Page 71 of The Malevolent Eight

Well, not actuallymylife.

‘Don’t kill him, you idiot,’ the Infernalist warned his cat-eared comrade. ‘Kill the damned Spellslinger!’

‘He’s in the way,’ she countered, delivering another more tentative slash at my legs in an attempt to get me to move without actually murdering me. I resisted the urge to flinch backwards and dropped low, nearly getting my head taken off in the process, which was really freaking out our opponents.

The borinist was trying to channel some kind of bludgeoning projection from his tusks, but he was young and hadn’t learned to hide the timing and direction of his attack yet. Avoiding him was far easier than the felinist.

The cosmist, watching from the door, where the void surrounding her physical form was conveniently dissuading more of her colleagues from entering my cell, shouted, ‘He can’t serve as a gate if you’ve beheaded him, you stupid furry slu—’

The felinist– who, despite her cat-like way of wiggling her bottom when she moved, struck me as a perfectly chaste young lady– spun on her heel and slashed at the cosmist’s non-existent face. The cosmist must’ve been relatively new to her attunement too, for she lurched backwards, her human instincts forgetting that nothing so banal as a set of mystical two-foot-long claws could do her any damage. On the other hand, the void surrounding her body consumed one of the guards– his scream was all too brief as he was sucked inside, swallowed up by the empty space in which he quickly became a tiny figure lost among the stars inside the cosmist.

Rest in peace, Lefty, I thought.You were my favourite guard. No, really, I mean it. Righty kicked me way harder.

The sounds of yet more footsteps racing down the hall suggested our time was running out. ‘How much longer?’ I asked Eliva’ren. I didn’t bother looking back to see whether she was still struggling to draw forth whichever destiny we needed, or if she had given up and found some other means of escape just for herself.

‘Another minute,’ she said. Her grunt told me that magically causing the events of a person or place’s doom to occur in the present rather than the future was harder work than she’d been letting on.

I kept bobbing and weaving in response to the felinist’s slashing attacks. She’d added a prehensile magical tail that was currently intent on wrapping itself around my neck. My defence was to throw myself at the claws, forcing the felinist to either pull back or risk slicing my throat open, then having to explain to her master why she’d killed possibly the only Pandorally attuned Mortal in the world. Instead, she got her tail wrapped around the borinist’s head and entangled with his tusks.

‘Will youdosomething?’ she asked the Infernalist, who’d finally undone his coat to reveal the sigils covering his chest. Many of these were charred, used up, but he started making a show of slowly awakening a Nightmare Bloom, which would certainly incapacitate my mind long enough for them to kill Eliva’ren and trap me once more.

You might be fooling your coven, I thought silently as I shot him a knowing grin,but you’re not fooling me.

Infernalists have to buy every spell, which was how Tenebris and I became. . . well, if not friends, then certainly frenemies. If this guy used up a Nightmare Bloom or a Weeping Arrow and it didn’t get the job done– like his Tongue-Wrester spell– then he’d’ve wasted a perfectly good–expensive– spell and would have to come up with the means to buy a replacement. So he was definitely slow-walking his casting, hoping someone else put me down first.

This was one of those rare occasions where thinking strategically was less useful than thinking tactically. It made perfect strategic sense for the Infernalist to keep his spells in reserve, given his comrades could cast theirs without cost. However, when you want to capture your opponent alive, mind-manipulation spells are vastly more effective than hacking or burning them into submission.

Their florinist finally appeared, tossing a handful of what looked like chestnuts on the filthy floor. Almost instantly, her magic caused them to start rooting into the stone and growing upwards into what would soon be a small forest, which would severely hamper my movements. Fortunately for me, I’m one of the few wonderists who’s made a serious study of just about every form of magic out there and considered how best to fight against each. One of the chestnuts was still rolling, which meant it hadn’t taken root yet. I snatched it up and hurled it at the felinist. I’d only been aiming to make her lurch backwards into the cosmist, who still hadn’t figured out that a walking void just standing there isn’t much use to her comrades. Oddly, the felinist hissed at me.

