Page 13

Chapter 13

Destiny’s Just Another Word for Getting Screwed by the Universe

It’s a strange thing to watch a ruined city repair itself before your eyes. Corrigan and I walked side by side along a wide avenue, stepping over chasm-like cracks grunting and groaning as they drew themselves back together, covering themselves like shy lovers with reassembling rocks that moments ago had been blasted shards. On either side of the path, buildings were drawing themselves up from the rubble to their previously proud heights, stitched together with mortar that had been nothing but dust seconds before. Bits of broken marble and alabaster were sliding around like puzzle pieces to form gleaming, seamless facades. With each step we took, the flagstones slid back into place, smoothing and straightening like a carpet being laid out for us.

‘What kind of magic can even do this?’ Corrigan demanded. He was angry and scared and blaming me for both. ‘Who was that lunatic woman and what the fuck did you do to piss her off, Cade?’

Eminently reasonable questions, for which I had no good answers. No doubt the others had concerns of their own, so I supposed I should have been grateful that Corrigan had insisted we take this little stroll by ourselves. Admittedly, my gratitude was muted by the occasions on campaign when he’d suggest a comradely stroll to a wonderist who’d screwed up one too many times. Inevitably, he returned alone. ‘ Took ’em to a nice farm ,’ Corrigan would say later, whilst parcelling out our absent colleague’s supplies to the rest of the coven. ‘ Lots of open space to frolic. ’

If that sounds heartless, well, clearly you haven’t been paying attention to all the other times he’s blown people up at the drop of a hat. To be fair, though, ours is a precarious business. One wrong move, one ill-chosen spell, one too many oh-look-Cade’s-brought-another-homicidal-immortal-lunatic-into-our-lives and it’s a one-way trip to ‘the farm’.

‘Tell me this is all some new kind of illusioneering,’ Corrigan pleaded, sweeping an arm to encompass the devastation that was slowly, inexorably, reversing itself as the town of Seduction returned to its former– if dubious– glory. ‘Actually, I take that back. Better the world’s gone mad than the prospect of luminists being taken seriously.’

‘It’s no illusion,’ I told him. ‘The Spellslinger isn’t drawing spells from the Luxoral realm. I don’t think she’s attuned to any of the usual ones.’

‘Whatever plane of reality she’s drawing power from, I wish you’d picked that instead of wasting your one shot with the Apparatus to attune yourself to fucking Fortunal magic.’ He ran a few feet ahead and kicked a stone, only to have it veer in mid-air to rejoin its brethren to form the foundation of what soon rose up to become a brothel. ‘Fucking unluckiest person I’ve ever met decides to become a chancer.’

The bones sticking out of the ground slid free of their bonds, clacking into formation and becoming a skeleton onto which charred bits of flesh stretched and smoothed themselves. We watched wisps of gossamer filaments wrapping around the revivifying body of a fair-haired young man, clothing him in the diaphanous toga of his profession. He stood up, confused at first, then offered Corrigan and me an inviting smile. ‘Welcome, my would-be lovers.’ He pointed to the brothel. ‘Three’s no crowd in my bed. . . or my sister’s.’

Corrigan made a sour face. ‘Ugh. Why do you young ones always bring up incest like it’s some erotic nirvana we all want to experience?’

The reborn prostitute gave us the finger before darting through the door of the still-rising brothel. Nearby, another pile of broken bones and sinew revivified into one of the young man’s colleagues, though she was closer to forty and had the wide hips and ample figure Corrigan preferred.

Nice smile, too , I thought as she winked at us.

‘Sorry, lass,’ Corrigan called to her. ‘Much as I’d love to rumpy-pump away the day with you, I’m stuck cleaning up after this moron.’

‘Happy to wait outside,’ I told him.

Corrigan just kept walking, grumbling at first to himself and then, inevitably, sharing his emotional distress with me. ‘Did you see that?’ he demanded. ‘Perfectly nice whore. Probably putting herself through university on tips. Now you’ve gone and ruined her educational prospects.’

My patience for casual abuse was wearing thin, partly because I was still holding back my own tremors following my encounter with the Spellslinger. ‘Either kill me now or quit your whining, you blustering ox. I didn’t ask to be ambushed by a psychotic immortal wonderist with a grudge against me. I didn’t ask to watch my friends lie down like sheep and die worse deaths than either of us have seen in gods-know how many wars, just to come back to life and shit all over me!’

