Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists

by Edited by Adrian Collins

  Kymbril makes a show of looking her up and down. “Takes a lot of nerve, coming here empty-handed.”

  “You’ll get the lotus,” Jax replies nervously, “but only after I see my brother.”

  “You think you can come here, to my house, and start making demands?”

  “You want our stash and you want us gone,” Jax says evenly. “All I’m asking is to make sure he’s unharmed.”

  Kymbril laughs at that. “Other than his finger, you mean.”

  Jax stares back defiantly. “I will see my brother. Only then will you see your reek.”

  “I don’t need your reek, girl.”

  “We have a lot of it, Kymbril.”

  The statement sits between them like a jewel for the taking. Kymbril considers a moment, then nods to Maru, who leaves and heads downstairs. He returns a short while later with Nehir, a black bag over his head, in tow. Maru removes the bag to reveal a face that is bruised and bloodied. He cradles his right hand, tightly wrapped in a bloody bandage, to his chest. The resignation in Nehir’s face is plain to see, as if he’s known for months that it would come to this, and now that it has there’s precious little to do but accept it.

  Jax reaches up and brushes his hair, tenderly, slowly. She’s positioned herself as Brama instructed so that neither Maru nor Kymbril can see the words written on her wrist. To his credit, Nehir’s expression hardly changes. He becomes more calm, a tell in and of itself, but the gods of his homeland are watching over him, for neither Kymbril nor Maru seem to notice.

  “Enough.” Kymbril steps between the two of them and turns to face Jax. “Where’s the ruddy stash?”

  She puts her fingers to her lips and whistles. On cue, Brama stands and stomps on the trap door on the roof. Through the crystal eye he sees Kymbril and Maru staring up toward the ladder against the wall and the trap door it leads to.

  “What’s this?” Kymbril growls.

  “Your stash,” Jax says.

  Kymbril raises a thumb at Maru, and Maru climbs the ladder to the trapdoor and pushes it open. On the roof, Brama opens his eyes, replacing the sapphire’s perspective with his own, and makes his way down the ladder. He tosses the heavy sack at Kymbril’s feet. Kymbril stares at it, then at him. Then he smiles wide, looking like a little boy who’s just been served his favorite meal from his memma. Kneeling, Kymbril opens the sack and takes a good whiff of the pile of fermented black lotus petals. “I’ll give it to you, Brama,” Kymbril says. “You almost had me convinced you were innocent in all this.” He stands and steps closer to Brama, pulls his shirt out and looks down his bare chest. “Where’s that necklace of yours?”

  Brama’s only reply is to unclasp two of Jax’s bracelets, the simpler ones, from around his wrist. He flips them in the air to Kymbril, who catches them with ease and stares, a quizzical look on his rough-and-tumble face. “What’s this?”

  “Enough, along with the reek, to let them leave the city unharmed. They’ll be no further trouble to you, Kymbril. That I promise. If they come back, I’ll take the knife to them myself.”

  “Ah, but we know what your promises mean.”

  “What Nehir did was more than foolish,” Brama continues. “You’ve made that clear. But he was only trying to raise money to head home and avenge the deaths of his parents. A fool’s dream. We can all see that now. Can’t we, Nehir?”

  Nehir stares at everyone in turn. Wearily, he nods to Kymbril.

  Brama goes on, “They’ve both given up, Kymbril. They’re leaving the city, far enough away that Sharakhai and their troubles in Malasan will be but a memory.”

  Kymbril shrugs. “You know how this city works, boy. Always mongrel dogs nipping at your heels. My soldiers see I let these two go, what will they think? Or worse, my enemies?”

  Brama considers this. “What if you and I could come to some sort of arrangement? What if I remained in your employ and helped heal those most addicted to the reek?” Kymbril and Maru exchange a look. It’s clear that Nehir confessed what Brama had done for him, but surely the two men had scoffed at the notion. Brama speaks quickly before either man can protest. “What I did with Nehir I can do again. I’ll do so whenever you ask.”

  “Even if you could, how would that help me?”

  “Because when your wealthiest patrons die, you lose a reliable source of income, but what if the lotus’s call was removed from them before that happened?”

  “I’d lose them.”

