A Practical Guide to Evil

Chapter Book 7 48: Root

The Flowing Gardens would never be called that again.

The old enchantments here had unravelled, unmade by the greater powers that had run wild across islets and canals. What had been left behind was beautiful in the eeriest of ways. Moren’s final winter lingered, the luminescent trees and flowers trapped in ice – forever perfect, forever blooming. A pale carpet of snow that no footsteps could mar remained, sparing only the frozen canals. There the last echo of the ancient songs of the Garden remained, for under a layer of cracked ice water flowed and so the canals groaned out strange hymns that made the heart shiver. And at the heart of it all stood a broken throne, before which we had killed a god by raising another.

Loc Ynan’s corpse, scoured clean of the Dead King’s soul shard, remained there with a spear of yew through the heart.

It was a hallowed placed, for good or ill, and its beauty was not unlike that of the Firstborn: strange and terrible and keening like a broken heart. I stood among the paleness with an old friend at my side, his eyes – one mortal, one anything but – alight with wonder as he watched the wind thread through his fingers.

“It will snow,” Masego said, “every time the moon is full. I can see the echo.”

I hummed in agreement. I could feel it too, how tonight would return to this place again and again.

And it was not yet over, for all that we were all bone-tired, keep on our feet only by the strange febrile energy that came of victory and feeling it all coming together. That tonic would fade before long, but we still had a little while in us still. So the two of us, together, watched as Sve Noc embraced the divinity that the Hierophant had forged for them. The night thrummed, as if defiant of the dawn yet to come, and wind like a warm breath rippled across Serolen. I couldn’t see it the way Masego could, his eye laying bare the truths of the world, but I trailed down my finger down the string of the story and smiled. The Sisters, at long last, were slipping the noose.

“Light and Night, huh,” I murmured. “Symmetry in all things.”

“Their godhead was flawed,” Hierophant mused. “Split from the start. What they received they gave out, keeping part for themselves, but that was making a single broken god and a million godlings. The godhead is a trick of perspective, Catherine – it can be shared, but it cannot be divided.”

So they’d fixed it, he and Akua. Gathered it all together again, dissolving the nails that bound all Firstborn to the Night, and handed it back to Sve Noc to put together into a true godhead. And now Sve Noc, the Sisters and the Crows and a hundred names more, were giving their gift away once more – but not in the same way they once had, oh no. Firstborn no longer held Night, no more than humans held Light: it was outside them, borrowed. Granted by a higher power.

“They won’t like it,” I quietly said. “Not at first. But they’ll get used to it.”

The worthy would still take and rise. Night could no longer be taken the old way, because now to harvest it from drow or others grew the Night as a whole instead of a Mighty’s personal hoard, but there were still gains. No one had ever quite figured out what defined how much Light individuals were capable of wielding, answers varying from a birth talent to the depth of faith or strength of the body. There would be no such doubt over Night: the more one added to it, the more of it one could wield. As one’s power grew, their body would change along the same lines holding much Night had once caused: indifference to age and silver eyes.

Sve Noc would not shortchange those who had fought for them, their loyal Mighty not suddenly faced with decrepitude.

I knew exactly what those changes would feel like because I’d already gone through them. My eye was not silver – not yet – but the rest? There were none, save perhaps Radegast the Guest, who could come close to wielding as much Night as I could. And as for age… I’d once told the Dead King the years would kill me and the old monster had just smiled, before answering – ah, but how many years would it take? Many, I knew. Enough that spending eleven years of my life to snuff out the Saint of Swords had not left a visible mark. I was not sure how to feel about having been the precursor to what Night would now grant, the first draft of the work.

“It won’t matter,” Masego said, openly pleased. “The Sisters have faith, now.”

I almost smiled. Someone who did not know Hierophant might have taken that as a spurt of religiosity, but I knew better. He was being quite literal, because when he’d mended Night and guided Sve Noc into rebuilding it he’d done more than just smooth away a few hard edges. He’d fixed it, the flaw. Now it wasn’t just a shoddy mantle of power that the Sisters bore and that… changed things. I raised my hand, a mirror to his, but it was not the wind I was grasping. It was threads, millions of them blooming. Night had been born finite, parceled from its very first breath, but that had changed. It was no longer something that could be counted or measured.

I watched the faith, the earnest belief of millions of drow swelling the godhead of Sve Noc, and let out a convulsive laugh. After all these years, all the sacrifices and the despair and the darkness, the two sisters had found the end of their winding road: they’d slipped the noose. The debt of the Firstborn would be wiped clean, the destruction they’d staved off with a loan and then Winter’s flesh at last gone for food. They were no longer finite, their godhead a living and breathing truth, and so what did a few measly years mean for them to pay? Faith fed Night, fed its twin goddesses, and like a beacon in the dark their power filled the sky above us.

