A Practical Guide to Evil

“Biting the hand that feeds you is another way to feed.”

– Dread Emperor Vindictive II

There were seventeen different repositories of books in the Arsenal.

It was a frankly absurd amount and that number didn’t even account the private collections some scholars, priests, mages and sundry Named had brought with them. The amount of knowledge held within these walls could be staggering to think about. There were a few places on Calernia where there might be greater collections, like the Tower in Ater or the House of Ink and Parchment in Delos, but those were fewer than five and even those would not draw from so many places and scholarly traditions as the Arsenal had. Several of the libraries were restricted to individuals assigned to official Grand Alliance projects and some held knowledge dangerous enough only a handful of people would ever be allowed to enter them, but we were not headed into the depths of this maze of a hidden fortress: the miscellaneous stacks were, in fact, a repository even guards had access to.

“People around here call them the Stacks of This and That,” Archer told me.

She’d fallen into to my right and Adjutant to my left as the three of us abandoned the eating hall and headed towards where the Doddering Sage was most likely to be at this hour.

“So it’s the dumping grounds for everything that doesn’t fit into another repository,” I said.

And wasn’t either potentially useful or dangerous, I didn’t add. Those books our people were most careful about leaving lying around.

“Might have started out this way, but it’s a different beast now,” Archer said. “It’s one of the largest rooms in the Arsenal and it’s filled with little alcoves. Now there’s half a hundred little secret nooks where people can sit with a cup of something, hide for a secret talk or a fuck or even just a quiet nap.”

“Wouldn’t the custodians put an end to that?” I said, eyebrow cocked.

While I found it oddly charming that even in a place as alien as the Arsenal people were finding ways to claw back a piece of normality from the world, at the end of the day the stacks had an actual purpose.

“I expect there aren’t enough of them to make a proper attempt,” Adjutant said. “There’s been two written requests to increase the people assigned to these stacks, since they frequently get their people temporarily poached for other work.”

I’d probably seen one of those requests and simply put it out of my mind within moments of reading it, I silently admitted to myself. Throwing more coin and people at something like the miscellaneous stacks wouldn’t have even warranted a second look when there were only so many of either those to go around and so many more important matters requiring them.

“It doesn’t seem to be causing trouble,” I finally said.

I was willing to let sleeping dogs lie, if the only consequence of letting this go on was the existence a few discreet places for people to wind down. Gods knew even Hasenbach’s financial wizardry had its limits, and I wasn’t going to be sending more coin this way if I could avoid it. The Arsenal cost near as much as one of the war fronts to maintain, which was a damned burden on the treasury even if it was a necessary one. The three of us kept a brisk pace as we passed through the central nest of winding hallways that was the Knot, the occasional pack of scholars in coloured robes falling silent as we passed by. A few recognized Indrani and greeted her, either through actual greetings or hastily taking a turn leading away from her, but to my amusement Hakram drew the eye more than I. I wasn’t wearing the Mantle of Woe and my face was not well-known here, while he was a towering orc in attention-catching blackened plate.

We headed down through a set of broad stairs towards the part of the Arsenal known as the Stump. Named for its stout build, low ceilings and the fact that it was where the leftovers of more important places ended up, it reminded me of the old Proceran keeps sometimes found up north. Except the stone here was new and utterly bare, like it’d been conjured up out of thin air, and there was a… scent in the air. Almost like metal, but not quite. It was everywhere in the Arsenal, I thought, but stronger here than anywhere else. It smelled of work done through sorcery, and the taste of it had seeped into every breath I took. We took a right on a crossroads where the other path would have, as the carving on the wall indicated, led us to the Repository.

“You’ve met the Doddering Sage before,” I said, breaking the silence.

I glanced at Archer and found the trace of a frown on her brow.

“Met is a strong word,” Indrani shrugged. “It wasn’t one of his good days.”

“He grows… confused, as I understand it,” I said.

“He’s an interesting fellow,” she replied, “but his conversation loops back around after a bit. He does not realize. Sharp, though, when he’s there. Or so Zeze says, anyway. He must have been quite something in his prime.”