  “Some perhaps, but certainly not all. And if you sensed that they were falling too far, you could force them to pay coin for it. You’d win either way, Kymbril, and fewer would die.”

  Brama’s words take me aback. This is either something Brama just thought of or purposely hid from me. Either way, in all our days together, I’ve never felt this from him—a spark amidst the terrible darkness surrounding him—and I wonder what will come of it.

  Kymbril, however, merely frowns. “I’ll admit I’m intrigued, boy. Yesterday it might’ve been enough to call things square. Yesterday, I was in a giving mood. But I made another deal this morning. Can’t go back on it now.”

  Fresh footsteps can be heard from below. Brama tenses as a dark form ascends the stairs. Jax and Nehir look at each other anxiously. This is something neither he nor Jax nor I had considered.

  The man is one they all recognize: the assassin. What has me transfixed, more than his sudden appearance, are the lights that dance around him. They’re dazzling, nearly blinding. And I realize Jax has become as dull as an old copper coin. It’s true, then. Jax’s role has always been to lead me to the assassin.

  He steps into the room and looks at Nehir and Jax. Apparently satisfied, he tosses a bag to Kymbril. It clinks as Kymbril snatches it from the air. Kymbril opens the bag and inspects the contents. “May your daughters find husbands and your sons wives,” he says with a wide grin, then shoves Jax toward the door.

  “No!” Nehir shouts, and leaps into Jax’s path.

  Brama is already on the move. He stomps hard on Maru’s foot, twists and elbows him in the jaw. Maru reels, and Brama sends him flying backward, through the doorway and toward the stair rails. Before Kymbril can react, Brama brings his heel down sharply onto the sack. The muffled sound of a bladder bursting emanates from the sack. A sizzling follows. Then green smoke rises from the bag.

  Brama dives toward the corner of the room to avoid Kymbril’s grasp.

  “Away, Nehir!” Jax shouts as she too runs for the far corner of the room.

  But it’s too late. The assassin stabs Nehir in the belly with a sharp thrust of his knife. Nehir stumbles, tries to crawl away.

  When a high-pitched whistling sound comes from the bag, Brama clamps his eyes shut, and the center of the room transforms into a burst of white light. On and on it goes, the shrieking sound, the bright light so strong it’s all Brama can do to keep it out. The skin along his left side burns hot, and he worries that the concoction he’d bought from the alchemyst with Jax’s third bracelet was too much, that they’d all go up in flames, but he no sooner has this thought than the light and sound and heat all subside. Soon the only sounds are the moaning of men and a sizzling like meat over an open fire. Brama realizes he’s on the floor, fingers grasping for purchase. He turns himself over, sees Jax standing in the corner, eyes dazed and blinking, yawning as she shakes her head.

  Kymbril is not far from her, unconscious. The front of his clothes are charred; the legs of his trousers still smoke.

  Near the open door, where the sack of black lotus once was, a hole is burned clear through the flooring and the timbers to the room below. Blue-green fire licks around the hole and up the door frame, where the flames transition to something more mundane: an orange the color of turning leaves. Nehir lies in the hall, grasping his gut, pulling at the banister in a vain attempt at regaining his feet. Past him runs Maru, back into the room with his knife drawn.

  Brama stands to meet him. He takes one step forward, pretending to charg
e, but when Maru lowers his shoulder, preparing for it, Brama drops onto his back, lifts his legs, and catches Maru’s gut with both feet. Maru swings his knife wildly at Brama, slicing his arm, but Brama uses Maru’s momentum against him. With an almighty thrust of his legs, he launches Maru into the air and through the window behind him. As Maru grasps for the window frame, his knife tumbles into the corner. A moment later Maru lands on the ground outside with a thud and a groan.

  Brama rolls over one shoulder and takes up Maru’s knife as Kymbril, mouth gaping, makes it to one knee.

  The assassin, meanwhile, stands in the doorway, his left arm burned and blistered. The lights swirl around him, and I am transfixed. I can do little, but I reach out to him. With all my will I beckon him, I force him to notice the glint in window. I whisper but one small memory: an arrow that bursts into flame as it strikes his enemy’s chest.

