Page 4 of The Malevolent Eight

She was no longer that traumatised young Sublime I’d met in Ascendant Lucien’s war camp. With her right hand extended, she made a fist. It looked as if the scarab were collapsing in on itself. Then she suddenly spread her fingers wide– and the creature exploded into thousands upon thousands of glittering shards of iridescent shell and gobs of sickly yellow blood that splattered over the demoniacs surrounding us.

‘Desist, you petulant children masquerading as warriors,’ she said, ‘else we seven shall henceforth Fuck. Your. Shit. Up.’

Peace at any price, I thought proudly.

The sizzle of Corrigan’s thunder joined the crack of Alice’s whip-sword and the eerier sounds accompanying the rest of our respective magics. I offered a silent apology to whichever spirit of decency might be questioning the ethics of seven wonderists trying to stop a war by engaging in rampant bloodshed. Well, those spirits could go ahead and close their eyes if they were squeamish, because peace was a dirty business, especially now. The gallants of long ago had left the rest of us with a world unprotected from the supernatural sons-of-bitches presently fighting over it. Corrigan had named us ‘The Malevolent Seven’ and that’s what we’d become. Maybe we weren’t the kind of heroes the world deserved, but we were the ones it got, and we sure as shit weren’t going to save it by pretending to be the good guys.

And now, without further ado, let me to introduce you to Temper.

Chapter 3

Temper

The story of how the creature Corrigan had affectionately dubbed ‘Temper’ came to join our coven is somewhat. . . tangled, not least because confessing my own part in the beast’s existence would almost certainly get me killed– likely by Corrigan himself. Nonetheless, as our mission was, as we say in the peace-making business, tomake an impressionupon the Infernals and Aurorals, there was no question that Temper was perfectly suited to that endeavour.

‘By the Auroral Sovereign’s Tears. . .’ Shame swore as she watched him in action. It takes a lot to shock an Angelic Emissary who’s witnessed the darkest depravities of the Mortal realm.

‘By the Sovereign’s Tears, indeed,’ I agreed.

It had been a long time since last I’d uttered that oath. Doing so now set the tip of my tongue to tingling, an uncomfortable reminder that no matter how hard you might try to turn your back on your training, the instincts beaten into you always remain.

But to get back to Temper. . .

Picture a seven-foot-tall tawny rabbit, but shorten the ears. Shorter– no, stop, that’s too short. It’s not a fucking hamster. Aim for something like the ears of a red fox, or maybe a bat. Okay, now, the tail: neither fluffy nor round, not rabbity at all, more long and thick, tapering towards the end. Oh, and imagine the beast launching itself with haunches powerful enough to send it leaping ten feet in the air and twenty-five feet towards you so that it can wrap that muscular tail around your neck and secure you tight so it can punch you into oblivion with paws quite capable of pulverising bone and rending flesh into a bloody pulp.

In retrospect, picturing a rabbit probably wasn’t a useful starting point. What Icantell you is that, according to the sole text I’ve found in the months since Temper’s arrival on the Mortal plane, scholars of cryptozoology believe his species derived from an especially violent, unhinged plane of existence where they were known as ‘kan-gar-oos’.

Kangaroos.

Even the name sounds ominous.

That’s not even the worst part. See, most creatures can’t survive in realms beyond the ones where they emerged naturally, and when theydosurvive, there tend to be. . . side-effects.

‘Musthe do that with the bodies?’ Alice complained, swinging her whip-sword in a wide arc at the enthusiastic bronze-lacquered pair of Hellions lunging for her. Before the blow could land, the silver ribbon of her blade split apart into thirteen segments, scattering past the heads of her opponents. The demoniacs grinned as they advanced upon what they naïvely believed to be an unarmed traitor to their cause. They were still wearing those grins as the shards of Alice’s whip-sword first slowed in mid-air, then darted back to rejoin the hilt by way of first slicing through the Hellions’ skulls.

Mind, even that disgusting piece of gratuitous butchery couldn’t hold a candle to the gruesome spectacle of Temper, his tail wrapped around the neck of an Artillerist he’d punched to death moments before, lapping up the blood pouring out from the wreckage of the demoniac’s face.

Yep, our latest recruit wasn’t merely a savage, remorseless kangaroo. He was a fuckingvampirekangaroo, who made it his business to messily imbibe the blood of his enemies. And business round here was plentiful.

‘Watch your own tail, Cade,’ Corrigan warned as he blasted a trio of demoniac Mortarists creeping up behind me with shrapnel lanterns. The Mortarists ended up being the ones decapitated when a bolt of Tempestoral lightning sent them to whatever passes for their ancestors’ warm bosom.

With typical thunderer recklessness, Corrigan’s Tempestoral eruption had also set off the lanterns– I would’ve been torn to shreds by the shrapnel, had it not been for Aradeus’ totemic quivering spell, which enabled his rapier toliterallybat every single shard of steel and bone out of the air before they reached me.

Rat mages aresuchshow-offs.

‘Will you be fighting any of your own battles, Fallen One?’ Alice asked, her whip-sword now moving with devastating speed as it decapitated one enemy after another.

‘The rest of you appear to be doing just fine without me,’ I said. ‘Besides, someone needs to keep an eye on the prize.’

I had no idea what that meant in the context of a chaotic massacre of otherworldly invaders, but Alice was contenting herself with eviscerating yet more of her fellow demoniacs. I did cast a few spells here and there, ones that looked enough like chancer magic– that’s a form of wonderism derived from the Fortunal plane of existence, where the physical laws allow for the alteration of probabilities– to avoid suspicion amongst my friends.

Every wonderist draws their spells from whichever plane of reality they’re naturally attuned. As a young man, my magic had come from Auroralism, which manifests as blessings conferred by the Lords Celestine. After I’d booted myself from their ranks, the only other attunement I could manage was to the Infernal realm, where spells are bartered for services negotiated by a diabolic representative of the Lords Devilish. If neither of those sound like appealing ways to acquire magic, it’s as Corrigan always says: ‘You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but nobody gets to pick their fucking mystical attunement.’

I’ve never been entirely sure that’s the right punchline for that particular saying.

Six months ago, an opportunity came along– one that very few wonderists in history ever got and almost all would’ve killed for– the chance to alter my attunement using a device ponderously named ‘The Empyrean Physio-Thaumaturgical Device of Attunal Transmutation’. Seriously. You can see why we in the business call it theApparatus. Regardless of appellation, that coffin-shaped relic is the only known means of choosing one’s attunement. Corrigan, knowing my propensity for relying on luck, assumed I’d attuned myself to the Fortunal realm. He’d guessed wrong.

Inside the ruins of a massive stone fortress racked by magical forces more chaotic and dangerous than any we’d ever encountered, we’d witnessed the culmination of an unbelievably nasty conspiracy by the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish to create a set of gates that, for the first time in recorded history, would allow their respective armies to enter the Mortal realm. Here, the long-prophesied cataclysmic war between them would at last come to pass. Given the low probability of our surviving such a war, I’d used the Apparatus to give myself a far less. . . whimsical attunement.

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