KNITE:

Erudite—if a single word might describe him. Armless spectacles sat perched on the bridge of his nose. Tinted disks of glass refracted candlelight and ignited his eyes with a quiet menace.

Not a single matrix adorned the room or his person except those spectacles. Not of light or heat or cold. Not of protection or offense. Not of any Art, be they foreign or domestic. Just rich mundanity. His suit continued the trend—immaculate loom-spun cotton, tailored to perfection but unprotected by enhancements, each article besides his snow-white undershirt as black as a moonless, starless night. He sat there, reveling in his own company.

All this revealed much about him: He cared little for comfort, only perfection. Image. Not only through the prism of others, but also as a reflection of his inner self. Bleak. Untouched by the colored factions of Evergreen. To him, allegiances were word-deep, discarded or disowned by opportunity as easily as it is to utter a lie. Neutrality was preferred. Self was paramount—worth and preservation. That was his god. His only true allegiance.

The handler, Nasiil's adjutant, leaned back into his cushioned chair. He placed his heels on the desk and crossed his legs. The desk was a crafted masterpiece of gold-bracketed wood. Rugs covered the floor. Draperies of damson, broken only by the flicker of candlelight, swayed on the walls. He stared into his glass of wine, which, guided by the delicate grip of his fingers around the rim, danced in circles.

I conjured a breeze and sent it coursing along the edges of the room. Curtains fluttered. Candle lights flickered.

"Who goes there?" The handler sprang to his feet and peered into the dimly lit room. His gaze jerked about, dancing shadows assailing his awareness.

I stepped out of the darkness. "You are a difficult man to find."

"You." The word slipped from him in a hiss. He set his wine down on the desk, pretended to adjust his spectacles—proving me right, for they sparkled to life with the power of matrices—and glowered at me from behind their glare.

The handler sat, projecting a calm he did not possess. "What are you doing here? How did you find this place?"

Slow steps drew me closer to the man. His chair was alone by design; this was no arena of rendezvous but a sanctuary of introspective solitude. A clandestine retreat where he spent his evenings away from the strain of his deceptions.

I mimicked his chair within the theater of my mind and sent my sensus to ensnare reality into believing it existed. Suddenly, the chair erupted from the void of nothingness. Vibrations set the air into a frenzy as the world adjusted to my will, space itself distending before snapping back in place.

"I've come to talk," I said, taking a seat.

The handler's eyes were wide; he thought me a Reaper. Being an Auger himself, though a Tunneller, he knew well how powerful my Painting was. Its power anchored my creation with such force that the very air quaked in its effort to accommodate my wishes.

"You're no son of Bainan," he accused. The wood of his armrests creaked under his grip. Worry crowded the edges of his expression. More filtered through his soul, the scent of it coaxing my inimitable cravings from their slumber.

"I never claimed to be." I waved a hand behind him at the frantic Tunnels he'd conjured at his back. "Please do away with those pesky things. They shall not help you."

"Who are you?"

"As you've surmised, I am no son of Bainan—thank luck for that. I am, however, a son of Evergreen. And you, despite being born from it, despite suckling from its teat all your life at the expense of its people, or perhaps indicative of it, are its enemy."

The handler was back on his feet now, arms outstretched. His Tunnels surged, a dozen or more sleek, spectral shards of his intent teeming with sensus. The deluge struck my defenses. The deluge of ineptitude continued for a long while. Behind them stood the handler. Trails of sweat descended his twisted expression, around the glint of fear etched into his furrowed brow and twitching eyes, and over his snarling lips. I waited, unconcerned and still seated.

Eventually, the handler ran dry. His arms fell to his sides. His Tunnels fizzled out, their forms unraveling like smoke caught in a passing squall. Sensus deprivation caused his limp hands to tremble.

A beat passed. Then another.

The handler lunged at me, an action I had not anticipated. His boots scraped the stone as he closed the distance. I slapped away a quick hook, adept for all that it was without sensus. He spun and came at me again. I leaned back, my chair tilting onto its rear legs, and buried the steel-tipped toes of my boot into his chest. Several of his ribs cracked. One broke clean, puncturing a lung. He staggered back, groaning and wheezing.

