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Sometimes it’s the little things that save your soul.
Corrigan’s gaze swept over the dead soldiers and paused on the unnatural scarlet hair of the girl hugging the yappy little jackal to her chest. He saw blood on her lower lip: blood that had previously been oozing from the hole in his left hand made by a jackal’s tooth.
‘Devils fuck me dry,’ he said. ‘Never thought I’d come across a real live blood mage. . .’
Slowly, so as not to scare either Galass or Corrigan into overreacting, which would surely end with at least one of them– and certainly me– joining the corpses currently littering my tent, I found a blanket and draped it carefully over Fidick’s Mortal remains.
I’m not a religious man, but in my previous profession I’d had to learn a lot of prayers. I spoke the only one I could still tolerate without making myself sick.
‘There is an end to flesh and spirit.
The flesh to the ground belongs,
The spirit to those above,
But one demesne do Mortals rule,
Birthed in hearts and smiles and songs,
For even we who command eternity,
Hold no dominion over love.’
I tweaked a corner of the blanket, pulling it straight over Fidick’s body, then rose and turned to Corrigan.
Not being the sentimental type, he was still staring uneasily at the young blood mage standing less than six feet away from him.
‘Cade. . .’ he began, almost as if he knew what I was about to say and didn’t like it one bit.
‘What was it you were telling me earlier? About us needing to recruit some especially nasty war mages?’ I asked.
Maybe it comes from being a thunderer, but Corrigan’s never been much for debate or negotiation. He makes every decision with the same swift, brutal immediacy of his spells, and he never wastes time second-guessing himself. So it was unusual to see him standing there in silence; he didn’t move for so long that I began to wonder if he’d slipped into a trance.
‘Ah, fuck it,’ he said at last, spinning on his heel to stomp back out of the tent. ‘We’re taking a job in a shithole so awful they call it Mages’ Grave. Gotta figure a little blood magic will come in handy somehow. Besides, she’s probably not half as crazy as the guy we’re picking up on the Jalbraith Canal.’
I took a deep breath, waiting for my hands to stop shaking, then, deciding that wasn’t going to happen any time soon, I grabbed my travelling pack and began filling it with the items I needed most. After a moment, I added a few bits of clothing and kit I thought Galass could use.
Less than ten minutes later, the three of us were ready to head north on a mission about which I knew practically nothing, save that it would supposedly earn us a fortune and would just as surely cost us twice as much. Three outlaw wonderists with a posse of Glorian Justiciars at our back and who the hell knew what waiting ahead.
Well, three wonderists and a yappy, bitey little jackal.
Chapter 12
The Canal
Jalbraith Canal is the longest, straightest waterway on the continent. Its high stone embankments were built centuries ago, during an era that wasn’t necessarily better than our own, but certainly more optimistic about the future. Sovereign Jalbraith the Beneficent, the former warlord responsible for the canal’s construction, had believed that trade was the gateway to peace. The endless stream of would-be tyrants who succeeded old Jalbraith had agreed, though with the intervening steps of a few judicious massacres along the way. In summertime, during what’s affectionately called ‘Empire Season’, when ambitious men like Ascendant Lucien set about fulfilling Jalbraith’s promise of a peaceful world in their own violent way, the canal is often clogged for miles with floating corpses.
‘I don’t like it here,’ Galass said, hugging her arms across her chest as she stood at the front of our leaky, single-masted sloop. Despite my offer of a coat and warmer clothes, she’d insisted on wearing her silver-white sublime’s gown as if it were a kind of armour protecting her from the truth of what she’d become. Her hair blew in the chill breeze, which would have made for a pretty picture were those long, colourful locks not dancing quite so menacingly. The picture wasn’t helped by Mister Bones, either, sitting at her feet and growling at the corpses drifting by, in case they had any ideas about troubling his mistress.
‘Don’t focus on the bodies,’ I urged her, keeping some distance between us in case the blood magic began to overwhelm her again. ‘Focus on the river, on the way the water never stops moving. It’s like. . . think of it as a huge vein filled with blood.’
That might sound creepy, but the thing most people don’t understand about blood mages is that the presence of death actually disturbs them. Blood is meant toflow, to bring life and vitality. When a body dies and the blood coagulates, it loses the particular form of ecclesiasm from which blood mages draw both power and sustenance.
Galass closed her eyes and extended her hands towards the canal ahead of us. Her fingertips began to sway as if she were conducting an orchestra, her scarlet hair matching each subtle movement.
‘I can feel it,’ she said. ‘The flow of life even amidst all this death, the. . . rhythms.’ Her eyes were clear when she turned to me. ‘I feel a little better now, thank you.’
‘You’ll want to get into the habit of attuning yourself to the motions of life all around you. Root systems, riverways, ant colonies. . . anything but human blood.’
