Chapter 37

I’m not going to sit here and pretend that some killings are more righteous than others. There are degrees of necessity. There are degrees of justification. None of that erases the fact that you’re exterminating a life, however vile and twisted it may be. To take a life is never a righteous act.

Do not, however, make the mistake of assuming the inverse is true. Intent matters.

If Kaze slashed Deela’s throat in her rage, no matter how well earned that rage was, no matter how badly Deela deserved it, it would have been an act of murder. That sort of thing taints your soul in ways we don’t fully understand. What we do understand is that murder is the first footfall on a truly slippery slope.

That was Flir’s intent all along. She had to know how miserable Deela was making Kaze’s life. That was the point. Kaze respected Lady Flir for teaching her magic, maybe even loved her for it. At the end of the day, though, she was still as purehearted as anyone in her position could be.

When Kaze killed, she killed out of necessity. She didn’t torment her prey. She didn’t enjoy making them suffer. Whenever possible, she made their end as brief and merciful as she could, and that was only if she couldn’t find a way to avoid it.

Flir needed more than Kaze’s respect and love. She needed to twist her into the same sort of broken, evil thing she had become. Deela was simply the tool she used, a tool so infuriating that anyone less dedicated to their ideals would have murdered them long ago. The calculated humiliation, the undermining, the backstabbing, that was all part of the plan.

Kaze was right. She couldn’t kill Deela.

On the other hand, I could. Breaking a tool isn’t righteous. It’s not something I’m inclined to get worked up over, either. Sure, I was angry that she hurt my friend, but I didn’t pull that trigger with hate in my heart. I pulled it because I loved Kaze, and I wanted to spare her the pain of living with that particular sin.

Love?

Don’t read too much into it. You can love your friends. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

The moment passed. Kaze collected herself and turned to face the sally port once more. I reloaded as quickly as I could and waited for the next surprise.

I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t giggling.

“Oh, very good, Ignus. Very, very good.”

The armored figure that stepped through the door was tall and improbably handsome. His snow white hair flowed around his head and shoulders, fluffed perfectly by an unseen breeze. The sneer that twisted his lips would have seemed cruel on a less beautiful face. There wasn’t enough beauty in the world to mask the madness that burned in his eyes.

He threw his head back and laughed.

“Bugger this,” I muttered, and shot him in the throat.

At a hundred meters, there was just enough room for divine intervention to save Plajin’s neck. He twisted at just the right moment, the bullet glancing off his gorget and caroming wildly into the gatehouse, where it apparently hit all the right things to drop the counterweight that held the gate closed.

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

The giant timber gate began to creak open, and soldiers rushed through the widening crack.

Kaze didn’t hesitate. She lashed out with her knives again and again, dropping as many as she could with each attack. She killed dozens in a pair of heartbeats. There were hundreds, though, thousands. They sprinted through, heedless of their chances of survival, trusting that she couldn’t possibly kill them all.

They were right. After the fourth attack, enough of her knives went missing that she couldn’t keep up. By the sixth, heavy infantry was starting to pour through, shielding their fellows until they were out of range.

It was over in less than two minutes. The breaching force consisted of around two thousand soldiers of various sorts, and they were now loose in the city.

All the while, the hero just stood there, cackling maniacally.

I should have been pissed, but honestly? I highly doubted they were going to have much luck getting to their objective. Between the raging inferno and my own menagerie of tricks, they’d have their work cut out for them, and then they’d have to contend with Degle.

At least they weren’t sticking around to bother us. They were terrified of their hero, terrified of our knife witch, and they knew there was an ignimancer lurking around somewhere, so they were probably terrified of me, too.

There were still others waiting on the pontoon bridge. I lined up an armored piercing shot and dropped a dozen of them with a single bullet. The rest decided to jump in the water, deciding it was safer to learn to swim in armor than deal with a pissed off ignimancer. Probably the smart move on their part.

All the while, Plajin kept laughing.

And honestly? I was impressed. The mad bastard managed to carry on like that for the full two minutes, until everyone waiting on the narrow band of land between the wall and the moat had crossed.

Only then did he wipe the tears from his eyes with the leather palm of his gauntlets.

“This is great,” he said. “Oh, this is fantastic. I was just expecting to find one traitor, but two? Oh, what a glorious, glorious day. Truly, I am favored by the gods.”

“Excuse me,” Kaze said. “Who the hells are you to call anyone a traitor? The pot would like a word with the kettle.”

“Silence, beast. You know what you’ve done. And your sneaky Ignus friend knows what he’s done. You betrayed your mistress. No great loss there. She made me a general and gave me your old army. If anything, you did the world a favor. He, on the other hand, betrayed me, which is the far greater sin. The gods won’t forgive one who betrays their chosen hero.”

The nerve of some people, honestly.

“I realize this is possibly the most pointless question ever asked, but have you gone mad? How in the hell did he betray you?”

“He turned his cursed musket on me,” Plajin whined.

“You pushed him down a bleeding wellspring. What was he supposed to do, say a prayer on the way down?”

“I. Am. The. HERO. What I do is righteous by default. Any who raises a hand against me is a traitor to the gods.”

There it was, that immense feeling of pressure, and a sense of being watched. Aethna? Soeh? I couldn’t tell one from the other. Whoever it was, I could feel their indignation. They weren’t well pleased with God King Senal’s latest toy claiming to speak for them.

They couldn’t openly defy their liege. You don’t earn a title like God King by tolerating dissent. But maybe, just maybe, they’d give me an opening, if only I earned it.

The gods help those who help themselves, after all.