Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists

by Edited by Adrian Collins

  Any of them might have been his sister Enna, snatched on the sly and bound into service. Close his eyes, and almost, Toler could hear her weeping, her mahogany riot of curls tamed with scrap yarn, and the star charm worn for luck clenched in fingers callused from threading the looms.

  Davien’s correction shredded the wistful fancy. ‘Koriathain don’t co-opt children with kinfolk, or fledgling artisans, only destitute foundlings culled off the streets.’

  If the Sorcerer lied, Toler found no evidence. He did as he was bidden for a full year, treated kindly by the sisters, who wore the gray rank of charitable service. No sign of sinister practice emerged. The labor he shouldered involved no arcana, though often he was apt to turn and discover the Prime observing his stolid performance.

  Her stalking unnerved him enough to cry out, had Davien’s working not quelled his reaction. Morriel surveyed his witless expression. A coiled adder angled to strike, she analyzed his every movement. Nothing untoward met her suspicious eye. Toler’s performance stayed above question. When the bitter, cold daybreak arrived, and her aged servant passed on, she took Davien’s gambit as the replacement.

  The moment caught Toler without warning. A senior enchantress with red bands of rank tapped his shoulder as he swept the sisterhouse meeting hall. Her peremptory shove hurried him on without pause to collect his dust bin and brush.

  He trailed at her heels like a leashed dog through a restricted hallway to a locked closet, where another ranked senior pointed to a copper-strapped chest guarded by potent sigils.

  Toler shouldered the load, gadded by the prickle of wrongness that puckered his nape. Soon enough, he experienced the unsavory reasons behind the Prime Matriarch’s taste for dimwitted servants. Invocations better off left to dark nightmares poisoned his days for another three seasons. Under candles in dim, curtained chambers drowning in incense-soaked air, he witnessed the uncanny, secretive workings conducted in her private sanctum. Here, his precarious placement as a Fellowship catspaw invited his instant destruction.

  Rinsed in clammy sweat, he shuddered with revulsion when the order’s arcane paraphernalia were unveiled for use: the rare crystals, mined elsewhere, that amplified spells, and the quartz wands that focused the master sigils enabling the order’s most potent craftwork. He shrank from far more than the bone deep chill when his strength was required in restraint. His straits forced him to endure in silenced horror as subservient initiates were drained of vitality to fuel the grand constructs that quelled storms and saved crops, or averted outbreaks of summer pestilence. Soon, the scent of Morriel’s lavender perfume made Toler cringe, while before his seemingly vacant stare, her insectile fingers inducted the channeled attributes of the major gem stones. He learned to dread the astringent sting emanated by the Skyron aquamarine, and far worse, the icy malice radiated off the faceted sphere of the amethyst Great Waystone.

  Davien’s eavesdropping presence seemed absent, throughout. Toler brooded, fearful his wretched case had been abandoned, until the autumn morning Morriel Prime attached him to an errand beyond the sisterhouse walls.

  Joined by six more cloaked and hooded enchantresses all bearing administrative rank, he bore the warded chest in their midst, containing the order’s most precious arcana. The irregular procession took him up the slate stair to the terraced battlement that fronted Hanshire’s ancient hall of state. Subservient as a dumb beast, Toler trod over slag scars inflicted by drakefire before Mankind’s habitation. Davien’s repressive spells scarcely dampened his awe of the lichened capstones, still embossed with the artistry of the centaur masons who had raised the Second Age fortifications. Beyond the massive, bossed doors, Toler passed the carved dais that seated Hanshire’s high council. The tall chairs stood empty. The massive, bronze lamps cast as coiled dragons hung dark on their chains, no flame in their parted jaws. The Koriani delegation crossed the vaulted chamber and filed through a side door into the chancellor’s privy closet.

  Toler followed the last enchantress over the threshold, unsettled by the pervasive fust of the strong herbals used to fumigate moths. The scent woke his graphic recall of the weaver’s loft on the night of his sister’s abduction. Enna had not run away. Three other girls had vanished the same week, though his mother scorned the persistent talk of a black ritual involving blood sacrifice.

  “A strapping lass able to fuller wool cloth would have left signs of a struggle. Enna bolted on her own, likely cozened from sense by a lad who promised the sweet life of luxury.”

