Page 10 of The Devils
Wrath
Balthazar pushed himself up with a piteous groan. Where was he? Darkness, lit by flickering flames, an acrid stench of burning. Was this hell?
The left side of his body ached appallingly. His head pounded. He remembered something about a trial. Wait, had he met the Pope? A spray of sparks as Baron Rikard hauled on a lever … the binding, the vomit, the wagon, the ambush ! It all rushed back. He was just starting to wish this was hell after all when his vision was seared by a brilliant flare and a wash of heat made him cringe.
He sagged against a counter, noticed a smouldering, apron-clad cadaver behind it, lurched away and nearly tripped over Princess Alexia. She was wriggling helplessly backwards, clothes in ash-smeared disarray, across the floor of a low common room scattered with broken furniture, charred corpses, bits of fallen ceiling, and several fires. Her terrified eyes were fixed on a tall woman who, from her arcane robes and knowing smirk – not to mention that she was in the act of stepping unharmed through a sheet of flame – Balthazar deduced to be a pyromancer of no small potency.
It appeared that the plans of Cardinals Zizka and Bock to bring the Empire of the East back into the loving embrace of the Church were about to – quite literally – go up in flames. Under normal circumstances that would have been a matter of the most profound indifference to Balthazar but, for the time being, he found himself irresistibly constrained by the Papal binding.
So it was that, as the sorceress raised her hands to tear flame from nowhere, Balthazar went in entirely the wrong direction: throwing himself between her and Princess Alexia. By some scrap of good fortune, he was still clutching his excrement-daubed prayer-sheet and, as fire bloomed towards him, he thrust it forwards like a shield, inscription outwards, hissing a charm of protection through gritted teeth.
He was at first immensely relieved to see the flames repelled, roaring around him as if around a glass dome, setting fire to the counter, a couple of stools, a section of the already ruined ceiling, and the circle-embroidered papal tabard of one of the dead guards. Sadly, whether due to the poor quality of the paper, the prayers on the back, the slight soaking with rain, or the imprecise drawing of the runes in shit with a piece of toenail, his relief was short-lived. The prayer-sheet began first to brown, then to blacken, then to curl at the edges, and finally burst into flames.
‘Ah!’ he squeaked. ‘Damn it! Ah!’ As the fires subsided, he flung the burning scrap down, alternately sucking and blowing on his scorched fingertips, struggling to blink away the fizzing streaks etched into his vision. The princess scrabbled back, slapping at a patch of flame on the hem of her dress, and Balthazar swallowed as the sorceress stepped forwards, lip curled and eyes narrowed.
‘You are a sorcerer?’ she demanded.
‘Magician,’ he muttered apologetically, scraping away like a disgraced chamberlain from an angry monarch, ‘though I hold sorcery in the highest esteem.’ He had always considered it a decidedly inferior methodology, the preserve of reckless fools who valued instinct over intellect, but now was hardly the time for absolute candour. ‘Do I have the honour of addressing one of the mentees of the Empress Eudoxia?’
The sorceress proudly tossed her head. ‘You do.’ Vanity was all too common a weakness with her kind. Balthazar deplored it but was not above exploiting it.
‘I understand she was a most puissant practitioner!’ he frothed.
‘The greatest of the age,’ pronounced the sorceress, narrowing her eyes. ‘I once saw her throw lightning.’
‘Magnificent,’ breathed Balthazar, while reflecting on what a ludicrous exaggeration it must be. ‘My name …’ And he delivered the most elaborate introductory bow he could manage while sweating profusely in a burning building surrounded by burning corpses and with his fingertips still singing with pain. ‘Is Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi.’
He had been hoping her look of furious contempt might dissipate. That proved optimistic. If anything, it intensified. ‘I have heard of you.’
He found himself marooned between fear and gratification. ‘Good things, I hope?’
