Page 30

Chapter 30

Reunions

She stood at the centre of the Glorian Vault, every inch the self-assured, almost roguish Spellslinger who’d beaten the pants off me and my friends only a week ago. And yet, something was off about her. The curls of her dark mahogany hair still gleamed with that same lustre; they still kissed the bronze skin of her high cheekbones. She wasn’t quite my age; I knew that now. Perhaps twenty-four? Yet in those amber eyes I now recognised a lifetime of suffering whose tribulations began with. . . me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

The smirk didn’t change, not even a fraction. ‘For what?’

I knew already that we were in dangerous territory. During our strange encounter in the Auroral Archives, when she was still the frightened young woman only recently unlawfully incarcerated by my fellow Justiciars, she’d mentioned that in the destiny she’d tried to bring forward in time, I always arrived too late to save the child. That was the key to all of this, I was sure of it: the event that had transformed Eliva’ren from terrified captive to the most dangerous wonderist I’d ever met. That also meant that if I mentioned the child too soon, I might trigger a deadly response. I’d already seen how casually she could kill, bringing forth what she called one of her victims’ ‘three dooms’.

So think of something else, idiot. Something that will keep her intrigued about you without awakening dangerous memories.

At first, I hadn’t noticed the way the interior of the vault was changing. The alterations were subtle, like watching the world around you age ever so slowly. The gleaming walls were beginning to show stains of damp while hairline cracks were splitting the stone. Cobwebs appeared in the corners; faint odours of mould permeated the stale air. This newly erected Glorian fortress was meeting one of its dooms: abandonment and inexorable ruination. None of this was especially momentous as far as magic went, nor especially troubling. What did surprise me was that it appeared to be happening without the Spellslinger being aware of what she was doing.

Which explains why she chose this place to confront me.

‘I’m sorry you had to come back here,’ I said at last.

Again, her features remained unmoving, frozen in that flawless, enticing expression of mild amusement and absolute self-confidence. ‘A guess?’ she asked.

She’s worried she gave something away. It’s as important to her that she can out-think me as it is that she can out-fight me.

I began to pace around the vault, mesmerised as it slowly deteriorated before my eyes. ‘The Lords Celestine don’t do anything without a reason. Like the Lords Devilish, they have a particular obsession with symmetry and symbolism. This grand fortress, this testament not only to Auroral might but to its inherent righteousness, could have been built anywhere. But why waste a symbol merely elevating one’s impending victories, when you can also wipe away the stain of one of your worst failures?’ I reached out and brushed the now damp wall with my fingertips. ‘You can’t bring back the past, can you? You can’t return this vault to whatever cavern or dungeon it was when the Lords Celestine had you imprisoned here to experiment on you. You can only bring the future to the present?’

‘It doesn’t work like that. I’m not manipulating time; not time as we know it, anyway.’

‘Doom,’ I said, using her word from when she’d killed the angelic Valiant. ‘But what is a doom if it isn’t just a depressing way of referring to future events?’

‘Destiny is an ending, Cade. It’s the culmination of a set of choices, ours and those of others.’ She came closer, taking my hand in hers and intertwining our fingers. ‘You can’t take your hand away without affecting me in some way, and my reaction will affect you. It’s not theoretical, it’s. . .’

‘Inevitable,’ I finished for her– precisely as she intended, which is no doubt why she smiled approvingly. People always approve of me when I fall into their traps. ‘That doesn’t explain how you can make those results come to pass before any of those subsequent decisions have been made, never mind acted upon.’

She brought our hands closer to her face, smelling the back of mine with a disturbing familiarity, as if the scent were somehow comforting to her. Her voice deepened even as it quieted, lending intimacy to her words. ‘Each decision we make adds momentum to the sequence of events leading to our respective destinies.’ She looked up, blinking as our gazes met. ‘This choice I made just now? It puts us on a path to a kiss neither of us will ever forget.’ Even before I tried to pull away, she’d clenched tighter to my fingers, laughing. ‘Oh, I know, that’s not your way. Wouldn’t be– how shall we say?– gallant?’

‘I never was that,’ I reminded her. ‘Gallantry was just a name they gave me. It never suited me.’

She shook her head slowly. ‘Ah, ah, ah. No lies between us, Cade. Whether or not you wanted to be gallant, once they gave you the name, you tried to live up to its meaning. That’s what brought you to me when I needed you most.’

I didn’t sense any alteration in the magic already at work around us slowly turning the Glorian vault to rubble, and yet, my vision filled with the memories of that cavern where my fellow Justiciars and I had found the frightened sixteen-year-old trapped in a realm far from her own. ‘Except that I failed you. I didn’t stand up to Fidelity. Had it been up to me, I would’ve executed you just to avoid her disdain.’

