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He clutched at my shoulder in panic, or maybe searching for a final moment of human connection. I shrugged him off; I needed to concentrate.
I placed my right hand above the first sigil, which looked like a distorted stick figure crowned in seven rays; it represented the enemy spellcaster. When I moved my hand upwards, the sigil followed, and I placed it in a direct line between myself and the Auroral mage casting the heartchain.
The second sigil, a gleaming black circle with a second, smaller half-circle overlapping the top of it, looked almost like a padlock. It moved of its own accord, floating silently up to Corrigan’s forehead, which would have unnerved him no end if he’d not been too busy dying to notice.
The particular forms of magic I work manifest a kind of elementary consciousness within them, which meant that the spell knew Corrigan was the target of the Auroral mage’s heart-rending invocation. I quickly placed three fingers atop the locking sigil, then moved it between me and the enemy wonderists atop the citadel walls, looking for my target.
This is where casting a poetic injustice gets tricky. Altering the binding on someone else’s spell requires finding someone to whom they have an already strong emotional connection, which would usually require time and research, neither of which we had to spare. But these idiots had made it easy for me. Beside the Auroral mage stood a fierce-eyed old gentleman holding her hand. I might not be the world’s most sentimental guy, but even I could sense the love between them. I quickly tethered the targeting sigil to him.
Now for the third sigil. With the thumb and forefinger of each hand, I grasped the two-headed coiled snake, ignoring the ink-black tongues that flickered menacingly at me, pulled the spiral straight and attached a head to each of the other two sigils.
The thin silver thread binding the Auroral mage to Corrigan snapped away from him, whipping through the air with blinding speed before attaching itself to the old man next to her. Even when he saw the heartchain coming for him, he didn’t make a move to abandon her. Maybe he was her husband and such a cowardly thought never occurred to him.
Till death did they part, as no one with a conscience might say.
Corrigan painfully sucked air into his lungs, giving me just the barest nod of acknowledgment, then, smiling with smug self-satisfaction, renewed his attack on the walls with just as much vigour and twice as much pleasure as before.
I had to lean against him just to keep from collapsing to the ground. Poetic injustice spells are hard on the body. And the soul, I guess.
In case I hadn’t made this clear already, we’re not exactly the good guys.
But don’t worry– by the end of this story, me, Corrigan and the five other wonderists who would come to be known as the Malevolent Seven would definitely be getting what was coming to us.
Chapter 2
And the Walls Came Down
Watching the walls of a once magnificent citadel being torn down isn’t pleasant. The rumbling, crumbling, thunderous collapse of stone, wood and mortar is soon followed by the screams of those unfortunate enough not to have died instantly in the fall. Thanks to a few time-delayed eruption spells,ingeniously placed with the help of engineers who ought to be building things rather than figuring out how to blow them apart,a magnificent feat of architecture that once made people believe the world could be a safe, civilised place was now proof of the opposite.
Cheers rose up from the foot soldiers on our side. Men and women who hours before had been glaring resentfully at us because we got better pay, better tents and better prostitutes than they did were now slapping us on the back and praising our achievements to the heavens.
I doubted anyone up there was pleased.
My part in this accursed endeavour left me sick to my stomach. It wasn’t just the spells themselves, which were vile enough. It was the thrill all this devastation produced in everyone around me, a pleasure I couldn’t seem to keep from slithering inside me until I was cheering right alongside them. Maybe it just felt good to be part of a team again.
‘Silord Cade! Silord Cade Ombra, I need to see you!’
The voice calling out my name was young, enthusiastic and exasperating. When I’d first met the gangly, witless teenager, I’d assumed he was some camp follower looking to worm his way into my tent. Turned out he was an amateur luminist hoping to apprentice himself to a war mage. I should’ve sent him packing when he’d first suggested the idea; it would have saved me having to constantly resist the urge to slap him senseless.
‘What did I tell you last time?’
‘Silord?’
Okay, this time Ididhave to belt him– as much for his own safety as my satisfaction. Silord, a portmanteau of ‘sir’ and ‘lord’, is, technically, how one should address a war mage, since in terms of rank we sit somewhere between a cavalry officer and a minor noble.
However. . .
‘Our employer–youremployer, in case you forgot– doesn’t approve of that particular honorific,’ I reminded the boy.Again.
Corrigan whispered conspiratorially to him, ‘Ascendant Lucien feels such titles risk confusing the peasantry about who the gods love and who they just sort of put up with.’
‘But Sil—’ He caught himself just in time to avoid a black eye. ‘Master Ombra—’
‘Ascendant Lucien doesn’t like hearing people refer to his subordinates as “master”, either,’ I told him. ‘Nor, by the way, do I appreciate you using my fucking real name in front of other people when there could be spies about taking stock of who should be on the receiving end of a sharp blade should the opportunity present itself. For the duration of this engagement, you will refer to me as Brother Cerulean. You will refer to our big friend with the ridiculous violet-blue hair’– I gestured to Corrigan, who was practically glowing from the admiration of the crowd of soldiers and camp followers flooding around him– ‘as Brother Indigo.’
‘And what should I call myself?’ asked the boy.
‘You are Cousin Green.’
