Page 26 of The Malevolent Eight

I led Corrigan down a boulevard filled with shops, the sidewalks littered with kids pulling handcarts laden with spices and trinkets and whatever else they’d scrounged in search of the busiest spots to sell their wares. ‘I don’t think the Spellslinger is a god,’ I said, watching the hubbub of an ordinary market day unfold. ‘And you know as well as I do that no magic allows one to travel through time.’

It’s true: the universe might be a chaotic mess, but it doesn’t screw around with causality.

‘Thenwhat is she?’ Corrigan asked. ‘I mean, aside from a paella-ruining strumpet of strictly average looks and I swear I will fucking murder you if you have sex with her.’

I ignored that jibe, being unsure which outcome I found the most unpleasant. ‘She talked about destinies as if they were tangible, somehow. Not so much predictions or prophecies, but. . . places. I know this sounds insane, but I think the Spellslinger has the power to somehow summon those places, those destinies, to the here and now.’

I stumbled backwards, a sudden ringing in my left ear and a pain just below my temple. Corrigan had just cuffed me in the side of the head. ‘Insane, I can handle. Vague, barely coherent conjectures that sound like lazy teenage poetry really piss me off. So stop being obtuse and tell me what the fuck you mean.’

He had a point, but I doubted I could make him feel any better. I stopped at an intersection. ‘Destiny isn’t like Fate,’ I began. ‘It’s not a singular proposition.’ I pointed to each of the four directions we could take. ‘In a sense, destiny is the inevitable outcome of who we are combined with the choices we make. Turn left, and whatever awaits down the road is your destiny. Turn right instead and an entirely different set of events will unfold.’

‘Sure, and if we float up to the clouds, birds will peck at our testicles until we get off their turf.’

‘Ah, but that’s just it, you see?’ I pounced on the weirdly apt example. ‘What are the chances of two wonderists who lack any spells for ascending to the skies doing so?’

‘Zero, obviously.’

I gestured to the boulevard straight ahead. ‘The further we walk down this street, the further we get from our friends back at the restaurant. Those outcomes, thosedestiniesare hazy, ephemeral.’ I pointed to the side street to our right that would lead us back to the others. ‘That path isn’t just more plausible, it has a sort of. . .solidityto it the others don’t. Our destinies aren’t set in stone, but they’re not random, either. They’re predictable– inevitable, in a sense.’

Corrigan rubbed at his bearded jaw. ‘And this Spellslinger has the ability to. . . how did you put it?Drawthose destinies to us?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Wouldn’t that make her the most powerful wonderist in existence? What makes you so sure she’snota god?’

This part was harder to explain, but I was absolutely positive about it. ‘Because she’s sad.’

Corrigan barked out a laugh. ‘Sad? Oh, well that explains everything! The Spellslinger issad.’ He held up a finger to keep me from interrupting. ‘You know what? I take it all back. None of this is your fault, it must be mine. If only I’d agreed to bed her like she was clearly hinting, she would’ve joined our coven– not that I’ll ever be okay with “The Malevolent Eight” as a name, mind you. Together, we’d’ve kicked the arses of the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish until they agreed to play nice with one another.’

Tempestoral energies gathered around his hands and an instant later, a bolt of red and black calamity tore up a three-foot section of the recently reassembled flagstones in the middle of the intersection.

‘Hey!’ an elderly woman shouted from a window above a wine shop. ‘What did you do that for, you bloody barbarian? Haven’t we got enough trouble with Infernals and Aurorals and who knows what else without a couple of wonderist drifters hurling spells at our streets?’

‘Blame destiny,’ Corrigan shouted back at her.

‘You done yet?’ I asked. Sometimes you just have to let him get these things out of his system.

‘How do you know?’

‘What?’

‘About the Spellslinger– about her being sad.’

‘It’s. . .’ I wasn’t eager to dissect every subtle clue in the way she talked, those brief flickers between smiles or the way her cocky attitude was ever-so-slightly too consistent. I turned to lock eyes with Corrigan. We’d never talked much about me having been a Glorian Justiciar,someone who hunted down people like us when the Aurorals decided they wanted them either imprisoned or dead. ‘I was never the most powerful of the Justiciars. I wasn’t the most devout and I sure as hell didn’t turn out to be the most loyal. But none of them had my instincts, Corrigan. None of them read people like I could.’

He chewed on that a while, probably because I’d once told him that my first betrayal of the Lords Celestine involved refusing to kill a certain reckless, loud-mouthed Tempestoral mage deemed too dangerous to be allowed to live. ‘Well, I suppose I can’t fault your taste in friends, at least.’ He gave me a punch in the arm that was far more painful than intended, given he followed it with, ‘Sorry about smacking you upside the head before.’

‘It’s okay. You’ve had a rough day. After all, some crazy woman wrecked your dinner and the paella got cold. Then she convinced some half-witted thunderer to blow a hole in your chest.’

He chuckled at that. ‘Damn, that reallywasgood paella. You think Tenebris could get his chefs to whip us up some more?’

‘Forget it. Paella’s for proper villains, not a bunch of milquetoast cry-babies who get their arses handed to them by an opponent so clueless she never once asked to see your cock.’

‘Damn straight.’ He puffed himself up, needlessly readjusting the bejewelled bands on his thick arms. ‘What’s the plan, then? Because I don’t intend to spend the rest of my almost certainly short life going without decent paella.’

‘Simple. We figure out where the Spellslinger’s drawing those crazy spells from and who she’s working for, whether it’s this so-called “Apocalypse Eight” or some other bunch of arseholes. Then we gather the proof that they’ve played both the Aurorals and the Infernals for fools and getthemto kill these shadowy warmongers for us, buying us time to diffuse this “Great Crusade” before it engulfs the rest of humanity– all while proving to their respective armies that the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish are incompetent morons long overdue for dethroning, followed by swift defenestration.’

‘Ha!’ Corrigan bellowed, thumping a fist against his chest. ‘Nowthatsounds like a paella-worthy mission.’ He threw his arm around my shoulders, nearly crushing me as we turned right down the side street towards where the others would be waiting for us. ‘You know, I feel a bit guilty. When I suggested we take a walk, just the two of us, I was contemplating killing you to keep the Spellslinger off our backs. Nothing personal, you understand, but that chick clearly has a hard-on for you.’

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