Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists

by Edited by Adrian Collins

  “The alternative?” Davien’s night-deep eyes glinted like the edge of a blade. “You perish.” A bald certainty, backed by his Fellowship’s intractable charge to preserve the world’s unspoiled mysteries. “You die beyond question, with all of humanity caught in breach of the compact that defines Mankind’s terms of settlement.”

  Never mind that Toler’s feckless disposition preferred to greet doom in pursuit of his indolent pleasures.

  Davien’s amusement bared teeth. “No such reward will grace your recalcitrance. Skills like yours are commonplace in the stews. I’ll find your replacement, while you fulfill your sentence digging latrines for the company fighting the Mistwraith’s invasion.”

  Hard labor with no happier outlook, given that looming catastrophe imperiled the world’s greater powers. Toler embraced the path Davien offered, sly enough to nurse his intent to desert. A press-ganged berth as a seaman showed merit, provided he could slip the Sorcerer’s reach.

  Davien’s eyebrows rose. “By all means, try your utmost. But until you succeed, your lawful future is mine, properly endorsed by free will upon your release in my company.”

  Ditch digging under the Mistwraith’s incursion, Davien might have added, was the kindlier lot than the razor’s edge precipice walked in his footsteps at the behest of the Rei-yaj Seeress...

  * * *

  The brisk morning two years past had been as winter cold, even with the exposed sandstone stair butter-yellow under full sunlight as Davien ascended the spired tower to consult with the ancient oracle. Come at the behest of her dedicated attendant, he had answered the unusual summons, unsuspecting. While the ongoing contention sprung from his opinions had not ruptured Fellowship unity, he seemed an unlikely delegate to represent their collective interest. To stifle the volatile flames of debate by agreeable disposition, his six colleagues shouldered the Mistwraith’s containment, while he minded affairs at large on the continent in almost solitary diligence.

  The wizened, blind seeress recognized his incisive footfalls, or else placed him by the crisp snap of his russet cloak in the gusts, although she did not turn her head. Statue still in her high, gimbaled chair, her marble white eyes stayed trained perpetually sunwards.

  “Some say,” she opened in her dessicated voice, “that you hate human nature enough to forsake the compact and revoke Mankind’s license to dwell on this world.”

  Davien might have corrected the misapprehension: he did not dislike humanity, only distrusted the means by which Fellowship oversight curbed the excesses of freebooting exploitation. Crown justice through charter law already showed fractures where discontent splintered into subversive factions. Davien’s concern had rigorously proven the pitfall that risked the mysteries to entropy: sooner or later, the rot of self-interest undermined guided wisdom. The sterling virtues that endowed the royal bloodlines were a stopgap palliative, unfit to sustain the challenge. The sovereign put to the test had failed to master Davien’s maze at Kewar, lost to madness when the inherited drive of exemplary principle foundered in the morass of human shortfalls.

  Davien’s outlying vigilance stood alone in the aggrieved aftermath. Weary of chafing debate that changed nothing, the Sorcerer laced clever fingers and awaited the purpose behind his irregular summons.

  A drawn minute passed, clocked by the ponderous clunk as the counterweight chain and geared wheel revolved the seeress’s seat with the sun’s passage. Weathered hands splayed on the chair’s ivory arms, she was a seamed sculpture in leather and bone, swathed in fringed, azure silk. White hair, pinned with jeweled, horn combs, scarcely stirred to her tranced breaths.

  “You still hold an unwavering stake in your species’ survival,” the oracle remarked at long last.

  Davien stifled wry humor. “My colleagues might argue the case, but yes.” Mortality nurtured astonishing genius, born in the fusion of irrational passion, untamed fancy, and ferocious impulse. Hope suffered when excessive logic withered exuberance. “In willful disregard of rational boundaries, provisional law must maintain perspective until far-sighted wisdom evolves.” But protective order carried a price. “Innovation suffers, shortened on the leash of over-simplified policy. I’ve argued the case against fixed tradition, in favor of more flexibility.”

  The seeress absorbed his points without comment, immersed in whatever inscrutable vision she gained from her lock-stepped communion with the sun. When she spoke finally, the Sorcerer listened, his impetuous assurance shocked by the precedent that her office seldom to never shared confidence, except where her fathomless interests aligned with Mother Dark’s crone, the revered elder of the Biedar tribe in Sanpashir.