The big brute spun on me, the notable absence of indigo sparks around his fists providing no reassurance whatsoever. Corrigan’s all muscle, strong and skilled as an arena gladiator, and equally comfortable committing acts of violence with his bare hands as with his Tempestoral spells. ‘ You’re not the one who died, Cade.’ He stared down at his hands. They were trembling. ‘You’re not the one who. . .’ He shuddered. ‘You have no idea what it was like.’

‘Tell me.’

The ball of his throat bobbed up and down and he swallowed twice, as if he had to force the bile back down before any words could come out. ‘When I saw that shadow on the ground and that bitch told me I was already dead, I. . . I didn’t even try to resist.’ Sparks of red and black began to dance across his knuckles. ‘I knew it would hurt– I’ve seen what it’s like when I. . . But she was right, Cade. She was right! That’s how I was supposed to die. That’s how I had died, only it hadn’t happened yet.’ He shook his head like a dog with a palsy, the indigo braids whipping back and forth. ‘Is she a god, Cade? Did a fucking god just foretell my death? Or did she transport an entire city into the future and then effortlessly bring it all back?’

An answer to that question had begun to form in my mind, bits and pieces of stray thoughts tied together with nothing but instinct and conjecture. The town of Seduction had all but finished its unthinking restoration to how it had been when we’d first arrived here three days ago. The early spring air was clear and crisp. People who’d been dead minutes ago were strolling past us to wherever they’d been headed before the Spellslinger had ushered them to their dooms. And yet I could see the uncertainty in their expressions, the awareness, thankfully already fading, that they had, however briefly, been dead. Soon those memories would unspool so their subconsciouses could weave the traumas into fanciful nightmares, easily dismissed and soon forgotten.

Would Corrigan do likewise? Alice? Shame? Would it be better if I offered up some convoluted theory about momentary distortions and mass delusion?

No , I decided. We made a deal, the seven of us, to end a war before that war became endless. We all agreed the mission would demand sacrifices of us, and that our own deaths would likely be the least of them.

I led Corrigan down a boulevard filled with shops, the sidewalks littered with kids pulling handcarts laden with spices and trinkets and whatever else they’d scrounged in search of the busiest spots to sell their wares. ‘I don’t think the Spellslinger is a god,’ I said, watching the hubbub of an ordinary market day unfold. ‘And you know as well as I do that no magic allows one to travel through time.’

It’s true: the universe might be a chaotic mess, but it doesn’t screw around with causality.

‘Then what is she ?’ Corrigan asked. ‘I mean, aside from a paella-ruining strumpet of strictly average looks and I swear I will fucking murder you if you have sex with her.’

I ignored that jibe, being unsure which outcome I found the most unpleasant. ‘She talked about destinies as if they were tangible, somehow. Not so much predictions or prophecies, but. . . places. I know this sounds insane, but I think the Spellslinger has the power to somehow summon those places, those destinies, to the here and now.’

I stumbled backwards, a sudden ringing in my left ear and a pain just below my temple. Corrigan had just cuffed me in the side of the head. ‘Insane, I can handle. Vague, barely coherent conjectures that sound like lazy teenage poetry really piss me off. So stop being obtuse and tell me what the fuck you mean.’

He had a point, but I doubted I could make him feel any better. I stopped at an intersection. ‘Destiny isn’t like Fate,’ I began. ‘It’s not a singular proposition.’ I pointed to each of the four directions we could take. ‘In a sense, destiny is the inevitable outcome of who we are combined with the choices we make. Turn left, and whatever awaits down the road is your destiny. Turn right instead and an entirely different set of events will unfold.’

‘Sure, and if we float up to the clouds, birds will peck at our testicles until we get off their turf.’

‘Ah, but that’s just it, you see?’ I pounced on the weirdly apt example. ‘What are the chances of two wonderists who lack any spells for ascending to the skies doing so?’

‘Zero, obviously.’

I gestured to the boulevard straight ahead. ‘The further we walk down this street, the further we get from our friends back at the restaurant. Those outcomes, those destinies are hazy, ephemeral.’ I pointed to the side street to our right that would lead us back to the others. ‘That path isn’t just more plausible, it has a sort of. . . solidity to it the others don’t. Our destinies aren’t set in stone, but they’re not random, either. They’re predictable– inevitable, in a sense.’

Corrigan rubbed at his bearded jaw. ‘And this Spellslinger has the ability to. . . how did you put it? Draw those destinies to us?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Wouldn’t that make her the most powerful wonderist in existence? What makes you so sure she’s not a god?’

