Page 47 of The Malevolent Eight

Chapter 24

The Glorian Banner

Wars are fought by soldiers and paid for by citizens, but they’re fuelled by faith. They don’t end with the death of the last soldier on either side, nor does surrender come just before inevitable defeat. Ask the infantry in most armies the night before their generals sign an armistice (that’s an agreement in which both sides pretend to agree to stop fighting because of their mutual love of peace but which is actually a polite way for the losing side to say, ‘Please stop stabbing us to death’) and they’ll swear up and down they’re on the verge of a decisive victory. Weeks or months after the defeated army have laid down their weapons in exchange for generations of humiliation and poverty, they’ll eventually acknowledge it was more of a coin-flip sort of situation.

Faith is what keeps soldiers fighting long after any reasoned assessment of their circumstances would have told them to drop their spears and race for the hills– faith not only in themselves or in those ordering their suicidal advance upon enemy lines, but faith in the myth that victory goes to the righteous. This is embodied not in the theatrical omens and auguries of soothsayers, but in the symbols that define what we believe about ourselves.

Don’t believe me? Buy a soldier a drink some time and they’ll happily talk your ear off about the idiocy of their commanders, the obvious flaws in their battle plans and the general unworthiness of the rulers for whom they fight. You’d swear that same soldier is one free beer away from defecting to the other side. Now, try pissing on the flag under which that soldier fights and you’ll quickly find yourself on the wrong end of a blade. You can insult the leadership, the war itself or even the cause as much as you want. Mess with the symbols, though. . .

‘So you’re saying this Glorian Banner is priceless?’ Corrigan asked as we ducked deeper into the alley, his interest in the mission perking up. ‘Golden thread? Some sort of magic silk?’ A gleeful smile lit his bearded face. ‘Right, then, here’s the plan. First, we let Temper here’– he patted the kangaroo companionably on the shoulder before miming what was supposed to be a kangaroo leaping high into the air but looked rather more like. . . well, we’ll leave that aside for now. The rest of the plan wasn’t any better– ‘bound right up to snatch the banner, then land on the other side of the parade. Meanwhile, I’ll—’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Shame interrupted. ‘That’s not some trivial scrap of silk you can purloin. It’s the first creation of the Celestines, woven from strands of their own divinity when the twelve of them broke from the Auroral Unity to devise the Auroral Hierarchy.’ She looked at the boulevard where rows upon rows of recruits were passing us by. Her features became firmer and smoother as she spoke of the banner, losing the mundane humanity in which she took such satisfaction, returning to a more angelic lustre. ‘The Glorian Banner is the symbol behind which humanity is meant to unite in service to the rule of the Lords Celestine.’

Corrigan frowned, scratching at his beard. ‘Not sure what a big flag woven from strands of a bunch of superior arseholes’ spirits is going to be worth on the open market.’

I smacked the back of his head. ‘We’re not selling it, remember?’

He smacked me back hard enough to send me stumbling backwards with hazy sparks clouding my vision. ‘Oh, right; I forgot. We’re trading it for information about some skinny strumpet who can kill us all– and probably the entire world– with barely a thought. Any idea what you intend us to do when we find her, Cade?’

‘One problem at a time. How to stop the Spellslinger and her bosses is, at best, number three in our list of problems to solve.’

‘I take it our first is acquiring the banner,’ Galass asked, ‘but what’s our second problem?’

Cheers reverberated through the alley from the boulevard. Apparently, someone had said something righteous and everyone else had agreed.

‘Our second problem,’ I said once the hubbub died down, ‘is that we can’t actually steal the Glorian Banner.’

‘How can we do otherwise?’ asked Aradeus, twirling the long hairs of his moustache between his gloved fingers. ‘We have signed a pact with the Lords Devilish. Does not the terms of that agreement, to say nothing of our own honour, demand we fulfil the bargain?’

See?Thisis why Mortals get screwed over by Infernals all the time. It’s not because diabolics are sodiabolicallyclever; it’s because nobody ever reads the contract properly.

‘The pact said we had tosecurethe banner and thenrenderit unto the Lords Devilish,’ I clarified. Everyone was still looking at me like that meant the same as ‘steal it ourselves’. ‘Specificity is the essence of all Infernal pacts,’ I explained. ‘There’s never a single word that doesn’t meanexactlywhat they want it to mean.’

‘The Fallen One is correct,’ Alice said. I couldn’t tell if her customary sneer was for me or for her own species. ‘There is never ambiguity in any contract with the Lords Devilish.’

‘But those wordsareambiguous,’ Galass insisted, scarlet tresses beginning to weave in the air as if they, too, were offended by our illogical stance. ‘Secureandrendercould mean lots of things.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Which brings us to the second quality of Infernal pacts, which is that they can’t involve either betrayal or breach by the Lords Devilish or their agents.’

‘Except that they’re constantly screwing over humans,’ Corrigan pointed out, to which Temper added, ‘Motherfuckers,’ which made Corrigan applaud the kangaroo for having added a second word to his vocabulary since, technically, and even I would have to agree, the plural of ‘motherfucker’ does qualify as a separate word.

‘That’s thethirdaspect of an Infernal pact,’ I explained. ‘They’re always written in such a way as to permit the Lords Devilish to double-cross the other partywithoutbreaking the terms of the agreement.’

‘Ah!’ interjected Aradeus, suddenly pleased that someone else’s honour was at risk of being impugned. ‘The vagueness of the wordssecureandrendermean that the path to our betrayal lies in interpreting them as stealing the Glorian Banner ourselves and attempting to likewise deliver it ourselves to the Lords Devilish!’

‘Which is precisely the mistake they want us to make,’ I said definitively.

Please let that be it, I prayed silently, although, as I was on the shit-list of most major religions, I was no longer sure to whom I should be praying.

‘One thing I still don’t understand,’ Galass began, tamping down her wilful locks as if they were as distracting to her as to the rest of us, ‘if the Glorian Banner is so precious to the Aurorals, why bring it to the Mortal plane at all? Wouldn’t it be better kept somewhere safe in their own realm?’

This was the part that had been confounding me ever since the Lords Devilish demanded the banner in exchange for sharing what they knew about the Spellslinger and her employers. However perverse their sense of justice, the Lords Devilish never actually rip anyone off: the more valuable the item they require, the more precious that which they offer in turn. The Glorian Banner held tremendous symbolic worth, which meant whatever the Devilish knew about the Spellslinger was equally precious. The question about the risk of bringing the banner to the Mortal realm was in itself a valuable piece of military intelligence.

‘The Lords Celestine wouldn’t parade the Glorian Banner about unless they needed to,’ I began, feeling my way through. ‘It’s a show of power, of unity. Which means there must be factions within the Auroral Hierarchy who aren’t as convinced of the righteousness of their plans for the Great Crusade.’

‘Do you surmise that our skirmishes to discourage recruitment by humans into their armies have begun to raise doubts with the Auroral forces themselves?’ Aradeus asked.

It was a perfectly reasonable conjecture, and certainly an explanation that would have pleased me a lot, not to mention making me look like an effective leader of our little seven-person resistance movement. However, it’s been my experience that when dealing with Aurorals and Infernals, I rarely come out of the experience feeling particularly happy, and I never end up looking clever.

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