Page 22 of The Malevolent Eight
The Spellslinger was waiting for me outside.
The town, on the other hand. . .
Chapter 12
Reminiscences of Futures Past
I stepped out of the restaurant and into Armageddon.
Weeks ago, before the folks of Hope’s Creek had signed their pact with the Infernals, this place had been a crisscross of narrow footpaths and muddy cart tracks. After the town’s rebirth as Seduction, the corps of Demoniac Erectors had littered the soil with burrowing worms that dug deep into the ground, oozing oils which swelled into buildings of gleaming onyx and flagstone streets as magnificent, in their way, as anything the Auroral Engineers could conjure. The promise of palaces, mansions and stores worthy of merchant lords was no lie. Really, if the Lords Devilish and Lords Celestine could have found fulfilment in devoting their efforts to urban improvement projects, everyone would be so much better off.
It was all gone now, though: the black-marble manors, the glittering boulevards. . . all reduced to a charred hellscape. Crumbling ruins as far as the eye could see were interspersed with the bones of desiccated corpses sticking out at all angles from the cracked stones, as though time and cruel fate were slowly swallowing them into oblivion.
‘I honestly wasn’t sure whether you’d come after me,’ the Spellslinger said. The tan waistcoat and the plum silk shirt beneath were the only bright spots of colour among a thousand shades of grey, the only sign of life. ‘My employers told me you were impulsive– that you couldn’t leave anything alone. They said there’s this part of you that knows if you stop racing from one catastrophe to another long enough to think things through, you’ll realise that some futures aren’t futures at all; they’re just histories waiting to be written.’
I glanced around at the devastation she’d wrought in less time than it had taken me to get up from my chair and follow her out of the restaurant. ‘This performance art thing you’ve got going on would be more impressive without the shitty poetry,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘It’s not a performance, Cade. It’s not an illusion or a trick. Some futures aren’t foretold, they’re already there, just waiting for you to catch up to them.’ She kicked at a skeletal hand buried in the ground. The finger bones scattered. ‘I just. . . brought this particular one to us.’
The air was stale, like a burned-out house months after the last smouldering embers have died out. I slowed my breathing, closing myself off to the stench even as I opened myself up to my attunement. The breach between planes erupted quicker than usual. I guess that was thanks to the Spellslinger having rid me of any fear of the outcome these particular esoteric energies always seemed to crave. ‘Any last words?’
‘Last words?’ she repeated. Her chuckle was meant to sound light-hearted, but I caught the tinge of something underneath. An ache, maybe. A regret. Only now did I notice among the coal-black ruins at her feet six shadows, contorted, unmoving, save for the way the silhouettes almost quivered in the breeze. ‘Funny how your mind works, Cade. It’s like those same instincts that blind you to your own destiny somehow figure out what’s about to happen before you do.’
Back when I was a Glorian Justiciar, my magic mostly came in the form of Auroral blessings: gifts of mystical armour or visions or really, really cool ways to smite people. When I took up Infernalism, each spell had to be purchased– usually through Tenebris– and then inscribed as an ebony tattoo on my flesh, to be awakened, cast and spent only once. The spells I accessed through this latest attunement were neither bestowed nor bought. Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure how the channelling of the inexplicable physical laws across the breaches I opened worked. All I knew was that this so-called Spellslinger wasn’t the only one who could pervert reality and shock the soul.
They say that to a guy with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The power I’d allowed into myself in that fortress in the Blastlands when I’d placed myself inside the coffin laughingly called ‘the Empyrean Physio-Thaumaturgical Device of Attunal Transmutation’– well, let’s just say I came out carrying one seriously nasty hammer.
‘Go on,’ the Spellslinger said, theatrically bracing herself. ‘Hit me.’
I couldn’t tell if she was trying to be funny, because my ears were filled with theclack-clack-clackingof what sounded like an ever-growing horde of beetles scrabbling over one another in a rush to escape the confines of my being. Their urgency quickly became a need too strong to resist– but then, like the Infernals say, ‘Temptation wouldn’t be tempting if there wasn’t something enticing about it.’
With that piece of dubious ethical philosophy firmly in mind, I let go of all the questions I had for this strange woman, the past she said we shared that I couldn’t remember and my qualms about unleashing forces over which my control was at best speculative. Then I blasted her from existence.
Coruscating black waves rippled out of me, becoming an ocean swell that rose up high, cresting far above the two of us before it came crashing down upon the Spellslinger. The flood hardened around her, burying her beneath a mound of pure onyx, only to then explode, unleashing a flock of tiny birds whose talons ripped her apart, one layer at a time. First, they tore away her clothes and skin. Next, muscle, sinew and internal organs unravelled into ribbons that the black birds gobbled up greedily. The bones, they pecked into dust, then scattered away with the beatings of their wings. But there’s more to a living being than mere flesh. Several of the birds began catching strands of the Spellslinger’s spirit in their beaks. They darted round and round in a counter-clockwise spiral of unmaking, leaving the rest of their flock to shred the last bits of her memories and emotions that had been wrapped around her essence like cloth-of-gold. Stripped of that last protective sheath, her soul became visible to the naked eye: a perfect, living gem free of sin or virtue, formed of pure consciousness. The birds crowded around it, squeezing themselves inside, bloating and swelling until at last what should have been unbreakable exploded into tiny motes of ecclesiasm.
I watched as those last motes of sentience drifted apart, losing the coherence that had, until I came along, constituted all the Spellslinger had been, all that she might have become. Only the devastation remained, along with the six contorted shadows ringing the spot where she’d stood, almost as if they awaited her return.
‘What are you supposed to be?’ I asked the shadows quietly.
It occurred to me then that my unmaking of the Spellslinger had taken at least a couple of minutes. Yet, I was standing alone out here in the wreckage she’d left behind. Why hadn’t any of the others joined me?
‘Nowthatwas impressive,’ said a voice that lacked the benefit of vocal cords, throat or lungs. The sound was coming from other things: the breeze whistling through the empty street, tiny bits of rock and stone crumbling off fallen walls, the trickling of filthy water down uneven ground. ‘I mean, I’ve seen some spellcraft in my time, but—Hold on a second, will you? We can’t have a proper conversation with me having to talk this way.’
She remade herself piece by piece, element by element. The floating motes of ecclesiasm returned, whirled around one another as if pulled by the increasing gravity of her will. Her spirit followed, sewing itself back together from recollections and thoughts that, once destroyed, should have been impossible to reassemble. Bones grew from the dust, flesh bloomed from droplets of moisture. Empty air spun itself into cotton, silk and leather that left her clothed exactly as she’d been when first she’d stepped inside the restaurant. The last piece of her remaking was her smile, which shone bright as before, and I would have sworn was meant just for me.
‘What are you?’ I asked.
The Spellslinger tugged on her waistcoat as she had once before. The gesture was so mundane, so. . .human, that it frightened me. ‘Oh, you know, it’s like I told you. I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, hoping he’ll tell her she’s the most beau—’
‘What are you, really?’
‘Eternal,’ she said with a shrug as if it were no big thing, then added, almost as an afterthought, ‘For now.’
‘That’s not what “eternal” means.’
Rather than dispute that, she tugged on her waistcoat once more, frowning. ‘Did I get something wrong? The fabric feels tighter for some reason.’
I had no clue what she meant, but I make it a policy never to let people see that I’m in knee-trembling awe of them. ‘I think maybe you made your boobs too big.’
