Page 17

Chapter 17

The Glorian Justiciar

I’d forgotten what it felt like to wear the armour. As a boy watching Glorian Justiciars stride into the gang-ridden slum where we cowered in terror every day before whichever third-rate wonderist had been hired to shake down the poorest families for every pitiful coin we’d scraped together, those shimmering suits of golden armour looked so grand, so indomitable, that I’d assumed they must weigh almost as much as the tall, broad-shouldered men and women wearing them. Years later when, as a youth of seventeen, I was first inducted into the order, I discovered that a Glorian’s armour weighs hardly anything; after all, it’s nothing but rags stitched together with fraying thread. Each recruit has to wander the streets, begging strangers for scraps of cloth, until they have enough to sew those worn, filthy castoffs into shirts and trousers so ill-fitting and unseemly that the proudest warriors would have hung their heads in shame to be seen in them.

That was, of course, the point.

Any true Glorian, be they Justiciar, Ardentor, Exemplar, Pareval or any of the other orders, needed to remember that no matter how great our power over our fellow Mortals, we, too, were made of flesh and sin.

That was an easy lesson to forget when at last I’d been deemed worthy to stand before the Celestine of Justice and her blessings filled my rags with radiance, reshaping them into breastplate, pauldrons, greaves and all the rest: stronger than steel, as proof against a blazing inferno or the coldest ice storm as swords, arrows and cannon-fire. A Glorian’s armour was wondrous to behold, yet the rough sensation of the tatters from which it was made remained against our skin, a constant reminder that we were no better than the least among those we were called to protect, to judge and sometimes, to kill. . .

‘Please!’ wept the girl hiding in the cave. ‘Please, I don’t belong here. I didn’t mean to. . .’

I couldn’t hear the rest of what she said. The Auroral Song filled my ears with the serene certainty that my mission to capture this creature of deviousness, to cauterise this infection before it could poison humanity, was an act of sublime righteousness.

‘Look,’ she cried, holding out her arms to us. ‘I’m not a demon! I don’t even know what a wonderist is, or any of these other things you’re — ’

There was something around her arms: tattooed bands of sigils of some sort? I couldn’t see them properly, because my eyes saw only the pristine beauty that was everywhere in Creation, save for where sin stained its perfect pattern.

‘Abomination,’ I deemed her.

‘Abomination,’ the eleven Glorians with me agreed.

Now was the time when a Glorian Arbitrator would be called to hear the facts of the case as we’d uncovered them and render a verdict upon the defendant. But we were far from any of our sanctuaries, which meant transporting a potentially dangerous suspect through populated areas. Under such circumstances, a senior Justiciar could be temporarily elevated to the rank of Arbitrator. The natural choice was my comrade Fidelity, a woman whose devotion made her physical beauty pale in comparison to her bright, shining spirit. It was she who turned to me unexpectedly.

‘You found her, Gallantry, when her filthy spells hid her from the rest of us. You defeated her bindings when she attempted to shackle our minds. It is you who should now serve as Arbitrator and determine her sentence.’

It was an honour I’d never thought to receive so early in my tenure: barely a year since the Celestine of Justice had blessed me into her service. To be given this sacred duty, to decide whether this Abomination should be executed or exiled back to the unnatural plane of reality from whence she’d come– to be asked this by none other than Fidelity. . . I wept, first with pride, then with shame for that same pride, and finally with joy that one so unworthy to have been born to a world where a wretched, unschooled boy called Cade Ombra should be granted such honours.

No, I’d reminded myself, not Cade Ombra. I am Gallantry now. Gallantry!

With my comrades at my side, the twelve virtues in my heart, I spoke the charges against the accused and allowed her to give such testimony as she believed would sway the pendulum of Justice towards mercy. And yet she merely blathered and bleated, moaned of her blamelessness and menaced us with threats of her foul magics. In the end, as the others looked to me for my verdict, I proved myself unworthy of their faith. Rather than accept the burden of my office and sentence the Abomination to swift execution, I allowed my selfish, childish desire to appear tender-hearted– that conceit sometimes called altruism– to sway me away from true justice.

‘Exile,’ I said at last.

And so, bound by my failure of judgment, the Auroral Will cast the grotesque creature back to —

‘Stop!’ I shouted, shaking off the tangle of emotions shrouding my memories. All around me, the Auroral Haze billowed so thickly I could barely see the girl cowering there, frozen in terror before me. ‘This wasn’t what happened– it’s only the story I was telling myself while the events were unfolding!’

A face appeared within the haze, golden as the fog itself. ‘ You asked to return to this moment, Gallantry ,’ the voice of the Celestine of Justice insisted. ‘ This is when you encountered the woman you call “Spellslinger” .’

