Page 74 of The Malevolent Eight

She looked rather delightful tonight, the intimate candlelight in this little restaurant in a quiet corner of town gleaming on her dark curls. She’d chosen an unpretentious ankle-length grey dress for the evening that looked utterly stunning on her. She’d purchased the dress from the same shop where I’d swapped my tattered rags for a surprisingly well-tailored brocaded coat in what’s apparently called the ‘baronet’ style, which was similar in cut to my usual wonderist’s coat. Instead of my customary azure, I’d had to settle for crimson with gold trim. Along with the inordinately puffy white shirt and narrow black trousers the shopkeeper had insisted I buy as well, I looked poncey enough to pass for a rat mage.

‘You look nice tonight, by the way,’ Eliva’ren said.

‘You too,’ I said, aiming for casual and somehow landing on fretful-seventeen-year-old-desperate-to-impress-a-pretty-girl.

She smiled, which told me she wasn’t unaware of the innate awkwardness of this particular conversation. ‘So. . . ground rules.’

‘Right. Rules. Must have rules. I take it the first rule is no sex?’

She looked surprised by that. ‘What? Of course not. I thought sex was the whole point when you propositioned me.’

‘I wasn’t propositioning you,’ I half-stammered. ‘I was merely proposing th—’

‘So it was a proposal. You were proposing to me.’

‘No, damn it, I was just. . .’

‘Brother Cade,’ I imagined Aradeus shooting me one of those swashbuckler grins of his, ‘I believe you are falling in love.’

No, I’m not. This is all part of a brilliant and cunning plan.

‘You are falling in love,’Alice insisted. ‘It is pathetic.’

Then Temper started in on some philosophical dissertation about the inseparable connection between love in the mind and love of the body and whether the existence of the latter voided the possibility of the former and I stopped listening to my own imaginings.

Truth be told, I hadn’t had much of a plan once I’d brought Eliva’ren to the town and she’d had a chance to recover from the exhaustion of wielding her strange form of wonderism to rescue us from the Unlucky Eight– although only because I’d forced her to, and only after she’d tried to torture me herself with her so-called silk magic. Then she’d passed out from the effort, leaving me the choice of whether to kill her or save her. Abandoning her outside the fortress would’ve likely produced the same effect, as I was suresomeoneworking for the Pandoral had survived the collapse.

So where had that left us? Two people who’d saved each other’s lives yet were on opposite sides of a conflict far bigger and more consequential than either of us. We were surely going to try to kill one another once this whole Great Crusade insanity came to its inevitable calamitous end– so what were we supposed to do? Wave goodbye and, vying for who got the last word, walk off in opposite directions? I could almost hear how that would go.

‘Farewell, beloved enemy. When next we meet, you will surely die.’

‘Ah, but we shall not meet again, for when I kill you, I shall give you a gift, for you will never see death coming.’

‘I need not see death, you poor fool, save in a mirror, for I am your death.’

‘Yes, you are my death, the last one I must commit ere this bloody business be done.’

‘Alas, it is already done, and soon your blood will. . . Wait, what was that last part? I didn’t hear it all.’

‘What’s that? You’re too far away now. I can’t hear a thing you’re—’

You get the idea. It was pointless to walk away at that moment, but the alternative was to start fighting again, which was also kind of silly given we’d just saved each other’s lives.

‘Say, does that destiny hoodoo magic of yours happen to tell you how far away my crew are?’ I’d asked instead, looking up at the town gates, unsure which of us would be expected to skip the comforts of town to avoid us having to deal with the obvious logic of resuming our conflict now rather than later.

Eliva’ren had closed her eyes briefly. Some shred of the connection we’d had through her silk magic before must’ve remained, because when I closed my own eyes, I saw images in flashes: Aradeus having a conversation with a group of rats; Alice, her eyes glowing an odd onyx, peering into the distance and apparently looking straight at me. Temper, hopping around madly shouting, ‘Motherfucker! Motherfucker!’

‘They’ve either abandoned you and gone their separate ways or they’ll be here in the morning,’ Eliva had said at last. ‘Both destinies ultimately end the same, but the intervening steps are equally likely.’

Personally, I thought she was being cynical and that the others would, of course, be on their way. ‘Tomorrow morning, you said?’

She nodded. ‘Assuming they haven’t given up on you.’

Ouch.

‘Okay, then I have a proposal.’

She looked at me, those dark eyes narrowed in suspicion, even as a glimmer of her smirk appeared. Her kiss still lingered on my lips, even after a week of torture. ‘All right, Cade, what are you proposing?’

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