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‘What’s that even supposed to mean?’ I exploded. ‘Why are you still talking in riddles, saddling me with a fuckingdemoniacwho thinks she’s a justiciar and expecting me to just blindly go along? What are you keeping from me, Hazidan? Whatexactlyis waiting for us in the Blastlands?’
I don’t know why I bothered shouting, or asking questions at all. Among the justiciars, Hazidan was without peer at two things: extracting information people didn’t want to reveal, and never giving away more than she wanted you to know.
‘Take Alice with you,’ she said. ‘Her calibre of demon was bred to survive the translation to the Mortal plane. She’s a rare one; the Lords Devilish killed off most of them because their minds aren’t quite right.’
‘That’s hardly an endorsement for recruitment!’
Actually, given how psychotically zealous most Glorian Justiciars were, maybe derangementwasa qualification worth considering.
Yet again, Hazidan had placed her hand on my cheek. She was becoming worryingly touchy-feeling in her dotage.
‘Do it for me, Cade. Do it for an old woman who’s been proven wrong so many times that all she’s got left is the faith that maybe even her worst mistakes, her most unforgivable errors in judgement, have a purpose. You owe me this much, Cade.’
Her ‘most unforgivable errors in judgement’, in case you missed it, included me. The old bully might have lost her eyes, but never her nerve.
‘Alice’ – her proper demonic name was probably the sound one makes when spewing blood and broken teeth – was yet again flying too far ahead.
I started running faster, trying to catch up– until my foot slipped on the glassy blackness of the path. Before I knew it, I was falling into the depths, leaving only my panicked shouts behind. Reaching out around me, I caught only empty space, as if I’d been dropped right in the centre of a canyon with no sides.
If only that had been true.
Without Tenebris’ blood to pacify the damned, the nearest grabbed me, pawing at my clothes, trying to rip them from my body, as if wearing them would somehow improve their Infernal existence. I felt teeth biting through my boots at the soles of my feet, and tongues licking at my neck, savouring the fear exuding from my pores.
This is it,I thought.This is where I’ve been headed all along, where I’ll end up when it’s all over.
Claws sharp as talons dug into my shoulder, piercing through the thick leather of my coat, tearing a second scream from me, and I screamed a third time as I was wrenched upwards, away from the hands and teeth and tongues of the damned, until I was dangling high above the writhing, moaning mass of abandoned humanity.
‘You should be more careful,’ my rescuer said as she dropped me unceremoniously back on the glassy black path. The gold fringes on her ivory justiciar’s shirt swatted me in the face as she ascended once again. I longed for a pair of scissors; I would have enjoyed clipping those stupid things– along with her wings. One thing about demoniacs, though: they can sense emotions, as if each one has its own unique smell. I guess I must have been stinking pretty badly.
‘Something you want to say to me, fallen one?’ she asked, turning in mid-air before winging back to land less than a foot from where I stood. The steel ribbon of her whip-sword slithered back inside the bone hilt and she sheathed it in the short scabbard she wore in the small of her back.
Fallen one.You know you’ve screwed up your life when a demon starts referring to you as‘fallen one’.
I didn’t so much resent her for having decided I was the lesser of Hazidan’s metaphorical progeny as for implying the two of us had anything in common at all. So I got in her face. ‘I’m thinking it’s best you and I have it out, here and now, before any confusion sets in.’
An eager and entirely unpleasant smile came to her features, the lines of her ritual scars contorting to add menace to her obvious disdain for me. ‘You believe you can best me in a duel?’
She unfurled her wings and took up a stance that had the points twisting towards me. I’ve no idea why demoniacs think showing off their wings makes them look tough. All it does is remind you that they’ve got these two flappy appendages that aren’t particularly good for combat but sure look pretty when they start flapping madly after you’ve lit them on fire.
‘Couldn’t care which of us is the better duellist,’ I informed her. ‘I’ve got business to take care of that doesn’t involve dealing with the demoniac equivalent of a petulant teenager trying to impress. . . actually, I’ve no idea who the hell you’re trying to impress. Regardless, since you seem determined to get me killed, I figured we could save some time and see if you’ve got the stones to take me on in afairfight.’
‘Trust me, fallen one, when I decide to ki—’
I decked her.
Yeah, it was a dirty move, but why did you think I made a point of asking for a fair fight, if not to use it to catch her off guard? Infernals are more durable than humans, other than the fact that they get sick and die pretty quickly if they set foot on Mortal soil, but Hazidan had made a point of teaching me both fencing and boxing. As effete wonderists go, I’ve got a pretty good right hook, and Alice nearly took a dive right there and then.
‘You hit me!’ When she spun back around, she had one hand covering her bleeding nose. ‘I think you broke it!’
‘Seems only right. You set me up to fall into the depths just so you could haul me back up and laugh in my face. A bloody nose is a fair exchange– and you Infernals are all about square deals, aren’t you?’
I kept my gaze soft, watching her wings for the slightest twitch that would tell me she was going to attack. That’s another flaw with wings: even the slightest move – like, say, reaching for the hilt of a whip-sword at your back – requires shifting them to keep your balance.
She’ll go for a distraction first. Hazidan always said the tongue can be as sharp a weapon as any blade.
Alice squeezed the bridge of her nose, snapping it back into place with a sickening crunch that almost but not quite hid the subsequent twitch of her left wing as her right hand reached back for the hilt of the whip-sword.
I punched her in the nose again, in the exact same spot.