‘Things.’ The fires in the inn were hot, but it was the waves of heat coming off her that were truly making Balthazar cringe, his face turned sideways and his eyes narrowed to slits while the spit on his lips was cooked dry. The air around her was shimmering, her sleeves scorching black, her hair wafted into a floating cloud by the updraught. She was powerful, that was plain. But those who give themselves to the fire become like the fire: reckless, destructive, and lacking all subtlety.
The princess scrambled for the doorway, the sorceress stepped after her, and Balthazar, with a helpless shrug, simply could not prevent himself from stepping between them once again. The woman’s eyes, glowing like coals, flicked towards him.
‘You dare oppose me?’ she breathed.
Balthazar was not without pride, but it had never prevented him from grovelling when his life was on the line. ‘I make abject apologies for any perceived slight, personal or professional. I have not the slightest wish to obstruct you, or any member of your highly regarded coven. I would positively revel in the opportunity of watching you reduce that ferrety specimen to ashes, with lightning or otherwise, but—’ Balthazar nearly tripped over the singed corpse of one of Her Holiness’s finest in his haste to back away then stumbled up with hands high in submission. ‘I have been placed under this bloody Papal binding!’
‘ That … is a Papal binding?’ The sorceress glared at the brown smear on his wrist. ‘It looks pathetic.’
‘You give voice to my very thoughts! But it is vastly more effective than it appears!’ The serving girl had only blackened twigs for legs, but the upper part of her might still serve a purpose. ‘I will discover its secrets, and I will break it—’ he gave vent to an unsightly burp and had to swallow some sick ‘—but for the time being – urgh – I fear I am compelled to do everything in my much-diminished power to protect the little weasel—’
The sorceress raised her hands. ‘Then burn.’
‘Does it have to be fire?’ squealed Balthazar, shrinking from another wash of heat and holding his trembling palms even higher, playing for time as he stretched his will, ever so subtly, towards the two dead guardsmen. ‘It has never been my strong suit!’
The shimmering around her hands had become even more intense. He could see her bones, glowing like red-hot metal within the flesh. ‘Do you have a strong suit?’ she sneered, stepping between the smoking cadavers.
‘Well, since you ask …’ Balthazar began subtly to move his fingers, threading through the familiar incantations in his mind, feeling out the joints, pinching up the sinews, stroking the fluids into motion. ‘It’s corpses.’
The larger of the two guardsmen lurched up with a gurgle and a loud fart. He had a look of lopsided surprise on his blistered features but, rather gratifyingly for Balthazar, nothing compared to the shock on the face of the sorceress.
She gave a hoarse scream, fire shooting from her fingers and sending the big guard up in flames again but, since he was already partly cooked and entirely dead, he was not greatly inconvenienced, grappling incompetently with her like a drunken lover.
‘Me, burn?’ snarled Balthazar, all the petty frustrations of the last few months spilling forth at once. ‘I will snuff you like an overgrown candle .’
Given the less than auspicious circumstances, he conducted those charred bodies like a string quartet. He whisked the small guard up to trembling attention and sent him flailing at the sorceress, pummelling her back. At the same time, he beckoned to the innkeep, whose eyes were cooked and so had to feel his way to the ale-casks like a blind man at a wine-tasting.
The smaller guard swung a fist, tottered on a stiff leg, missed, hit the big guard, and broke his burning hand off. But there was still plenty to work with. The sorceress shrieked as the big guard bit her arm, farting intermittently, which is a common problem with the recently dead unless one really concentrates on the relevant sphincters and, really, who has the patience? Fire spurted up and set the rafters alight, the sorceress stumbled under the big guard’s weight, the upper half of the serving girl caught her ankles in a tight embrace, and she gave a despairing howl as she was brought down hard on the charred boards.
The small guard had become confused, wandering around in circles with his clothes on fire, but the big one was still holding on, pinning the sorceress however she twisted, while the serving girl gnawed viciously at her legs, cooked skin sloughing off her shoulders while she did it.
‘I am Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi, you incandescent drudge .’ Balthazar lifted his clenched fist high and the innkeeper reared up, hefting a barrel over his charred head with undead strength. ‘If someone kills that turd of a princess it will be me !’
