Page 13 of The Devils

Least Worst Choices

The rain came down.

It had been coming down for hours, turning the track they’d taken to avoid the main roads into a crooked bog, dripping from the foliage that overgrew it on both sides, and gradually soaking the unfortunate congregation of the Chapel of the Holy Expediency to the skin. It had worked through Brother Diaz’s hood, trickled down the small of his back, collected around his balls and, in unholy alliance with the endless movement of his damp saddle, chafed them raw. He didn’t remember chafing being mentioned among the torments inflicted upon the martyrs. It bloody should’ve been.

‘I’m not at my best in the rain,’ he grumbled, glaring towards the iron-grey skies.

‘It was sunny a while back,’ said Princess Alexia, who rode beside him with a perpetual drip on the tip of her nose and all the royal dignity of a drowned cat’s carcass. ‘You were grumbling then, too.’

‘I’m not at my best out of doors at all,’ he grumbled.

‘Don’t think anyone’s enjoying it,’ she grumbled back.

‘I’m enjoying it!’ called Vigga from in front, holding high one tattooed arm. The wetter it got, the more clothes she’d taken off, until she was riding barefoot in a leather vest with a hood she hadn’t even bothered putting up. The way the unfortunate garment clung to her muscular back was deeply distracting, her good humour in the face of all hardship exceedingly aggravating. Especially since the worst danger around, as far as Brother Diaz could tell, was her. He lived in constant terror that she might transform back into a toothy nightmare and rip him apart. Or, indeed, skip the transformation and rip him apart while in human form. She looked entirely capable of it.

He made one more futile effort to work his sore balls into a more comfortable position, and failed. ‘How bloody far is it to Ancona?’

Brother Diaz was in charge, of course, appointed by the Pope herself. But Jakob of Thorn was actually in the lead, sitting stiffly, a man locked in a mortal battle with the weather. One in which there could be no retreat, no surrender, and no victory. ‘We’re not going to Ancona,’ he grunted.

‘What?’ Brother Diaz felt the grip of serious alarm. For perhaps the fiftieth time since they’d left the inn. He reined in his unhappy horse – no great task since they were moving at a crawl. ‘Ancona was very distinctly Cardinal Zizka’s plan—’

The old knight turned his mount in preference to turning his head. ‘Plans must bend to the situation,’ he growled.

‘Ours usually turn shockingly floppy within a few miles of the Holy City.’ Baptiste leaned from her saddle and tipped her hat with one finger, letting a stream of water pour from the brim. ‘After which we tend to improvise.’

‘Marcian knew where to find us.’ Jakob winced as he worked his fist into one of the spots where, not that long ago, he’d sported an arrow. ‘He’s likely not the only one familiar with our plans. We need another port.’

Brother Diaz sagged yet further into his damp saddle. ‘If not Ancona, where?’

‘The Kingdom of Naples is out, obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Genoa or any of the western ports—’

‘Genoa has its charms in the spring,’ mused Baron Rikard.

‘—would mean sailing past Sicily. The place is alive with pirates.’

‘Ugh, pirates.’ Baptiste shuddered.

Brother Diaz had no warm feelings for pirates, but they could hardly be worse than his current company. ‘You spent no time in the profession?’ he asked, with heavy irony.

It missed the mark. ‘Three voyages, maybe?’ said Baptiste. ‘It only came about through a bad throw at dice. I admit I started with some romantic notions, but they were soon shattered, I can tell you. The thing you don’t realise, is …’ She gave an elaborate shrug. ‘Pirates are fucking horrible.’

Princess Alexia raised her dewy brows. ‘You don’t say?’

‘They’re just really, really horrible thieves on the sea. They’re not funny, they’re not charming, the food is awful. If someone offers you the chance to be a pirate, tell them you’re busy. That’s my advice.’

‘I probably will be busy,’ said Alexia. ‘Being Empress of the East. Or, more likely, dead. Those are the two options I’m looking at, really, long term.’

‘Of course, you say that now, but in my experience – and it is—’

‘Considerable?’ offered Brother Diaz.

‘—life takes strange turns. Strange turns. I mean …’ And Baptiste waved one hand towards their current company, on horseback in a dripping excuse for a clearing. ‘Look around you.’

‘Why have we stopped?’

Brother Diaz wrenched about in terror to find Sunny haunting his elbow, those unnaturally huge eyes upon him. Whatever Black Art she used to pass unobserved seemed to apply to her horse as well. He eyed the beast with considerable suspicion.

‘Considering the route,’ muttered Alex.

‘Can’t risk the Tyrrhenian coast.’ Jakob picked up where he’d left off with the weary air of a man forced to do it often. ‘So it has to be the Adriatic. The Kingdom of Naples is out, obviously—’

‘Obviously.’

