The Tyranny of Faith (Empire of the Wolf, #2)

by Richard Swan

“But you said some of the entities are malevolent,” I said. “They appear to be. Tell me, Helena, what are the elements of the crime of murder?” I shrugged. “To kill another human being—” “No, give me Caterhauser.” I thought for a moment. “The premeditated killing by one human being of another without lawful excuse or justification, under the Emperor’s peace.” “Right. So, to put my analogy to the rack, an elephant may trample and gore a man and leave his body a broken ruin, and do so without having the least idea of the impact of its actions. The elephant does not ‘murder’ the man, out of some heinous desire to inflict fear and anger on us. It does not premeditate the crime. To the elephant, it isn’t a crime. It does so because it is driven by some base instinct. “When we see creatures of the afterlife feeding off a person’s life force, or turning them insane, or taking possession of their body, it appears to us that the entity is acting from a place of malevolence because the effect on us is one of horror and revulsion. But the entities are inscrutable to us. Their thought processes exceed and outstrip ours. Perhaps malevolence may form a part of it, in the sense that we understand it – the considered desire to inflict evil upon a person – but we cannot truly understand how their minds work.” He shrugged. “Either way, there is no sense in only armouring oneself against the intentional when the accidental is just as likely.”