The Malevolent Seven

by Sebastien de Castell

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Sword & Sorcery

Synopsis

'Seven powerful mages want to make the world a better place. We're going to kill them first.'

Picture a wizard. Go ahead, close your eyes. There he is, see? Skinny old guy with a long straggly beard. No doubt he's wearing iridescent silk robes that couldn't protect his frail body from a light breeze. The hat's a must, too, right? Big, floppy thing, covered in esoteric symbols that would instantly show every other mage where this one gets his magic? Wouldn't want a simple steel helmet or something that might, you know, protect the part of him most needed for conjuring magical forces from being bashed in with a mace (or pretty much any household object).

Now open your eyes and let me show you what a real war mage looks like . . . but be warned: you're probably not going to like it, because we're violent, angry, dangerously broken people who sell our skills to the highest bidder and be damned to any moral or ethical considerations.

At least, until such irritating concepts as friendship and the end of the world get in the way.

My name is Cade Ombra, and though I currently make my living as a mercenary wonderist, I used to have a far more noble-sounding job title - until I discovered the people I worked for weren't quite as noble as I'd believed. Now I'm on the run and my only friend, a homicidal thunder mage, has invited me to join him on a suicide mission against the seven deadliest mages on the continent.

Time to recruit some very bad people to help us on this job . . .

Release date: May 11, 2023

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Chapter 1

Real Mages Don’t Wear Funny Hats

Picture a wizard. Go ahead, close your eyes if you need to. There he is, see? Old, skinny guy with a long scraggly beard he probably trips over on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. No doubt he’s wearing some sort of iridescent silk robes that couldn’t protect his frail body from a light breeze. The hat’s a must, too, right? Big, floppy thing, covered in esoteric symbols that would reveal to every other mage which sources of magic this moron relies on for his powers? Wouldn’t want a simple steel helmet or something that might, you know, protect the part of him most needed for conjuring magical forces from being bashed in with a mace or pretty much any household object heavier than a soup ladle.

Yep. Behold the mighty wizard: a stoop-­backed feeb who couldn’t run up a long flight of stairs without giving himself a heart attack.

Now, open your eyes and let me show you what a real war mage looks like.

‘Fall, you pasty-­faced little fuckers!’ Corrigan roared as our contingent of wonderists assaulted the high citadel walls our employer had sent us to bring down ahead of his main forces. ‘Fall so that I can rip your hearts out with my bare hands and feed you to my favourite devil as an appetiser before he feasts on your miserable souls!’

Yeah, Corrigan was a real charmer all right.

Big man, shoulders as broad as any soldier’s. I stood maybe half an inch taller, but in every other dimension he was my superior. The muscles on Corrigan’s forearms strained against the bejewelled gold and silver bands he always negotiated into his contracts. Tempestoral mages of his calibre have no particular use for precious metals or gemstones, but when it comes to selling his services, Corrigan likes to – in his words – ‘Remind those rich arseholes who needs who.’

‘Watch this one, Cade!’ he shouted to me over the tumult of battle all around us. Our employer’s foot soldiers and mounted cavalry were fighting and dying to keep the enemy troops busy while we wonderists did the real damage. Corrigan’s eyes glowed the same unnerving indigo as the sparks that danced along the tightly braided curls of his hair and beard. Tendrils of black Tempestoral lightning erupted from his callused and charred palms to sizzle the air on their way to tear at stone and mortar like jagged snakes feeding on a colony of mice. He grinned at me, his white teeth in stark contrast to the ebony of his skin, then laughed as each of his fists closed around one of his lightning bolts. He began wielding them like whips, grabbing hold of the stalwart defenders atop the walls and sweeping them up into the sky before shaking them until their spines snapped. Several other poor bastards leaped to their deaths rather than waiting for Corrigan to take an interest in them.

‘We don’t get paid extra for making them shit their pants, you know,’ I reminded him, my fingers tracing misfortune sigils in the air so that the volleys of arrows the enemy fired at us missed their targets. ‘Our job is to convince them to surrender, not commit suicide.’

‘Our job?’ The indigo braids of Corrigan’s beard rustled with the same enthusiasm his lightning snakes showed as they destroyed in minutes the gleaming, high-­towered citadel that had taken hardworking masons decades to build. ‘Our job, Cade, is to make what we in the trade call an impression.’

