Only Villains Do That

It was not one of the best trips back to North Watch, but definitely wasn’t the longest or most difficult; that honor still went to the previous one, when I’d been escorting most of the population of Cat Alley, along with their various hangers-on. This group was smaller, and while the kids slowed us considerably, the ladies were experienced wilderness survivalists and did a great deal to compensate. We didn’t rush, taking frequent breaks and pausing overnight to let the children get enough sleep, and in the end made it in a day and a half.

As it turned out, some of the young noblewomen were quite good with children, keeping them engaged in conversation and playing games as we walked, once we were far enough from civilization for that to be safe. Some were more aloof, which I well understood; kids can be stressful if you don’t know how to handle them. I sure as hell didn’t, so I just talked to them like I would to an adult except less aggressively than I talked to most adults. Which, quite accidentally, seemed to work very well. They responded positively to it, anyway. As we gained some distance from Gwyllthean, the kids started lightening up noticeably. Walking in nature can do that for a person, especially if they’re not used to it. Even if the nature was Ephemeral seashell-based alien nonsense.

That was only my own perception, anyway. To them, it was just nature.

By far the worst part was the looming specter of Lady Gray, whom we all expected to jump out of every shadow. She never made an appearance, though. Not in the Gutters, and at no point during our journey back. This, needless to say, was stressful. Lady Gray was doubly unpredictable, both because she was a more adept maneuverer than I at the best of times, and because she appeared to have gone entirely off her rocker. She just…killed five children to fuck with me, and then vanished.

Undoubtedly some of that had to do with the immense amount of pressure Rhydion had laid down on her while I was seeing to the dead. Still. I hated not knowing where someone like that was, or what she was up to.

“We’re almost there,” I said. “Should see it within the hour, maybe less.”

“Less, I think,” Aster added. “We’re closer than that.”

“I’ll take your word for it, every patch of this hell forest looks the same as every other to me.”

Nazralind, who had chosen that moment to ride up to the front of the column with us, rolled her eyes but said nothing. Aenit, the other person in the lead with me, just nodded, eyes ahead. She didn’t really talk unless she had something specific to say that she judged worth the effort.

I had wondered, initially, why Aenit hadn’t been among the kids Gilder considered trustworthy to recruit, and whether I might be making a mistake by relying on her, but since then I’d figured it out. He probably just hadn’t known her that well. She was generally not interested in being known, and hadn’t been very sociable even with the other Rats who’d come with us. Aenit had latched onto me as a source of…I dunno, safety, I guess? She still didn’t say much, but watched and listened and kept close by. Not unlike Benit, but more intense.

“Biribo, how’re you doing?” I asked.

“No signs, boss. I’ll letcha know immediately if something comes up, never fear.”

“Yeah, I assumed you would,” I said. “I meant, how are you doing? Need to take a break?”

Biribo, who’d been sitting on my shoulder for the whole trip rather than hovering around as usual, looked up at me in plain surprise. So did Aster.

“Uh… Thanks, boss, but it’s okay. This isn’t stressful or anything, just takes concentration.”

“Okay,” I nodded. “Honestly, at this point if you haven’t spotted any signs, it’s probably moot. Either she’s not out there, or she’s too good for us to catch.”

“Yeah…” His wings buzzed once and then fell still. “I know. Makes me feel better to keep watch, though.”

“Sure, that’s fine. Just saying, you have permission to let up if you want.”

“Thanks, boss.”

We’d been brainstorming a way to penetrate Lady Gray’s stealth; his familiar senses didn’t beat that dagger’s power by default, but we’d come up with something that became feasible once we were inside the khora forest. Biribo could sense people and other lifeforms, and could also detect the physical shape of his surroundings, the skill that enabled him to find hidden compartments. So he’d spent the trip actively concentrating on our surroundings, alert for any signs of the underbrush or ground being disturbed in a way that seemed like a human’s presence could have caused it, with no apparent human present.

