Page 34

Chapter 34

The Kangaroo

The most common cause of death among wonderists is not, as you might expect, violent confrontation with competing wonderists. It’s not being burned at the stake by enraged mobs either, although that’s not entirely uncommon. Cleverly orchestrated executions by military leaders, religious zealots and, of course, Glorian Justiciars are frequently responsible for the head of a would-be mage decorating the top of a pole, but even those account for only a fraction of the wonderist corpses out there.

No, the most pervasive cause of death for a wonderist is, quite simply, blowing themselves up. Well, it’s not always an explosion; im plosions are actually more common. Sometimes it’s burning up your own internal organs or causing one or both of your lungs to accidentally appear six feet outside your body. You’d be surprised how often that happens. Infernalists often drive themselves insane without even realising it. Cosmists cover their bodies in a thin layer of the void of space, and if they get the dimensions wrong by so much as a hair’s breadth, they get swallowed up by that same void. Blind luminists are incredibly common, but they’re still rather funny to watch because their magic makes them think they’re still seeing the world exactly as they want it to be. Even totemists manage to kill themselves by accident, although don’t ask me how. Maybe they become so convinced they’re carnivorous beasts that they eat themselves to death?

Basically, every form of magic is, first and foremost, a death trap waiting to consume you two seconds after your particular attunement kicks in. If you’re lucky and you happen to come from a long line of wonderists, you might have some training and– even better– someone to notice the early signs of an attunement. And not all attunements are equally lethal. Before someone attuned to the Auroral plane can manifest any actual abilities, they first have to devote years of their lives to training and prayer to the Lords Celestine, who then awaken those abilities as ‘blessings’. That’s what the Lords Celestine claim, anyway.

But yeah, all those legendary farm boys and milkmaids living in remote villages who suddenly discover they’re incredibly powerful mages? It’s a myth. Those poor fools pretty much always obliterate themselves the first time they feel that mystical itch awaken inside their minds.

The only chance any emerging wonderist has at survival is how quickly they can figure out which plane they’re attuned to, and how smart they are about learning– either from books or other wonderists– how to focus and control the unnatural physical laws of the planes they’re breaching when they activate their magic. It’s these various focusing techniques that become what we commonly refer to as ‘spells’.

Simple, right?

Or it would be simple if you weren’t the type of idiot who, when given the one chance in a lifetime to access the Empyrean Physio-Thaumaturgical Device of Attunal Transmutation, decides not to attune himself to a cool, easily understood plane of reality like, say, the Fortunal realm, or even the Tempestoral, but instead has an attack of accidental heroism and attunes himself to the one plane of reality that might supply enough power to prevent an endless war from engulfing the Mortal realm.

That’s why I’d attuned myself to the Pandoral realm: to give us an ace in the hole against the Lords Devilish and Lords Celestine.

Logical, right? Some might even say admirable.

What makes Pandoral magic so effective as a potential weapon against Devilish and Celestines alike is that neither they nor anyone else know how its magic operates, which makes it virtually impossible to counter. The problem was that I’d not only given myself an attunement which was, if you’ve been paying attention, both highly likely to lead to my own precipitous demise and for which there were neither books nor experts to guide me in how to use it safely.

Experimenting with booze is unwise. It’s even riskier with drugs; with sex, almost always a good idea. Experimenting with a form of magic you don’t understand is generally considered suicidal.

So I’d approached the problem scientifically. First, thanks to my experience with both Auroral and Infernal spells, to say nothing of my extensive studies of various forms of wonderism under the tutelage of Hazidan Rosh, I’d developed a sensitivity to magic, which basically meant that if I was, say, thinking a dirty thought or getting overly emotional and my attunement was threatening to open a breach to the Pandoral realm, I was able to cut it off quickly. My second step was to figure out what spells I could cast, which is where I got into trouble.

