Page 43

Chapter 43

Even Ruder Awakenings

There are sights one really does not expect to see whilst standing around naked and looking out at the early morning sky from the second-floor window of a friendly little inn. One of those unanticipated sights is the entire fucking sky burning gold and red. Seriously, there were actual flames raging towards us, scattering clouds and filling the air with the screams of those who’d just woken up to the end of the world.

‘Stop screaming,’ Alice said. ‘It’s annoying.’

‘What the fuck happened while I was being incarcerated, tortured and interrogated?’ I demanded.

‘How was it?’ Corrigan asked, sad eyes almost soulful as he gazed down at me.

Watching what must be the cataclysmic supernatural effects of the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish marching their armies towards this benighted little town hardly felt like the right time for unburdening my emotional trauma on my best friend. Still, it was nice of him to ask.

‘Honestly? I’d place the experience somewhere between that time we got arrested by that mob of wonderist hunters and our more recent encounter with the Lords Devilish.’

‘Oh, no, I don’t give a shit about that.’ Corrigan poked me in the ribs with his elbow and nodded not at all inconspicuously to the other side of the room where Eliva’ren was still reclining on the bed. ‘I mean, how was it with her ?’

His casual attitude was a clue to just how screwed we were. Corrigan’s no fool, no matter how convincingly he plays the part. If he thought there was any action we could possibly take to prevent the apocalypse coming our way, or even for us to escape, he would’ve been the first person to start stomping about and shouting orders. Instead, he was making salacious jokes, which, as he’s made clear many times, is one of the only two ways he wants to die. The other. . . well, that should be obvious by now too.

I glanced over at Galass, who, being younger and more idealistic than the rest of us, was less prone to fatalism. She met my gaze but said nothing. Even her hair was hanging limp and dull.

‘Give me the lay of the land,’ I told them anyway.

‘Well, Cade,’ Corrigan began, the tone of his voice suggesting he was poised to blame all this on me, ‘after you got taken by the Arsehole Eight — How are they, by the way?’

‘Corpses, mostly.’

‘Too bad. I was thinking of recruiting one of them for your spot on the team after you’re dead.’

‘I think the luminist might’ve survived. Maybe you could invite him?’

‘Better than a fucking pandoralist !’ Corrigan swatted the back of my head hard enough to send me reeling towards the window, where I cracked my skull on the wooden frame– ‘brilliant move, by the way. Fucking genius. You could’ve chosen any attunement you wanted and you picked the one that turns you into a walking catastrophe waiting to explode? Fucking well done.’

‘I figured we might need an edge when fighting the Aurorals and Infernals,’ I said, rubbing my forehead. ‘Pandoral magic is the only kind that frightens them — ’

Corrigan smacked me a second time, leaving me seriously dazed. ‘That’s because, unlike you, they’re smart enough to know it’s nothing but a disaster waiting to happen.’ He jerked a thumb towards the bed. ‘Especially after they turned her into a living, breathing agent of chaos.’

‘Well, sure, in hindsight I suppose a different attunement might’ve worked out better. Maybe florinist. I’ve always wanted to learn gardening. But since I have it on good authority you can’t alter your destiny, how about filling me in on the rest of it. What happened with Tenebris?’

Corrigan laughed. ‘After you were taken and he’d explained this cabal of disaffected mid-level Infernals and Aurorals he’d put together to overthrow the Lords Devilish and Lords Celestine, your former agent tried to negotiate a pact with us! Can you believe it? That diabolic little prick offered each of us more than we could ever have hoped for.’

‘And?’

‘What?’

‘Did you take the deal?’

He crossed his arms over his chest defensively. ‘Well, Aradeus looked like he might give in, but naturally, I refused.’

The rat mage looked confused. ‘I fear your memory may be failing you, Brother Corrigan, as I distinctly recall you asking only that in addition to the other terms of the pact they would. . .’ Aradeus pointed to Corrigan’s groin, then placed his hands rather close together before widening them.

‘Lies!’ Corrigan bellowed. ‘Foul calumny — !’

‘That is exactly what happened,’ Alice confirmed.

‘He was rather insistent,’ Shame added, then, because she has neither a sense of propriety nor etiquette, lifted her skirt to manifest the appendage in question along with the proposed alterations.

Corrigan became agitated. ‘It was a ruse, you idiots, I was stalling for time. And it worked, too!’ He turned back to me. ‘While I cunningly stalled the diabolic, Aradeus sent a message through some of his rat brethren to that Ardentor twat we duped into stealing the Glorian banner. He found an angelic to commune with the Lords Celestine, who immediately mobilised their forces. Naturally, spies for the Lords Devilish got wind of what was happening and immediately sent their forces, which. . . Well, you can guess the rest.’ He gestured through the open window to the vivid golden and crimson fiery flourishes currently devouring the sky even before their avatars on the ground could fight over who got to attack the Pandoral first.