I wasn’t pinning all my hopes on this, and wouldn’t have even if he hadn’t warned me that this was a gambit and far from foolproof. The sheer amount of data he was processing was more than a human brain could handle even if a human had the necessary senses. We didn’t, though, and he did; a familiar was apparently a sort of conduit for raw information, so it stood to reason his means of cognition was different. Still, the forest was just too complex for this to work perfectly. Biribo had spotted no consistent patterns that looked like a person tailing us, but there had been false alarms at a rate of at least one per hour as things shifted from wind, water, erosion, or who knew what else.

He’d also identified people who held still as we passed. Not far from the city he reported a small bandit gang whose position I asked him to remember for later. They had apparently taken one look at the cloaked women and gwynneks and decided they wanted none of this. Gwynneks, I was informed, differed from horses in that they didn’t spook easily and would go fiercely on the attack if their riders were assaulted. Looking at those claws and huge murder beaks, I wouldn’t have wanted to mix it up with that, either. Farther into the forest, Biribo twice reported small catfolk hunting parties which held still as we passed, clearly considering us a danger. We never caught a glimpse of them.

And I still couldn’t be absolutely sure that Lady Gray wasn’t following us home. We kept to a strict guard protocol: no fewer than four adults on watch at all times, positioned in each other’s view and far enough apart that anybody stabbing one wouldn’t be able to reach a second before they raised an alarm.

But nothing happened. The anticipation was a constant, oppressive stress.

“Do you think the Viryans describe themselves as Evil?” Aster asked suddenly, causing the rest of us to turn and stare at her. She shrugged, gazing ahead with a pensive expression. “Biribo’s talked like that a few times. I know everybody I grew up around equated Viryans with evil, but… Well, it really resonated with me, Lord Seiji, that speech you made the first time we met. About why people end up as bandits, how a lot of hate is directed at other victims of a bad system to keep people turned against each other instead of the system itself. Honestly, that makes more sense to me than the idea of people just…just doing wrong. The more I think about it, the more it seems like everybody’s horrible behavior has some reason behind it, that they’re short-sighted and do things because they don’t consider consequences or other people, not because they’re evil.”

“That sounds like what Rhydion was talking about,” Nazralind observed.

Aster shrugged again. “Yeah, well, he made a lot of sense.”

“Virya called herself the Goddess of Evil right to my face,” I said. “Of course, Virya is definitely crazy and probably a liar, so take that for whatever it’s worth.”

“Some Viryans embrace Evil as a label,” said Biribo. “Others reject the entire concept as meaningless sophistry. They all have differing opinions of what it even means.”

“What do you think evil is, Lord Seiji?” Nazralind asked.

I could sense a lot more eyes and ears trained on me than just the few of us here chatting at the head of the column.

“Evil is whatever it’s easiest not to understand,” I declared. “People always want to categorize things, and people tend to reject out-groups as some amorphous other that can then be despised and not really considered people. And obviously that’s super useful to whoever’s in charge. Just keep your subjects angry at someone you can call Evil, someone they won’t know any better about or try to comprehend, and you can keep them from turning on you no matter how badly you deserve it. Just look at Fflyr Dlemathlys and what’s evil here, which is practically everything because it takes a lot of misdirected anger to keep this shitshow of a country from devouring its rulers. Goblins, whores, women in general, lowborn in general, Viryans… Not foreigners, which is extremely telling. Foreigners are an easy and common target for rulers using this trick—except in a country that’s heavily dependent on foreign trade, and bordered by a large militaristic power that might not appreciate that kind of rhetoric.” I channeled a huge weight of contempt into one expressive snort. “I tend to agree with those Viryans Biribo was talking about. Evil is a made-up concept. It’s politically useful, but it’s not a real thing.”

“I was just thinking,” Aster said quietly, “about the…the contrast. You talked before about, you know, banditry and people falling through the cracks of a failed society. But when you talked to that last bandit gang we took over, it was… It was all about the highborn being gratuitously vile for no reason. Just, evil for the sake of evil.”