The innkeep dashed the cask down and stove the sorceress’s skull in with the rim, timbers bursting apart and beer spraying out to forever quench her flames with a satisfying hiss. A rather pleasant yeasty odour joined the smells of cooking meat and, for reasons Balthazar could not immediately discern, rather fine perfume.
He let his hands fall and the recently deceased flopped down in a smouldering heap, except for the small guard who tottered on towards the back door a few steps, one pointing hand extended towards daylight, before issuing a final fart, tripping one foot with the other, and pitching onto his face.
The goat giant ducked under the archway to tower head, shoulders, and chest over Jakob. With human hands it hefted a monstrous club sprouting with rusty nails, opened its maw, stuck out its tongue, and gave a braying scream to freeze the blood.
But Jakob had stood unflinching before worse horrors than overgrown livestock.
He shrugged off the instinct to shrink back, stepped forwards as the club plunged towards his head, and at the last moment angled his shield so the blow didn’t crush him, but glanced off with a painful jolt, nails gouging wood before thudding into the mud beside him. The goat-thing lurched off balance on its skittering goat hooves, triumphant bleat turned to a honk of alarm.
Whack.
There’s a sound a sword makes cutting into flesh. A slick, quick whack . Not that loud, if your technique’s good and your steel sharp. Jakob never let his sword go dull.
Shocked honk became agonised squeal as the blade smacked deep into the thing’s furry thigh, just below the flapping hem of its undersized mail coat, and it lurched sideways. Goats are really meant to have four legs. Very unsteady on two, especially when one’s chopped near in half. It slumped against the archway, trying to lift its club again.
Jakob had been far stronger once. Too many wounds half-healed. Too many fights fought and lost. But a sword doesn’t need strength if you have the skill and the will.
Whack.
He could’ve taken the beast’s horned head off with one blow in his youth. Now he only cleaved its neck halfway, blade lodging in its spine. It crumpled in the archway, blood flooding from the yawning wound.
A man sprang over it. A squat man covered in black-and-white-spotted fur like a hunting dog, a heavy mace in each hand.
When you have a shield there’s an urge to stay back. To hide behind it like a gate. But Jakob had never liked retreating. An enemy with a shield pressed in his face can’t attack and can’t defend – he’s weakened, demoralised, prone to slip and fall. A fallen enemy is a dead enemy, and a dead enemy was Jakob’s favourite kind.
So he made his shield a ram instead, drove it into the hound-man’s chest, crowding him against the side of the gateway. He flailed with one mace around the rim but there was no venom there, it bounced harmlessly from Jakob’s shoulder. Now Jakob rose up over the shield, sword angled down, looking the hound-man in his white-furred, black-spotted face. Dog’s fur, but man’s eyes.
The edge of a sword needs little strength. The point needs hardly any. You wouldn’t have called them thrusts, just firm prods. The first took the dog in his furry cheek, scraped across his teeth. The second punctured one eye. The third slid through his throat. Dark blood welled from the holes, and when Jakob stepped away the hound-man crumpled like an empty sack, face in the mud and arse in the air. He had a hole cut in the back of his trousers for his dog’s tail to stick out of.
Another beast was already charging through the gateway, grey hair woolly as sheep’s fleece, spiral ram-horns curling from it, one of his eyes with a human pupil, the other with a sheep’s keyhole. Even more off-putting was the great axe he was swinging with both hands. Jakob tottered back, the blade missing him by a hair and knocking a chunk of stone from the archway.
The ram-man hefted his axe again. Plates of beaked iron were strapped to his arms, but aside from tufts of wool his hands were bare. Pick one piece of armour, make it a helmet, but gauntlets had always come second on Jakob’s list. His sword clanged against the haft of the axe, sent two woolly fingers flying off and left a third hanging by a flap.
The ram bellowed in fury, snapping forwards over Jakob’s shield, horns crunching into his face. Jakob reeled back, fell gasping to one knee. The ram-man screeched as he hoisted his axe high in his good hand—
Thud.