I tried to peer through the clouds of my younger self’s remembrances to see the girl, but the vision kept blurring, my zealotry painting the world in broad strokes of gold-tinged perfection marred only by a putrid blotch surrounding the accused.

‘You promised me entry into the Glorian Archives so that I could recover the memories of my eyes and ears,’ I reminded her. ‘If all I’d been looking to do was relive my glory days as a Justiciar, I could’ve holed up in a pleasure parlour for a few days and drugged myself senseless with psychedelics. Show me what really happened.’

Disapproving faces made up of wisps of fog are particularly good at sighing. ‘ As ever, you elevate the muddled perceptions of flawed flesh over the flawless precision of faith. Yet you remain my favourite among my fallen children, Gallantry, so turn away from the mirror of truth if you insist and gaze instead into the muddy pool of your base Mortal senses, blind to the deeper spiritual clarity that once guided you. ’

My old boss really knew how to pour on the guilt when it suited.

‘Please!’ wept the girl hiding in the cave. Her cries were like claws digging into clay, so full of anguish over what was happening to her, so terrified of. . . me .

‘Please,’ she repeated, staring up at us wide-eyed, trying to make us hear her– to make us understand. ‘I don’t belong here. I didn’t mean to break the laws of this place. It was an accident– a spell gone wrong. Somehow, I breached the veil between my plane of reality and yours. I don’t belong here!’

‘Why would an innocent attempt so foul a spell?’ asked Dignity. He was probably the only vaguely compassionate one of us, and even he tended to be– you guessed it– a right prick at times like these. ‘Even now, the wickedness of your wonderism weaves itself among the strands of this realm, a foul weed seeking to take root in the garden.’

He reached down a gauntleted hand and held up a strand of her dark hair as if it were the web of a spider seeking to lure him closer. ‘How could one so young rip through walls that the Auroral Sovereign himself erected around this, his most perfect creation? Unbind the lies your masters have woven around you, girl. Confess to us which of the Lords Devilish fed you this perverse magic. Testify to the plot meant to twist the souls of innocent Mortals to the Infernal cause.’

‘Look at me,’ she cried, sliding back the torn sleeves of the clothes she’d worn to rags fleeing from our pursuit these past weeks. ‘Look– I’m not a demon! I was an initiate in the traditional magic of my people. I’ve never even heard of this wonderism, or these Infernals you accuse me of colluding with — ’

With the Auroral Haze parted at last, I could now see what she’d actually been trying to show us: intricate bands of sigils tattooed into her skin with some sort of metallic ink. Each band had its own distinct colour and sheen: one a purplish-platinum, one burnished orange like the glow of an ember, one an iron-grey band. Sparks erupted sporadically from some of the sigils, then quickly died, dulling the tattoos once more.

‘I’m only sixteen,’ the girl pleaded as if that should somehow render her immune to our judgment. Even without the Auroral Haze blurring my Mortal senses, it was hard to make out her features through the matted mahogany-brown hair.

This was the Spellslinger, I knew now, though there was nothing of the wry, imperturbable mage who’d kicked our arses in this trembling, shattered girl who’d fled my fellow Glorians until she was nearly dead of thirst and her feet had been torn to bloody tatters.

‘I was undergoing my mage’s trials,’ she said, speaking so quickly to forestall our verdict that her words were little more than stuttering sobs. ‘The third test requires us to devise a spell never before recorded in the annals of Jan’Tep magic by our spellmasters. Usually, initiates only do some trivial variation of an existing spell, but I’– the tattooed sigils of three of the bands, purple, blue and grey, shimmered faintly– ‘I found a way to interweave silk, breath and iron magic that I believed could create momentary breaches in the fabric of my world, allowing one to travel great distances. Instead, I found myself here.’ She glanced around the cave as if every shadow hid some new terror even worse than my fellow Glorians and me. She was wrong. ‘I’m sorry! I just need time to find a way home, please !’

The timbre of her voice, the rapid blinking of her tear-soaked eyes, the spasms rippling through her emaciated limbs, all spoke of the terror of being so far from safety, from all that she knew, to being surrounded by men and women in gleaming armour accusing her of being some sort of. . .

‘Abomination,’ I condemned her.

‘Abomination,’ the eleven other Glorians agreed.

Fidelity, a woman whose single-minded fanaticism for our cause led her to constantly question my loyalty, turned to me. ‘You found her, Gallantry, when her filthy spells hid her from the rest of us– though the Auroral Sovereign knows it was luck and not your clumsy, banal attempts at “investigation” you seem to believe make up for your lack of spiritual insight.’