I suppose I couldn’t argue with that. Our employer was an Ascendant Prince – self-­declared, of course – who’d been having some difficulty convincing the local ruling archons of his divinely sanctioned rule. Sending a coven of mercenary wonderists to wage mayhem and murder (I never lied to myself by calling it ‘war’) wasn’t likely to convince anyone of Ascendant Lucien’s holiness, but as his Magnificence had explained it to me, ‘Kill enough of the brave ones and the rest will pray to anyone I tell them to.’

He might be a complete fucking moron, but Lucien was right about that much, at least.

The crossbowmen atop the walls stopped firing their bolts at us, no doubt tired of watching the wooden shafts splinter against the rocks as the ill-­luck spells I’d kept around our division meant each and every one of them missed their mark. Meanwhile, Corrigan and a couple of the others got on with blasting their brethren to pieces with impunity.

Corrigan lightened up on his thunderous assault and motioned for a nearby echoist to spin a little sonoral magic to amplify his voice as he called out to the citadel’s terrified defenders, ‘There now, my little ducklings, no need to jump. Just open up the gates for Uncle Corrigan and we can all have a nice cup of tea before supper.’ He glanced back at me. ‘There. Happy?’

‘You really are a prick, you know that?’ I took advantage of the momentary distraction among the archers to give my fingers a shake before renewing the shield over our squad of eleven wonderists.

Corrigan shrugged. ‘What do you expect? I conjure rampant fucking devastation from the Tempestoral plane for a living so that one group of arseholes can conquer another group of arseholes – and then a couple of years later, that second group of arseholes hires me to kill off the first lot. That can’t be good for the soul.’

Truer words had never been spoken.

‘Enemy wonderists!’ one of our comrades shouted.

Up on those high walls, the tell-­tale shimmer of Auroral magic (that being the ‘nice people’ kind) appeared: Archon Belleda had finally sent out her own contingent of wonderists to kick our arses.

When Corrigan got a look at the silk-­robed, grey-­bearded scarecrows standing up there, he was pissing himself laughing so hard his tendril spell almost collapsed.

‘Look,’ he shouted to the rest of us, ‘real live Auroral mages have come to cast our souls to the pits! Kneel before these noble miracle-­workers and weep for mercy, for surely the judgement of the Lords Celestine is at hand!’

The rest of us didn’t laugh. We focused on our jobs, which now included sending those dignified old men and women to their graves. It wasn’t Archon Belleda’s fault her defenders couldn’t beat us. They were locals, patriots fighting for a noble cause, while we were mercenaries, motivated by greed and lousy upbringings, loyal only to the fees our employer had promised us.

The poor bastards never had a chance.

One of the enemy wonderists, a silver-­haired woman already dripping with nervous sweat, took the lead. Blood seeped from her eyes as she cast a sorcerous incantation we in the business call a ‘heartchain’, because it pierces right through defensive spells to burst the enemy’s blood vessels. It’s not the sort of thing any of us would use because it’s a conjoined sympathy spell, which means a heartchain also kills the person casting it. I marvelled at the old codger’s redoubtable courage and sacrifice as the thread-­like silver tether stretched across the two hundred yards between them to bind her heart to Corrigan’s.

The big brute’s eyes went wide as his thick fingers clawed at his own chest. He turned to me, but no sound came from his lips as he mouthed my name.

Corrigan Blight was a monster, no doubt about it. He killed people for money, and he did it without ever questioning whether such acts could be justified. Any time I’d asked whether perhaps there was a better way to earn a living, he’d slap me across the head and proudly declare, ‘Didn’t make the rules, don’t plan to break them.’ If you stuck him next to the old lady on the wall and asked a hundred people which one of them deserved to live, not one of them would say Corrigan.

Well, except me.

Corrigan was my friend, which was a hard thing to admit to myself and an even harder thing to find in this profession. He’d saved my life more times than I’d saved his, and I know that doesn’t justify the choice I made in that moment, but maybe it explains why, without giving it a second’s thought, I conjured a poetic injustice.

Beneath my leather cuirass, a set of three intertwining sigils etched into my torso began to smoulder, then the sigils appeared in the air before me as floating scrawls of ebony ink, curves and edges glimmering. I could feel the seconds counting down towards Corrigan’s heart bursting in his chest.

He clutched at my shoulder in panic, or maybe searching for a final moment of human connection. I shrugged him off; I needed to concentrate.

I placed my right hand above the first sigil, which looked like a distorted stick figure crowned in seven rays; it represented the enemy spellcaster. When I moved my hand upwards, the sigil followed, and I placed it in a direct line between myself and the Auroral mage casting the heartchain.