  “I have a riddle, and an urgent tasking, best pursued in rigorous secrecy. Of the Seven, you are most fitted, loyal as you are to their purpose at heart, but given to differences that drive you apart.”

  Sudden chill ruffled Davien’s composure. “What dire charge are you asking?”

  “The quiet disclosure and dispatch of an anomaly that sets our species’ future in jeopardy.” Blinded at birth, hardened by the ruthless discipline of her dedicated post, the seeress watched the gamut of Mankind’s doings from her lofty perch all her days. Bright, dark, and dire, she witnessed the beauty and pain, the heights and the dregs of the human spirit, from exalted grace to unvarnished ugliness. Whatever disturbed her unshielded sight would not be trivial.

  “I speak of an abomination, a talisman crafted by foul means that allows the Gray Kralovir necromancers to cloak their affairs.”

  Davien bridled, alarmed. “You are describing an artifact able to turn broad-scale vision and blind the centaur guardians, including the expanded awareness wielded by Tehaval Warden at Althain Tower?”

  The Rei-yaj Seeress raised a thumb in acquiescence. “This danger is already abroad in the world.”

  She need say no more. By grotesque implication, a black cabal whose rites perverted natural death demanded a Fellowship intervention. The imperative was not malleable, bound as the Sorcerers were by the dragons to safeguard the original mysteries. A summary judgment, called out for harsh reckoning, might take innocent lives along with the guilty.

  Davien paced, a livid flame in suede boots and clothes the bright colors of autumn. Once his colleagues discovered this grim scrap of news, or if a great drake gleaned a whisper, mercy became forfeit. The horrendous consequence must be carried out, past any margin for reprieve. “You are giving me an advance notice that Mankind’s place on Athera could be revoked with a bloodbath.”

  The seeress’s eggshell gaze remained fixed on the sun. But a jewel flared at her brow as she nodded. “The Biedar eldest in Sanpashir has requested your service in this regard.”

  Davien’s lip twitched, a cynic’s concession. The crone would have her purpose for stirring the pot, given her tribal stake in Mankind’s affairs pursued a debt spanning millennia. “What else can I do but agree?” His deceptively pleasant consent buried agony for what this covert division of loyalty might come to demand.

  The Rei-yaj Seeress acknowledged his word. “You will never reveal this exchange, at your peril, without the formality of Biedar leave.”

  Irritable as a cornered wolf, Davien mused on the irony that evading the Sighted view of Tehaval Warden, not to mention side-stepping all six of his perceptive, inquisitive colleagues, tortured the limits of devious invention.

  Wheezing laughter disrupted his consternation. “Had you forgotten? The Biedar’s affairs lie outside of such onerous purview.” Davien’s mercuric intellect pounced. “Mother Dark’s eldest has a party favor of some sort stuffed up her sleeve?” Otherwise, this parlay’s confidence would have been compromised.

  The ancient seeress stirred a bony arm and snapped fingers like the dry crack of a stick. Her attendant stepped forward and presented a silver ring with three embossed crescents setting a round cut citrine.

  “The crone’s token, of course,” Davien murmured, chary of the signature power that inflected the battered gem
stone. The heirloom was old beyond measure, and did not originate on Athera.

  “The stone came from Scathac,” the seeress confirmed. “It carries the imprint of a Biedar legacy, given to you in discretion.” With the delicate caveat that its off world matrix also escaped the range of Tehaval Warden’s earth-sense.

  Davien grasped the committed force of its history as he slid the band over his knuckle. No fool, to accept such trust lightly, and no small request, to be thrown an imperative directive to intrigue against his own colleagues. “Pray to whatever bright guidance you have the crone in Sanpashir doesn’t live to regret.”

  Then he bowed to the Rei-yaj Seeress and received her husked leave to depart. “May the wisdom of ages walk in your footsteps. More than one people will suffer the brunt if you fail to disarm the Gray Kralovir’s meddling...”

  * * *

  By winter’s edge, Toler fervently wished he was shoveling dung pits in the milder climate of the south shore. Instead, the bad half of his bargain with Davien found him shredding himself on the brambles in the desolate scrub of the Korias Flats. Rough living stripped off his excess flesh. Cranky with exertion, he slogged through lists of pointless tasks, while the Sorcerer tinkered, supposedly perfecting the stayspells needed to safeguard his coming assignment.

