Chapter 2
The Aftermath
Dawn found Malachy Bane as it had every day for the three months of his imprisonment: exercising in the confines of his Tribunal cell to stave off the atrophy of his body and mind.
He pushed himself harder this morning, doing chin ups until his calloused fingers could no longer grasp the stone overhead.
Yet his mind still churned in a path as worn as the rug underfoot, marking where he had failed to outpace his mounting frustration.
Minutes ticked by like eons in his four-walled world.
Locked inside a travertine fortress at the bottom of a flooded quarry, Malachy felt the full weight of stone and water, pressing in on him.
He gazed out the narrow cell window. Beyond the Master Aeromancer’s enchanted dome, the sky was made not of air but water. Shimmering ripples of light cast the sprawling wings of the Tribunal compound in an otherworldly glow.
A pretty cage for trapping the Realmwalker.
When Bittenbinder had dragged Malachy from London to Rome in February, the Masters had dithered and deliberated on which technicality to strangle him with for the London Nightmare.
It was a unique blend of incompetence and maliciousness hey had become increasingly familiar with as the days stretched to weeks, then months, exiled in administrative purgatory.
Eventually the Tribunal had settled on his alleged crime of no pre-authorization. Malachy had solved the problem of a body-snatching dream demon for them, but he had not asked their permission first.
Through the cell window, he had watched the anemic gardens outside shrug off the coat of winter and bask in the filtered light of spring.
Crocuses now emerged from the thawing earth, growing incongruously in the watery hollows.
Bare branches, like outstretched arms, reached towards the fleeting rays of sunshine, unfurling jaundiced leaves.
The Tribunal had been masterful in doling out their punishment, simple in its cruelty, to lock the portal mage who could traverse anywhere in a cell welded shut by the iron bars of bureaucracy.
Malachy had a century’s worth of practice playing waiting games, but there hadn’t been a woman waiting for him then. A woman whose fragile trust in him unraveled as all the distances between them grew.
Cora.
A quarter of a year underwater had given Malachy ample time to study the alchemy of what she did to him.
He lived off the echoed sensations of memories like an addict in the throes of withdrawal.
Memories he tortured himself with during the long days and unending nights.
The nuances of her laugh, her taste, occupied the fevered fantasies of his lonely mind.
He took out his favorite memory like a photograph, worn smooth by the caress of his mind’s eye into dreamlike impressions and smudges of sensation.
Cora had fallen asleep facing him in his four-poster bed, and he had awoken to their fingers entwined on the sheets between them.
She had reached for his hand in the night and held it until morning.
The precious weight of her trust had crushed him.
He’d laid there beside her, hand in hand, his heart clenching at the tenderness of her hope, the small miracle of it.
Now, the hairpin turn of fate that had brought them together had wrenched them apart with a cruel twist. Malachy felt like a shadow parading as a man. When—if—the Tribunal released him, would Cora even recognize him?
Time and distance apart had sharpened his longing into a knife’s point. The urge to somehow escape to London, incurring the Tribunal’s wrath be damned, was overpowering.
There was only one way in and out of the Tribunal compound, warded against his Choromancy.
Even if he made it to the heavily guarded Gateway, there were still fathoms of water enchanted by the Master Hydromancer for opaqueness and by the Master Memnomancer for forgetfulness.
He’d forget what he was doing and drown long before he breached the flooded quarry’s surface.
Malachy was well and truly trapped, by stone and water and fucking paperwork. With a growl of frustration, he paced the bars of his cage, following the path he’d worn into the rug.
He had not wasted all that time confined to a cell, of course.
Solitude had enabled him to plot his revenge against the Tribunal in cold, exacting detail.
Even from afar, he was moving the pieces of his schemes with elegant strategy.
Payback against the Masters would be slow and agonizing, his favorite kind of revenge.
His schemes were meaningless, though, if the Tribunal executed him for the London Nightmare fiasco.
The knock on his cell door came like clockwork. The heavy glide of locks, then the same well-armed Ferromancer guard entered and dropped the same tray of assorted gruel onto the desk. Beige mush slopped onto Malachy’s carefully organized letters and notes.
