who he was. Here and now my fear brought him guilt, but guilt so rarely won out against desire.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “You want to know why I can’t stomach looking at him? Because he knew all this, Masego. Everything I just told you. He knew it and made his choice anyway.”

My lips quirked mirthlessly.

“It wasn’t the wrong choice,” I said. “He did a great good through it. And I should not begrudge him that.”

But I did. Because he’d left me, and I knew hundreds of thousands would be better off for it, all of the Clans. But the Clans were far and it was my flesh split, my bones cracked. The queen saw nothing to forgive, but it was not the queen who loved him. Masego studied me for a long time.

“You are keeping something back,” he said.

My eye found the knife stabbed into the straw. I reached out to touch it, but my fingers flinched away.

“That night,” I said. “In Ater.”

The golden eye watched me but the shadowed one allowed me my shame in peace. An even-handed stare.

“On the steps, I made the decision,” I murmured. “Them or Calernia. And I hesitated, I did, but it was…”

I bit my lip.

“I knew from the moment I stood at the crossroads,” I said, “which choice I would make. I hesitated the same way you hesitated before putting your finger against an open flame – knowing it’d hurt. I knew I’d kill him if it came to that. It was inevitable from the moment the choice was asked of me.”

“And you think he’ll not forgive you that,” Masego stated.

I shook my head.

“I don’t know if he will,” I said. “But I think yes. Because it took the two of us to end up standing on those stairs with a knife between us. It’s not about that. I guess it’s about me.”

The golden eye watched, impassive.

“Every time I’ll look at him,” I said, “I’ll know. That he’s probably the most important person in my life, the first and closest friend I ever made, and I still chose to kill him.”

I’d have to live with that, with the scent of it hanging in their air every time we were in the same room. I’d chosen to kill him and we both knew that. How little love mattered to me when there was a war to win, an enemy to beat.

I’d thought I had lines I wouldn’t cross.

Masego reached for the bottle and I handed it to him. After wiping it clean once again, he swallowed the last mouthful of the bottle. He grimaced after, for it had been a middling bottle and so the bottom had tasted strongly, and set it down into the thatch.

“It is you who is ashamed,” Masego said.

He added nothing, as if waiting for confirmation. Slowly, I nodded.

“Yet it is him confined to distance, even should he wish otherwise,” Masego noted.

I grimaced, echoing his own. It was as bitter a mouthful to swallow. My friend waited for me patiently, until I had finished going through all my denials and delays and settled on something I would live with.

“Salia,” I said. “I’ll join the briefings with Abreha until then, but I’ll speak to him alone in Salia. When we can be in the same room.”

“That is all I ask,” Masego said.

I slumped back down into the straw and so did her. Dusk was approaching, and with it the time of our departure. Three weeks to Salia now, perhaps one more if there were troubles on the way. My fingers found the handle of the knife and closed around it. I wouldn’t leave it here, much as a part of me wanted to. Children of the knife, Masego had called us. We’d wield them until they killed us all, that was what we’d been born to. All you got, I thought, was to choose what you did with it. If you tried to make the world bright or you tried to lessen it. It wasn’t much.

But it was something.

We lied there on the roof in silence until the sun came down.