Or he was a skilled liar and thought it in his interest for others to believe him as past said prime, I thought. Though Indrani could be frightfully perceptive at times, she was not flawless in her judgements. None of us were.

“Anything I should worry of?” I asked.

She considered that for a moment.

“I can’t place his accent,” Indrani said. “More like he doesn’t have one, and he speaks at least four languages.”

Maybe not Proceran, then. Most Named tended to be polyglots, but in that regard both heroes and villains from the Principate tended to be lacking. It wasn’t a reflection of any inherent inferiority but rather of the fact that most of them tended to be regional and might genuinely never meet someone who didn’t speak their native tongue throughout their entire life. Then again the old man was a sage, even if a doddering one, and that implied a certain knack for the scholarly. Something to keep in mind, anyway. A walk down a stunted little corridor brought us to broad open doors, and a carving in the wall spelling out Miscellaneous Works Repository in three languages: Chantant, Lower Miezan and Ceseo. There was a bureau buried under an avalanche of books just pas the doors, and a harried-looking young man behind it who was frowning at an open volume by magelight. Someone had written department of this and that in chalk on the side, as well as the even cheekier ring if you need a custodian, we would like one as well I noted with a suppressed smile. We entered and as Archer took the initiative to go speak to the young man I took a moment to study our surroundings.

After the description of this being dumping grounds for every other library, I’d expected some sort of rampant chaos with but it wasn’t anything like that. The magelight globes hanging from the low ceiling shone instead down on cramped but neat paths of shelves filled to the brim with books of all shapes and sizes, Chalk slates haphazardly distributing revealing some arcane library reference symbols and broad themes to swaths of the collection to which I saw no rhyme not reason: history of fish, probably untrue sat side by side with Arlesite romance and both were across an entire stack filled with travel journal, but metaphorical. There was not a single lit flame within here, but magelights in glass globes had been tied to tongs of leather in a way that made it so they could both be worn and used as a handheld lantern. The impressive part, though, was the size of this place.

It was larger than the throne room in Laure, at the very least, and every spare inch seemed to be used by either stacks or wagon-sized wicker baskets filled with books not yet classed. I could hide an entire company of legionaries in here, I thought, and not a soul would notice until the goblins got bored. While I’d been lost in my contemplations, Archer had apparently gotten what she needed from the young man at the bureau – who was now, I noticed, staring at me with fear and awe while trying very hard to pretend he’d gone back to reading his book. I winked at him, then turned to Indrani.

“So?” I asked.

“He’s in there,” Archer said. “Though Gods only know where. Last sighting was apparently near the ‘fluorescent, neither flora nor fauna’ stacks.”

“Stacks,” I repeated. “As in, we have multiple of those?”

“It’s important to look on the bright side of life, Catherine,” Indrani grinned at me, then winked. “You know, ‘cause fluorescent means-”

“You are the worst person I know,” I informed her in disgust.

Ugh, puns. At least when the sappers made one of those, something usually exploded not long after. That was as close as redeeming such atrocity against the laws of Gods and men could be had. It was a true shame the Sisters weren’t willing to allow that in the holy book, but I’d just have to keep suggesting it. Maybe some sort of appendix, I mused.

“But I don’t expect we’ll have too hard a time finding him,” I continued, “will we, Adjutant?”

“That’s about as clever as her pun,” Hakram told me. “You just didn’t wink afterwards, so it was less glaringly terrible.”

We both ignored Indrani’s outraged noises.

“Everybody’s a fucking critic these days,” I muttered. “Fine. My lord Adjutant, kindly use your aspect to search for the Doddering Sage until we have obtained his presence.”

“Well, since you asked so nicely,” Adjutant gravelled, sounding amused.

