doing, or whether he might be imagining the whole thing-maybe a piece of timber
had fallen on him, a piece of masonry collapsed so fast he hadn’t had time to
realize it, and he was dead too, dead but denied a peaceful rest, trapped in
some netherworld with the ghost-horse, on which he’d wander forever, seeking his
lost rightside partner.
But no: The sky was full of lightning, there were shouts and mutters on the
breeze from somewhere near by where factions fought. There was a plague in
Sanctuary, all right, but not some spurious one that turned your lips blue and
made your armpits sore: it was a plague of human failing, of confusion, of greed
and desire and endless power plays.
It wasn’t, he admitted as he mounted the bay (which felt surprisingly
substantial, for a ghost-horse), the magic or the gods which made Sanctuary such
a foul pit, but human excess; magic was no more to blame than sword or spear or
rock. There were enough rocks on the earth to eradicate the race; magic
couldn’t do a better job, only a more colorful one. But rock or spear or wand
or Nisi globe didn’t murder on their own, nor enslave-the weapon must be
wielded; the true culprit was human greed and human will. And the killing
never stopped- in the name of magic or the name of god or the name of honor
or nationalism or progress or liberation, it was just killing.
And because it had always been so, and would always be so, Critias had come to
the profession of arms himself: the only protection he could see was to be a
perpetrator, not a victim.