The Gods of Vice

by Devin Madson

  “That precaution won’t be necessary,” I said, feeling Kimiko shaking with mirth against me.

  “Just as you say, my lord, just as you say.” He walked away, whistling loudly, and unable to contain her amusement any longer, Kimiko snorted.

  “What an amazing man he is,” she said. “We must be sure to be at it again at this time tomorrow just to see what else he might say.”

  “No, you wretch, we are not going to do that.” I reached for the closest scroll, a task made no easier by Kimiko’s weight. “For all we know, he’ll tell everyone down in the town, and next time we’ll have an audience.”

  I cracked open the wax seal on the first scroll while Kimiko nibbled my ear. “That could be amusing,” she said, but if she said any more, I didn’t hear it.

  Lord Otako’s army spotted several miles north of the pass. A few thousand men larger than expected. The third and fourth western battalions have arrived on their way to join His Majesty at Orotana, and we will engage the enemy when they move this way.

  District Commander Yao

  It was dated yesterday. I grabbed the next scroll, but it was merely an update from Monomoro on yearly estate income from the farms in the west quarter, and I threw it aside. Kimiko had stilled on my lap and made no effort to stop me reaching for the last scroll.

  Lord Laroth, Sixth Count of Esvar,

  I, Loalin Ko, have hereby taken command of the district of Esvar in the name of His Imperial Majesty Emperor Katashi Otako, long may he reign. I am pleased to inform you that no battle took place in the northern pass. The only men who lost their lives were the hundreds who insisted upon loyalty to the Usurper Kin in the wake of a coup by true servants of the imperial throne. Many are we.

  District Commander Ko

  I closed my eyes. “When you were travelling around with your brother, did you spend much time in the Valley?”

  “A bit.” Kimiko said, no ardour left in the way she sat astride me. “But Katashi is good at making friends everywhere. He’ll win, you know, even with you trying to stop him.”

  “Then I look forward to facing the executioner before long,” I said and threw the scroll onto the desk.

  “I won’t let him do that. He owes me.”

  “Then I’ll have reason to thank you for saving me from him—twice!”

  Kimiko leant back and gave me a severe look. “Would it really be so bad were he emperor?”

  “He just executed hundreds of soldiers,” I said, jabbing a finger at the scroll. “That is not the action of an honourable man. If he wins this war, he will root out and destroy every last person who ever supported or fought for Kin and will no doubt oppress the south more than Kin has ever oppressed the north.”

  “Bullshit,” Kimiko said. “When Kin killed my father, he slaughtered thousands of our supporters or exiled them, took lands and imposed taxes. This is not the way of one man; it is the way of any who want to take power. Fear and unyielding determination are as important as love and loyalty. You just picked a side and now won’t sway. There may be much bloodshed before my brother sits on the throne, but he will rule fairly once he is there. Trust that I know him better than you do.”

  I have to believe Kisia needs no gods.

  I took a deep breath. How easy it would be to fall into my old habits, how easy to make use of the Vices and shape the world the way I wanted it. But if I did, I would lose everything I had gained and have nothing but self-hatred to flavour my success—a success even Kin would not thank me for.

  No, the answer was not to be a Vice again; it was to be a minister.

  “Quick, hand me my brush,” I said, reaching around her for a sheet of empty parchment. “I have to write a letter.”

  Chapter 15

  Endymion

  Pale predawn light trickled into the courtyard, drawing dense vines from the night. With the sun came the birds, singing in a new day, heedless of the knot tightening in my stomach. I sat and stared at nothing as time flowed past. Perhaps if I sat still long enough, I would turn to stone.

  The sound of footsteps came to me like a dream. The steady, unhurried click of sandals on floorboards.

  “Hiding?” Darius asked.

  “I want to learn,” I said, too afraid to voice the other words in my head. I’m afraid next time I won’t come back at all.