I found I was swallowing a grin. Gods, how was it that I’d missed those assholes so much? Without any more need for verbally jostling, Adjutant called on one of three crystallized manifestations of his Name. Find was Adjutant’s most subtle aspect, and in truth one of the most nuanced I’d ever heard of: much like with Hakram himself, the apparent simplicity hid remarkable depth. While it could be used to significantly accelerate searched for anything material, whether living or not, it had more abstract uses as well. They tied into the way the aspect itself functioned, in my opinion. For example, after we hit the first crossroads Hakram closed his eyes and called on his aspect again before taking a swift left. This was not the act of finding information from a book where we knew it was or picking out a woman from a crowd: he was, in effect, going on nothing. And still he’d get us to the Doddering Sage, I had no worry whatsoever about that.

Masego had theorized – and Akua seemed to think it a reasonable inference – that what Adjutant was doing was a phenomenon known among diabolists as tapering. It was apparently common among the most intelligent of devils, when they grew ancient enough. It was an inherently inhuman degree of perception born from the fact that such devils could notice and remember ever detail in a way that humans could not and call on a sheer amount of experience physically unattainable by mortals. It allowed those creatures to adapt to wildly different surroundings, people and situations with seeming flawlessness by taking in everything around them and then refining the possibilities to what was the most likely truth. Tapering the noise until all that was left was the true tune. It was why an incubus could take over a Praesi seraglio just as easily as it could break apart a Stygian line-match.

The devil had a degree of perception that could not be matched by humans, and it was helped along by decades if not centuries of learning about the ins and outs of human nature. It was the opinion of those two that Hakram’s aspect essentially allowed him to tap into a similar state for a small amount of time.

Vivienne, on the other hand, had noted she’d seen similar behaviour from the Bumbling Conjurer: providence’s golden son, whose every debacle turned out to be a masterstroke until he ran into a villain so far beyond him providence was buried along with him. I was actually inclined to side with her on this. To my eye, Find looked a lot like discount providence put together for one of Below’s: luck put together from the possible, but only ever a story’s sort of luck. It could get us closer to what we needed, or what was already within our grasp, but it was not a panacea for all our ills and relying on it for answers was putting our lives into the hands of fickle, fickle luck. Regardless of who had the truth of it, though, in practice Adjutant guided us through twists and turns until we were deep within the maze.

Twice we passed hidden nooks, one occupied by a snoring priest on an armchair and the other by an impressive collection of bottles from I confiscated what looked liked genuine Harrow brandy in the name of the throne of Callow, until Hakram’s steps slowed. I cocked my head to the side, taking a whiff of the air. Was that what I thought it was? Huh. I took the lead in turning the corner, stumbling onto my first sight of the Doddering Sage. The old man looked haggard, I thought, taking in the rumpled grey robes and ratty cloth shies, but somehow there was a sense of power to it. A mane of shoulder-length grey hair mixed with would have been a long and luxurious beard, were it not unkempt. The Doddering Sage licked wet red lips and narrowed his amber brown eyes as he caught sight of me in turn, leaning back into a ratty brown armchair. In his hands was the source of the smell I’d caught: a polished little wooden pipe filled with freshly-lit wakeleaf.

“It’s not for you, Constance,” the Doddering Sage told me. “You’re much too young, and this is a fool’s vice besides.”

“Shit,” Archer muttered. “Not a good day.”

I stepped forward, ignoring the comment, and came to lean against the stacks at his side.

“Tell me about it,” I sighed, reached for the pipe I carried in my tunic. “I get headaches if I don’t smoke at least once, nowadays.”

The Doddering Sage watched me produce a small packet of my own wakeleaf – Hanno’s gift, still with me – and stuff my own pipe before passing a palm over it to light it with a touch of black flame.

“Dragonbone,” the old man said, eyes narrowing further. “Expensive. Rare. Dangerous. You are not Constance.”

I breathed in, swallowing the smoke and spat it back out.

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m the Black Queen, and you have answers for me.”

“Do I?” the Doddering Sage said. “How good of me.”

He brusquely snorted, then pulled at his own pipe. I could only watch in envy as he blew a smoke ring, then further showed off by blowing a smaller ring into it.

“Damn, but that is impressive,” I admitted.

“I have a few years of practice on you, Foundling Queen,” the old man smiled, face wreathed in the lasts wisps of his smoke. “You come to me for my eyes, I take it.”

