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‘He looks like one of his progenitors mated with a rabbit.’
‘Let’s hope that’s the biggest of our problems. Anything else?’
Alice glared at me with those daunting, angular demoniac eyes of hers, the tightness of her lips pressed together like she was just waiting for me to mock her so she’d have an excuse to draw that bone-hilted whip-sword of hers from its sheath at her back and disembowel me.
A funny thing happens when somebody stares at you longer than they should: you start wondering if maybe it means something other than what they want you to think. Alice looked frozen in time, this brittle ice sculpture of a smug, disdainful captain preparing to pass judgement on a soldier who’d deserted his troop in the midst of battle. I’d seen that same look a dozen times on other Glorian Justiciars. I think they practise it in the mirror. But Alice held it too long.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
The scowl twisted into a sneer and I braced myself for the inevitable recitation of my own flaws, but then something cracked. She turned away from me quickly and resumed her soldierly march towards the town at a pace that would soon have her overtaking the rest of our crew.
‘I don’t want to let her down, that’s all.’
Girl,I thought, watching the wings on Alice’s back twitch as she trudged with violent determination past the others,Hazidan got to you bad.
Chapter 30
The Blood Soot
The first glimmers of dawn transformed the dusty haze between us and our destination, painting it the colour of rose petals. Technically, ‘breach dross’ only described the effects of conflicting spells fracturing the barriers between realities on the terrain. But the cloying, ashy fog filling the air the closer we got to Mages’ Grave was mixed with the ground-up flakes of skin and bone from two thousand dead wonderists and the ecclesiasm left behind by their ruined souls, and it was all bound together by the perversion of nature caused by the breach dross. It settled on everything, strangling most plant life and making seeds and animals sterile, only to then be stirred up and redistributed by the wind so it could begin the process all over again.
That morning, seeing it up close and in daylight for the first time, feeling it on my face and hands, I coined my own term, saying out loud, ‘Blood soot,’ just to hear how it sounded.
‘There’s some kind of human settlement up ahead,’ Alice called back, ignoring me.
She was now in the lead, always staying a few yards ahead of us, clomping along with a resentful belligerence and a periodic twitching of her wings which, like the rest of her– like all of us– were caked in powdery red. The others had pretty much taken to ignoring her, preferring the aura of sullen silence to having to actually deal with her lousy attitude.
Well, all except for Aradeus, of course, who was taking courtesy and comity to unnatural heights. ‘You can see through all this fog? Your eyesight is truly magnificent, Alice.’
‘Don’t be stupid, rodent boy,’ she snarled back. ‘Sharper eyes don’t let you see through particles filling the air.’ She tapped a finger to her nostril. ‘Can you not detect the stench of your kind coming from up ahead?’
‘She’s right,’ Shame said. The blood soot had turned the irises and whites of her eyes golden, which was far less pretty and a lot more unnerving than you might expect. Her right hand was stretched out before her as if she were walking blind. ‘I can feel the vibrations of many human souls from here.’
The physics of that claim struck me as dubious, especially as vibrations don’t work that way, but I wasn’t in the mood to create any more friction in this unhappy crew.
‘How far away are we?’ I asked.
The angelic’s fingers twitched for a moment. ‘No more than a quarter of a mile.’
I breathed a sigh of relief. Actually,breathingwas a polite word for the incessant hacking; the air in our lungs felt like shards of glass. I was looking forward to leaving this damned and forsaken desert clinging so tightly to my boots that they threatened to come off at every step. ‘So it shouldn’t take us more than ten or fifteen minutes,’ I said.
‘Doubt we’ll get there before nightfall at this plodding pace,’ Alice grumbled.
‘You could always fly ahead and scout the place out for us,’ Corrigan said, shooting me a grin. ‘Go on then, great demon justiciar, flap those resplendent wings of yours and fly away.’
‘Don’t,’ I warned him.
Alice tried to spin to face him, drawing her whip blade as she did. I’ve no doubt it would have been terribly impressive, had her right boot heel not been trapped in the clay. Her leg twisted awkwardly and she lost her balance. Whip-swords aren’t quite so threatening when their wielders have just fallen on their arses in the muck.
‘Enough of this, all of you,’ Aradeus said pleadingly.
He was walking with one arm around Galass’ shoulder, his free hand wiping the blood soot away from her face with a now filthy handkerchief.
She’d been sweating more than the rest of us, and over the past hour had begun to shake uncontrollably. With trembling fingers she wiped again at her lips. ‘The ashes keep trying to get inside my mouth,’ she murmured. She’d said the same thing at least a dozen times now. ‘They want to get inside me.’
Aradeus shot me a questioning look, but all I could offer was a shrug. Breach dross was not one of my specialist subjects. Nothing was going to help Galass until we severed her attunement to blood magic.
I wiped at the muck clinging to my own lips, reminding myself that when people like me try to do the right thing, more often than not we leave only ashes behind.
