The Gods of Vice

by Devin Madson

  The words stopped spilling, but I was breathing fast, the memory so real that for an instant, rain lashed my face, obscuring Endymion’s intent gaze. I wanted to push him away, to demand he stop staring at me, but that would only crack my armoured skin further still. All I had ever wanted was my father’s love.

  “Is that why you think about Malice so much?” he said. “Why you miss him? Your father never loved you but Malice did. Now Kimiko is beginning to, and you want it so much that it scares you. But you’re tired of suffering too, and if there’s even a small chance you could stop your Empathy from defining you, you would take it, and that frightens you even more.”

  His eyes had glazed as he spilled fears from my mind onto the stones, so stark and raw, each a blade in my skin. Endymion ought to have been horrified to hear it, but he seemed not to know his own words.

  “Tell me, how many people are in this house, Endymion?” I said.

  “Two.”

  “How many people in Esvar?”

  “One thousand seven hundred and nine.”

  His eyes grew even less focussed, and I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. “And the Valley?”

  “Twenty-two thousand eight hundred and seventy-seven.”

  It was a truth I could not verify, but with about a hundred and fifty villages farming the land, it seemed accurate enough.

  “And Kisia?”

  Eyes closed, Endymion grew still, his long fingers resting lightly upon his linen-clad knees. His frown deepened.

  “They took my husband in the last war,” he said in a scratchy whisper. “They won’t take my son. Forty bushels? That’s barely enough wheat for thirty. Wine, girl, not water, what stupid bitch gives a man water? That ship will never come back. The storms are coming.”

  He opened his eyes. “One million three hundred and twenty-one thousand four hundred and two.”

  I couldn’t but stare it was so horrific and yet remarkable, his strength immense even for a Whisperer. Yet at Koi, he had been barely more powerful than Malice. Could so short a time really make so great a difference?

  I held out my hand. “Touch me.”

  Endymion lifted his hand and we connected over the stone board. He did not have to force it. At first touch, our souls joined, and he began drawing me out, thoughts and memories sliding through my fingers. He had done the same at Koi, but I had given them to him then. Now his every breath sucked emotion, sucked life. And he wasn’t even trying.

  In the darkness, men screamed.

  I pulled my hand away, fingers shaking like the wisteria as a breeze gusted through the court, picking up a flurry of petals. In mere weeks, his strength had doubled. Malice had been right. If he lost himself, there was no way I could control him on my own.

  “He’s coming,” Endymion said.

  “Malice?”

  “Yes, he’ll be here in a few days.” He touched his palm to his chest. “Or maybe a little longer. It’s hard to tell.”

  Reaching over the Errant board, I gripped his shoulders. “You said you broke his mark. How?”

  “Fill it with hate. Hate is what hurts him most. Hate and abandonment.” It sounded like a quotation, but though I did not recognise the words, I recognised the sentiments. The two things Malice had always feared above all others: being hated by those he loved and being abandoned. Someone else had come to know him well enough to see it, to see why his marks kept the Vices close and why they had to obey. He had never been able to see that obedience and love were not the same thing.

  “Love,” Endymion said abruptly, and I withdrew my hands. “Your marks are full of love because that’s what you’ve always wanted. Love and control, and you’re afraid it’s not you she is falling in love with at all but just the mark inside her.”

  He looked over my shoulder. Kimiko was standing in the doorway, and I tried to tell myself it was the sight of her that sent my heart thumping, not Endymion’s words.

  I got to my feet, leaving the Errant pieces set for a game not yet played. “Keep out of my head, Endymion,” I said. “I won’t warn you again. When you come back to your senses, find me. I can’t teach you anything when you’re like this.”

  I could try to shock him out of it, with cold water or a jolt of emotion, but too full of my own fears, I turned toward the house.

  “You don’t need to believe Kisia needs no god, Darius,” he said. The words halted my steps like a hand upon my shoulder, and I turned back. Endymion had not moved. He knelt upon the stones, vines rising behind him like a throne. “You are one, and you are already here.”

  My makeshift office on the portico had begun to feel like home, and I let out a sigh as I knelt before my desk. I had been too busy and distracted to keep it tidy, leaving no space for my tea tray amid the thick covering of papers, so I made space by using it to push other things off.

  “That is not a very orderly way to clear your desk,” Kimiko said as she dropped onto the pile of cushions she had brought out a few days ago, preferring to read while I worked than be inside by herself.

  “My thoughts are not yet orderly enough for orderly desk clearing, for which you are entirely to blame, my lady.”

  “Oh, are we on formal terms again now?”

  I met her laughing gaze. “I hardly feel that is possible when my back is so riddled with cuts.”

  “There’s some blood on your lip too.”

  I touched where she had so recently bitten me, and my fingertip came away red. “Is that really necessary?” I said. “Being reminded of you every time I move already makes it hard enough to concentrate on orderly desk clearing.”

  Kimiko rose from the cushions and padded over in her bare feet. “Here, let me get it.”

  She bent and gently kissed the corner of my mouth, sucking clean the remaining blood. “Oh.” She groaned as she straightened. “That was way more exhilarating than I was expecting. I should bite you that hard more often.” She licked her lips as if hunting for any lingering trace of my blood, and my kindling desire died with a grimace.

