Page 46

Chapter 46

Blind Spots

I hadn’t made much of a study of pandoralist magic in the six months since I’d foolishly attuned myself to that realm of pure chaos rather than something less suicidal. Truth be told, I’d hoped I’d never need to draw on it, other than to one day scare the shit out of the Lords Devilish and Lords Celestine, who understood and feared its cataclysmic potential far better than I did. Oh, I’d intuited a few of the esoteric mechanics involved, most of which involved warping living beings and physical space into alternate variations of what nature had intended. In practical terms, this meant I was mostly good for tearing stuff apart in disturbing and grotesque ways. The one time I’d attempted something more sophisticated, I’d found myself in a punch-up with a seven-foot-tall not-quite-rabbit creature from another plane of existence that I’d accidentally turned into a vampire– which don’t even exist on the Mortal realm any more. Well, they do now, thanks to me.

All of this made the endeavour on which I’d gambled all our lives especially precarious. I had to transform my body into a living gate between our world and the Pandoral realm, and I absolutely, unquestionably had to get it right on the first try. After that? Well, after that probably wasn’t going to matter because she wasn’t going to let me get that far.

‘I warned you it would come to this,’ Eliva’ren said, ‘that it would come down to the two of us.’

I hadn’t planned on opening my eyes, but the sadness in her voice took me by surprise. I’d expected a coldness between us as we reverted to the enemies our respective destinies had intended us to be before our spectacularly odd ‘date’. Business was business, after all, and the Spellslinger’s left little room for sentiment.

‘Why did you have to be who you are?’ Eliva’ren asked, tears filling her eyes. She wasn’t even trying to hide the pain, which in turn, tore at my own emotional defences. ‘Why couldn’t you have been a proper Glorian Justiciar who didn’t care about anything but following Divine Will? Or a narcissistic Infernalist who would have walked away from this mess the first time I showed you what I could do to you and your friends?’

I’m no expert on affairs of the heart, but it seems to me that it’s pretty easy to fool yourself into believing you’re in love when everything else around you is falling apart. Even now, the sight of her, the ache of her voice. . . It was as if the colour of her skin, the shape of her eyes, the curve of her lips, even when she frowned, were all part of a language that I had never before spoken yet had known for ever. When I’d left the Justiciars and the Auroral song had been stripped from me, I’d taken it for granted that for the rest of my life there would be a hole inside me that nothing else could fill. Some observers– cynical pricks, I assume– might suggest a couple of attempts at killing one another followed by an– admittedly excellent– first date hardly qualified as a replacement for the majesty of the Auroral Song, but I was only just beginning to learn the terrible, heart-rending, reckless, wondrous truth: love really is all it’s cracked up to be.

Now that love was threatening to tear me apart faster than the Pandoral energies currently transforming my flesh and bones into a portal. The experience was exactly as unpleasant as it sounds, but there’s something to be said for mercenary work: I’d grown accustomed to finishing the jobs I’d agreed to take on, even the stupid ones.

‘Who would you have preferred me to be?’ I managed to say, expanding the Pandoral rift inside me. It was getting harder to speak and my consciousness was threatening to sever itself from my physical body.

Eliva’ren bridged the distance between us. She was drawing on her own bizarre esoteric energies, cloaking herself in the destiny magic that would enable her to hasten the doom she had, in her way, tried to keep me from. Her hand on my cheek, the warmth of her fingertips and the raw humanity of her touch, helped me hold on. ‘I wanted you to be a knight without resolve,’ she replied. ‘I would have had you be a courtier who swept me off my feet and into his bed, only to abandon me at daybreak without a second thought. A priest who gave rousing sermons in the morn, only to give in to temptation at night.’ Now it was she who closed her eyes as if to squeeze away the tears. ‘I wish you’d been someone who could’ve beaten me,’ she whispered.

All around us, the war raged, between four different sides now. The Celestines and Infernals were trying to direct most of their efforts against the Pandoral, but many of their troops couldn’t wait and were tearing into their ancient enemies, even as their comrades fell wherever the Pandoral’s gigantic fists struck. My friends were beleaguered too, fending off the attacks Tenebris directed at me– having known me a while, he wasn’t taking any chances despite his confidence in my inevitable defeat.

‘It’s over,’ Eliva’ren told me. ‘Everything you’ve done has followed the same path to this same doom. Why can’t you see that?’

I shrugged, or tried to. I wasn’t sure how much of what lay beneath my skin was actually muscle and bone any more. ‘I guess I’ve always prided myself on being unpredictable.’

‘But you aren’t – that’s what I’ve been trying to show you, Cade! Every decision you’ve made– every single one – has brought us to this exact moment. Even this final gambit, making a last-minute deal with the Pandoral entity to give him an avenue of escape because you think once he’s back in his realm he’ll be able to access the full might of its chaos magic– you think the Celestines and Devilish will be forced to flee back to their own realms and be denied their war.’

‘Sounds. . . like a. . . good plan,’ I said. I was starting to choke, but only because my lungs weren’t really lungs any more.

She slammed her fist against my chest, which hurt more than it should have, given what was happening to me. ‘This is exactly what my employers wanted you to do all along, Cade!’

Yeah, Tenebris always has been a little too cunning for anyone’s good. Can’t believe the Lords Devilish never saw him coming.