The second sigil, a gleaming black circle with a second, smaller half-­circle overlapping the top of it, looked almost like a padlock. It moved of its own accord, floating silently up to Corrigan’s forehead, which would have unnerved him no end if he’d not been too busy dying to notice.

The particular forms of magic I work manifest a kind of elementary consciousness within them, which meant that the spell knew Corrigan was the target of the Auroral mage’s heart-­rending invocation. I quickly placed three fingers atop the locking sigil, then moved it between me and the enemy wonderists atop the citadel walls, looking for my target.

This is where casting a poetic injustice gets tricky. Altering the binding on someone else’s spell requires finding someone to whom they have an already strong emotional connection, which would usually require time and research, neither of which we had to spare. But these idiots had made it easy for me. Beside the Auroral mage stood a fierce-­eyed old gentleman holding her hand. I might not be the world’s most sentimental guy, but even I could sense the love between them. I quickly tethered the targeting sigil to him.

Now for the third sigil. With the thumb and forefinger of each hand, I grasped the two-­headed coiled snake, ignoring the ink-­black tongues that flickered menacingly at me, pulled the spiral straight and attached a head to each of the other two sigils.

The thin silver thread binding the Auroral mage to Corrigan snapped away from him, whipping through the air with blinding speed before attaching itself to the old man next to her. Even when he saw the heartchain coming for him, he didn’t make a move to abandon her. Maybe he was her husband and such a cowardly thought never occurred to him.

Till death did they part, as no one with a conscience might say.

Corrigan painfully sucked air into his lungs, giving me just the barest nod of acknowledgment, then, smiling with smug self-­satisfaction, renewed his attack on the walls with just as much vigour and twice as much pleasure as before.

I had to lean against him just to keep from collapsing to the ground. Poetic injustice spells are hard on the body. And the soul, I guess.

In case I hadn’t made this clear already, we’re not exactly the good guys.

But don’t worry – by the end of this story, me, Corrigan and the five other wonderists who would come to be known as the Malevolent Seven would definitely be getting what was coming to us.

Chapter 2

And the Walls Came Down

Watching the walls of a once­ magnificent citadel being torn down isn’t pleasant. The rumbling, crumbling, thunderous collapse of stone, wood and mortar is soon followed by the screams of those unfortunate enough not to have died instantly in the fall. Thanks to a few time-­delayed eruption spells, ingeniously placed with the help of engineers who ought to be building things rather than figuring out how to blow them apart, a magnificent feat of architecture that once made people believe the world could be a safe, civilised place was now proof of the opposite.

Cheers rose up from the foot soldiers on our side. Men and women who hours before had been glaring resentfully at us because we got better pay, better tents and better prostitutes than they did were now slapping us on the back and praising our achievements to the heavens.

I doubted anyone up there was pleased.

My part in this accursed endeavour left me sick to my stomach. It wasn’t just the spells themselves, which were vile enough. It was the thrill all this devastation produced in everyone around me, a pleasure I couldn’t seem to keep from slithering inside me until I was cheering right alongside them. Maybe it just felt good to be part of a team again.

‘Silord Cade! Silord Cade Ombra, I need to see you!’

The voice calling out my name was young, enthusiastic and exasperating. When I’d first met the gangly, witless teenager, I’d assumed he was some camp follower looking to worm his way into my tent. Turned out he was an amateur luminist hoping to apprentice himself to a war mage. I should’ve sent him packing when he’d first suggested the idea; it would have saved me having to constantly resist the urge to slap him senseless.

‘What did I tell you last time?’

‘Silord?’

Okay, this time I did have to belt him – as much for his own safety as my satisfaction. Silord, a portmanteau of ‘sir’ and ‘lord’, is, technically, how one should address a war mage, since in terms of rank we sit somewhere between a cavalry officer and a minor noble.

However . . .

‘Our employer – your employer, in case you forgot – doesn’t approve of that particular honorific,’ I reminded the boy. Again.

Corrigan whispered conspiratorially to him, ‘Ascendant Lucien feels such titles risk confusing the peasantry about who the gods love and who they just sort of put up with.’

