Page 63 of The Malevolent Eight

A few weeks after we’d killed off the Seven Brothers and the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish had begun their recruiting drive for armies of gullible Mortals to die in their pointless war against one another, it occurred to me that recruiting my own army of really cool-looking rhinoceros-headed spearmen and tiger-faced cavalry and salamander-tongued spies might give us an edge against both Aurorals and Infernals.

I’d escaped from the others for a couple of days and ridden out into the desert to try my hand at transforming a scorpion into one hell of an assassin. After finding a suitable subject, I began the careful process of awakening my connection to the Pandoral plane and feeling my way towards reshaping the scorpion into an effective and hopefully obedient servant. That’s when it all went wrong.

The problem wasn’t that Ifailed tomake the scorpion subservient to my wishes. Once I’d felt my way through the attunement to the bizarre physical laws of the Pandoral realm, the thought patterns needed to produce the alteration became so clear as to be almost simple. The problem wasme: I remembered Madrigal, the goat-headed servant of the Seven Brothers. In the brief time I’d known him, Madrigal had been polite, erudite, sometimes almost witty and, worst of all, entirely conscious of what had been done to him. The Seven Brothers had transformed him against his will into a being shaped to their needs, utterly uncaring of his own free will.

That’s the thought that went through my head when I was supposed to be conjuring Knife-Butt, the perfect scorpion assassin. You wouldn’t think it would be easy to empathise with a scorpion, but looking at little Knife-Butt squirming there in a circle in the sand, wiggling his lethal little tail like he was hoping this was all some kind of mistake and I was about to give him a nice treat. . .

I just couldn’t do it. I kept remembering Madrigal.

Riding back to town, I realised how stupid my qualms were, given I was trying to avert a war that would last until the very last humans were slaughtered. So I climbed up into some nearby hills and found a large cavern filled with bats. Unlike scorpions, I figured bats had given me enough trouble in my life that one of them deserved to be my slave. Fangy the Aerial Assassin, I would call him, not worrying about whether I could make his wings big enough to let him fly with a human-sized body. Still, it would’ve been worth it just to make fun of Alice, who can’t fly for shit on the Mortal plane with those too-small wings of hers.

So there I was, about to transform a bat, when that same hesitation came over me. Unfortunately, by then I’d opened too strong a breach into the Pandoral realm and now all those messed-up physical laws were about to leak through. I had to focus them intosomething, or else risk blowing myself up, which was when an ingenious and morally sound solution presented itself.

See, Pandoral magic isn’t about physically reshaping living beings or warping rocks: it’s chaos magic. It works by reversing the relationship between matter and sentience, causing the former to be reshaped according to the latter. If that sounds obtuse, well, I guess it kind of is, but simply put, Pandoral magic unravels and then re-weaves the threads of reality. Usually, it works by trying to impose the caster’s will on reality, but in my case, instead of forcibly transforming the bat into a warrior, I let my mystical awareness seek out a thread of an animal thatwantedto become part of a bizarre war against Infernals and Aurorals: something that actively fancied going around kicking the shit out of demoniacs and angelics and generally making trouble.

Turns out, there wasn’t a single living creature anywhere in the Mortal realm that, deep in its psyche, secretly wanted to be a malevolent shit-kicker like me and my friends. But notions of time and space don’t apply to the physics of the Pandoral realm, so my incipient spell just went further and further, until it found a plane of reality that happened to have a nasty country that had bred an animal so mean-spirited and ill-tempered that its own psyche grabbed onto the offer of spreading chaos and bloodshed with tremendous enthusiasm. And as that beast was being pulled from its world into ours, being transformed to survive and thrive in this other realm, it also managed to twist my spell into granting it the means to be even deadlier here than in its own world. . .

. . . which is how I ended up summoning and transforming a weird-arse-looking rabbit-with-short-ears-and-a-thumpy-tail into a fucking vampire kangaroo.

First thing he did was to attempt to eat me.

‘Whoa, boy,’ I said, managing a Pandoral spatial chaos spell that caused the distance between his fangs and my face to keep changing. He snapped at empty air several times, then– thanks to the perversity of Pandoral chaos magic– accidentally bithis ownmuzzle.