  Linen shifted by my ear, and Darius sat on the step beside me, stretching sandalled feet toward the sunlight. He stared at the gate at the far end of the courtyard, his perfect profile slightly frowning. “Do you understand what you are?”

  Slivers of the previous day came back to haunt me. He had been afraid. Of me. “I’m a monster,” I said.

  “The beast lives inside you as it lives inside every man. Yours just has access to greater power.” He turned to look at me then. “Men are animals, Endymion, it is what allows soldiers to kill and torturers to maim. It is hatred, lust, power, justice, everything that turns your blood to fire. In this, you are no more special than any other. Despite his foolishness in taking you to Kokoro, your priest taught you well, he—”

  “They shouldn’t have hurt him.”

  “No?”

  “No. He was innocent of any crime. He was a priest. An old man.”

  Darius’s brows rose. “Innocent? I think hiding the heir to the Crimson Throne would be a crime in most people’s eyes.”

  “He didn’t know who I was. Only Father Kokoro knew. They ought to have tortured him instead.”

  “But he is the court priest.”

  “That makes it even more unfair.”

  “The whole world is unfair, Endymion. It is broken in every possible way. That’s why we invented gods to see our justice done, because it is easier to say, Don’t worry, he’ll go to the hells for killing that boy, than to deal with a world in which the wicked get away with whatever they want and the good suffer for it.”

  He scowled at his hands, twitching the dark linen that covered his Empathic Mark. He looked different in linen, more natural, no longer the perfect doll of the Imperial Court. This Darius was a man, troubled in the way all men were.

  “You don’t believe in the gods?” I asked.

  “Didn’t you tell me yesterday that I am a god?”

  Had I? I could remember the start of the Errant game but no more; somewhere in that first round, everything had faded and melded into whispers and… nothingness. “I’m sorry,” I said, unable to think of anything else to say. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “You said it because it was true. I might have learnt I ought not think of myself like that, but I always have and still do.” He got to his feet, his linen robe stirring around his ankles. “They say power corrupts a man. What do you think being a god does to him?”

  Darius walked away. “Come on,” he threw back over his shoulder. “We’re going into the back field today. I have something to show you.”

  Knives of sunlight sliced through the vine-laden portico as I jogged to catch up, falling into step beside him as he turned down a narrow path between the house and the outer wall. It ran the length of the main building only to spit us out in an overgrown pleasure garden. There, a dry canal wound through beds choked with fleeceflower, the bridge that spanned its width weathered to brittle grey sticks. Wisteria ruled here too, let run so wild its thick stems had crushed its wooden support like twigs in a man’s hand.

  Darius seemed to know the easiest route through the tangles, and once over the bridge, we found a path. At its end, a gate was set into the garden wall, and there Darius stopped and bowed, gesturing for me to step through before him.

  What waited beyond was a field of lush green grass, stretching all the way to the brow of the hill, crowned by the distant shadow of the Kuro Mountains.

  “Welcome to my grave,” Darius said, joining me.

  “Your grave?”

  “This was where our father tried to kill me. There used to be a maze here, an enormous thing, or at least it seemed so to me as a boy. The townsfolk said people used to c
ome from far afield to walk it, back when the house was welcoming. Of course by my time, it had become as overgrown as the rest of the garden, the original paths barely recognisable from weed.”

  I looked around the field again, this time seeing the scars. Here and there dark patches peeked through the grass, and the charred stumps of old growth protruded like knuckles from the ground.

  “I was a very sickly child,” he went on, looking out at the waving grass with ill-concealed loathing. “Empaths often are, I believe. Half a dozen times, the doctors prophesied my death from little more than a chill. So one night, in the middle of the worst storm of the season, our father dragged me into the centre of the maze and left me there in the dark.”

  It was cold. It would have been so easy to lie down and give up, but I wanted to live. I want to live.

  “You survived.”

