AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Oh, for the love of all things Infernal,’ I swore, rolling up the cuff of my jacket and exposing my wrist to the rat. ‘Fine, but if you try anything funny I’m tossing you over the side.’
The rat gave a somewhat aggrieved twitch of its tail, scampered up my leg and settled on my forearm, from where it proceeded to give an unnecessarily vicious bite to my wrist.
‘Cade?’ the rat asked with Aradeus Mozen’s voice. ‘Are you alone?’
I glanced around the deck and saw no one, then closed my eyes and looked again. This time I could see a feminine silhouette sitting cross-legged about twelve feet away. One of the prince’s wonderists– not a justiciar, thankfully– was hiding in a patch of Infernal gloom. It’s a simple but useful spell that draws shadows from the Infernal demesne. They are impenetrable to human eyes, unless those eyes happen to gaze into that particular realm with regrettable frequency. I pretended not to see her and whispered an old meditational quieting spell I know. It’s so subtle you’d have to be watching for it to notice someone casting it on you, since its only purpose is to aid in focusing the mind towards the spiritual and away from the mundane. For the next few minutes, at least, my watcher would be too embroiled in peacefully questioning her own moral peril to notice me talking to a rat.
‘Is there literally no other way any of you people know to handle distance conversations?’ I asked.
The rat shrugged, although I couldn’t tell if that was Aradeus telling me that was just how things are, or the rat saying, ‘Hey, you should try being me, buddy.’
‘The major domo is having me watched,’ Aradeus said. ‘Two wonderists are stationed outside my cabin: a lock mage and a felinist.’
I paused to appreciate the cosmic symmetry of our host using a cat mage to watch over a rat mage.
‘What about the two prostitutes with you?’ I asked.
‘I cast a mesmerism on them,’ Aradeus replied. The rat on my arm turned its head and shuddered slightly. ‘Not sure one was required. They were far more concerned with pleasuring each other than me.’
Having a rodent sitting on your forearm looking offended that a pair of hookers were too busy having sex with each other to pay attention to Aradeus made me almost lose my grip on the spell keeping this conversation from being overheard.
‘Regardless,’ Aradeus went on, ‘my reputation has rendered me too great a risk to go about the barge unwatched. The greater share of our noble quest passes to you, Brother Cade.’
In other words: I got to do the hard part that usually involves getting caught and then beheaded. Somehow I’d known this was going to be the gist of this conversation.
I sighed. ‘What do I have to do?’
The rat on my forearm gave me a tiny salute that was in no way inspiring. ‘Find a way to the bottom deck near the stern– that’s the back. That’s where they’re keeping her.’
‘Keeping who? You’ve been awfully tight-lipped about this whole operation, Aradeus.’
‘Just. . . can I beg your trust in this matter, Cade? On my honour, she is worth the risk, and her plight one that men of valour such as ourselves cannot possibly allow to continue.’
The rat was giving me the rodent equivalent of soul-searching eyes. It was surprisingly effective.
‘Fine, but just so you know, Corrigan and I have a deal about murdering the person responsible for either of us getting killed for something really stupid like trying to rescue a rat mage’s childhood sweetheart off a damned floating brothel with nine wonderists lurking about.’
The rat nodded. ‘Understood. Now, can you find some way to convince the major domo to let you down to the cabin levels?’
‘Not if we’re trying to keep him from being suspicious. At this point, we’d need divine providence or—’
At that very moment, a man’s scream pierced the wooden deck beneath my feet, shaking the very hull of the massive barge. When I looked down, I saw blood oozing up through the surface of the deck.
‘Actually,’ I said to Aradeus’ rat as I took off for the stairs leading below, ‘I think I may have just the thing.’
Chapter 18
The Price and the Prize
I once heard it said– from an exceedingly reliable source on the subject– that the root of humanity’s downfall was not evil, lust, greed or any of the usual sins, but simply hubris: that unique mixture of arrogance, conceit and a distinct lack of foresight of which only human beings are truly capable. Indeed, some have developed it into a fine art.
For example, it was hubristic of Aradeus to think we could casually sneak onto a prince’s floating brothel to rescue (or kidnap, for all I knew) whoever it was being kept in the most secret cabin as far below decks as possible. It was hubristic of that same prince to believe his own pet wonderists would keep him safe from war mages like Corrigan and me, or that he could get away with flouting his greatness for all his other noble guests by not just allowing us aboard his magnificent pleasure barge, but actually insisting that we sample his equally magnificent wares.
Corrigan’s hubris was his conviction that whatever trouble came our way, he could use brute force to get out of it.
But it was Galass, in her need to– just for one little moment, for one fractured fragment of an existence defined by the desires of others– feel what it was like for her own desires to take charge, who’d shown an entirely different kind of hubris: the kind which had produced the first of many casualties to follow.
As formyparticular hubris? I’ve never had a hubristic moment in my life.