Sve Noc paid the old debt of the Twilight Sages, returned the years borrowed, and for them it was no different than a sigh. Time meant nothing to the immortal.

“How does it feel?” I asked.

Masego turned to look at me with his mortal eye.

“What does?”

“How does it feel,” I smiled, “to be first man in Creation to ever make a Choir?”

Because that was what he and Akua had done, when it came down to it. In Night instead of Light, but that was a shallow difference when it came down to it. Should I call my patronesses angels of thievery and murder instead of gods, what would it change? And that, more than the rest, made it plain the scope of what he’d achieved to night. Because Choirs did not choose a single nation, and single people, and remain bound to them. They were not so… limited. And come morning, neither would Sve Noc be.

I gave it a month before the first goblin was blessed with Night.

Masego considered my words, face pensive.

“Do you remember,” he finally said, “what the Queen of Summer said to me, when I tried to throw off her binding in Arcadia?”

After the Battle of Five Armies and One, I recalled, and it took me but a moment to recall the words.

“If you’d had a few years, Masego,” I quoted. “You have not seen enough.”

He smiled, closing his fingers around the wind.

“If I met her tomorrow,” Hierophant simply said, “she would be wrong.”

Nothing more need be said.

The two of us stood there, in companiable silence, until dawn came and pulled the final curtain over it all.

The First General gilded its patronesses new crown with fresh victories.

Three battles won in a day, Gloom-shards keeping the day’s bite away from the Firstborn, and now the dead were on the backfoot. It was a matter of weeks until they were driven out entirely. General Ysengral used the time to purge Serolen of the most egregious traitors – an easy enough task, given that Sve Noc now refused them the wielding of Night – and consolidating our hold on the city. There was no organized resistance to the effort, the second apotheosis of the Crows and Kurosiv’s murder having snuffed out any thought of rebellion in even the most hardline of the opposition. It was one thing to deny a god when you had the protection of another, but without that?

Only fools and the mad kept holding their spears, and those were made short work of.

I myself had another duty. I sat in what drow now called Verde Zyebog, the Garden of Dead Gods, and told the scribes of the Losara of what had happened. Not all, for some truths were better left buried, but enough. We sat among the snow whose cold never seemed to reach my bones and spoke, until day turned to night and day chased it away. I left the Garden exhausted, leaning on my staff, but there was more yet. My presence was required, for Cordelia Hasenbach had finally sought her audience with the Crows. The deal she had come to Serolen to strike was to be unveiled at last.

I limped my way to the temple-fortress, returning to the depths, and stopped by my quarters loon enough to wash. It was with fresh clothes and wet hair, still half-combed, that I made my way to the war council room where the princess would be allowed to make her case. I was, I found with mild amusement when I entered, the last to arrive. Two crows were perched on the back of my throne, so even the goddesses had gotten here before I did. Declining to apologize, I limped across the room and settled into my seat. On my left was Ysengral, and on my right Rumena – neither of which looked particularly interested in what Cordelia Hasenbach, standing before us straight-backed, had to say. She had won some respect by fostering the civil war among Kurosiv’s sigil, but in the wake of our more recent victory that counted for less than before.

“Princess Cordelia,” I said. “As First Under the Night, I grant you audience in this hall.”

The fair-haired woman bowed, as was the etiquette. My words were pretty much a formality, given that though I had the highest status of the mortals in this room in practice it was Rumena and Ysengral that ran Serolen – and the Sisters who had the final say on agreements with Procer. I suspected that Sve Noc would take a step back as the years passed, distancing themselves from earthly affairs, but it would wait until the storm had passed. I felt a flicker of approval from Andronike.

“I thank you for the privilege,” Cordelia calmly replied, straightening. “I come on behalf of First Princess Rozala and the Grand Alliance to offer treaties to the Empire Ever Dark.”

If this were a Proceran court that’d be the part where we moved to a more comfortable setting, but that wasn’t the way of things in Serolen. She’d be standing through it all while we sat, which I felt bad about but not enough to start standing on my bad leg. I flicked a look at Ysengral and gestured it could start speaking, letting the negotiations begin. In Chantant, since Hasen- Cordelia spoke no more than a few sentences of Crepuscular. The start of it was nothing unexpected, reaffirmation of the alliance against Keter and Rozala ‘expressing her firm belief in the importance of our friendship’ through her envoy, but then we got to the parts that mattered.

