Page 1 of The Malevolent Eight
Chapter 1
Epitaph
Can you hear it yet? A sound so subtle your heart mistakes it for the first blush of dawn before the sun kisses the darkness from the horizon.
Or maybe it’s more like the innocent joy of a puppy licking your face. What? You don’t like puppies licking your face? Fine, it’s a cat. Imagine a sound that reminds you of a furry kitty-cat head nuzzling your cheek. Can we get down to business now?
Envision a blanket of golden sand beneath your feet. Look down and watch the breeze sending thousands of perfect crystalline grains skipping across a pristine desert, dancing to unheard rhythms. It’s in your body now, this song that slips past the ears to echo deep in your bones. Lyrics written in a language never before spoken in this land whisper a thousand nuanced meanings that will thrum for ever inside your heart.
What shall we call this immaculate love song, this clarion call to the soul? Some have named it the Ballad of the Celestines, others, the Sublime Symphony.
Me? I call it the sound of angels being tortured to death.
‘Well, fuck me,’ Corrigan said, collapsing the three brass tubes of his spyglass and tucking the device into the bandolier across his chest. Sparks of indigo magic tickled the braids of his beard, illuminating his onyx-black skin and the unpleasant gleam in his grin. ‘That’s some nasty devilry right there.’
When a Tempestoral mage refers to something as ‘nasty’, you can skip right past words like ‘terrifying’ or ‘horrific’ and jump right to—
‘Obscene,’ Galass murmured. Pale arms crossed over the sleeveless silver gown she’d worn when she was still a Sublime: one of the Mortal handmaidens of the Aurorals. It wasn’t the chill desert air making the slender seventeen-year-old shiver, and lacking Corrigan’s spyglass, she hadn’t yet seen the atrocities unfolding a quarter of a mile down the road from us. But Galass was a blood mage, a sanguinalist, if you want to get technical about it;her mystical attunement to the flow of life here in the Mortal realm left her particularly sensitive to death and torment. The tresses of her hair, usually a dark brown, turned scarlet as they began to weave and whirl in the air like asps waiting to strike– never a good omen with blood mages, who tend to be borderline lunatics at the best of times.
‘We’ve seen worse,’ said Alice, adding that derisive snort she used as punctuation when addressing. . . well, pretty much everybody. The demoniac unwound the silver ribbon of her whip-sword in preparation for the mayhem awaiting us down the road. Despite being a denizen of the Infernal realm herself, Alice had been initiated into the rites of the Glorian Justiciars, making her the first and only demoniac to become a pompous, moralising prat. The bat wings that sprouted from her back– utterly useless on this plane of reality– flapped in anticipation of eviscerating her fellow Infernals.
‘Leave the child be,’ Shame admonished Alice with her customary patronising seen-it-all-before sigh. Shame never mean to be rude; it was just, as a former Angelic Emissary, she was roughly seven thousand years older than the rest of us. Shame and Alice never got along, despite both of them being traitors to their own realms. There’s nothing funnier than watching an ancient apostate angelic arguing theology with a teenaged demoniac desperately trying to prove herself as a Paladin Justiciar. Well, it’s funny until someone loses an eye. Or a soul.
‘Everybody keep your pants on,’ I said, not that anyone in this motley band of wonderists ever took my commands seriously. I pinched the tip of my forefinger against my thumb to form a loop, held it up to my right eye and whispered an apparently innocuous invocation that was far more despicable than the Infernal spells I used to cast before I’d become attuned to a much more dangerous mystical realm. Inside the circle formed by my thumb and forefinger, the empty air warped and quivered, defying the laws of physics to collapse the distance between us and the outskirts of a small town once called Pleasance and now. . . well, it hardly mattered what anyone called it any more. What was important was that I could now clearly see a contingent of low-level Infernal infantry putting the finishing touches on a singularly gruesome gallows.
Atop the platform, four Angelic Valiants– picture heroic, golden-skinned Auroral warriors deployed to smite the unworthy on behalf of the Lords Celestine– were screaming in helpless, transcendent harmonies. Around their necks hung nooses made of three-foot-long centipedes whose twitching stingers continually pierced their heavenly flesh. The unspeakable agony was tearing the Auroral Melody from their throats, and unlike my companions, I was familiar with the particular words being sung. The captives weren’t pleading for the Lords Celestine to rescue them; they were begging for oblivion.
