Page 12

Chapter 12

Reminiscences of Futures Past

I stepped out of the restaurant and into Armageddon.

Weeks ago, before the folks of Hope’s Creek had signed their pact with the Infernals, this place had been a crisscross of narrow footpaths and muddy cart tracks. After the town’s rebirth as Seduction, the corps of Demoniac Erectors had littered the soil with burrowing worms that dug deep into the ground, oozing oils which swelled into buildings of gleaming onyx and flagstone streets as magnificent, in their way, as anything the Auroral Engineers could conjure. The promise of palaces, mansions and stores worthy of merchant lords was no lie. Really, if the Lords Devilish and Lords Celestine could have found fulfilment in devoting their efforts to urban improvement projects, everyone would be so much better off.

It was all gone now, though: the black-marble manors, the glittering boulevards. . . all reduced to a charred hellscape. Crumbling ruins as far as the eye could see were interspersed with the bones of desiccated corpses sticking out at all angles from the cracked stones, as though time and cruel fate were slowly swallowing them into oblivion.

‘I honestly wasn’t sure whether you’d come after me,’ the Spellslinger said. The tan waistcoat and the plum silk shirt beneath were the only bright spots of colour among a thousand shades of grey, the only sign of life. ‘My employers told me you were impulsive– that you couldn’t leave anything alone. They said there’s this part of you that knows if you stop racing from one catastrophe to another long enough to think things through, you’ll realise that some futures aren’t futures at all; they’re just histories waiting to be written.’

I glanced around at the devastation she’d wrought in less time than it had taken me to get up from my chair and follow her out of the restaurant. ‘This performance art thing you’ve got going on would be more impressive without the shitty poetry,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘It’s not a performance, Cade. It’s not an illusion or a trick. Some futures aren’t foretold, they’re already there, just waiting for you to catch up to them.’ She kicked at a skeletal hand buried in the ground. The finger bones scattered. ‘I just. . . brought this particular one to us.’

The air was stale, like a burned-out house months after the last smouldering embers have died out. I slowed my breathing, closing myself off to the stench even as I opened myself up to my attunement. The breach between planes erupted quicker than usual. I guess that was thanks to the Spellslinger having rid me of any fear of the outcome these particular esoteric energies always seemed to crave. ‘Any last words?’

‘Last words?’ she repeated. Her chuckle was meant to sound light-hearted, but I caught the tinge of something underneath. An ache, maybe. A regret. Only now did I notice among the coal-black ruins at her feet six shadows, contorted, unmoving, save for the way the silhouettes almost quivered in the breeze. ‘Funny how your mind works, Cade. It’s like those same instincts that blind you to your own destiny somehow figure out what’s about to happen before you do.’

Back when I was a Glorian Justiciar, my magic mostly came in the form of Auroral blessings: gifts of mystical armour or visions or really, really cool ways to smite people. When I took up Infernalism, each spell had to be purchased– usually through Tenebris– and then inscribed as an ebony tattoo on my flesh, to be awakened, cast and spent only once. The spells I accessed through this latest attunement were neither bestowed nor bought. Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure how the channelling of the inexplicable physical laws across the breaches I opened worked. All I knew was that this so-called Spellslinger wasn’t the only one who could pervert reality and shock the soul.

They say that to a guy with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The power I’d allowed into myself in that fortress in the Blastlands when I’d placed myself inside the coffin laughingly called ‘the Empyrean Physio-Thaumaturgical Device of Attunal Transmutation’– well, let’s just say I came out carrying one seriously nasty hammer.

‘Go on,’ the Spellslinger said, theatrically bracing herself. ‘Hit me.’

I couldn’t tell if she was trying to be funny, because my ears were filled with the clack-clack-clacking of what sounded like an ever-growing horde of beetles scrabbling over one another in a rush to escape the confines of my being. Their urgency quickly became a need too strong to resist– but then, like the Infernals say, ‘Temptation wouldn’t be tempting if there wasn’t something enticing about it.’

With that piece of dubious ethical philosophy firmly in mind, I let go of all the questions I had for this strange woman, the past she said we shared that I couldn’t remember and my qualms about unleashing forces over which my control was at best speculative. Then I blasted her from existence.