“Do I?” I asked.

When completely out of my depth, I was in no way above smiling meaningfully and saying something mildly cryptic. A truly ridiculous amount of people were almost eager to fall for that.

“That boy of yours, the one with the deadly earnestness, he’ll be a terror one day,” the Sage said, “but he’s a few years short still. That’s why an old sack of bones like me are brought in even when there are all these swaggering youths. I can look, yes I can. But you’ll not hurt Constance, will you? Promise me.”

His lip trembled in sudden emotion, and something in me clenched. He looked fragile, in that moment, though the truth of his fragility was hidden from him. Pity welled up, but I pushed it down. You could be playing me, I thought. And so I’ll offer kindness where I can, but never without keeping a knife in hand.

“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

“Good,” he muttered. “Good. You do remind me of him, you know. Robert. He was kind, but he was not soft.”

I said nothing, for there was nothing to say.

“Perceive,” the Doddering Sage said, and Creation shivered.

I watched him, and saw his eyes had turned pure white – he looked blind, but only a fool would have made that mistake. I felt something skittering across my soul, like a spider against glass, and the old man exhaled.

“Twinned,” he said. “Incipient. You make your own Role, and the Name walks hand in hand with another. I cannot see them, there is… refusal.”

I shivered, fingers clenching around my pipe, and did not believe this for a moment to be the mad ramblings of an old man. Not when my very soul was shivering along with the rest of me, lost and reaching. The Doddering Sage turned towards me abruptly, so quick I thought his head might snap.

“More?” he said, sounding surprised. “You… how? It isn’t yours, where did you take it?”

“What?” I said, leaning forward. “What did I take?”

“A rival?” he muttered. “A thief? A successor? You keep stories within you that neither your ear nor eye ever knew. Shapes and beats and the sound of the knife kissing flesh.”

My pipe tumbled across the floor, though I did not remember dropping it – or catching the Sage’s robes, fists tightening around them as I pulled him closer.

“Focus,” I ordered, voice ringing with power. “The stories, where do they come from?”

My hand was shaking, and the answer was on the tip of my tongue. I knew this, I’d had it since/

/and my eyes were blinking. I pushed down the surge of rage that seize hold of me at the way I just couldn’t seem to remember what I wanted. I would be mistress of my own mind, even if I had to rip out the parts that misbehaved.

“Sage,” I said, “tell me.”

“Reflection,” he whispered, sounding awed. “No, an echo. You stole from her echo, and now it’s in your head. How did you not break?”

I released his robes, stumbling back. Oh. Oh. And at last I remembered, what it was that Masego and I had done in the depths of Arcadia, when we’d harvested the echoes left behind by things that would become gods. He’d learned dark secrets from that, deep magics. And I had/ no you fucking don’t, it’s my mind and I there is only one ruler here. I wrenched the world back from the blankness, wrestled it back into submission. I was kneeling, gasping, and Adjutant’s worried hand was on my shoulder. But it didn’t matter, even as I convulsed and threw up at the feet of the Doddering Sage.

“Cat,” Hakram quietly asked, “can you hear me?”

“Yes,” I laughed. “Yes, I can hear you. And I remember now, what it is I got from the Intercessor.”

The shape of a thousand stories, the tune of the song if not the words. An instinct, one that’d sharpened something already existing into a blade capable of upending old monsters and empires. I wiped my mouth and an apology to the Sage was halfway to my lips when I realized his eyes were closed and he was, seemingly, sleeping. Unearthing what had been waiting in the back of my head had knocked him out, looked like. I rose to my feet, slowly, and allowed Hakram to tuck my cleaned pipe back into my tunic as I leaned against his arm.

“Catherine,” Indrani quietly said, “what the Hells was that?”

“I forced myself to remember something my mind didn’t know how to cope with,” I said. “But it was worth it. I know what’s in the back of my head, and now that I know it can’t be used against me.”

