Page 54 of The Malevolent Seven

She tilted her head a little. ‘I suppose that’s true, isn’t it? But no, the reason you were my favourite is because of the Two Cades.’

‘The two what, now?’

‘The Two Cades: the first is perceptive, insightful, almost preternaturally gifted at peeking behind the veil of human self-deception to see the truth underneath.’ She reached out a hand and cupped my jaw. Hell had really made her go soft. ‘The other is a callow boy who won’t stop hiding behind cynicism and a desperate fear that should he ever find something truly worth believing in, he’ll be trapped: shackled for the rest of his days beneath the unbearable weight of knowing that the world really is worth defending.’

‘Maybe I would have been a better student if you weren’t trying so hard to be a poet, Master. What the fuck is any of that supposed to mean?’

She gestured down at the training hall. ‘You know what this is about– and don’t start up with all that nonsense about me wanting to create my own little demoniac army, because I’ll tolerate insubordination from you, but not lazy conjecture.’

I followed her pointing finger, studying that replica of a place that had been the most sacred in all the world to me until, suddenly, it wasn’t any more. I understood what Hazidan had been up to here in the Infernal demesne. It wasn’t just about hiding from the Celestines, nor about getting revenge on them, although that was surely part of it, despite what she might have liked to believe. This was, I was certain, about the passion that drove Hazidan more than any loyalty or spiritual vocation ever had: proving something which no other Auroral but her had ever believed.

‘We all have a choice,’ I said, and she grinned, a trifle too maniacally for my tastes.

‘Free will, Cade, the Great Gift. With awareness, with consciousness, comes choice. None of us can be damned by anyone but ourselves. No one can be forgiven– no one can beredeemed– save by their own heart.’

‘You haven’t been training an army.’

‘No.’

‘Because the Infernals would never allow it.’

‘Correct.’

‘But theydohave a perverse sense of humour. They enjoy a good prank, especially at the Aurorals’ expense, but even at their own.’

‘An admirable quality, in my opinion.’

‘Yes, but a joke that hitsboththe Auroralsandthe Infernals? Now that would be something truly hilarious.’

‘Stop dancing around the question, Cade.’

She was right; Iwastrying to avoid it, maybe because, deep down, I’d always felt a certain twisted pride in the notion that I was the only one: Hazidan’s one true student. It hurt to think that after giving up on me, she’d tried with someone else.

‘Who is he?’ I asked.

‘Not “he”.’

She took me by the shoulder and spun me around to face the long corridor we’d come from. A woman was standing a few feet from the doors, apparently waiting for us. She was lithe and lean, wearing a leather cuirass the colour of a lion’s mane over an ivory shirt. The wide, fringed sleeves narrowed as they reached her long golden gloves. Her trousers were a textured midnight-blue leather, her boots a shade darker than that. Silvery-white hair shorn almost to the scalp added a striking contrast to her blue-black skin. The self-inflicted facial scars her people considered fashionable were not Infernal sigils but the symbols graven into the nine-pointed star above Hazidan’s training hall and representing a set of ideals that should have been utterly foreign to an Infernal.

‘You’ve lost your mind,’ I breathed, staring at the demoniac. She, in turn, stared right back at me– at my wonderist’s coat, specifically– with far more disdain than one would expect from a being whose favourite food was probably ecclesiasm extracted from dead puppies or something equally horrific.

‘I did, in fact, lose my mind,’ Hazidan confessed. She walked over to the girl– the demoniac, I should say– and put one arm around her shoulders. My old mentor looked far more comfortable showing affection to an Infernal than she’d ever been with me. ‘Meet your sixth recruit.’

Chapter 27

Comrades

Her name was Alice, and, even for a demon, she proved to be a real pain in the arse right from the start.

‘Could you slow down?’ I called up to her as I ran breathlessly along the winding, dizzying path. ‘Some of us don’t have wings.’

She glanced down just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of the same smirk I’d got the last two times I’d politely requested a little consideration. I was starting to really look forward to the first time she stepped out onto the Mortal plane and discovered that a pair of bat-like wings barely longer than her arms wouldn’t provide nearly enough lift for a human-sized body to propel itself through the air. In the meantime, I had to rely on the light cast every time she cracked her steel whip-sword in front of us to split the shadows, allowing me to see the path ahead.

What were you thinking, Master?I wondered despairingly.

Hazidan Rosh had always been eccentric–unstable, even– but behind those piercing storm-coloured eyes there had always been a. . . a sagacity. A kind of insight that promised this time for sure she knew what she was doing. I hadn’t seen a single sign of that sagacity when she’d informed me that not only had she trained a demoniac in the ways of the justiciars, but that she expected me to recruit her new apprentice into my coven.

‘You have to look beyond the old divisions, the old fights,’ Hazidan had said as I’d walked away from her cosy private corner of the Infernal demesne. ‘The game changed while the rest of us weren’t paying attention. The players aren’t who we think they are.’

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