This part was harder to explain, but I was absolutely positive about it. ‘Because she’s sad.’

Corrigan barked out a laugh. ‘Sad? Oh, well that explains everything! The Spellslinger is sad .’ He held up a finger to keep me from interrupting. ‘You know what? I take it all back. None of this is your fault, it must be mine. If only I’d agreed to bed her like she was clearly hinting, she would’ve joined our coven– not that I’ll ever be okay with “The Malevolent Eight” as a name, mind you. Together, we’d’ve kicked the arses of the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish until they agreed to play nice with one another.’

Tempestoral energies gathered around his hands and an instant later, a bolt of red and black calamity tore up a three-foot section of the recently reassembled flagstones in the middle of the intersection.

‘Hey!’ an elderly woman shouted from a window above a wine shop. ‘What did you do that for, you bloody barbarian? Haven’t we got enough trouble with Infernals and Aurorals and who knows what else without a couple of wonderist drifters hurling spells at our streets?’

‘Blame destiny,’ Corrigan shouted back at her.

‘You done yet?’ I asked. Sometimes you just have to let him get these things out of his system.

‘How do you know?’

‘What?’

‘About the Spellslinger– about her being sad.’

‘It’s. . .’ I wasn’t eager to dissect every subtle clue in the way she talked, those brief flickers between smiles or the way her cocky attitude was ever-so-slightly too consistent. I turned to lock eyes with Corrigan. We’d never talked much about me having been a Glorian Justiciar,someone who hunted down people like us when the Aurorals decided they wanted them either imprisoned or dead. ‘I was never the most powerful of the Justiciars. I wasn’t the most devout and I sure as hell didn’t turn out to be the most loyal. But none of them had my instincts, Corrigan. None of them read people like I could.’

He chewed on that a while, probably because I’d once told him that my first betrayal of the Lords Celestine involved refusing to kill a certain reckless, loud-mouthed Tempestoral mage deemed too dangerous to be allowed to live. ‘Well, I suppose I can’t fault your taste in friends, at least.’ He gave me a punch in the arm that was far more painful than intended, given he followed it with, ‘Sorry about smacking you upside the head before.’

‘It’s okay. You’ve had a rough day. After all, some crazy woman wrecked your dinner and the paella got cold. Then she convinced some half-witted thunderer to blow a hole in your chest.’

He chuckled at that. ‘Damn, that really was good paella. You think Tenebris could get his chefs to whip us up some more?’

‘Forget it. Paella’s for proper villains, not a bunch of milquetoast cry-babies who get their arses handed to them by an opponent so clueless she never once asked to see your cock.’

‘Damn straight.’ He puffed himself up, needlessly readjusting the bejewelled bands on his thick arms. ‘What’s the plan, then? Because I don’t intend to spend the rest of my almost certainly short life going without decent paella.’

‘Simple. We figure out where the Spellslinger’s drawing those crazy spells from and who she’s working for, whether it’s this so-called “Apocalypse Eight” or some other bunch of arseholes. Then we gather the proof that they’ve played both the Aurorals and the Infernals for fools and get them to kill these shadowy warmongers for us, buying us time to diffuse this “Great Crusade” before it engulfs the rest of humanity– all while proving to their respective armies that the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish are incompetent morons long overdue for dethroning, followed by swift defenestration.’

‘Ha!’ Corrigan bellowed, thumping a fist against his chest. ‘Now that sounds like a paella-worthy mission.’ He threw his arm around my shoulders, nearly crushing me as we turned right down the side street towards where the others would be waiting for us. ‘You know, I feel a bit guilty. When I suggested we take a walk, just the two of us, I was contemplating killing you to keep the Spellslinger off our backs. Nothing personal, you understand, but that chick clearly has a hard-on for you.’

‘Why would I take being murdered in cold blood by my best friend personally?’

He nodded. ‘Exactly. So, what’s our next move?’

As it happened, the first step in my– only slightly adjusted brilliantly masterminded plan– would require uncovering precisely why the Spellslinger had such a. . . hard-on for me. Regrettably, that meant digging into my past as a Glorian Justiciar and therefore I required the metaphysical assistance of a group of people who would be disinclined to do me any favours.

‘We need to set up a meeting,’ I informed Corrigan as we made our way back to the others– assuming they hadn’t come to their senses and abandoned us already.

‘A meeting? With whom?’

‘My old bosses. We’re going to pay a visit to the Lords Celestine.’