Page 24 of The Devils

In Circles

They’d taken the right-hand hallway this time, or maybe the left, Vigga was getting mixed up, and what was the difference anyway? Every hall led back to the same room, the same rotten food, the same flies. Jakob and Baptiste squabbled, just like always, and Sunny fretted, hoping to stop Mummy and Daddy fighting, just like always. Vigga enjoyed a good squabble as much as the next werewolf and normally would’ve got stuck right in there, but now and again she’d come over all listless and leaden and now was one of those flat, grey times.

‘What’s the fucking point?’ she grunted, dropping into one of the chairs, across the table from her mother, who was busy sewing. She’d always been nimble as Brokkr with a needle, took in mending work from around the village for an extra coin or two.

Her mother didn’t look up, which was very like her. So organised, so patient. One thing at a time. Not like Vigga at all, always flying off in every direction.

‘Where have you been?’ her mother asked.

Thinking about that seemed to hurt, and a salty sea tang breezed in from the gloomy hallways and kissed Vigga’s sweaty forehead, which was nice. ‘Around, maybe? I’m a bit confused.’

‘You always were confused. Flying off in every direction.’

‘Even before the bite. Life just … comes at me. Like a wasps’ nest breaking open in my hands. Shocking and frightening and painful. And maybe makes you swell up a bit.’

‘Don’t pick up wasps’ nests, that’s my advice.’

‘I never was very good at taking advice.’

Her mother glanced up. ‘Even before the bite.’

‘Aye.’ Vigga flopped forwards with her arms on the wharf’s rickety rail and her head on her arms, watching the waves slop against the barnacle-crusted timbers. ‘I’ll let the others deal with this for now, I reckon.’

‘Others?’ asked her mother, fingers busy with Vigga’s hair, tugging and braiding. ‘Deal with what?’

Vigga watched a self-important seagull waddle down the wharf, looking beady-eyed for scraps the fishermen might’ve left. ‘Not sure,’ she said.

Lot of flies around.

‘Ready?’ asked Vigga, knitting her fingers together to make a step.

‘Usually,’ said Sunny, setting her bare foot in Vigga’s tattooed hands where it looked all thin and pale, like a child’s drawing of a foot.

The werewolf counted, nodding with each number. ‘One, two, three .’

Sunny jumped as Vigga heaved her up and she flew as if she weighed nothing. She didn’t weigh much more than nothing, to be fair. She gave the rail the lightest touch in passing and dropped in a crouch on the gallery in total silence.

‘Always impresses me,’ she heard Jakob say, below.

‘The throwing or the jumping?’

‘Honestly? Both.’

‘Aye, well,’ said Vigga, ‘either must look like magic to a man can’t get off a boat without help.’

‘You’re not going to let me forget that, are you?’

‘Man of your age,’ said Baptiste, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t forgotten it already.’

There were four doorways off the balcony, and Sunny padded to the nearest, pressed her back to the wall, and peered around the corner, showing as little of herself as she could. Force of habit.

The more of her people saw, the less they liked it.

Another hall. Chequered tiles, dusty panelling, leaning suits of armour. How many had they walked down now? It felt like dozens.

‘You should join the circus, you two,’ Baptiste was saying.

‘Sunny tried that already,’ grunted Jakob. ‘Didn’t work out.’

‘Maybe if I’d been an acrobat,’ called Sunny, ‘instead of a freak.’ She waited, but there was only silence. People rarely laughed at her jokes. It was the way she told them, they said. Work on your fucking delivery. But she’d been hoping for something. She went back to the rail and peered down. The room below was empty.

‘Jakob?’ she hissed. There was an ugly creeping of nerves up her throat.

‘Vigga?’ Her words sank into silence, such buried quiet it tickled her ears.

‘Baptiste?’ But even the flies were gone.

‘That’s … strange?’ murmured Jakob, limping out of the hallway yet again.