  Toler’s violent qualm all but shredded Davien’s elaborate cover. Explosive fury propelled him ahead. Invested by hatred, committed for more than a Sorcerer’s whim, he embraced a peril that rightly should have sapped his intemperate courage.

  The gathering centered upon Enna’s murderers convened a select handful of Hanshire’s high councilmen, the rosy cheeked, fidgety mayor, and two Koriathain retained as his advisors. But Toler’s interest fastened on the pair of dignitaries who dominated the dais: a wizened man with watery eyes and stick limbs, too pallid to have seen daylight, and a hairless woman in a string cap whose jaded ennui shaped a face transparent as a shelled oyster. Yet her acid interest watched everything.

  Toler avoided her gaze, head bent and oafish feet shuffling. The Prime’s circle directed him to deposit the chest beneath the right hand seat, which Morriel claimed, her purple skirt draped in prim folds to her ankles. Her gesture dismissed Toler to a back corner, where he sat on the floor, disregarded as furniture.

  More figures entered, influential guild factors in peacock silk and two imposing women in starched lace that Enna’s craft mistress would have priced in gold coin. Only the front bench was filled when the door clicked shut on the select enclave.

  Hanshire’s mayor presided, a plump wolf masquerading in stylish manners. “We gather in private to weigh a unique proposition that opens a wide range of fresh possibility. Today, you will hear the particulars and consider the merit of Hanshire’s involvement.” Gleaming in his chains of high office, he deferred to his gaunt guest, whose severe, scholar’s robe wafted the sickly taint.

  “Taranthine, if you please, engage our protections.”

  The bald woman produced a small coffer, unlocked with a silver key. Within, nestled four drawstring bags of raw silk, painted over with unclean symbols. She removed each one, loosened the ties, and withdrew fist-sized objects of polished bone, which she placed against the walls at the cardinal points. Toler’s vantage revealed skulls with prominent eye sockets and needle thin incisors. The dome of each brain case bore an inlaid jet circle, centered with the glitter of a ruby setting.

  “Fate master’s mercy!” the Prime Matriarch gasped, shocked. “Are those what I think?”

  The cultist declined to answer, but positioned the last artifact, snout facing inwards. Toler felt the subliminal snap as his spell-crafted link with Davien’s presence sheared off, leaving him deaf and mute. Seized by rank terror, utterly lost, he beheld nothing more than the color and movement of lackwitted incomprehension.

  * * *

  Davien shot erect, banged his head on the slant beams of the attic ceiling in his rented quarters, and swore murder until he exhausted his breath. For one fleeting glance had exposed the dire forces behind the impenetrable ward: dragonets, taken alive from the egg, then killed and ensnared by ritual necromancy before their spirits gained quickened intelligence.

  Gray Kralovir’s meddling had opened a threat in the world utterly without conscience. Davien understood he beheld the opened gate to calamity. Great drakes rearranged the formed world with a thought; their dead, left unrequite, seeded the grimwards, gyres of peril so dire that only the strongest of constructs kept them safely isolate. Without the most drastic protections, the caged revenant could unravel creation in the throes of mad dreaming.

  If one dragon ever realized unhatched young had been stolen and suborned for abusive practice, humanity risked being expunged from existence in one vengeful strike. And if Tehava
l Warden divined the infraction, the Fellowship Sorcerers must answer the crime and remove Mankind’s offending presence directly.

  Sanity quailed at the scale of the stakes. Davien curbed his fierce agitation before he attracted disastrous scrutiny. Informed hindsight made him jumpy as a scalded cat, that his indispensable access for redress rode the knife’s edge of a back-stabbing smuggler’s recalcitrance.

  * * *

  For Toler, the excruciate trauma stretched on, forcing him through the crucial proceedings in a near helpless stupor. While the numbing influence cast by the matched skulls dissolved his connection to Davien, he witnessed the gestures of heated debate, powerless to hear, and unable to grasp the words spoken. Koriani affiliation might not protect him where even the witches appeared to walk softly. Past the first, appalled outburst, their Prime kept composure in her imperious silk. Yet her darted glances flickered with unease, while Hanshire’s mayor and his rabbity chancellor colluded with the wicked cabal that surely had preyed on his sister.