The promise to balance: Keter had been promised to the Herald of the Deeps for his support and to the Firstborn for theirs. It could not be held by both.

“You are not asked to cede lands that were promised to you,” Cordelia plainly spoke. “The Kingdom of the Dead remains yours, whatever else is said today, and our talks concern only the acquisition from your empire of the Crown of the Dead as well as surroundings.”

A map had been drawn and was now brought forward, one I’d seen before – it was the one the Herald had agreed with. The city of Keter and a significant but not particularly large amount of land around it were marked out. Enough farmland that the city could be fed without needing imports, that had been the calculation made. After we got all the poison out of the ground, anyway. Pretty phrasing on Cordelia’s part, I thought, casting this as the Grand Alliance buying a claim from an ally instead of offering it to someone else. The Sisters were not so easily swayed, but presentation mattered if you wanted to keep trust.

“And why,” General Rumena bluntly said, “should we care to cede a single thing to Procer? We have bled for every inch of that claim.”

And now the moment of truth came, as I had genuinely no idea what Cordelia would bring forward. She’d been having trouble finding a price, I’d known that, but our last conversation had seen her declare she’d found it. She started out predictably enough, offering on behalf of Procer things the Firstborn would need after the war: seeds for fields, cattle to begin herds and goods made in Proceran cities. Neither Rumena nor Ysengral were sold, I could tell from their presence in the Night. They knew they could get all those things without needing to cede territory. But that had been the prologue, and then she got to the meat of the offer.

“You have been asked to bleed for the west,” Cordelia acknowledged, eyes sliding to me for a moment before looking away. “To make sacrifices for human kingdoms few of you have ever seen. And none have ever paid you back for the losses, save in promises now bargained over.”

“How can the word of humans be worth?” Ysengral scorned.

It did not bother to exclude me from that, but I didn’t take offence. Mighty Ysengral was one of the Firstborn who believed that my being First Under the Night meant I wasn’t human, not in the ways that mattered. Maybe not drow either, but far from cattle.

“I do not blame you for the mistrust,” Cordelia said. “It was earned. And yet we need the Kingdom Under if we are to win against the Dead King, so sacrifices must be made.”

Neither of the generals were pleased to hear that, and truthfully neither was I.

“So let Procer pay its share,” the blue-eyed princess said. “We ask of you to cede territory, and so we offer to cede the Empire Ever Dark territory in turn.”

I hid my surprise, feeling that of the others. Even Sve Noc. The map she brought forward this time marked the territory she proposed Procer was to cede and the sight of it had my eyebrows rising. It was a third of the Principality of Cleves, namely the northern third. Coastlands and rocks, little land good for farming, but if we won the war? The city of Cleves was in there, a natural harbour near the crossroads of the Grave, the Tomb and Lake Pavin. A natural harbour at the end of well-kept roads going south. It’s going to be one of the trade centres of Calernia in the coming decades, I thought. One of the richest cities on the continent.

And there lay Cordelia’s cleverness. Because she was giving away something hugely valuable, but for it to be valuable there needed to be trade between the Empire Ever Dark and Procer. And trade meant relations, meant a measure of peace. And that meant First Princess Rozala would sign the treaty, because peace with the Firstborn would be worth so much more to her than lands she did not hold and were infested with undead.

“A worthy offer,” Mighty Rumena conceded.

“You are owed more,” Cordelia frankly replied. “The Firstborn have stood by Procer in its darkest hour, dying by the thousands so that our realm might survive. And so I would return that pledge.”

I leaned forward.

“On behalf of the Grand Alliance, I would offer this treaty and oath,” the blonde princess said. “So long as the Grand Alliance and the Empire Ever Dark stand, I pledge that the full might of the Grand Alliance will be mustered in the defence of your empire in the face of any attack by the Kingdom Under and its vassals.”

Ah, I smiled. So that’s what you figured out. Loyalty. From our talk, she had decided that what the Empire Ever Dark really wanted – really needed – was a guarantee that never again would they be forced into another exodus. That never again would they stand against the dwarves without allies, without an alliance spanning half of Calernia and willing to make a fucking ruckus on their behalf. Cordelia kept talking, delicately making it known that the pledge would be written to stand even if members of the Grand Alliance had been suffering raids, but I was already leaning back in my seat with a pleased sigh.

I already knew how this would end.

I had not slept in too long when I found her.

It added a haze to all I saw, as if the edges of the world were blurred. Her, though, I saw clear as day. Akua was seated on a worn old paving stone that must’ve been ripped out of the street, looking at an altar that could not be more than a day or two old: a simple tile of ceramic, on which two crows had been painted in black. It was faint, but I could feel the power in there. Honest faith had been offered up to that tile, the kind that left ripples behind. And Akua Sahelian’s golden eyes watched the altar with a distant look, the long skirt of her black dress draped about her seat. Cloth-of-silver drew the eye to her waist and only a single small pin kept her hair in place.

