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Awkwardly, the eldest brother took my hand and we shook on our new deal. ‘To peace.’ I was about to pull away when his grip on my hand grew firmer. ‘Allow us to add a small token of our friendship to make this new arrangement of ours all the sweeter.’

As the buzzing started, Madrigal the goat man entered the room with seven other servants, carrying what looked suspiciously like a brass coffin.

‘A threat?’ I asked, looking down at the eldest brother’s fingers, gripped in my right hand. If he thought I couldn’t trace the sigils with my left, he really didn’t know much about Infernal magic.

He shook his head vigorously as if simultaneously surprised and embarrassed. ‘Hardly that, Silord Cade.’

He let go of my hand as the eight animal servants set the ornate casket down in the middle of the chamber. I followed behind him, curious. Was this truly a gift, or a threat, or something in between? On closer inspection, the brass sarcophagus was inlaid with gold and silver, and a third metal that looked like mercury flowed within narrow channels across the lid. Inscribed on the surface was a beautifully rendered outline of a human form, the head adorned with a halo made up of dozens of tiny sigils that I struggled to recognise at first. The eldest brother standing next to me made a soft harrumphing noise as several seconds ticked by, watching me as if confused about why I wasn’t already jumping up and down in ecstasy at being shown what looked to be a particularly attractive coffin.

Then I realised why I was having so much trouble making sense of the sigils: while I knew most of them, I’d never seen them all in one place before, because the magics to which they referred belonged to different wonderist attunements.

Allthe different wonderist attunements.

This wasn’t a coffin at all.

Chapter 36

The First Offering

Mister Bones leaped from Galass’ arms and raced around the seven-foot-long brass casket, making the animal servants distinctly uncomfortable as he darted between their legs, yapping happily all the while.

Galass, Aradeus, and Corrigan approached more cautiously.

‘Unholy shit,’ I heard Corrigan whisper behind me. ‘Is that—?’

‘Pretty sure it is,’ I replied.

I’d never actually seen it before– almost no wonderist ever had. That’s why I’d presumed it was a coffin at first, brought out to warn us against crossing the brothers. I should have known better; the forty-two floating wonderist corpses above our heads were more than sufficient to remind us of their power.

This wasn’t a warning at all. It was a bribe– the best bribe imaginable for someone in my profession.

‘The Apparatus,’ Aradeus murmured.

The eldest of the brothers stepped between us and the casket, frowned down at the puppy-like antics of Mister Bones, and corrected us. ‘I believe its proper name is the Empyrean Physio-Thaumaturgical Device of Attunal Transmutation.’

‘Only ponces call it that,’ Corrigan said.

Me, I wasn’t so concerned with semantics. I was too busy staring at the solution to all my problems, past, present and future. I cared not at all about what the Seven Brothers called it– and not much about how they’d come by it.

‘That’s why you came to Mages’ Grave when you did,’ my idiot mouth said, too conditioned by Hazidan’s training to stop myself from making uncomfortable deductions that shouldn’t matter at all to me right now. ‘You got word that Baron Tristmorta had acquired the Apparatus. The attunements with which you were born that connected your magics to the Pandoral plane were too weak to achieve your aims.’ I pointed to the brass casket with its elaborate gold and silver inlay. ‘You laid siege to the baron’s fortress for weeks, killing off the mercenary wonderists he kept hiring to protect him, all so you could get your hands on this.’

I heard the light footsteps of the other six brothers coming to join their elder. That faint buzzing in my ear told me they were discussing whether it was going to be necessary to obliterate us after all.

Boy, were they reading the situation wrong.

‘I don’t care how you got it,’ I said.

Galass could be rid of the blood magic that would otherwise drive her to murder anyone crazy enough to be close to her. I could alter my own source of magic to a plane of existence that didn’t demand I sell pieces of my soul to a diabolic every time I needed a spell. Hell, if I wanted, I could use this thing to attune myself to the Auroral plane once more, hear the Auroral Song. . .

All this was being offered to us on the proverbial silver platter.

‘What’s the catch?’ I asked.

The brother who looked closest to my age, who’d been sitting opposite me at the table, stepped closer like an old friend come to keep me from making a bad decision. ‘Do not let the distrust and suspicion that is the instinct of petty mercenaries overcome you,’ he said, going so far as to place a hand on my shoulder. ‘As you surmised, we did indeed require the artefact in order to more perfectly attune ourselves to the Pandoral plane. Now that this has been accomplished– now that we can fulfil our mission and rescue the beings whose own realm is slowly collapsing in on them– we have no more need for the device.’

‘Power for its own sake holds no sway over us,’ one of the others said, the youngest from the sound of his voice. ‘Nor do the riches that power can provide interest us.’

‘We seek only to give our benefactors a home in this small, wasted territory,’ my guy assured me, his hand giving my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. His other hand gestured upwards to the dead wonderists still hanging upside down from the ceiling by invisible tethers. The horror and pain evident in their gaping mouths and widened eyes made them look almost alive– just not any kind of alive you’d want to experience. ‘Every time we are forced to defend ourselves,’ the brother said sorrowfully, ‘our mission is delayed yet again, for we must wait for our strength to be rekindled. All we ask is that you leave this place for a time. Allow us to complete our great work, and tomorrow’– his raised hand descended so slowly it was like watching a feather floating down on the breeze– ‘tomorrow the Apparatus and all its wonders will be yours.’