Chapter 32
Eleanor Naismith was almost giddy as she rode through the Badlands. Her horse, the pathetic beast that it was, trotted gently beneath her. She kept it at a gentle pace to avoid aggravating parts of her left tender by the Wastrels’ orgy; she had to hand it to the followers of That Which Sins, they knew how to throw a party.
It was such a shame that she had to leave early. That Faustian would be bathing in the blood of the Wanted Man by now and would have his newest Vessel to boot. They’d lost a few Vessels, sure, and all their cultists but with the boost provided by whatever he had planned for Resistance’s lackey it’d only be a matter of time before he tried to make an Avatar.
And, well… that was when the real fun would start.
She laughed to herself, a high bark that echoed. It had all been so easy. That was what excited her most. That obese whore Mahrey had been bought cheaply with orgies and spells that looked almost like what she’d wanted The Faustian had had no choice about the matter, needing his blubbery masthead. And Dust, oh Dust… convincing him she was just a spoilt brat, showing her underbelly in a way that weakened him and got him captured… that had been the most fun she’d had in a long, long time.
The last two days hadn’t been so much a mission as a vacation, a wonderful dalliance in the lives of those who thought they were more powerful and smarter then her. That she could enjoy her service so much was proof that Omnis loved her.
Her only annoyance, her only concern, was Shadows Fade. She’d tried to get Dust to ignore the bitch but he’d insisted on bringing her along. The Faustian had understood she was a threat and taken her out first… but somehow she’d survived, whether through a regeneration spell or some secret Indian ritual. She could be the only thorn in their plan, the only grit in the mechanisms.
“Fucking Indians,” she said, her joy all but gone. Of all the Triangle, Omnis had the greatest enmity towards the natives of this land; Omnis was the god of magic and knowledge, the Seeker of Hidden Truths, and the Indians kept the most powerful rituals of this world to themselves. As far as Eleanor knew, any and all attempts to get them to spill their secrets had failed.
Well, after tonight, Resistance would have less influence over the world. The Indians would be weakened and some would naturally turn to Omnis instead. Eleanor smiled again, remembering how she’d pretended she’d not heard of the fourth god when Dust spoke about him. It’d been so much fun and oh so simple.
Her Bite, her personal familiar, found her smiling as she rode away from Crucifix. It circled overhead, a black ball of fur with bat-like wings, and emitted a rapid succession of staccato notes that sounded deliciously alien.
Eleanor recognised the cry and looked up. Why had it returned? Usually Bites waited twenty-four hours before delivering their payload and she had only summoned it that morning, when she’d left camp to urinate. It had been a risk, casting a spell with Dust busy making breakfast, but she’d gotten away with it.
Frowning, she drew her rifle and beckoned the Bite down with a sharp whistle. It chirped then swooped down. As expected, another creature went for the familiar; being small and weak, it was a natural target for the Badlands’ predators. The opportunist was a Paint, perhaps a straggler from the herd she and Dust had destroyed. Eleanor put a shot through its swirling form before it got its… self on her familiar.
Grateful, the Bite settled on her arm and clicked like a noisemaker. She stroked it idly. It often begged for attention and her mood was so bright she was glad to indulge it.
Bites were information gatherers, creatures that lived on and for knowledge. Their great power came in their stealth; they flew high above the world and used so little magic that not even the Wanted Man could detect them. Omnis used them extensively, gave them complex instructions, but this one had been set a simple task; monitor the Wanted Man, learn everything about him.
Satisfied with being fussed, the Bite opened a great mouth which spread right across its spherical torso, revealing an array of shark’s teeth and a gross tongue curled like a spool of thread. This tongue unfurled. Data secreted from its pink flesh and coalesced, becoming thick honey that slowly shifted clockwise around a central mass. There was a great deal of it, more than she’d ever seen gathered by the creature. Perhaps it had returned because it was full?
To find out, she put her finger into this gooey knowledge. It was cold to the touch. Numbers, facts and statistics flooded her vision. The Bite had learned much about Dust; height, weight, relative strength, surges of magic and the levels they’d reached and even the average time it took for his wounds to heal, rated by severity. It would be very interesting to analyse later.
Eleanor balled the knowledge together and uttered a spell to solidify and codify it. The world returned as the data became a small amber sphere. She rolled the ball across her palm, enjoying the feel of its smooth surface, then placed it in her travel pack.
The Bite, she concluded, had returned because its target was dead. She was about to dismiss it when she noticed more information on its tongue, a puddle compared to the main block of data but significant nonetheless. A questioning gaze got no response; it just waited for her to gather what it’d found.
Tentatively, she put a finger in the pool and a map appeared, the trail of a journey from the Wastrels’ stolen temple to Crucifix. At first she thought it was her own escape but the trail was too slow and halting; someone else had limped out of the temple and gone to Crucifix. Her heart stopped and her throat ran dry. She followed the path into the town and saw the statistics of a conflict, traded spells and a capture. The information stopped with a surge of magic, a hurried sprint and a gentle walk back to the chapel.