She was a vision, I thought, though of what I could not quite find the word for.

“Thinking of converting?” I asked.

An amused glanced was flicked my way.

“Are the perks worth it?” she lightly asked.

“Eh,” I shrugged. “I’ve seen better.”

I felt the Komena’s indignation echo from a distance, which only improved my mood. Akua chuckled, running her fingers gently across the dried paint.

“It is not a small thing that we did,” she said. “In some ways, it might be the most consequential action we ever undertake.”

“Ending Keter will beat that,” I said. “Hard for Night to matter if there’s no one left to use it.”

She conceded the point with a nod but did not look entirely convinced. She wasn’t entirely wrong, either. Keter had been beaten back before, but what we’d done here with the Night? It didn’t really have a precedent, as far as I knew. It was just that this war with the Dead King wasn’t like the others, even if it was hard to understand. Neshamah was laying it all on the line, this time, knowing it was the best shot at winning he’d ever get.

“How did dear Cordelia’s talks go?” Akua idly asked.

I hummed.

“She’s convinced them,” I said. “Now all that’s left is shaking hands with the dwarves.”

“A most convincing woman, Cordelia Hasenbach,” she mildly said.

I cocked an eyebrow. That hadn’t entirely sounded like a compliment.

“That something you mind now?” I asked.

An assessing look, then she for some reason she looked satisfied.

“Not so long as she doesn’t overstep,” Akua vaguely replied, then offered me a smile.

I frowned at her, unsure what exactly that was supposed to mean. She thumbed the painted crows one last time, then withdrew her hand.

“Are we to depart from Serolen soon, my heart?” she asked.

“Two days at most,” I said. “I am to… speak, before we go, but we will be marching on Keter with reinforcements after.”

By now, the siege should have begun. And there were only a few days left before the Hellgates opened, not that I was too worried about that. Amadeus of the Green Stretch had, once more proving his mind was a steel trap, found a way out of that horror that was more than simply closing the gate. I’d ordered his legacy to be seen through to the end, and it would be. Akua nodded, eyes lingering on me.

“You did not come to tell me this,” she stated, as if she knew it to be a fact.

I grimaced. Sometimes it still surprised me how well she could read me. It had snuck up on me, the way she’d become one of my closest friends. It might be a nightmarishly complicated thing, this relationship, but it was no less deep for that.

“I wanted to see how you are,” I admitted. “Now that it’s done.”

She’d held a godhead in the palm of her hand, for a moment. And bent it to her will. But when she chose to use that power, what she’d done with it… I’d known Masego was her favourite of the Woe, but I’d not seen what she did coming. And even now, it did not feel entirely like a personal decision.

“How lightly you have learned to tiptoe in your old age, dearest,” Akua drawled.

I grunted in displeasure.

“Fine,” I said, eye turning to the crow-adorned tile. “You made a decision, that night.”

Healing a friend over godhood. Once more lending her hand to a ritual that would change the world.

“Do you still stand by it?”

It was one thing to choose in the heat of the moment. But night’s veil had passed and been replaced by the cold light of day. Akua did not answer at first. I snuck a glance at her and found she was staring at where I’d stopped: the crows on the tile.

“You told me once,” Akua said, “that nothing could ever even the balance for the Folly.”

I nodded, but she didn’t see.

“Yes,” I got out.

“I didn’t really understand, then,” Akua admitted. “I saw one hundred thousand lives and thought it was a heavy debt, but not beyond settling.”

She breathed out.

“I learned differently in Praes,” she murmured. “I saw…”

She fell silent.

“It ripples out,” I murmured.

Those full lips stretched mirthlessly.

“It ripples out,” Akua softly agreed. “More was lost than lives that day.”

She looked down at her hand, clenching her fingers.

“It is not a debt I can repay,” she said. “Not even should the rest of my days be spent on the labour. And so, for a time, I thought to do away with the thought entirely.”

“And now?”

She hesitated.

“I like him,” Akua confessed. “Masego. He reminds me of my father in a way that doesn’t sting.”

“So you wanted to help him,” I said.

“All it took was a nudge,” she mused. “I had the knowledge for it, and I was in the right place – at the right time. I felt so easy that the real question was why I shouldn’t do it. And that was when I saw it, Catherine.”

Golden eyes turned to me.

“It’s not about whether the debt is repaid, is it?” she asked. “It never was.”

