Page 18

Chapter 18

Crimes of Dispassion

Rage clouds our vision with its own kind of haze, sometimes. Fury has a colour, after all: a deep, blood-red at once repellent, yet somehow pure: a hue that makes you want to paint the entire world to match. I’ve never been prone to indulging in bouts of anger, bloodlust or temper tantrums. I am a peacemaker at heart.

‘May the Void take every one of you fucking morons,’ I swore as the cathedral drew me back out of the Archives and returned me to the august presence of the Lords Celestine. ‘You lied to me– you violated your own Justiciar’s verdict and half a dozen of your own laws to bury the living evidence of your perfidy in an illegal secret prison! Why? So you could torture a young mage lost in our realm by accident and experiment on her in pursuit of yet more power for yourselves? The hells with ending your asinine war, I’m going to kill you all myself!’

The reason why I’ve made it my practice never to lose my composure is because it rarely produces the desired trembling, falling to the knees and begging for pardon in the targets of my ire.

‘As ever,’ intoned the Celestine of Humility to his sister Justice, his deep voice infused with the weary melancholy of one whose patience goes forever unrewarded, ‘your fallen child places his own flawed judgments over those wiser not by mere years but by millennia.’

‘Fury is the sister of Lust,’ explained the Celestine of Chastity, the perfection of his own youthful features marred by the disgust evident in his sneer. ‘Wrath is the sin by which the sinner fools themselves into believing it is others who owe them penance.’

Even Rationality, that least irritating of Celestine Virtues, felt the need to pile it on. ‘Anger fuels the blaze that smothers wisdom in the smoke of rage.’

Shitty poetry aside, she was right. Personally, I would’ve gone with something along the lines of ‘ Anger is the iron with which we forge the bars of our own prisons .’ Okay, that’s not much better, but it was a more accurate description of my present predicament.

‘So much for “we’re beneath the notice of the Celestines”,’ Corrigan muttered, his arms stretched behind his back where he, Shame, Alice, Galass, Aradeus and even poor Temper were shackled to ivory columns that hadn’t been there when I’d left. I’d somehow managed not to notice those shackles appearing around my own wrists too.

‘The Celestines cannot normally punish a supplicant for accepting their gifts,’ Shame replied. ‘Cade’s ventures into the Archives of the Glorians must have somehow violated the terms of our agreement with them.’

‘How?’ Galass asked. ‘Cade, what did you do?’

It would be nice if that wasn’t always the first question anyone asks when things go to hell.

‘We permitted you to consult the annals of your time as a Justiciar,’ my old boss reminded me. ‘You, however, delved beyond your own experiences and sought out those of the Abomination. Confess the nature of your misdeeds and we will, as always, be guided by mercy.’

‘Her name was Eliva,’ I corrected the Celestine of Justice, ‘not “the Abomination”.’ I looked at each of the twelve Presences seated upon their grand thrones in a semi-circle around us. ‘Since you’re all so big on confession, how about you repent for the atrocities you committed against her?’

There were a number of ‘how dare yous’, threats of divine retribution and demands for me to explain myself, but I paid little attention to any of it. I certainly wasn’t going to get into specifics about their crime. When being held captive, never give your interrogators more information than necessary. I wanted to rile them, to see how much they knew about my encounter with Eliva’ren– and how involved they’d been in Fidelity’s betrayal of the rules of our order.

It was Justice who spoke first, and she sought to distract me by rekindling my anger. ‘Exile can have many interpretations,’ she said.

‘ Seriously? ’ I asked. ‘ That’s what you’re opening with?’ I turned to sneer right back at Chastity, ‘Does that principle apply to celibacy as well? Because sometimes when my penis gets cold, technically that makes someone else’s orifice just a different interpretation of an “undergarment”, right?’

Aradeus, bound to the column at my right, coughed quietly to get my attention. I’d hoped this was because he was signalling me about some cunning escape spell he was about to cast. Rat mages are good at that sort of magic. Instead, he said, ‘Forgive my ignorance of the diplomatic protocols of the Glorian Justiciars, but was that comment intended to improve our situation?’