‘But Sil—’ He caught himself just in time to avoid a black eye. ‘Master Ombra—’

‘Ascendant Lucien doesn’t like hearing people refer to his subordinates as “master”, either,’ I told him. ‘Nor, by the way, do I appreciate you using my fucking real name in front of other people when there could be spies about taking stock of who should be on the receiving end of a sharp blade should the opportunity present itself. For the duration of this engagement, you will refer to me as Brother Cerulean. You will refer to our big friend with the ridiculous violet-­blue hair’ – I gestured to Corrigan, who was practically glowing from the admiration of the crowd of soldiers and camp followers flooding around him – ‘as Brother Indigo.’

‘And what should I call myself?’ asked the boy.

‘You are Cousin Green.’

And never was there a name more apt.

Corrigan whistled through his teeth and shoved his would-­be admirers away. I knew without having to look around that this meant our employer was approaching.

‘Ah, Silord Cade, Silord Corrigan,’ Ascendant Lucien said graciously.

I shot Green a look so he’d know this wasn’t a contradiction of my earlier injunction. Lucien was just showing us how magnanimous he could be. By nightfall, you could be certain one of the soldiers would have mistakenly referred to us as ‘silords’ and Lucien would have them crucified for it to make sure everyone remembered the rules.

‘Your stratagem worked just as you predicted, Ascendant Lucien,’ I said, swallowing the bile engendered by having to compliment this silver-­haired, alabaster-­faced moron who couldn’t plan his way out of a privy. On the other hand, a little arse-­kissing after a victory does help loosen the purse strings.

Lucien gave me that smile of his – the one that had already kept me up several nights during this campaign contemplating murdering him and switching sides. I might have, too, but there are rules to the game we play. Breaking a contract can damn your soul faster than razing a dozen villages.

‘And you executed the plan flawlessly,’ Lucien enthused, always determined to best me, even in flattery. ‘Such skill and loyalty deserves recognition . . . and reward.’

A dozen of his private guard – who were, so far as I could tell, just regular soldiers wearing shinier armour beneath their gaudy white-­and-­gold tabards – marched smartly up to us in two columns, escorting a group of what any decent person would have to call boys and girls. They were clean and well-­dressed in fresh silver-­white gowns, which made me feel sick, because it meant they were here for a purpose.

‘For my wonderists!’ Lucien declared, drawing oohs and ahhs from hard-­bitten soldiers who were in no way impressed by this act of perversity.

The boys and girls smiled at us with every part of their faces but their eyes, which betrayed them. I grinned as wide as I could without letting what was left of my integrity spew from my mouth.

Corrigan put a collegial hand on my shoulder and squeezed hard enough to make the bones creak. This was his way of keeping me from throttling our beloved employer then and there.

The Lords Celestine, benevolent rulers of the Auroral realms, rely on their human worshippers to enact their policies upon the Mortal plane. Some of these agents act as judges to punish heretical crimes; others, like Lucien, ‘spread the Auroral song of devotion and self-­sacrifice’. Some are even raised in monastic institutions to believe that their own spiritual fulfilment can come about only by giving themselves utterly – in every sense of the word – to whomever they are gifted by their religious leaders. These lucky boys and girls are known as the sublime. It’s said there’s nothing you can do to a sublime – not even murder them – that won’t fill them with righteous bliss. It’s all consensual, of course, as long as you’re a piece of human garbage who thinks teenagers dream of becoming your playthings.

‘The Ascendant’s cunning in battle is rivalled only by his generosity,’ I said, and though I doubted I managed to keep the disgust and nausea from my voice, Lucien nonetheless nodded graciously.

‘One each,’ he said, wagging a finger at the others among our little cadre of mercenary wonderists, ‘but for my captains, my chancer Cade Ombra and my thunderer Corrigan Blight, I offer two!’

While a centuries-­old citadel fell behind us, crushing men and women who, if not innocent, at least deserved something better out of life than being squashed to death beneath the rubble, those on our side clapped daintily as if we were at a tea party and His Most Gracious Ascendancy had just given a toast.

My fellow wonderists made their picks of the most comely, except Corrigan, who, noting my glare, gave me a slight nod to acknowledge that whatever pleasure he might have taken wouldn’t be worth the consequences I would dish out later to any among our number who sampled too deeply of our employer’s ­magnanimous ‘gift’.

Unable to risk giving offence by turning down the generous gesture, I chose the two most frightened of the group: a young boy of about eleven – who Lucien kept leering at – and the girl of seventeen hugging him protectively as if that would do either of them any good.

Ascendant Lucien shot me a curiously satisfied look, which I met with one of those smiles men like him recognise as the enjoyment of terror over beauty.