  “Why wear ourselves cross-eyed with boredom in this waste?” grumbled Toler, tongue freed to complain of the nightmares spun by the dread gyre of a nearby grimward.

  Davien never glanced up, agile fingers knotting unsavory forces into what appeared nondescript as a loop of frayed string, except for the searing bursts of uncanny static. “Because here, the proximal electromagnetic discharge disrupts slipshod spellcraft and scryers, and justified fear of a grimward deters prying interest. Have you gathered the fifty stones I marked in the next vale? If you can’t build tonight’s fire pit, you’ll get tapeworms from dining on raw meat.”

  Davien backed his threats. Since flippant rejoinders provoked blistering consequence, Toler’s better sense prevailed. He gathered his random clutches of river stones, or drift wood with oblate knot holes, whatever exercise in futility filled day after dreary day.

  Weeks passed. Nothing meaningful happened. Toler suspected the Sorcerer wasted his time, until the hour he returned early, cramped by a stitch, and found Davien in rapt discourse with a dragon.

  Not a small, carnivorous wyvern, but a great drake, fire breathing, eighty-five spans of shimmering, scaled might, from armored crest to ebony tail spikes. Before her mailed talons, the Sorcerer seemed a toothpick, spiked upright while the massive wyrm snaked around him, her wide golden eye and slit pupil a cloth yard across, terrifying as staring into the abyss.

  Toler dropped prone in a gulch. Hands clapped over his ears did nothing to muffle the percussive subsonics of the thought/voice by which the monster communed with the Sorcerer.

  ‘I know something’s afoot!’ the dragon insisted, horned head tipped aslant in fixated focus.

  Davien’s quiet response did not carry. Stock still, to every appearance in charge, his loosely clasped hands contradicted his frown of furious concentration.

  The clipped phrase he returned settled nothing. The dragon reared up, snorting cinders and smoke, then spun with a tiger’s circling grace. ‘You sidestep my question. Forget at your peril! You are sworn to defend the light of the mysteries, no matter the cost of the sacrifice.’

  Davien tipped up his chin, visibly taxed, while the dragon’s gyrations lashed his white-streaked hair against his trim shoulders. ‘My Fellowship upholds our commitment! I will answer to nothing without certain evidence of a catastrophe.’

  The dragon flicked her massive tail. Displaced air tumbled the broom and whistled past Toler’s cowering form. ‘Then your colleagues shall answer for your assessment to the letter and line, should you fail them.’

  “No,” Davien replied in caustic disagreement. “Your inquiry rests upon my word alone. If I stand in error, if Mankind has transgressed, then Dragonkind claims reparation on me without condition.”

  The drake towered, rampant, vast wings spread like sails. ‘Know that I, Seshkrozchiel, shall claim due redress on the moment you are foresworn.’

  Davien bowed his head. Shown his acquiescence, the great drake clapped down the doubled vanes of her wings and launched her sinuous coils aloft.

  Raked by the backwash of her brimstone wake, Toler whimpered, cramps forgotten. When terror receded, he fled without shame and immersed himself in his unfinished assignment until sundown.

  Davien greeted him upon his return as though nothing momentous had happened. Yet urgency rode his mood like bleak smoke in the fallen shadow of dusk, and by morning, he drove his laid plan into motion.

  * * *

  Eight days’ travel on foot saw Toler huddled against a bitter wind with a begging bowl, in the portside market at Hanshire. Vagrancy would see him arrested the moment the town watch caught up with him. Soon, he hoped, while the gusts whistled through his threadbare clothing, and spellcraft that saddled him with the appearance of a half-witted deaf-mute frightened him beyond spitless.

  At the unpleasant crux, he faced risks far beyond the high-stakes smuggling of contraband.

  ‘Soonest begun, soonest finished,’ the Sorcerer rebuked, his exasperation exposed by the internal contact. Evidently the necessity galled, that his critical gambit relied upon Toler’s scapegrace character.

  For, as Davien explained, in due course an overture from the Gray Kralovir would seek to extend their cult’s covert alliance. The unique intersection of Koriani affairs and the grasping interests of Hanshire’s mayor offered the best chance to expose the intrigue without confrontation. Provided, of course, Toler’s cultivated affliction could infiltrate the sisterhood’s ranks in advance.

