Page 34 of The Malevolent Eight

It was an honour I’d never thought to receive so early in my tenure: barely a year since the Celestine of Justice had blessed me into her service. To be given this sacred duty, to decide whether this Abomination should be executed or exiled back to the unnatural plane of reality from whence she’d come– to be asked this by none other than Fidelity. . . I wept, first with pride, then with shame for that same pride, and finally with joy that one so unworthy to have been born to a world where a wretched, unschooled boy called Cade Ombra should be granted such honours.

No, I’d reminded myself, not Cade Ombra. I am Gallantry now.Gallantry!

With my comrades at my side, the twelve virtues in my heart, I spoke the charges against the accused and allowed her to give such testimony as she believed would sway the pendulum of Justice towards mercy. And yet she merely blathered and bleated, moaned of her blamelessness and menaced us with threats of her foul magics. In the end, as the others looked to me for my verdict, I proved myself unworthy of their faith. Rather than accept the burden of my office and sentence the Abomination to swift execution, I allowed my selfish, childish desire to appear tender-hearted– that conceit sometimes called altruism– to sway me away from true justice.

‘Exile,’ I said at last.

And so, bound by my failure of judgment, the Auroral Will cast the grotesque creature back to—

‘Stop!’ I shouted, shaking off the tangle of emotions shrouding my memories. All around me, the Auroral Haze billowed so thickly I could barely see the girl cowering there, frozen in terror before me. ‘This wasn’t what happened– it’s only the story I was telling myself whilethe events were unfolding!’

A face appeared within the haze, golden as the fog itself. ‘You asked to return to this moment, Gallantry,’the voice of the Celestine of Justice insisted.‘This is when you encountered the woman you call “Spellslinger”.’

I tried to peer through the clouds of my younger self’s remembrances to see the girl, but the vision kept blurring, my zealotry painting the world in broad strokes of gold-tinged perfection marred only by a putrid blotch surrounding the accused.

‘You promised me entry into the Glorian Archives so that I could recover the memories of my eyes and ears,’ I reminded her. ‘If all I’d been looking to do was relive my glory days as a Justiciar, I could’ve holed up in a pleasure parlour for a few days and drugged myself senseless with psychedelics. Show me whatreallyhappened.’

Disapproving faces made up of wisps of fog are particularly good at sighing. ‘As ever, you elevate the muddled perceptions of flawed flesh over the flawless precision of faith. Yet you remain my favourite among my fallen children, Gallantry, so turn away from the mirror of truth if you insist and gaze instead into the muddy pool of your base Mortal senses, blind to the deeper spiritual clarity that once guided you.’

My old boss really knew how to pour on the guilt when it suited.

‘Please!’ wept the girl hiding in the cave. Her cries were like claws digging into clay, so full of anguish over what was happening to her, so terrified of. . .me.

‘Please,’ she repeated, staring up at us wide-eyed, trying to make us hear her– to make us understand. ‘I don’t belong here. I didn’t mean to break the laws of this place. It was an accident– a spell gone wrong. Somehow, I breached the veil between my plane of reality and yours. I don’tbelonghere!’

‘Why would an innocent attempt so foul a spell?’ asked Dignity. He was probably the only vaguely compassionate one of us, and even he tended to be– you guessed it– a right prick at times like these. ‘Even now, the wickedness of your wonderism weaves itself among the strands of this realm, a foul weed seeking to take root in the garden.’

He reached down a gauntleted hand and held up a strand of her dark hair as if it were the web of a spider seeking to lure him closer. ‘How could one so young rip through walls that the Auroral Sovereign himself erected around this, his most perfect creation? Unbind the lies your masters have woven around you, girl. Confess to us which of the Lords Devilish fed you this perverse magic. Testify to the plot meant to twist the souls of innocent Mortals to the Infernal cause.’

‘Look at me,’ she cried, sliding back the torn sleeves of the clothes she’d worn to rags fleeing from our pursuit these past weeks. ‘Look– I’m not a demon! I was an initiate in the traditional magic of my people. I’ve never even heard of this wonderism, or these Infernals you accuse me of colluding with—’

With the Auroral Haze parted at last, I could now see what she’d actually been trying to show us: intricate bands of sigils tattooed into her skin with some sort of metallic ink. Each band had its own distinct colour and sheen: one a purplish-platinum, one burnished orange like the glow of an ember, one an iron-grey band. Sparks erupted sporadically from some of the sigils, then quickly died, dulling the tattoos once more.

‘I’m only sixteen,’ the girl pleaded as if that should somehow render her immune to our judgment. Even without the Auroral Haze blurring my Mortal senses, it was hard to make out her features through the matted mahogany-brown hair.

This was the Spellslinger, I knew now, though there was nothing of the wry, imperturbable mage who’d kicked our arses in this trembling, shattered girl who’d fled my fellow Glorians until she was nearly dead of thirst and her feet had been torn to bloody tatters.

‘I was undergoing my mage’s trials,’ she said, speaking so quickly to forestall our verdict that her words were little more than stuttering sobs. ‘The third test requires us to devise a spell never before recorded in the annals of Jan’Tep magic by our spellmasters. Usually, initiates only do some trivial variation of an existing spell, but I’– the tattooed sigils of three of the bands, purple, blue and grey, shimmered faintly– ‘I found a way to interweave silk, breath and iron magic that I believed could create momentary breaches in the fabric of my world, allowing one to travel great distances. Instead, I found myself here.’ She glanced around the cave as if every shadow hid some new terror even worse than my fellow Glorians and me. She was wrong. ‘I’m sorry! I just need time to find a way home,please!’

The timbre of her voice, the rapid blinking of her tear-soaked eyes, the spasms rippling through her emaciated limbs, all spoke of the terror of being so far from safety, from all that she knew, to being surrounded by men and women in gleaming armour accusing her of being some sort of. . .

‘Abomination,’ I condemned her.

‘Abomination,’ the eleven other Glorians agreed.

Fidelity, a woman whose single-minded fanaticism for our cause led her to constantly question my loyalty, turned to me. ‘You found her, Gallantry, when her filthy spells hid her from the rest of us– though the Auroral Sovereign knows it was luck and not your clumsy, banal attempts at “investigation” you seem to believe make up for your lack of spiritual insight.’

‘Whereas you are as insightful as you are beautiful,’ Indomitability chimed up. He never failed to leap at the opportunity to kiss up to Fidelity. I was pretty sure he was hoping to wear her down until she got so tired of his pathetic flattery that she’d finally reward him with a pity fu—

‘Is the post-facto commentary enlightening somehow?’asked the Celestine of Justice in my mind.

‘Sorry. Forgot you were still here.’

Take my word for it, though: Indomitability was a complete arsehole. But let’s get back to Fidelity being. . . well, being Fidelity.

‘. . . No doubt that same luck was at work when you defeated the nefarious bindings of the Infernal infiltrator who attempted to shackle our minds,’ she said, managing to make ‘luck’ sound like ‘unimpeachable evidence of your innate incompetence’.

‘How could anyone shackle Gallantry’s mind?’ chortled Indomitability. ‘There’s so little there to bind!’

---