‘Excellent choices,’ His Ascendancy said to me. Then he raised his arms wide to the others. ‘Revel tonight, my loyal followers, for tomorrow, we burn every last one of the false Archon Belleda’s followers on the stake!’

‘But Your Ascendancy,’ I said, probably louder than I should have, ‘our contract was to induce Archon Belleda’s people to capitulate to your rule, not kill them – already they raise her flag upside down to signal their surrender.’

Lucien’s shoulders rose and fell wearily, as if to say he was just as disappointed in this recent development as I was. ‘Alas,’ he said, turning to leave. ‘They waited too long.’

This was my cue to shut up, but I made one last appeal. ‘They worship the Aurorals, as do you. Surely the Lords Celestine would nev—?’

‘The Lords Celestine have sanctioned my ruling in this matter,’ Lucien informed me, adding a gravel to his voice which hadn’t been there a second ago. ‘Do you wish to question their judgement? Perhaps you have some special relationship with the Aurorals that gives you a deeper insight into their wishes?’

‘Of course not, Ascendancy,’ Corrigan said, casually driving the second knuckle of his forefinger into my spine. ‘Cade here’s just addled from the battle. All that Fortunal magic, you know. Makes him forget himself – but only temporarily.’

Lucien gave a gracious chuckle before leading the procession of happy soldiers, wonderists and soon-­to-­be miserable sublimes on their way, leaving me and Corrigan standing there listening to the cries of the dying behind us.

‘Don’t fucking say it,’ I warned him.

He kept his mouth shut, but his expression made it clear that this wasn’t our fight, and that if I couldn’t summon the self-­discipline to keep my mouth shut, he’d do it for me. We were mercenaries, not heroes. Wars almost always end with a good old-­fashioned massacre, whether by steel or by spell.

I returned him a look that said I understood completely, would heed his warning to keep quiet, but also that Ascendant Lucien was going to meet with an unfortunate accident tonight, and so would anyone who tried to get in my way.

Chapter 3

Necessary Cruelties

Those who wage war for a living see the world around them as territory. The most breath-­taking landscape, the most heart-­rending scene of devastation, both are merely lines on a map to be erased and re­drawn with pen and ink when diplomacy served, or with swords and blood when it did not. It should be no surprise, then, that Ascendant Lucien’s camp was a moveable nation, with tented cantons and districts arranged according to his own design. Just as in any city, location was a marker of status easily understood by those who lived nearby.

‘Your tent is like a palace!’ the boy – Fidick, he’d said his name was – declared.

‘Have you ever been inside a palace?’ I asked.

He gave a light, nervous laugh. ‘No, Silord. Never.’

‘Then what the hell do you know?’

The girl, who’d told me her name was Galass, gave the boy a quieting glare and me something more akin to a snarl. She so obviously saw herself as his protector that I almost pitied her the heartbreak for which she was surely destined.

Galass was on the cusp of womanhood, dark-­haired and pretty in that way that waxed and waned depending on her expression, but Fidick was something else entirely. He was possessed of a luminous beauty that would make great artists want to lock him away so that no one but they could capture his golden curls and cherubic features. Others would want to lock him away for far worse reasons.

Someday soon Galass would be cradling Fidick’s trembling body, wiping away the blood and filth emanating from every orifice, whispering to him that it was all right now and he should just put the recent atrocities done to him out of his mind. And when Fidick finally slept, she would contemplate the ways in which she might, with sublime kindness, cause him such permanent disfigurement that he would for evermore be an object of pity and disgust rather than desire.

The worst part of it all? That nonsense about spiritual bliss they’d been filled with at whichever monastery Lucien had acquired them from would be the only retreat from the misery of life available to them. Sometimes a lie really is more comforting than the truth. I should know.

There was a small stool outside my monstrously spacious tent of dyed ­blue canvas featuring front flaps painted with golden esoteric sigils (which did nothing, but whoever Lucien had in charge of our accommodation had taken some artistic license with the design). I sat down and wiped the muck and grime from my trousers and boots with the towel left there for that purpose, then handed it to the boy. ‘Clean your feet, both of you. I don’t want you tracking mud into my “palace”.’

They did as they were told while I undid the spell knots from the cords fastening the tent flaps, trying not to breathe in the stink of putrefied flesh emanating from the recently charred canvas. Some curious individual was now walking around camp with a couple of missing fingers.

‘Where are the tents of the other wonderists?’ Fidick asked, glancing around. ‘Aren’t you friends with them?’