She let go of my hand and turned away. ‘I never said you did me any good, Cade. Only that all the steps along the way that made you Gallantry, Glorian Justiciar of the Aurorals, brought you to me at the moment when I needed someone truly gallant.’

Given all the lousy things I’ve done in my life, it takes a lot for someone to make me feel like crap. ‘Eliva, what am I going to find out when I meet up with Tenebris after the Glorian Banner has been handed off to him?’

‘Don’t call me Eliva,’ she snapped, still facing away from me. ‘You haven’t the right.’

‘Wrong.’ I took a chance, striding up to her and turning her around to face me. ‘You gave me the right, remember? When you pulled me back from the Auroral Archives into this place when it was still your prison.’

There were no tears in her eyes, no physical admissions of sentiment, yet I was almost sure I could feel the connection between us. ‘Did I do that? Really?’

I nodded. ‘You said you were trying to pull forward a better destiny and that I — ’

‘You were in all the good ones,’ she admitted, speaking barely over a whisper. ‘I remember that now.’ I caught the flash of coloured lights from the tattooed bands around her forearms before they settled into a softer iridescence. ‘The experiments they performed on me failed, all of them. The magic of my people is tied to the oases from which our spells are drawn.’ A tightening around her eyes and mouth spoke of remembered agonies. ‘They kept trying to force me to attune myself to other esoteric planes of reality, dozens of them, but I couldn’t. Not until. . .’

‘Not until those morons attuned you to the Pandoral realm and caused the slow collapse of that plane of reality, which then caused its rulers to seek to invade ours.’

She said nothing at first, keeping that near-perfect poker face that only gave something away because it was so inscrutable.

She’s trying to decide whether to correct me, which means her attunement isn’t to the Pandoral realm at all!

‘You’re so unlike the rest of them,’ she said at last. ‘The way you not only see through the lies, but into the truths that we all leave unspoken.’

‘I was an investigator,’ I reminded her.

She shook her head. ‘No, it’s not that.’ She reached up with the palm of her hand and held it to my cheek. The sensation was softer than I expected– probably because that particular gesture usually precedes me being slapped in the face. ‘I think you love the world, Cade Ombra. I think you love all of it, even the ugly parts. That’s why you were such a skilled Justiciar. As much as you might rail against your fellow human beings, as much as you might denigrate yourself, you never shy away from seeing all of our contours, like a lover.’ The corners of her mouth rose, but this smile was different from the others. ‘Even when you look at me as though I’m some nemesis you’re contemplating how best to kill, you make me feel so. . . beloved.’

‘Is this the part where we kiss?’ I asked. ‘Because the Lords Celestine expect me to murder you, and I generally prefer to do these things in the right order.’

She laughed, a light, airy sound that brought with it the rumbling of stone collapsing beneath its own weight. The walls were coming down, and soon the roof would follow, leaving us both trapped beneath the rubble. ‘See what I mean about our choices becoming heavier and heavier?’ she asked. ‘That’s the magic that came from the torture your former Glorian comrades put me through. That’s the next part of the secret the Lords Devilish will reveal to you in exchange for that silly piece of gold and ivory cloth you’ve so cleverly convinced one of the Celestines’ own disciples to steal on your behalf.’

I glanced around us, watching the odd languor with which the vault was slowly coming apart, a sleepy, almost lazy kind of self-destruction. ‘You transform the momentum of someone’s decisions, the collapsing of all the possible outcomes of their actions, to warp reality to conform with that inevitability– that particular doom.’ A thought occurred to me then. ‘You said each of us has three dooms?’

She nodded. ‘This is one of yours. You allow your guilt over past failures to lead you into the traps the Celestines, the Devilish and even my employers keep setting for you.’ She stood up higher on her toes and whispered in my ear. ‘This isn’t even the worst of your three dooms, Cade. Are you sure you want to risk the other two?’ I felt her lips brush my cheek before she added, ‘Although, there is one in which you and I make love, so perhaps that will serve as some small consolation for what happens after?’

At the sound of a heavy crack, I looked up and saw the chunks of stone from the ceiling about to rain down on us. ‘I don’t believe in destiny,’ I said, too late realising that those would’ve made rather ironic last words.

The rubble froze in mid-air, teetering there as if unsure which way was up and which way was down any more. Then, as slowly as they’d fallen, the chunks of ceiling floated upwards, sliding into place next to one another, the smaller shards of rock and dust filling the seams perfectly. Soon, whatever invisible force had kept us sealed inside disappeared, and Corrigan came thundering– literally– through the door.