All of which plays right into the hands of Tenebris and his cabal , I realised, though I didn’t mention that to the others. When you’re already doomed, being told you also got played doesn’t exactly inspire the heroic urge for one last fight.

‘It’s madness, Cade,’ Galass said, looking flummoxed by Corrigan’s glib recounting of what my inopportune kidnapping had sparked. ‘Once those two armies reach the Pandoral, it’s going to be absolute chaos.’

‘Destiny, actually,’ Eliva’ren corrected her. She rose from the bed, both more elegant in her nudity and considerably less troubled by the stares of three human wonderists, an angelic, a demoniac and a vampiric kangaroo than I was. Aradeus was naturally averting his gaze. Eliva left last night’s dress on the floor and instead opened her pack to retrieve her everyday clothes, pulling on the tan trousers and sliding her shirt over her head before tightening her belt. ‘That’s what no one understood about the Pandoral realm before. It’s not just a place where the physical laws produce chaos; they produce both chaos and destiny.’

‘But those two things are opposites, aren’t they?’ Galass asked.

One of the bands of metallic sigils tattooed onto Eliva’ren’s right forearm glimmered and tiny sparks of light began to dance in front of her, each one moving in wild, incomprehensible patterns. ‘Chaos creates unpredictability. Unpredictability makes it impossible for us to control what follows– where each event or decision will lead. This prevents sentient beings, even those as powerful as the Celestines or the Devilish, from being able to truly direct the course of history.’ Some of the manic sparks collided, altering their courses, until, gradually, their paths began to coalesce. ‘No individual action or choice stands alone: they interact with other events, becoming affected by them. So over time, no matter how chaotic or unpredictable the choices, they inevitably form a pattern together. Order cannot prevent chaos, yet out of chaos always comes order.’

The sparks had now become a cosmos in miniature, orbiting around one another in mesmerising and oddly beautiful ways. Kind of like the woman who’d conjured them.

‘That’s. . .’ I hesitated, trying to wrap my head around the concept. ‘That’s how your magic works, how you “bring forth” someone’s destiny. You accelerate the chaos around them. You don’t affect the decisions or events themselves, but instead cause the collisions between those decisions and events to intersect sooner?’

Eliva’ren slid her waistcoat on, then glanced at the dress she’d worn last night as if contemplating whether to keep it. I didn’t need to predict the interactions of chaotic events to know she was going to leave it there on the floor. She came to stand before me, making me feel oddly vulnerable being naked in front of her like that. She sensed my discomfort, because she smiled and kissed me for what I presumed would be the last time. ‘I don’t get to decide anyone’s destiny, not really,’ she said, then stood up on her tiptoes and whispered in my ear, ‘But I’m sorry all the same, Cade Ombra.’

She started for the door, but before she got there Corrigan said, ‘Umm. . . hello? Aren’t we going to kill her now?’

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Because you’ve got some brilliant plan to defeat her later?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Because you’ve gone soft and you’re in love with this lunatic?’

Everyone was watching me, waiting for my answer. There was something amusing about the fact that they were far more enthralled by the idea that I was in love with the Spellslinger than they’d been about whether I had a plan to stop her and her bosses from bringing the world to an end. I decided to make them wait and went to the corner where my new coat, shirt and trousers lay in a heap on the floor. Before I got there, a bolt of indigo lightning obliterated them, fogging the air with charred fragments of expensive cloth.

‘You expect me to save the world naked?’ I asked, staring at the sooty remains of my beautiful clothes.

‘Forget it, Cade,’ Corrigan said angrily. ‘I’m done with your idiocy. We all are. You said we were going to be a team of heroes and all you’ve done is lead us from one disaster to another.’ I heard the sound of a pack being dropped onto the floor, the string ties being opened. ‘From now on, we do things my way.’

Now that I was freed from the wards they’d put in my cell back in the fortress, I had any number of ways of taking down Corrigan– well, at least one. I couldn’t, though. It wasn’t just that he was my best friend in a profession that didn’t lend itself to friendship, but that, truth be told, he was right. Nothing I’d done had dissuaded the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish from their war. If anything, like Eliva’ren and her chaos magic, I’d brought our doom closer.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s try your way, Corrigan.’

I turned, half expecting him to blast me from existence, or at least to punch me hard enough in the face to do some serious damage. Instead, he was holding up a long dark leather coat in one hand, with matching trousers, a burgundy shirt and a belt in the other. Emblazoned on the breast of the coat in that same burgundy were a pair of lightning bolts forming the number seven. I could see more of the ridiculous outfits spilling out of the bag. The others picked through them to find theirs.

‘ Uniforms? ’ I asked. ‘ That’s your idea of taking control?’

