Page 64 of The Malevolent Seven

‘You all really should get going,’ Vidra said. ‘He gets louder the longer a speller’s nearby.’

I started leading the others away, but Shame moved to stand under the baron’s corpse.

‘My lady,’ Aradeus called out to her gently, ‘we should not tarry here. There’s nothing we can do for him.’

Ignoring him, the angelic reached up and touched the baron’s skinless toe. Tristmorta kept on screaming at first, but something started to change. At first it was just a kind of ripple, travelling up and down the clay-built muscle and bone: flesh sloughed from his bones, only to slither back up, breaking down and reforming, over and over again.

A second scream joined his, which turned out to be Shame herself.

‘My lady!’ Aradeus cried, and ran to her, but she held out her other hand in warning.

‘Stay back!’ she shouted in between her agonised screams.

Corrigan started calling up another blast of lightning, though I don’t know what he hoped to accomplish with it. ‘What the hell’s she doing?’ he asked.

I was watching in wonder at the suffering Shame was putting herself through. ‘She’s. . . she’s trying to transfigure his body so that the spell that keeps giving it life won’t recognise it any more. But he’s reforming almost as fast as she’s breaking him apart.’

‘She’s going to kill herself!’ Aradeus was trying to pull the angelic away from the baron, but she was resisting. ‘Cade, use one of your spells to make her stop before it’s too late!’

‘Silly thing to do,’ Vidra said, turning to walk back towards the town, clearly feeling that whatever duty she felt she’d owed us had been delivered in full. ‘Girl’s going to ruin herself for a body that ain’t got no soul any more.’

‘The angelic can’t abide the desecration,’ Alice said to me. For the first time since I’d met her, she sounded sympathetic, almost admiring. ‘Desecration affects all who witness it. We are diminished by the unconscionable abuse of another’– her narrowed, angular eyes caught mine– ‘even when we prefer to pretend otherwise.’

‘Diminished is better than dead,’ I said, unbuttoning the collar of my shirt. The nightmare bloom had a decent chance of breaking the angelic’s concentration.

‘No!’ Galass said, seeing what I was planning. She darted to join Shame, who was now shaking all over from the effort of trying to alter the baron’s corpse into something the spell reanimating it couldn’t overcome.

Galass held out her left hand and almost immediately, red droplets began drifting from the baron’s body towards her own. She held up her right hand– and now scarlet drops began to ooze out of her own pores to mingle in mid-air with the baron’s blood. ‘Try now,’ she said.

Shame didn’t appear to hear her at first, but then, gritting her teeth, she grabbed hold of the baron’s ankle. The ripples increased in intensity, like earth tremors across a mountain ridge. We could see Galass’ blood mixture was seeping inside the baron’s exposed veins, and at last his screams turned to groans as the spell reanimating him started to lose its hold. He was about to die, I knew then– die properly, with whatever dignity was left him. The decent thing would have been to let him do so.

‘Wait!’ I shouted, my fingers tracing the nightmare bloom sigils on my chest. ‘Answer my question, or I’ll fill your last moments of life with terrors worse than any you’ve ever known!’

The others stared at me like I was an utter monster, even Corrigan.

Fair enough, I suppose.

‘Tell me what the Seven Brothers want,’ I commanded the baron.

His lidless eyes swivelled to me. He gave a sigh, and I thought his last breath had fled his body. But he actually sounded relieved when he managed to articulate one sentence before Shame and Galass granted him the final peace the Seven Brothers had tried to deny him.

‘The red,’ he whispered. ‘They want the red.’

Chapter 33

The Red

Shame collapsed into Aradeus’ arms, and when Galass stumbled backwards, I ran to catch her. I wondered what damage the two had done to themselves in order to give some trivial measure of grace to a reanimated corpse.

‘We did it,’ Galass said to me, smiling with fierce pride as tears streamed down her cheeks. ‘We did it.’

She wasn’t meant for this world, not when she so adamantly refused to let it corrupt her.

‘What did he mean?’ Aradeus asked, staring up at the now silent corpse. Had the baron, too, felt proud that he’d managed to defy his tormentors to leave us with that minuscule, meaningless piece of information? ‘What would the Seven Brothers want with the blood soot?’

‘Perhaps they mean to spread it further south,’ Alice suggested. ‘Corrupt more and more of the land so that your kind will all end up like the villagers, addicted to their own despair as much as to the poisoned crops grown in their soil.’

Corrigan scooped up a handful of the dry-as-dust clay, sniffed at it, then tossed it away. ‘Who cares? We’re not fucking farmers, we’re mercenaries, and our client’– he jabbed a thumb up at the dead body still hanging in the air– ‘is in no condition to pay our fees.’ He turned back the way we’d come. ‘Let’s go, Cade. Maybe we can pick up a little work down the road– blow up a troublesome monastery for the local crime lord or maybe a good old-fashioned kidnapping. Those were always fun. We know how to do kidnappings.’

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