‘Why? Isn’t it working so far?’

Justice waved off Chastity’s impending smiting of me and took control of the conversation once again. ‘The decision by Justiciar Fidelity to incarcerate the Abomination rather than enact the sentence of exile as you happened to understand it, Gallantry, was made of her own volition and without consulting either the Glorian Hierarchy or myself.’

I noticed a pale yellowing upon one of the previously pristine columns to my right, while unsightly cracks had appeared in the ceiling above. The gleaming perfection of the cathedral was losing its lustre. This wasn’t unusual– ritual magic of this type does degrade fairly quickly– but the conjuration is also a reflection of the thoughts of those summoned, all of which made me suspect the Celestines were not entirely proud of this little episode they’d kept hidden for ten years. ‘Why do I have the feeling that Fidelity didn’t keep you in the dark all that long?’ I asked.

‘She did come to us eventually,’ Justice conceded. ‘The reasons she offered for the necessity of investigating the Abomination’s perverse mysticism were sound.’

‘You mean, she tantalised you with the prospect of new esoteric weapons with which to one day wage the inevitable war against the Infernals.’

Justice is sometimes blind and often perverted, but she’s rarely embarrassed. ‘Bravo, Gallantry. You have prosecuted your case against us effectively. Do you now intend to pass sentence upon us?’

In case you needed any evidence that I’m not, in fact, an impulsive idiot who launches into lengthy speeches about honour and decency every time he’s confronted with injustice, you’ll note that my next move wasn’t to keep chastising the Lords Celestine for their hypocrisy. After all, hypocrisy isn’t one of the thirteen sins they actually attribute to the Lords Devilish. Instead, I focused my efforts on puzzling out the chain of events between one over-zealous Glorian Justiciar kidnapping a castaway from another plane of reality to the creation of a being who can literally draw an enemy’s least pleasant destiny into being.

‘So what was the problem?’ I asked. ‘You had the Glorian Ardentors experiment on the girl but nothing they tried awakened her magic?’

‘Correct,’ said the Celestine of Justice. Her short reply suggested she wanted me to reveal my suspicions, just as I was probing her own knowledge of the Spellslinger and this mysterious apocalyptic cult for whom she was now working.

‘Then the Ardentors reported her. . . condition.’

I didn’t use the word ‘pregnant’ because I wasn’t sure the Celestines had been able to overhear my conversation with Eliva’ren. Since none of us apparently knew how her powers worked, I couldn’t even be sure when that conversation had occurred, since it was, technically, impossible. Had it happened ten years ago when she’d first been captured, making my trip into the Archives today the fulfilment of some potential destiny she’d drawn back to herself? Or had I spoken in the present to some earlier manifestation of her?

Don’t believe anyone who tries to sell you on the wonders of magic. Most of it is brutal, toxic or drives you nuts if you think about it too long.

‘Indeed, her. . . condition was unexpected,’ the Celestine of Justice confirmed. ‘The magic of her people is drawn from six different esoteric energies which are sourced from what is called an “oasis” and then channelled through the metallic inks within the tattooed sigils of the six bands around their forearms. Neither our Glorian Ardentors nor we could have anticipated what would happen once we re-attuned those sigils to other planes of reality.’

That Justice misunderstood me suggested they still weren’t aware of the Spellslinger’s pregnancy, which at least meant they hadn’t intentionally killed the child. In fact, Eliva’ren never explicitly said her baby had died, only that I’d failed to help her save it, which could have any number of meanings, given how esoteric energies coursing through a mother’s body can affect an unborn child.

‘Which plane of reality was the Spellslinger finally attuned to?’ I asked. ‘I imagine Fidelity and your Glorian Ardentors failed with the Auroral or Infernal realms, because those would have been your first two choices in searching for an edge against the Lords Devilish.’

My old boss shared a troubled look with her fellow Lords Celestine that set me wondering just how much they’d really known before today. Nonetheless, immortal beings will go to great lengths to appear all-knowing.

‘I would have thought the answer were obvious, Gallantry,’ she said, a tolerant if over-familiar smile on her lips.

