Chapter 18
Echo Chamber of Dangerous Ideas
Malachy was running late to a meeting of heretics. While the Protean Society were meeting at an abandoned factory in Limehouse, he loitered at the Emerald Club, hoping to steal a glimpse of Cora. Pathetic, yet he couldn’t bring himself to leave until he saw her, until he knew she was all right.
An aching hollowness filled his chest since he had ended things before they could begin.
He remembered the taste of her on his tongue, the feel of her beneath his worshipful hands.
He had gotten so close, and now the possibility was nil because of him.
Devastation and damnation lurked in every dark corner of his mind.
Once again, he found himself clutching the malachite ring like a talisman. He could feel the emptiness on the other side, the lack of her. She had taken his ring off.
It was for the best, he reminded himself for the thousandth time.
He couldn’t risk losing her to Ghose, as he had lost everyone else he loved.
His mind stuttered at the last word—loved.
How easily it had come, a word he had not used in seventy years, and likely wouldn’t for the next seventy.
A wasteland of disillusionment stretched before him.
In the past week, they had both taken pains to avoid each other. An easy enough feat, despite the ache clawing inside his chest, with all the catastrophes unfolding around them.
Planning was his antidote to uncertainty, to the crushing sense of powerlessness holding him down like a fist. He pored over his ledgers, trying to distill his problems into neat rows and columns, but the comfort of numbers—their simple rules and defined relationships—eluded him.
No matter his cleverness, he couldn’t outthink his former Master.
Ghose always played several steps ahead in a game with rules of his own making.
Ghose remained crouched at the edge of his awareness, a phantom that dogged his every step.
The demon needed not just a Necromancer but his Necromancer to resurrect the missing half of his spirit, and Malachy would be damned if he let Ghose get to Cora.
He wouldn’t be caught unprepared again, although the gun in his shoulder holster and the magic in his veins failed to reassure him.
Skull full of dark musings, he left his office for the club’s inviting jazz and the possibility of glimpsing Cora before the cursed Protean Society meeting.
Next week, the club’s doors would reopen to the public and recommence the promotion of sin and enabling of vices. Tonight, the club’s disreputable delights were open only to mages with the passcode. As he drifted through the late-night crowd, his gaze swept over the club and landed on her.
One glance of Cora razed the walls he had rebuilt around his heart. She sat near the back, a part of but apart from the others drinking and laughing around the table. She stared unseeing at some middle distance, looking as forlorn as wilted flowers on a grave.
The ache in his chest tightened like a winch. Each second he couldn’t pry his eyes away from her was an eternity in the hell of his black heart. Every line of sorrow she couldn’t hide might as well have been carved by his own hand. He had hurt her, and it no longer mattered why.
After everything Cora had been through, she deserved better than him.
Her eyes snapped to him. That glare withered his bollocks from across the club.
Like a coward, he slipped away without a word.
Outside, Malachy traversed to Limehouse. The district had been a behemoth of manufacturing during the war, belching prosperity from its coal-fired bellies. Now, it sat abandoned after the war’s boom had busted, haunted by the ghosts of Industry and Progress.
The streetlamps cast a spectral glow in the fog.
Alone in the rising dark, Malachy felt the hair on the back of his neck rise with each step towards the address Sloane had given him for the Protean Society meeting.
He felt the watchful weight of unseen eyes upon him.
Skirting the edge of paranoia, he searched the fog for shapes and froze.
Was that a figure emerging from the mist?
No, the fog merely conspired with the night to twist sinuous shadows into Ghose’s form. Malachy was jumping at shadows. Tired and heartsick, his nerves and the night had put him on edge. He shoved his hands in his pockets and continued on.
According to Sloane, the Proteans met at a different location each time. The address was never written, only spoken. Tonight, they had chosen a suitably derelict warehouse. On its soot-stained brick face the windows were smashed in like dark, gaping mouths.
Unease settled like stones in his stomach. Malachy wondered what grim surprises this meeting might have in store. If the rumors were true, Ari Razaq was running not only Julian’s gang but the Proteans, as well. The Umbramancer was a well-connected shadow amongst shadows, where demons dwelled.
The basement door, the only functional entrance, was locked. Malachy knocked on the rusted metal and waited with growing impatience. Finally, the peephole cover slid back. A single bloodshot eye appeared.
