Page 25 of The Malevolent Eight

She knelt for a moment so our faces were close. ‘You’re a fine liar, Cade, but an oath isn’t a lie, and nature, despite how it tricks us’– she gestured to the destruction all around us– ‘is immutable. That’s what you can’t comprehend. What’s going to happenisgoing to happen. The war between the Aurorals and the Infernals isn’tdestiny, it’shistory, unfolding as it must. You and me, we’re the only ones outside that history. Me because. . . well, let’s save that story for another time.’ She smoothed my hair from my brow. ‘You, though. . .’ She shook her head. ‘What you did to yourself up in that fortress in the Blastlands? Was that impulsive– a moment of reckless insanity? Or did you really choose to make yourself into what you’ve become?’

‘Neither,’ I replied, watching her eyes, her mouth, her face, taking in her scent and the breathiness of her voice, everything I could sense about her, and locking it away in the back of my mind. ‘I made a bet with the universe.’

She smiled. ‘A bet with the universe. I like that.’ She rose to her feet and stood a moment in silence, eyes closed. I felt an odd sort of pressure building, as if she were tugging not so much the world around her but its history, tying it to herself like a cloak too heavy and too long for anyone but her to wear. ‘I guess we know each other a little better now, don’t we?’ she asked.

Without waiting for an answer, she walked away from me, down the broken street. I watched her go, the events of the past hour dragging along behind her, pulled away from this place and time like a dirty rug from the floor beneath. The cracks in the road began to mend, the buildings groaned as stone and mortar, marble and plaster shifted back into place. The six bodies the Spellslinger had left behind stood up, dazed, then shook themselves off and came to stand next to me.

‘So,’ Corrigan asked. ‘How fucked are we?’

It took a moment before I could convince my mouth that when next I spoke, actual words would come out instead of dried leaves and my crumbling sense of self. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s all going according to plan.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Corrigan said as he grabbed me by the back of my collar and hauled me alongside him down the still-resurrecting street.

Chapter 13

Destiny’s Just Another Word for Getting Screwed by the Universe

It’s a strange thing to watch a ruined city repair itself before your eyes. Corrigan and I walked side by side along a wide avenue, stepping over chasm-like cracks grunting and groaning as they drew themselves back together, covering themselves like shy lovers with reassembling rocks that moments ago had been blasted shards. On either side of the path, buildings were drawing themselves up from the rubble to their previously proud heights, stitched together with mortar that had been nothing but dust seconds before. Bits of broken marble and alabaster were sliding around like puzzle pieces to form gleaming, seamless façades. With each step we took, the flagstones slid back into place, smoothing and straightening like a carpet being laid out for us.

‘What kind of magic can even do this?’ Corrigan demanded. He was angry and scared and blaming me for both. ‘Who was that lunatic woman and what the fuck did you do to piss her off, Cade?’

Eminently reasonable questions, for which I had no good answers. No doubt the others had concerns of their own, so I supposed I should have been grateful that Corrigan had insisted we take this little stroll by ourselves. Admittedly, my gratitude was muted by the occasions on campaign when he’d suggest a comradely stroll to a wonderist who’d screwed up one too many times. Inevitably, he returned alone. ‘Took ’em to a nice farm,’ Corrigan would say later, whilst parcelling out our absent colleague’s supplies to the rest of the coven. ‘Lots of open space to frolic.’

If that sounds heartless, well, clearly you haven’t been paying attention to all the other times he’s blown people up at the drop of a hat. To be fair, though, ours is a precarious business. One wrong move, one ill-chosen spell, one too manyoh-look-Cade’s-brought-another-homicidal-immortal-lunatic-into-our-livesand it’s a one-way trip to ‘the farm’.

‘Tell me this is all some new kind of illusioneering,’ Corrigan pleaded, sweeping an arm to encompass the devastation that was slowly, inexorably, reversing itself as the town of Seduction returned to its former– if dubious– glory. ‘Actually, I take that back. Better the world’s gone mad than the prospect of luminists being taken seriously.’

‘It’s no illusion,’ I told him. ‘The Spellslinger isn’t drawing spells from the Luxoral realm. I don’t think she’s attuned to any of the usual ones.’