  Under volatile scrutiny by a dragon, himself, the Sorcerer continued, impatient. ‘The town watch is one street away. They’ll pick you up before you freeze, and remember I’ve got your back.’

  Toler clenched his jaw, unable to utter the scathing retort to level the one-sided record: the stayspells impaired his speech and hearing, except through his tie to Davien. Rebuff that ephemeral link, and he would be deaf and mute, languishing as a simpleton under the Sorcerer’s moribund enchantment.

  ‘You’d truly rather be pulling an oar in the sleet for your mandated reckoning?’ Razored sarcasm inflected Davien’s likely grin. ‘How little faith you place in my exemplary handiwork.’

  Toler seethed, while his puppet-string tie to the Sorcerer delivered the tramp of approaching authority. ‘One day,’ he vowed, ‘I will bollux your string-and-clapper plan with such indiscretion, you’ll stay buried for most of your immortal life under the steaming monument.’

  ‘Stay alive, first,” Davien allowed. ‘Then we’ll see who’s left standing to crow atop the proverbial dungheap.’ Infuriating, laconic, his riposte stung back from the comfort of his garret lodgings, ‘But under the hobnailed boots of the town guard, your wishful fancy’s a bit premature.’

  Four brutes arrived in Hanshire’s red surcoats to collar Toler for beggary. He endured a few cuffs. A kick sent his tin alms bowl flying, before anyone noted the inscription stamped into the rim.

  “Lay off him, boys,” snapped the squat, bulldog officer. “Won’t be worth dog’s dirt if we break him.”

  ‘You’ll be sold to the traffickers,’ Davien confirmed, reliant on the flourishing corruption arisen since the Mistwraith’s invasion.

  The brazen transaction was shamelessly swift. The guardsmen gagged Toler, bound him hand and foot, then bundled him in his own tattered cloak. Hefted across town like a nameless corpse bound for a pauper’s grave, he changed hands to the furtive clink of coin in a noisome alley. The buyer cached him in a dank cellar, where the brothel scents of rose oil and patchouli wafted through the taint of nesting rats.

  ‘You’ve landed in Madame Everlay’s love nest,’ Davien supplied, unmoved by Toler’s discomfiture as a leering servant unpacked
him from the muffling cloak.

  Toler vented his rattled nerves. ‘Serve you right if the Prime Matriarch doesn’t bite, and Madame Everlay has second thoughts. Care to wager my black market service winds up keeping her filthy transactions discrete?’

  Davien upped the ante with sardonic delight. ‘If greed does not triumph, you will win the day. My hand will muck out her unpleasant establishment, and you’ll be released to go your sorry way.’

  But smug irony suggested the posited stake was already forfeit.

  The Prime Matriarch of the Koriathain swept in two days later to inspect her ill-gotten goods. Titled head of a powerful order of enchantresses, she had the alert posture of keen intelligence, and eyes as intimidating as the Sorcerer’s. But the cold, black stare of her assessment was impenetrable as a spider’s.

  Toler forgave Davien’s months of meticulous preparation. The visceral recoil when her narrow palm gripped his chin reduced him to primal terror. Even the Sorcerer’s inexhaustible spellcraft could not stifle his flinch.

  Morriel released him, indifferent, and gloved her narrow hands in brisk closure. “He’ll do. My attendant will take him in tow, while we settle the fee for the bargain.”

  * * *

  Davien never disclosed the round sum that sold Toler into the Hanshire sisterhouse. Quartered in the garret for orphaned boys given shelter until they came of age for apprenticeship, he spent his days doing the menial toil decreed by the senior peeress. He chopped wood, watered his eyes whitewashing the hammer-beamed chambers, and lye scrubbed the echoing, bare floors and austere, granite arches. He hauled laundry for the order’s skilled healers, cleaned the jakes in the infirmary, and gently assisted with restraint of the injured for treatment. Other times he minded the iron gates that no one dared cross without leave. He saw the young girls arrive for induction: the haughty ones chosen from prominent families flushed with excitement, and others claimed by owed debt to the order brought in tearful defiance. None of the unwilling evaded the sisterhood’s yoke. To the last, they emerged pale from their test for raw talent. The oath taking that confirmed their novitiate reduced even the ebullient ones to cowed silence.