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Chapter 3

Temper

The story of how the creature Corrigan had affectionately dubbed ‘Temper’ came to join our coven is somewhat. . . tangled, not least because confessing my own part in the beast’s existence would almost certainly get me killed– likely by Corrigan himself. Nonetheless, as our mission was, as we say in the peace-making business, to make an impression upon the Infernals and Aurorals, there was no question that Temper was perfectly suited to that endeavour.

‘By the Auroral Sovereign’s Tears. . .’ Shame swore as she watched him in action. It takes a lot to shock an Angelic Emissary who’s witnessed the darkest depravities of the Mortal realm.

‘By the Sovereign’s Tears, indeed,’ I agreed.

It had been a long time since last I’d uttered that oath. Doing so now set the tip of my tongue to tingling, an uncomfortable reminder that no matter how hard you might try to turn your back on your training, the instincts beaten into you always remain.

But to get back to Temper. . .

Picture a seven-foot-tall tawny rabbit, but shorten the ears. Shorter– no, stop, that’s too short. It’s not a fucking hamster. Aim for something like the ears of a red fox, or maybe a bat. Okay, now, the tail: neither fluffy nor round, not rabbity at all, more long and thick, tapering towards the end. Oh, and imagine the beast launching itself with haunches powerful enough to send it leaping ten feet in the air and twenty-five feet towards you so that it can wrap that muscular tail around your neck and secure you tight so it can punch you into oblivion with paws quite capable of pulverising bone and rending flesh into a bloody pulp.

In retrospect, picturing a rabbit probably wasn’t a useful starting point. What I can tell you is that, according to the sole text I’ve found in the months since Temper’s arrival on the Mortal plane, scholars of cryptozoology believe his species derived from an especially violent, unhinged plane of existence where they were known as ‘kan-gar-oos’.

Kangaroos.

Even the name sounds ominous.

That’s not even the worst part. See, most creatures can’t survive in realms beyond the ones where they emerged naturally, and when they do survive, there tend to be. . . side-effects.

‘ Must he do that with the bodies?’ Alice complained, swinging her whip-sword in a wide arc at the enthusiastic bronze-lacquered pair of Hellions lunging for her. Before the blow could land, the silver ribbon of her blade split apart into thirteen segments, scattering past the heads of her opponents. The demoniacs grinned as they advanced upon what they na?vely believed to be an unarmed traitor to their cause. They were still wearing those grins as the shards of Alice’s whip-sword first slowed in mid-air, then darted back to rejoin the hilt by way of first slicing through the Hellions’ skulls.

Mind, even that disgusting piece of gratuitous butchery couldn’t hold a candle to the gruesome spectacle of Temper, his tail wrapped around the neck of an Artillerist he’d punched to death moments before, lapping up the blood pouring out from the wreckage of the demoniac’s face.

Yep, our latest recruit wasn’t merely a savage, remorseless kangaroo. He was a fucking vampire kangaroo, who made it his business to messily imbibe the blood of his enemies. And business round here was plentiful.

‘Watch your own tail, Cade,’ Corrigan warned as he blasted a trio of demoniac Mortarists creeping up behind me with shrapnel lanterns. The Mortarists ended up being the ones decapitated when a bolt of Tempestoral lightning sent them to whatever passes for their ancestors’ warm bosom.

With typical thunderer recklessness, Corrigan’s Tempestoral eruption had also set off the lanterns– I would’ve been torn to shreds by the shrapnel, had it not been for Aradeus’ totemic quivering spell, which enabled his rapier to literally bat every single shard of steel and bone out of the air before they reached me.

Rat mages are such show-offs.

‘Will you be fighting any of your own battles, Fallen One?’ Alice asked, her whip-sword now moving with devastating speed as it decapitated one enemy after another.

‘The rest of you appear to be doing just fine without me,’ I said. ‘Besides, someone needs to keep an eye on the prize.’

I had no idea what that meant in the context of a chaotic massacre of otherworldly invaders, but Alice was contenting herself with eviscerating yet more of her fellow demoniacs. I did cast a few spells here and there, ones that looked enough like chancer magic– that’s a form of wonderism derived from the Fortunal plane of existence, where the physical laws allow for the alteration of probabilities– to avoid suspicion amongst my friends.

Every wonderist draws their spells from whichever plane of reality they’re naturally attuned. As a young man, my magic had come from Auroralism, which manifests as blessings conferred by the Lords Celestine. After I’d booted myself from their ranks, the only other attunement I could manage was to the Infernal realm, where spells are bartered for services negotiated by a diabolic representative of the Lords Devilish. If neither of those sound like appealing ways to acquire magic, it’s as Corrigan always says: ‘You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but nobody gets to pick their fucking mystical attunement.’

I’ve never been entirely sure that’s the right punchline for that particular saying.

Six months ago, an opportunity came along– one that very few wonderists in history ever got and almost all would’ve killed for– the chance to alter my attunement using a device ponderously named ‘The Empyrean Physio-Thaumaturgical Device of Attunal Transmutation’. Seriously. You can see why we in the business call it the Apparatus . Regardless of appellation, that coffin-shaped relic is the only known means of choosing one’s attunement. Corrigan, knowing my propensity for relying on luck, assumed I’d attuned myself to the Fortunal realm. He’d guessed wrong.

Inside the ruins of a massive stone fortress racked by magical forces more chaotic and dangerous than any we’d ever encountered, we’d witnessed the culmination of an unbelievably nasty conspiracy by the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish to create a set of gates that, for the first time in recorded history, would allow their respective armies to enter the Mortal realm. Here, the long-prophesied cataclysmic war between them would at last come to pass. Given the low probability of our surviving such a war, I’d used the Apparatus to give myself a far less. . . whimsical attunement.

