Chapter 18 #2
“I had a husband and baby,” said a ruddy-faced woman. “Before the influenza took them. All because I couldn’t risk using my blood magic at the hospital to save them.”
Overlapping voices rose in a chorus of discontent.
Malachy could almost relate. His assigned role during the Great War had been intelligence gathering, on both sides of the Irish Sea, but he had fought in enough wars long before any of these mages were born.
As a lad he too had been disillusioned by patriotism once, until the pieces of his friends were sent home in coffins, wrapped in a flag that symbolized ideas they’d convinced themselves were worth dying for.
“Before the war,” Ari said, so softly the room quieted to hear him.
“I was a scholar following in my father’s footsteps at the Egyptian University.
The human's war interrupted my studies. They drafted me, a scholar, and sent me out to the front as a meat shield for the white colonizers. They forced us, my brothers-in-arms and I, to waste away in the cruel desert without sufficient rations or ammunition. Still, we were willing to die for the country that scorned and reviled us, its native sons. And die we did. One by one, I watched my brothers bleed out in the sand, unable to use my shadow magic to protect us. And for what?”
A deep, otherworldly hiss underpinned his soft voice. His shadow elongated, casting the men behind him in a darkness of roiling tendrils. He seemed to grow larger, more commanding. Those closest to him took an instinctive step back.
“For a rule made by old men centuries ago, in the literal Dark Ages?”
Hands and assenting voices rose into the air.
Ari gathered his composure and his errant shadow.
“Before the war, given my father’s academic clout, I was fortunate to meet the founder of the Protean Society.
Dr. Franz Dalton, Professor of Anthropology at Frankfurt University.
Dr. Dalton’s research—the very foundation upon which our beliefs rest, fellow Proteans—is simple yet profound.
Human evolution is about adaptation, but mages don’t just adapt to our changing environment; we change our environment to adapt it to us.
I can cloak myself in shadows on a bright day.
Rune can manipulate metals to his bidding.
” His dark eyes passed over them and latched on Malachy.
“And you, Realmwalker, can distort the fabric of space.”
Every head swung to Malachy, their expressions ranging from irritation to fearful awe.
He ignored them, regarding the Umbramancer from beneath his lowered brow.
Ari had the mind of an academic, the persuasiveness of a politician, and the single-minded determination of a zealot. A dangerous combination.
Malachy wondered why Ari was now being so open about a past he had gone to lengths to conceal. What was he actually hiding?
“The Proteans are so named for our adaptability. It is what separates us from the inferior humans. When one considers a mage’s inherent powers, strength, speed…
the only question is why we submit to lowering ourselves to human weaknesses.
Humans have subverted the natural order, and we know who is truly to blame.
” Ari paused and rolled his lips, as if tasting his next words.
Flames danced in his eyes. “The Tribunal. Our unelected Masters oppress us with their suffocating rules. For too long, the lions have been ruled by the ants. But not for much longer. Survival of the fittest, Proteans. The natural order, as it must, always returns.”
“Return the natural order,” they chanted. “Return the natural order!”
“Survival of the fittest!”
The fervor of their clamoring voices rose in a crescendo that reverberated off the rusted walls.
Malachy’s hackles rose. Survival of the fittest was the justification eugenicists like Dr. Franz Dalton clung to. Their chants carried Ghose’s doctrine of mage supremacy on the twentieth century tidal wave of Progress.
He searched the Proteans’ faces. Clean-washed or grime-streaked, they were all alight with the same inner fire of conviction. Razaq was preaching to the converted in an echo chamber of dangerous ideas.
Malachy wasn’t attending a meeting; he’d stumbled into a fucking cult.
“How will we return the natural order?” Ari called over the din. He met everyone’s gaze in wordless challenge. Their voices quieted, their expressions sobered. Suggestions curled like shadows in the whispering dark. Softer, Ari said, “How will we return the natural order?”
An immense pressure pushed down on the mages from all sides, a moment before the eruption. Then voices rushed forth like an undammed river.
“Revoke the Covenant!”
“Kill the Masters!”
“End the humans!”
Along the walls slithered many-fingered shadows that only Malachy seemed to notice. They traced back to Ari’s own shadow, warped and inhumanly proportioned. It seemed a living thing, tendrils coiling like a serpent about to strike.
Hellfire sparked in Ari’s gaze as it swept over the riotous mages. He held up a hand, and silence descended like a funeral pall.
“And when shall we—”
His words cut off as a tumult broke out above. Muffled shouts, then gunshots.
The basement door crashed open.
All hell broke loose.
A tide of coppers burst through the door and flooded the stairs. Two dozen mages stampeded away from the only exit in the windowless basement.
Malachy was swept into the crush of bodies. Fear curled its claws in his belly. They were trapped like rats in a barrel. He could traverse himself and another person away, but not all of them.
Over the hammer of his pulse came the thud of heavy boots, the uproar of shouted orders, the thwacks of police batons.
Mages scattered like roaches under a boot, darting to shadows and cracks. Desperate for escape, they tossed themselves against the floor, the walls, even the ceiling. Magic crackled in the chaos.
A low blanket of shadows descended over them. In the spreading darkness, Malachy dodged sparks of electricity, volleys of gusting wind, bursts of flame.
He spun in search of a place where he could create a portal for more mages to escape. Over the panicked crowd, his eyes connected with the razor-sharp gaze of a police lieutenant.
Malachy realized several things in the span of a lurching heartbeat. The surveillance on him must have increased after Ghose hand-delivered two corpses to the police, and he had inadvertently led Lt. Potts straight to a clandestine meeting of radical mages.
In short, they were fucked.
Their gazes held fast in the tumult. Potts blinked rapidly, as if trying to determine whether Malachy was an illusion.
Potts was as shocked by his presence as Malachy was, which gave Malachy pause in the pandemonium.
How could Potts have followed him traversing across London to a meeting he'd told only one person about, and then looked surprised to see him there?
Unless the person funding Potts had somehow tracked Malachy through a portal and into this trap.
“There’s no way out!” Rune Borges screamed over the roaring panic. Sweat trickled down his face, into the furrows of his stubbled jowls. The ex-mercenary had evidently not seen as much action as his embellished tales claimed. “Meu deus, what do we do?”
A part of Malachy was tempted to leave the Proteans behind as a test of their own supremacy.
He scanned the shadowy basement in a quick assessment.
Two Aeromancers had created a wall of air, temporarily keeping the coppers at bay.
The police fought against the invisible shield, anger and confusion creasing their faces.
Only moments remained before they breached the barrier and mayhem unfurled.
A portal outside was useless if the warehouse was surrounded. Limehouse was also likely infested with coppers, and Malachy didn’t know the neighborhood well enough to accurately traverse himself, let alone two dozen others. What he needed was a portal somewhere the coppers couldn’t follow.
He flattened his palm on the nearest wall. His magic tore apart the threads of the veil between Realms, creating a gash like an open wound for the mixing of strange bloods.
Rune Borges was the first through the portal, after he clocked the mage next to him with the jewel-encrusted butt of his pistol and leapt over the prone body.
Malachy ushered the other mages through.
They climbed in a surge of tangled limbs as the Aeromancers’ wall of air began to topple under the copper’s siege.
When the last Aeromancer was through, the coppers hot on their heels, Malachy’s magic grasped the threads of the torn veil and hastily rewove them. He closed the portal behind him and crossed the threshold into another Realm.
First came the familiar swooping drop in his stomach. Then, a moment of sharp, animal panic as he passed through the airless void between worlds.
Had he looked back, he would have glimpsed the small hole his magic failed to reweave, and seen Lt. Potts’s razor-sharp eyes peering through it.