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‘Sorry to do it this way, Cade,’ Corrigan began, preparing his spell. Thunderers are mostly all about destructive forces, but Corrigan was one of the best, and I knew he had a few other tricks up his sleeve.

‘You’d use magic against me?’ I asked him. ‘You’d force me to come with you against my will?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, stop being so fucking melodramatic. It’s just a little bludgeon spell to knock you out until you come to your senses– trust me, you’ll be thanking me for this tomorrow.’

‘In that case. . .’ I took in a breath, trying to calm myself. I hadn’t done this in a while. ‘Corrigan Blight, by your deeds and words have you proven yourself guilty, and I do judge you for it.’

His jaw hung open for a moment. ‘Youwhat? Youjudgeme? You fuckingjudgeme?Me?You think you can pull that justiciar bullshit on me, Cade? I’m not some. . .’

His voice tailed off, he went quiet and his eyes went wide as he realised he hadn’t been watching my hands for several seconds. He looked down at the glowing black sigils in the air between us and noticed he couldn’t move his feet any more. ‘Oh, shit. . . you bastard.’

He’d already got us into position for the spell, which would otherwise have been the hard part. I’d had the binding ready ever since I’d made Tenebris give it to me. With just a few words from my lips, Corrigan Blight, my best friend, was now my slave.

‘What have you done to him?’ Aradeus asked.

I didn’t answer. Technically it’s called a ‘recruitment’ spell, which I suppose is as accurate a name as any; after all, when an army recruits you, you don’t have much in the way of choice either.

A pale, blueish sheen had fallen across Corrigan’s features; only his eyes remained fully under his own control, and they spoke volumes. ‘You treacherous son of a bitch,’ he said, but only because I allowed him to do so.

‘You enslaved your own comrade,’ Alice remarked. She didn’t sound particularly judgemental about it.

Galass, on the other hand, had set her scarlet hair swirling all around her. She looked as if she was one wrong word away from killing me. ‘How could you do something like that to him? Would you try it on me, too, knowing what I’ve—?’

‘Shut up,’ I said, letting go of Corrigan’s arms. He stood there, looking exactly as he always did, apart from the blue-grey tint to his skin: belligerent, arrogant– ready to kill someone for the sheer hell of it. The only difference was that now he would be doing those things for me.

I turned and spoke to the others, all of whom had come here by choice and were now wondering whether I would betray them too. I doubt any of them considered the fact that Corrigan had been intent on denying memychoice. I doubted that justification would have made them feel any better. It certainly hadn’t worked for me.

‘I’m going to make this very simple for you all.’ I jerked a thumb at the tunnel ahead of us. ‘Seven wonderists with a lot more power than any of us have ever seen are about to create a permanent bridge between this plane and that of the Pandorals. Are they monsters? I don’t know. Maybe they’re lovely souls. Maybe they just want what’s best for everyone. A hundred years from now, the whole world might be some garden paradise under their benevolent rule. I. Don’t. Give. A. Shit.’

I bent down to pick up Aradeus’ glove. The charred lines provided our only map to where his rats had died. The sleek grey velvet was covered in filth now, so I wiped it off against my trousers before handing it back to him. ‘Unless we kill the brothers, this world is lost, and it’s the only one we’ve got. We can argue all day about whether human beings truly have free will or just a choice between survival and death, but there are countless millions out there who haven’t been given the privilege of debating that question. They don’t even know any of this is happening. Their freedom is about to be taken away and they don’t even get the choice of whether to fight or not. So, on their behalf, the seven of us are going to go up into that fortress, and we’re going to throw our lives away in the vain hope that we can stop the Pandoral gates from opening. And have no doubt: if I have to choose between all of our deaths and eternal damnation, in exchange for even one hopeless shot at taking those bastards down? I’m taking the shot.’

I shut up just long enough to realise I was out of breath and my hands were trembling. I spun on my heel and started up the tunnel, Corrigan close behind like a dog on a short leash.

One by one I heard them follow behind. Fidick caught up with me first.

‘Nice speech,’ he said.

Chapter 45

The Walls

To the omnipresent stench of the sewer was added a tingling in the hairs on the back of my neck as we entered the fortress. I’d been curious why the Seven Brothers had bothered to set up shop inside the old keep. With all their power, it wasn’t likely that they feared an attack from the outside world. I’d come to the conclusion that they were simply avoiding the trouble of having to blast aside hordes of pitchfork-wielding townsfolk who might have taken exception to someone constructing supernatural gates on their land.

I was dead wrong.

‘By all that’s good in this world,’ Aradeus breathed. ‘What’s happening to the walls?’

Fortifications like this fortress are generally built with stone walls more than fifteen feet thick. Normally, a wonderist would work on wearing them down over time, but this was something completely different. The huge stone blocks were activelyripplingas we watched– and it wasn’t just the walls: the worn carpet beneath our feet was undulating like a snake slithering across the sand. We struggled to keep our balance as we were tossed left and right.

‘All this weaving around is making me nauseous,’ Corrigan said; being bound inside a recruitment spell wasn’t stopping his complaints about all the things that were currently displeasing him. I hadn’t had the heart to take that away from him, too.

‘It’s not the motion of the floor that’s making you sick,’ Alice said, her largely useless bat wings reflexively twitching as they tried in vain to keep her upright. ‘The barriers between the Pandoral plane and this one are weakening, so the physical laws of both realms are clashing against each other. Our own bones and flesh are absorbing these infinitesimally small fractures, losing coherence with the laws of this plane of existence.’

‘That. . . does not sound like the kind of thing one recovers from,’ Aradeus said.

‘It isn’t,’ the demon girl replied. ‘The brothers picked this place to perform their rites because stone withstands the effects better than weaker forms of matter, and that includes flesh.’ She turned to me. ‘Before long, we’ll all be too weak to cast spells or fight.’

I watched the floor in front of me trembling like a dog shaking its fur. ‘How long do we have?’ I asked.