Chapter 21
The Hollow Realm
Dublin was a different world than the one thirty-year-old Mal had left a year ago. Industrialization, then famine, had spread like cancer and ravaged the city and countryside alike, gripping Ireland in the tight fist of starvation.
A telegram from Kieran Doyle, his business partner and fellow Choromancer, had lured Mal back to Dublin with the prospect of their grandest job yet.
Mal had not set foot on Irish soil since he had gotten into hot water regarding the ownership of a certain relic.
The heap of money he’d gotten for selling the contested relic had been worth it.
He’d given most of it to his eight younger siblings, half-starved from the famine, and spent the rest on a steamboat ticket, the first and farthest away.
Despite the blood on his hands and guilt on his conscience, Mal couldn’t bring himself to regret what he’d done to see his family thriving.
The jobs he’d taken, from larceny to murder, had all been worth it to see that easy smile on Seamus’ face when they’d parted ways outside his Trinity College dormitory.
Seamus was the first Bane to finish school, let alone attend university, and Mal would sell his own soul to ensure his brother graduated.
The price of working so much and so far from home was that his siblings grew up without him. They had a house in Dublin and fine clothes to wear, but Mal often wasn’t there to enjoy it with them, off staining his spirit black in his quest for more.
Now, a year later and in a far nicer suit, neither Mal nor the city were the same.
According to his siblings’ letters while abroad, many of the people Mal had once known were gone, through death or relocation. The potato blight had devastated Ireland for five long years, wringing the desperate people dry and scattering them in a mass diaspora that showed no signs of abating.
Mal knew the real blight upon the Irish were the Englishmen in Parliament.
He had taken on some political jobs to cull the heart of spreading rot, including the assassination of an influential English Lord.
Mal had relished severing the Lord’s hand that had signed off on continuing potato exports from famine-plagued Ireland.
The Whig bastard had blamed the Irish for their lack of moral character. Divine providence, he’d called it, as his ink dried on the death sentence for a million starving people.
Divine providence had come for that Englishman in the form of Malachy Bane. He’d kill that Lord all over again if he could, and slower.
He walked now through Dublin’s barren cobblestone lanes.
Despair coated the empty houses and storefronts.
Dead bodies and tragedy piled up in the alleys, tossed aside like rubbish.
Each fine wool thread of his tailored suit weighed heavily on him to see such squalor where there had once been splendor.
His family had suffered and starved in prideful silence while Mal was off stealing rich things for rich people.
The job that had brought him back to Dublin was dangerous, of course, but the money was too good to refuse. If an inter-Realm heist meant his siblings could eat through the unending blight, then so be it.
The warehouse where Mal stockpiled his plundered treasures squatted on the outskirts of the Monto. Even the red-light district was starving for clients. Only a few scarecrow-like prostitutes haunted the doorways as Mal let himself inside the warehouse.
Kieran Doyle, his partner in crime, was sprawled upon a crate in the dim, musty cavern, tipping back a liquor bottle. Time had pressed the Ulsterman Choromancer under its palm, making Kieran even stockier as a man than he’d been as a lad.
“Mal?” Kieran leapt to his feet and pounded Mal’s back in hearty greeting. “Welcome home, mate.”
“Tell me about this job.”
“I got a letter a few weeks back with the job of a lifetime. The famine could last another decade, and we would feast like bloody kings.”
Mal affected a gentlemanly disinterest so as not to appear over eager. Unlike when he’d started stealing years ago, his accent no longer rolled like the dying, brown hills. Now, armed with a fine suit and cool expression, Mal was prepared. “Who wants what stolen from where?”
“Letter was signed by some bloke called Janus.”
“Like the Roman god, Janus?”
“How should I know?”
“Show me the fuckin’ letter.”
“Fine,” Kieran grumbled. “But you won’t see much.”
The sheet of ivory stationery was stiff and heavy and blank. Mal glanced from the letter to Kieran. “Thieves Ink?”
“Aye, the instructions were written in Thieves Ink. When I opened it, the words were red until I read them, then they disappeared. This Janus ain’t messing around.
Don’t matter who he is so long as he pays.
And he’s prepared to pay a pretty penny for this relic in another Realm.
” Kieran wrote a figure on a greasy napkin.