“Like Lady Gray,” Aenit said suddenly. I reached down to pat her head.

“Or like Archlord Caludon,” I added. “No offense, Naz. The Captain told me about the…seige.”

“You’re not gonna offend me,” Nazralind said, grimacing. Newneh, ever sensitive to her rider’s mood, made a low trilling noise deep in her throat and fluffed her neck feathers slightly. “Trust me, I lived in the palace with them. Politics is politics, but Uncle Caludon and Aunt Nazfryn are completely insane. Nobody’s ever going to be safe anywhere they have influence.”

“Nazfryn?” I grinned up at her. “Were you named for her, by any chance?”

“Can we not dredge that up?” she asked plaintively.

Aster cleared her throat loudly to steer the conversation back on track. “I just wonder, Lord Seiji… Which do you think it is?”

“Which? Ah, you think there’s some contradiction there?”

“Well…isn’t there? They’re sort of opposite interpretations, aren’t they?”

“I would say, rather…different manifestations of the same basic problem.”

I paused, drawing in a breath and letting it out slowly as I considered my next words. Nazralind and Aster were both watching me; Aenit was looking ahead and minding her feet on the broken path, but I could practically feel the pressure of her attention. And that of the riders and orphans behind me, not to mention Goose, Lamm, and Twigs.

“Let me take you back in time,” I said finally. “Back before the dawn of history, all the way back when humanity first began to be recognizably human. Before writing, before metal, before stoneworking. When our ancestors were only a few centuries separated from the animals from which they’d evolved. They were naked and hairy, their language little more than patterns of grunts; they’d had simple bone tools for a few generations, and fire for even fewer. There were no cities, no farms, and definitely no isekai offshoots like elves or goblins or animal people. Just the original humans, barely separated from the beasts.”

“Some of the creation accounts say elves came first,” Nazralind said, arching an eyebrow.

“Naz, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but humanity developed on the world I’m from. We have records of our evolution from lesser life forms; we know how it happened, where it happened, and how long it took. And on Earth, there are no elves. Elves are a myth there, and those myths are undoubtedly the template the goddesses used to create them from human stock when they arrived on Ephemera, along with probably every other sapient race here. Fflyr highborn are recognized by having elven blood, right? Then if humans and elves can interbreed, they are by definition the same species. A species which is from Earth, not Ephemera, whose origins are understood by science, not creation stories.”

“Oof.” Despite that, she grinned; I got the feeling Nazralind was hard to ruffle and not very invested in her culture’s beliefs, which made sense considering her backstory. “That kind of talk would get you in a lot of trouble among the movers and shakers in Dlemathlys.”

“I intend to do a lot worse to them than hurt their feelings, trust me. Now where was I? Ah, yes, the first people sitting around the first campfires. Picture two of them: primitive, naked hunters armed only with pieces of bone, grunting barely intelligible proto-words at each other as they relax over dinner after a long day. Let’s call them Burp and Fart.”

That brought me a rash of giggles from my audience, or at least one particular segment. I turned to wink over my shoulder at the kids. Ah, toilet humor, the foolproof crowd-pleaser—so long as your crowd is under ten years old. The ladies looked significantly less impressed, but that was fine. It wasn’t like I was trying to date any of them.

“Now, Burp has had a less successful day of hunting, so he’s hungry. He reaches over and grabs a handful of Fart’s dinner. So, to dissuade Burp from such pilfering, Fart clonks him over the head with a bone club.”

By that point several of the kids were cackling in pure glee. I didn’t think it was all that funny, but damn it was good to hear them laugh after what we’d all been through just the day before. I paused to let the juvenile mirth subside before ruining the fun.

“And that is all of human history ever since. Somebody wants something, they try to take it, and whoever they try to take it from hits them back. That can play out in an infinite number of ways, all of which boil down to who can hit harder, but that basic story is the only story.”

“Wow, you’re in fine form today,” Aster commented. “Grim and reductive.”

