Chapter 21 #4
“What took you so long?” he said.
They dragged Mal out of the cemetery and into a glossy carriage. Its curtains were drawn tight against the muggy summer afternoon. Mal blinked at the sudden gloom as the carriage jostled away down cobblestone streets.
Seated across from Mal was a man. Everything but the callused hands resting on the knees of his fine wool trousers were concealed by the carriage’s deep shadows.
“You expected me, lad,” said the man in a gravelly Scottish burr.
“Aye.” Mal, at thirty years of age, had not been referred to as lad in some time. The word should have rankled, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. It was a relief to have his death handed to him so swiftly.
“Do you know who you’re dealing with?” The Scot's voice hardened, spine-tipped thistles among the rolling heath.
“A murderer with a fondness for pocket watches.”
The blow came faster than Mal expected. His skull cracked against the lacquered wall of the carriage. Light burst across his vision.
“I am your judge, jury, and executioner!” The man settled back in his seat, brushing lint from his suit.
“My name,” he said, a hard edge straining his gruff voice, “is Alastair Ghose, and I am no murderer. I am the Master Chronomancer, and the representative elected by the Tribunal to enact justice for your many crimes. Do you know what the punishment for possessing and selling a demonic relic is, lad?”
“Death,” Mal said in a hollow voice.
“Aye, death. And not a pretty death, mind you, for so egregious a violation of our sacred Covenant. The Profane Arts are expressly forbidden, as you very well know. Not that it’s stopped you by the looks of your rap sheet, Realmwalker.
That’s right, lad. We’ve had our eye on you for a while now.
It’s not every day we find a portal mage of your skills or criminality. ”
The threat echoed in the emptiness that had consumed Mal. The Realmwalker had been weighed and found wanting by judges unseen. But he had been damned long before the Tribunal set their sights on his neck.
From the shadows, Master Ghose shook his head, a mockery of gravity. “Perhaps death is a welcome punishment to you, judging by those fresh graves you soiled with your blubbering. And death you shall find, lad, if you carry on the way you have been.”
Mal’s head, bent in the cradle of his shackled hands and pounding from the earlier blow, rose by degrees. He met the Master’s gaze flashing in the gloom. If. Salvation and damnation in a single word. A single word that his fate hinged upon.
“As the Tribunal’s executor of justice in your case, I have a counteroffer for you, lad. Either face the full consequences of your actions—a slow and painful death that I shall relish, I assure you—or become my apprentice.”
Surprise dimly registered. “Apprentice,” Mal repeated.
“That’s right. So you’ve wiled your youth away on feckless misadventure.
What lad hasn’t, eh? I raised hell myself back in my day.
Some pubs in Glasgow still won’t let me step foot inside, Tribunal Master or not.
I see potential in you, lad, and potential is a terrible thing to waste.
As a Master, ‘tis a great sacrifice of my time and energy to train apprentices for the continuity of magic across generations. Only I was deemed worthy by the Tribunal’s rigorous standards to represent Chronomancy.
Only I can peer through the veil of time into possibilities past and future.
Time is not linear, lad. The future is not a guarantee.
It can always change. What I am offering you is the chance to change your fate.
The things we could accomplish with your abilities…
‘Tis too tempting a fruit not to pluck, eh?” Ghose laughed, not pleasantly. “What’ll it be, lad?”
Execution or apprenticeship. A swift end, or prolonged torture.
Conviction flickered within his suffocating grief, a blaze of purpose to follow through the ravenous darkness. Before death found Mal, it would come for the bastard who had shredded his family.
“Apprentice.” Mal tasted the word—metallic, of blood and shackles and vengeance.
The Chronomancer’s grin flashed from the shadows. “Smart lad. Your first lesson as my apprentice is this. It’s not about the money, the machinations, nor the false comfort of lies. It’s about power. What price would you pay for power?”
“Anything,” Mal answered without hesitation.
How many times Ghose would throw those words back at his face like a closed fist.
St. Petersburg, Russia. 1855. Five years later.
Mal entered the St. Petersburg hotel room and found Master Ghose hunched over the same mysterious object he had been tinkering on for months. The Chronomancer stiffened as his apprentice approached, carefully sweeping the object away. Mal caught a flash of silver.
“Leaving for Siberia tomorrow is a mistake,” Mal said without preamble. “We’re not prepared.”
“You seem nervous, lad.” The burly Scot was a head shorter than Mal and a mere twenty years his senior yet insisted on referring to his thirty-five-year-old apprentice as lad.
The word grated as much as it had five years ago.
“This case is nothing to be nervous about. It’ll be just like the Palermo case.
We’ll be in and out before the demon notices what we took. ”
Mal looked into Ghose’s blackening eyes.
Mal no longer wasted time on scruples, but even his anemic conscience twinged at this “case.” Allegedly, the Tribunal had ordered Ghose and his two apprentices into the heart of the Russian winter to investigate the dark magic behind Tsar Nicholas’s tirade across the Crimean Peninsula.
Mal knew what a fucking lie that was. This was Ghose’s personal crusade and had nothing to do with enacting the Tribunal’s questionable justice.
In the cluttered disarray of the hotel room, they prepared to embark across the Siberian tundra to steal a myth from a demon. A myth that would quietly disappear into Ghose’s pockets, as had all the other treasures he’d dragged his apprentices around the globe to obtain.