Mal fought to keep a calm expression. The number written had two more zeroes than even he had imagined, and he had an ample imagination.
Traversing into a new Realm was reckless, but the risk had always been worth the reward. And this reward was enough to keep a roof over his family’s head and food in their bellies through the famine that loomed over them like a scythe. Accepting the job wasn’t a choice.
“What relic in which Realm?”
Kieran outlined the job. A ringing silence fell when he finished.
“Let me get this straight,” Mal said at length. “You want me to traverse to…”
“The Hollow Realm,” Kieran supplied. “I’d go with you, but you’re quicker and all.”
Mal knew the not-so-hollow Realm by another name. The Demon Realm was a harrowing plane he’d only heard whispered tales of.
The Tribunal claimed demons were confined to the prison of the Demon Realm, but Mal knew just how vast and dark the world of demons ran.
He had summoned a demon over his father’s grave that had taken a memory of his in exchange for purging his siblings’ worst memories of Da.
It had been more than worth the price to see the brightness on their faces, the lightness in their hearts, as their darkest moments were siphoned away, like oil skimmed off water to sparkle in clarity.
Mal couldn’t remember what he’d lost, though he had a nagging feeling he’d left something important behind in Dublin.
“The Hollow Realm. Right.” Mal drew the word out into valleys of skepticism. “You want me to traverse into demon territory and acquire what?”
“A pocket watch.”
“A pocket watch,” Mal repeated. Kieran had spoken the words in the same insipid way as everything else, and Mal doubted the Ulsterman had enough of a sense of humor to attempt a joke. “You want me to risk my life for a pocket watch. How am I supposed to get there or find it?”
Kieran lifted a shoulder. “Up to you.”
Mal heard the words between the words. It was a skeleton of a plan that Mal’s flesh would have to shape and his blood would have to fill.
“The less I have to go off of, the riskier the job is, and we both have a vested interest in its success.”
“That’s all the sodding letter said, all right?
We’re not getting paid to ask questions, Mal.
Or should I call you Realmwalker? Got yourself quite the reputation these days for getting into impossible places.
This job should be easy for the likes of you.
Oh, there is one more thing. Once you get the watch, don’t look at it or touch it with your bare skin. ”
“Why?”
“It could, well, not kill you exactly, but make it so that death would be preferable.” Kieran handed him an unopened envelope. “Here’s the address Janus sent for the swap. I haven’t read it.”
Within the envelope was another sheet of ivory stationery. Thieves Ink, glimmering like blood, spelled out an address in a posh Dublin district. Mal committed the words to memory as they faded away.
To perform the traversing ritual, Mal needed the help of Kieran and the grimoire they had stolen from a British Lord’s vault a decade before.
The Profane Arts spells within had proven more than worth the grimoire’s selling price.
Though the sky blue eyes Mal had inherited from his mother darkened with each new spell, the rewards of forbidden magic outpaced the risk.
Mal would stop, he told himself, long before his eyes became the abyssal black of a demon.
Within a pentagram of red salt, they laid a large mirror.
Mal and Kieran sliced their palms and clasped their hands together, fusing their Choromancy, then painted symbols with their blood on the mirror.
Chanting the Profane incantation from the grimoire, Mal tentatively stepped onto the mirror, willing the glass not to shatter under his weight.
Instead, it warped and rippled like waves on a pond. He sank into the quicksilver depths.
Sick anticipation coursed through him. Traversing into a new Realm was like parting the veil and blindly casting a thread of magic, hoping it anchored onto an unseen point on the other side and held.
Too many people depended on his survival for him to fail. Resolved, he sank through the portal into another Realm.
Mal landed, poised on the knife’s edge of a steep ridgeline, and nearly lost his footing.
The towering mountain he found himself on was sheathed in a haunting phosphorescence.
Its ridgeline extended as far as he could see in either direction under a sky the color of shale.
His hair stirred in an unfelt breeze, laced with brimstone.
A pervasive sense of wrongness wrapped itself around him like a vise.
The entire mountain range opened like a hinged trap door: on one side was a gradual incline painted in a rainbow of earthy tones—bands of reddish clay streaked with chalky white, strips of forest green and muddy brown and sulfurous yellow; on the other was a sheer cliff of bone white.