Among professional wonderists, it’s understood that luminists are the biggest wastes of space out there. Their spells all involve bending light and conjuring illusions. This in itself wouldn’t necessarily make them losers, since there’s a lot you can do with illusions. The problem, as I’ve pointed out before, is that magic isn’t particularly good for you, especially not for the mind. Every form of wonderism comes with its own form of mental illness. Tempestoral mages are all arsonists barely in control of their urges to blow things up. Aurorals are convinced everything they do is blessed by the Sovereign, so they always look surprised when they’re killed by entirely predictable means. Luminists are congenital narcissists who can’t stop themselves from using their abilities in unnecessarily flashy ways and– here’s the really stupid part– they often get mesmerised by their own conjurations.

Totemists are attuned to a plane where the laws of physics transmute the symbolic representations of animals into magical characteristics; their spells are like a pallet of abilities or traits one might associate with that particular animal. How it works, I’ve never quite figured out– I mean, what doactualanimals do in the Totemic plane? Regardless, like all other wonderists, totemists suffer from emotional issues. Aradeus, believing that rats are the most noble and elegant of creatures, is obsessed with living up to their example, thus poncing about spouting ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ wherever he goes while acting preposterously humble and honourable. The felinist? I guess her sense of being cat-like was more literal, which was why when she saw me about to hurl the chestnut she opened her mouth wide– she had lovely fangs, by the way– and hissed at me. That’s how the chestnut ended up in her throat, which is where it took root and turned into a majestic little tree that happened to be covered in dead cat lady parts.

‘Damn it all,’ the Infernalist said– a common oath for those who share that attunement. He stopped screwing around, awoke the Nightmare Bloom on his chest and watched the black sigils oozing from his skin to drift in the air between us. There’s no way to evade an Infernalist spell, since it goes wherever the caster wants it to, so I didn’t bother ducking as I darted to the chestnut tree, grabbed the torn-apart arm of the dead felinist and stabbed the Infernalist through the heart with one of her magically created claws just before it faded into nothingness. He was left with an odd hole going through his chest.

‘Damn it all,’ he repeated.

I guess I got his heart dead on, because the stream of blood erupting from the wound practically blinded me. Two more of his fellow wonderists were coming into the cell, but as I couldn’t see clearly enough to make them out, I was at a serious tactical disadvantage, since all my tricks depended on knowing what plane they were attuned to and how they were likely to use their spells.

‘Eliva. . .’ I warned.

‘Don’t call me that,’ she snapped. I didn’t bother reminding her that an earlier version of herself had told me I could.

I felt rather than saw the doom overcoming the dungeon cell– I suppose doom was the wrong word, though, because the destiny she’d brought forth was the one in which this fortress became a palace whose ruler had turned this part of the dungeon into a throne room. The whole place took on an eerie glow from all the gilded oak-panelled walls. A magnificent spiral staircase ascending to the main floor constructed itself out of the stone beneath our feet.

‘Let’s go,’ she said. She took my hand and led me up the stairs, while the rest of the room was still transforming itself and my captors were getting pelted by blocks of stone that were quite keen to become a far more elegant floor. I stumbled a couple of times on the way up, but within minutes we were standing outside in a desolate field, staring at a fortress steadily becoming the palace it would one day be.

‘Won’t they just chase after us?’ I asked.

Eliva’ren wasn’t paying attention. Her brow was furrowed, sweat trickling down her forehead as she halted the fortress’ magnificent destiny and drew forth a less likely and significantly worse one. ‘Fifty years from now, the warlord conquering this region has a high probability of choosing to kidnap a fifteen-year-old girl from the town nearby. Apparently, he’s enamoured of red hair.’

‘Really? I prefer brunettes.’

She smiled weakly as she drew more and more of her strange magic into her spell. ‘The girl has a sister, several years older, who sneaks into the warlord’s camp and first seduces him, then kills him.’

I gestured to the fortress that was now twitching like an old codger with a bad palsy. ‘So, no palace?’

Eliva’ren reached out with one hand, fingers curled as if holding onto a doorknob or the face of a clock and twisted. ‘The elder sister becomes a kind of nomadic war chief, leading an army made up almost entirely of pissed-off women determined to tear down every male-owned castle and fortress they can find.’

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