Eleanor had ordered the Bite to only gather information on Dust… this had to be about him. The Bite had returned to warn her that he had escaped. The gods-damned son of a fucking bitch had escaped the temple. That Which Sins’ Faustian had to be dead. She examined the map again; Dust had had three companions with him. Two of them would be Shadows Fade and her damn wolf.
The third was probably Penelope.
Calmly, she dismissed the Bite. It rubbed its soft fur against her arm and returned to Omnis’ realm. Then she jumped from her horse, thumped it three times on the rear to make it stay, and walked into the Badlands.
It had been too easy. That should have been her first warning; nothing worthwhile was easy. She and the plan had relied on the Wastrels and they had failed even with the Bond, one of Omnis’ most powerful artefacts! They’d had him completely disconnected from Resistance and he’d still slipped from their grasp to wreak a terrible vengeance; worse still, he’d probably saved Penelope in the process.
Eleanor growled. All of that planning, all of the careful movement and meetings and money spent to take the Wanted Man out and get a cult of That Which Sins to make a false Avatar, all of her time and effort… it had been wasted. She had failed. Eleanor was a failure.
It didn’t take her long to find something to take her anger out on; the Badlands were always crawling with foolish projects of That Which Sins or Melting Flesh. Omnis rarely worked here, preferring more… powerful grounds to experiment in, she could shoot the small herd of coyotes she set her sights on with impunity.
With a roar, she raised her rifle and fired into the pack. The pitiful things scattered when their leader exploded in a shower of gore. Eleanor did not relent. Her gun was akin to Noose in that it drew on a tainted artefact for power and she didn’t need to worry about bullets. So she poured shot after shot into their fleeing hides. When murder stopped satisfying her, she took wounding shots, knocking a creature’s paw off or gut-shooting it.
Their confused behaviour and lack of any will to fight told her the coyotes weren’t creatures of the Triangle. That made the destruction more enjoyable.
But this joy was short-lived. Her mind returned to the consequences of her failure; she hadn’t known her cult had an agent in Crucifix until she felt Omnis’ magic in him. He was also dead and they wouldn’t add evidence against Dust, a plan hatched quickly in a moment alone. That was a sidenote but it would count against her in the final tally, another black mark against her name.
Some creatures had noticed her rampage. They kept their distance for now, monsters of Melting Flesh if she were any judge. They waited to scavenge whatever she left behind. In her fury, Eleanor shot at them too but they were more careful, stronger, and avoided the bullets with magic or unnatural agility.
The red veil dropped then; she didn’t want something nastier to be drawn by the blood or her hatred. Eleanor lowered her rifle, checked her surroundings and jogged back to her ride. The mass of coyote corpses should keep the predators occupied enough for her to slip away.
And so it proved. She was not followed on her jog through the cold night.
Her horse stood where she’d left it, scared to resist its master. She clambered onto it and spurred it into a gallop in spite of her sore orifices.
The horse ran for twenty minutes before Eleanor slowed it to report her failure. She activated a series of tattoos around her body and sacrificed what she’d learned of this growing craze called ‘baseball’ to create another messaging spell. The knowledge was torn from her, a sensation not unlike having your fingernails pulled, but that was the price she had to pay when short of magic.
A swirling portal like a mirror at the bottom of a whirlpool appeared before her eyes. It showed only her reflection for a few seconds. Then another face, a familiar and handsome one with most of the same features, appeared.
“Eleanor, daughter of mine,” her father said. “To what do I owe the unalloyed pleasure of this early morning communiqué?”
She winced. This was always going to be a horrible conversation but his tone told her it would be worse than she’d imagined. She decided to cut to the chase, be clear. He’d appreciate that.
“Our plan has failed,” she said.
“You will have to repeat that, Eleanor, as I was certain you just said that the plan has failed.”
“It has. The Wanted Man lives. And he probably has Penelope. Your agent in Crucifix is also dead as a result.”
Her father looked around, confirmed he was alone, then roared “What in the name of Omnis happened? What? How could you possible mess this one up? After all the steps we took, after all the planning and the care, what did you do?!”
She would not let tears form in her eyes, would not have her cheek twitching as it wanted; this was how her Father would talk to any of his men if they’d failed him and she hadn’t wanted to be treated differently. The hurt caused by her own papa talking to her like she was a useless bitch would have to go ignored.
“It looks… It looks as though the Wastrels were unable to keep the Wanted Man restrained. He escaped with the help of an Indian warrior and saved Penelope Chalmers, presumably before she fully became a ‘Vessel’.”
“And what did you do about this?”