Jakob caught a glimpse of Baptiste’s snarling face as she buried a dagger in the side of the ram’s neck. He drooled red blood into pale wool, axe dropping in the dirt, fumbling at his belt for a sword. Baptiste nailed him through the top of the skull with another knife before he got there, right between the horns. He flopped sideways, mute testament to the greatest fighting technique of all: a friend behind your enemy.
Jakob growled as Baptiste dragged him up, flinched as a horse flashed past, spattering mud. Half the mounts hadn’t fitted in the stable and now they’d formed a panicked herd, frisking riderless out of the gate, harnesses flapping, trampling the misshapen corpses Jakob had left there. Beyond them, hazy through the rain, Jakob saw figures. Lumpen, animal figures, furred and horned and hoofed and bristling with weapons, and leading the way a man in bright armour.
‘Where did these things come from?’ hissed Baptiste.
Jakob wiped blood from under his throbbing nose. ‘Troy, maybe?’
‘Your nose is broken.’
‘Hardly the first time.’
‘We’re in trouble.’
‘Hardly the first time.’
‘I should’ve quit after Barcelona!’
‘We should all have quit after Barcelona.’ The walls were falling, beast-men springing and wriggling and clambering down into the yard to press the last few guards. Their young captain was sitting against the well, wheezing as he was stabbed again and again with a spear. The moustache hadn’t helped. The stables had caught fire, patches of flame all over the thatch, the few remaining horses plunging and screeching inside. Brother Diaz was on his knees, clutching his holy circle and mouthing prayers.
‘Here’s a pickle,’ breathed Jakob, and he ripped the shield from his arm and snapped his aching fingers at Baptiste. ‘Key.’
She stared at him, eyes wide and white, hair black and bloody. ‘You sure?’
‘Key!’ No one wants to see doubts. You make your choice and live with it. Or die with it.
‘God help us all …’ She shrugged the chain from around her neck, the iron key dangling. Jakob snatched it from her and ran for the wagon. Not that fast, since his left knee didn’t move too well and his right hip barely moved at all and it was hard these days to say which of his ankles was more buggered, but he ran still, past a guard with an arrow in his back, mud smeared down one side of his twisted face, crawling to nowhere.
You learn to spot the lost causes. You save what can be saved.
He slid the key into the lock but his crooked fingers were slick with blood and it slipped, dropping in the mud.
‘ Shit! ’ he groaned, bending to fish it up by the chain, reaching, reaching—
‘Uh!’ He sagged against the wagon, a burning pain in his side. An even worse one than usual. He’d a good guess what would greet him when he peered down, but it was still somehow a shock to see the arrowhead sticking out above his hip. He turned to see a woman kneeling on the walkway. She had great, tall ears like a hare, one of them flopped over, dozens of earrings dangling from it. He might almost have laughed, if it hadn’t been for the bow she was already drawing again. One of those vicious little recurves they use in the desert. ‘Oh,’ he grunted, ‘fucking – uh!’
The second arrow punched through his lung, from the way his breath started to crackle. God, the pain.
Baptiste had vanished as neatly as Sunny might’ve. Don’t stick your neck out , she always said. Good advice. His neck was always stuck out. His whole life, a succession of last stands, lost causes, and bitter ends.
But he had his sword in his hand still, and his oaths to consider. He made of his pain a spur, growled through gritted teeth as he gathered what strength he had left, blood on each breath.
The man in bright armour strode through the broken gates of the inn. He was tall and handsome, a warrior in his prime, a drawn sword in each hand and at least four daggers sticking from his belt, the only hint of animal his gilded helmet crafted like a lion’s mouth. He roared as he hacked the crawling guard between the shoulder blades, and again, then stabbed him through the back for good measure and left one blade stuck there.
‘This is it?’ He glowered around the yard. ‘An old knight, a young monk, and a handful of the Pope’s hirelings?’ The captain of the guards was dead already, but the newcomer hacked at him savagely anyway, carved his head open in a shower of blood, then kicked the corpse over on its side. ‘Bock must be losing her fucking marbles.’
