Page 38 of The Malevolent Eight

Yeah, yeah. I’m a lousy actor. So what?

I pivoted the conversation back to blaming the Lords Celestine for their hand in this disaster. ‘And you callmereckless?’ I demanded. ‘Your Glorian Ardentors tortured a castaway over and over, forcing one attunement after the other on her until one of those gleaming idiots had the brilliant idea to try thePandoralrealm? That’schaos magic– those aren’t physical laws that just clash with ours; they take a fucking hammer to the fabric of our reality!’

So you can see why I didn’t want my only friendsfinding out what I’d done to myself, right? Or that I’d managed to turn a kangaroo into a vampire, but that was an accident. For now, I was taking what satisfaction I could from the discomfort evident on the faces of the twelve so-called divine beings in front of me.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Anything to say for yourselves?’

‘Our Glorian Ardentors have, on occasion, proved overly. . . zealous in their hearing of the Auroral Song,’ the Celestine of Justice conceded.

I took advantage of that rather tepid defence to reconsider the events that had led to the opening of the portals through which the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish had at last been able to enter this realm and begin their long-prophesied war against one another. At the time, I’d been rather busy nearly dying and being betrayed by both sides to ask too many questions.

Now, though. . .

Why had the Pandorals, those strange beings from that unknowable realm of chaos magic, suddenly decided to invade the Mortal realm? Their acolytes, the Seven Brothers, had told me it was because their own plane of reality had begun to collapse in on itself.

Okay, perfectly logical reason to decide to invade and conquer someone else’s realm, but howdoesan entire plane of reality collapse?

‘The Spellslinger,’ I said aloud, still working through the problem. ‘Her forced attunement to the Pandoral realm set off the chain of events that led to the beings who ruled it attempting to colonise ours. The combination of the magic from Eliva’ren’s realm channelled through the tattooed bands on her arms, when attuned to the chaos laws of the Pandoral realm, enabled her to create an entirely new form of wonderism.’

‘Destiny magic,’ Aradeus said, awe-struck.

Oh, sure, sounds lovely when you dub it ‘destiny magic’. The problems come when you start wrapping your head around the full implications, which no one seemed to have done.

‘What if. . . ?’ Corrigan began uncomfortably. ‘Cade, who’s to say she can only manifest or pull forward or whatever the fuck she does for a single individual? What if she’s capable of triggering a destiny for an entire people? An entireworld?’

See? Not nearly as dumb as he pretends.

‘Indeed,’ agreed the Celestine of Humility, leaning back on his throne as if some long-standing debate between them had now been settled. ‘The Spellslinger represents an existential threat not merely to the Mortal realm, but to the Auroral Crusade itself.’

‘Oh, no, not the Great Crusade!’ Corrigan said mockingly. ‘Go cry me a river, you self-important cock,’ he added unhelpfully.

Okay, sometimes Corrigan reallyisas dumb as he looks.

‘We are decided,’ announced the Celestine of Justice. I suppose they took the vote silently and without us getting to observe the count. ‘Justiciar Gallantry, the will of the Divine is upon you. From this place shall you venture and through your deviousness and that of your comrades shall you seek out and kill the Abomination who calls itself the Spellslinger.’

‘And why would we follow your commands?’ asked Galass. ‘Until this revelation,youwere the greatest threat to the Mortal realm.’

Chastity put on what I presume was meant to be his most winning smile. I’d describe it more as ‘eminently punchable’.

‘Alas, poor child, you fail to—’

‘Don’tchildme, you insipid, pompous, gaudy halfwit from some amateur painter’s banal interpretation of divinity!’

Perhaps I should have warned Chastity that former sublimes-turned-blood-mages don’t take kindly to condescension. . . Nah, that would have been condescending.

‘Why shouldn’t we conjure some Infernal temple or brothel or wherever the Lords Devilish like to appear and cut a deal withthem?’ Galass asked.

Not the worst idea, and that was precisely why I’d chosen to commune with the Celestine Presences in the first place. Not that my friends were going to see it that way once they found out.

The Celestine of Rationality broke the impasse, unsurprisingly, given her particular virtue. ‘You seek answers to the wrong questions, Sanguinalist.’ She stepped down from her throne and came to me. Without so much as a wave of her hand, she dismissed the seven decaying columns and the shackles binding us. ‘What you are really asking is why should anyone entrust such a mission to you when far more powerful forces could be deployed in this endeavour?’

‘Because the moment you divert any of your major resources to hunting down and killing the Spellslinger, the Lords Devilish will see an opportunity to initiate the first full-scale attack in the war between you,’ said Alice. For once, she didn’t sound annoyed at having to explain something she no doubt considered obvious.

‘Ah, but there is more to it than that,’ said Rationality, smiling at me, her eyes meeting mine. Yeah, okay, golden irises can, in the right light, be alittleenticing. ‘Your coven, oddly composed as it is of fallen souls, is far better suited to undertake this mission than any other we could assemble.’

‘Why, fair Lady?’ asked Aradeus.

Rationality walked closer, making me profoundly uncomfortable. The cathedral began to come apart in earnest, the high sculpted walls collapsing back into our rough-hewn wooden posts with the silver ribbons tied between them. The Celestine kissed me on the cheek as she said, loud enough to ensure my comrades would hear, ‘You know why it must be you, Cade.’

---