Coruscating black waves rippled out of me, becoming an ocean swell that rose up high, cresting far above the two of us before it came crashing down upon the Spellslinger. The flood hardened around her, burying her beneath a mound of pure onyx, only to then explode, unleashing a flock of tiny birds whose talons ripped her apart, one layer at a time. First, they tore away her clothes and skin. Next, muscle, sinew and internal organs unravelled into ribbons that the black birds gobbled up greedily. The bones, they pecked into dust, then scattered away with the beatings of their wings. But there’s more to a living being than mere flesh. Several of the birds began catching strands of the Spellslinger’s spirit in their beaks. They darted round and round in a counter-clockwise spiral of unmaking, leaving the rest of their flock to shred the last bits of her memories and emotions that had been wrapped around her essence like cloth-of-gold. Stripped of that last protective sheath, her soul became visible to the naked eye: a perfect, living gem free of sin or virtue, formed of pure consciousness. The birds crowded around it, squeezing themselves inside, bloating and swelling until at last what should have been unbreakable exploded into tiny motes of ecclesiasm.

I watched as those last motes of sentience drifted apart, losing the coherence that had, until I came along, constituted all the Spellslinger had been, all that she might have become. Only the devastation remained, along with the six contorted shadows ringing the spot where she’d stood, almost as if they awaited her return.

‘What are you supposed to be?’ I asked the shadows quietly.

It occurred to me then that my unmaking of the Spellslinger had taken at least a couple of minutes. Yet, I was standing alone out here in the wreckage she’d left behind. Why hadn’t any of the others joined me?

‘Now that was impressive,’ said a voice that lacked the benefit of vocal cords, throat or lungs. The sound was coming from other things: the breeze whistling through the empty street, tiny bits of rock and stone crumbling off fallen walls, the trickling of filthy water down uneven ground. ‘I mean, I’ve seen some spellcraft in my time, but — Hold on a second, will you? We can’t have a proper conversation with me having to talk this way.’

She remade herself piece by piece, element by element. The floating motes of ecclesiasm returned, whirled around one another as if pulled by the increasing gravity of her will. Her spirit followed, sewing itself back together from recollections and thoughts that, once destroyed, should have been impossible to reassemble. Bones grew from the dust, flesh bloomed from droplets of moisture. Empty air spun itself into cotton, silk and leather that left her clothed exactly as she’d been when first she’d stepped inside the restaurant. The last piece of her remaking was her smile, which shone bright as before, and I would have sworn was meant just for me.

‘ What are you? ’ I asked.

The Spellslinger tugged on her waistcoat as she had once before. The gesture was so mundane, so. . . human , that it frightened me. ‘Oh, you know, it’s like I told you. I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, hoping he’ll tell her she’s the most beau — ’

‘What are you, really?’

‘Eternal,’ she said with a shrug as if it were no big thing, then added, almost as an afterthought, ‘For now.’

‘That’s not what “eternal” means.’

Rather than dispute that, she tugged on her waistcoat once more, frowning. ‘Did I get something wrong? The fabric feels tighter for some reason.’

I had no clue what she meant, but I make it a policy never to let people see that I’m in knee-trembling awe of them. ‘I think maybe you made your boobs too big.’

Cool as a midnight breeze , I complimented myself.

Hey, you come up with something wittier when you’ve just committed the foulest form of murder imaginable, only for your victim to come back– not from the dead, by the way: from non-existence – and ask you why her waistcoat feels too tight.

The Spellslinger brought her hands up to her chest and gave her breasts a squeeze through the tan fabric. ‘You want to hear something weird? I think you might be right.’

I left her to concern herself with her bust while I prepared myself to summon up the esoteric energies of unmaking once more. While legends and fairy-tales tell us that attempting a failed spell a second time is destined to fail again, I live in the real world. Just because a wall doesn’t come down when you hit it with a hammer, doesn’t mean a few more swings won’t get the job done.

‘Uh-uh,’ she said, wagging a finger at me. ‘You took your shot, Cade. Now it’s my turn.’

Okay, so: shield spells. Almost every form of mystical attunement affords some kind of protective magic. It’s all about figuring out how the —

The heavy heel of Corrigan’s boots announced his arrival as he leaped from the doorway of the restaurant down to the broken ground next to me. ‘Ah, shit,’ he swore. ‘Now, this is disappointing.’

‘By all that lives. . .’ Galass murmured, following close behind. ‘Cade, what did you do?’

Notice how everyone just assumes I must be the one to blame for everything having been blown to hell?

‘Don’t get your hair in a tizzy, girl,’ Corrigan told her. He gestured dismissively to the devastation. ‘This is just luminist magic.’ He spat on the ground. ‘Illusionists really piss me off. All show, no substance.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Shame, coming out next. I turned and saw her body had shortened, growing a dozen tentacles with tiny eyes of different colours at the ends which were probing the scene before her. ‘This is real.’