‘Can I kill th’monk?’ snorted a man with a bull’s face, the words not quite fitting in his animal mouth.
‘Killing priests is bad luck,’ snapped his master, sounding quite disappointed about it.
‘Damn ith!’ blew the bull, in a mist of angry spit. He kicked Brother Diaz between his shoulders and the monk went down with a muddy boot-print across the back of his habit.
The key was the only chance, but it was in the mud, a stride or two away. Jakob gritted his bloody teeth, and with the faintest groan pushed himself from the wagon, clinging to his sword’s hilt as if it was the last rung on a ladder.
‘Do we have to?’ asked the man with the lion helmet, one side of his sneer spotted with blood.
‘I swore …’ Jakob wheezed in one more bubbling breath, took one more wobbling step, ‘some oaths.’ He swung as best he could.
‘For God’s sake.’ The man stepped disgustedly around Jakob’s sword so it clanged into the corner of the wagon and bounced away. ‘This is fucking embarrassing !’ And he ran Jakob through the chest.
‘Ooooof …’ he groaned. That had definitely got the heart. So many times stabbed, and still he was never ready for the feeling of metal entering his body uninvited. He stood trembling a moment longer, then the blade whipped out of him and he crumpled to his knees.
His pulse surged in his ears. A sound like the sea. At Parnu, where they’d said their last goodbyes. Waves draining through sand stained black by all the pyres. He tried to get up, one more time. He had his oaths, and the oaths must keep him standing when his flesh failed, when his courage failed … when his faith failed …
He flopped on his face.
Alex scrambled from the nightmare in the inn and straight into a nightmare in the yard.
The stables had caught fire in spite of the rain, horses inside plunging in a frenzy. One of the guardsmen screamed as a woman with a great bushy tale like a squirrel’s clawed and chomped and worried at his guts, snout speckled with blood. Most of the others lay hacked, stabbed, or broken. The maid was face down with an arrow in the back of her head. A woman with great tall hare-ears sat on the walkway, an arrow nocked to a bow, legs dangling playfully off the edge. They ended not in shoes, but dainty little rabbit paws.
A big man in bright armour stood near the wagon. He’d run Jakob of Thorn through with a jewel-hilted sword. Now he looked over at Alex like a bloodhound caught scent of the quarry.
‘Ah! How nice of you to join us .’ He strode towards her, not even bothering to wipe his sword, a trail of dark spots dripping from the point. ‘I’m Duke Marcian. Youngest son of the Empress Eudoxia.’
Behind him, the old knight flopped on his face in the muck. Alex looked into the eyes of the monsters around her. The pitiless animal eyes, and the even more pitiless eyes of the man who led them. She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure her mouth still worked.
‘I apologise for these … creatures of my mother’s.’ Marcian elbowed a man with slitted cat’s eyes and crossed belts bristling with knives out of his way. ‘They smell as bad as they look, but they’re as savage as you’d expect, and surprisingly loyal. And you can’t really put a price on loyalty when you have the family we have.’
‘We?’ Alex managed to stammer. ‘You’ve got me confused … with someone else.’ She tried to smile, but it ended up a wobbly grimace. ‘I’m nobody. I’m nothing—’
‘The Pope doesn’t think so.’ Marcian pulled something from between the two daggers thrust through his belt. A roll of paper. He held it up, letting it unfurl by the weight of its elaborate seal. Alex couldn’t read it, of course, but she knew what it said. She’d heard Cardinal Bock dictate it. The Papal bull confirming who she was. One of the copies no one was meant to know about till she got to Troy.
Alex could actually hear the glug in her own throat as she swallowed.
‘That’s right.’ Marcian’s eyes flickered scornfully over the paper, then even more scornfully over her. ‘ You. The long-lost Princess Alexia Pyrogennetos. Her. My cousin, born in the flame. This. The one rightful heir to the Serpent Throne of Troy.’ He curled his lip. ‘Fuck me .’