She laughed, a little bleakly, and my heart clenched at the sound of it.

“It’s about whether you’re the sort of person who’ll try,” Akua said.

I licked my lips.

“Are you?”

“I don’t know,” Akua Sahelian admitted. “But sometimes, I want to be.”

Fifteen thousand. That was the sum of the reinforcements that Sve Noc had agreed to send south to the siege of Keter, though more might follow if Radegast’s victories continued to rack up. I was grateful they could rustle up that many to spare, after the rough year Serolen had suffered, and did not hide it from my patrons. Even more of a boon was the Might meant to lead the expedition.

“I swore in Iserre, Losara Queen,” Mighty Rumena reminded me.

“Before nine years have passed,” I muttered.

“Keter’s gates will lie broken,” the old drow finished. “I will keep not break my oath.”

“It wouldn’t be the same without you,” I honestly replied.

The sincerity seemed to take it aback, which was rare enough I rather enjoyed it. Beyond the mustered sigils, though, there was another duty left to me in Serolen. Much had happened in the city since I came, and though in time the words set down my scribes – which would follow me south, as part of the Losara contingent under Ivah – would spread among the people, there was a need for a more settled conclusion. An end to the journey that had begun on the outskirts of the Gloom and taken us all the way here to Serolen, the entwining of my fate with the Firstborn’s coming to the end of the road. All we had left now was Keter, but I owed more than that before my mantle was passed to another.

And so the Firstborn gathered to the Garden of Dead Gods.

A tide of grey flesh as far as the eye could see, from the lowest of nisi to the heights of the Ten Generals. One hundred thousand, two? I could not tell, and the Sisters whispered in my ear that it didn’t matter. I was First Under the Night: sooner or later, all drow heard my words. I had not needed to carry word north of the reforms of Iserre for them to bear fruit. So I stood before a people not mine – sometimes close, but never quite – and leaned on my staff. The eyes on me were not only those of the few, the Mighty, but of all who dwelled in Serolen. How many of these nisi and dzulu had never so much as caught a glimpse of the First Under the Night before today?

It was not my place to fix these people, to mend their broken pieces. I did not understand them enough for that, and even if I did would they want the meddling of my hand? No, I had been chosen as the herald of the Crows because I was the stranger. The dark mirror through which they could look at themselves, the asker of questions. And that was what I had to offer them, today.

“In the depths of Twilight,” I said, “I asked you something.”

A pause.

“Are you worthy?”

Sa vrede. And that harsh question I had once castigated the Mighty through was no longer simply that. It was a ritual now, now, something that they owned more than me. And Ivah, oh Ivah had made something true of it. Something worth believing in. Sa vrede, I asked them. Cera aine, the Firstborn answered, as they once had in Twilight.

Maybe tomorrow.

“You have come,” I said, “a long way. But a long way yet lies ahead of you.”

I looked at the ocean of faces, the shining eyes and those that Night had not yet silvered.

“So I must ask you,” I said. “Who do you want to be, children of the Ever Dark?”

I looked behind me, at the god slain with a spear.

“Will you reach for the Heavens with hungry hands?” I asked. “There is glory in the Old War, let none tell you otherwise. In defiance against the tyranny of the sun.”

I looked at the blue sky above, the endless expanse that held so much promise.

“Or perhaps you would take the winding path,” I said. “Make accords, raise stones. There, too, there is glory – in casting aside the old empire to make one greater. To conquer peace as you have conquered war.”

My one-eyed gaze swept them.

“I ask you again, children of the Ever Dark,” I said, voice echoing. “Who do you want to be?”

Some answered, words or curses or oaths, but they were few and one answer was louder than all the rest: silence.

“That, too, is an answer,” I gently told them.

And not a bad one. Ignorance was a blank slate.

“The choices are yours,” I told them, warned them. “So hear me now-”

I extended my arms, encompassing all the world around us.

“These are no longer the Burning Lands,” I said. “Do not look back, for there is no path there to be found. Your home is here, and so you receive the greatest of gifts: in this strange land, your fate is your own.”

I leaned forward, smiling toothily.

“Struggle and rise,” I told them. “Struggle and fall. But, above all, struggle.”

I struck the ground with my staff and the earth shivered,

“Today,” I told them, “you have nothing.”

Or so little, I thought, that there was hardly a difference.

“But tomorrow? Tomorrow is an empire there for your taking.”

They were an old people, the Firstborn, but made young again. Let them not waste that chance.

“So go out into the world, children of the Night, and carry with you my blessing and my curse.”

I laughed, and thousands shivered.

“May you ever get what you deserve.”