Page 38

Chapter 38

Commitment Issues

There’s nothing more boring than mages fighting a battle of the minds: no exciting bolts of Tempestoral lightning, no fiery implosions simultaneously burning the flesh whilst asphyxiating the lungs. There isn’t even the screeching and scurrying of rats or cats or bats to entertain you. A mind war is basically like watching two people in a staring contest, trying to work out who’s winning based on which opponent looks most constipated. For the record, I was not at all constipated.

‘You’re not putting up much of a fight,’ the Spellslinger said– maybe silently, possibly out loud; it was hard to tell at the time– as she meticulously tugged at the threads of my thoughts and rewove them into new and troubling patterns.

‘I’ve always considered it bad manners to interrupt an artist at work,’ I replied.

I felt rather than saw her smile. ‘You think that because I can’t afford to have your mind fray completely I’ll be tentative in altering your thoughts?’

That was, in fact, one of the things I was counting on. All my enemies agreed that somebody was going to use my attunement to Pandoral magics to turn me into a living gate to that unfortunate realm, and since a wonderist’s mind is a fragile thing at the best of times, shattering mine would make me useless in that noble endeavour.

‘Your people’s magics are rather blunt and clumsy in comparison to those of the Jan’Tep,’ she informed me with what I felt was undue condescension. Meanwhile, a dozen new inclinations, beliefs and memories were being sewn inside my consciousness. It was hard to tell exactly what was changing, other than I was fairly sure that before this began I hadn’t considered roast chicken to be evil. Maybe she wasn’t as good at this as she thought. ‘To even spark the band for silk magic first requires the initiate to envision dozens of intricate esoteric geometries all at once. What I’m doing to you now is literally child’s play.’

Bragging is generally considered unattractive on this plane of reality , I thought. Maybe I said it out loud. It was really hard to tell, what with my brains being scrambled.

Best I could tell, the Spellslinger had begun with my sense of pride, simultaneously magnifying its intensity– which felt rather pleasant– while retooling it away from things like my joy in undermining other people’s expectations and channelling it all into my disdain for would-be tyrants. And given the Pandoral was the very definition of a would-be tyrant. . .

‘There,’ Eliva’ren said, sounding satisfied with her handiwork. ‘By the time they come to take you from your cell, the prospect of bowing down before the Pandoral will be so intolerable you’ll. . .’ Our eyes were open, so I could see her leaning closer, almost as if she were trying to peer inside my skull. ‘What the hells have you done to yourself?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘You’re lying.’ She leaned back again and through whatever pathways her silk magic had opened between us, I caught a flash of hundreds of choices and inclinations collapsing into a final decision, which in turn led to a single doom. ‘You’re still going to do it. You’re going to give yourself over to the Pandoral.’

‘I probably should’ve warned you, sweetheart. I’m rather stubborn.’

‘Not for long,’ she said, and I felt intangible fingers tracing threads of my sense of self, tugging and twisting and tying them in knots. ‘And don’t call me sweetheart.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s all right. I know you didn’t mean to sound creepy.’ She continued her work and within seconds I found myself so open-minded you could’ve persuaded me to take up mime or improvisational dance or even to appreciate abstract art. That thought made her chuckle. ‘You would have made a truly excellent mime, Cade Ombra. Unfortunately, I need you to be a —

‘Spirits of my ancestors! How can you still be intending to give yourself to the Pandoral? I’ve tethered your instinct for belligerence whilst unleashing your hatred for everything he stands for!’

I shrugged. Inwardly, I think. Most likely my shoulders and neck hadn’t moved at all. Possibly you don’t care about that, but I found it amusing. ‘I suppose my decision was less a matter of pure stubbornness and more from — ’

‘Perversity,’ she said, getting there ahead of me. ‘You’re driven to transgressive impulses both from your own cynicism and learned from your old mentor, Hazidan Rosh.’

‘She did enjoy obscenity in all its myriad forms,’ I conceded, and imagined myself tapping a finger to my right temple. ‘There’s a positive garden of obscenity waiting for you in here.’

‘Then a little pruning is clearly in order,’ Eliva’ren said, but she couldn’t hide her anxiety now. As fast as she was working her silk magic on me, she was still running out of time. Also, there was only so much terrain in my skull she could mess with before the structures she was building there would collapse on themselves and I’d go irretrievably insane.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ I told her, even as she plucked out strands of perversity like unruly nose hairs. ‘Also, you might want to leave some of those naughty thoughts where they are, just in case.’

‘Just in case what?’

‘Well, you know. . .’

She kept stripping obscene inclinations from me, although I could feel she was definitely becoming more hesitant. ‘No, I don’t know. Why should I be leaving any of these “naughty thoughts”?’