Duke Michael was dead. The Pope’s guards were dead. Jakob of Thorn was, if not dead, then certainly on the way. Brother Diaz hunched in the mud, hands clasped and faintly rocking, probably dead but not realised yet. To be fair, he hadn’t seemed much use at the best of times.
‘I know.’ Alex realised she was still clutching the snake-hilt dagger and tossed it away, backing off, holding up her hands. ‘It’s a joke.’ Begging for her life again. At least she’d had plenty of practice. ‘No one thinks it’s a bigger joke than me!’
She tripped on a corpse, caught one fur-trimmed riding boot with the other, and went down hard on her arse. Marcian snorted laughter. The really sad thing was she laughed, too. A cringing little titter. They were going to kill her, and she was laughing along.
‘I’m not a princess!’ She wriggled back in the filth, voice rising to a pathetic little whine. ‘I’m a thief! I only came to run from a debt. Three debts! I’m a piece of shit. What would I do with a throne?’ She was laughing and crying at once, heels scuffing the bloody dirt. ‘I sell fake relics in the Holy City! I trick pilgrims, and send ’em to be robbed. I stole a comb! Look!’ And she shook it from her sleeve into the mud. ‘I didn’t know what else to do with it. You don’t have to worry about me. No one has to worry about me—’
‘Unless you’re a pilgrim, eh?’ said Marcian, and the creatures gave a clamour of honking, snorting, squawking, gibbering, like laughter mixed with feeding time at the farmyard. Eudoxia’s youngest son stalked after her, red sword resting on his shoulder, the way a digger might rest his shovel, the vicious-looking spurs on his armoured heels clinking with each step. ‘Thing is, you’re offering me heaps of wretched desperation and contemptible cowardice, but what I’m not getting is any trace of a reason not to kill you. Obviously , you have to die.’ Her back hit the wall of the tavern, and there was nowhere left to go. Marcian sneered down at her, face speckled with blood. ‘You can shuffle off with some dignity, at least. You’re royalty, aren’t you?’ And he tossed the Papal bull into her lap.
‘Please. You don’t—’
‘Get up!’ he screamed, spraying spit.
Her knees trembled so badly she had to drag herself up by the wall behind her. But somehow, the further she got, the stiffer her joints became. She ended up standing tall. As tall as she got, at least. And she lifted her chin and looked her handsome, awful cousin in the eye.
‘ Fuck you , then!’ She spat at him.
‘Huh.’ His smile faded, leaving him looking thoughtfully at her. ‘I see it now. The resemblance.’ And he lifted his sword.
‘Wait!’ Brother Diaz blundered between them. ‘Just a moment!’
Marcian caught the monk by the front of his habit, lifted his sword to tickle him under the chin. Brother Diaz swallowed, wincing as his Adam’s apple brushed the red point. Alex followed his staring eyes. She could’ve sworn she saw a footprint appear from nowhere in the sloppy mud.
‘For what ?’ demanded Marcian.
Sunny stepped from empty air beside the wagon, plucked the key from the mud, nimbly turned it in the lock, took a deep breath, and was gone. The four bolts sprang open.
‘That,’ said Brother Diaz.
The back of the wagon slowly tipped forwards then splashed down into the puddle-pocked filth beside Jakob’s corpse.
Inside there was only darkness.
Or … did something shift in there? A deeper shadow in the black.
Marcian frowned towards it. ‘What’s in the wagon?’
A low growl came from inside. Like the fighting dogs Alex spent one summer taking bets on, but deeper, bigger, far more frightening. The bull-man stepped back a pace, fingering his axe.
‘No one would tell me …’ whispered Brother Diaz.
And with a blood-chilling howl something burst from the darkness in a wash of foul-smelling wind, a mass of snarl and claws and whipping hair, of teeth and bunched muscle.
It fell on the bull-man and crushed him into the mud, blood spraying from his snout in an agonised bellow. It ripped him from throat to groin and he came open like an old coat, insides sliding out in a red-black slurry.
‘Oh God,’ whispered Alex.