  Twilight darkened the windows, and gloom shadowed the stifling atmosphere before the wax-featured necromancer snapped his gaunt fingers. His female colleague arose like a specter and collected the jeweled skulls. When she veiled the last of the uncanny relics, the gathered officials exhaled in collective relief.

  Toler smothered his pithless shudder as his suppressed awareness resurged. Reprieved by the click of the latch on the coffer that sequestered the sinister artifacts, and sick with mounting anxiety, he longed to escape the repellent miasma clogging the stuffy air.

  Yet no command to depart brought release.

  Hanshire’s paunchy mayor exchanged nervous banalities with the Kralovir, then requested due leave for a private discussion. The Prime Matriarch watched the unsavory cultists file out, alert in her upright chair. She withheld comment. When the mayor’s councilmen and chancellor, and the strutting flock of beribboned guildsmen departed, she dismissed her subordinate entourage, but kept Toler in place.

  Servants entered to brighten the candles, and a freckled maid brought a tray of light fare. While the mayor poured wine and nibbled on pastry, the Prime’s gesture cued Toler to heft her locked chest to the table top. Then, hands folded, she waited until the staff left the room. Behind the shut door, only Toler attended her closed discussion with Hanshire’s mayor.

  “Are you certain the lackey should stay?” The mayor’s pink fingers toyed with a morsel, as if tension blunted his appetite.

  Morriel responded with arctic disdain. “The deaf-mute halfwit? He would perish the instant I thought he posed any threat. Though given Gray Kralovir’s shady morality, stringent precaution is justified.” Youthful dexterity at odds with her age released the protective ciphers and raised the domed lid of the copper-strapped box. “I have brought our order’s most powerful focus to enforce our privacy.”

  She whisked the silk shroud off the Great Waystone. The mayor choked and pounded his chest, spraying crumbs as the sphere’s dire cold shocked his poise. The Prime regarded his paroxysm without sympathy. “Count your blessings we chanced bringing this stone from the sisterhouse. No other jewel we possess has the strength to blindside the Fellowship Sorcerers.”

  The sigils of containment she amplified through the quartz matrix clenched Toler’s gut and wrung him dizzy. Fearful he might lose control of his faculties, he huddled in a shivering knot, to every appearance the dullard Davien’s mission required.

  The mayor smeared paté on his crumbling bread and chewed through his nervous talk. “Do you believe the support for this revolt is as widespread as the Gray Kralovir claim? A bold move, and exceedingly dangerous, to overthrow charter law by mass murder and dethrone the crown bloodlines. The Fellowship of Seven will not be complacent, no matter that their compliance with the Major Balance honors free will.”

  Morriel’s hooded gaze glittered. “The risk is great. But the potential for gain is enormous. The Sorcerers are overextended, with most of their resource committed in crisis to stall the Mistwraith’s advance. Tehaval Warden does not watch the towns where crown justice is secured by the Fellowship’s surety. Many interests chafe for a sweeping change, given the mysteries languish from neglect.”

  Hanshire’s mayor dusted crumbs from his paunch, poured more wine, and sipped to suppress his trembling anticipation. “We may never see a more opportune moment. Since the Kralovir will finalize the conspiracy under absolute secrecy, what have we to lose? If crystal transmission can signal the rising across all five kingdoms at once, not even the Fellowship’s reach could contain the widespread scope of the outbreak.”

  “The Sorcerers must be caught by surprise. Should they catch any word in advance, the entire effort will fail.” Morriel measured the mayor’s ambition as though sizing up prey. “And your tidy plan for a simultaneous assault cannot happen without the Koriathain. Our order’s partnership carries a price.”

  “Of course.” Hanshire’s mayor dabbed his moist lips with his sleeve. “Name the debt.”

  Morriel’s withered mask never twitched. “Acquire the dragon skull wards, and grant possession of them to my order.”

  The mayor’s vermilion complexion drained white. “That’s a steep demand, to barter with necromancers!”

  The Prime’s teeth gleamed like strung pearls through her satisfied smile. “Nonetheless. You have leverage. Gray Kralovir need us. Their use for impenetrable defenses will be moot in the absence of persecution. What price for the bargain, to shatter the Fellowship’s yoke and release Mankind’s claim to free enterprise...?”