“That’s one of those criticisms people make when they don’t like what I’m saying but can’t prove me wrong.”

She gave me a vintage Aster Look but said nothing, which I took for a concession.

“That’s the pattern, though, like it or not,” I said more softly. “Burp is hungry, so he steals some meat. Fart doesn’t want to share, so he clubs Burp. The rest is just…scaling, and context. Burp is being pressured by a dark goddess to conquer a country, so he liberates a bunch of women and causes a great big inconvenience for Fart’s criminal empire. Fart doesn’t like that, so she uses her magic dagger to murder five children and leave them where Burp will find them.”

“And then Burp nails a man to a wall,” said Goose from behind me.

“You’ll never catch me claiming to be anything more than the same pile of shambling meat as everyone else,” I said curtly. “It’s the same with the highborn. Their actions are sadistic at the expense of profitability, but for the same reason. Everything about the system that supports them depends on the lie that they’re inherently better than the people they rule over. A different, more elevated category of being. Which they obviously aren’t, and even worse, on some level they know that. The mental circuits that recognize other people are honed by billions of years of evolution and too deeply embedded in the mind to be fully excised by mere ideology. The highborn oppress and persecute and slaughter the lowborn, not only to keep them in their place, but because they’re flailing against the enemy they can never defeat: their own buried self-awareness. The truth that they aren’t better or even

meaningfully different. Same piles of shambling meat; we’re all just Burp and Fart around the campfire. People who are deeply invested in believing otherwise are at war with reality itself. No wonder they flail around and spread as much misery and suffering as they possibly can. They’ve driven themselves completely insane.”

I drew in a breath and let it out slowly, tilting my head back to watch the khora fronds passing by overhead.

“People become more sophisticated. They do not become better.”

“I think…you’re wrong,” Nazralind said slowly. “Or…not wrong, exactly, but seeing only half the picture. The thing is…people do get better. Maybe not in the deep animal recesses of our brains, but we have evolved morally. That’s what the concept of morality is. Just like we’ve developed knowledge and technology to make life easier, we’ve developed philosophy, science, law, justice. Just like we have craftsmen and specialists because the trades are too complex for everyone to know how to do everything, we have priests, scholars, and judges. People do want to be better, Lord Seiji. I believe they will, if given the opportunity. Isn’t that what all of society is about? Surely that’s the entire point of it.”

“Yeah?” I shrugged. “Look around you at the world and let me know how you think that’s going.”

“Fflyr Dlemathlys is a wreck of a country,” she said frankly. “I don’t think it’s fair to judge the potential of all thinking people everywhere by one really bad example. Dount is impoverished and violent, and also Gwyllthean lacks a university and even a proper sewer system. Now that you’ve pointed it out, I suspect all these things are connected.”

“How do you make people better, Nazralind?” I asked. “I’m not trying to be glib, I’m genuinely interested in ideas. In theory, I’m supposed to end up ruling a lot of people, and I want them to have the best lives they can. I can’t see any point in ruling any other way. It’s a big problem and I have no fucking clue how to solve it.”

She winced. “I’m a Fflyr Highlady, Lord Seiji. If anybody who taught me knew anything about proper governance, I bet none of us would be here.”

“A university and a sewer system would be nice,” said Aster. “Though abolishing indenture and the caste system would be better starting points.”

“Dark Lord Yomiko did that, y’know,” Biribo said suddenly. “When these islands were under the control of the Savindar Empire, light elves used to be slaves by definition, and the same elf-blooded humans who are now highborn were automatically second-class citizens.”

“Well, everybody knows that, but hold up,” said Nazralind. “The Dark Lord did that?”

