The Emperor's Wolves (Wolves of Elantra #1) - Michelle Sagara Page 0,14

men, following their barbs. It settled, in the end, on Elluvian. “I do not enjoy killing. I do not decry it. It is, like sleep, a very occasional fact of life.”

“The Barrani don’t require sleep,” Helmat said.

“When severely injured, Lord Marlin, even the Barrani require rest. Perhaps, in the end, you do wish to explain? The choice is going to be yours, not mine.”

Helmat flicked impatient fingers in Elluvian’s direction.

“Killing livestock is not, in the end, more of a burden than killing a man. I take little pride in the act; it is a necessity, not more and not less. I am entirely neutral.”

“Why do you do it?” The young man surprised him by asking.

“That is a complicated question. Ah, no, it is a simple question; the answer is complicated. Let me say, simply, that I do it because I want to.”

One dark brow rose.

“That is hardly complicated,” Helmat said.

“I am famously lazy. Why did you agree to this interview?”

Severn said nothing for one long beat. Two. And then he said, “Because I wanted to.”

Helmat laughed. “En is being difficult. You will come to expect that, if you remain with the Wolves. You have killed. You have no desire to do so again. Tell me, boy, would you make the same choices that led you to kill the first time?”

“Yes.” He answered without hesitation.

“Even knowing what you now know?”

“Yes.” The word was defiant, and given his apparent age, this was not unexpected. But beneath it, Elluvian heard a depth of sorrow, of exhaustion. He wished, not for the first time, that human eyes, like the eyes of any of the rest of the known races, shifted color with mood or emotion. They did not. Various experts over the centuries had attempted to find reasons for this stubborn persistence of color, some going so far as to suggest that humans were simply slightly more intelligent livestock—which had not gone over well.

“Belief,” Helmat said softly, “is a dangerous game. En follows the laws because he has chosen to serve the Emperor; he does not feel any personal loyalty to them. Nothing is personal to En.”

“That is untrue.”

“Nothing to do with the Wolves is personal. En has offered the Emperor his oaths of allegiance, and the Emperor has accepted them. But En has seen the rise and fall of many things in his time, and he oft feels that laws such as ours are merely waiting to become the detritus of yet another mortal civilization.”

“The Eternal Emperor isn’t mortal.”

“That, of course, is the rejoinder to his philosophy. I have dedicated my life to the Emperor’s service. In En’s view, my life—the whole of it, from birth to death—is insignificant; it will be irrelevant.”

Elluvian grimaced. “It is simple to maintain principles for a handful of decades—even I am capable of that. But to maintain them for centuries as the world shifts and changes? It is far, far more complicated. We who live forever—without the malicious intervention of our foes—oft choose to live in the moment because change is inevitable. For you, that is not necessary.

“To live as a Wolf, you must be true to the principles you have chosen to uphold. Those principles cannot be rocked or shaken by anger, by grief; they cannot be ignored when convenient. The act you commit, you commit for a reason, and that certainty is what holds you above the abyss. The abyss,” he added quietly, “that you will live on the edge of while you serve. Helmat?”

The Wolflord nodded. “It is easy, in the end, for all who serve the Imperial Law to feel, viscerally, that what they see, what they make their life’s work, is all there is to see. The Hawks deal with petty criminals on a daily basis. Some of those Hawks have come to believe that all citizens are petty criminals; that only petty criminals exist. The Swords deal with frightened or angry crowds—and on occasion, with the mobs those crowds become. It is natural for the Swords to believe that people should not—should never—be allowed to congregate; that people in congregations naturally evolve into something more deadly. In both cases, their fear is based on their experiences—both Hawks and Swords have died in the line of duty, and they wish to prevent future deaths of their comrades.

“It is work to fight against the growth of those beliefs, when all of your experience screams the opposite. The consequence of a Hawk or a Sword falling slowly into that bleak, gray cynicism is not