Page 20 of The Malevolent Seven

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll be happy to take that job up north with you.’

Chapter 9

Military Indiscipline

My ankle hurt. What a strange thing, that such a trivial, mundane sort of pain should catch my attention, given all the death and destruction I had witnessed only minutes before, not to mention the chaos and bloodshed that was surely still to come.

I stumbled through the encampment behind Corrigan as he blazed a trail through the haze of dust stirred up by the distinctly un-military disarray that had taken over Ascendant Lucien’s once great crusade. Real armies are led by generals with ordered chains of command. They have neat and tidy divisions of cavalry, infantry, and artillery full of archers or cannon or whatever the hell people use to rain destruction down on each other when they don’t have wonderists at their beck and call. Lucien’s army mightlookmagnificent when it came marching up to your fortress, citadel or impoverished village, but in disciplinary terms, it was basically a well-dressed mob whose primary function was to pick up the scraps after Corrigan and I– and the rest of our recently deceased brethren– had made the enemy shit their pants and throw up their hands in surrender.

Without Lucien’s charismatic leadership, not to mention the ever-present threat of him ordering his own troops crucified, his ‘grand campaign’ was what any proper military strategist would refer to as a ‘shit-show on wheels’.

The once orderly camp had disintegrated into anarchy. Soldiers, staff and camp followers alike were scurrying about madly, some following orders given them by equally panicked superiors, others just trying to keep moving, terrified about what might happen if they stopped. The looting had started, with idiots getting into fights over the goods they were stealing, the women they were leaving or the bitter old scores they were settling before the whole place went up in flames.

Corrigan was delighted. This chaos would put a serious crimp in the Glorian Justiciars’ efforts to hunt us down.

‘We’ll leave tonight,’ he said, leisurely shoving aside two men about to come to blows with no regard for the weapons they’d left in an untidy heap beside them. ‘Two hundred and fifty miles in ten days is easy enough, but we’ll need to pick up a few more wonderists along the way. Apparently, the reason this Baron Tristmorta is getting whupped so bad is because these seven wonderists– brothers, if you can believe it– have laid siege to his fortress. The client wants seven ofusto beat the shit out of the seven ofthem. You know the drill, make an example of them, or some such nonsense. Either way, to fulfil the contract, we’ll need recruits.’

‘Having second thoughts about exploding all the wonderists we knew?’

‘Eh?’ He paused from stomping through the mud, then chuckled. ‘Yeah, too bad about that. Truth be told, the only one of them I liked was Locke. Pity I couldn’t have saved him too, but I couldn’t be sure he’d go along with the plan– or that he wouldn’t try to steal the reward for himself at the end.’

‘Fine,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Tell me about this wondrous artefact.’

‘Oh, no.’ Corrigan jabbed his finger right up to my nose. ‘You pissed all over me earlier for even bringing it up, so now you can just suffer the frustration of ignorance and hope that maybe–maybe– I’ll let you borrow it when the time comes.’

He set off again, his long-legged stride quickly eating up the distance.

I put a hand on his arm to slow him down. My abused ankle was making it hard for me to keep up. ‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘For what?’

‘For believing I was innocent.’

Corrigan stopped again. ‘Are you shitting me? You’re saying youdidn’tsend that shadowy monstrosity to kill Lucien?’

‘I told you back at the tavern, that wasn’t me.’

‘Huh.’ Once again, he resumed his march across the camp. ‘Wonder which of those pricks killed him, then?’

That Corrigan didn’t care one bit about whether I was a murderer or not wasn’t much of a surprise to me, but the fact that he’d readily killed the entire squad of wonderists– his comrades-in-arms– because it was the only way to save me? That was harder to reconcile with the man I’d come to know over the past couple of years. It wasn’t as if we were childhood friends or sworn brothers. At a guess, Corrigan liked me maybe ten per cent more than he’d liked Locke and the others. I guess that ten per cent was worth more to him than any moral qualms about obliterating them.

Some religious scholars have theorised that violating the natural laws of the universe is a fundamentally perverse and unholy act, leaving the practitioners of such perfidy ‘little more than soulless demoniacs whose outward human faces are mere masks to cover their devilry’. Corrigan was pretty solid proof of that theory, but he’d just saved my life, so, you know. . .

‘Halt!’ shouted the leader of a small squad of soldiers as they surrounded us.

The ash and grit and smoke enveloping the camp were now so thick it was like being caught in a dust storm. Although I could barely make out my hand in front of my face, I counted eight soldiers blocking our path, and occasional glints of steel, not to mention experience, drawn swords and readied spears.

‘We’ll want two horses each,’ Corrigan said, heedless of the armed men all around us. Neither of us were in a state to put up much of a fight. He’d just used the most powerful spell in his arsenal, so he’d need time to recover before he could conjure anything more destructive than a candle flame. As for me, I’d been poisoned by a bat, then hung upside down for nearly an hour. Yet Corrigan kept right on talking to me as if he hadn’t even noticed the soldiers. ‘We’ll be travelling through the Blastlands, so we’ll need supplies.’

‘Maybe we should deal with these guys first?’ I asked, gesturing to the officer striding determinedly towards us.

She was a big woman– or possibly she was a big man; it was hard to be sure when someone was in full armour. One of Lucien’s few endearing qualities had been his insistence that there be no discrimination in his army; distinction wasearnedthrough valour– oh, and flattery. Either way, the silver three-feathered wings on her collar marked her as a lieutenant.

‘You’ll be coming with us,wonderists.’ She said that last word as though she had never much liked our kind and was finally being given an opportunity to do something about it.

Corrigan spared her barely a glance– but what a glance it was. I marvelled at the way he could decide in a split-second whether a challenge would best be solved with a few words, a menacing threat or sudden, irredeemable violence. Looking at the lieutenant, I wondered if any part of her was aware that her fate, whatever it would be, was already sealed, and that nothing she would do now could change that.

‘By order of the Ascendant—’ she began, then staggered slightly as Corrigan backhanded her with stunning brutality, knocking the steel half-helm right off her head.

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