"You've made a mistake," he said. "You shouldn't have come here."

I studied him as one might examine a maze, curious to see what lies he'd place in my way. "And yet, here I am," I said, "uninvited, unafraid, and unimpressed."

The handler returned to his desk. He pushed his hair flat, palms coming away with the gleam of sweat. The candlelight caught the edges of his spectacles, igniting his eyes once more. But the menace was gone. Only determination remained. That and the sweet scent of his fear.

"You're not here to talk," he said. "You're here to pass judgment."

"Merely a consequence. I'm here for answers." I shrugged. "If, by chance, serendipity presents me with a chance to enjoy myself, then I am beholden to partake."

"You've made a mistake," he repeated. "I am not guilty of whatever you've come to judge me for."

"So your resistance was a proclamation of innocence, was it? Tell me, why did you attack me after your Tunnels had failed? You know I am a capable Reaper, yet you attacked anyway. Why? A case of foolhardy desperation? A distraction? A hope you might chance upon a means of escape?" I pointed at his spectacles. "Ah! You meant to test me, to see I am the same man you met in the Lair."

The handler hesitated. Slowly, he reached for the wine glass he'd abandoned, fingers trembling as they found the stem. He raised it, not to drink, but to stall. To think. He steeled his nerve and fought for stillness. A deep breath later, the tremble in his hands softened.

"Would you like a drink?" he asked.

"Silas's?"

He shook his head. "Kolokasi."

"Then I'll have to refuse."

The handler edged back to his chair, eyes fixed on me. He sank into the seat as if it offered refuge from the perils of my presence. Head tilted back, he drained his glass of wine. With careful movements, he reached out and opened a drawer on his desk, retrieving an old bottle sealed in aged wax, its surface scarred by time.

"I have a rarer blend from Af'titala," he said, "if you fancy their sour fruits."

"Part payment for your betrayal, perhaps? Did you give them a craft capable of traversing The Dead Sea?"

"I know not of what you speak."

There was no hesitation in his answer, yet the room thickened with the scent of his fear. I drew it in through my nose, held it in my lungs to savor its depth, then exhaled softly, a hum of dark satisfaction slipping past my tongue. The handler shivered, for somewhere in my unblinking gaze, he must've glimpsed my merciless hunger.

To distract himself, he broke the wax seal on the Af'titalan bottle, grasped the cork firmly with his fingers, and pulled it out with a smooth, confident motion. He tilted the bottle gently, allowing the thick, black wine to flow steadily into his glass, the sound of it filling the emptiness.

"Which House do you reckon possesses the greatest tools for torture?" I asked.

The flow faltered. Sputtered globules of liquid gouged into the cup, sending rogue droplets into the air and onto the table and floor. The handler lowered the bottle with deliberate care, outwardly composed.

"An odd question to ask," he said.

"Many think Tunnellers. I disagree."

"Dare I ask why?"

"I'll tell you anyway." I rose to my feet. Behind me, my chair faded back into nothingness. Reality, recognizing the intruder after it had absconded, huffed in irritation, convulsing once more. "Each House has unique methods, limited only by the minds of those who wield their Arts. True, Lorail's Art—and her progeny—tend to be intrinsically more suited to such applications; however, their summits—not the breadth of their foundations, mind you, but their peaks—are near equivalent. Can you imagine, then, what heights one might reach if you could stack them atop one another?"

"Are you threatening me?" Much as he tried, there was a quiver at the end of the handler's question.

I drew closer, leaned over the desk, and plucked the spectacles from his face. Credit to him, he let me. Suddenly, the dull, dark blue of his eyes darkened into pits of blackness. I studied the artifact. The matrices and the sensus they were built from were exacting to detect by nature. Foreign, too. Plausible reasons why others had not noticed, if they were so inclined as to defend their failure.

