Page 80 of The Malevolent Seven

‘But what?’

‘But you felt something else, too, didn’t you?’

‘What makes you say that?’

She shrugged, still apparently obsessed with her own reflection. ‘Because you didn’t try to go back.’

How much of this interrogation was curiosity and how much was trying to make sense of her own decision to– as she put it– ‘switch sides’, I wondered. I still didn’t know what deal she’d made with Tenebris, and as she’d made it clear she had no intention of telling me, really, what did I owe her?

‘I felt free,’ I said at last. ‘For a while. The feeling didn’t last.’

She pursed her lips and at first I thought she was posing in front of the mirror, but then realised she was thinking about my words. ‘All that you gave up– purpose, companionship, the love of the Celestines – all for a fleeting sense of self-determination. I wonder, was it worth it?’

I noticed suddenly that she was not studying her own image in the mirror, but looking at me, watching my expression.

I left her with a gambler’s grin and four words. ‘You bet your arse.’

My visit with Aradeus was more entertaining, if only because watching a rat mage shadow-fencing in a dark, dirty cottage before a fight in which a blade would almost certainly prove useless is kind of funny.

‘Cade!’ he shouted at my arrival, greeting me with the sort of enthusiasm normally reserved for a long-lost friend.

I found myself wishing that I’d met the rat mage sooner. Maybe life would have gone a little differently for me if I’d had more experience of the way his debonaire idealism could hold even in the face of the wretched world in which we lived. Aradeus embodied what Hazidan used to call ‘the sublime contradiction’– she hadn’t been referring to the sublime orders, but to the way human beings could embody contrary notions and make them somehow beautiful. Aradeus was a wonderist who modelled his magic after rats, which everyone with any brains despises as plague-spreaders and corpse-eaters. Yet he took from those loathsome rodents all those qualities that others missed, and in so doing, not only made himself admirable, but somehow managed to ennoble all rats in the process.

‘Have we a daring plan with which to defeat these vile brothers and their insidious patrons?’ he asked me after a moment or two.

I smiled. ‘We have two, in fact.’

‘Excellent!’ He launched into a series of parries and ripostes against an invisible attacker, brandishing his rapier with consummate skill and grace.

‘You don’t want to know the details?’ I asked.

He performed a pair of long, lightning-fast lunges, punctuating each one with a bizarre ‘huzzah!’ before pausing long enough to say, ‘You’ll tell me when I need to know. You’re a good leader, Cade.’

‘You met me barely a month ago. Besides, Corrigan was supposed to be in charge.’

He grinned, and made a few more swipes in the air with his rapier. ‘I’ve an instinct about such things. Rats are excellent judges of character. You’ll see us through the dangers to come, and by morning we’ll be celebrating our victory and spreading tales of our adventures far and wide.’

He said all this with a certainty that convinced even me, if only for a moment.

Aradeus Mozen, rat mage and swashbuckler, really was a remarkable human being. He would have made a lousy justiciar.

Chapter 42

The Demon and the Diabolic

I decided to leave Alice for last, mostly because I disliked her company almost as much as she disliked mine. It wasn’t just because she was an Infernal, either.I’d had more than my share of dealings with them and your average demon is no more nor less pleasant to spend time with than a human being. But Alice had that look in her eyes I’d seen on far too many of my fellow justiciars: a warning that every word you ever said would be weighed to judge its righteous holiness. Who wants to spend what may well be their last hours of life in the company of a zealot? Especially one of the smirking, snarling, ‘aren’t my bat wings so very impressive?’ variety.

There were altogether too many demons in my life at that moment, and there was one I needed to see far more importantly before I got down to her.

‘Cade, brother!’ Tenebris said excitedly as I summoned him inside the circle of spell-sand. I’d spread it in the middle of the main road that ran from the edge of town up to the fortress on the hill. One of the cottages would have been safer, but I wanted to be outside.

‘Kind of a risky spot for a meeting, don’t you think?’ the diabolic asked, looking around. ‘What if one of those townies sees us together and gets the wrong idea about you?’

‘What would the wrong idea about me be?’ I asked.

‘That you consort with the Infernal, of course.’

‘I think the cat’s out of the bag on that one.’

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