I gave her my best rendition of a shy smile– she was the one who’d opened me up to the possibility of a career as a mime, after all. ‘Just in case you and I decide to have sex once you’ve got us out of here. I mean, I realise it’s a long shot, but we’re both adults, both unattached and in need of relieving some tension. I’d hate for us to jump into bed together and for me to be all out of erotic moves.’

No laughing now, no clever rejoinder. She was getting desperate. ‘ I’m sorry, Cade ,’ she murmured before letting loose the cruellest arrow in her quiver.

When next she reached inside me, the soft, sleek tendrils of her people’s silk evocations fused with her own destiny magic. No longer did she constrain or unleash my inclinations but instead infused the consequences of the choices I was making directly into my mind. I’d been prepared for this, of course; forcing the captive to envision imminent suffering can be far more effective than inflicting pain on them in the present. Humans are, after all, prone to believing the future will turn out better than the past. But it wasn’t my destiny that Eliva’ren unveiled, nor was it any kind of torment. Instead, she showed me what my decisions were costing my only friends.

‘ Come on, you beautiful bastards! Let’s show these golden-faced dandies who’s boss! ’ Corrigan’s cries are punctuated with bolts of indigo lightning striking the front lines of the Auroral troops. He’s dressed in the gleaming, form-fitting coppery armour of an Infernal Schemelord and leading an entire division of Demoniac Hellions and Malefic Artillerists into battle.

I’d never seen him so happy.

Without you dragging him into your impossible quest to prevent an inevitable war, he negotiates a deal with Tenebris , the Spellslinger whispered inside me. The new Lords Devilish will give humanity greater freedom than the Lords Celestine ever would in exchange for Corrigan helping to lead the Infernal armies.

I wanted to believe it was a lie, but the strands of her silk magic weren’t just casting images into my mind; they were showing the inexorable cause and effect of Corrigan’s own choices once freed from my influence.

‘ Motherfuckers! ’ bellows Temper as he leaps into the fray, his muzzle covered in the blood of angelics, his entire body swelling with vampiric power until. . .

‘Are those wings ?’ I asked, not able to make them out clearly amidst all the raucous, joyous chaos of battle. But Eliva’ren cut the tendril away, threading a different one into my thoughts.

‘ Rest easy, Grandmother ,’ Galass said, fingertips tracing the air over the body of an elderly figure shivering on a narrow cot in a temple. Tiny droplets of blood riddled with sickness rise up from a frail, heaving chest to spin in the air, the ailment burned away before they drift back down beneath the skin. The tremors calm, the breathing eases. Both women smile. A body is healed. A spirit soars. One day soon, Galass knows, blood magic will no longer be reviled, but revered.

You protected her from madness and misery, Cade. You gave her the chance to uncover the depths of her own strength. Will you now snatch away her destiny?

‘You’re lying. This is a — ’

I’ve never lied to you, Cade. Not once.

It was true. The Lords Celestine, the Devilish, Tenebris and just about everyone else had been pulling one con or another on me since before the Great Crusade even began. Eliva’ren had never tried to deceive me, and now I understood why: she couldn’t make this hurt unless she first banished any doubts I might have that these destinies were true.

‘ Go on then ,’ I said.

No, I hadn’t spoken this time. I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

Eliva’ren was relentless, driven by a conviction as strong as any I could muster that her path was the right one and that mine was entirely futile.

‘ A blossom may pale before such beauty as yours, my lady ,’ Aradeus says in a voice stripped of youth yet no less dashing. A trembling hand, withered with age, shakes so much that the flower in its grasp begins to shed its petals. ‘ Yet still the rose a smile demands .’

And she does smile.

Shame, her age matching his, as it has all these years since at last she consented to marry him, doesn’t take the rose from him. Instead, she wraps her hand around his, steadying him as she inhales not only the familiar scent of the flower but that of her husband. The smile that comes to her lips is made all the more brilliant by its imperfections, by its mixture of adoration and sorrow, uncertainty and gratitude, and all the fragrances of humanity the former angelic has come to embrace.

She’ll never know that life, Cade. How could she, fighting alongside you in an endless failure to prevent an endless war? There is no end to the story you offer them other than death and ruin.

‘Don’t gild the fucking lily. Show me Alice.’

No words this time. Instead, I saw a woman, a demoniac, dressed in gleaming armour I’d never seen before yet recognised instantly by the steady, determined gazes of those following behind her as they pursue a fugitive murderer whose wonderist spells have left a trail of bodies behind him. She and her squad wear the raiments of a new order of Justiciars. No longer beholden to the Glorians, they serve the laws that Alice herself helped set right: laws which shield human beings from the foibles of the Lords Devilish, who prevailed against the Lords Celestine only to find that people like Corrigan, like Galass, like Shame, Aradeus, Alice and even that gods-damned vampire kangaroo Temper, never fail to hold them to account. Heroes, one and all. And if, admittedly, the name ‘Malevolent Six’ never quite had the same ring to it, still, it’s a legend others will seek to reinvent generation after generation.