‘—and the docks in the Papal States will be watched, passengers documented—’

‘The Church does love paperwork,’ observed Balthazar, hunching bedraggled in his saddle with a stretch of dripping tarp held over his head. ‘Even more than God.’

‘The Church is not that keen on God, in my experience,’ said Baron Rikard. ‘They think of him much as a lawyer thinks of the law. Something to be got around.’

‘You’re a vampire,’ snapped Brother Diaz. ‘Of course you hate the Church.’

‘On the contrary, I am a great admirer of the tenets of your religion. I merely find it a shame that the Saved are, as a rule, so little like their Saviour.’

‘Must we really endure a vampire’s opinions on theology?’

‘Or law,’ added Baptiste. ‘I spent two months arguing a case before magistrates in Navarre, so I feel I’ve got one foot in the profession.’

‘Like every other,’ observed the baron.

‘How many feet can one woman have?’ asked Vigga, and she laughed. Alone.

‘The docks in the Papal States will be watched,’ repeated Jakob, even more wearily.

‘Which rules out Ravenna, Rimini, and Pescara,’ said Baptiste, counting the cities off on her fingers.

‘Pescara’s awful anyway,’ threw in Baron Rikard. ‘Wouldn’t be caught dead in Pescara.’

‘You are dead,’ said Vigga.

‘But I wouldn’t be caught .’

‘It needs to be a busy port,’ grunted Jakob. ‘Somewhere we’ll fade into the background.’

‘That’s what I do,’ said Sunny, almost wistfully.

‘And me.’ Vigga dragged her mass of hair to one side and pulled up her hood. Her sinewy shoulders, tattooed with runes and warnings, were still very much visible, along with the doglike fangs in her smile.

‘You look like a werewolf with a hood,’ said Sunny.

‘ So …’ Jakob delivered the word with the brutal finality of a cleaver on a butcher’s block. ‘We’re going to Venice.’

‘Venice?’ Brother Diaz grew even more alarmed. ‘ That’s your plan?’

Jakob ignored him. ‘Anyone know people in Venice?’

‘I know people everywhere,’ said Baptiste. ‘I can’t promise they like me—’

‘Does anyone like you?’ asked Balthazar.

‘They’re lukewarm at best. And yet I’m the most popular among us by far .’

The baron swept the group with a scornful eye. ‘The definition of a low bar …’

‘People rarely remember me fondly,’ said Vigga, grinning. ‘But they rarely forget me.’

‘Speak for yourselves,’ said Balthazar. ‘I am one of the top three, possibly two, necromancers in Europe. Success leads to jealousy, of course, and jealousy to resentment, but people have no choice but to at least respect me.’

‘Point out one person who respects you,’ said Princess Alexia.

There was a silence filled only by the patter of rain.

‘Venice,’ said Jakob, turning his horse. ‘We’ll find a ship there to take us on.’

‘But the Serene Republic is at daggers drawn with the Papacy!’ blurted Brother Diaz. ‘The Dogeressa’s been excommunicated! Twice! ’

‘Some very fine people have been excommunicated,’ said Balthazar.

‘It’s well known she poisoned her husband!’

‘Some very fine people have poisoned their husbands,’ murmured Baptiste.

‘The place is a pit of vice!’

Vigga pushed her hood back again, one brow raised. ‘That a fact?’

‘We’re not going there to pray,’ said Jakob.

‘And if we were,’ said Baron Rikard, ‘surely it is the prayer that counts, not the place in which it is given, for, lo! To the Saviour the lowliest midden was a cathedral.’

‘Venice is a nest of gangsters! They’re no better than the Sicilians!’

‘They’re worse,’ said Sunny. ‘They’re better organised.’

Jakob shut his eyes, rubbing at the scarred bridge of his nose. ‘Which is why the last place anyone will look for a princess supported by the Pope … is Venice.’ And he bared his teeth, and turned his horse to leave.

All Brother Diaz could think of was the stench of burning thatch. The sensation of a bull-man’s boot in his back. The murderous scorn on Marcian’s face. The crunch of bones in the jaws of the wolf-monster now riding happily alongside him cracking abysmal jokes about the rain. He never wanted to experience anything like any of that ever again, and he could feel a bubble of trapped panic rising in his gullet that must burst out either as vomit or a desperate squeal for help.

‘We are not going to Venice!’ he shrieked. ‘I am Vicar of the Chapel of the Holy Expediency and if you recall the terms of the binding—’

‘There’s a gathering place for pilgrims.’ Princess Alexia interrupted as if he hadn’t spoken at all. ‘Near Spoleto. Hundreds go through every day.’

‘What took you there?’ asked Balthazar. ‘Concern for your immortal soul?’

‘I’m guessing,’ said Baptiste, brightly, ‘she stopped by to swindle the Saved.’