"A wondrous creation," I said. "Your mother's?"

The handler's distress soured into something new. His jaw tightened, and a trace of pride surfaced beneath his sheen of fear. "Made for my mother by my grandfather," he said. "She was half Golodanian, for which they'd driven her out of the lands she was born in."

"You don't much look like an Af'titalan—except those eyes of yours, of course. I did not expect Silas to go so far as to father a child with an Af'titalan. Your father has always been a reckless fool, but this…"

"I am a forgotten memory," the handler said. "As is my mother. We piqued his interest for not even a cycle of the moon before the next fleeting impulse took him." His fingers bit the edge of the desk, knuckles white.

"Together, they stripped you of your history, so now you wander the world alone, led forth by the scent of fortune. I can't say it's a bad way of living. That you've trampled over the bodies of so many as you stampeded towards this meager fortune of yours, however…"

The handler shrugged. "The same would happen to me if I allowed it."

"Ah, the stench of hypocrisy, how obsequious it is in this fair world of ours."

The handler finished pouring his drink, then savoured it as though he'd never again chance upon such an opportunity. "A rather trite observation from someone as old as you are."

"Trite for good reason, my young—Tell me, what was your name? I'm sure one of my people mentioned it, but for the life of me, I cannot remember."

"Contrilius."

"Ah, yes, that was it. For good reason, my young Contrilius. It'll take time before you become tolerable to me. You have no idea how sweet you smell, how beautifully dark your soul has become in your century of unbridled self-indulgence."

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"I don't understand."

I waved away his confusion. "You will. But before that, tell me how Kakaro and your fellow countrymen have been entering the Isles."

***

Night. A full moon. It's borrowed light played tricks on the mirror-like waters of The Dead Sea. Behind me, in the distance, the eastern coast of Partum was but a jagged silhouette. On the other side of the horizon, flat but for its natural curve and the dark profile of a boat in the distance, came the faint ripples that just now declared the silent approach of the man I'd come to thwart.

Contrilius sat at the far end of our vessel, eyes subdued, a shadow of his former self. He was irreparably broken, an echo of the man who had once considered his own counsel supreme; freedom is a tenet of such a person's sanity—their own, of course, for they think little of that which others seek or possess.

"Who engraved the vessel?" I asked him. I might've taken the answer from his soul, but it had taken all of me to brand him without ending his life, and I cared not to tempt myself overmuch.

"Stolen from The Scorpions."

"I did not think you capable of such foresight."

"I'd have died long ago if I lacked the trait."

"You'd not have found yourself in your current circumstances if you had enough of it to mention."

"Grono and my father are but two of six—their deaths would not become Evergreen's downfall." Apathy drained the heat from Contrilius' defense, the words rendered almost meaningless. "Besides, it was as likely they'd fail as succeed."

I shook my head. "Do you know why spies and assassins make for poor leaders?"

Contrilius shrugged.

"They are trained to see threats, to become them, but no further than that which they see from whatever shadows they're lurking in. The future, Contri, how the smallest pebbles spread ripples, how some of these ripples become waves, and how these waves clash or join, that is what a leader must see."

He gave a dry chuckle. "You speak like a man who's never needed to disappear. I doubt you're averse to shadows."

"On the contrary, darkness is a friend of mine. And I speak like a man who's had to reemerge from behind the veil of death. A man who's seen the great kingdom of Evergreen reduced to a pit of snakes."

The boat creaked, a sound like shifting bones. The silhouette ahead grew clearer. Larger. A figure stood on the bow of the narrow craft, hands behind his back, a greatsword latched to his hip. Ostensibly, his shape was like an aperture in reality, an abyss where light went not just to die, but to forget it had ever existed.

Contrilius squinted. "They're early."

"As are we."

The boat stopped where an errant breeze might cause its head to touch ours. Kakaro stepped onto our boat, strode confidently to stand before me, and stared.

"I see my clemency has been rebuked," I said.

Kakaro snorted, half amused, half irritated. "Clemency, you say?"

