Page 56 of The Malevolent Eight

Aiming the centre of the larger cylinder at Eliva’ren, Corrigan jammed his thumb down on the opal, depressing it into the shaft. A brief grinding sound, almost as if teeth inside the shaft were crunching the gemstone into powder, was immediately followed by a blast of pinkish-gold light that struck the Spellslinger dead centre in the chest. Clothes, flesh and bone provided only the briefest resistance before the Auroral blast shot out her back, only to then curve on itself and strike again. More bolts erupted, cascading into a blinding storm of eldritch energies that would have consumed an entire island.

‘It’s not proper Tempestoral magic,’ Corrigan decided, dropping the now spent Auroral weapon to clatter along the floor before the incandescent brass shaft could burn his hand. ‘But it’s not bad.’

The retribution lance Corrigan had casually used up was worth more than a dozen cannon,along with the crews, carts and horses needed to transport them and ready them for battle. Glorian Parevals competed for years to be given the privilege of being among the few entitled to wield a retribution lance in battle. The Spellslinger walked away from its Auroral fury without a scratch, her body having reformed faster than the spells could attack her.

She patted Corrigan on the shoulder as she passed him by. When she reached the doorway, she paused, turning to give me a look at once reproving and somehow sad. ‘Can’t you feel the weight of your actions yet, Cade? You’re bringing your doom closer and closer with every bad decision. I’m not sure how long I can hold it at bay.’

‘Who are you working for?’ I asked, reasoning this was likely the only chance I’d get to ask before she disappeared again. ‘If you’re not working for the Pandoral, then wh—?’

‘They are as Heaven to the Heavens, and Hell to all Hells. They are the end of all things from which all things once sprang. They are the doom that awaits you all. . . and they will wait patiently no longer.’

And then, she was gone, leaving Corrigan and me alone in the vault, and the sounds of shouts and pounding boot heels filling the passages outside.

‘Shit poetry,’ Corrigan observed.

‘The doom that awaits you all,’ I repeated silently to myself.Not ‘us all’, just ‘you all’. Which means whoever her bosses might be, her deal with them gets her away from this realm before it’s too late.

‘Come on,’ Corrigan urged me, hauling on my arm. ‘We’ll have to kill a few nice guys on our way out if we don’t want to end up imprisoned in this fortress until the war’s over– not that that isn’t an appealing idea right about now.’ I followed him out, and somewhere between the first and fifth brawl we found ourselves in during our escape, Corrigan asked, ‘So, that kiss. . . how was it?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve had better.’

Not all lies are meant to deceive others. Sometimes the most important lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

Chapter 31

Payment

Corrigan and I rejoined Galass, Shame, Aradeus, Alice and Temper at an old crossroads temple some seven miles south of the Auroral citadel. My plan to abscond with the Glorian Banner without any of us actually laying our hands on it had for once gone off without a hitch. When I first walked inside the ruins of that temple, I thought I must have had something on my face– other than the transmogrified golden features, of course– because the looks of my friends were entirely unfamiliar to me. I believe the technical term for their expressions was ‘confused admiration’.

‘Don’t get a big head,’ Corrigan said, slapping me on the back of my skull yet again. ‘We still have to figure out how to stop your girlfriend from dooming the entire Mortal realm and all the ecclesiasm keeping it together from being sucked through some portal to prop up the Pandoral realm.’

We’d come to this abandoned church, consecrated to some god no one could remember, to collect our payment from the chosen representative of the Lords Devilish. We were prepared for the fact that we’d probably have to torture him a bit first.

Despite their relative hardiness and affinity for intense sensations– and not just pain– there are any number of ways to torture a demon. I’ve performed many of them, mostly on Tenebris. In all our irritating interactions, however, it had never previously occurred to me that there isonemethod for tormenting a diabolic that is so devious, so cruel, so immoral as to make all other abuses little more than the gentle caresses of a butterfly’s wings.

‘You gotta change me back, Cade. Yougotta!’ whined Tenebris.

My former agent in Infernal spells was leaning over a large shard of glass from one of the arched windows, staring despondently at his own reflection whilst plucking at curls of golden hair and prodding his gilded cheekbones. Shame really had gone a bit overboard with the diabolic’s transfiguration.

‘What exactly did you say to her?’ I asked.

‘Me?Nothing!I showed up here for the hand-off and all of a sudden your dopey crew put the boot to me, bound me up and then. . .’ He was leaning so close to the glass the tip of his perfect nose was touching it, his breath beginning to fog it over. ‘To dothisto a guy? To a pal? Practicallya brother?’

‘How long has he been like this?’ I asked Shame.

She gestured to the Glorian Banner lying in a heap among the dust and debris. ‘The diabolic did pause briefly in his whingeing when the Glorian Ardentor came to bestow the banner upon him, then immediately fell back into some sort of repetitious quasi-poetic lament about the loneliness of being the only sane being in the universe.

‘Then I recalled that it was he who set the child Fidick in my path.’

‘I was just following orders!’ Tenebris insisted. ‘You know how it is, Cade. Business is bus—’

Shame interrupted him. ‘I contemplated re-transfiguring his face to no longer require a mouth.’ Her eyes flickered briefly to Aradeus. ‘Then I was. . . reminded that whatever pleasure such an act brought me would be at the cost of slowing down your subsequent questioning.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, but Shame only looked away. I turned my attention back to Tenebris, having noticed a flicker of something wistful in the diabolic’s expression when she’d mentioned the Ardentor. ‘Did something happen with Propriety?’ I asked him. ‘Did he suspect we were pulling a con?’

Tenebris tore himself away from his reflection to sneer, ‘Nah, the moron bought it hook, line and sinker.’ The sneer faded, leaving behind a kind of melancholic confusion. ‘It’s just. . . I mean, here he was, handing over one of his side’s most sacred relics, and instead of having qualms about it, he was—’

‘Are you coming to a point any time soon? I’m not really equipped for hand-holding Diabolic Contractualists through what’s starting to sound like a severe emotional crisis.’

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