‘They band together and head to Venice for the voyage towards the Holy Land.’ The supposed heir to the throne of Troy didn’t confirm Baptiste’s accusations, but she didn’t deny them, either. ‘We can all get hoods. Fall in with them.’

‘But that might take weeks!’ squawked Brother Diaz.

‘I’d rather get her to Troy late and alive than quick and in bits,’ said Jakob.

‘Can’t disagree on that one,’ muttered Alex.

‘Your Highness …’ Brother Diaz was caught halfway between lecturing and wheedling and ended up doing neither well. ‘Her Holiness picked me for a reason—’

‘Cardinal Zizka picked you.’ Alex gave him a surprisingly withering look. ‘Because she knew you’d do as you’re told. Venice is the least worst choice.’ And she clicked her tongue, and moved on up the track.

‘Sometimes,’ growled Jakob as he turned his horse to follow, ‘least worst is the best you can hope for.’

‘Off to the Holy Land,’ sang Sunny, and she followed Alex and Jakob.

Brother Diaz stared miserably after them. Half a dozen monsters, yet it was the princess who’d slain him. ‘It seems our charge can be rather high-handed.’

‘It’s virtually a requirement in royalty,’ said Baptiste, ‘but shouldn’t you be pleased? What could be more pious than a pilgrimage?’

‘Merciful Saviour,’ breathed Brother Diaz.

From this place, the faithful set forth to tour the tombs of the saints, the blessed shrines, the hallowed monasteries and cathedrals of Europe. Hoping to persuade the martyrs to intercede with the Almighty on their behalf. Cripples to be healed. Sinners to be made pure. Trespassers to be washed clean.

From this place, pilgrims journeyed in sacred fellowships, bound together by the hope that, through humble suffering and honest repentance, they could touch the divine.

From this place.

It was a city of tents, seething with a blundering throng, stinking of woodsmoke, incense, rotten cooking, and old dung. A canvas metropolis floating on a sea of filth, flickering points of lanterns and campfires stretching into the dusky distance. It was not a track they rode down but a river of rutted mud, scattered with half-buried rubbish.

‘The Last Judgement’s coming!’ screeched an old man from the back of a mired wagon, voice broken from preaching, tearing at his hair in the desperate urgency of his mission. ‘Could be tomorrow! Could be tonight! Get on God’s good side now, you bastards, ’fore it’s too late!’

Brother Diaz swallowed, and refused to meet his eye, and his words were soon drowned in the drunken babble and desperate laughter and bawdy music and slobbered prayers, with here or there a sobbing or a roar of rage. A man squatted at what passed for a verge, listlessly watching them ride by. It was only as they passed that Brother Diaz realised he was in the act of emptying his bowels.

‘You were saying something about a pit of vice?’ murmured Baron Rikard, raising his brows at a set of scantily clad young women and men, awkwardly posed before a large tent decked in bedraggled ribbons.

Brother Diaz could think of nothing to say. Here was a pit of vice indeed, not confined to sinful Venice but within a few days’ ride of the Holy City, catering to the weak flesh of those supposed to be embarking on a holy trek to save their souls.

‘Looks like the pilgrims are getting all their sinning done before they set off,’ murmured Baptiste.

Baron Rikard looked faintly amused, as it seemed he was by more or less everything. ‘The more he has to absolve, the happier the Lord shall be.’

‘My question,’ murmured Vigga, ‘is can I get a taste?’

‘Of the absolution or the sin?’

She showed him her fangs. ‘How d’you get one without the other?’

Jakob brought them to a halt beside a stall selling pilgrims’ habits. Scarcely more than hooded tents of rough sackcloth, but Brother Diaz supposed they might hide the worst excesses of his monstrous flock. Sunny had melted into nothingness in her usual fashion, at least, but he was forced to wonder whether – in the midst of this carnival of the grotesque – even an elf would have excited much comment.

‘To work, then.’ And Baptiste slung one leg over the saddle and sprang down.

‘Find us a group to travel with,’ said Jakob. ‘Not too small, not too big.’

‘Got you.’ She nodded, turning away.

He brought her back around. ‘And make sure it’s one of the able-bodied ones, we need to get to Venice this side of Saviourmas.’

‘Got you.’ She nodded, turning away.

He brought her back around again. ‘And leaving soon. This place is …’

Baptiste glanced around and wrinkled her nose. ‘Got you.’

Jakob gently patted his horse’s neck as he surveyed the scene of moral carnage. ‘Then we’d better sell the horses.’

‘We’re walking to Venice?’ muttered Brother Diaz.

‘It’s a pilgrimage.’ Jakob let go a grunt of pain as he hauled his left leg over the saddle and frowned down at the lamplit mud like an old enemy he doubted he could defeat. ‘Everyone walks.’