Eleanor checked her surroundings, aware that she’d been concentrating heavily on the communication spell, but saw no predators following her. “I escaped, as per the plan! Their Faustian should have had the battle in hand so-”
“Daughter,” her father said, raising a hand. “Please do not tell me that you saw Dust, the Wanted Man, the being we specifically wanted to ensure was dead, had enough strength to engage in a fight and you still left the cult of that wasted whore god to deal with him?”
What was she supposed to say to that? What could she say? The plan had been laid out and she had followed it to the letter. “I- Well, that is… The plan…”
He sighed, a weary sound that cut worse than his anger. “You did the right thing in calling me. That much I can appreciate. But you have failed me with dogmatic adherence. Worse than that, you have failed Omnis. This shouldn’t have been a complex plan, Eleanor; Omnis has a great many schemes with far more subtleties and variables in play every day. I thought we had made this very clear, foolproof even… but I was wrong.”
Eleanor decided she did want to be treated differently. It was time to pull a cheap move, tug at his heart-strings as she had since she was a child. “Please, Daddy, forgive me… Find it in you to forgive your little girl.”
His eyes gained a paternal grace then, a forgiveness and love that gave her hope. “My dear daughter, you are not wholly to blame. I must declare, I too made a mistake in the execution of this plan; I should have seen you weren’t quite ready for such an important task.”
Eleanor clasped her hands to her chest. “Then you will forgive me?”
He looked down slightly. Eleanor noticed how tired and old he looked. This news had not served him well. His shoulders started moving, as though he were doing something outside of the spell’s view.
“Daddy?”
He winced but kept doing whatever he was doing. “This is hard for me, Eleanor. You know that I am a family man, that I loved your mother dearly and love you just as much. I would never want to be seen as being cruel or a poor father…”
Then he looked up. “But you wanted to join the family business, the world of Omnis and our little tendrils all across these fine United States. You asked me to not treat you with any kindness, as though you were any of my other employees. Is that not right, daughter of mine?”
“No, Daddy, wait-”
“Did you not ask me to treat you as I would anybody else?” he hissed, shoulders still moving rhythmically. She guessed he would have shouted if he weren’t wanting to avoid bringing attention to himself.
She nodded. It was all she could do.
“Exactly. There now, all done,” he said with a satisfied nod. Leaning forward, he blew on something. The sound of wafting paper came across the spell, her rustling doom. “Well, I never could deny you anything, could I, Eleanor, my little bookworm? So I brought you in. I introduced you to the true god of this world. And I never once treated you like you were my little girl.”
Eleanor shot her hand into the portal and tried to dispel its magic. But her father reached forward first and somehow took control of the spell, changed its source, and it repelled her as an intruder. Her hand shook violently. There was no way of escaping this now.
“No, daughter, I’m afraid there’s no escaping this. You asked and you shall receive.”
He held a piece of paper over the spell, covering his tired face. On it he had inked the symbol she’d tried to avoid; a jagged drawing of a humanoid creature with a bulbous head, two great rending claws at the end of spindly arms and no torso below the waist. Around the sketch were sigils and runes, the framework of a spell. This was a curse, her father’s own invention, one she had seen used many times to eliminate those who had wasted Omnis’ time and resources.
“No, Daddy, no!”
The drawing burned away as the curse was consumed. Her father’s face appeared through the withering paper, thin and a little emotional. “I would say that I’m sorry, Eleanor, but you knew what you were getting yourself in for. And wasting knowledge is the greatest sin against Omnis. Goodbye, my daughter.”
The messaging spell disappeared, leaving Eleanor to look at the Badlands once more. Where once she had found relative comfort, now she felt fear in every peak, horror at every twisted plant or unseen road. The curse was out there, coming for her.
She quickly debated her options; she could flee, find somewhere to fortify against the curse until she could work out how to undo it… or she could turn back to Crucifix and ask for Dust’s help. Neither one was appealing. But if it were a choice between facing the wrath of the Wanted Man and sitting alone in a cave for the next few weeks, she knew which she’d rather-
Her thoughts were interrupted when a serrated claw shot through her shoulder and burst from the front of her chest. It was covered in her blood. She looked down and the agony, the cold shock and horror, of a major wound mastered her; her shoulders slumped, her nerves wailed and she coughed blood down her front.
She looked behind her with the last of her strength and saw the creature in her father’s curse, a floating engine of death. It’d come far more quickly than she’d thought possible.
Her father was an amazing mage.
Her horse screamed and charged away, filling her ears with its pounding hooves and leaving her to dangle from the curse’s claw. The curse’s wide, yellow teeth were like arrow-heads as it gave her a great smile. Then it pierced her with the other claw and tore her in half with one swift movement.
The top half of her torso fell to the floor. She landed face-down. The Badlands’ dust filled her vision as she died and her final act was to smile; the irony was not lost on her.