"You're alive, are you not. So alive you dared to come back."

I peered over Kakaro's shoulder, my eyes catching two more figures aboard their vessel. Sat near the stern was a pallid-faced Islander tethered to the ancient, glowing matrices that permitted the craft across the finicky and unyielding breadth of The Dead Sea. His face was slack with weariness, hands gripping the weathered oars that had carried them here from the mainland. The other passenger was a muted presence—cross-legged as if in meditation, cloaked in shadow, head drowned in blackness beneath a hood, her shawl pulled low, her face turned away in guarded silence.

"And you've brought another with you," I said.

"She insisted," Kakaro said. "I now suspect she knew you'd intercept us."

I shifted my gaze to the guant man who held the reins of the vessel. He sat hunched, making less of his formidable bulk in an effort to fade into the background, lest he draw unwanted attention. "House?"

"None, your lordship."

I turned back to Contrilius. "You bound him?"

"Not as such," he said with that same bored dejection he'd adopted since he himself was bound. "Honeyed lies become sweet truths to foolish and ambitious Roots."

"How many died before him?" I asked.

"Seven."

The Root's gasped at the dawn of the terrible fate Contrilius had in store for him.

"You shall live," I said, finding his soul too gray to dispatch. "Your memories of the last cycle of the moon, however…" I turned to Contrilius once more. "How many?"

"Seventeen."

"Strength?"

"Mostly equivalents to Named. A few godlings." He gestured at Kakaro with a lazy nod of his head. "He was the only Leaf among them."

"You will not turn me away again," Kakaro said.

I patted him on the upper arm with all the condescension I could muster. "The choice is outside your reach, young one."

"Stop!" The hooded figure's voice sliced through the tension just before Kakaro's growl evolved into savagery. There were no walls, no cliffs, no surface but The Dead Sea to catch the sound, yet it echoed as if we stood within a cavern.

Kakaro spun. "I have friends among those we've sent into Evergreen." The intonations—thought not the tone—of his pleading were distinctly childlike.

"Friends he'll return to us," she said.

"Sure of that, are you?" My amusement was plain to see and hear.

Kakaro's mother, Jilinin, lowered her hood. The sight of her stole my breath, remnants of those precious depths my sister had stolen from me flickering before the color drained once more. She was, ironically, what I imagined Lorail would look like if she were born an Af'titalan. Tall. Lithe. Beautiful. Not the sort of pretty men chased, driven by lust. No, the kind of pretty that froze them still, a call to honor the sanctity of life and experience. The type your eyes drank, the only desire you wished to quench being that of the soul's capacity to appreciate beauty.

"I might've believed you didn't expect me," she said, "were you not you."

Words deserted me. Air thinned. The glimpse of who she was took hold of me even as it faded into obscurity. I stared at her obsidian skin, the pure darkness of her eyes, the cut under her chin I'd caused that somehow added to her beauty, the fullness of her onyx lips, searching for that hint of color, that sharp evocation that had briefly buried itself into my heart.

Jilinin came within touching distance, stopped, then, as if recognising she was within my reach, took a single step back. "I suppose our most honest conversations were always the silent ones."

"I never lie," I said.

Jilinin stepped forward, once more within reach. Then took another. A dainty step. Cautious. Like a shy youth courting her first infatuation. And another. Her soft breath brushed against my face. She was close now. The smell of her, the blackness of her skin, the darkness of her gaze, each was a figment of my past; what they stirred within me, however, was new. Or the anonymous echo of something new.

"Yet you have never been honest," she said.

"I speak, do I not? And if the words I utter are not lies, they must be truths."

"Yet you have never been honest," she repeated.

I shrugged. "Why have you come here, Jil?"

Our eyes locked. Whiteness bled into hers, giving shape to the pits I held in my memories, those same pits I stared into for long nights and late mornings. She leaned in and kissed my cheek.

That's when her knife found my groin.

She dug it in hilt-deep, twisted, heaved the blade up to my abdomen, scarping across bone as she went, then held it there just below my chest.

