Page 69 of The Malevolent Eight

‘Not for long,’ she said, and I felt intangible fingers tracing threads of my sense of self, tugging and twisting and tying them in knots. ‘And don’t call me sweetheart.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s all right. I know you didn’t mean to sound creepy.’ She continued her work and within seconds I found myself so open-minded you could’ve persuaded me to take up mime or improvisational dance or even to appreciate abstract art. That thought made her chuckle. ‘You would have made a truly excellent mime, Cade Ombra. Unfortunately, I need you to be a—

‘Spirits of my ancestors! How can youstillbe intending to give yourself to the Pandoral? I’ve tethered your instinct for belligerence whilst unleashing your hatred for everything he stands for!’

I shrugged. Inwardly, I think. Most likely my shoulders and neck hadn’t moved at all. Possibly you don’t care about that, but I found it amusing. ‘I suppose my decision was less a matter of pure stubbornness and more from—’

‘Perversity,’ she said, getting there ahead of me. ‘You’re driven to transgressive impulses both from your own cynicism and learned from your old mentor, Hazidan Rosh.’

‘She did enjoy obscenity in all its myriad forms,’ I conceded, and imagined myself tapping a finger to my right temple. ‘There’s a positive garden of obscenity waiting for you in here.’

‘Then a little pruning is clearly in order,’ Eliva’ren said, but she couldn’t hide her anxiety now. As fast as she was working her silk magic on me, she was still running out of time. Also, there was only so much terrain in my skull she could mess with before the structures she was building there would collapse on themselves and I’d go irretrievably insane.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ I told her, even as she plucked out strands of perversity like unruly nose hairs. ‘Also, you might want to leave some of those naughty thoughts where they are, just in case.’

‘Just in case what?’

‘Well, you know. . .’

She kept stripping obscene inclinations from me, although I could feel she was definitely becoming more hesitant. ‘No, I don’t know. Why should I be leaving any of these “naughty thoughts”?’

I gave her my best rendition of a shy smile– she was the one who’d opened me up to the possibility of a career as a mime, after all. ‘Just in case you and I decide to have sex once you’ve got us out of here. I mean, I realise it’s a long shot, but we’re both adults, both unattached and in need of relieving some tension. I’d hate for us to jump into bed together and for me to be all out of erotic moves.’

No laughing now, no clever rejoinder. She was getting desperate. ‘I’m sorry, Cade,’ she murmured before letting loose the cruellest arrow in her quiver.

When next she reached inside me, the soft, sleek tendrils of her people’s silk evocations fused with her own destiny magic. No longer did she constrain or unleash my inclinations but instead infused the consequences of the choices I was making directly into my mind. I’d been prepared for this, of course; forcing the captive to envision imminent suffering can be far more effective than inflicting pain on them in the present. Humans are, after all, prone to believing the future will turn out better than the past. But it wasn’t my destiny that Eliva’ren unveiled, nor was it any kind of torment. Instead, she showed me what my decisions were costing my only friends.

‘Come on, you beautiful bastards! Let’s show these golden-faced dandies who’s boss!’Corrigan’s cries are punctuated with bolts of indigo lightning striking the front lines of the Auroral troops. He’s dressed in the gleaming, form-fitting coppery armour of an Infernal Schemelord and leading an entire division of Demoniac Hellions and Malefic Artillerists into battle.

I’d never seen him so happy.

Without you dragging him into your impossible quest to prevent an inevitable war, he negotiates a deal with Tenebris,the Spellslinger whispered inside me.The new Lords Devilish will give humanity greater freedom than the Lords Celestine ever would in exchange for Corrigan helping to lead the Infernal armies.

I wanted to believe it was a lie, but the strands of her silk magic weren’t just casting images into my mind; they were showing the inexorable cause and effect of Corrigan’s own choices once freed from my influence.

‘Motherfuckers!’ bellows Temper as he leaps into the fray, his muzzle covered in the blood of angelics, his entire body swelling with vampiric power until. . .

‘Are thosewings?’ I asked, not able to make them out clearly amidst all the raucous, joyous chaos of battle. But Eliva’ren cut the tendril away, threading a different one into my thoughts.

‘Rest easy, Grandmother,’ Galass said, fingertips tracing the air over the body of an elderly figure shivering on a narrow cot in a temple. Tiny droplets of blood riddled with sickness rise up from a frail, heaving chest to spin in the air, the ailment burned away before they drift back down beneath the skin. The tremors calm, the breathing eases. Both women smile. A body is healed. A spirit soars. One day soon, Galass knows, blood magic will no longer be reviled, but revered.

You protected her from madness and misery, Cade. You gave her the chance to uncover the depths of her own strength. Will you now snatch away her destiny?

‘You’re lying. This is a—’

I’ve never lied to you, Cade. Not once.

It was true. The Lords Celestine, the Devilish, Tenebris and just about everyone else had been pulling one con or another on me since before the Great Crusade even began. Eliva’ren had never tried to deceive me, and now I understood why: she couldn’t make this hurt unless she first banished any doubts I might have that these destinies were true.

‘Go on then,’ I said.

No, I hadn’t spoken this time. I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

Eliva’ren was relentless, driven by a conviction as strong as any I could muster that her path was the right one and that mine was entirely futile.

‘A blossom may pale before such beauty as yours, my lady,’ Aradeus says in a voice stripped of youth yet no less dashing. A trembling hand, withered with age, shakes so much that the flower in its grasp begins to shed its petals. ‘Yet still the rose a smile demands.’

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