And all it requires is that you let the Aurorals and the Infernals have their war, Cade. You resist until the right moment so that Tenebris can betray the Pandoral and take what’s left of the power of that doomed realm for himself and his co-conspirators. My son is freed, a war that might have gone on for millennia is reduced to mere decades and your friends find such happiness as people like you and I could never even imagine for ourselves.

‘You’re right,’ I said, and I definitely heard myself speak this time. ‘This is a better destiny than any I could ever give them. A just compromise between the prospect of humanity’s eternal enslavement and merely losing a few generations of its children and the chance to choose their own gods. And hey, one thing about me? I don’t give a shit about religion.’

Eliva’ren was so deep inside my mind now, my very spirit, that she already knew the gambit had failed. ‘ I don’t understand ,’ she murmured, unleashing wave after wave of alterations to my thoughts and instincts. The surgeries became so fast that all I saw were the flashes of images, most abstract, some literal, each representing choices I might make and the destinies to which they would lead. One after another they faded from potentiality, always leaving behind the same decision.

‘How are you doing this?’ she asked aloud, her tone sharp, anxious, her breathing haggard. ‘Every time I alter one aspect of your personality, some other part of you becomes even more entrenched in following that path to the Pandoral. How are you doing this? ’

Despite my affection for her, what I wanted to say was, ‘ Because I’m not an amateur, Princess. I’m a former Glorian Justiciar who broke away from the brainwashing righteousness of the Lords Celestine themselves. I became an Infernalist who trafficked in spells and horrors, yet eluded every attempt by the Lords Devilish to align my spirit to their intentions. I’ve survived enemies whose power over-matched mine a hundredfold. I’m still here and they’re dead because I don’t walk into a fight unless I know exactly how to win. I’m a fucking tactical genius, and the only reason I don’t shout it from the rooftops is because tactical geniuses like me are too gods-damned cunning to let people know just how much better we are at this shit than they are. ’

What I did say, however, was equally true but less suicidal. ‘I didn’t choose to risk destroying myself and my friends out of pique, Eliva’ren. I didn’t do it because I lack pride or dignity or as a gamble. You and Tenebris and the Pandoral and everyone else keeps trying to argue with me about which destiny humanity must follow, but that’s because you’ve forgotten what it means to be human.’

‘Because your Justiciars took that away from me!’

‘I know, and I’m sorry for my part in it. But nobody’s suffering gives them a licence to take away someone else’s freedom.’

‘Yet you’re willing to deny the six beings you’re closest to in the entire world their chance at happiness?’

That made me laugh. It wasn’t a happy laugh, mind you, but then, happiness had never been the point. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? I can’t give my friends those pretty little futures you showed me because they’re not mine to give. Me, Corrigan, Galass, Shame, Aradeus, Alice and even that fucking lunatic kangaroo, we already made our choices. We swore we wouldn’t let the Mortal realm become anyone’s plaything, no matter what the cost. We’re not wide-eyed idealists, Eliva’ren, and we sure as shit aren’t the good guys. I may play the hero these days, but I’m fighting the fight my way.’

She leaned closer, placing her hands on either side of my face. Her fingertips pressed hard into my skin, but I didn’t feel any magic passing between us. This was something else. She was trying to make sense of me.

Good luck with that, sister , I thought.

Realisation dawned on her slowly, and her brow furrowed as she wrestled with the implications of what had happened. ‘With each alteration I made to your mind, some other part reshaped itself into finding a different, yet equally determined, commitment to your decision. Nothing I can do will move you without destroying you entirely.’

I took her hands away from my face. ‘You asked earlier why I wasn’t resisting? It’s because I don’t waste time fighting when the opponent has already lost.’

I felt her make one final, almost feeble attempt to invoke her silk magic, but too much intimacy makes the romance go stale. I sent a sudden, sharp jolt against the connection between us. Had she been prepared for opposition as she’d been earlier, or had she not been so exhausted, it might not have worked. But the tether between our minds snapped so hard the two of us recoiled from both the pain and the sudden loss.

I heard the sound of footsteps coming down the passageway, and something that sounded suspiciously like a swarm made up of thousands of buzzing bees. I rose to my feet, forcing myself not to immediately topple over when the dizziness hit me. ‘Come on,’ I said, extending a hand to her. ‘Time you got me out of here.’

The Spellslinger, utterly baffled by what had happened, accepted my hand. We stood side by side and waited as the key turned in the lock of the door.

‘Guess we’re going to have to fight our way out,’ I said. Under normal circumstances I would’ve left it there but, you know, people who mess with your brain should expect consequences for their ill deeds. That’s why I added, ‘Sweetheart.’