AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He walked backwards into the fortress and closed the doors shut. For the next several minutes, Aradeus and Alice were occupied holding back Corrigan to stop him from punching me in the face with a fistful of lightning. Once he’d stomped off, Galass said, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on. You heard the brothers: the Pandorals only need a place to live. This land is barely used and they agreed to every single one of your demands, even going so far as to offer you this “Apparatus” you’re all so mesmerised by. Why are you acting as if they’ve already betrayed their promises?’
I walked down the stairs and headed back along the path towards town, my mind already trying to work out a plan that had almost no chance of success.
‘Because they agreed to every single one of our demands,’ I explained.
Chapter 39
The Thunder
Wonderists tend to spend their last hours before a big fight sitting cross-legged in a dark room, meditating silently, attempting to gather the inner calm and focus that spellcasters need to survive the mayhem of battle. I found Corrigan in one of the abandoned cottages at the edge of town Vidra had offered us, slumped over a battered wooden table. The dusty green-glass bottle in his hand stank of a liquid whose alcoholic benefits had likely been achieved through festering rather than fermentation. At least half the remaining six bottles lined up on the table had been drunk dry.
‘So, you really are one of them,’ he said when he caught sight of me in the doorway. ‘Not just some guy who ran afoul of a bunch of Glorians, but an actual fucking justiciar.’
The obvious response was,Don’t pretend to be surprised. You knew. You always knew. You just pretended you didn’t so we could remain friends.
‘Iwasa justiciar,’ I corrected instead. ‘Past tense.’
He shook his head, turning to stare at the cottage wall, refusing to meet my eyes. ‘Except that’s not true, either, is it? One of those golden-haired chisel-jawed disembodied headsdeputisedyou. So now you’re not just a lying ex-Glorian Justiciar, you’re acurrentGlorian PaladinJusticiar.’ He made a show of holding up his hands. ‘You here to arrest me on a charge of blasphemous sorcery,Glorian Paladin Justiciar?’
‘Look, it was a long time ago. I was a kid, barely older than Galass, when I was recruited by the most remarkable woman I’d ever met. She convinced me I could be something more than a. . . You know what? It doesn’t matter any more.’
Corrigan took a long swig from the bottle, ignoring the dribble of thick brown liquid oozing into his beard. ‘Makes no difference. Once a lunatic religious wonderist hunter,alwaysa lunatic religious wonderist hunter.’
I couldn’t argue with that.
‘Should’ve killed you back at Lucien’s camp,’ he added with renewed spite, ‘let Locke and Narghan and Smoke and the others have their way with you. Instead, I killed them to protect you – killed all of them. I liked Lady Farts, you know – liked all of them. They were family.’
‘You hated them,’ I reminded him. ‘Half of them had tried to kill you on previous jobs, and Lady Smoke tried to do it on that one, as I recall.’
Corrigan scrunched up his mouth in a drunkard’s scowl, shaking his head. ‘Jus’ a misunderstanding. She was a good comrade. They were all good comrades.’
‘Even Zyphis?’
Corrigan took another swig, swishing the foul-smelling liquor in his mouth. Finally he swallowed, then winced. ‘Nowthatreedy little snake was going to have to die either way, so I’ll give you Zyphis.’
This was as much of an invitation as I was going to get. Slowly, keeping my hands loose in case things got ugly faster than I expected, I stepped over debris and sand to pick up a battered chair lying on its side. I set it upright and took a seat.
‘None of them were good guys, Corrigan. Good guys don’t survive in this profession.’
He gave a soundless snarl, then slammed the bottle on the table and slid it over to me. ‘Except you. Fucking Glorian Paladin Justiciar.Best of the best.Don’t you have to be, like, inhumanly holy to get that job?’
I felt certain the rancid booze was a test of some kind, so I drank it, and regretted my decision instantly. ‘I used to believe that– it’s what we told ourselves, anyway. But after a while, I couldn’t keep doing the job.’
‘What happened? You get an erection one day and they kicked you out for having illicit desires?’
‘I refused an assignment.’
‘Why?’
I slid the bottle back to him. ‘It’s a long story.’
He slid the bottle right back over to me. ‘Give me the short version. You might not have time for a longer one.’
How do you explain something like this to someone who’s never been part of the order? How do you share what it’s like to hear the Auroral Voice– which, by the way, hadn’t returned to me even though I’d been ‘deputised’– singing inside your skull, inside your very soul? What words can describe the sense of belonging, the absolute, unassailable conviction that you’re fighting for a great cause rather than selling yourself for money or more magic? How do you make someone understand what it feels like when all that gets taken away?
‘I thought the Celestines were the most noble, compassionate, loving beings in the universe,’ I said at last. ‘I believed our cause was righteous.’
‘So what happened?’
