Page 17 of The Malevolent Seven

‘Desiccated blood,’ Zyphis explained, ‘among other bodily fluids. I’ve formulated the mixture to pour at the same rate as sand.’

Green muttered an unconvincing thank you for Zyphis’ generosity, then held the hourglass between his thumb and forefinger while with his other hand, he poured out the soil.

I heard whistling, like steam escaping a boiling pot, as Lady Smoke uttered the first incantation. The grains of dirt in Green’s palm began to twitch and crackle like paper held too close to a candle flame.

In our realm, ecclesiasm isn’t visible to the naked eye, but it’s hard to mistake the queasy feeling it produces in your stomach when you’re too close to it.

‘Quickly now,’ Narghan urged Green, ‘before it dissipates into the aether.’

Green steadied himself against a table as he began the second incantation.

The backwards gaze is a tricky spell to perform, especially when you’re nervous. The first syllables have to be uttered slowly, at a plodding pace, but by the second verse, you have to start speeding up, and by the third verse, the words should be tripping off your tongue so quickly that no untrained mouth could form the syllables accurately enough.

Green must have had a decent teacher, because soon the tiny flecks of dried blood in Zyphis’ hourglass were floating above the bottom, moving synchronously with the grains of dirt in Green’s palm. After a moment, the individual flecks of blood began drifting upwards, back into the top half of the hourglass.

‘Hold her close now,’ Locke advised, putting a hand on Green’s shoulder. ‘Time may be your mistress here, but you are not her master.’

‘Don’t coddle the boy,’ Corrigan said. He kept one eye on Green and the other on me to make sure I wasn’t in danger of escaping. ‘Let’s get on with this, shall we? We all need to see what happened to Lucien.’

Luxoral magic isn’t widely respected among those in our profession; someone who conjures images in the air is about as impressive to us as a decent ventriloquist. When Green had first shown up in the camp begging to join our company of wonderists, the others had refused him. The universe having a perverse sense of humour, I’d felt bad for the boy; it was me who’d convinced them to give him a chance– after all, we all have to start somewhere.

With Lady Smoke splitting the raw ecclesiasm from the mundane soil and Green’s backwards-gaze spell shifting the direction of the sensory impressions it held within, he was finally set to do the easy part: cast a luminist spell to show everyone in the tavern what they would have seen if they had been standing on that same muddy mound when death had come for Ascendant Lucien.

Green carefully spread the dirt across a tabletop. All the lantern lights dimmed at once, shrouding us all in darkness– save for the thousands of stars, just pinpoints of light, that had appeared above our heads and the flickering light of a fire leaking out from between the flaps of Ascendant Lucien’s gaudily decorated tent a few feet away.

‘I don’t see anything happening inside,’ Narghan complained, leaning forward, trying to peer through the gap in the ghostly tent flaps.

‘Green hasn’t got the timing right,’ Lady Smoke said, softening her whistle to keep from burning up all the ecclesiasm emanating from the soil. ‘We’re too far back.’

Green began tilting the iron-banded hourglass clockwise, a fraction at a time, and as he did, the events that had transpired an hour ago played out for us all to see.

‘There!’ Zyphis hissed. He jabbed a finger towards the back end of the tavern behind us. ‘It’s coming for him!’

When the others turned to follow where he was pointing, I followed suit, twisting my head uncomfortably to see past Corrigan’s crimson leather-covered buttocks. Travelling through the landscape of Green’s illusory spell, heading for the Ascendant’s tent, was a shadow.

‘Who is that?’ asked Narghan. ‘I can’t make out a face.’

‘That’s because it has no face,’ Zyphis said with delight. ‘The shadow is cast from elsewhere. We are witnessing a hellborn conjuration: a demoniac’s spirit, shredded from its physical form on its own realm and then squeezed through the nether planes until it can manifest on ours. It won’t survive long that way. Watch as it slithers between the substrata of reality, its very existence a violation of laws both natural and divine.’

‘Nobody asked for a fucking poem,’ Corrigan said. ‘What does it do?’

‘Just watch,’ Zyphis replied unhelpfully, ignoring his glaring colleagues.

He was right about the spirit, though. The shadow twisted, writhing against the unnatural physics of our realm that couldn’t bind it into earthly matter. It slithered along the ground like a snake, then split apart into twin black serpents that reared up, the two heads coming together as if in a kiss– and from that kiss bloomed a shadowy torso which shook itself until arms grew on either side. It didn’t bother with a head. The quavering black emptiness entered the Ascendant’s tent, stepping effortlessly across magical wards that would have torn any war mage’s conjurations into a thousand pieces. It devoured Lucien’s protectors before moving on to the main course.

It’s usually almost impossible to keep a troop of wonderists quiet, but everyone in that tavern bore witness to what happened next in horrified silence. Most of us would have rather clawed our own eyes out than to watch what transpired next.

I’d never believed that one way to die was any better than another. There are gradations of pain, of course, and levels of personal desecration, which is its own type of pain, I suppose– but death? Death itself is nothing but a final tick of the clock wound inside us by our unwitting mothers the moment they gave birth, counting down from our first breath to our last. There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ways to leave this Mortal realm. We simply. . .end.

Turns out I’d been wrong about that, though, because the death suffered by Lucien the First, Ascendant Prince and Beloved of the Lords Celestine, revealed to us in brief snatches between the rustling flaps of his tent as his body contorted and danced in hideous torment, was worse than any I could have imagined. His screams echoed continuously around the tent, each cry magnified and repeated sevenfold, as the hellborn took Lucien apart, piece by piece, before moulding him back together, constructing a body perfected in its ability to know pain and misery, blind to all sensation but that of its own damnation.

At the end, the hellborn finally showed mercy, tearing Lucien’s head from his body. It placed the bleeding skull atop its own shadowy shoulders and danced a jig before finally losing its battle with the natural forces making up our own plane of existence.

Lucien’s severed head fell to the ground, the empty sockets where his eyes should have been staring out at a world now proven to be beyond redemption.

Zyphis, the most deranged and perverse lunatic I’d ever met, chose that moment to find his sanity. ‘We’re all fucked,’ he said.

The death of a patron or employer isn’t exactly unheard of in our business. Jobs go bad all the time, and when they do, often as not, the boss gets it first. In such unfortunate circumstances, there are typically three possible outcomes.

---