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Without doubt, that was the nicest thing anybody had ever said to me. Too bad it had come from a diabolic.
I didn’t bother thanking him. I stared at my little pipe for a moment, contemplating keeping it as a souvenir just in case we survived the battle tonight. I started to toss it away, then found I couldn’t. There was something about the existence of something so mundane– so lacking in purpose either glorious or vile– that felt reassuring right then.
‘I’m going to need a few spells for tonight,’ I said at last.
The diabolic looked a little hurt. No doubt he’d been expecting that the two of us would bare our souls to each other– figuratively, rather than literally– and talk about how we were just two half-decent beings caught in the machinations of the great powers. But I had business to conduct up in that fortress on the hill, where seven wonderists who were far more powerful than my ragtag little gang were putting the finishing touches to whatever gate would enable the Pandorals to enter this plane and make themselves gods or slavers or whatever they’d decided they’d be. Who knows? Maybe I should have been asking myself whether humanity might not be a bit better off with someone else guiding our affairs.
‘So about those spells?’ I said.
Tenebris nodded, and for the next half an hour we went back and forth over my particular needs. The diabolic made a show of trying to negotiate me down from my demands, but a show is all it was. We both knew I was doing the bidding of this little alliance between the Lords Devilish and Celestine, so there wasn’t really any point in denying me what I needed.
‘Cade?’ he started as I turned to go. ‘Good luck tonight.’
One of the things you learn becoming a justiciar is to listen for the things people say that don’t need to be said: the extra word here, the repetition of something they already told you, the forced smile or awkward handshake. I guess I should have been flattered that both my training and my instincts told me that his parting words were signs that he really was my friend, and that some part of his diabolical heart wished things could be different.
‘No such thing as luck,’ I told him. ‘Just angels and demons putting their thumbs on the scale.’
They weren’t bad words to part on. Just because you’re heading off to meet your doom doesn’t mean you can’t do it with a dash of style.
That’s why it was too bad that by the time I got to Alice’s cottage there were tears streaming down my face, and the moment I stepped inside, I dropped to my knees and wept like a child.
‘What is it?’ she asked, wings twitching in awkward discomfort. ‘Has someone injured you?’
I didn’t know how to answer that question. How do you explain to a demon that you’ve come to realise nothing you ever did mattered– that all your petty efforts at freedom have served only to make you a more valuable slave?
She came closer, and I took her hand and pressed it to my cheek. The hard, leathery feel of her skin was a reassuring proof that life was exactly as callused as I’d come to believe. I clung to her as though she were a rope tied to the shore, keeping me from being swept away by the tide.
‘Why have you come to me?’ she asked. ‘If you seek comfort, why not go to Corrigan or the girl– or even the angelic?’
‘Please,’ I cried, ‘please, tell me Hazidan sent you here for a reason. Tell me the old woman saw all of this coming, that somehow it all fits into one of her damned conspiracy theories. Tell me our mentor had a plan.’
The demon girl stopped pulling away and instead just stood there a while listening to me weep. At last she rested her other hand on top of my head as if in blessing.
‘Oh, Cade,’ she said. ‘She warned me you’d get like this.’
Chapter 43
The Tunnel
Midnight came and the seven of us set out on a mission that could either have been described as a noble quest to protect all humanity from supernatural forces of unimaginable power, or just plain old-fashioned murder. One thing it would never be described as, however, was pleasant.
‘How did I not call this?’ Corrigan grumbled as we trudged up the treacherous stony slope of the sewer tunnel, stooped over like old men to keep from bashing our skulls on the rough-hewn rock overhead. ‘Follow a rat, wind up knee-deep in shit.’
‘Follow a ratmage,’ corrected Aradeus with what even I considered unseemly joviality, ‘and you find the surest way to penetrate a fortress undetected.’
‘Surest way to drown,’ Corrigan countered. ‘Inshit.’
I was no happier with our surroundings than he was, but my deeper concern was that none of us could detect any spells preventing our passage. There were no mystical barriers, no aetheric alarms. Was Pandoral magic so foreign to the multitude of planes to which the seven of us were attuned thatnoneof us could sense its effects? Whatever saga was written to commemorate our daring crusade was going to be awfully short if we snuck all the way up a sewer tunnel only to find ourselves surrounded by battle-ready mages with nothing to fight them off with but the stench emanating from our clothes.
‘My deepest apologies,’ Aradeus told Galass, who was stumbling a little drunkenly through the malodorous river of filth. ‘I promise we haven’t much further to travel along this admittedly unpleasant path I’ve selected for us.’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said, gazing absently around the tunnel. Her features were unnaturally pale under the faint glow of Alice’s whip-sword. The blade was now only a few inches long, illuminating our way forward as it weaved in the air like a candle flame. ‘The sewer carries the scents of all those who once lived in the fortress. It’s. . . intoxicating.’
She’s not a vampire,I reminded myself.She’s just confused by the aftershocks of her blood magic. She won’t suddenly switch sides in the middle of the fight to drink your blood.
Corrigan shot me a look that told me he knew what I was thinking and wasn’t nearly so optimistic.
‘Quiet now,’ Aradeus said, turning to face us. He looked down at the palm of his gloved hand, where even now multiple lines were appearing, marking the routes of half a dozen rats scurrying along the passages of the keep. Their trails were becoming a map on Aradeus’ gloved hand. ‘My little spies are seeking out these gates to the Pandoral realm the brothers have been constructing.’