‘Fidick!’ Galass hissed.

‘It’s fine,’ I said, only because I didn’t want her thinking she could decide what was or wasn’t discussed under my roof. ‘His Ascendancy prefers that his wonderists be spread out in case one of us is urgently needed to fend off an unexpected magical attack.’

A more truthful answer would have been that Lucien didn’t like the idea of a coven of wonderists nestled together in the bosom of his encampment where they might be tempted to talk late into the night, drinking, imbibing various pleasure drugs and wondering aloud why those whose magic was crucial to winning the war shouldn’t be the ones to rule over what was left when said war was over.

Was that why he’d ordered us to slaughter Archon Belleda’s troops in the morning? Did Lucien want to make such monstrous villains of his wonderists that no one else would ever trust us? Why would the Lords Celestine, those beneficent guardians of morality, sanction such a massacre in the first place?

‘Your domain is magnificent, Silord,’ Galass said as she stepped inside.

The tent was indeed glorious, the rough canvas barely visible from inside, hidden as it was by long lengths of gleaming azure silk hanging from hooks attached to the very top and draping over the ten-­foot-­long mahogany poles holding the shape. The light of half a dozen bronze oil lanterns twinkled off the precious threads woven into the thick carpets covering the ground, each one depicting some of Lucien’s many victories – most of which hadn’t actually taken place yet, but it’s never too early to be thinking about commemorating one’s glorious legacy.

Walk into the average soldier’s tent and you’ll be hit with the odours of musk, sweat and stale beer. Mine was scented with fresh flowers and baskets of pine needles, which Lucien’s overworked retainers would refresh each morning before battle. Every evening they would deliver a cask of wine from the Ascendant’s own vineyards three hundred miles away, as well as a variety of delicacies utterly unlike the swill afforded his hard-­fighting troops.

War is hell, just not for everybody.

The ostentatious accommodations were more for Lucien’s benefit than mine; he wanted those among his officers who might be contemplating their own advancement to be aware that he was the one who commanded the deadliest wonderists in the country. As petty acts of self-­aggrandisement went, this was one I didn’t actually mind.

I removed the preposterous golden cape Lucien insisted we wear in battle and hung it inside the polished oak armoire next to my silk-­sheeted bed. Fidick and Galass were still standing at the entrance, waiting for my commands.

‘Get in here. Make yourselves . . .’

I was about to say at home, but that would have been dishonest. They wouldn’t be here more than a single night. My hesitation confused Galass and Fidick in the worst way possible: they began disrobing.

‘Stop—’ I said, too loudly and forcefully for anyone’s good.

The pair of them froze, hands on the hems of their silvery-­white gowns. Fidick’s glance flitted around the tent, clearly worried I’d changed my mind and was about to banish them from this temporary but welcome opulence.

‘Have we displeased you, Silord?’ Galass inquired, using pretty much the same inflections I use when asking, ‘What the fuck is your problem, arsehole?’

I began unclasping the bronze bindings of my leather cuirass. ‘Forgive my outburst,’ I said. ‘The two of you are welcome to stay here for the night – as long as we come to certain agreements about what you will and won’t see here. Either way, I give you my word I won’t lay hands on either of you.’

Fidick’s breath came out in a whoosh and he looked so relieved I thought he might faint with joy. Then his eyes caught something to my right and his face lit up. I followed his gaze to a bowl of red and purple plums on the far side of the bed. You don’t generally find much in the way of fresh fruit in army camps.

‘Help yourself,’ I said, then thought better of it. ‘You may have one now, and another in the morning.’ Those unaccustomed to such luxuries invariably overindulge, and I don’t know any spells for getting diarrhoea out of my carpet.

The boy gingerly stepped past me to begin a careful tour of the fruit bowl, never touching anything, just sweeping his gaze over every inch of its contents in search of the perfect choice.

Galass folded her arms across her chest. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Because it’s too sweet if you’re not used to it,’ I replied. ‘I don’t want either of you—’

‘No, I mean, why do you have no intention of making use of our bodies?’

Making use of our bodies.

I liked her bluntness, but the fact that this was the third time she’d been belligerent suggested that her perceptiveness could be dangerous to both of us. She read in my words and deeds a weakness that suggested I committed acts of violence for money but lacked the stomach to do so for pleasure – and she was right, after a fashion, which was a problem because it might require me to prove her wrong.

‘I have no taste for the flesh of unripe fruit,’ I sai