  As Brama moves to engage Kymbril, the assassin moves to the window. He reaches out and grasps the necklace. With a downward tug, he snaps the string holding it in place. He clutches the sapphire in his warm hand. I can already feel his eagerness, his ambition. By Goezhen’s sweet kiss, what we might do together, he and I. For a time, he will be the one in control, I have no doubt, but with someone like him holding the necklace, it won’t be long before I am the master of my fate once more. Perhaps then we’ll return to Malasan. Perhaps I’ll allow him to accept commissions from his lords. I could do with a bit of murder to quench the fire that’s been building within me. Or perhaps I’ll move on, toss the assassin aside and take the form of one of his lords. It’s been too long since I’ve been to Malasan in any case. The last time I was there it wasn’t even called Malasan.

  Brama and Jax are wrestling with Kymbril. Kymbril tries gouging Brama’s eyes, but Jax raises a knife high overhead and plunges it into Kymbril’s neck. Blood sprays over her, over Brama. Kymbril thrashes as the two of them stand and back away. Then the big man with the mismatched eyes goes still, his hands grasping empty air. Finally his body goes still, and Brama and Jax turn to the assassin. Nehir is there as well, on his feet, hands pressed against his stomach, his face white as salt. Together, the three of them hem the assassin in.

  Brama eyes the sapphire in the assassin’s hand, but he knows something has changed. He can feel it. A distancing from me, which, even though he’d come to resent it, leaves an empty space inside him.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Brama says.

  The words are for me, not the assassin, but the assassin still responds. “All of this is necessary.” He grips the sapphire tight. Wills me to burn them all as I burned the arrow.

  But there’s something about Brama that gives me pause. I haven’t seen him through another’s eyes in years, and when last I had he was dull, almost lifeless. Back then, I hardly spent a moment on him, blinded as I was by my obsession with the White Wolf.

  But now...

  There are lights, but they are dark and difficult to see. They remind me of my lord Goezhen. Will Brama be touched by the God of Demons? Will he one day stand before the lord who made me? It is something I’ve given up on ever happening again, thinking my god abandoned me. But if it might be so, what a fool I’d be to pass it up. And yet it isn’t up to me. Not me alone, in any case.

  Nearby, the green, alchemycal fire is dead, and a mundane fire of flickering orange burns in its place. The smoke is growing, but no one pays attention to it. The assassin has opened his mind to me, enough that I can take his body from him for a time. “If I remain,” I say with the assassin’s voice, “will you allow me to help you?”

  “What’s happening?” Nehir asks, leaning against the wall. As he slides to the floor, his confused gaze flits between Brama and the assassin. Jax rushes to his side, every bit as confused as her brother, but Brama understands all too well who voiced that question.

  “I will not kill for you,” he says.

  “You hold the reins, Brama. I only wish to help.”

  Brama stares, clenching his teeth.

  “Brama—” Jax begins, but when Brama holds his hand up, she goes silent. Brama looks the assassin in the eye, and I know his answer before he gives it.

  “Very well,” he says.

  And I nod back to him.

  With a voice given to me by the God of Chaos himself, I whisper to the assassin’s mind. I tell him a story, of how he came to Sharakhai, how he found Jax and Nehir, how he made a deal with a local drug lord to secure them. I tell him how he slit both their throats, completing his lords’ mission here in the desert. I breathe into him the satisfaction the deed gave him, and he swells from it.

  As I knew it would, the urge to return to Malasan after long months spent tracking his quarry here to the slums of Sharakhai is born inside him. Slipping his knife into its sheath, he drops the crystal and walks through the smoke, beyond the flames, and down the stairs.

  When he is gone, Brama walks to the where the necklace fell. He picks it up and slips it around his neck.

  * * *

  One week later, Jax stands at the door to the room that was once Kymbril’s bedroom. “There’s a man downstairs asking to see the Tattered Prince. He’s the cousin of the girl you put right yesterday.”

  “How bad is he?”

  “Bad,” Jax replies.

  Brama stands from the chair he’d been sitting in and begins to stretch. “Tell him I’ll speak with him.”

  Jax stares. “You can’t mean to heal him now.”

  “I do, if he can convince me of his earnestness.”