"Stop!" she screamed.

Kakaro was beside me, a knife in hand, its point ready to plunge into my neck. My hand was wrapped around his throat, the glow of a rather insidious and imminently fatal Surgeon matrix floating against his skin, its abstract light unable to reach the darkness of his power and race.

"Let him go," Jilinin said.

Kakaro's fingers tightened around the black leather of his grip. "But—"

"I was not speaking to you, child. Now be quiet, and I'll get on with saving your life."

Kararo lowered his weapon like a sullen child retreating from whatever confection he was refused. I let him go.

"You have never been honest with me lest sweat was involved, Knite," she said. A sharp inhalation. Contri. He had not known who I was. "I find I am and have always been incapable of treating you in kind." She let go of the dagger, stepped back, and glanced down at the hilt, at the fine ball of black diamond embedded on its pommel, and at the blood pouring out from between my fingers as I held back my entrails from spilling out. "This is the only requital I can conceive of."

My matrices sealed the wound. More went to reconstituting my severed insides. I pulled the dagger out and handed it to her hilt-first.

"Pain is a worthless weapon against me," I said.

"I know." Jil took the blade and sheathed it somewhere under her flowing cloak. "It's what allows you to be so cruel."

I winced at those words, so faint a reaction that the movement was near imperceptible. Jilinin frowned.

"If not to cause pain, why bother?" I asked.

"For inconvenience."

I smiled. Few knew me as well as Jil did. How was she to know that I was more honest with her than with any other? Except Helena, perhaps.

"So, why have you come, Jil?" I asked. "Besides gutting me like a fish, that is."

"She's winning. Your mother—"

Her abrupt silence made me aware I was grinding my teeth.

"Apologies," she said. "I know you never…"

I knelt down, dipped my hand into the blood at my feet, and invoked my Reaper Arts to return what belonged to me. Some had soaked too deeply into the wood of the vessel or been contaminated by foreign material. The rest filtered past the skin of my hand.

"These wars have raged for centuries," I said, standing back up. Much of the crimson ichor was gone. Behind the cut of my clothes, naked groin and all, was untouched skin. No one present cared. We were all too old to fake modesty.

"Your brothers are slowly but surely winning it from the comfort of their island."

"This, I know." I pointed at Kakaro. "It is why your people have sent him to my shores. Why are you here?"

"You do not wish for war."

"War is my servant. It serves me well."

"Not if it also benefits your enemies."

"What do you know of my enemies?"

Jil gazed up at the moon. Not a hint of its light reached her, or so it seemed. "You did not fall in battle. That tells me enough."

My smile was one of pride. Why? I did not know. Jil was not mine; I was not hers; we were apart. Why then did her cleverness please me?

"My enemies are mine to deal with," I said. "And do not forget that your people count themselves among them."

"And me?" she asked.

"You are exactly as much my enemy as I am yours. You decide."

"Does that extend to friendship?"

"Yes."

"And more?"

"Why are you here, Jil? You know me too well to have come in hopes of recruitment, you're too wise to think I'd allow your boy's mission to succeed, and too… decent to have come here for petty revenge. Unfounded revenge, if I may add."

"You may not." There was steel in her voice. A cold anger. "Not when you're incapable of pain."

"Why are you here, Jil?"

"Why do you stop us?"

"Because I stand with Evergreen."

"You stand with your enemies?"

I shook my head, sighing deeply. "You disappoint me. Evergreen is not what The Old Queen and her children have made of it. You know this. Or you should."

"I came to see you."

"Why?"

"To see if time had changed anything."

"It hasn't."

"I see that now."

"And your son?"

Kakaro adjusted his sword belt. "I will not be leaving."

Jil glided back onto her vessel. "Yes, you are."

"Mother, I have always been a filial son, not least because you have been a marvelous mother, but do not ask this of me. Not this. I am trying to save our home."

"You ask me to let you die. I cannot. I ask you to live. For both our sakes, you must."

"What I must do is take heed of my father's decree. Your husband's."