For the record: I never once had sex with the Celestine of Justice. I never even kissed her. Talk about dodging a crossbow bolt. Oh, and no, at no point will I be launching into a detailed explanation of the mystical and physical processes by which a manifested Presence of a so-called divine being lowers themselves into being able to have sexual relations with a Mortal. Trust me, you’re not missing out on anything. It’s really kind of gross.

In my head I ran through the various forms of wonderism with which I had some passing familiarity. Each type of magic is derived from momentary breaches between two planes of reality, allowing the physics of one to leak briefly into the other, which triggers the complex collision of contrary laws of nature which we in the wonderism business glibly refer to as ‘spells’. As each of those sets of laws have different effects, it was easy to discard Totemic, Tempestoral, sonoral, sanguinal and most of the others for having no resemblance to the Spellslinger’s powers.

That left three options, although it didn’t mean I was going to start with one of them.

‘Luminism?’ I suggested to the Celestine of Justice. ‘The Spellslinger’s a jumped-up luminist, right?’

That got a chuckle from Corrigan, at least. No one else got the joke. Shame, Alice and Galass had never been mercenary wonderists, and Aradeus was too polite to mock even such a derisive target as luminists. Temper, noticing Corrigan’s amusement, started to laugh, too. Here’s another tip: never subject yourself to the laughter of a kangaroo, vampiric or otherwise. It’s just plain unnerving.

‘Thought I’d cut the tension a little,’ I explained to the Lords Celestine. ‘Getting down to business, abyssal magic transcends spatial boundaries, which might explain how Eliva’ren wound up in our realm?’

Rationality contradicted me. ‘Logical, in principle, but still wrong. Alas, the correct answer requires adopting a less. . . rational premise.’

‘Fortunal magic could explain it.’ I was getting progressively more desperate the closer we got to the inevitable. ‘The natural laws of the Fortunal realm allow for the altering of probabilities, which might suggest how the Spellslinger is able to bring forward a target’s potential destinies into the pres — ’

‘Cease your prevarication, Gallantry,’ interrupted the Celestine of Justice. ‘You have already gleaned the answer, as you should have done days ago when first encountering the Abomination’s new powers.’ She slammed a fist on the arm of her throne. Apparently, I’d disappointed her. ‘One wonders why the instincts in esoteric matters nurtured in you by your mentor should fail in this particular instance.’

Does she know about what I did? That prospect terrified me. Celestines aren’t what you’d call discreet by nature. If Justice blurted out my crime, I was going to have some explaining to do– followed by some prolonged dangling from a rope around my neck when they figured out the implications of my decision.

So I put on a show of being shocked, sickened and terrified all at once. I even went so far as to utter the answer in the sort of stage whisper most often used by melodramatic stage actors.

‘ Pandoralism. . . ’ I breathed.

Yeah, yeah. I’m a lousy actor. So what?

I pivoted the conversation back to blaming the Lords Celestine for their hand in this disaster. ‘And you call me reckless?’ I demanded. ‘Your Glorian Ardentors tortured a castaway over and over, forcing one attunement after the other on her until one of those gleaming idiots had the brilliant idea to try the Pandoral realm? That’s chaos magic – those aren’t physical laws that just clash with ours; they take a fucking hammer to the fabric of our reality!’

So you can see why I didn’t want my only friendsfinding out what I’d done to myself, right? Or that I’d managed to turn a kangaroo into a vampire, but that was an accident. For now, I was taking what satisfaction I could from the discomfort evident on the faces of the twelve so-called divine beings in front of me.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Anything to say for yourselves?’

‘Our Glorian Ardentors have, on occasion, proved overly. . . zealous in their hearing of the Auroral Song,’ the Celestine of Justice conceded.

I took advantage of that rather tepid defence to reconsider the events that had led to the opening of the portals through which the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish had at last been able to enter this realm and begin their long-prophesied war against one another. At the time, I’d been rather busy nearly dying and being betrayed by both sides to ask too many questions.

Now, though. . .