‘How fare the noble townsfolk, Brother Cade?’ asked Aradeus in a voice exactly as smooth and pompous as that sentence suggests. Rat mages, being annoying, unconscionably handsome fops who think ‘swashbuckling’ is a valid lifestyle, refer to almost everyone as ‘noble’. Aradeus Mozen was as decent and valorous as he appeared, which made it hard for me to trust him with a mission like the one we were about to undertake.
‘The townsfolk are fine,’ I reassured him. ‘Getting nobler by the minute.’ Actually, the good citizens of Pleasance weren’t doing anything other than standing there in mute horror, witnessing the morbid performance unfolding before them. ‘The demoniacs aren’t interested in executing humans. The Lords Devilish probably orchestrated this little show to convince the townies to switch sides.’
The Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish had been plotting this ‘Great Crusade’ against each other for millennia, and ever since they’d found a way to enter the Mortal realm, they’d set about recruiting us humans to serve as cannon fodder in their no-holds-barred fight against one another. Their emissaries were going from one town to the next, offering the residents mystically erected temples and palaces. Of course, when bribery failed, they resorted to more brutal means of persuasion.
There was no one standing ready to pull the lever that would open the trapdoors beneath the angelics’ feet, finally allowing them to die. No, the demoniacs in their macabre military garb were too busy cheering and dancing around the gallows. I squeezed my thumb and forefinger tighter to focus my unnatural lens on a tall, leathery-white-skinned diabolic whose twin sets of ram and goat hornsmarked him as a mid-level Infernal Schemelord. Looking smugly pleased with the unfolding theatrics, the Schemelord was gathering golden tears from his captives into slender silver champagne flutes, which he passed one by one to his lower-ranked subjugators so they could toast this latest victory of the Lords Devilish against the Lords Celestine. Off to one side of the gallows, a demoniac Hellion– kind of like a sergeant only more prone to eating anyone who irritates them– was gleefully pounding a sign into the sand. The sign read, ‘Infernal Territory. Aurorals Will Be Fined.’
You’ve got to appreciate the sense of humour.
‘Well, oh mighty coven leader?’ Corrigan asked, jostling me with his elbow. The big thunderer was spoiling for a fight and resented having to wait for me to give the order. ‘Are we butchering some Infernals or not?’ He gestured to the final member of our unhallowed company. ‘Temper’s getting bored.’
‘Temper’ was what we called the seven-foot-tall furry—No, you know what? Better I leave that malicious monstrosity to introduce himself in his own inimitable style. Corrigan did have a point, though: if we waited too long to let Temper start killing things, he might reevaluate his position on whether we were friends or food.
‘Okay, fine,’ I agreed, mentally putting the finishing touches on my brilliant peace plan.
‘About fucking time,’ Corrigan muttered, stomping across the desert sands towards the gallows. The rest of us had to run to catch up with him before delivering what passes for a rallying cry amongst our little band of lunatic wonderists: ‘Peace at any price, no matter how many dumb fucks we have to kill!’
I know, needs work.
Pity the confused folk of the tragically named town of Pleasance; they were probably praying for a squadron of Glorian cavalry to come charging in on magnificent white steeds, their golden hooves barely touching the ground. What they got instead were seven emotionally unstable mercenary mages with unpredictable powers and severely compromised moral compasses.
What they got was the Malevolent Seven.
Chapter 2
Diplomacy
The rising sun at our backs sent our shadows stretching out before us like grim heralds as seven of the deadliest wonderists ever to wield magic strode towards the gallows. Well, six of us strode. One of us hopped. I’ll get to him in a minute.
The repugnant mechanics of angelic torture ground to a halt once the Infernal soldiers became aware of our approach. More than three dozen demoniac Hellions, Burrowmancers and Subjugators froze in contorted poses of gleeful dancing. The wailing of the captive Angelic Valiants quietened, leaving behind the aching memory of an Auroral melody that had once thrummed in my own heart. As for the townsfolk, they just stood there, watching and wondering what new misery was coming into their lives. The grimy stone walls of the settlement behind them were so weatherworn that a single decent catapult shot would have tumbled them to the ground– yet near the centre of town were spires of gleaming marble and alabaster rising up to kiss the sky.