The Augur had told us that the Bard saw in stories, saw all the stories, and that when dealing with Named she was nigh untouchable. But she could be beaten, because the more we knew of her the less power she held over us. And one of these days I would find a set of shackles even her smug immortal ass couldn’t slither her way out of. The first step to that was realizing I’d stolen part of her and made it my own: that was on less surprise for her to pull on me when the time came. With surprising gentleness, Indrani reached out and took my face in hand. She withdrew after touching under my nose, fingers coming away flecked with blood.

“Don’t think too hard, Cat,” she said, sounding worried. “You’re not made of Winter anymore: some things you won’t get back up from.”

“The more I bleed now,” I replied, “the less I’ll bleed when the knives really come out.”

Still, I winced as I wiped away the blood beneath my nostrils. I had the most horrible headache. A glance at the Doddering Sage told me he was still out, so there’d be no more to learn here.

“Find out who the Constance he was talking about is,” I quietly told Hakram. “If she’s still alive, see to it she doesn’t want for anything. If she’s not, see to her descendants.”

I owed the man, for this, and I’d pay my debt in full. He’d have a warm place to stay in after the war, be it in Callow or at Cardinal. That much I could repay, for what I’d learned today and what it had cost him to tell me.

“I’ll see to it,” Adjutant promised.

“I hate to be that girl,” Archer said, “but we’re in the shit now, aren’t we? You said we were here for a revelation, but there wasn’t anything about this that helps us figure out what’s going on here.”

I pushed off of Hakram and took my staff from the stacks where I’d left it propped up against, rolling my shoulder to loosen it. She wasn’t wrong about that, though she wasn’t exactly right either. I found the bottle of Harrow brandy I’d liberated from oppression earlier pressed into my hand, uncorked, and Indrani gave me a steady look.

“Your breath still smells like, you know,” she told me, not unkindly.

Ah. That. Fair enough. I took a long swallow from the bottle, then another until the taste of vomit was quite gone and a pleasant warmth was beginning to settle into by belly.

“Good stuff,” I muttered, passing it back. “Right, so us being the shit. True enough, ‘Drani, but the actually told us exactly what we needed to know before we dipped into my little… gift.”

“He told us things about your Name,” Archer skeptically said. “Which I’ve been curious about, true, but it doesn’t get us out of this mess.”

“Sure it does,” I said, “if you consider that, should we have followed the story as it was offered to us, we’d be learning this quite late. This is our revelation, Archer. We can go back from it.”

Hakram cleared his throat.

“You’re doing that thing again,” he told me, “where you talk to yourself in your head and then expect us to keep up.”

“You usually do, though,” I muttered. “Fine, hear me out then. The three of us are bold investigators for truth and justice-”

“Hungering Gods,” Hakram swore under his breath.

“Yes,” Indrani jeered, “and let them kneel before us, begging abjectly for mercy we will always deny!”

“I’m not going to touch that,” I decided, “so, by going down that road we bite into a story. One that got set out for us to bite because we’re a bad fit for it, so we’ll fail.”

“And we are a bad fit for it, because?” Hakram asked.

“Indrani,” I said, “how many people have you killed this year?”

The ochre-skinned Named hummed.

“Define people,” she finally asked.

“Because that,” I told him.

“So we are avoiding this story,” Adjutant said.

“No,” I said, “if I had something else to slap down instead I might, mind you, but I’ve got nothing. But that doesn’t mean we can’t cheat. The thing is, Hakram, that is a functional story. If we were a band of heroes, we could ride it to the finish.”

“Now you’re just making it too easy,” Indrani reproached.

“For the trap to work,” Adjutant slowly said, “the story has to be… functional for lack of a better term. It is simply us who would not function with it.”

“Yeah,” I said, “which is why we went directly for the Doddering Sage. He was my guess for the guy who, when it looks like we’re about to lose for good, reveals a truth to us and allows us to turn it all around.”

“As heroes are wont to,” the orc nodded.

“Hate to break it to you, Cat, but he didn’t say shit about conspiracies,” Archer pointed out.

“Yes,” I agreed. “He talked, instead, about my Name. Which means someone’s trying to fuck with my Name, or maybe the one ‘twinned’ to it.”