Why had the Pandorals, those strange beings from that unknowable realm of chaos magic, suddenly decided to invade the Mortal realm? Their acolytes, the Seven Brothers, had told me it was because their own plane of reality had begun to collapse in on itself.

Okay, perfectly logical reason to decide to invade and conquer someone else’s realm, but how does an entire plane of reality collapse?

‘The Spellslinger,’ I said aloud, still working through the problem. ‘Her forced attunement to the Pandoral realm set off the chain of events that led to the beings who ruled it attempting to colonise ours. The combination of the magic from Eliva’ren’s realm channelled through the tattooed bands on her arms, when attuned to the chaos laws of the Pandoral realm, enabled her to create an entirely new form of wonderism.’

‘Destiny magic,’ Aradeus said, awe-struck.

Oh, sure, sounds lovely when you dub it ‘destiny magic’. The problems come when you start wrapping your head around the full implications, which no one seemed to have done.

‘What if. . . ?’ Corrigan began uncomfortably. ‘Cade, who’s to say she can only manifest or pull forward or whatever the fuck she does for a single individual? What if she’s capable of triggering a destiny for an entire people? An entire world ?’

See? Not nearly as dumb as he pretends.

‘Indeed,’ agreed the Celestine of Humility, leaning back on his throne as if some long-standing debate between them had now been settled. ‘The Spellslinger represents an existential threat not merely to the Mortal realm, but to the Auroral Crusade itself.’

‘Oh, no, not the Great Crusade!’ Corrigan said mockingly. ‘Go cry me a river, you self-important cock,’ he added unhelpfully.

Okay, sometimes Corrigan really is as dumb as he looks.

‘We are decided,’ announced the Celestine of Justice. I suppose they took the vote silently and without us getting to observe the count. ‘Justiciar Gallantry, the will of the Divine is upon you. From this place shall you venture and through your deviousness and that of your comrades shall you seek out and kill the Abomination who calls itself the Spellslinger.’

‘And why would we follow your commands?’ asked Galass. ‘Until this revelation, you were the greatest threat to the Mortal realm.’

Chastity put on what I presume was meant to be his most winning smile. I’d describe it more as ‘eminently punchable’.

‘Alas, poor child, you fail to — ’

‘Don’t child me, you insipid, pompous, gaudy halfwit from some amateur painter’s banal interpretation of divinity!’

Perhaps I should have warned Chastity that former sublimes-turned-blood-mages don’t take kindly to condescension. . . Nah, that would have been condescending.

‘Why shouldn’t we conjure some Infernal temple or brothel or wherever the Lords Devilish like to appear and cut a deal with them ?’ Galass asked.

Not the worst idea, and that was precisely why I’d chosen to commune with the Celestine Presences in the first place. Not that my friends were going to see it that way once they found out.

The Celestine of Rationality broke the impasse, unsurprisingly, given her particular virtue. ‘You seek answers to the wrong questions, Sanguinalist.’ She stepped down from her throne and came to me. Without so much as a wave of her hand, she dismissed the seven decaying columns and the shackles binding us. ‘What you are really asking is why should anyone entrust such a mission to you when far more powerful forces could be deployed in this endeavour?’

‘Because the moment you divert any of your major resources to hunting down and killing the Spellslinger, the Lords Devilish will see an opportunity to initiate the first full-scale attack in the war between you,’ said Alice. For once, she didn’t sound annoyed at having to explain something she no doubt considered obvious.

‘Ah, but there is more to it than that,’ said Rationality, smiling at me, her eyes meeting mine. Yeah, okay, golden irises can, in the right light, be a little enticing. ‘Your coven, oddly composed as it is of fallen souls, is far better suited to undertake this mission than any other we could assemble.’

‘Why, fair Lady?’ asked Aradeus.

Rationality walked closer, making me profoundly uncomfortable. The cathedral began to come apart in earnest, the high sculpted walls collapsing back into our rough-hewn wooden posts with the silver ribbons tied between them. The Celestine kissed me on the cheek as she said, loud enough to ensure my comrades would hear, ‘You know why it must be you, Cade.’

Ah, shit , I thought. They know. Or at least, Rationality knows.

‘She means because I’m such a competent leader,’ I said quickly.

