Page 87 of The Malevolent Eight

Chapter 49

Inevitability

Having transformed my body into a portal to that ill-fated plane of existence, I hadn’t actually expected to survive the return journey from the Pandoral realm. The only other time I’d seen anyone perform that particular spell had been the Seven Brothers, and when it was over there hadn’t been anything left of them but splatters of viscera all over the walls.

But air brushed what was left of my face once more and I felt the boy, Hamun, tumble from my arms, and I heard the gasp of the mother who’d never once, not even at the moment of his birth, held him until this exact moment.

Not a bad way to go, I thought.

They say a hero is defined not by their strength or courage but by their willingness to sacrifice themselves. Actually, I may have made that up. Certainly, it was a self-serving definition of heroism in my case, since it was the only measure by which I qualified for the title. So I was okay with death. I was even okay with a particularly gruesome death. I had returned one small boy to his mother on the eve of the world’s end, and if my accomplishment was meagre, didn’t that make my sacrifice all the more heroic?

‘Hold him together!’ I heard Galass shouting, which suggested I still had ears, which was unexpectedly good news. Unfortunately, it appeared I also had nerves.

‘Stop your whingeing,’ Corrigan bellowed before deafening me and everyone else with a tempest of aetheric lightning bolts intended to keep at bay whoever was currently trying to kill us.

‘I can’t hold onto his form,’ Shame murmured, close enough to my ear that I heard her despite the ringing left behind by Corrigan’s Tempestoral spells. Through the agony permeating my entire body, I could feel Shame’s fingers moving over my skin, reshaping flesh and bone that was apparently unwilling to be rebound into human form.

‘Allow me to assist,’ said a youthful voice sounding far more confident than anyone of that age had a right to be.

At first, I figured it must be Hamun– maybe the version of me he’d known in the Pandoral realm had spent these past nine years acquiring mystical insights into how to transform my steadily devolving body into something more closely resembling an adult human male with dark hair and a slightly broken nose. All very logical: a nice bookend to my having rescued him and then him returning the favour.

Then I considered– in the midst of the unspeakable agony which made my torture at the hands of the Lords Devilish and later the Apocalypse Eight feel like mere love taps by comparison– just how irritating that voice had sounded. It was the sort of voice that gave me an uncontrollable urge to punch the speaker’s face in, which then reminded me that it was the voice of someone who I had, in fact, once decked, despite him being only eleven years old and more beautiful than any angelic. In my defence, he was a right little shit.

‘You!’ Shame practically screeched, which wasn’t helping my ears recover at all. She barely registers above a long-buried corpse when it comes to emotional reactions, but evenshehad a desperate need to kill this little fucker.

‘Ah, ah, ah,’ warned Fidick, the boy who’d once tricked me and people far wiser than me into doing his extremely dirty work. Shame had managed to get my eyes vaguely back in their sockets, so I could just make out that beatific, punchable smile of his. ‘If you attack me, there will be no one to hold Cade’s body together, and Galass can’t keep his life’s blood flowing by herself.’

Shame looked only slightly hesitant about not ripping the kid’s head off, regardless of what it meant to my survival, and I couldn’t blame her. Fortunately, Alice stepped up, the segmented blade of her whip-sword twitching like a demoniac’s tail. ‘Forgive me, Sister, but would it be rude ifIwere to butcher the child on your behalf? I would like to start with his feet.’

I shivered a little at how casually she referred to slicing off the little brat’s ankles.

‘Well, somebody do something,’ Corrigan said, exhaustion evident in the way he was panting. Tempestoral magic is potent, but there’s only so much of it even someone as physically hardy as Corrigan can channel. ‘In case no one has noticed, most of the Lords Devilish and Lords Celestine are dead, the ones who aren’t are fighting off their own men, who’ve apparently decided that Tenebris and his cabal of careerist pricks are a better bet, and anyone not currently occupied in the battle appears intent on blamingusfor all the trouble Cade’s caused!’

‘Fight on, Brother Corrigan,’ Aradeus called out cheerfully. In between the blur of his rapier I could see rather a lot of rats gleefully hurling themselves at our foes. ‘Temper and I shall have your back every step of the way!’

The kangaroo didn’t look all that interested in anyone’s back, but he certainly was intent on their throats. The psychotic beast was not only biting the necks of those opponents intent on attacking us, but pausing in between to drink the blood of those already dead.

‘You’re going to give yourself a tummy ache if you keep gorging like that,’ I warned him.

Hey, it sounded funny in my head. But that brat had to come along and ruin even that momentary bit of solace.

‘It’s time, my lady,’ said Fidick.

I could see him more clearly now: the slender frame, the angelic blond curls, the posture so relaxed it could only belong to someone who’d suffered the worst humanity had to offer children and somehow decided he didn’t much care. When last we’d seen him, Fidick had claimed he was done with Aurorals and Infernals and wonderists like us. He was going to go off and find some nice family to adopt him. Apparently, he’d changed his mind.

‘Go on,’ he urged Eliva’ren, who was still holding tightly to her son. ‘Kill the other wonderists so that I can reshape Cade’s planar connection– that’s the only way you and your son can return to your own world.’

Eliva’ren’s face as she looked up at me over her son’s shoulder was filled with twisted, mangled expressions of incalculable gratitude and unfathomable misery. She had warned me all along that in the end she would bring forth the dooms of my friends and the far worse one awaiting me, and despite all my attempts to fight that destiny, here we were, back at that same fork in the road. The last time– was it truly only a few minutes ago that I’d sent my consciousness into the Pandoral’s insect forms to enter his realm?– I’d tried to convince her that the one part of my destiny she couldn’t perceive, the one unpredictable, redeeming element of chaos, had been her own influence over me.

Turned out, I was wrong. Nothing, not even Eliva’ren herself, could make her change the course she’d set for herself nine years ago in that Glorian prison when her child had been born into an entirely different plane of reality. But of course, as the remnants of the Pandoral being had warned me before I’d fled his collapsing realm, order is only temporary, and chaos has a habit of showing up when you least expect it.

‘Mamma?’ said the boy.

It was a small thing to say– the kind of appeal a mother hears thousands of times a day from her child. Only, this was the very first time Eliva’ren had heard her son’s plea.

Talk about a potent magic spell.

‘It’s the only way,’ she tried to explain to him. ‘This is how we get home. You have. . . you have grandparents and aunts, and an uncle who’s so funny he can make you laugh in the middle of a toothache. You have a people waiting for you, and a culture. A future. A destiny.’

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