How many times now, the same room? The same chequered tiles. The same table, laden with fly-blown food, one chair tipped over. The same chandelier holding a dozen candles. But the table was on the tiled ceiling now, and the chandelier stuck up from the wooden floor.

You’d be surprised if you saw nothing surprising in an illusionist’s house, but this, he was pretty sure, wasn’t right. He prodded at one of the strings of glass beads on the chandelier, sticking straight up, and it tinkled faintly as it waved back and forth, like rushes on the bed of a river.

‘It’s upside down,’ murmured Jakob.

‘Or we are?’ said Szymon, as though this happened all the time. Szymon Bartos, large as life, which in his case was large indeed, carrying the shield with the double eagle and the holy circle Pope Angelica had permitted them to add to their arms, turning the Iron Order into the Golden. How proud they’d been, to wear the circle when they marched out with hymns on their lips to set the world to rights. He had a bad feeling he knew how that had turned out.

‘Where’s Sunny?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

‘And what’s-her-face. Werewolf.’

‘Werewhat?’ Szymon frowned. The other Templars were all frowning, too. The spell of command was so easily broken. The structure they all relied on could crumble, and that meant chaos, and death, and the failure of the sacred cause. The Grandmaster had to seem more than a man. Harder. Stronger. Above all, more certain .

From your certainty would grow their certainty, and the company united in a righteous purpose could not fail.

No one wants to see doubts.

‘Never mind.’ Perhaps he’d dreamed it. It sometimes seemed he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing the past. Jakob rubbed at his throbbing temples. A greasy sweat kept gathering there. ‘I thought you lot were dead. Long ago.’

‘I’m as alive as you are, Chief,’ said Szymon.

‘Bad as that, eh?’

‘So many choices,’ said Elzbieta, turning slowly about as she scowled up towards the upside-down gallery, and the upside-down doors that led off it, each one the same.

Jakob couldn’t meet her eye. He was sure she was dead. He remembered strangling her himself. There’d been no choice. Doubt was like plague in a city, it had to be burned out before it spread. Only there she stood, with that fat bottom lip and the braid coiled around her head, which had always faintly annoyed him though he’d never been able to say why.

The buzzing of flies was everywhere. It made his teeth hurt. It made his knees hurt.

‘Which is the right door?’ asked Elzbieta.

‘There is no right door,’ muttered Jakob, closing his eyes. ‘They all lead to hell.’

A hell they would break their backs to build for themselves.

‘There is no right door,’ muttered the head. ‘They all lead to hell.’

‘That doesn’t sound hopeful.’ Brother Diaz was growing increasingly alarmed. His moral compass might be spinning wildly of late, but he was reasonably sure hell was still in the wrong direction. ‘Does that sound hopeful?’

‘No,’ snapped Alex, glaring at Balthazar.

The magician clawed at the air again, as if he was struggling to pull up an invisible team of horses, and this time an answering breeze washed through the room, making the candle flames dance, the pages of the weighty books flutter. Baron Rikard sat up a little, not quite so fashionably bored as usual.

Balthazar was starting to look ill, in truth, hands and lips moving ceaselessly, a sheen of sweat appearing on skin with a slight greenish tint. The severed head was now babbling and leaking almost constantly, though whose words were in its dead mouth it was becoming impossible to say.

‘I don’t like this,’ said Alex as the wind died back.

‘Well, no one likes it,’ said Brother Diaz.

‘I don’t trust him.’

‘Well, no one trusts him!’

‘Never fear …’ Balthazar forced one eye open a slit and hissed through a fixed and deeply unreassuring smile, ‘this will all be over soon.’ And he winced as he swallowed a burp, then dragged angrily at the air again.