The only Pandoral wonderists I’d ever met were the Seven Brothers. I’d seen them use a form of telepathic communication, which I presumed worked only between other Pandoralists (or possibly only blood relatives, although I’ll admit that was less likely). Also, I’d seen them warp reality in ways that were entirely destructive. Although I agreed it probably wasn’t a good idea for me to attempt, I had taken the risk during my encounter with the Spellslinger outside Tenebris’ restaurant and, other than having utterly failed to stop her, I was nonetheless proud of the unmaking spell I’d conjured. The third type of spell I’d seen the Seven Brothers use was the ability to reshape animals into semi-human servants.

Bet you’re seeing where this is going, right?

A few weeks after we’d killed off the Seven Brothers and the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish had begun their recruiting drive for armies of gullible Mortals to die in their pointless war against one another, it occurred to me that recruiting my own army of really cool-looking rhinoceros-headed spearmen and tiger-faced cavalry and salamander-tongued spies might give us an edge against both Aurorals and Infernals.

I’d escaped from the others for a couple of days and ridden out into the desert to try my hand at transforming a scorpion into one hell of an assassin. After finding a suitable subject, I began the careful process of awakening my connection to the Pandoral plane and feeling my way towards reshaping the scorpion into an effective and hopefully obedient servant. That’s when it all went wrong.

The problem wasn’t that I failed to make the scorpion subservient to my wishes. Once I’d felt my way through the attunement to the bizarre physical laws of the Pandoral realm, the thought patterns needed to produce the alteration became so clear as to be almost simple. The problem was me : I remembered Madrigal, the goat-headed servant of the Seven Brothers. In the brief time I’d known him, Madrigal had been polite, erudite, sometimes almost witty and, worst of all, entirely conscious of what had been done to him. The Seven Brothers had transformed him against his will into a being shaped to their needs, utterly uncaring of his own free will.

That’s the thought that went through my head when I was supposed to be conjuring Knife-Butt, the perfect scorpion assassin. You wouldn’t think it would be easy to empathise with a scorpion, but looking at little Knife-Butt squirming there in a circle in the sand, wiggling his lethal little tail like he was hoping this was all some kind of mistake and I was about to give him a nice treat. . .

I just couldn’t do it. I kept remembering Madrigal.

Riding back to town, I realised how stupid my qualms were, given I was trying to avert a war that would last until the very last humans were slaughtered. So I climbed up into some nearby hills and found a large cavern filled with bats. Unlike scorpions, I figured bats had given me enough trouble in my life that one of them deserved to be my slave. Fangy the Aerial Assassin, I would call him, not worrying about whether I could make his wings big enough to let him fly with a human-sized body. Still, it would’ve been worth it just to make fun of Alice, who can’t fly for shit on the Mortal plane with those too-small wings of hers.

So there I was, about to transform a bat, when that same hesitation came over me. Unfortunately, by then I’d opened too strong a breach into the Pandoral realm and now all those messed-up physical laws were about to leak through. I had to focus them into something , or else risk blowing myself up, which was when an ingenious and morally sound solution presented itself.

See, Pandoral magic isn’t about physically reshaping living beings or warping rocks: it’s chaos magic. It works by reversing the relationship between matter and sentience, causing the former to be reshaped according to the latter. If that sounds obtuse, well, I guess it kind of is, but simply put, Pandoral magic unravels and then re-weaves the threads of reality. Usually, it works by trying to impose the caster’s will on reality, but in my case, instead of forcibly transforming the bat into a warrior, I let my mystical awareness seek out a thread of an animal that wanted to become part of a bizarre war against Infernals and Aurorals: something that actively fancied going around kicking the shit out of demoniacs and angelics and generally making trouble.

Turns out, there wasn’t a single living creature anywhere in the Mortal realm that, deep in its psyche, secretly wanted to be a malevolent shit-kicker like me and my friends. But notions of time and space don’t apply to the physics of the Pandoral realm, so my incipient spell just went further and further, until it found a plane of reality that happened to have a nasty country that had bred an animal so mean-spirited and ill-tempered that its own psyche grabbed onto the offer of spreading chaos and bloodshed with tremendous enthusiasm. And as that beast was being pulled from its world into ours, being transformed to survive and thrive in this other realm, it also managed to twist my spell into granting it the means to be even deadlier here than in its own world. . .

