Page 67 of The Malevolent Seven

The wording was carefully considered, and conveyed more than I thought he had intended.

‘Are you being held captive in this form?’ Galass asked. ‘Are you forced to serve the Seven Brothers?’

Madrigal gave a goaty laugh and pressed onwards through the surprisingly dank, decaying hallway. ‘We are all captives of our bodies, are we not?’

I didn’t find the deflection convincing.

‘And we are all servants of someone,’ he continued.

‘Not so!’ Aradeus declared. The rat mage stepped around us to face the goat man. Putting a gloved hand on his shoulder, he said earnestly, ‘Freedom is not a play on words, honourable Madrigal. It isreal. Itmatters. Tell me you are enslaved in this place and by the sword at my side and the spells on my lips, will Aradeus Mozen win your freedom.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Corrigan swore. ‘Can you not so much as take a shit without declaring yourself to be on some noble quest?’

Madrigal laughed then, and it really was an endearing laugh, almost a cross between a deep, throaty chuckle and bleating, but when he spoke, it was once again with forced precision. ‘My thanks, Lord Mozen, for your generous offer. But I will serve my time, and when I am done, I will return to my mountain. Your kindness has moved me, however, so perhaps one day I will come and setyoufree from your bondage.’

He bleated even more uproariously at his own joke as he motioned for the four of us to pass beneath another archway into a great hall with a large wooden table at the far end. Seven chairs were set on each side. The ones nearest the far wall were occupied by seven figures in grey robes, their heads covered by hoods. The other chairs were empty, if you didn’t count the red-brown stains of dried blood, which I could see even from here. Hanging upside down by silvery gossamer threads from the ceiling some thirty feet above our heads were the mad-eyed, gaping-mouthed corpses of dead wonderists. . .a lot of dead wonderists.

I counted forty-two of them as I gazed up at their expressions of horror and despair. I saw Fortunal mages and Totemics, Tempestorals, luminists and every other attunement you could name. I even recognised one familiar face.

‘Hey, look at that,’ Corrigan said, pointing up to the slender fellow whose leather bandolier of keys was dangling from the bloody ruins of his corpse. ‘Good old Locke made it out of that tavern before I blasted the others, after all!’

‘He’s still dead,’ I pointed out.

‘Yeah, but it wasn’t my fault, so I’m okay with that.’

Forty-two bodies, I thought looking up at them.Six groups of seven wonderists.

That’s how many Vidra said had got here before us. One of the few things the Lords Devilish and Lords Celestine have in common? An abiding fascination with symmetry.

Which makes us the seventh crew of seven wonderists come to face the Seven Brothers.

‘If you would be so kind as to take your seats?’ Madrigal asked, gesturing to the table where the seven most dangerous men ever to walk the earth awaited us.

Chapter 35

Familial Relations

As we approached the table, our hosts removed their hoods, revealing just how unremarkable they were: seven men with dark hair and pasty white skin, neither imposing in stature nor particularly slight. Not young, not old, but somewhere in between, ranging in age, I’d have guessed, from about nineteen to thirty-five or six. It was unusual to find seven male siblings, but not impossible. Maybe it was just a really big family and the women were all off slaughtering someone other than wonderists.

On the whole, though, these seven fellows looked like anyone you might find wandering the streets of your own home town. Admittedly, the crimson irises were a little troubling, but I’d seen worse on chronic drunks and those afflicted with certain blood disorders. The spidery crimson veins creeping over their chalk-white cheeks and foreheads. . . yeah, those were a little unsettling, I suppose, but it wasn’t like staring into the abyss of a cosmist’s face.

There was nothing about their appearance that explained the unnerving effect the seven men had on us. I knew instantly that they were human, like us, and wonderists as well. Despite the differences between those who make up our profession– different sources of power, approaches to spellcraft and, for want of a better word,styles– we all share a sensitivity to individuals attuned to planes beyond the Mortal realm. It’s like a tingling on the tips of your fingers or a sudden sharp taste on your tongue, an ache in your bones that differs depending on which plane those who you come into contact with are attuned. That’s how I knew the moment I got within ten feet of the Seven Brothers that they weren’t like us at all.

Oh, they were mages– of that I was certain– but I’d never encountered whichever realm they drew their spells from. Corrigan had made a far more diligent study of the various forms of wonderism than anyone else I knew (mostly so he could more easily kill his fellow practitioners when the occasion warranted), but his expression when he looked at our hosts betrayed the same mixture of confusion and panic that I was experiencing.

As for the seven gentlemen seated behind the table, they were looking as cool as a winter’s morning.

‘Will you sit?’ one of them asked.

Beyond the red eyes and veiny cheeks, they displayed the similarities and differences you’d expect to find in that many siblings. Most had reasonably strong chins, but a couple were softer. There were aquiline noses all around, although two looked as if they had been broken at some point. One and all were clean-shaven, and their tidy, jaw-length hair was cut alike, but the colour ranged from muddy brown to just this side of black. They shared what you might call boyish good looks, though some wore it better than the others. If I hadn’t been so acutely aware of the forty-two dead mercenary wonderists hanging upside down from the ceiling behind us, I would have assumed I was sitting down to a pleasant country brunch.

I strolled up to the middle chair on our side of the table and rested my hand on the back of it. ‘Somebody bled on your furniture.’

The brother fourth from the left inclined his head at me, for all the world as if we’d just chosen each other for a duel. ‘The remnants of a barbaric ritual,’ he said. ‘We would never willingly impose such discourtesy on our guests without cause.’

In other words,sit down, shut up while we tell you how things are going to be, and maybe– maybe– you can walk out of here alive.

I heard a murmur coming from one of the other brothers that set my inner ear to buzzing. It wasn’t quite like the muted paper-crackling sound I could pick up when Aurorals were talking to each other, but close enough that it must have resonated with one of the mystical planes to which I was attuned. A few seconds later, footsteps– or rather,hoofsteps– echoed from the passage outside the great hall, and through the arched entrance came a group of robed servants, each one bearing a chair that, while clearly not part of a matched set, was at least free of blood. A couple of the servants were goats like Madrigal, but there were other species, too. The donkey looked particularly unhappy to be there, and the one who might have been a mountain cougar– or maybe just a really big house cat– was definitely eyeing up the man-sized rat on two legs, who looked like he was trying to stay as far away from the feline as possible.

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