My body felt as if it were coming apart, but it was only Eliva’ren shaking me, shouting in my face as if this was all my fault. ‘I’m going to collapse the Pandoral realm, Cade. I’m going to bring forward its eventual demise by thousands of years so that the limitless energies there flow back into this realm while I twist your attunement first to Infernalism and then Auroralism, channelling all that power into Tenebris and his cabal. They’re going to become gods!’ She swung an arm to the battlefield. ‘Look at what’s already happening! The Celestines and Devilish are beginning to fall. The cabal will take their place, but a hundred times more powerful than they ever were, all because of you — ’

‘Not only me,’ I reminded her.

All her anger and despair drained from her, leaving only determination behind. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like to have given birth to a son you’ve never seen, knowing his entire life is being spent in a place where he’s utterly unlike any other living being that exists there. Nine years my child has lived in the Pandoral realm, raised by an illusion, wondering why his real mother never comes to rescue him.’ She hit me again, a right cross to the jaw this time. I barely felt it at all. ‘Damn you for making me hate myself even more than I thought possible!’

I’d worked out most of the details of how Eliva’ren’s son had been kept alive all these years and how Tenebris intended to bring him back here. With the energies he’d channel through me from the Pandoral realm as it collapsed, he’d have more than enough power to transform the boy’s physical body into one that could survive on the Mortal plane. He’d probably even recreate the breach to Eliva’ren’s home so that mother and son could reunite with their own people. My failure to master Pandoral magic aside, I’d studied almost every other form of wonderism, and had a knack for esoteric theory. The mechanics of this scheme were intricate, almost beautiful in their way. But as flawless as they looked, there was one missing piece in the clockworks of destiny: an extra gear Eliva’ren had been incapable of seeing.

‘I’d imagine it’s uncomfortable for someone who can perceive the dooms of everyone and everything around them to be surprised,’ I said to her. My voice was weaker, little more than a whisper. Whatever was left of my insides was held together with Pandoral energies, but I fought to make sure she could hear me over the din of battle.

‘Fate is never surprised, Cade. How can you still not see that?’

I glanced back at the war being waged by the oh-so-gullible Lords Celestine and Devilish against the Pandoral. The swarm was thin now, mostly a person-shaped cloud of erratically buzzing insects that weren’t long for this world, or any other.

Eliva’ren didn’t hear me.

‘What?’ she asked. Thousands of images were appearing and disappearing all around her now in a wild dance of potentiality so strong that I could feel them tugging against the chaos of my own attunement.

‘I said, Fate can’t see itself.’

She stared back at me, sympathy for my impending doom giving way to resignation. ‘Your consciousness is coming apart, Cade. It won’t be long now.’ She reached out and touched me again, but this time there was nothing human connecting us. This was power against power, chaos against inevitability. Had I been given an entire lifetime to master my attunement, still I couldn’t have beaten her. Then again, I had no plans to do so.

‘Ever since — ’ I coughed, which is a strange sensation when your throat and lungs are no longer made of flesh. ‘Ever since I met you, you’ve shown me how easily you can see the destinies and dooms of others.’ Pain assailed me; it was getting harder to make myself heard. ‘But. . . but it occurred to me that you’ve never spoken about your own destiny, Eliva. Not once.’

She looked irritated. ‘That’s not how it works. I can’t — ’

‘You can’t see your own influence over the world because the power emanates from you . You’re always in the eye of the storm. You can predict all the choices, the critical decisions that fork the destinies of others, but only the ones that don’t involve you, because you’re incapable of perceiving yourself as part of another’s destiny.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘What are you talking about, Cade?’

It was becoming hard to see her now. A haze was coming over me, my perceptions losing their grip on the Mortal realm. I smiled, or tried to. ‘I was never meant to be a hero. I was an angry young man who thought joining the Glorian Justiciars would make me righteous. When that failed, I became a mercenary, convinced that having fallen so far, I was absolved of ever having to care about anyone else.’ I couldn’t make out the shapes of my friends any more, only the swirl of colours in the eruptions of their magics. ‘Then I met a bunch of idiots and too late I discovered that my destiny didn’t belong to me any more.’

‘It’s a nice thought.’ I felt sure she was smiling back at me. ‘Hold onto that thought for as long as you ca — ’

‘You’re still not getting it, Eliva. You’re not seeing how I’m beating you at this game of destinies because you’re not seeing yourself in mine. The Cade Ombra who hadn’t met you would’ve done precisely what your abilities are telling you I’m doing right now: negotiated a last-ditch pact with the Pandoral to make my body into a gate so he could get back into his plane of reality and force the Aurorals and Infernals to retreat. But this Cade Ombra? The one who met you, who fell in. . . Well, let’s just say that that guy’s got an entirely different plan.’

‘Cade, what are you. . . ?’ Too late, she finally understood that because she couldn’t perceive her own destiny, she was also blind to how someone might make a choice entirely foreign to their own nature because of her. ‘Cade, it won’t work– you don’t understand how the Pandoral realm operates, never mind how to — ’

Silently, I let the Pandoral know it was time. The paltry swarm of surviving insects containing what was left of his consciousness flew towards me, a gust of glittering wind. As my sentience finally lost its hold on the gate my body had become, I let it come apart in hundreds, maybe thousands of fragments of consciousness, each one finding a home inside one of the bugs as they flew into the gate inside me. I managed to utter one final message to the remarkable, dangerous and altogether entrancing woman who’d unwittingly brought us both to this moment. After all, when you’re the hero, it’s important to have the last word.

‘Stick around, sweetheart,’ I heard what had once been my mouth say. ‘I’m going to bring your son back.’