‘Whereas you are as insightful as you are beautiful,’ Indomitability chimed up. He never failed to leap at the opportunity to kiss up to Fidelity. I was pretty sure he was hoping to wear her down until she got so tired of his pathetic flattery that she’d finally reward him with a pity fu —

‘ Is the post-facto commentary enlightening somehow? ’ asked the Celestine of Justice in my mind.

‘ Sorry. Forgot you were still here. ’

Take my word for it, though: Indomitability was a complete arsehole. But let’s get back to Fidelity being. . . well, being Fidelity.

‘. . . No doubt that same luck was at work when you defeated the nefarious bindings of the Infernal infiltrator who attempted to shackle our minds,’ she said, managing to make ‘luck’ sound like ‘unimpeachable evidence of your innate incompetence’.

‘How could anyone shackle Gallantry’s mind?’ chortled Indomitability. ‘There’s so little there to bind!’

See what I mean? He just couldn’t let that one pass.

A cruel smile came to Fidelity’s thin lips. ‘Divine Providence need not be granted only to the deserving for such omens to command our obedience.’ She reached down and grabbed the Jan’Tep girl by the jaw, forcing her to her feet. ‘As we are too far from the sanctuary to summon an Arbitrator, surely the Auroral Sovereign has decided that Gallantry should now serve in the role and, with his renowned wisdom, determine the wicked one’s sentence.’

It was barely a year since I’d been inducted into the service of the Celestine of Justice and I wasn’t nearly ready to serve as an Arbitrator. I was untrained in the eccentricities of Auroral Law, especially when it came to cases involving beings from other planes of reality who were, in some contexts, unbound by the rules and punishments meant for those of us from the Mortal realm. Yet Fidelity had foisted this dubious honour upon me, knowing I couldn’t refuse for fear of confirming my inadequacy as a Justiciar and my unworthiness to stand among my fellow Glorians. It also meant she and the others were expecting me to level the severest penalty upon the foreign girl.

I wept, first with shame over my cowardice, then for failing to feel the righteousness I knew guided the others, and finally, for this sixteen-year-old looking up to me as if somehow my tears were evidence of compassion for her plight. But compassion requires courage, not ‘Gallantry’.

Such a stupid fucking name. Why did I ev — ?

‘ Again, you drift ,’ interrupted the Celestine of Justice. ‘ You claim to seek clarity and yet you insist on clouding those events with your present self-judgement. ’

‘ No, seriously. That’s exactly what I was thinking at the time. Gallantry was, is and shall ever be a fucking embarrassing name. ’

But as the trial played out before me, every word, every argument, every shameful and trivial evidentiary ruling, I finally understood why it had been so easy for those memories to become lost in the blissful delusions of righteousness offered by the Auroral Haze. When at last the trial was done, I uttered the verdict with the quavering voice of a coward who’d fooled himself into believing he was a hero.

‘Execution,’ I said, then stepped back and waited for the others to concur.

Fidelity laughed. Despite everything I’ve said about her, she had a lovely laugh, rich and rumbling. It always made you want to smile– well, except after selling out a fellow human being and your own conscience.

‘I beg,’ she began, drawling that second word, ‘to differ.’

‘What?’ I asked, so shocked by this unexpected turnabout that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Fidelity was playing at.

The others looked equally confused. Even Indomitability couldn’t find a way to turn this into a good sucking-up occasion. ‘You wish to appeal the Arbitrator’s verdict?’ he asked, then added hastily, shooting a glare at the others, ‘which is the right of any of us, of course.’

Fidelity made a show of contemplating the shaking, cowering girl before us. ‘Justice is more than the absence of compassion,’ she said, shaking her head in apparent disappointment. ‘I fear you grow too zealous in your desire to appear righteous, Gallantry.’

The others fell in line, quickly convincing themselves that my verdict– the very one they would’ve demanded of me had I gone the other way– betrayed me as a cruel, callous youth too soon risen to their ranks. After I then overturned my own sentence and sought redemption by offering to perform the Ritual of Exile on the defendant myself– a painful and all-around unpleasant duty, I assure you– Fidelity surprised me a second time.

‘No,’ she said, and took the Jan’Tep girl’s hands in her own before kissing each palm. ‘The child has suffered enough. Return to the Justiciars’ Hall, all of you. I will perform the ceremony myself and see to it that the defendant reaches the destination called for by our esteemed Arbitrator’s new-found mercy.’

The vision ended, not so much fading away as becoming shrouded ever more deeply behind the golden fog of the Auroral Haze. My gleaming armour slipped off my shoulders like rotting gossamer, my hair darkened to its natural black. Even my nose returned to being slightly crooked, a parting gift from those same Glorian comrades when I abandoned their company. I was stepping backwards through the fog, not of my own volition, as the Archives expelled me from their hallowed halls. Just as the cathedral began coming back into view, I felt a hand grab me and yank me into another part of the mists.

