Page 27 of The Malevolent Eight
‘Why would I take being murdered in cold blood by my best friend personally?’
He nodded. ‘Exactly. So, what’s our next move?’
As it happened, the first step in my– only slightly adjusted brilliantly masterminded plan– would require uncovering precisely why the Spellslinger had such a. . . hard-on for me. Regrettably, that meant digging into my past as a Glorian Justiciar and therefore I required the metaphysical assistance of a group of people who would be disinclined to do me any favours.
‘We need to set up a meeting,’ I informed Corrigan as we made our way back to the others– assuming they hadn’t come to their senses and abandoned us already.
‘A meeting? With whom?’
‘My old bosses. We’re going to pay a visit to the Lords Celestine.’
Chapter 14
Words of Glory
One enters the Presence of the Celestines by stepping inside the Auroral Cathedral through the Gates of Humility. The last part is certainly true, but it leaves out the bit about firstbuildingthe gates– not to mention erecting the whole damned cathedral.
‘Remember the good old days, when we used to blow things up for profit rather than constructing shitty pigpens with our bare hands?’ Corrigan asked as he pounded an eight-foot-long wooden post into the muddy ground of an abandoned field roughly twelve miles outside of the Infernal town of Seduction. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, which he attempted to dry on the damp, matted hair of his naked chest. ‘Also, is there some reason we’re not allowed to wear clothes?’
‘I thought you liked walking around naked,’ I reminded him. ‘“Got to let the dragon out of his cave now and then, Cade,”’ I mimicked in a rendition of his boisterous tone that even I had to admit was atrocious.
‘This situation is entirely inappropriate,’ said Alice, who was doing an admirable job of using her bat wings to hide various parts of her demoniac anatomy while tying the end of a length of silver ribbon to one of the posts. She unspooled another twelve yards of ribbon and stretched it to the next post.
‘An unexpectedly prudish point of view,’ Shame observed, obviously amused by her own body, now determinedly heavyset and ageing, various fleshy parts swinging to and fro as she worked. ‘One would expect Infernals to be more comfortable with their bodies, given their philosophical predilections for carnality.’
‘Says the angelicwhore,’ Alice countered. ‘And a typically bigoted response from one whose own species barely think for themselves.Iam a Paladin Justiciar,’ she declared proudly, only to discover that heroic poses caused her wings to flex, which in turn exposed the rest of her body to public scrutiny. ‘I hate you all,’ she muttered, and went back to tying ribbons to wooden posts.
‘I have offended her,’ Shame said to me with a sigh. ‘Again.’
I watched for a moment as Alice finished knotting a ribbon as if she were strangling someone to death. ‘It’s not you. Alice was convinced by my old mentor, Hazidan Rosh, the most brilliant, inspiring and utterly perverse human being ever to walk the earth, that even a demoniac could become a Paladin Justiciar if that’s what she chose to be.’
‘So your mentor deceived her as part of some sort of game or ploy?’
‘No,’ I replied with more certainty than I had the right to. ‘Hazidan was the best of us. The perfect Justiciar. She saw the law as an instrument of restitution, not condemnation. The old woman would fight anyone who denied that redemption was the ultimate proof of free will.’
‘But, a moment ago, you claimed she was perverse?’
I smiled, unable, for once, to push back the memories of my years with Hazidan, fighting alongside her, being manipulated into questioning everything and forced to see that the very beliefs I clung to were shackles I was tightening around my own wrists.That’swhy she rebelled against the Celestines and led me to abandon the order.That’swhy she got it into her head to convince an innocent young demoniac that she could become the first in a new order of Justiciars.
Except you’re not here to form that order, Master. You’re in hell, and I’mstuck here trying to save the world you left behind.
‘Hazidan was perverse, indeed,’ I said.
Shame was staring at me, watching my eyes, my mouth, as if the fractional movements of the muscles in my face might contain the answers to all her questions about humanity. ‘I fear that I will never understand your kind.’
‘Do you want to?’ I asked.
‘I. . .’ She hesitated a moment, then, as if confessing to some terrible crime, said, ‘I do not wish to be alone for ever,’ and walked away from me.
‘Give her time,’ Aradeus said, taking a break from trimming the branches off our freshly hewn wooden posts. Through what I had to assume was some heretofore unrecorded form of rat magic, he managed to use his rapier to hack off the branches without looking like an idiot. ‘However well she hides it, Shame cannot forget the atrocities the boy Fidick, through the vilest of mystical means, forced her to commit on our first mission together.’
What that little pissant kid had done to Shame, forcing her to use her flesh-sculpting abilities to transform a coven of mages called the Seven Brothers into grotesque parodies of humanity, their jaws stretched open wide enough to enable the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish to walk through their gaping mouths, stepping across distended tongues like red carpets, was a memory I only tolerated when I paired it with the fantasy of finding Fidick again one day and smashing that beatific, flawless face into a paste that I swear I would use to polish my boots with.
Aradeus must’ve caught my reaction and mistaken it for sympathy because he nodded solemnly. ‘That a child who appeared so innocent could prove so callous has left our comrade. . . unsure about what it means to be Mortal. Yet there is no doubt in me that Shame will find her own way to humanity as we all do, through joy, through sorrow, through laughter and, above all else, through love.’
The problem with irreconcilably noble people is that you can’t tell whether they actually believe the things they say or whether it’s only that they’re stupid enough to fall in love with beings incapable of returning those feelings. ‘Shame is more than seven thousand years old,’ I reminded him. ‘Some habits die hard.’
Naturally, he treated this observation as a testament of faith that the enormity of the challenge was proof of its righteousness. ‘Indeed!’ he declared, resuming his chopping, only to stop again. ‘On the subject of ancient Auroral beings, precisely how does one commune with the Lords Celestine by constructing a dodecahedron-shaped pigpen?’