. . . which is how I ended up summoning and transforming a weird-arse-looking rabbit-with-short-ears-and-a-thumpy-tail into a fucking vampire kangaroo.

First thing he did was to attempt to eat me.

‘Whoa, boy,’ I said, managing a Pandoral spatial chaos spell that caused the distance between his fangs and my face to keep changing. He snapped at empty air several times, then– thanks to the perversity of Pandoral chaos magic– accidentally bit his own muzzle.

The belligerent idiot then started punching at me with his paws, hopping around me in a circle trying to outflank me. Not being able to keep the warping spell going indefinitely, I got clipped with a lucky jab. Later, I’d come to learn that even a glancing blow would normally have taken my head off, but the beast was still disoriented from suddenly finding himself on an entirely different plane of reality. Also, since his translation had accidentally transformed him into a vampiric being and he was woefully short of other people’s blood, he was severely weakened.

As a Glorian Justiciar, Hazidan Rosh had trained me not only in mystical forms of combat but also in fencing and pugilism. And since it turns out I’m also a belligerent idiot, I quickly lost my temper and ended up in a knock-down, drag-out punch-up with a kangaroo.

Keeping track of the passage of time while in combat is pretty much impossible, but it felt like we were at it for several hours, which means the fight probably lasted about five minutes. When it was done, the two of us were both flat on our backs, panting from exhaustion, neither of us able to see clearly out of our severely swollen black eyes. That’s when the scavengers found us.

There are a lot of weird evil creatures in the world. Some occur naturally, like scorpions and rhinoceroses. Some are manifested through nefarious forms of magic like my own attempts. Others. . . Well, some monsters, you just don’t know where the hell they came from. In this case, it was half a dozen weirdos who looked like men and women, only with distended limbs and bodies covered in a patchwork made of fur and scales. My best guess? Amateur totemists who’d never been given the training to focus their attunement to a single symbolic animal realm and had ended up driven mad by the incompatible characteristics they’d manifested within themselves.

‘Truce?’ I asked the kangaroo.

I wasn’t sure how intelligent he was or whether he could understand me at all. Back then, he hadn’t yet developed his comprehensive vocabulary of ‘motherfucker’, ‘ motherfucker ’ and ‘motherfuckers’. Nonetheless he offered up a grunt that I took for assent and the two of us got back on our feet and fought side by side against the grinning, drooling pack of scavengers.

Were they the most deadly foes I’d ever encountered? Probably not. But I wasn’t in great shape for casting more spells and I wasn’t keen to witness how the chaos of Pandoral magic would interact with already corrupted beings, so the kangaroo and I handled things the old-fashioned way. After the first few awkward moments of clumsiness, we fell into a rhythm: he’d distract our opponents by bounding over them, I’d grab one in a wrestling hold, using them as a shield against the others, letting go just in time for the kangaroo to rip out its throat. Our foes eventually grew wary– who says crazies can’t learn?– which we used to our advantage, and pretty soon, they were all dead, the kangaroo had drunk enough blood to make him giddy as he hopped around farting with glee, and I had found the seventh member of our coven that Corrigan had been demanding because, as he’ll happily explain to you in exhaustive detail, ‘the Malevolent Six is a shit name.’

By my count, in the three months or so that Temper has been on this plane of reality, he’s killed more than two hundred humans, angelics and demoniacs, not to mention every magical monstrosity with something akin to a neck he can bite. And the bastard’s just getting started.

Care to guess why I’ve been reluctant to try that spell again?

This is the problem with Pandoral spells, friends: not only is chaos unpredictable, it doesn’t remotely obey what we think of as the normal limitations of magic. Corrigan can produce only so much aetheric lightning and fire. Aradeus can summon only so many rats. Even Galass can mess only so much with the flow of life and blood.

But chaos magic? It doesn’t operate at that level: it alters the underlying causes that shape reality.

I guess that’s why there aren’t many mages attuned to that particular plane, which was why the Pandoral needed his little cult of psychos to find a disposable human wonderist attuned to his realm, so that he could violate every law of nature to create a gate between them that would surely end up collapsing our world so that his could thrive again.

And now, without further ado, let’s get back to all that torture I lied about skipping over.