‘You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?’ asked the cowering Jan’Tep girl. I could feel her shaking through the fingers wrapped around my forearm. She looked even worse than she had moments before.

‘How — ?’ I turned, my eyes searching through the fog that was no longer golden but a kind of sickly green. I couldn’t make out the cavern I’d been in before nor the cathedral to which I should already have returned. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked. ‘Where are we?’

She took her hand away. ‘It’s too late now. Don’t think asking questions will make it any better. Knowledge isn’t justice, any more than a guilty conscience is restitution for what you didn’t do.’

The girl was still young, still dressed as when last I’d seen her. I made a pre-emptive attempt to awaken my attunement, though my spells hadn’t worked on her last time we met, but I felt nothing. I was trapped.

‘How are you doing this to me, Spellslinger?’ I asked.

She shook her head, wisps of mahogany brown hair whipping this way and that. ‘I’m not her. Not yet.’ She glanced around us as if she were seeing something more than just mist and fog. ‘I’m still here. Still locked up.’

‘Who are you at this moment, then?’

‘Nobody. Not really. They call me Abomination. You did, too, so just call me that.’

‘No. What’s your name? Your real name?’

‘Eliva,’ she began, then straightened, standing a little taller. ‘Eliva’ren, daughter of the House of Ren, a middling family of mages from the city of Oatas Jan’Xan, who thought she could bring honour to her name, her blood and her people.’ She saw my confusion and grinned. ‘Looks like I’ll be somebody soon, though. Somebody dangerous.’ She reached out with her fingers as if she were trying to clutch onto a wisp of air. ‘Maybe not, though. Maybe I’ll just rot in here until they’re done experimenting on me.’

‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Eliva, what experiments? Where are you?’

‘Eliva’ren,’ she corrected me. ‘Don’t talk like we’re friends. Not yet, anyway.’

‘Okay, fine. Eliva’ren, daughter of the House of Ren of the city of Oatas Jan’Xan, tell me where you are. Tell me how I ca — ’

‘No way out for me,’ she said, shaking her head vigorously. ‘Not unless I can draw a different destiny to me.’ Again she reached out, straining so hard I could see the veins sticking out against the bronze darkness of her skin. ‘It’s hard to catch hold of the good ones– none of the likely ones end well, so I’ll have to settle for the one they’ll offer me, I guess.’

She sounded exhausted, at the end of her rope and on the verge of giving up.

‘Settle for what , Eliva’ren? Is someone going to offer you a way out? Is that what you’re trying to draw to yourself? A. . . a destiny that isn’t real yet? Maybe I can help you find a better one. Tell me what to do.’

She chuckled in the way of those on the edge of losing their sanity. ‘ Help me? Don’t be stupid, “Gallantry”. You’re standing– what? Ten years from where I am? You can’t change the past, you know. That’s not how this works.’

I tried to grab her wrist as she’d grabbed mine when she’d pulled me here, but my fingers passed right through her arm as if I wasn’t really with her, which, I suppose, I wasn’t.

‘You would have helped me, though,’ she murmured, as if she were hearing my thoughts, though she seemed only dimly aware of my presence. ‘That was one of my destinies– a good one.’ She smiled, a whimsical, melancholic smile. ‘In that destiny, you get over your fear of Fidelity just long enough to ask where she took me to perform the Ritual of Exile. She tries to put you off the scent, but that’s a mistake. You’re Cade-fucking-Ombra, Hazidan Rosh’s finest investigator. The more Fidelity works to convince you everything was done properly, the more those instincts of yours awaken. That’s my favourite destiny of all. The one where you find me before it’s too late.’

‘Too late for what?’ I asked, kneeling, trying to make her look at me, but it was as if I were made of mist, becoming less and less real to her.

‘My own fault, really. I never thought. . . it was just one night, and he was so. . . He couldn’t look at anyone but me. We were celebrating because I’d figured out the spell that would change everything, make weak little Eliva’ren famous among the entire clan– famous among all the Jan’Tep clans. So I wasn’t thinking right, and neither was he. And then the next morning, I cast the spell and. . .’ Tears dripped down her cheeks, leaving streaks in the dirt and grime. ‘You really want to know?’

‘I do. Tell me, Eliva’ren.’

‘Call me Eliva.’

‘Okay, Eliva. Call me Cade. Tell me what I was too late for.’

The fog thickened between us and I found myself rising to my feet without willing to do so, my steps drawing me backwards to the cathedral. But Eliva’ren jumped up and ran to me, and though I was now as insubstantial as the mist itself, she tried to kiss me on the cheek as she whispered, ‘Too late to save the baby.’