“Yeah, I bet the Sanorites don’t mention that part,” he said, flicking out his tongue at her. “Funny thing is they could and it wouldn’t cast her in a much better light. Yomiko found slavery personally objectionable and ordered it to cease. Nobody dared defy anything she commanded because her soldiers were fanatically loyal to her and got very rough with anybody who disobeyed the Dark Lord. So, the elves were freed, which barely did them any favors. Yomiko was… Well, she was an incredibly powerful fighter, and a gifted general, but pretty clueless about civilian governance. She was summoned right into the heart of Savindar, was immediately recognized and propped up by the Empire, and was accustomed to having its bureaucratic mechanisms execute her will.”

“That sounds pretty fucking nice,” I grumbled. “Thanks, Virya.”

“Yeah, well, it raised problems when she ordered the empire of haughty dark elves to do stuff they didn’t want to do, like free the light elf slaves in the Fflyr Isles. They complied to the letter, and so the light elves and their partially-human relatives were…freed. Turned out into the wilderness with only the clothes they were wearing, if they were lucky. They turned to banditry to survive, because what the hell else were they gonna do? Which of course was what the dark elves wanted.”

Nazralind grimaced. “Right. Even if you’re not allowed to persecute elves for being elves, you can do pretty much whatever you want to bandits. But then came Hara’s Sin.”

“Whose what?” I demanded.

“Satoshi Hara was the Hero at that time,” Naz said, taking over the narrative. “He had the backing of the Lancor Empire. Really, that whole Dark Crusade ended up being a proxy war between Savindar and Lancor, with each propping up a Champion. Lord Hara destroyed the landbridge that North Watch was supposed to be guarding—the only connection between these islands and Savindar. The only other one is the remaining northern landbridge from Dount, but that’s a long way around and more importantly is blocked off by Godspire, which does not allow armies to pass through its territory.”

“Why is that called Hara’s Sin, then?” I asked. “By you lot, I mean. Sounds like he won the war for you.”

“Destroying a landbridge is the Great Sin,” Aster said gravely. “It irrevocably divides up the world, disrupting trade and travel at best, and carving nations apart in many cases. It’s the most severely punished crime on Ephemera. In any country.”

“Hara got away with it,” added Naz, “because he was the Hero, because he had the unconditional support of Lancor…and even so, only because they won. Lancor lost a lot of diplomatic credibility over that, which is one of the reasons Dlemathlys ended up an independent state instead of an Imperial province. I bet Hara was also in hot water with the Imperial government and the Radiant Temple, but those are more details that the history I learned didn’t cover.”

“Oh, you can bet there was trouble,” Biribo agreed. “Exactly the kind that gets swept under the rug.”

Nazralind nodded. “So, Shylverrael was cut off and the remaining dark elves and survivors of Yomiko’s armies retreated there. That’s the reason we have naga and harpies on this island. Shylverrael itself is incredibly defensible; attempts to attack it have always been shrugged off with almost no effect. With no reinforcements coming from Savindar and Lancoral forces pushing north, the last Viryans went on the defensive. The Fflyr bandits became rebels, and eventually the Clans we have know.”

“Exiles and bandits,” I mused. “Rebels and conquerors.”

“And now it comes full circle,” Aster agreed, nodding.

“History really is a wheel,” said Nazralind.

“And somehow,” I added, “nobody ever fucking learns that this is what happens when you oppress people. Can you imagine how it would have gone down if the dark elves hadn’t been shitty to the light elves in the first place? Lancor would have found no sympathetic foothold here and this might still be Savindar territory.”

Aster gave me a sidelong look. “So you’re saying that cruelty and brutality are counterproductive?”

I found, to my immense displeasure, that I didn’t have a ready answer to that.

“Hey, boss,” said Biribo, rescuing me, “while we’re speaking of Lancor and Savindar and Shylverrael and the last Dark Crusade, I think I got an answer to the question you asked me.”

“The…? Biribo, I ask you hundreds of questions a day, that’s what you’re here for.”

“I meant the one I couldn’t easily answer. You asked me about spells or artifacts or anything that could counter Lady Gray’s dagger, remember?”

“Aha! Yes, go on.”