That unnatural wind swept through the room, stronger this time, making the torn wallpaper flap, whipping up swirls of dust, the metal rings rattling angrily against their screws. For perhaps the thirtieth time since he’d sat on that bench outside Cardinal Zizka’s office, Brother Diaz had the sense that things were going profoundly wrong, but he was utterly powerless to prevent it. For perhaps the hundredth time since he’d sat on that bench outside Cardinal Zizka’s office, he pressed the vial on its chain beneath his habit and closed his eyes. ‘O Blessed Saint Beatrix, see me safely through my trials and deliver me into the grace of our Saviour …’

‘No, no,’ the head was saying. ‘I’ll be good.’

Somehow, that sounded less hopeful to Brother Diaz than ever.

‘No, no! I’ll be good!’

But everyone knew she wouldn’t be. She’d never given the slightest hint that she even knew how. They dragged her on across the village square, a chain tight on each wrist and ankle, iron links biting at her, two grim men on the end of each one, hauling so hard it felt like her joints would pop apart.

Folk watched, peering scared around doorways, or cursing as she was bundled past, or hard-faced with arms folded, careless as empty suits of armour on a stand. Friends and neighbours become a gloomy jury and not one spoke up for her. She couldn’t blame ’em.

‘Ah, my shoulder! Ah, my knee!’ But they didn’t care how bad they hurt her. The more the better. They dragged her through the mud and dung and chilly puddles, torn trousers falling halfway down her arse, then all in the air, then hopping on one foot, then bouncing off the corner of a cart, sobbing and spitting and choking on a mouthful of her own hair.

They dragged her towards the square of shadow that was the doorway of the longhouse, and she caught one of the posts beside it, clung to it, hugged it like it was her last friend in all the world. It was.

‘No, no! I’m safe! I’m clean!’ But everyone knew she wasn’t. The men hauled with all their weight, chains snapping taut, and she squealed as a woman started beating her with a broom, smack, smack across her back. They finally tore her free, arms ripped and bleeding, and she smashed her face against the side of the house and was into the darkness, smelling of herbs and smoke.

‘You’re not safe and you’re not clean,’ said Sadi, laying out the ink. ‘You’re the very opposite of both.’

‘I’m sorry!’

‘So am I. But sorry will give no one back their lives.’ And they looped the chains around stakes in the straw-scattered dirt so she was dragged face down over the stained rock where the sacrifices were made.

‘It was the wolf,’ whimpered Vigga, straining and struggling but trapped fast as flies in candle wax. ‘I couldn’t help it.’

Sadi lifted Vigga’s face and held it with both hands, more sad than angry, and wiped Vigga’s tears away with her thumbs. ‘That’s why we have to mark you. Folk must know what you are.’ She took up the bone needle, and nodded, and they began to cut Vigga’s dirty clothes off. ‘It is the only decent thing to do. And you know how we are here. We always try to do the decent thing.’

‘You can’t,’ whimpered Vigga, ‘you can’t.’

‘We must.’ Tap , tap , tap , as Sadi began to prick the warnings into her, and Vigga cried.

Not because of the pain. But because she knew there was no way back.

‘You can’t,’ the head was mumbling, ‘you can’t.’

Balthazar neither knew nor cared whose words it was parroting. He had always considered illusion an inferior discipline, the very definition of fraud, the province of crass pick-up artists rather than of self-respecting magicians. It was an opinion only reinforced when – after sharing it with her at a meeting of the Friends of the Numinous – Covorin of the Nine Eyes had tricked him into kissing a goose in front of the entire gathering, a humiliation neither forgotten nor forgiven, neither by Balthazar nor, he imagined, by the goose.

Probably the unkillable idiot, the unseeable elf, the unspeakable werewolf, and Europe’s most experienced smug harpy were even now blundering in circles through an imagined maze of their own horribly clichéd worst fears. There they could indefinitely remain, as far as Balthazar was concerned. He had been living his own worst fears for the past few months already, and was entirely focused on liberating himself, thank you very much. That task, it turned out, was proving more than demanding enough.