No matter how distant they traveled, it was never far enough away from the grief eating Mal alive.
Nights were the worst. When the distractions of the day quieted and he could hear the teeth of all the things gnawing away at him—guilt and loneliness and unquenchable despair.
He would lay awake in his tent or swaying ship’s cot or hotel bed, with an emptying bottle of whiskey and a fully loaded pistol, wondering what he was living for, wondering if he was even alive.
Mal let the memories close their jaws around him. He deserved it.
The Master Chronomancer turned to his youngest apprentice. “Lazlo, any updates on Master Ikelas? Has the Oneiromancer bitch caught our scent?”
“Yes, Master,” said the young Sciomancer prodigy in a thick Hungarian accent.
“I walked around Palace Square as you asked and identified mages by fleeting touches. No one noticed this time, Master. I followed the mages my Sciomancy detected until I overheard this: Master Ikelas knows where the demon is. She is close behind.”
Ghose swore in colorful Gaelic. “Then we’ve no time to waste. Ikelas can’t be allowed to get her tainted hands on Koschei’s Egg first. It’ll only turn the Master Oneiromancer into more of a monster.”
Mal scratched the coppery beard he hadn’t bothered shaving in months. He hadn’t bothered arguing with Ghose in months either. But something about this case stretched even his atrophied morals to the breaking point. “The Tribunal sent two competing Masters after the same Profane relic?” he said.
Ghose whirled to face his mutinous underling. “Questioning me, lad? You do so at your own peril.”
Lazlo’s worried gaze darted between them. The young Sciomancer beat a hasty retreat from the hotel room.
Mal hadn’t finished digging this grave for himself. “I wonder what the Tribunal would say about this ‘case’ if they learned of it.”
The time mage was fast, but Mal was faster. He dodged Ghose’s flying fist.
“Everything relies on Koschei’s Egg, you insolent shit. You don’t understand how much is at stake. The future I glimpsed through the veil of time—a most glorious future, where mages ruled and humans served—will be ours once I have the Egg.”
Mal clenched and unclenched his fists and said nothing.
The Chronomancer often waxed poetic about this possible future, an unlikely utopia with a one in a million chance of coming true, that Ghose was hellbent on forging.
Mal had enough blood on his hands to prove it.
The only thoughts of the future Mal entertained now were of Ghose’s blood spilling in a crimson arc on white snow.
“The future of mages relies on this, lad. I’ll have no more backtalk. Be ready to traverse us to these coordinates in the morning.”
“Traversing three people and all this equipment will require the Profane Arts. In direct violation of the Covenant.”
“More of a suggestion than a rule.” The Tribunal Master waved away the centuries of rules he was ordained to enforce.
“And if I refuse?”
Ghose’s near black eyes veered to Mal. “I am warning you,” he said, soft and dark. “Betrayal has consequences.”
Mal absorbed the Chronomancer’s words like a poison dart. A sudden stab, then a steady drip of poison into his veins, seeping inside the black dregs of his heart.
Ghose stalked out of the room, his words lingering in the stillness. Betrayal has consequences. Mal had held onto that ivory card with those damning words written in Thieves Ink, long faded. The terrible pieces came together in his mind.
For five years Mal had scoured the earth for his family’s murderer, following trails of breadcrumbs across the hinterlands of every continent, all without result.
Five years spent at the bottom of a well, dragged under dark waters by grief and regret that held him in their spiteful embrace.
Five years, wishing he could reach inside his chest and tear out the rot of his guilt and hollow himself into an unfeeling shell.
Now, his guilt boiled away into a seething fury. He had suspected Ghose, of course, given the Chronomancer’s vile temper and myopic obsession with power. But he had never found proof that Ghose was Janus.
After he confirmed that Ghose had left the hotel and Lazlo was asleep in his room, the hunt began.
Mal went to the desk Ghose had been hunched over earlier.
A few clever applications of Choromancy, and his hand was past the wards.
He blindly rifled through the desk drawers.
Inside was a jumble of documents, pens, coins.
His fingers brushed smooth metal, and he felt a faint trill of magic.
Clutching the metal, he withdrew it along with his hand.
In his palm sat a silver pocket watch, its face embedded with lapis lazuli and engraved with peculiar symbols in lieu of numbers. What Master Ghose had been tinkering on for months.
The Doomsday Watch.
Fury and betrayal warred within him. His family had paid the ultimate price when he sold the watch. All this time, he had been following a false trail of clues that spun him in idle circles by the very monster who had massacred his family.
In hindsight, the signs of Ghose’s guilt had been there. Mal was filled with deepening shame at how willingly he had ignored them. Grief had held him underwater for so long that he hadn’t breached the surface to see with clear eyes. He missed what had been in front of him for five wasted years.
But no longer. Purpose seized Mal by the shoulders. He would climb out of the deepest pit of despair to ensure Ghose was buried in his own. Death was too kind an end for Alastair fucking Ghose.
Mal had to act fast. With the Doomsday Watch and Koschei’s Egg in hand, Ghose would soon be unstoppable; deathless as he slipped through time like water. He had grown more cunning and careful under the Master Chronomancer’s dubious tutelage. A beautiful scheme unfurled its petals.
After all, betrayal had consequences.