He tossed me the coat and trousers, then wielding the belt like a whip, waited for me to dress. ‘We’re all going to die, Cade. That’s what happens in the real world when you take on competing armies of supernatural morons. I don’t blame you for leading me to my death. All I ask is that we look cool while dying.’

I heard light, mostly restrained laughter from near the door. Eliva’ren stood there watching us, amusement and sadness in her eyes, and a terrible longing for something she had never known and hadn’t realised she had so desperately wanted. We exchanged looks for a moment as I dressed myself in Corrigan’s preposterous idea of a heroic uniform, and in those silent glances an entire conversation took place: a pleading on my part that she reconsider, a steely rejoinder that, unlike me, she knew where all this was heading, and that she had long ago decided that the only fate she cared about was that of her son; a suggestion that maybe her unyielding resolve was precisely what made doom for all of us so certain. An apology, and a farewell.

We let her walk away, listening to the sound of her footsteps as she descended the stairs.

‘Yes,’ I said once she was gone.

‘Yes, to what?’ Corrigan asked, buttoning up his own dark leather coat and discovering that his was a little too tight.

‘You asked a moment ago whether the reason I was letting her leave was because I’d fallen in love with her. The answer is yes. I’m positively nuts for this woman, Corrigan. I’ve got no plan, no strategy for how we can stop what’s coming for us. Even if the Aurorals and Infernals manage not to destroy each other and half the world when they get here– which is highly unlikely– or they don’t end up blowing up the other half in a witless attack on the Pandoral, it’s almost certain that what happens after will trigger this “doom” the Spellslinger was hired to bring about, which is apparently also the only way she can save her son from the Pandoral realm. There’s no plausible way the seven of us can prevent any of that from happening!’

I was breathing too fast, my heart was pounding and the aches and pains of my incarceration by the Pandoral’s minions suddenly flared up like the torture was happening all over again. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs and I knew– knew more clearly than anything I’d ever known before– that this was entirely the wrong time to have an emotional breakdown in front of the only six people on this plane who might at least try to save the world.

It took every ounce of discipline I’d learned among the Glorians, every perverse impulse I’d ever acquired from the Infernals, and a touch of something considerably more dangerous than both– I believe decent people call it ‘honesty’– to continue.

‘On the positive side,’ I managed between gasps, ‘if by some miracle we survive this, I’m thinking of asking the Spellslinger to be my girlfriend.’

Nobody laughed, not even a quiet titter. They remained dead silent for an uncomfortably long time. Finally– and unexpectedly– it was Shame who spoke for all of them. ‘This has always been a fight over whether the fate of this realm should be determined by gods or mere Mortals. To risk everything on sentiment seems a profoundly. . . human course of action.’

‘I like it,’ Galass said, her jaw set in that way of hers that refused to accept that fate or circumstance could rule our lives.

‘The Spellslinger better have been really good in bed, is all I’m saying,’ Corrigan grumbled, though his grin was wide and full of that wild impulse to go out and die fighting impossible odds.

Temper thumped his foot several times, causing the whole floor to shake, which I guessed was him agreeing. Then he grinned at me, showing his fangs, and I wasn’t entirely sure what he was trying to convey.

It was Alice who surprised me most, though, because she spoke so quietly, I almost hadn’t heard her until I saw the tears in her eyes. That’s when I understood what she’d said.

‘ I would like to die for love. ’

Strangest coven of wonderists this plane of reality or any other has or will ever see , I thought.

I headed for the door. ‘Come on,’ I told the others. ‘Let’s go and kick destiny in the face and save the world.’

We were halfway down the stairs when I stopped.

‘What’s wrong?’ Galass asked, crashing into me.

I turned and looked up at Corrigan near the back. Pinching the lapel of my leather coat, I asked, ‘Did you really– while I was being held captive and tortured to enact a spell that would’ve destroyed the entire Mortal realm– did you seriously stop somewhere to get custom-tailored outfits made?’

‘It only took a day,’ he admitted sheepishly. ‘We’d stopped for supplies anyway, and I saw this tailor’s shop run by a florinist who uses her abilities to shape and weave all kinds of fabrics. . .’

A day . Most people don’t last an hour under torture, never mind a day. And this hulking brute of a thunderer camped out in a tailor’s shop somewhere for an entire twenty-four hours getting uniforms made instead of racing madly to rescue me.

‘Why are you smiling like that?’ Shame asked, trying to replicate my smile on her own face. It wasn’t working too well.

I wasn’t sure how to answer, because unless you understand the twisted mind of Corrigan Blight, you’ll never be able to make sense of the fact that the only reason he would delay rescuing me to get these stupid uniforms made was because he hadn’t harboured a single doubt– not even the slightest hesitation– that I would not only resist the Pandoral’s torture but find a way to escape before he and the others got here.

Of course he was absolutely right.

Bow down ye gods and devils, for I am Cade fucking Ombra, we are the Malevolent fucking Seven, and we’re here to fuck you up but good.