  “Sorry, my dear, I’m afraid that was just me you were feeling.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I tapped my lip. “My blood. It can carry emotions and sensations that even those who aren’t Empaths can feel. I was more than halfway to wanting to tear your robe off again, and you got that when you…”

  I faltered beneath her intent stare. “Are you telling me that if I want to know what you’re feeling, I can just drink your blood and find out first-hand?”

  “It’s really not that simple. And please don’t. Have some tea instead.” I held a bowl up to her, and she took it with a seemingly unconscious little bow of thanks.

  “Fine,” she said. “Tea it is, but I guess that explains why I like the taste of your blood so much, when…” A troubled look flickered across her face, but she shook it away. “Even without that added spice, you would taste better than this tea at all events. Have you ordered fresh leaves yet?”

  “No.”

  “Food?”

  “No.”

  “Fresh robes?”

  I grimaced rather than repeat the negative.

  Kimiko rolled her eyes. “Honestly, I don’t understand you at all on this, Darius. I know you want fresh food and clothes and tea, but all you will send out for is information and spies. If your mind is too busy thinking of other things, then give me permission to go down into the town, or send Endy—Takehiko if you don’t trust me.”

  “Not trust you? I told you who he really was, didn’t I?”

  Taking her tea with her, she settled back onto her cushions, managing not to break her gaze from mine. “Yes. I wanted to ask you about that, it’s been bothering me.”

  “Then by all means, ask away, my dear,” I said. “If I can answer you, I promise I will do so honestly.”

  She gave me an odd look, but it was the unsure little flutter in her heart that made mine thump hard. Her growing love was like a jolt of adrenaline, and I revelled in it despite the fear scratchi
ng at my thoughts. Hate it though I did, Endymion had been right. I feared it was nothing more than the mark I had left inside her staining her heart with false attachment.

  “So,” she said, setting down her tea bowl and splaying her hands on her knees. “He was not Emperor Lan’s son, but he was still in the line of succession, wasn’t he?”

  “As far as I’m aware, yes. I believe he was acknowledged despite what seemed to be a general understanding that he was my father’s bastard. That fact certainly makes him ineligible to take it, however.”

  “Yes, he’s not the threat he might have been, though I imagine Kin would not like to have him floating around making trouble. Katashi certainly would not. Does he know?”

  “His Majesty? No.”

  “You never told him?”

  I had promised to answer honestly, and what a foolish promise it had been. “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  Why hadn’t I? It had just seemed wise at the time not to trouble him with even more fears, but that was hardly a good reason. “I think… I think I didn’t want to explain the dangers of having an Empath in a position of power.” Again, the rawness of such honesty was like cutting my own skin and I wanted to look away.

  “Like having one as the minister of the left?”

  “Exactly like having one as the minister of the left.”

  For a moment, she mused on my answer, but any hope of escaping further questions was soon dashed. “Why didn’t he tell us who he was? He travelled with us from Nivi Fen to Koi and never said a word.”

  “Probably for the same reason Hana never told you. Malice is very persuasive, and it’s easy to believe your brother would kill anyone necessary on his way to revenge, even members of his own family.”

  She made no reply, perhaps remembering that he had sold her to Malice for a way into Koi. When she faded, ghostlike, for a moment, I was sure of it.

  I’d come out here to attend to a number of small tasks, although for the most part I was just waiting on news from District Commander Yao. But I couldn’t tell Kimiko about our plan to ambush Katashi at the northern pass, nor that Malice was on his way.

  I ought to have known it wouldn’t be long before he came in search of me. I could leave, could keep running, but what sort of a life was that? And then there was Endymion. If he failed, I would need Malice more than I had as a lost and lonely boy watching his world burn, and from there, what a frighteningly small step it would be to letting go entirely.

  “You could leave here, you know,” I said. “I could order you to leave so it doesn’t hurt.”

  She scowled. “Bored of me?”

  “Hardly, but I know you hate being stuck, and it’s… not going to be safe here much longer.”

  Kimiko sat up straighter on her pile of cushions, her tea totally forgotten. “Because of the war?”

  “No. Endymion. I think he’s going to fail.”

  Her bright eyes roamed my face, her brow creased with worry. “You’re teaching him how to control himself, aren’t you? How to stop being an Empath.”

  “How simple you make everything sound, my dear,” I said, and I could hear the sneer in my voice. “We were born with the marks and we will have them until the day we die.” I drew back my sleeve. Three horizontal lines cut the inside of my wrist, crossed by a single diagonal.

  Kimiko looked away, and though I knew it for a momentary instinct, that only made it hurt all the more.

  I let my sleeve fall. “You should go.”

  “I’m sorry, but do you think this is easy for me?” She brandished the book she had been reading. “Do you think it’s easy to give your heart to a man you know is capable of even more terrible things than ordinary men?”

  “What happened to ‘Empathy need not define you’? I warned you not to read the books, yes?”

  She flinched. “Don’t say that.”

  “Say what?”

  “Don’t say ‘yes’ like that; you sound just like him.”