  He heads for the pair of beds that sit along the far side of the room. Brama will lie in one, the lotus addict the other, and then he and I will work together to lift the addiction and place it on Brama so that the man might be freed.

  “But you’ve only just recovered.”

  “Maybe, but I am recovered. Send him up.”

  “Gods,” Jax says under her breath. She stares at Brama as if he were some unanswerable riddle. “You’ll kill yourself if you keep going.”

  “Perhaps. But I’m giving people new chances at life.”

  He’s used that term once or twice before, and it has struck Jax hard each time. Nehir died the night of the fight with Kymbril from the wound to his gut. They buried him in the sand the following morning. When it was done, Brama asked Jax what she planned to do.

  “I don’t know,” she said, staring out at the eastern horizon, toward Malasan. “Part of me wishes to return to my home. Part of me wishes to leave and go to Kundhun as I’d planned.” She turned to Brama then. “And part of me would stay.”

  It was an offer, a plea, as clear as she could make it just then.

  Brama smiled, a bit of the scoundrel returning to him. “Stay for a day. Stay for a week. I’ll show you parts of the city you’d never find on your own.”

  As she stared into his eyes, a genuine smile crossed her lips. “I’d like that.”

  But she hadn’t counted on Brama following through on his offer to Kymbril. The very next day, he healed two of the worst addicts who’d wound up in the lowest floor of Kymbril’s manor, freeing them from the prison the lotus had built around them.

  In the manor, Jax strides to Brama’s side and takes his hand. “Promise me you’ll be careful?” She leans in and kisses him, pulling away as quickly as she’d come. “We have sights to see, you and I.”

  I feel him brighten from within, and a smile most genuine spreads across his face. “I will be.”

  The look they share is precious, one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in Sharakhai, a tattered prince and a young, foreign noble. And then Jax leaves the room to lead the suffering man up.

  When she’s gone, Brama moves to a beaten brass mirror hung against the wall. “Are you ready?”

  “Of course, my master.”

  “I asked you not to call me that.”

  In the mirror, my visage smiles. “You don’t have to suffer like this, you know. There are a thousand things and
a thousand more we could do together. You and I and the girl.”

  “To live is to suffer,” Brama replies. “I merely wish to do something virtuous with my life for once.”

  I consider this, wondering where the dark lights I’d seen will take him. Where they will take me.

  “Very well,” I say. “I’m ready.”

  A Storm Unbound

  - Moonborne -

  E.V. Morrigan

  Smoke billowed above Aventail Quarter, shadowy whorls staining the morning sky black. Shae froze, eyes tracing the smoke, knowing full well its source before her gaze even settled.

  They’ve found me.

  Heart thrumming in her throat, she darted along the cobbles, racing for the home she’d made in the intervening years between her old life and new. A small crowd gathered in the street before the steps to her building, eyes wide and rumors flowing. She pushed her way through the finger-pointing throng and took the stairs three at a time. The symphony of crackling flames urged her on, each breath like inhaling shards of glass. Shae pulled her tunic over her mouth and crashed through the door, which already hung crooked on broken hinges. Wafts of smoke greeted her, and she bit back a cough. The heat struck her a palpable blow, stealing the moisture from her eyes. She stumbled to a halt just inside. There, on the floor not two paces from the doorway, lay Vitra, arms extended, fingers twitching against the wood. A discarded dagger lay just out of reach. Flames danced on the far side of the room, creeping ever closer, consuming everything in their wake.

  “No!” Shae knelt beside the slip of a woman and rolled her over, drawing her into her arms. “Vitra?” She brushed strands of raven hair from her ashen face, swallowing hard at what she saw beneath.

  Brown eyes, surrounded by halos of red, fluttered and struggled to focus. A darkness welled unchecked in their depths. “They...they took...her.” The words ignited and faded in a huff, dying embers without fuel. “I... I couldn’t...stop...” Shae’s eyes trailed her limp body and spied the ooze of ruby fluid that spread about a bubbling gash at Vitra’s ribs. The unmistakable tang of silvertail venom clung to the wound, the flesh tainted with emerald striations. A chill crept spider-like down Shae’s spine, her stomach roiling. “It was... Ero...ghast,” Vitra finished with a gasp.