Page 93 of The Malevolent Seven

Shame clearly didn’t share his enthusiasm. There was a terror in her expression I’d never seen before that I found particularly discomfiting in an otherwise preternaturally placid Auroral being.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘To be. . . enmeshed with so many others at the same time. . . I will lose myself in your flesh, in your petty lusts and loathings! I have known the freedom to explore my own nature for such a brief time– now you would take that away from me? There may be nothing left of me afterwards!’

More insects were crawling out of the brothers’ mouths.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, feeling dreadful. Such a feat would be horrendously intimate for anyone, but for an angelic who’d already been abused by the desires and hatreds of so many others? It would be tantamount to spiritual suicide. Then again, maybe my guilt was just nausea from my body slowly being destroyed by the exposure to so much raw extra-planar magic. ‘Shame, this is it. We’re at the end of our road. Here in this lousy fortress in the shittiest part of the entire continent. The seven of us have been tricked, manipulated, lied to, and now we’re probably all going to die. Am I to blame because I let myself be suckered by an Ascendant, a sublime, a diabolic, the Lords Celestine and Devilish, and even my old master? Maybe, but I think if you factor everything together, it’s really more Corrigan’s fault than mine.’

‘Hey! I’m not th—’

‘But it’s not about blame.’ I jabbed a finger at the nearest of the brothers. ‘It’s about killing these pricks before their bug-faced masters can take over what’s left of this world. The Mortal realm might be one giant shithole to an angelic– hell, it’s a giant shithole to me, and I was born here – but it’s the only home left to any of us. This is our one shot, and we can’t make it without you.’

You know how usually a speech sounds good in your head and then falls flat when you blurt it out loud? This time it happened in reverse, because I seriously didn’t think I’d made a persuasive argument for personal sacrifice. And yet. . .

Shame smiled weakly at me. ‘Then I will try.’

‘Good, then let’s—’

She ignored me, went to Aradeus and took his hand. ‘There is something I would say to you, Aradeus Mozen. You came to me on that ship, you risked everything for a stranger. The Celestines teach us that humanity is all weakness and corruption. They do not despise you for it, but reason that this is why you must be guided.’ She lifted up his hand and kissed it. ‘Thank you for teaching me that even the gods can be wrong sometimes.’

‘My lady. . .’ he said.

It was a nice moment, and I wished I could have allowed it to continue, but I couldn’t be sure how many insects it would take to form another Pandoral on our side of the gates.

‘How will you make this work, though?’ Fidick asked. ‘You assume that killing the brothers will close the gates, but what if you’re wrong? Surely just blasting away at their insides is too simple a solution?’

I looked at Fidick and he stared back up at me with that same guileless expression. I’ve hated a lot of people in my time, but never as much as I hated that eleven-year-old boy in that moment, because I knew his question wasn’t musing but guidance. He was making sure I knew that our plan wouldn’t work– that we needed something else.

So why is it so important that he not just tell us?

But I had to set that aside for the moment, because right now what we needed was a plan. I stared at the others, looking for the key to unlock this puzzle.

By my reckoning, there were only two possibilities here: either we were seven random people brought together by malice and happenstance, or each of us had been necessary to get to this place at this moment– and we did have it within us to destroy the gates. This wasn’t a problem of spellcraft, but of alchemy: how did we all fit together? How were a bunch of wonderists, an angel and a demon supposed to cure what was destroying our world?

A cloud of the reddish haze that periodically blew across this terrain came through the window, making us cough as we inhaled its poisonous. . .

Poison,I realised then.We don’t need a cure or even a weapon– we need to become the poison that makesthemsick.

‘Quickly,’ I said, ‘everyone, gather round. Aradeus, we’re going to need your rapier.’

Without a word, he proffered the hilt.

I held out the palm of my hand. ‘Cut me– cut all of us, especially Alice.’

‘Why me?’ the demoniac asked. Her leathery wings were shuddering as they tried to keep her balanced. The room was swirling around us and the creak of shifting stones in the walls and ceiling was so loud I had to shout to be heard.

‘Because the rest of us don’t disgust the Pandorals so much that they’d bother wanting to kill us. It’syourexistence that sickens them, and right now, I want to make them very fucking sick indeed.’

It took her a moment to work it out. ‘My blood? You believe they can’t tolerate that which comes from the Infernal plane?’

I would have taken some pleasure in the look of surprise on her face, but I had other things to deal with. ‘Galass, we’re going to need your magic.’

‘How?’ she asked. ‘I barely know what I’m doing.’

‘This will be easy,’ I lied as one by one they allowed Aradeus to make incisions on their palms with the tip of his rapier. ‘Everybody join hands. We need our blood to mingle.’

The others complied, and soon the seven of us were standing in a circle like a bunch of religious zealots about to pray– only we were facing outwards, towards the Seven Brothers, our hands clasped together tightly, the shallow wounds on our palms touching. They were as dull-eyed and slack-jawed as ever, but I would have sworn the one in front of me was trying to smirk.

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