  “I am just like him.”

  “Darius—”

  “You should go.” I stared down at the papers but did not see them, only the sneer with which Malice would mock me if he could see me now, could see how pathetically my heart ached.

  With a rustle of cushions, she got to her feet. “I’m sorry, Darius, I am. It ought not define you, it doesn’t, but just as you struggle to accept that, so must I learn to always trust it. To trust you.”

  “You should still go.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you why. Endymion is going to fail.”

  “Then let him fail. What has that got to do with you?”

  I looked up at her, the way she held herself and the great mass of her curls always making her look taller than she was. “I don’t think you understand how powerful he has become, Kimiko. For now, he listens to me, he trusts me, but what will happen when he forgets everything his priest taught him?”

  Despite the warmth, Kimiko shivered. “What will he do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. He killed one hundred and four men on the road to Rina by filling them with despair. He’s capable of worse. I hoped I could teach him enough to combat the growth, but it’s too late. I think he’s beginning to realise his own strength, and nothing corrupts men faster than power.”

  She bent and gripped my chin, her fingers and thumb digging into my cheeks. “Why do you have to be so noble?” she said. “Why do you have to be such a good man?”

  Holding her wrist, I prised my face from her grip. “You said earlier that I could do terrible things. Which am I? The monster or the paragon?”

  “I don’t know, but the monster would be easier to leave if that’s what you really want me to do.”

  “I remember you saying something like that before. That you wished I were easier to hate.”

  “Or easier for my conscience to love.”

  I cringed. “A fine way to put it,” I said. “I am not noble. I am the worst man you know, but still I cannot run and leave Kisia to its fate. Or Endymion.”

  Kimiko let out a long sigh and crouched beside me. “That was an awful thing for me to say. I’m sorry.”

  “You have already said that many times.”

  “Yes, and I think I will have to do so many more times. You see, I never planned on even liking you, Darius. Endymion scares me, and I hate Malice so much that I hope one day to repay him in kind for that scar of yours. Yes, I know it was him. What was it you said, that you got it the last time someone loved you? And if his heart is on the wrong side too, then I’ll just have the joy of stabbing him twice.”

  How could I say I did not want her to? I could not defend his actions toward her nor even toward me, and yet had he appeared here and now, I would have held her back rather than let her kill him. An admission that even in the privacy of my own head sounded more like the foolish boy I’d once been than the man I was trying to become.

  I glared down at the papers on my desk, and Kimiko kissed my cheek, the way she leant forward sending her curls cascading over my arm. “I’m truly sorry for what I said.” Her breath tickled my cheek. “Do you know why I am reading the books?”

  “For ammunition?”

  “No, so I can accept you for everything you are and everything you are capable of, rather than holding on to some rosy view of you that can easily be shattered. No one is perfect, Darius, not you, not me, no one. Don’t you think it’s better that I understand you as you really are?”

  Malice had been the first person to understand me, to understand the pain and the hurt and the anger, to understand the need for mastery and control that had seethed through my veins. He had understood and encouraged, inspired and adored, and hundreds if not thousands of people had suffered for it.

  Her hand stroked my cheek when I did not answer. “What is the dark place your thoughts keep going to?”

  Malice is coming. Words I could not say.

  “It is still too dangerous for you to remain here,”
I said instead. “Between Endymion and the war. Trouble is going to keep coming.”

  “We could just leave, you know. Together.”

  I turned to remind her of all the reasons I had to stay, but she pressed her finger to my lips. “Hush, let me have my little daydream.” She threw her leg over mine and settled on my lap, wriggling close. “We could find some little cottage somewhere in a forest and stay there forever,” she said, her body pressed against mine. “We could forget the rest of the world exists at all and just… stay there, arguing about fresh tea and fucking until we’re so old one of us breaks their back.”

  “Does one of us have to break our back?” I said, happy to shift the conversation from its dangerous ground.

  “Nothing can ever be perfect, so something bad has to happen.” She rocked back and forth slowly as she spoke, rubbing her cheek against the stubble I’d not had time to shave that morning.

  “This,” I managed to say as she sped her rocking, eliciting the sort of groan from my lips that so many layers of fabric ought to have prohibited. “Is not a good place for this. Imagine my scribe’s horror when he comes back from his errand.”

  “Think of it as highly educational. He’s probably never touched a girl before. Or a boy.” She slid her hand down between us. “Besides, I think we could make this very quick.”

  Someone cleared their throat, and I looked around her, expecting to find Endymion had emerged from his trance. Our regular messenger stood on the edge of the portico, a broad grin stretching his lips. “Not meaning to intrude,” he said in the most intrusive way he could. “But there’re some dispatches come for you special and they sounded important.”

  Not moving from my lap, Kimiko rested her head on my shoulder while, still grinning, the man dropped three scrolls beside my desk. “There you are, my lord, though I daresay they aren’t half as important as—”

  “Thank you,” I interrupted. “I have no messages to send right now, so you may go.”

  “Going. Going,” the man said, jumping down off the portico and still grinning. “I’ll be off and maybe I’ll not come at the same time tomorrow, eh?”