‘Seriously?’ Corrigan asked before turning to me. ‘What did you do, Cade?’

Aradeus and Alice joined us. Temper, perhaps wiser than the others, only peeked his furry kangaroo head out from the doorway.

‘Come one, come all,’ the Spellslinger announced. ‘There’s plenty of room for everyone.’ She pointed first to Corrigan then to a spot on the cracked ground beside her. ‘I believe this belongs to you, big man.’

I expected the sizzle of an indigo thunderbolt or a death threat or at least a rude joke. Instead, Corrigan walked right past me to take his place over one of the shadows surrounding the Spellslinger.

‘You’re dead, obviously,’ she informed him, then narrowed her eyes as if trying to recall some forgotten detail. ‘Killed by your own thunder, I think.’

‘That makes sense,’ Corrigan agreed, and then lay down on the ground atop the contorted shadow. ‘Like this?’

‘One arm across your chest and the right leg more bent,’ the Spellslinger told him. ‘And, of course. . .’ She gestured to his stomach, made a fist and then spread her fingers. ‘You know. Boom.’

‘Right, right,’ Corrigan said, his expression one of sheepish embarrassment. His left arm came up, hand shimmering with the indigo sparks that preceded one of his simpler spells.

‘Corrigan, no!’ I screamed, but he never heard me. The crack of a breach between our realm and the Tempestoral plane erupted into a deafening thunderclap. A bolt of indigo lightning tore through his torso, leaving behind a blackened, charred hole where his internal organs had been.

‘Alice next, I think,’ said the Spellslinger.

‘Stop,’ I said, widening my own breach between this world and the plane of reality whose physical laws made the destructive energies of the Tempestoral realm pale by comparison. But the clack-clacking in my mind settled almost instantly to an impotent silence.

‘Told you, it’s my turn,’ the Spellslinger reminded me.

She beckoned to Alice, who approached obediently, though her usual petulant sneer was firmly in place. ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘I end up dying by my own blade?’

‘Sorry, hon. If it makes you feel any better, you never once wavered in the Justiciar Path. It’s an honourable death.’ She held her nose. ‘Though not a particularly pleasant one.’

I tried to yell for Alice to refuse the unspoken command, but the words tumbled from my mouth as dried leaves that crumbled apart and scattered to the wind.

Alice took her place over the second shadow on the ground. As soon as she removed her whip-sword from its sheath, the silver ribbon split apart into dozens of tiny slivers. She pressed the cross-guard of the now bladeless bone hilt to her chest and squeezed, then screamed as the shards reassembled themselves inside her heart. She fell next to Corrigan, her pose a perfect match for the shadow that gave way for her.

‘I believe my death comes next,’ Aradeus said, striding past me to find his shadow among the others. ‘Corrigan and Alice tend to attack first, but I would not have allowed my other comrades to fall before me.’

The Spellslinger nodded. ‘A true swashbuckler to the very end.’

Aradeus drew his rapier, then tossed it away. ‘I doubt I would’ve died by my own blade. Rats are far too cunni — ’

‘Yes, of course,’ the Spellslinger agreed, then leaned over to whisper in his ear. The rat mage paled, but then lay down where his shadow awaited. ‘I am ready.’

‘No, you aren’t,’ she said, her voice tinged with sympathy. ‘Who could prepare themselves for this?’

Unseen hands began to claw at Aradeus, pummelling his face and body, grabbing hold of his limbs and slowly tearing first skin, then sinew as they stretched him in four directions until at last the bones popped. I don’t know why, but I’d always imagined him dying with a defiant smile on his face.

He didn’t.

‘How are you doing this?’ I demanded of the Spellslinger, but my confusion and rage came out as nothing but bits of moss pouring from my mouth.

One by one, I watched them die: Shame, Temper, Galass: passive actors in a gruesome stage play written by a madman and directed by the Spellslinger.

‘You can speak now,’ she informed me, after Galass had been strangled by the scarlet strands of her own hair.

I’ve studied the esoteric variations of wonderism more than most scholars of the subject. I first heard the Auroral Song when I was fifteen, when I joined the Glorian Justiciars. Years later, I became a mercenary Infernalist because I couldn’t attune myself to any of the other mystical realms. I know this business– which is how I knew for certain the Spellslinger was no luminist and none of this was an illusion.

This was real .

My friends were dead.

‘History,’ I murmured, stumbling to where Corrigan and the others had joined a thousand other victims of the devastation all around me. ‘History waiting to be written.’