“Password?” called a gruff voice through the door.
“Open the door.”
A moment of blinking disbelief followed. “Is that the Realmwalker himself? Blimey, when they said you might show up tonight, I didn’t think—”
“Open. The fuckin’. Door.”
“Right away, Mr. Bane, sir.”
The door swung open. Malachy brushed past the stunned doorman and down a narrow stairwell.
Not even the pungent sweetness of the burning sage incense could mask the stench of stale sweat and bitter spirits in the windowless basement. Rust stained the dented walls, the crooked floor, the bowing ceiling.
Packed shoulder-to-shoulder was a worrisomely large crowd.
Of the two hundred or so mages in London, two dozen had braved the wet night and dark dangers of Limehouse to assemble at this abandoned factory.
Circling the lone speaker were men and women of all ages and walks of life.
Secretaries and dockworkers, housewives and businessmen; teenagers covered in spots while sporting adult pretensions, and withered husks of crones stooped by time—all united in their disdain of humans.
Every attentive face was turned to the man speaking in the center.
Malachy wove through the crowd for a closer look. Sloane Kilbride and Julian Morro were conspicuously absent. Sloane, under the passion demon’s influence, had inadvertently caused a schism in their gang, much to Malachy’s benefit.
He spotted Rune Borges, the purported leader of the Protean Society, with a cigar clamped between his teeth and arms crossed over his weapon-festooned paunch. The Ferromancer’s perfectly coiffed hair, more silver than black, gleamed under the flickering light bulbs.
Beside Rune Borges stood a curvaceous woman whose breasts threatened to burst out of the low neckline of her crimson dress. Camille Borges, former Gilded Lily courtesan and Rune’s current, significantly younger wife.
But Rune was not the one speaking. Another man held the assembled mages in his thrall.
“What the Proteans want is simple.” Ari Razaq’s voice—curiously soft yet ringing with a fierce, unshakeable conviction—expanded his presence beyond his slight frame.
His accented English rolled like endless desert dunes, whispering of untold secrets buried beneath the sand.
“We want mages to become masters of our own fates.”
A murmur of fervent agreement rippled through the crowd.
The eloquent man standing before Malachy now in a rumpled suit of last decade’s fashion was not the monster he'd banished to the hinterlands of Suffolk. No fire burned in the Umbramancer’s dark eyes.
No shadows roiled around him like the heart of writhing darkness.
No claws of elongated shadows sliced the walls.
Dr. Jekyll for public speeches and Mr. Hyde for private audiences, then.
Without a doubt, Malachy’s suspicions were right: Ari Razaq was in charge.
Julian Morro was as much a decorative figurehead as Rune Borges while the shadow mage pulled the strings.
There were few things Malachy enjoyed more than being proven right, but in this he felt no satisfaction.
Why would Razaq, who currently held an entire room on tenterhooks, choose to hide behind smokescreens?
“We are not alone,” Ari continued. “The Protean Society is a growing faction. Our brothers and sisters in magic are rising up against the human oppressors. How many of you here today were drafted into fighting the human’s Great War?
” A dozen hands—some calloused, some manicured—rose up with bitter grumbles.
“How many of you had to hide your magic at the cost of your safety? At the cost of your comrade’s survival?
” The raised hands curled into fists. The grumbles turned to shouts.
“How many more of us would have survived had we been permitted to use our magic?”
“All of us!” The chorus echoed across the rusted walls. “All of us!”
“All of us.” A cold fire burned in the depths of Ari’s gaze as it swept over them. “Yet the Tribunal refuses to lighten the yoke of the Covenant’s secrecy mandate, even during times of war. Were the Masters the ones dying in the trenches?”
“No!” they cried.
“Who was?” Ari called out.
“We were!”
Ari’s grim nod was reflected by two dozen heads. “We were. Who remembers what our lives were like before the war-mongering humans stole them from us?”
“Had me a steady job before,” said one man. “Lost it along with my arm in the war. Factory gave my job to a lad who’d been too young to serve. A human.”
“I defended my country with my life,” said another man. “But I couldn’t even defend myself with me own magic. And what did the human bastards give me in return? Shellshock and a limp so bad I can barely get up to me own flat.”