“Do I have any correspondence?” Malachy asked, as he did every morning.
The guard tossed a crinkled envelope beside the gruel.
The Tribunal no longer bothered concealing how they pawed through his mail, sifting through each line with a fine-toothed comb and redacting intentionally vague statements further.
The words on that already opened letter had been pored over by countless prying eyes before they found his own. Malachy was far from thrilled.
Sick anticipation filled him as he reached for the letter, followed by too-familiar disappointment. It wasn’t from Cora. It was never from Cora. John O’Leary, his dutiful solicitor, had written another business update.
Her silence—the purest misery—had slowed time to a crawl.
On the first day of his detainment, he had sent Cora a telegram about his inconclusive business with the Tribunal, knowing scant details would slip past the Masters’ watchful eyes, if they sent it at all.
A terse telegram was better than nothing.
If she believed he’d abandoned her for Rome, he might as well snip each fraying thread that held her together himself.
No response had come. Something had twisted in his guts, fanged and foreboding.
Next, he had risked the Tribunal’s ire and sent Cora a letter.
Awful that he could traverse across Europe in an instant, but a letter was all he could manage.
It had been a delicate balance of saying what he wanted and saying what he could, which wasn’t much.
After careful deliberation, he had signed the letter with the truth: Yours, MB.
Days passed. There was no reply.
His mind had run rampant with the possibilities as his nerves unraveled in the growing silence. A carousel of nightmares branded the inside of his eyelids—Cora crying out to him, and he was helpless to help her. Cora in a clawfoot bathtub, slipping beneath waters that ran crimson with her blood.
He had sent her more telegrams and letters as winter unfurled into spring, all without response. As the days mounted, so had his desperation. Was Cora avoiding him, or was the Tribunal not sending his messages to her?
They were sending his other correspondence, though. Turning back to O’Leary’s recent letter, Malachy scanned the words written in a coded Irish they had developed during the Great War.
The solicitor's news, as usual, was grim. The mid-Atlantic Ocean portals that ensured Malachy’s ships arrived ahead of schedule and out of the authority’s increasing grasp were faltering.
Without the Profane magic of Koschei’s Egg to maintain the space-distorting enchantments, his smuggling operation into the Prohibition-parched States had slowed to a dribble.
Malachy had not allotted for this scale of disaster and cursed his lack of foresight. Imprisoned as he was, there was next to nothing he could do about it. He schooled a blank expression, though he needn’t have bothered. The guard was already turning towards the door, keys in hand.
“Escort me to the library,” Malachy said. Time outside his cell was a privilege that had taken weeks of tediously good behavior to earn.
“For an hour, Bane, and only an hour. No more of your aimless meandering about.”
On his not-so-aimless meanders, Malachy had tested the bars on his cage, learning which steps out of line made the ever-vigilant guards descend on him like bloodhounds. Under their scrutiny, he had made a mental map of the Tribunal compound and eavesdropped on succulent crumbs of gossip.
The guard motioned him out of his cell. Malachy drew his first full breath in days.
He now had these little escorted walks down to an art.
A half hour of shambling through the stone corridors in the general direction of the library was all it took for the guard to lose interest and hang back chatting with the fellow guards.
Today, it only took twenty-three minutes. The guard was getting complacent. Good.
Malachy was inching beyond the chatting guards’ line of sight, towards the library for plausible deniability, when he overheard voices. Through the crack in a heavy door, the shadows of figures shifted. His steps were soundless as he sidled within hearing distance but out of sight.
“The whispers are growing louder,” came the musical voice of Sakura, the Master Phytomancer, as susurrus as the leaves that followed her plant magic like the sun. “Rumors of demons are spreading like plague.”
The hair on the nape of Malachy’s neck stood on end. After ensuring the guards were still preoccupied around the corner, he eased himself closer to the door.
“This puts growing pressure on all mages,” came the accented voice of Nastassja, the Master Choromancer. Light glimmered on the severe bob of silver hair framing the portal mage’s angular features. “We can’t keep demons a secret forever.”