Chapter 26 #2
The time bubble began to warble around them. The edges distorted—the world beyond twitching into life—until it burst. Over the roar of rushing water Malachy shouted a Latin incantation that Cora echoed.
The flooded chamber warped. The water above joined with the water below in a disorienting blur. Ghose’s scream was swallowed by the void that unhinged its jaws around them.
Together, Malachy and Cora traversed with the time demon into Purgatory.
The endless plane of wandering spirits was blanketed in a silence so thick it pressed in from all sides.
Cora materialized next to Malachy, wreathed in the twilight gloom of fog that shifted like sinuous hands, dragging their every step.
Cold steam penetrated his pores, seeped into his marrow, dripped wrongness into his very spirit.
The living were not welcome in Death’s waiting room.
Hand in hand, they turned to Ghose. The demon knelt in the mist, retching bile onto a ground that was both solid and not solid.
“Wh-where are we?”
“Your grave.”
“Foolish lad.” Ghose struggled to his feet. “The future is nearly ours, and you throw it away with both hands. I gave up on you a long time ago, Mal. But the Necromancer understands that sacrifices are needed for mages to survive.”
“I certainly fucking do not,” Cora said.
“Och, lass, you do not yet see the potential, in yourself or in our plans. You are the key to unlocking our most glorious future. Mages shall rise and take dominance over humans. Only you can resurrect mages into the world of the living.”
“The dead should stay dead. Starting with you.”
Ghose barked a laugh. The horrible sound echoed across the fog. “Says the Necromancer who won’t stay dead.”
Cora lunged towards Ghose at the same moment his magic slowed time to a trickle. Even without the Doomsday Watch, drowned in another Realm, the demon could still distort time. Her outstretched hand moved as if through sap. Ghose took an easy step outside of her reach.
“Mal.” Her voice was slow and distorted. “Hold the bastard still while I unweave him.”
“Don't let the lad fool you, Necromancer. He is as heartless as he was before you brought him back to life. How many would be alive today if not for him, eh? You, for one. And eight wee baby brothers and sisters, too. They cried for their Mam and Da as they died, Mal, and not for you.” Ghose dodged the slow arc of Malachy’s fist. “Mal has pulled the wool over your eyes, lass. But we shall help you see. The future belongs to us.”
Malachy’s magic crawled through the netlike drag of the demon’s magic and grasped the threads of space nearest Ghose. But he was too slow. Ghose surged to his feet, his mismatched hands raised. The fog around the demon moved slower than in the mist-veiled distance.
Beside him, Cora was stuck in time’s molasses.
She inched towards the demon several feet away.
From her outstretched fingers came the slow drip of death.
Her other hand trembled in his. Their magic reserves drained the longer they spent in Purgatory.
They were nearly empty. Malachy couldn’t keep them here much longer.
He concentrated his remaining magic and grasped the threads of space around Ghose; the threads farther away from the demon were slower to reach.
With difficulty, he distorted the frayed edges of space into a loop, a skill he had practiced but never perfected.
The threads resisted his magic’s manipulation.
“What do you think you’re doing, lad?”
Time thickened. Malachy struggled against the syrupy flow of time, against the hands of fog that pushed him back, and grasped the frayed edges once more. Every iota of magic in his veins poured into weaving the threads into a loop, like a snake eating its own tail.
Ghose was locked in an Ouroboros trap. One that wouldn’t hold long.
Drained, Malachy dropped to his knees, and Cora, hand-in-hand with him, nearly fell beside him in the fog. “Hurry,” he whispered.
Ghose hurled himself against the Ouroboros trap until he was panting. He ran but went nowhere, trapped in a never-ending corridor of portal magic. Black eyes rolled in his grotesque face, searching for escape, then landed on Cora. The Unweaver stood over him, a dark reckoning.
She reached a black-veined hand inside the trap and planted it over the abomination’s heart. Ghose’s antique suit rotted away. His skin and muscle peeled off in necrotic slabs, but the coarse thread that held him together refused to unravel. Her magic slid off the thread like rain on oilskin.
“You cannot unweave the threads of Fate!” Ghose half shouted, half cried. The demon flung Cora off before her hand sank into the rotted cavern of his chest. She was almost upon the demon again when Malachy tugged her back.
“Leave him.”
The black flesh around Ghose’s heart was spreading, deepening. A slow, painful tide of death would wash over Alastair Ghose, locked within an endless tunnel of fog in Purgatory, an in-between Realm he could not escape from.
“You will die alone and forgotten, Ghose, entombed in this place of nonexistence.”
An enraged scream tore out of the demon’s throat as he clutched his rotting heart. “You cannot unweave the threads of Fate! The abomination will always die at the age of thirty. The—”
Malachy sealed the trap. Ghose’s final scream went unheard.
Rot ate around the demon’s heart, spreading its black fingers across his chest. It was only a matter of time before Ghose withered into nothingness.
