Page 30 of The Malevolent Seven

In case you hadn’t noticed up until now, my spells tended to be a little slow to cast and frankly, not all that impressive. Any three-on-three fight against a floranist, a cosmist and a. . . okay, so the luminist is probably a waste of space, but you get the point: we’d get our arses handed to us. In fact, the cosmist who was presently standing before us, arms spread wide and waiting to show off how powerful he was, could kill any of us with the merest touch, and since none of Corrigan’s thunder could touch him, nor even Galass’ blood magic, that meant he was pretty well invulnerable.

Or so he thought.

The cosmist wasn’t just a walking void, he was a talking one; he spoke, he laughed, he expressed thoughts and desires, all of which meant he was a conscious being. And a mind is a terribly dangerous thing in the hands of an Infernalist.

That sigil I traced earlier was a weeping arrow. I called on it now, and the black, teardrop-shaped arrowhead not much larger than my thumb appeared in the air before me. I flicked it with my finger and sent it flying towards the cosmist. The weeping arrow doesn’t move all that fast– perhaps a touch faster than I could have run the distance on foot. At first the cosmist ignored it, until at the last second he must have understood what was about to happen to him, because he tried to duck. Alas, he’d waited too long. The floranist made an effort to save him by causing the fallen leaves on the ground to swirl up in front of the arrow, but this spell isn’t made of matter or normal energy, so it passed right through them. The luminist, meanwhile, decided the safest option was to cower behind his colleagues, which was ironic since any one of his light-shaping illusions would have destroyed the sigil, which was made of shadow.

The weeping arrow isn’t an especially impressive incantation. It’s just a despair-inducer: it makes you despise yourself. It’s good for breaking an enemy’s concentration or maybe persuading them to become long-term alcoholics. But if you happen to be someone whose entire body is covered in the vastness of space, you’re already constantly reminded of your relative insignificance in the universe. When the weeping arrow struck the cosmist, all those existential anxieties coalesced in a torrent of whimpering self-hatred. He fell to the ground, curled up into a sobbing ball of emptiness– and the pocket universe that had been wrapped around his skin collapsed in on itself.

Hey, it was him or me.

‘Okay, now,’ Corrigan said, clapping his hands together. ‘Anyone else want to play “who’s the bloodthirstiest of them all?”’ He threw an arm around Galass’ shoulder. ‘Our blood mage here is a little new at the game, so she could really use the practice, if one of you would care to oblige.’

The floranist and the luminist elected to politely decline the offer, which they communicated by taking off at a fairly athletic pace into the forest and towards a brighter future than the one awaiting them with us. Mister Bones chased them enthusiastically for a few yards, then returned, tail wagging in victory.

‘By all that’s good and decent in this life,’ Galass said, shrugging off Corrigan’s arm and turning to me, ‘is there nothing of kindness or mercy in your existence?’

‘Not usually,’ Corrigan replied, tip-toeing past the rats, being careful not to step on any of them. ‘But the pay is good.’ He stood over the mound of dirt and kicked at it with his foot.

‘Was he a friend of yours?’ I asked, coming to stand alongside him.

‘Hmm?’

I pointed to the mound. ‘The dead guy.’

‘Oh, he’s not dead. He’s just buried. Elania and her band of morons were probably just trying to scare him into telling them about the gig so they could bypass us and claim the job for themselves. Even those idiots knew not to kill a guy when torturing him would be more profitable.’

‘Don’t you think he’s been buried rather a long time?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t we dig him up?’

‘Oh, hell no. I’m not wrecking my nails digging in the dirt.’ Corrigan stepped away from the mound and turned to the waiting rodents. ‘The enemy’s gone. Shouldn’t you little bastards be getting to work?’

Just like that, the rats scampered over to the upturned earth and began digging away, kicking up a veritable storm of soil. Mister Bones barked at them angrily, then decided to join in. It was, as exhumations go, a rather festive event.

You’re perhaps wondering how Corrigan, a Tempestoral mage with no connection whatsoever to the Totemic demesne, could speak to a bunch of rats. The answer is, of course, that he couldn’t; the rats were conveying what their little ears were hearing to the individual whose spell had summoned them in the first place.

Pointing to the rapidly disappearing mound of dirt, I said to Corrigan, ‘I can’t believe you turned down a thunderer, a floranist, a cosmist and a lumin—Well, the first three, anyway, for one ofthem.’

He grinned, clapping a hand on my shoulder. ‘Not justany, my friend. The handsomest, most charming ofthemyou’ll ever have the privilege and pleasure of meeting.’

Soon the rats had carved out the general shape of a person, along with various tiny tunnels underground which I presumed must lead to holes nearby; that explained how a buried man had been able to breathe. The figure pushed up out of the dirt, leaped heroically to his feet and began to brush himself off to reveal a man roughly my own age, a couple of inches shorter and perhaps a trifle slimmer. His long coat was a perfectly even grey, as was the short hair that tickled his collar at the back. His moustache was long and sparse, groomed– once he’d brushed the dirt out of it– to look almost like whiskers. They gave him an oddly debonair appearance, which was complemented by the scabbarded rapier at his side.

‘He’s beautiful,’ Galass breathed.

I wouldn’t have gone that far myself, but he was, as Corrigan had promised, handsome, dashing, and with a smile that made you want to follow him anywhere.

I hate rat mages.

Chapter 15

The Handsome Rat

The running joke among wonderists regarding practitioners of rat magic is that no one knows whether they’re human beings like the rest of us, who happen to be attuned to some Totemic plane ruled by all-powerful rodent gods who grant them magical abilities, or just really big rats who have learned to stand on two legs and dress like dandies while talking about themselves all the time.

‘Rat wizardry is, of course, highly misunderstood,’ Aradeus informed us as he stood at the front of the sloop. He was apparently unable to speak without one foot on a handy coil of rope and the opposite arm outstretched– all very theatrical, but Galass was entranced. Corrigan and I were doing our best to ignore him.

‘How so, Master Mozen?’ she asked, sitting on the deck with her back against the mast, staring up at Aradeus while stroking a pair of fat river rats who were making themselves comfortable in her lap. Mister Bones, sulking, took himself off to the back of the sloop, where he periodically lifted his head to snarl at these unexpected competitors for his mistress’ affections.

Aradeus took her question as an opportunity to strike yet another devil-may-care pose, placing one fist on his hip, sweeping his rear foot back in a semi-circle and bending at the waist to kiss her hand. ‘My dear, please, to you I am merely Aradeus.’

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