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‘Hard to say. The breeding that allowed me to survive the translation from the Infernal realm into the Mortal plane gives me a certain resilience. I’ll last perhaps another hour.’ She gestured to Shame, who was watching the fortress shifting all around us with a distinct lack of interest. ‘The angelic’s form is inherently malleable, so it’s possible she’ll endure longer.’

‘What about the rest of us?’ Aradeus asked.

Alice shrugged. ‘Humans are brittle things with delicate forms and fragile minds. I suspect your bodies will begin to fail you within the next half an hour or so. Within minutes, you’ll become puddles of flesh upon the floor.’

‘So what do we do?’ Galass asked. She was holding on to Fidick as if somehow her body could protect him from the onslaught of tiny fractures in reality currently destroying our skin and bones.

I stared at the boy a moment, wondering whether his connection to the Celestines would provide him with protection Corrigan, Galass, Aradeus and I didn’t have, but the boy was the slightest of all of us, and he was looking increasingly weak now. I wasn’t sure whether that disappointed or reassured me.

‘We keep going,’ I said, running up the latest undulation of the floor in front of me, trying to ride the crest of the wave as it flung itself down the corridor. ‘Fifteen minutes should be plenty of time to save the world.’

Chapter 46

The Thunderer’s Choice

I tried to keep track of time, but we were making such unbearably slow progress, fighting down nausea as we battled the motion of the floors all around us, that I gave up. After all, no one was likely to be awarding us posthumous medals for having died slightly later than Alice had predicted.

The distortions got worse the higher we went, until we found ourselves combatting the weather itself, which shouldn’t even have been possible inside a roofed fortress. Halfway down the second corridor, a sudden downpour– without the benefit of any clouds, I noticed in passing– drenched us to the bone. When we turned the next corner, we were pelted by hailstones the size of apples, then enveloped in a fog so thick we had to hold hands to avoid losing one another. Only Aradeus knew where we were going as he followed as best he could the lines that had been inscribed on the palm of his glove by the rats which had died, nobly or otherwise, in our cause.

‘There’s a large open area up ahead,’ he said, his words echoing confusingly around us as if he’d spoken them minutes earlier and they were only now reaching us. ‘It could be a foyer or hall of some type. There’s a narrow passageway beyond.’

‘And after that?’ I asked.

His voice was grim. ‘After that, I believe we will have our reckoning with the Seven Brothers.’

Those last few feet of corridor became even more treacherous as a pounding hurricane took hold, hurling us against walls that shivered and shook us off. The wind was so strong we had to close our eyes and feel our way ahead with our hands, until suddenly we were clear of the gale and could see again.

I almost wished we’d remained trapped by the weather.

‘What have they done?’ Aradeus demanded, striding forward.

There were doors on three sides of the space, and between them, walls that at first looked as if they’d been decorated with the trophies of some sort of big game hunter. Only I couldn’t imagine any hunter being as cruel as this.

‘The servants. . .’ Galass’ voice shook. ‘The animals the brothers transformed. . . why would they do this to them?’

There had to be more than a dozen of the poor creatures, all buried within the walls, almost as if they had fallen into melted candle wax which had then hardened around them. Their heads were sticking out, as if in their last moments they’d desperately stretched their necks to keep from drowning in the stone. There were paws and hooves poking out here and there too, reaching for something they would never find.

‘Why did they have to kill the animals?’ Fidick asked, for once sounding like an eleven-year-old boy.

It was Shame who answered. ‘The creatures must have sensed what their masters were doing. They are of this world, and this realm belongs as much to them as it does to humankind. I would guess they tried to stop the brothers, and paid the price for their defiance.’

‘But the brothers could have just turned them back into animals,’ Fidick insisted. ‘They didn’t have to kill them. . .’

The angelic’s reply was flat, emotionless. ‘When the slave displeases the master, the master punishes them neither for convenience nor justice, but as a warning to others that disobedience comes with a price.’

I walked over to the far wall, where Madrigal the goat man was imprisoned for ever. His dead eyes seemed to follow me, as if to warn me away from this place, as I had tried to warn him just a few hours earlier.

‘How did you know?’ Galass asked, coming up to stand beside me.

‘Know what?’

‘The brothers. They were so. . . reasonable. The way they described the Pandorals sounded almost noble. But you knew the whole time, didn’t you? You knew right away that they were callous and cruel. How?’

I felt like telling Galass that my predictions came down to assuming the very worst imaginable about someone and then waiting to be disappointed. But as there was a high chance none of us were getting out of here, instead, I told her the truth.

‘They gave him the power of speech,’ I said, reaching out a hand to touch one of Madrigal’s horns. I knew nothing about him, about his life or what it had meant to exist as a goat and then a man. Yet somehow I felt a kinship with him. Was that empathy, or vanity? I wondered. ‘But they never once spoke to him in our presence, just commanded him with their thoughts.’

I felt sick again, but I chalked it up to the nausea that came with feeling the very essence of my body gradually falling part.