Sixty seconds. Sixty seconds and an eternity before the demon’s chest collapsed.
The thread of Fate glowed—a blinding flash of brightness—then faded away.
The mismatched halves of Ghose came apart at the seam, falling one after the other without a sound.
His corrupted spirit faded into nameless mist.
“It’s over, Malachy.” She squeezed his shaking hand.
For a moment, he permitted himself to close his eyes and let the horror wash over him.
His family slain for a pocket watch. His heart blackened for power.
A fractured hundred-year-old spirit in the scarred body of a thirty-five-year-old lad from County Cork, holding hands in the in-between with the death mage who had brought him back to life in every way.
“May you be forgotten,” he whispered into the nothingness.
Fingers interlaced, Malachy and Cora traversed back to the Realm of the living.
They landed on the surface of the flooded travertine quarry in Rome.
A dusting of stars painted the night sky. Moonlight shimmered over dark waters. The hush of night was alive with a chorus of crickets and the rustle of reeds on the lakeshore, stirred by the wind’s gentle fingers.
Malachy gazed upon the water’s still surface and wondered if the Tribunal’s enchanted barrier had shattered, drowning the Masters and their centuries of hoarded knowledge down below.
“Do you think…” Cora ventured.
Their eyes met in the darkness. Wet hair and clothes plastered to their chilled skin, stained with rivulets of blood and memories. Malachy drew her, shaking, into his arms. They clung to each other, half drowned and fully drained.
Cora had remained unflinching as she defended him, from both the Tribunal and the demons. Pride swelled in his chest. He held the beautiful, ruthless woman in his arms tighter, like a lifeline.
“Cora, I—”
Voices drifted in the night.
They were not alone. Beleaguered Masters, all sodden and bleeding, lined the far shore. Virgil Carpathia was the first to spot them in the darkness. The Master Sciomancer picked his way over loose stone, his drenched ceremonial robe catching on rocks and branches.
“Bane,” Virgil Carpathia rasped. “We thought you had drowned. The Master Hydromancer managed to keep the waters at bay long enough for Nastassja to reopen the Gateway. We rescued everyone except… Kabir might not survive the night, and Inez’s body remains down below.”
The Master Ferromancer Inez had not been the only casualty.
Ghose and his cabal of demons were gone, though not all his co-conspirators were lying in a watery grave.
Malachy’s gaze searched the faces crouched along the shoreline.
Three among them were traitors who had opened the doors to demons.
Three Masters, awaiting judgement after they had condemned him to death.
“Where are Bittenbinder and Lakwa?”
“My fellow Masters made it out. They were gone by the time I came through the Gateway and onto the surface. Perhaps they left to mourn in private. The Tribunal has lost… everything. Generations of knowledge. Centuries of priceless relics. Our entire history… Everything upon which we stand.”
“A clean start,” Malachy said, his eyes on the Masters’ dark silhouettes.
He wondered which of them had conspired with demons, and why.
Were they, like the Protean Society, so gripped in the fervor of their own magical superiority that they had invited demons to bring about their reckoning?
They would tear down the foundation of their own authority to bring the humans down with them, then crown themselves as rulers of the graveyard.
“Is Ghose gone?”
Malachy met the Sciomancer’s gaze. He nodded. Adrenaline was trickling out of his veins, leaving him hollow. “How will the Tribunal reward me, do you think? A quick death or a slow one?”
“They can’t kill you after you saved everyone,” Cora said.
Master Carpathia’s gaze settled heavy upon her. He studied her for a long moment. “There is a peculiar magic about you, Necromancer.”
“It’s called rage. Mal saved all you hypocritical bastards from what you deserve.
He hunted down the demons you let walk all over you.
Master mages, my arse. You ran at the first hint of danger, and now you dare threaten the man who rescued you.
Perhaps I should resurrect the demons we killed for you and see how well you handle them, Master. ”
Carpathia watched her intently. “A most peculiar magic.” He reached out to touch her shoulder, and she batted him away.
“Stay out of my head, Sciomancer.”
The Master’s hand fell. “Ms. Walcott does make a valid point, amidst her threats. A death sentence cannot stand in light of the evil afoot. Myself and the other Masters who voted against Bane’s sentence will fight to waive it.
” Carpathia leaned close and said in a pained whisper only Malachy could hear, “Evil must be ripped out at the root. The time demon was but one arm of a wicked body my Sciomancy has sensed. Hold onto those recordings you made. Not all who sit upon the Tribunal may be trusted. Matthew 13:39.”
With that, the Master Sciomancer left them to the night.
Malachy was too tired to tell the ex-priest to go fuck himself for quoting the Bible at him again. Sore and bone-weary, he was on the verge of collapse.
It wasn’t over, but Ghose was gone and that was a bloody start. Wordlessly, he pulled Cora into his arms.
“Oh, Mal. I won’t let them have you.” She wrapped her arms around his middle and burrowed into him. “Let’s go home.”