“So, I do know of one. An artifact. It’s a bow—it conjures its own arrows when the string is drawn, fires with unerring accuracy even at targets in motion, and its arrows are even empowered to pierce artifact armor. That’s really rare, boss; artifacts that specifically counter the defense of other artifacts are highly unusual. Normally, duels between Blessed with Might are puzzle fights where everybody tries to figure out how their special abilities can be cleverly applied to counter the other guy’s. Straight up ‘fuck your armor, get shot’ is a real game-changer.”

“But…Lady Gray doesn’t have armor,” Aster protested. “Or at least, that’s not the trouble we’re having with her.”

“Yeah,” Biribo said patiently, “if there was a straightforward counter to that dagger specifically it’d’ve been the first thing I mentioned. I was just thinking, the thing has anti-artifact properties, and unerring aim. That doesn’t directly apply to shooting an invisible target, but…if we get clever, it could possibly be made to.”

“I see what you’re getting at,” I said, frowning. That didn’t sound like a very applicable match-up to me, but he’d told me up front there weren’t going to be any immediately accessible options. “Wait, let me guess. You were prompted to bring this up by that conversation about history… The dark elves have this bow, don’t they.”

Biribo lifted off my shoulder to buzz alongside me, flicking his tongue out. “Yeah. It was one of the treasures of Savindar they assigned here when they set out to colonize Dlemathlys. The Empire was fully invested in that; they even bought a miracle from Virya to establish Shylverrael as the capital of their new client state.”

“Wait, Shylverrael is a miracle-built city?” Aster demanded.

“Oh, yeah,” Nazralind answered with a grin. “I’m not surprised you haven’t heard; that’s exactly the kind of thing the Clans don’t want spread among the lowborn. Shylverrael isn’t just impossible to conquer, at least for any armed force Dlemathlys has ever cobbled together. It is easily the most beautiful and functional city in this country. Makes Fflyrdylle look like a cluster of hovels, let alone Gwyllthean. Supposedly it’s every bit as glorious as Lannitar itself. The Clans would like everybody to forget it exists, especially since the dark elves there haven’t made a single aggressive move since the last Dark Crusade.”

Something about that rang alarm bells in my mind. Admittedly, I was the furthest possible thing from an expert, but from what little I had been told, Viryans and “not making aggressive moves” was a contradiction in terms.

“And nobody knows what’s been happening in there for the last century and a half,” added Biribo, “but the fact they’ve been hunkered down and not having wars or adventures suggests that none of the things which would cause a priceless artifact to get lost will have gone down.”

“So they still have my bow,” I murmured. “The problem is…getting it from them. Which means dealing with dark elf politics. Thoughts?”

“Well, boss, I suspect that’s at least part of the reason Virya summoned you right into North Watch. Shylverrael is isolated and stagnant, which is basically the worst fate possible for a Viryan society. It’s one city, the surrounding lake it’s built on, and the khora swamp around that. So, a small and desperate population, relatively speaking. Out of all the nominally Viryan societies on Ephemera, the Shylver are probably the least powerful and most desperate, and the one you’d have the easiest time taking over. But easiest doesn’t mean easy. The other side of that coin is that the arrival of a Dark Lord means the end of uncontested power for whoever holds it there now. I should warn you, Viryan countries have tried to assassinate Dark Lords for exactly that reason.”

“Uh huh. And how do I accomplish all this before Lady Gray either attacks North Watch or gets finished off by the adventurers Rhydion’s riled up?”

Biribo ducked lower in the air as if to make himself less of a target. “Uh, boss, realistically speaking, you…don’t. I told you there weren’t any good options! This is the least terrible one I could think of. They only get worse from here.”

I was just swelling up to say something which I’m sure would have been pithy and very educational for the children following us when I heard it. So did Newneh, the gwynnek raising her head and chirping a warning to her rider.

“Ah!” I grinned, craning my neck to peer up through khora branches. There it was—the distant battlements of North Watch, and the frantic barking of Junko racing toward us. “Well, all that can be dealt with later. Kids, ladies, we’re home.”