‘Whatever plane of reality she’s drawing power from, I wish you’d picked that instead of wasting your one shot with the Apparatus to attune yourself to fucking Fortunal magic.’ He ran a few feet ahead and kicked a stone, only to have it veer in mid-air to rejoin its brethren to form the foundation of what soon rose up to become a brothel. ‘Fucking unluckiest person I’ve ever met decides to become a chancer.’

The bones sticking out of the ground slid free of their bonds, clacking into formation and becoming a skeleton onto which charred bits of flesh stretched and smoothed themselves. We watched wisps of gossamer filaments wrapping around the revivifying body of a fair-haired young man, clothing him in the diaphanous toga of his profession. He stood up, confused at first, then offered Corrigan and me an inviting smile. ‘Welcome, my would-be lovers.’ He pointed to the brothel. ‘Three’s no crowd inmybed. . . or my sister’s.’

Corrigan made a sour face. ‘Ugh. Why do you young ones always bring up incest like it’s some erotic nirvana we all want to experience?’

The reborn prostitute gave us the finger before darting through the door of the still-rising brothel. Nearby, another pile of broken bones and sinew revivified into one of the young man’s colleagues, though she was closer to forty and had the wide hips and ample figure Corrigan preferred.

Nice smile, too, I thought as she winked at us.

‘Sorry, lass,’ Corrigan called to her. ‘Much as I’d love to rumpy-pump away the day with you, I’m stuck cleaning up after this moron.’

‘Happy to wait outside,’ I told him.

Corrigan just kept walking, grumbling at first to himself and then, inevitably, sharing his emotional distress with me. ‘Did you see that?’ he demanded. ‘Perfectly nice whore. Probably putting herself through university on tips. Now you’ve gone and ruined her educational prospects.’

My patience for casual abuse was wearing thin, partly because I was still holding back my own tremors following my encounter with the Spellslinger. ‘Either kill me now or quit your whining, you blustering ox. I didn’t ask to be ambushed by a psychotic immortal wonderist with a grudge against me. I didn’t ask to watch my friends lie down like sheep and die worse deaths than either of us have seen in gods-know how many wars, just to come back to life and shit all over me!’

The big brute spun on me, the notable absence of indigo sparks around his fists providing no reassurance whatsoever. Corrigan’s all muscle, strong and skilled as an arena gladiator, and equally comfortable committing acts of violence with his bare hands as with his Tempestoral spells. ‘You’renot the one who died, Cade.’ He stared down at his hands. They were trembling. ‘You’re not the one who. . .’ He shuddered. ‘You have no idea what it was like.’

‘Tell me.’

The ball of his throat bobbed up and down and he swallowed twice, as if he had to force the bile back down before any words could come out. ‘When I saw that shadow on the ground and that bitch told me I was already dead, I. . . I didn’t even try to resist.’ Sparks of red and black began to dance across his knuckles. ‘Iknewit would hurt– I’ve seen what it’s like when I. . . But she was right, Cade.She was right!That’s how I was supposed to die. That’s how Ihaddied, only it hadn’t happened yet.’ He shook his head like a dog with a palsy, the indigo braids whipping back and forth. ‘Is she a god, Cade? Did a fucking god just foretell my death? Or did she transport an entire city into the future and then effortlessly bring it all back?’

An answer to that question had begun to form in my mind, bits and pieces of stray thoughts tied together with nothing but instinct and conjecture. The town of Seduction had all but finished its unthinking restoration to how it had been when we’d first arrived here three days ago. The early spring air was clear and crisp. People who’d been dead minutes ago were strolling past us to wherever they’d been headed before the Spellslinger had ushered them to their dooms. And yet I could see the uncertainty in their expressions, the awareness, thankfully already fading, that they had, however briefly, been dead. Soon those memories would unspool so their subconsciouses could weave the traumas into fanciful nightmares, easily dismissed and soon forgotten.

Would Corrigan do likewise? Alice? Shame? Would it be better if I offered up some convoluted theory about momentary distortions and mass delusion?

No, I decided.We made a deal, the seven of us, to end a war before that war became endless. We all agreed the mission would demand sacrifices of us, and that our own deaths would likely be the least of them.

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