Alice was the most suspicious of me, mostly on account of me having abandoned my role as a Glorian Justiciar. She had devoted herself to just such a calling, despite the fact that no way was any demoniac ever going to be inducted into the order. Deep down, she must have known that Hazidan Rosh, the greatest and also most rebellious Justiciar who’d ever lived, had put her on a completely futile path. And yet. . . Alice couldn’t give up her pursuit of that impossible dream.

‘I’ve got my eye on you, Fallen One,’ she warned me, laying low a demoniac Burrowmancer who’d somehow convinced himself that one of those creepy three-foot-long centipedes they’d used on the angelics could get around her whip-sword.

Alice’s blade sliced through both soldier and centipede with ease.

You could admit to her what you did , I tried to convince myself. You could tell all of them why you chose a form of magic so inherently dangerous that someday soon, you’ll likely become as big a threat as the Aurorals and Infernals together. Come on, Cade, just spit it out. Make them see why what you did wasn’t reckless but necessary : an act of sublime self-sacrifice for which, really, they should be applauding you.

Yeah. That was never going to fly. Alice would definitely try to kill me when she found out. Corrigan would attempt to stop her, of course; my best friend would surely consider it his own personal duty to carry the pain and blast me out of existence himself.

‘Cade, are you all right?’ asked Shame, coming to my side. Looked like there were some demoniac trident fighters there after all, as I recognised the viscous remains of their internal organs she was wiping off her fingers. Angelic Emissaries, once freed from the laws imprinted upon their spirits by the Lords Celestine, can learn to unleash their flesh-sculpting powers upon bodies besides their own. It may not be the most painful way to die, but it’s definitely the gooiest. ‘I can sense your desire for the violence to end,’ she announced. ‘Why aren’t you calling for a ceasefire?’

That’s the other problem with Angelic Emissaries. The Lords Celestine created them to embody the physical ideals most prized by those with whom they came into contact, and that was mostly to present diplomatic entreaties. That in turn required an instinctual awareness of the desires of those they were sent to persuade. Although Shame had left the service of the Celestines, the yearnings of those around her still tugged at her transmutational abilities. I guess my particular yearnings were currently tugging hardest, because she’d shed her walking rhinoceros guise and was now a woman near to my own age, the same black hair and even a matching dent in her nose where mine had been broken by my fellow Glorian Justiciars shortly after I’d announced my departure from the order. The woman standing before me now could have passed for the sister I’d never had– and until this moment, had never realised how badly I wished were real.

‘We came to deliver the Lords Devilish a message,’ I reminded her, searching for some sign of forgiveness in her eyes and disgusted with us both when I found it there.

Is this you finally trying to connect with humanity, Shame? I wondered silently. Or is it more proof that you’ll never understand us at all?

I turned to Galass, who until now had turned her sanguinalist abilities only on the living weapons wielded by the Infernal troops. Blood mages, counter to what most people think, aren’t cackling warlocks spreading death wherever they go. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: their magic attunes them to the natural ebb and flow of life itself.

That’s why my next request was so unforgivable. ‘Finish them off,’ I told her.

Demoniac soldiers, whether Hellions, Burrowmancers, Mortarists, Subjugators or Schemelords, come armed with plenty of their own spells. Throughout the battle, their Infernal shields had protected them from magics that manifested inside the target, but Corrigan, Alice, Shame, Aradeus and Temper now had them on the ropes. I might have given up my attunement to the Infernal realm, but I could still perceive the esoteric frequencies of their spells, which was how I knew their shields had begun to collapse enough for Galass to employ the most innate and intrusive ability of her sanguinalist magic. I wished there were some other way, but the Lords Devilish don’t care about a few soldiers killed here or there, and they certainly don’t give a shit about how many get taken captive.

‘Do it,’ I ordered her.

Young she might be, but Galass isn’t the sort of person to take commands, especially from me. Nonetheless, she’d understood the job when she’d signed up for it. Furrowing her brow, she extended both her arms and gave her body free reign to unleash the spell it so badly craved and which she, very much to her credit, fought so hard to deny it.

At first the magic manifested as little more than a hazing in the air between Galass and the demoniacs. Unlike human blood, the life-fluid of Infernals comes in all sorts of colours. It began to look like a rainstorm had appeared from a cloudless sky, the drops blown by a dozen different winds in a dozen different directions. Her silver gown was quickly showered in the myriad hues of blood seeping from the increasingly ashen flesh of the Infernal troops.

‘Void take me, that’s disgusting,’ Corrigan swore. He clamped a hand over his mouth and nose to keep the blood splatters flying towards Galass from getting inside him. ‘Temper, close your muzzle. You’re being gross.’

The kangaroo ignored the admonishment and kept hopping up and down in the air, jaws open wide to catch every droplet of demoniac blood. Try painting that image on a portrait of seven heroic mages out to save the world.

Our enemies slumped one by one to the ground, their leathery skin engraved with the intricate symbols of their respective lineages turning paler as they died what must have felt to them a depressingly Mortal sort of death.

When it was over, I knelt by Galass, holding her hair as she vomited onto the desert sand. Her crimson tresses whipped out at me, the tips jabbing at my hands and arms. I ignored both them and the uncomfortable intimacy. I noticed neither Alice nor Shame were volunteering to take my place.

‘I’m okay,’ Galass said at last, trying to mask a sob. ‘I. . . I understand why it has to be this way.’

‘A grim duty,’ Aradeus said, keeping a respectful distance. ‘Take solace, Lady Galass, in the lives that will be saved by this unfortunate yet necessary violence, and trust in Brother Cade’s virtuous leadership of our coven.’

Why did the damned rat mage have to make me sound gallant right when I was about to commit an even more heinous act?

You wanted to save the world , I reminded myself. Now be a hero: go and kill some angels.