He was required to perform two taxing rituals simultaneously: a lesser to suppress the nauseating effects of the binding and a greater to break it, all while maintaining the pretence that he was dispelling some hack illusionist’s cumbersome home defence mechanism. That red streak on his wrist, however, was proving more stubborn than he could possibly have anticipated, notwithstanding one failed attempt already at his back. The more force he brought to bear, the more tightly it seemed to grip, the more the nausea bubbled up, the more effort he had to expend to force it down. He was running with sweat beneath his borrowed robe and was beginning to wonder how much these conjurer’s circles could take before ripping their screws from the floor, warping in the heat or, indeed, simply melting.

The results of a sudden miscarriage could be explosive – for Balthazar, for everyone in the room, potentially for the entire neighbourhood. He remembered his disbelieving laughter when he discovered that Sarzilla of Samarkand had blown herself up attempting to turn tin into silver – since no one tried lead into gold after that fiasco with the lizards – along with two and a half reasonably prosperous streets and a fabric market.

What the hell would possess someone to take such a chance? he had wondered aloud. To his birds, obviously, since he had been living alone. Now here he was, making an even riskier gamble. But there could be no backing down. Here was his opportunity, not only to win his freedom, but to make an indelible mark as one of the great arcane practitioners of the age! He would show those sanctimonious hypocrites Bock and Zizka, and that smirking bitch Baptiste, and Covorin of the Nine Eyes and every other envious rival who had ever dared underestimate him!

He overcame his rising nausea as he had overcome all the obstacles, the injustices, the misfortunes. He would show the whole world! History was not made by the cautious!

He gritted his teeth and drew again, sucking air in through his flared nostrils, sucking power into the conjurer’s circles, ringing now, singing, starting, like iron in the forge, ever so faintly to glow.

‘This is wrong,’ muttered Jakob. ‘We shouldn’t be here!’

And he ran from the dining room and its endlessly buzzing flies. As close to running as he got, anyway, gripping his right hip, left leg held nearly straight. He lurched back down the shadowed hallway, tiled with black and white skulls, panelled with shields hammered flat, dozens of suits of ruined armour standing at butchered attention. He ducked under the broken portcullis, past the shattered gates, and out onto the battlefield.

They were cut off. They were outflanked. He heard drums and horns and wailing battle-songs. The drone of the ‘Our Saviour’ from a thousand mouths. The elves were everywhere. Ghosts in the forest, shadows at the corner of your eye, gone like smoke when you grabbed for them. Their black arrows flitted from the trees, poisoned whispers. To lose your way was death, to lower your guard was death, to turn your back was death.

‘Forward!’ Jakob held his sword high, or as high as he could with the pain in his shoulder. Courage is catching. If one man shows it, it spreads. Fear is the same. Retreat becomes rout. So one more time he made himself the point of the spear, into the melee, rain hammering down, leaking through his armour to soak the gambeson beneath, turning it to cold lead.

He wasn’t sure who they were fighting any more. Was it the elves? Or the Lithuanians? Or the Sicilians? Or the Castillians? Or the Picts, or the Irish, or the witches from that tower they burned, or the monks from that church they burned, a century and more of enemies, flowing together like paints on a madman’s palette.

He shoved and stomped, crushed shoulder to shoulder, snarled and shoved, hardly knowing whether the fighters around him were dead or alive, each helpless as a cork in a flood. Men groaned and screamed and bit and elbowed and punched and howled and fell to be trampled into the mud.

He could taste blood, he could taste death.

‘Kill the bastards!’ he snarled, struggling to free his sword arm. ‘Kill them all!’

The party was in full swing when Sunny stepped out of the hallway and made her grand entrance.

‘Ta-da!’ she sang, but no one noticed, which was a shame, because she’d spent hours dressing and was all sparkly for the occasion. Everyone was, a happy crowd packed into the high-ceilinged dining room under the chandelier. Up on the gallery, too. All knotting together and breaking apart and swirling around with a band playing somewhere.

