Page 58 of The Malevolent Seven

‘We wantourguy,’ Corrigan insisted.

‘Corrigan,’ I said quietly.

‘Don’t try to stop me, Cade, I’m not fucking—’

I stepped away from the portal. ‘Fry his ass.’

The diabolic wiped a non-existent teardrop from his eyes, which aren’t able to produce any in the first place. ‘After all the good times we’ve had together, I’m truly disappointed.’ Abruptly, he spat right at me. The mottled grey-green fluid never hit me, of course; it couldn’t pass through to our realm. Instead, it began collapsing the portal. We could still see through, a little– kind of like staring through a sheet of ice.

Corrigan hurled a bolt of red and black lightning, but it passed harmlessly through to the other side as if nothing was there, instead scorching the already wasted red ground fifty feet away from us. As the glassy remnants of the portal darkened to match the night air, Tenebris held out a fist towards me, palm up, then raised his middle finger. He did that often when our negotiations had come to an end. I think it must be a gesture of farewell among his people.

‘Nice friends you have, fallen one,’ Alice said with the barely contained smugness of a teenager who’s just caught her parents drunk and naked on the floor with the neighbours.

I hate demons.

Chapter 29

Travelling Companions

Abandoned by our diabolic escort, the six of us– seven if you wanted to count Mister Bones, who’d been rolling around excitedly on the cracked, dusty ground, only to then race around our legs and rub that reddish clay all over us– set off along the closest thing that passed for a road through the Blastlands, towards the town of Mages’ Grave.

I kept looking up into the night sky, hoping to see stars, but finding only the scarlet haze that smothered everything here. The spell-poisoned soil on which we trod was no better. The clay might be hard and dry, but somehow it stuck to our heels, slowing us down, grabbing at us like the hands of the damned. Every exhausting step felt both torturous and treacherous, making me wonder if maybe Hazidan had had a point about Hell being as good a place to retire as anywhere else.

‘It’s as if too much magic drains away the soul of a place,’ Galass said, struggling to keep up. ‘I feel like. . .’ She reached out a hand in front of her, the hem of her white sublime’s gown that had shrugged off the dirt of every other place we’d been now caked in red clay. ‘I feel like this land doesn’t want us any more.’

‘Us?’ Corrigan asked dubiously.

‘Human beings. Mortals.’ She shook her head as if trying to shake her thoughts free. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not making sense. I’m just so very tired.’

Mister Bones ran beside her, yapping encouragement. She started to bend down to pet him, then gave up. She looked like she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stand up straight again. The problem with blood mages– I mean, other than the high rates of insanity generally leading to mass murder– is that they’re so attuned to the flow of life that any corruption of the natural order has a particularly violent effect on them, leaving them generally confused and weak.

All of which you can fix if you just keep your head down, find the client, kill off the seven heroic gentlemen impeding his oppression of the locals, make him give you the Apparatus in payment, and use it to alter Galass’ attunement to something less homicidal. Hey, and maybe if the device works more than once, you can use it to give yourself an attunement that doesn’t require kissing the arse of a diabolic every time you need a spell!

Yeah, nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan.

Treading through breach-dross infected terrain was hard on all of us, but Aradeus had a fencer’s endurance and Corrigan was too bull-headed and competitive to acknowledge physical hardship. I wasn’t sure how an angelic’s body even worked, but Shame’s form kept changing: she’d be older one minute, younger the next, fat, skinny, male, female, and every shade in between. Maybe all that transforming made the way easier for her, but the creepily placid smile that hadn’t left her face since we’d escaped the pleasure barge was making me wonder whether she was celebrating her freedom or working out when best to split open our skulls and start eating our brains.

As for our newest recruit, Alice didn’t appear to mind the struggle of trudging through the treacherous clay. It looked like she was blessed with both a justiciar’s enthusiasm for deprivation and a demoniac’s perverse pleasure in watching others suffer.

‘The blood mage won’t survive, you know,’ she informed me, keeping pace with me when I slowed to let the others go on ahead. ‘She has no training, no discipline. Even petty wonderists like you havesomerudimentary knowledge of how to control your spells. Her mind won’t long endure the torments of her attunement. It will burn her out from the inside, and when that happens, she’ll kill you all. She’ll drain the blood from your bodies and weep useless tears over your corpses.’

‘Only if Shame doesn’t eat our brains first,’ I said, bending over to rest my hands on my knees so I could catch my breath.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. What were you going on about again?’ I held up a finger. ‘No, wait, I remember. Galass is a liability and we should get rid of her; the angelic is probably spying on us for the Aurorals; Corrigan’s a reckless moron and Aradeus is a rat mage who’ll definitely come in handy should one of these seven mystical freedom fighters, or whoever’s been pissing off the local despot, offer to settle the dispute over tea after a polite fencing match. Does that about cover it, or do you have any criticism of Mister Bones that you’d like to share?’

‘I don’t trust him.’

‘Who?’

She spoke in a hush. ‘The dog.’

Infernals usually get sarcasm, but I suppose I should have anticipated a fanatical demoniac trained by a psychotic old blind woman wouldn’t necessarily have a finely tuned sense of humour.

‘He has an irritating bark,’ Alice went on. ‘And his ears are too long. I’ve seen images of your fauna in books and those ears are completely out of proportion for a dog’s head.’

‘He’s a jackal. They’re supposed to have long ears.’

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