‘By every bolt of Tempestoral fury, I’m going to — ’ He stopped, seeing the Spellslinger. ‘Oh, it’s her. Of course. Come to kill us all, sweetheart?’

‘Not yet,’ she replied, still looking at me. ‘But soon, Cade. We can only meet once more after this before my employers will demand I bring you to your final doom. You’ve got to give this ridiculous rebellion of yours up. No one can prevent the Great Crusade. No one can stop the doom that the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish must bring upon each other and upon this entire realm.’

I shot her my best wry grin– the one that’s meant to stop people from noticing how badly I’m shaking. ‘Darling, if the war was truly inevitable, your bosses wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep me from preventing it.’

I expected more threats, or some new display of power, or maybe just a disappointed sigh. Instead, she reached a hand behind my neck and pulled me into a kiss.

That kiss. . .

I didn’t even try to push her away. Why would I? Even if I could’ve drawn a blade unnoticed and slipped it between her ribs, I. . . Well, no, I would’ve killed her for sure. Much as I’d convinced myself I was the last person who should take up the mantle of a hero, recent events had taught me that waiting for the good guys to get their shit together and get the job done was a recipe for utter fucking calamity. One thing about us irredeemable, morally compromised arseholes? We don’t throw away an opportunity at a quick and easy victory for the taste of another’s lips and, if I’m being honest, a pleasingly adept tongue. No, sir. I’m all business when it comes to saving the world.

But, since I didn’t have a hidden blade. . . Seriously, that kiss was something else.

‘See?’ she told me when she finally let go, the heaviness in her breathing telling me I wasn’t the only one who’d come close to forgetting the mission comes first. ‘I told you, some things are inevita — ’

‘Hey, Cade, take a look at this fancy Auroral torch I found in the armoury next door,’ Corrigan said, holding up a two-foot-long brass cylinder with a shorter, thicker gold cylinder at the top whose circumference was inscribed with blessings in the Celestine language. ‘Can’t figure out how to light it.’ He pointed to the single pink opal embedded in the shaft. ‘Do you suppose pressing this will do the trick?’

‘Corrigan, that’s not a torch, it’s a — ’

He grinned. ‘Just kidding. I know what it’s for.’

Aiming the centre of the larger cylinder at Eliva’ren, Corrigan jammed his thumb down on the opal, depressing it into the shaft. A brief grinding sound, almost as if teeth inside the shaft were crunching the gemstone into powder, was immediately followed by a blast of pinkish-gold light that struck the Spellslinger dead centre in the chest. Clothes, flesh and bone provided only the briefest resistance before the Auroral blast shot out her back, only to then curve on itself and strike again. More bolts erupted, cascading into a blinding storm of eldritch energies that would have consumed an entire island.

‘It’s not proper Tempestoral magic,’ Corrigan decided, dropping the now spent Auroral weapon to clatter along the floor before the incandescent brass shaft could burn his hand. ‘But it’s not bad.’

The retribution lance Corrigan had casually used up was worth more than a dozen cannon,along with the crews, carts and horses needed to transport them and ready them for battle. Glorian Parevals competed for years to be given the privilege of being among the few entitled to wield a retribution lance in battle. The Spellslinger walked away from its Auroral fury without a scratch, her body having reformed faster than the spells could attack her.

She patted Corrigan on the shoulder as she passed him by. When she reached the doorway, she paused, turning to give me a look at once reproving and somehow sad. ‘Can’t you feel the weight of your actions yet, Cade? You’re bringing your doom closer and closer with every bad decision. I’m not sure how long I can hold it at bay.’

‘Who are you working for?’ I asked, reasoning this was likely the only chance I’d get to ask before she disappeared again. ‘If you’re not working for the Pandoral, then wh — ?’

‘They are as Heaven to the Heavens, and Hell to all Hells. They are the end of all things from which all things once sprang. They are the doom that awaits you all. . . and they will wait patiently no longer.’

And then, she was gone, leaving Corrigan and me alone in the vault, and the sounds of shouts and pounding boot heels filling the passages outside.

‘Shit poetry,’ Corrigan observed.

‘ The doom that awaits you all ,’ I repeated silently to myself. Not ‘us all’, just ‘you all’. Which means whoever her bosses might be, her deal with them gets her away from this realm before it’s too late.

‘Come on,’ Corrigan urged me, hauling on my arm. ‘We’ll have to kill a few nice guys on our way out if we don’t want to end up imprisoned in this fortress until the war’s over– not that that isn’t an appealing idea right about now.’ I followed him out, and somewhere between the first and fifth brawl we found ourselves in during our escape, Corrigan asked, ‘So, that kiss. . . how was it?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve had better.’

Not all lies are meant to deceive others. Sometimes the most important lies are the ones we tell ourselves.