  “Obviously,” Darius said. “And I came back and set it on fire. I stood right here and watched it burn. It was the closest I ever got to telling my father how much I hated him. Even when I watched him die, I could not say it.”

  “Why not?”

  He gave me an odd look. “Because I couldn’t talk. It was my Maturation. Despite everything he did to me, I was a late one.”

  The wind whipped past us, rustling the tips of the tall grass.

  Darius’s eyes narrowed. “You must have had one,” he said. “A time when you couldn’t speak. It felt like my voice had abandoned me.”

  “Yes,” I said. “After we met in Shimai, but I didn’t know it had a name. Malice never said.”

  My Empathy brought back whispers. After Shimai? No wonder he was so weak. Brought up by a priest who was never cruel to him. And Malice knew. Still keeping secrets, Brother?

  “You were looked after too well,” he said, breaking upon his own thoughts to speak. “Maybe that’s why you’re different. Your priest thought kindness would be the making of you, that if you were good, you would forget what else lurked inside you.”

  One. Two. One thousand seven hundred and eight.

  He ought to be home.

  I hope the war doesn’t come this far. It didn’t last time, all praise Qi.

  Twenty-two thousand eight hundred and seventy-seven.

  I dragged myself free to find Darius watching me. “Tell me how to control it. How to kill it.”

  Those amethyst eyes glittered almost angrily. “Your Empathy isn’t alive, Endymion, it doesn’t have a life of its own. It does what it’s told. If you want to connect to someone, it connects, if you want to hurt someone, it hurts them, if you want to kill them, they die. It is as much a tool as your arm or your leg, but just because you own a hand doesn’t mean you should slap someone.”

  I wanted to slap him, to stop him spilling wise quotes as though they would help. “Are you saying there’s nothing I can do?”

  “No, I’m telling you to stop blaming your Empathy. It doesn’t have its own mind. It only does what it’s told. It has no personality. It has no thoughts. That whisper you hear in your head isn’t some dark creature that has taken over your soul, it’s just you, just your thoughts magnified by fear or anger or lust. You are the only one you can blame. I had to learn that the hard way, had to learn that it was me, me I hated. I could never stop being an Empath, so I had to stop being myself. Stop letting things matter. Stop caring about the very things that I cared most about.” Control. Love. “Do you have any idea how hard that is?”

  I stared at him, the revelation so stunning I could not speak. But I did not hate myself, not the way he did, and transfixed, I said, “Then why did you do it?”

  “Why?” Darius repeated. “What choice did I have? It was either live the crippled life of a Normal or go back to being the boy who had hunted helpless children for sport, just to see them run crying to their mothers. I gave them such fear, filling their heads with nightmares. Anger was fun too. All I had to do was infuse them and sit back to watch them rip each other to pieces over the last nut in the bowl.”

  Darius stepped closer, his gaze flicking from one of my eyes to the other. “I know that expression. I used to see it on my own face in the aftermath of a bad night. Malice never suffered from contrition, but I did. It was so easy for him. So easy to sleep at night. Trust me, if there had been a way to kill the Empathy, I would have found it.”

  My heart pounded with his anger. “If you could control it, then so can I,” I said. “I killed one hundred and four men on the road to Rina. I drained them of their hope until they killed themselves. I don’t want to do it again.”

  “Then tell me why you did it.”

  “Because Malice told me to.”

  “But you didn’t have to. You weren’t marked.” Darius jabbed me in the chest. “Why did you do it?”

  I shook my head. The field was spinning and I felt sick, bile pooling in my throat. “To protect Hope. And Avarice. And Ire.”

  “Ah, noble and selfless in fact. What about the guards in Shimai?”

  I shook my head, not wanting to think about the fear that had filled me so completely there had been no space for other thoughts.

  “Why did you kill them?”

  “It was an accident. I was afraid.”

  “No,” he said. “Try again. Why did you do it, Endymion?” He gripped my shoulders and shook me so hard my teeth snapped together. “What makes you angry? What drives you? You can’t beat it if you don’t know.”