Nobody looked convinced.

My one minor turn of good luck? The parting gift the Celestine of Rationality gave me was a brief kiss and the wink that followed.

‘Void take us, Brother,’ Corrigan said, smacking me on the back and sending me stumbling forward into what was once again a muddy field. ‘Does the Celestine of Rationality really think you’re going to kill the Spellslinger just to get into bed with her? Because if so, I may have to rethink my opposition to organised religion.’

I wiped off as much mud as I could and went to retrieve my clothes. I didn’t keep bringing up our nakedness because I figured it would make you uncomfortable. Also, remember when I said Infernals have a weird aversion to public nudity? I guess that’s why the unbelievably huge fucking contingent of Demoniac Hellions, Subjugators, Monstrosity Artillerists and a host– literally– of other troops waited until we were fully clothed before they dropped the obscurement spell and revealed that we were surrounded.

‘Geez, Cade,’ Tenebris said, stepping gingerly to avoid soiling the garish purple and scarlet military finery he wore over his Schemelord’s armour, ‘what the fuck were you thinking? Conjuring a Celestine cathedral barely five miles from an Infernal barracks? You think nobody would notice?’

‘I thought you considered military service beneath you, Tenebris. Aren’t you supposed to be a humble restauranteur these days?’

Corrigan nudged me. ‘Ask him if he brought any of that paella.’

Tenebris gestured to the insignia of rank on his left shoulder. ‘This Schemelord gig was a requirement of the deal. Strictly part-time– you know, like when some idiot summons the Lords Celestine right on our back doorstep.’ He peered at my face. ‘Seriously, man, you got some kind of emotional problems or something?’

I turned in a slow circle, taking in the sight of more Infernal troops than I’d ever seen assembled outside of Hell itself. ‘So, what’s the plan, Tenebris? This is a lot of firepower just to kill seven wonderists.’

‘ Kill you?’ Tenebris chuckled, a little sorrowfully, I thought, and shook his head. ‘We don’t bring out this many guys just to off a bunch of losers like you.’ He gave a signal, and dozens of Sorcerers and Artillerists took up position at the front. ‘This is how much firepower we need to subdue your crew without giving any of you the chance to commit suicide.’ He stared at me, crimson eyes narrowing. ‘You must’ve known this was coming, Cade. All your screwing around, messing with our plans, our recruitment efforts? The bosses want a sit-down.’

‘The Lords Devilish?’ Alice asked, mouth agape. In the six months since Hazidan Rosh had stuck me with her, this was the first time Alice had looked like a scared teenager– and this is a teenager whose psychopathic torturer parents can hold a grudge for millennia and really like making examples of those who defy them.

‘Tell me this is part of the plan,’ Corrigan murmured, standing close behind me. ‘Tell me that somehow this unbelievable screw-up that’s about to put us at the mercy of the fucking Lords Devilish is, contrary to all available evidence, a brilliantly cunning ploy of yours.’

‘Let’s go,’ Tenebris said, and a squad of Demoniac Subjugators bound us with intricate bronze shackles. The elaborate design and engraved sigils made it clear they had been custom-made for each of us– even Temper had a set, which made our capture unexpectedly unnerving.

The moment the cuffs closed around my wrists, I felt half a dozen spells suddenly incapacitating every part of my being, from my body to my spirit to my lousy sense of humour. I could see the same effect in the despair taking hold of all my friends. It hurt my soul, the way everyone looked at me like I was somehow supposed to offer words of encouragement– the looks that fill real heroes with an unyielding determination to fight back. And okay, maybe I haven’t presented myself as having the most heroic heart beating in my chest, but these six lunatics weren’t just some mercenary crew I’d joined; they were the best friends and the bravest people I’d ever known. And damn it, whatever the price, no gods-damned mystical shackles were going to stop me giving them my all.

As Tenebris and his army led us off in chains to wherever we were going to face the merciless Lords Devilish, I fought back against one of the spells in the subjugation cuffs long enough to call back to them, ‘Hey, did I ever tell you guys about the time I had sex with the Celestine of Rationality?’