The ash finished draining into the ground and San Venganza went quiet.
Abel sat on his block at the plaza's edge with the wand across his knees and worked out that his evening's best piece of work had lasted about four minutes before somebody took the stage back off him.
He had known the Sorcerer Supreme was strong. Everyone knows that, but every time he sees her fight he has to recalibrate his expectation and her level of power. A hundred devils erased with one gesture, a town folded into the Mirror Dimension, a prince of a hell dimension taken apart between two lightnings that arrived from opposite directions on a schedule she set.
He turned the wand over and noted, without much surprise, that he had spent the last thirty seconds assessing the leader of Kamar-Taj the way you assess an opposing piece.
Out on the flat, the Ancient One was frowning at nothing.
She had felt it at the end. Her working had gone in clean and the ash had come out the far side of it, and in the half-instant between those two facts something else had reached into her arena and taken the occupant. What had burned in front of her was a shell with the greater part of its power still resident, left behind so the killing would look complete.
She knew whose hand that was. A father had come to collect his son, which happened even in hell dimensions.
She could follow it. There were doors, she knew where several of them stood, and she had the standing to walk through one and present a bill. She stood in the drained plaza and weighed it for perhaps two seconds, and set it down again. Chasing Mephisto into his own house to argue about a debt he would never pay bought her nothing except a great deal of trouble carried home on her own back.
The Ancient One let out a breath and turned to send her people home.
She got halfway through the turn and stopped.
Forty metres off, crouched over the body of a devil with the water still running past his boots, Abel had a scalpel out. He had the creature's flank opened along a line he had clearly chosen in advance and was working something free of it with the concentration of a man who has done this often enough to have preferences about technique.
She watched him for a moment. Then she left him to it and went to the Ghost Rider instead.
He was where the slab had put him, head over at an angle, the last of the hellfire crawling along his collarbones and the chain still alight in his fist. She knelt, set two fingers at the base of the skull, and moved her other hand through a short figure that took less than a second to complete.
The vertebra went back with an audible sound.
Black smoke came off him in a rush and kept coming, and the skull went under it, and what was lying on the stone when the smoke cleared was a man in a leather jacket with his eyes shut. Johnny Blaze got an elbow under himself and sat up slowly.
Going toe to toe with that thing had cost him. He had held the line for the whole of it and he had put two wounds on a devil that nothing was supposed to be able to mark, and now that the fire had gone out of him he could feel every minute of it sitting in his arms.
"Thanks," he said.
The Ancient One inclined her head.
Johnny got to his feet, looked across the plaza to where Abel was working, saw what he was doing and elected to leave him to his business. Roxanne came out from behind them through a portal, and he found the bike where the flood had dropped it, and it started on the first kick because it always did.
They went out through the north end of the town and the sound of the engine took a long time to disappear.
"Kaecilius. Mordo." The Ancient One raised her voice slightly. "Take everyone back to Kamar-Taj. Treat the wounded first. Then see to the ones we are carrying home."
Kaecilius nodded and turned to go.
Mordo stayed where he was, and when he spoke he pitched it low enough that it stayed between the three of them.
"Master. What Abel Shaw used tonight was black magic in its purest form, and it looked evil." He chose the last word carefully and it still came out heavier than he intended. "He did not turn it on the innocent. I grant that. But those who study that art fall eventually, all of them, and if we take no action against him at all, I would still say Kamar-Taj has no business drawing any closer to him than we already have."
Kaecilius came back around before the Ancient One could answer.
"Mordo, listen to yourself. His magic saved a dozen of our people out of that flood and it killed the water demon, which is more than either of us managed. Black magic or not the thing he did with it was right."
"I know you two are friends." Mordo kept his voice level, which made it worse. "So understand what I am actually saying. We exist to defend this world's peace and its light. The magic itself frightens nobody. What it does to the man holding it is the whole danger, and you know that as well as I do."
A month ago Kaecilius would have had an answer out of his mouth before Mordo finished the sentence.
What he had instead was the study he had been quietly conducting at the Ancient One's own instruction, in a room nobody else entered, on texts nobody else was permitted to open. He had something to keep back now, and a man keeping something back argues at half his usual speed. The reply came a beat late and it came a shade weaker, and both of them heard it.
Mordo turned to the Ancient One.
"Master, that was only my own view. The decision belongs to you."
"Mordo. Kamar-Taj has safeguarded this world, and it will continue to do so for at least another couple of centuries. *will not begin a conflict tonight." She spoke without any particular emphasis, which was how she spoke when a matter had already closed. "Master Abel is a sworn friend of this order and an ally who fought beside us on ground of our choosing. Until the day he raises his hand against the innocent, nothing between us changes. As for what you fear, I do not believe he will do it."
Mordo held her eye for a moment, then bowed, and said nothing further.
He gathered the remaining Masters, opened a portal onto the courtyard at Kamar-Taj, and took them through it.
Kaecilius stayed behind a moment longer.
He had come to all this with one thing he wanted, and it had never changed: a world where the whole of it could sleep through the night. Getting there took strength, and strength came from where it came from. Abel had put it to him plainly once, and it had gone in and stayed in, power carries no good or evil of its own, and the man who keeps hold of the decency in his own chest can take the foulest working ever written and make it serve peace. Tonight the proof had been standing in the plaza in a wet coat. He had cast something genuinely vile, and with it he had broken open a sub-dimension, killed a demon prince's lieutenant, and pulled a dozen sorcerers out of a flood that would have finished them.
Exactly as Abel had said. Word for word.
He bowed to the Ancient One, opened his own portal, and took the last of them home.
The Ancient One watched the sparks close and allowed herself a small nod. Out of every student she had raised in this generation, one had finally stood in front of her and shown the bearing that belonged to a sorcerer.
Then she walked over to the boulder, where Abel was cleaning his scalpel on a strip of cloth.
"Master Abel. Are you finished with your materials?"
"Finished here." He folded the cloth over the blade and put both away. "The rest is bench work once I'm back. I've a great deal of potion recovery still ahead of me, and some of what's in these bodies should carry over."
"The magic that you inherited." She let that sit for a second. "How much of it runs like the thing you used tonight?"
There it was.
He had known it was coming from the moment the Cruciatus left his wand, and he had decided on the way up the spiral that the answer would be the true one.
"Roughly seventy per cent white and neutral work, thirty per cent black," Abel said. "And most of that thirty is ordinary. Stronger than its neutral equivalent, occasionally unpleasant to look at, nothing that would trouble you.
"What I used tonight is called the Cruciatus Curse. It belongs to the small end of that thirty, the part that is genuinely vile. There are two others of the same standing. Between them the three are called the Unforgivable Curses, and they are the worst things I carry."
"Please do not take offence at the question." She said it directly, without softening it. "Whether a working is good or bad is of no consequence to me. I believe you are capable of holding the reins on what you inherited. I asked because it is my place to ask."
"I'd have thought less of you if you hadn't."
That earned a smile. The Ancient One let it settle, and then, with the ruined plaza standing empty around the two of them, moved on.
"Then the favour you wanted to commission from me. When would you like to begin?"
Abel got up off the block.
"Now works."
END CHAPTER 66