The belligerent idiot then started punching at me with his paws, hopping around me in a circle trying to outflank me. Not being able to keep the warping spell going indefinitely, I got clipped with a lucky jab. Later, I’d come to learn that even a glancing blow would normally have taken my head off, but the beast was still disoriented from suddenly finding himself on an entirely different plane of reality. Also, since his translation had accidentally transformed him into a vampiric being and he was woefully short of other people’s blood, he was severely weakened.

As a Glorian Justiciar, Hazidan Rosh had trained me not only in mystical forms of combat but also in fencing and pugilism. And since it turns out I’m also a belligerent idiot, I quickly lost my temper and ended up in a knock-down, drag-out punch-up with a kangaroo.

Keeping track of the passage of time while in combat is pretty much impossible, but it felt like we were at it for several hours, which means the fight probably lasted about five minutes. When it was done, the two of us were both flat on our backs, panting from exhaustion, neither of us able to see clearly out of our severely swollen black eyes. That’s when the scavengers found us.

There are a lot of weird evil creatures in the world. Some occur naturally, like scorpions and rhinoceroses. Some are manifested through nefarious forms of magic like my own attempts. Others. . . Well, some monsters, you just don’t know where the hell they came from. In this case, it was half a dozen weirdos who looked like men and women, only with distended limbs and bodies covered in a patchwork made of fur and scales. My best guess? Amateur totemists who’d never been given the training to focus their attunement to a single symbolic animal realm and had ended up driven mad by the incompatible characteristics they’d manifested within themselves.

‘Truce?’ I asked the kangaroo.

I wasn’t sure how intelligent he was or whether he could understand me at all. Back then, he hadn’t yet developed his comprehensive vocabulary of ‘motherfucker’, ‘motherfucker’ and ‘motherfuckers’. Nonetheless he offered up a grunt that I took for assent and the two of us got back on our feet and fought side by side against the grinning, drooling pack of scavengers.

Were they the most deadly foes I’d ever encountered? Probably not. But I wasn’t in great shape for casting more spells and I wasn’t keen to witness how the chaos of Pandoral magic would interact with already corrupted beings, so the kangaroo and I handled things the old-fashioned way. After the first few awkward moments of clumsiness, we fell into a rhythm: he’d distract our opponents by bounding over them, I’d grab one in a wrestling hold, using them as a shield against the others, letting go just in time for the kangaroo to rip out its throat. Our foes eventually grew wary– who says crazies can’t learn?– which we used to our advantage, and pretty soon, they were all dead, the kangaroo had drunk enough blood to make him giddy as he hopped around farting with glee, and I had found the seventh member of our coven that Corrigan had been demanding because, as he’ll happily explain to you inexhaustivedetail, ‘the Malevolent Six is a shit name.’

By my count, in the three months or so that Temper has been on this plane of reality, he’s killed more than two hundred humans, angelics and demoniacs, not to mention every magical monstrosity with something akin to a neck he can bite. And the bastard’s just getting started.

Care to guess why I’ve been reluctant to try that spell again?

This is the problem with Pandoral spells, friends: not only is chaos unpredictable, it doesn’t remotely obey what we think of as the normal limitations of magic. Corrigan can produce only so much aetheric lightning and fire. Aradeus can summon only so many rats. Even Galass can mess only so much with the flow of life and blood.

But chaos magic? It doesn’t operate at that level: it alters the underlyingcausesthat shape reality.

I guess that’s why there aren’t many mages attuned to that particular plane, which was why the Pandoral needed his little cult of psychos to find a disposable human wonderist attuned to his realm, so that he could violate every law of nature to create a gate between them that would surely end up collapsing our world so that his could thrive again.

And now, without further ado, let’s get back to all that torture I lied about skipping over.

Chapter 35

The Sublime Art of Resisting Torture

Look, ifyou’dbeen captured and tormented twice in one week–onefucking week– wouldn’t you want people to know how bravely you’d withstood all those cruel acts of barbarity?

‘Oh, please, no!’ I screamed, crawling along the soiled stone floor, knees and palms slipping on my own urine and faecal matter. I persevered, however, determined to kiss the buzzing swarm of insects forming my beloved lord and master’s feet. ‘Please, I beg you, oh mightiest of the mighty, wisest of the wise, please don’t hurt me anymore! I can’t take it– not another minute, not anothersecond!’

Actually, I could take alittlebit more. Like, maybe six and a half minutes more. Seven at the outside.

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