A poetic way to talk about a nemesis, but it fit. For every villain with Destroy, there was a hero with Protect. That was the way the Game of the Gods was played, and I’d be no exception. I cleared my throat.

“Without sounding arrogant-”

“That’d be a first,” Indrani mused.

I flipped her off.

“- at least part of this is meant as a swing at me as well as a broader attack on the Truce and Terms,” I said. “And that rather narrows down who it is we might be fighting against.”

“If you cannot name the swordsman, name the sword,” Archer snorted. “Fair. Only so many people who’d come swinging at you this way. So we’re in a scrap with the Wandering Bard, are we?”

“She’s come out of the woodworks at last,” I grunted in agreement. “And she took her sweet time before she did, ‘Drani, so this isn’t going to be some sloppy half-baked attempt. She’s come for blood, and at the moment she’s winning.”

“The Truce and the Terms are holding,” Adjutant said. “And you have learned valuable information.”

Yeah, I had. Which I would have taken for a victory, if I’d not just learned that part of the instincts that’d driven me to this decision had been ripped out of the old monster I was now facing. Which meant I was about to get taken for a ride, because she’d known about that and until now I hadn’t.

“The Sage is unconscious,” Archer suddenly said.

“But obviously alive, and not a hero besides,” Hakram said. “If stirring conflict is the purpose, that is a weak hand.”

“Shut up,” I said, “both of you. Use your Name.”

I called on Night instead, sharpening my senses to the very limit of what I could bear, and that was when I heard it: hissing sounds. Like a gas being released. At least ten, probably more.

“There is something in the air,” Adjutant growled.

“And I don’t hear anyone out there moving,” Archer said.

Was everyone else out there dead? It might simply be a curse or a deep sleep instead, I mused, though death would likely be easier to arrange. I could not afford to take a moment and ponder how many innocents had likely just been snuffed out as part of a scheme, not when there were more lives on the line, so I tucked that away cleanly.

“The Concocter would be capable of making a brew that can do this,” I said.

“I’ve known her to work with gases, sometimes,” Indrani hesitantly agreed. “But she wouldn’t, Cat.”

“It doesn’t need to be her plan,” I murmured, “just her work. It being used will be quite enough, when heroes stumble into this.”

Because that’d be the logical move, wouldn’t it? If someone was trying to start a fight between Named in the Arsenal, what better way to have a pack of heroes stumble unto me and two of the Woe surrounded by corpses and an unconscious Named. Hells, it was going to be the Mirror Knight and his band wasn’t it? That was the reason that little fucker was here at all: so that the Intercessor would have someone capable of rallying the heroic side of the Arsenal but having no interest in talking this out with me instead of drawing a sword. Any moment now he and the worst possible combination of Named the Bard could muster were going to come in, and I needed to think how I could wiggle out of this mess. The moment the Mirror Knight and the Black Queen came face to face, I decided, this was no longer recoverable. It’d become a conflict between the two of us, and people would have to take sides: even if I won and showed restraint, there was a decent chance the Truce and Terms would collapse in the aftermath of this debacle.

I needed someone to distract the Named coming, and then I needed to start tugging at the other threads of this story until it all came tumbling down and the Intercessor had nothing left to work with.

“People just came in,” Archer murmured, then paused as she pricked her ear. “Five, two in armour.”

“Hakram,” I said, “I need you to do something for me.”

The orc looked at me, then sharply nodded.

“It was my plot,” he agreed. “Will you have already arrested me, or are we fighting?”

I clenched my fist, then slugged him in the side of the face.

“The day I throw any of you under the wheels like that is the day I slit my own throat,” I hissed. “You, Adjutant, are investigating this on the behalf of the Black Queen. You’re going to them for help, because you caught sight of two people running. Do what you can from the inside.”

He took a step back, staggered more by the words than the hit.

“Archer and I are going to make a run for it,” I said. “Make it look good.”

If the Intercessor wanted to make me the villain of this fucking story, then she ought to have been more careful what she wished for.