  “They deserved it.” The words came out of my lips without thought, a mouse’s whisper with a meaning that cut deep.

  “There, say it again.”

  “They deserved it.”

  “Louder.”

  “They deserved it!”

  The words echoed over the field, the morning suddenly quiet. Sweat dripped down my cheek. Or it might have been tears, I couldn’t tell, could only look into that beautiful face and wish it would not smile.

  “Those men in Shimai should never have hurt Jian,” I said, desperate to fill the silence. “Or me.” I swallowed hard. “They treated me like a monster, a freak. They never gave a thought to how it would feel on the other side of the bars, to be afraid, to be taunted with such cruelty. No one understands. No one cares. No one knows how it feels. I never asked to be born this way!”

  At least we schooled our anger. The whisper came unbidden from Darius’s head. We learnt to make it do what we wanted. So many journeys down the hill to Esvar in search of victims. Experimentation became practice, and practice became sport. But he is too strong, too fast, and it isn’t going to stop.

  “Justice,” he said. “You want justice. You want to right the wrongs of the world.”

  “Yes.” The power thrilled through me. “And I can.”

  “No.” Darius took my face between his hands. “You have to let it go, Endymion. You have to fight what makes you angry. You have to stop caring. Don’t pretend you have no heart, don’t have one at all. Your compassion will kill you.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. We are at war, yes? So what? Let the children become orphans. Let the women be raped. Let the men die. Let the wrong people live and prosper. Do you understand?”

  If you don’t, you will kill them all.

  One million three hundred and twenty thousand eight hundred and seventy.

  I stared into those violet eyes.

  Please, Endymion. You have to try.

  One million three hundred and twenty thousand eight hundred and seventy.

  One million three hundred and twenty thousand eight hundred and seventy-two. One million three hundred and twenty thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight. One million, three hundred and…

  The stables were poorly lit, but Kaze was always happy to see me, a novelty that had not yet worn off. Darius had left me out in the field, yet I could remember walking back steeped in his thoughts, a mixture of worry about me and fear for himself, neither of which was comforting.

  He was in the house now, Kimiko too, and though my stomach rumbled, I stayed sitting on the hay-s
trewn floor staring at dust motes. Not be myself. Not care. Let it all go. It sounded so simple in theory, but how had Darius managed to so completely shut himself off?

  One choice at a time, he had said. Beginning with the hardest.

  His had been leaving Malice, the only person who had ever shown him love. He hadn’t said so, but he hadn’t needed to. I wasn’t sure what mine was.

  I leant my head back against the wall of Kaze’s stall. “What am I meant to do?” I said to him as he shuffled his hooves in the hay. “We could leave, but I’m not sure how that would help. I’d just be like this somewhere else. Perhaps this was why my father ended up trapped here. Did someone lock him up, do you think?”

  I ought to ask Darius, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. Nor did I want to consider it an option. Surely the best way to stop worrying about injustice was to make the world just. I bit my lip, knowing the thought was wrong. “Maybe that’s what Darius means about believing he’s a god but knowing he shouldn’t.”

  “Why do you talk to him?” Kimiko was standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips. I hadn’t felt her coming, but as it could have been as much through inattention as choice, I gave myself no credit for it.

  “I like talking to him.”

  “Because he doesn’t reply?”

  “He replies. At least, I can hear him.”

  She came in and began rummaging in the bag of feed. Darius says I shouldn’t be scared of him but I can’t help it; I can feel the touch of his Empathy like a hand. Darius doesn’t feel like that.

  Choice.

  I pulled my Empathy away with an effort and held it back, hands clamped to fists and fingers whitening. Kimiko looked around as she poured feed into a bucket but said nothing. Could she feel the difference? Did she know? The desire to check if she had noticed almost let the reins slip from my hands, but I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes and wished I could close my ears so I could not even hear her moving around.