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‘Out!’ Corrigan snapped. ‘Before I roast your insides!’

‘Oh, let him speak if he must,’ Lady Smoke said. I didn’t understand why, but she’d always had a soft spot for the kid. Maybe his naïveté and innocence attracted her. Perhaps she wanted to handle his inevitable corruption personally.

When Green next spoke, his words crashed down on us all with the force of an Infernal conjuration, which turned out to be a regrettably apt metaphor.

‘The Ascendant has been murdered in his own tent,’ he told the assembled wonderists. Then he pointed to me. ‘With one of Silord Cade’s spells.’

Chapter 7

A Nasty Way to Die

Righteous moral outrage can spread through a coven of wonderists faster than a wildfire when they find out they’re not going to get their bonuses. Death and destruction are never more than a few ugly syllables and a twitch of the fingers away, so keeping temperatures cool through calm and diplomacy takes on tremendous urgency.

‘Everybody shut the hell up before I blast each and every one of you dumb fuckers to oblivion!’ Corrigan roared over the din.

Cousin Green’s panicked revelation of Ascendant Lucien’s murder had got everyone in a frenzy, which struck me as an excellent time to begin wriggling out of Narghan’s abominable tethering spell. Corrigan must have come to the same conclusion, for he spun on his heel before driving his fist into my stomach with so much malice that I wondered if I’d ever draw a full breath again.

‘Finally!’ Zyphis cheered, the hollow-cheeked bastard grinning so wide his tongue slithered out from between his teeth. He tried to get past Corrigan, but the broad-shouldered thunderer shoved him away before turning his ire on the hysterical Cousin Green.

‘You,’ Corrigan said, jabbing a finger at the teenager, who was wiping his sweaty hands on his chartreuse wonderist’s coat. ‘Tell us what happened.’ Then he stopped himself. ‘No—You’re some kind of luminist, right?’

‘Yes, Silord. I mean, sort of. I studied luxoral magic for several years under—’

‘Don’t care. Show us all what you saw.’

Green started to stutter. ‘I. . . I didn’t actuallyseethe murder, Silord. I was—’

‘The kid doesn’t know shit,’ Locke Fandaris interrupted, scratching the patchy grey stubble of his jaw. ‘Probably heard a few screams before running off like a chicken with its balls cut off.’

‘Ididrun when I saw what was left of the body,’ Green confessed. The others mocked his cowardice a while, then fell back on debating the best way to flee the justiciars. But the boy swallowed, wiped the back of his hand across the sweat-soaked muddy brown hair matted to his forehead and called out, ‘But not before I grabbed a handful of dirt from right outside the Ascendant’s tent.’

The room went dead quiet.

‘You gotactualsoil from outside Lucien’sactualtent?’ Corrigan asked.

Green nodded.

‘Soil that no one touched, no one trod on, no one so much as spat on?’

Green took the black velvet glove dangling from his belt and slid it over his palm. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why he’d taken his gloves off in the first place, but now I understood he hadn’t wanted the sweat on his hands to permeate the velvet and thus pollute the evidence when he removed it from the pocket of his coat.

‘Dust from inside the tent would have been better,’ Lady Smoke said, the blanket of fog surrounding her drifting towards Green as she approached him, readying herself to apply her particular abilities.

‘Candlewax is best for such work,’ Smoke said, offering Green an encouraging smile. ‘I will awaken the ecclesiasm inside the dirt, but you must perform the backwards gaze to go with the temporal visualisation. Can you manage both?’

‘I can, my Lady. I will.’ With his jaw set that way, Green was looking almost heroic. Shame he ruined the effect when he asked sheepishly, ‘Does. . . does anyone have a purified hourglass handy? I left mine in my tent.’

Amateur,I thought. Everyone else said it out loud.

The first thing a war mage does when the situation gets ugly isn’t to run around proclaiming doom and destruction. It’s to get their gear together. Otherwise, half your best spells are just nice ideas in your head that won’t do you any good when the mayhem starts.

‘I’ve got an hourglass, of sorts,’ Zyphis said.

It was unusual for the creep to offer, but I guess he was keen to watch a murder up close. His bony hand slithered into his filthy rags to pull out a small hourglass, maybe three inches tall, trimmed in blackened iron.

Green took the object from Zyphis gingerly– as one should do with anything that wretch offers.

‘This isn’t sand inside the glass,’ Green said, holding it up to his eye. ‘It moves. . . unnaturally.’