Sunny loved bands. Always seemed like magic how they could make a piece of wood sing like that. She would’ve liked to dance but was incredibly bad at it. She’d practised a dance once but when she showed it to the Ringmaster, he’d looked like he was sucking on a lemon and said, I thought all you fuckers were supposed to have an alien grace.

When did she last get invited to a party? Never. Obviously. Everyone despised her. But she’d always wanted to go to one. One where she wasn’t eavesdropping, or stealing something, or trying to poison somebody, that was.

Parties. Amazing. People dancing and laughing and flirting and saying one thing but somehow meaning another. Making the moves with the smiles and the eyes and the hands flapping around. Like a high-stakes game of social chess on that black and white tiled floor. Sunny loved people, they were so weird.

She wished she was one.

She was clutching the invitation tight. She’d been so excited to get it. To our dearest Sunny, you are cordially invited … blah, blah, blah , or something. Though she didn’t remember opening the envelope, now she thought about it. Was she drunk? She’d got drunk once before. One glass of wine, and it tasted like feet, and she’d got dizzy very soon afterwards, then been sick and lost her dignity, and Vigga had to put her to bed.

Who was Vigga, anyway? She scratched her head. Very odd.

She tossed her cloak to the doorman, but he didn’t notice and it just crumpled on the floor where someone promptly trod on it.

‘I am here,’ she said, but the doorman ignored her, the rude bastard, busy taking a coat from some woman who’d crowded in after her, the rude bitch. Sunny noticed she was wearing a mask. Then she noticed everyone was wearing masks. Everyone but her.

She stared in panic at the invitation. You are cordially invited to a masked ball … blah, blah, blah. No! If anyone needed a mask it was her. Her face was appalling. The sight of it made people puke. She clapped her hands over it, and found she was blushing so hard it was almost painful, which was strange because she’d never blushed before, she’d seen it done and thought it was excellent but had tried for hours in the mirror and couldn’t manage it.

‘Sorry,’ she said, slipping sideways through the press, but no one made space for her. ‘Excuse me!’ But they all acted like she wasn’t there, and someone barged into her and someone else trod on her foot then as she was gasping someone told a joke and flung a careless elbow and caught her right in the mouth.

‘D’you fucking mind?’ she snarled at him, but he carried on and everyone burst out laughing at the punchline. A woman with great muscly shoulders and wild dark hair and writing on her cheek sat in one of sixteen chairs at a dining table, talking very animatedly to someone despite being alone.

She looked at the invitation again, but now it was an old, dog-eared bill from the circus, printed badly on bad paper. Look in horror on the only captive elf in Europe! Third down behind the living statue and that man with a giant wart on his face. It wasn’t even true. About being the only captive elf, not about the wart. But you get no crowds for the commonplace , the Ringmaster always said. She wished he was there, even though he’d hated her. Even being hated was something.

Proof you’d made an impression.

Everything was too bright and too loud. She could hear flies. Was she drunk? She didn’t feel sick but she’d certainly lost her dignity. Not that it mattered. What use is dignity if no one knows you’re there? What use is anything?

If no one knows you’re there, are you really there at all?

The band was playing that music with the honking trumpet they used to play at the circus when she came on to be booed and knocked over with a slapstick. She didn’t like that music so much.

There was a circle of masked revellers pointing and laughing and a man standing bent over in the centre. A grey, scarred, worried man and he looked so familiar, but Sunny couldn’t place him.

‘This is wrong,’ he was saying. ‘We shouldn’t be here.’

‘Hello?’ Sunny snapped her fingers in his face. ‘Do I know you?’

But he didn’t know her. He didn’t even see her. She crushed the bill in her trembling fist. She was furious, and no one noticed, and she was terrified, and no one noticed, and she was miserable, and no one noticed, or would’ve cared if they had.

She found a corner and wedged herself into it. She slid down to sit and drew her knees tight into her chest.

She could make herself invisible. That was her thing.

But could she make herself visible?

There was the problem.