The Spellslinger, this mass-murdering, impossibly powerful mage whose every word, every expression and action indicated she knew me, placed both palms on my chest. ‘Get it now?’ she asked. One hand reached up, touching my hair. ‘The day we met, you were still filled with the Auroral Song, a brave Glorian Justiciar crowned in that glow that gave all of you those lustrous golden locks. Even then, I sensed your true colour was black. Cade Ombra: your last name means shadow, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

The amber irises brightened. ‘But you’re no shadow. You’re a raven. The gleaming armour and righteous zealotry couldn’t hide your feathers from me, Cade Ombra. I saw the raven and knew it would be you who rescued me before the Glorian Magistrate could condemn me for what he referred to as my “crimes of being”. But you never came to rescue me, did you, Cade?’

‘I. . . I couldn’t. I don’t remember. The haze, it’s — ’

She looked down at the corpses arrayed around us. ‘Would you like me to rescue them, Cade? Would you like me to rescue you ?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me I’m a good person. Surely only a good person would go against her employers’ wishes to save the friends of a man so determined to interfere in their plans, right?’

‘You’re a good person,’ I said.

‘Tell me you love me.’

‘I love you.’

‘Kiss me like you mean it.’

I kissed her with more passion than I’ve ever kissed anyone in my life. I kissed her with the desperate intensity of a teenage boy who’s convinced he’s got to make this one kiss perfect or there will never be another for as long as he lives. I kissed her with all the love I felt for the six people lying dead at my feet.

‘That was. . . nice,’ the Spellslinger said as she pulled away. I don’t think she was aware of the tears in her eyes. ‘Now, one last thing, my raven of shadows. One tiny, insignificant promise before I unwind destiny and give you back your friends.’

Hazidan Rosh, my old master, always said recklessness was both the curse and the blessing I kept bestowing on myself, a never-ending pattern of damnation and redemption that would define my life until death or wisdom freed me from the cycle. But I wasn’t stupid, and my impulsiveness hadn’t prevented me from becoming the finest investigator the Chief Paladin of the Glorian Justiciars had ever trained.

‘I’ll stop,’ I promised without further prompting from the Spellslinger. ‘Bring my friends back and I’ll cease any further interference in the war between the Infernals and the Aurorals. Your employers will never hear about me again.’

‘Swear to it,’ she commanded. ‘Give me your oath.’

I dropped to my knees, took her hand and placed her palm against my forehead. ‘I swear it.’

She took her hand away, then placed her forefinger under my chin and tilted my head back. ‘You can’t.’

‘What?’

She knelt for a moment so our faces were close. ‘You’re a fine liar, Cade, but an oath isn’t a lie, and nature, despite how it tricks us’– she gestured to the destruction all around us– ‘is immutable. That’s what you can’t comprehend. What’s going to happen is going to happen. The war between the Aurorals and the Infernals isn’t destiny , it’s history , unfolding as it must. You and me, we’re the only ones outside that history. Me because. . . well, let’s save that story for another time.’ She smoothed my hair from my brow. ‘You, though. . .’ She shook her head. ‘What you did to yourself up in that fortress in the Blastlands? Was that impulsive– a moment of reckless insanity? Or did you really choose to make yourself into what you’ve become?’

‘Neither,’ I replied, watching her eyes, her mouth, her face, taking in her scent and the breathiness of her voice, everything I could sense about her, and locking it away in the back of my mind. ‘I made a bet with the universe.’

She smiled. ‘A bet with the universe. I like that.’ She rose to her feet and stood a moment in silence, eyes closed. I felt an odd sort of pressure building, as if she were tugging not so much the world around her but its history, tying it to herself like a cloak too heavy and too long for anyone but her to wear. ‘I guess we know each other a little better now, don’t we?’ she asked.

Without waiting for an answer, she walked away from me, down the broken street. I watched her go, the events of the past hour dragging along behind her, pulled away from this place and time like a dirty rug from the floor beneath. The cracks in the road began to mend, the buildings groaned as stone and mortar, marble and plaster shifted back into place. The six bodies the Spellslinger had left behind stood up, dazed, then shook themselves off and came to stand next to me.

‘So,’ Corrigan asked. ‘How fucked are we?’

It took a moment before I could convince my mouth that when next I spoke, actual words would come out instead of dried leaves and my crumbling sense of self. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s all going according to plan.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Corrigan said as he grabbed me by the back of my collar and hauled me alongside him down the still-resurrecting street.