Jil turned to me. Something glinted in her eyes. Pain? Sadness? Whatever it was, it was hidden, and I liked her too much to drag it out into the open or pierce the protections that kept it from easy viewing.

"Might I ask a favor?" she said.

"He'll live," I said. "As will any of his friends if the war has not tainted them beyond redemption."

Kakaro stepped onto the water, his feet held aloft by a coating of sensus that distributed his weight and kept him from plunging into the depths. Immediately, the water, enchanted by the power of the most extraordinary man I had ever known, began to erode his sensus. A mere commoner might have only moments before The Dead Sea claimed their life and dragged them to its grand cemetery. But Kakaro was no mere commoner.

He unsheathed his sword. His long cape swayed, the tassels at its end brushing the surface of The Dead Sea as he walked further from the two boats. The blade gleamed like midnight, dark and mysterious, except when compared to Kakaro himself. I followed him out, my own feet sensusless for The Dead Sea was born a friend to me.

He stopped half a league from the boats, turned to me, and said, "I am not half-starved or locked in chains."

The moon disappeared. The stars were gone. We stood in absolute darkness. This darkness came as quickly as fire sheds light. Kakaro's doing. He ate the scant brightness around us, sucked it in, smothered it, and made it his own. Not just light. Sounds, sensus, and air. I saw The Dead Sea itself waver, but only as far as a feather might cause a ripple. Kakaro did not know he expedited his loss with this—this veil gave me freedoms he was not ready to contest.

Kakaro charged at me. My Souleyes flickered to life, revealing a starscape within the shape of a man, an outline carved against the void molded by his Af'titalan powers.

I waited, loose and nimble, took a deep breath, and flexed my soul.

The world stilled. Sensus roiled. A slithering, oily black spiralled out from me, a stark contrast to the abyssal black of Kakaro's sensus. The air grew heavy. Suffocating. Not for me, for I was free for the first time in quite a while, uncontricted by my mask and less restrained by my caution.

Kakaro stumbled. The sensus on his feet sputtered. He gave more to achieve less. His grimace was raw, unfiltered by pride or any other motivations. Slowly, he began to sink.

I walked to the boy and stared down at him as he struggled. The dome of darkness began to recede, drawing closer and closer to him until it threatened to leave me outside of its embrace. Only then did my soul retreat behind my mask.

I held out a hand for the kneeling Kakaro. He was knee-deep in the waters, fighting against the forces that thought to claim him.

"Do not be stubborn," I said. "Take my hand."

I pulled him up. As if sensing my touch, as if the gesture had given him a pardon, the water ceased to drag him under. Wet, sullen, and fighting against the impudence of shame, Kakaro got to his feet.

"Are you content?" I asked.

"I had thought myself a power to be reckoned with." Again, the boy sounded far younger than he was.

"Coddled by inferior foes," I said, "and soft surroundings. Your mother's doing, I'd guess. I suppose your father sent you here to rectify her mistake."

"For once, I must take his side on the matter."

"As would I. But consider their motivations."

"Indulging my safety will not help me."

"Nor will sending a dull knife against a sharp sword."

"My father—"

"I jest. I am a god, Kakaro. You are not. Do not overreach."

We returned to our audience. Contri stepped onto the vessel he had stolen, his footsteps echoing softly across its battered deck. Kakaro followed, dripping wet and sulking. Jilinin, however, lingered behind.

"It was good to see you," Jil said, her jovial smile and sad eyes combining into melancholy.

"Likewise," I said, taking her hand and directing her onto the other boat. "But do not come here again. Not until my purpose has concluded."

"What is your purpose?"

"Goodbye, Jil."

I kicked our boats apart. Contri, stunned, began to row with frantic urgency, his face contorting in horror as it had been since the truth of my identity was stamped onto his features. Jil stood firm on the stern, Kakaro beside her, their silhouettes steadfast against the encroaching dawn.

I did not turn back towards Partum until they had dwindled to a mere speck against the vast, indifferent enormity of the horizon.

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