  * * *

  Toler tossed on his cot in the deep of the night, surrounded by the whispered breathing of the boy wards’ innocent slumber. The reek of herbal moth bane poisoned his dreams, and spun nightmares of blood and slaughter. Sweating, while the full moon frosted the casement, he startled bolt upright when Davien’s thought breached his awareness.

  ‘Just how brave are you?’

  Toler flung off the bedclothes, distraught. ‘You want me to cross the Kralovir necromancers and the Order of the Koriathain?’

  ‘With my help. If you’re willing.’ The pause hung, textured by the disturbing notion that the Sorcerer nursed rattled nerves, also. ‘I’m proposing an intervention to pull the rug out from under the Hanshire conspiracy.’

  Toler flogged tried wits. ‘How?’

  The testy response reflected the Sorcerer’s restless pacing. ‘If I provoke the uprising early, all parties involved will be scrambled into disarray.’

  The shocking tactic at first failed to sink in, that a Fellowship Sorcerer could turn on his own, launch a bloodbath aimed to upset charter law, and unleash wanton murder upon the irreplaceable descendants who carried the fivefold attributes of crown heritage.

  Davien squared the hideous facts, not unflinching. ‘If I don’t react first, the brute consequence will break our Fellowship’s inviolate bond. But if I trigger the rebellion on my terms, half-planned, chaos will favor the chance of outlying survivors. Charter law may be saved within the free wilds, with enough structure left in the aftermath to rebuild from the pieces.’

  The imperative conclusion dangled, beyond words: that the dragonet skulls would be vulnerable during the proposed change of hands between Kralovir and Koriathain.

  ‘You can’t act without me,’ Toler surmised. His light-fingered ingenuity must seize the moment and smuggle the perilous artifacts from Morriel’s close guarded collection. ‘Where’s my assurance that I’m not expendable, given your own straits are desperate?’

  For the moral imperative to warn the other Sorcerers would expose the inside agent allied with the Fellowship.

  ‘Think, bantling!’ snapped Davien, already cornered by the dearth of alternatives: to let human transgressions revoke colonization and, perhaps, save the harmonic balance of the world’s mysteries. Or else thwart the summary eviction and have dragons discover the abuse of their stolen hatchlings. To waste this covert chance to confiscate the skull artifact
s meant inciting the flames of a wrath that would consume Mankind utterly, without any hope of merciful discrimination.

  Toler stalled to chew over detail. ‘How will you infiltrate the signal relay of the Koriathain?’

  Davien’s whiplash sarcasm stung. ‘Leave that delicate dealing to me.’ Had he not already exposed the gamut of Mankind’s inherent weaknesses? Fallen out with his colleagues for hundreds of years, he knew every bitter card to be played. ‘There are culpable fools in the Koriani sisterhood who will drop their guard, baited into manipulation on the pretext of my conflicted loyalty.’ Flashpoint resonance could suborn a quartz network in a fractional second of close proximity.

  ‘You knew all along about Enna,’ Toler accused, resentment simmering under his burning hatred of the Kralovir cabal. As the Sorcerer’s attacking pawn, he was entitled to ask the agonized question. ‘What happened to her?’

  Davien’s charged contact went piercingly still. ‘Do you truly want the unquiet truth?’

  For in his heart, Toler already knew she had suffered a hideous end. Better to close his eyes to the ugliness, and remember her dancing for joy with her shining hair laced with yellow ribbons. Grief locked his resolve. “How do I bring the Gray Kralovir down? If you render justice for the crime of my sister’s ritual sacrifice, I will attempt what you ask.’

  Davien’s promise rang back. ‘Help spare our Fellowship’s covenant from ruin, and I will not rest until necromancy in all forms has been expunged from the world. Smuggle the dragonet skulls out of Hanshire, and no dark cabal will be able to hide or evade due redress.’

  But the midnight pact courted terrible ruin: lives would be lost, disastrously many, while the blow to civilized order shocked stability to the brink. The ruthless course demanded Davien’s undivided focus at Hanshire, while Toler tiptoed into the jaws of dissent for the caper to deflect Mankind’s certain downfall.