Page 36 of The Malevolent Eight

‘No way out for me,’ she said, shaking her head vigorously. ‘Not unless I can draw a different destiny to me.’ Again she reached out, straining so hard I could see the veins sticking out against the bronze darkness of her skin. ‘It’s hard to catch hold of the good ones– none of the likely ones end well, so I’ll have to settle for the one they’ll offer me, I guess.’

She sounded exhausted, at the end of her rope and on the verge of giving up.

‘Settle forwhat, Eliva’ren? Is someone going to offer you a way out? Is that what you’re trying to draw to yourself? A. . . a destiny that isn’t real yet? Maybe I can help you find a better one. Tell me what to do.’

She chuckled in the way of those on the edge of losing their sanity. ‘Helpme? Don’t be stupid, “Gallantry”. You’re standing– what? Ten years from where I am? You can’t change the past, you know. That’s not how this works.’

I tried to grab her wrist as she’d grabbed mine when she’d pulled me here, but my fingers passed right through her arm as if I wasn’t really with her, which, I suppose, I wasn’t.

‘Youwould havehelped me, though,’ she murmured, as if she were hearing my thoughts, though she seemed only dimly aware of my presence. ‘That was one of my destinies– a good one.’ She smiled, a whimsical, melancholic smile. ‘In that destiny, you get over your fear of Fidelity just long enough to ask where she took me to perform the Ritual of Exile. She tries to put you off the scent, but that’s a mistake. You’re Cade-fucking-Ombra, Hazidan Rosh’s finest investigator. The more Fidelity works to convince you everything was done properly, the more those instincts of yours awaken. That’s my favourite destiny of all. The one where you find me before it’s too late.’

‘Too late for what?’ I asked, kneeling, trying to make her look at me, but it was as if I were made of mist, becoming less and less real to her.

‘My own fault, really. I never thought. . . it was just one night, and he was so. . . He couldn’t look at anyone but me. We were celebrating because I’d figured out the spell that would change everything, make weak little Eliva’ren famous among the entire clan– famous amongallthe Jan’Tep clans. So I wasn’t thinking right, and neither was he. And then the next morning, I cast the spell and. . .’ Tears dripped down her cheeks, leaving streaks in the dirt and grime. ‘You really want to know?’

‘I do. Tell me, Eliva’ren.’

‘Call me Eliva.’

‘Okay, Eliva. Call me Cade. Tell me what I was too late for.’

The fog thickened between us and I found myself rising to my feet without willing to do so, my steps drawing me backwards to the cathedral. But Eliva’ren jumped up and ran to me, and though I was now as insubstantial as the mist itself, she tried to kiss me on the cheek as she whispered, ‘Too late to save the baby.’

Chapter 18

Crimes of Dispassion

Rage clouds our vision with its own kind of haze, sometimes. Fury has a colour, after all: a deep, blood-red at once repellent, yet somehow pure: a hue that makes you want to paint the entire world to match. I’ve never been prone to indulging in bouts of anger, bloodlust or temper tantrums. I am a peacemaker at heart.

‘May the Void take every one of you fucking morons,’ I swore as the cathedral drew me back out of the Archives and returned me to the august presence of the Lords Celestine. ‘Youliedto me– you violated your own Justiciar’s verdict and half a dozen of your own laws to bury the living evidence of your perfidy in an illegal secret prison! Why? So you could torture a young mage lost in our realm by accident and experiment on her in pursuit of yet more power for yourselves? The hells with ending your asinine war, I’m going to kill you all myself!’

The reason why I’ve made it my practice never to lose my composure is because it rarely produces the desired trembling, falling to the knees and begging for pardon in the targets of my ire.

‘As ever,’ intoned the Celestine of Humility to his sister Justice, his deep voice infused with the weary melancholy of one whose patience goes forever unrewarded, ‘your fallen child places his own flawed judgments over those wiser not by mere years but by millennia.’

‘Fury is the sister of Lust,’ explained the Celestine of Chastity, the perfection of his own youthful features marred by the disgust evident in his sneer. ‘Wrath is the sin by which the sinner fools themselves into believing it is others who owe them penance.’

Even Rationality, that least irritating of Celestine Virtues, felt the need to pile it on. ‘Anger fuels the blaze that smothers wisdom in the smoke of rage.’

Shitty poetry aside, she was right. Personally, I would’ve gone with something along the lines of ‘Anger is the iron with which we forge the bars of our own prisons.’ Okay, that’s not much better, but it was a more accurate description of my present predicament.

‘So much for “we’re beneath the notice of the Celestines”,’ Corrigan muttered, his arms stretched behind his back where he, Shame, Alice, Galass, Aradeus and even poor Temper were shackled to ivory columns that hadn’t been there when I’d left. I’d somehow managed not to notice those shackles appearing around my own wrists too.

‘The Celestines cannot normally punish a supplicant for accepting their gifts,’ Shame replied. ‘Cade’s ventures into the Archives of the Glorians must have somehow violated the terms of our agreement with them.’

‘How?’ Galass asked. ‘Cade, what did you do?’

It would be nice if that wasn’t always the first question anyone asks when things go to hell.

‘We permitted you to consult the annals of your time as a Justiciar,’ my old boss reminded me. ‘You, however, delved beyond your own experiences and sought out those of the Abomination. Confess the nature of your misdeeds and we will, as always, be guided by mercy.’

‘Her name was Eliva,’ I corrected the Celestine of Justice, ‘not “the Abomination”.’ I looked at each of the twelve Presences seated upon their grand thrones in a semi-circle around us. ‘Since you’re all so big on confession, how about you repent for the atrocities you committed against her?’

There were a number of ‘how dare yous’, threats of divine retribution and demands for me to explain myself, but I paid little attention to any of it. I certainly wasn’t going to get into specifics about their crime. When being held captive, never give your interrogators more information than necessary. I wanted to rile them, to see how much they knew about my encounter with Eliva’ren– and how involved they’d been in Fidelity’s betrayal of the rules of our order.

It was Justice who spoke first, and she sought to distract me by rekindling my anger. ‘Exile can have many interpretations,’ she said.

‘Seriously?’ I asked. ‘That’swhat you’re opening with?’ I turned to sneer right back at Chastity, ‘Does that principle apply to celibacy as well? Because sometimes when my penis gets cold, technically that makes someone else’s orifice just a different interpretation of an “undergarment”, right?’

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