Page 25 of The Devils

Nothing but the Truth

Wind sucked through the room, snatching at the candle flames, blowing dust into strange patterns. The bronze circles were humming, smoking. The severed head’s burblings made Alex think her friends inside the house were losing their minds. If they’d ever had them.

So what did Balthazar have to grin about?

‘Something’s wrong,’ she said.

‘Everything’s wrong!’ Brother Diaz gestured at the leaking head, at the rattling circles, at the muttering wizard. ‘It’s been weeks since anything was right—’

‘He’s trying to break the binding.’

‘Now you’re an expert on magic as well as deportment?’

‘I can spot a liar,’ she snapped. ‘I heard him talking about it on the road.’ And she nodded at the baron. ‘To him.’

The vampire draped limp fingers over his chest with an air of injured innocence. ‘To me ?’

‘Is this true?’ Brother Diaz actually looked a bit wounded.

Baron Rikard sighed. ‘People can confide in me without fear of judgement. I am a vampire. I leave the moral adjudications to those …’ And he waved lazily at the monk. ‘With less capacity for reason and more for hypocrisy.’

Balthazar was smiling wider, his movements growing sharper. The wind was snatching papers from the tables, whipping Alex’s hair in her face, torn wallpaper flapping at the rotten plaster.

‘Why didn’t you say something sooner?’ squealed Brother Diaz.

Alex licked her lips. Mostly ’cause she’d been hoping to be miles away by now, slunk off in the dead of night to begin a brand-new life that she definitely wouldn’t fuck up like the old one, with werewolves, vampires, and magicians just another set of ugly memories to pretend to have forgotten about.

Then Marcian and his man-beasts attacked, and it turned out the rest of Eudoxia’s sons likely knew about her, and she started to think her best chance was to stay with the others. Jakob, and Vigga, and Sunny, say what you like about them, and you could say a lot , but they’d shown they were in her corner. Been a long time since there’d been anyone in her corner but her. Her corner was a fucking desert.

‘Tell him to stop!’ She had to shriek over the racket.

The monk looked vaguely desperate. The kind of man who’d sooner let the boat sink than give an order to bail it out. You had to say he was a shitty choice of leader. But then Alex was a shitty choice of princess.

She caught a fistful of his habit. ‘Her Holiness put you in charge! Those were the words of the binding! Order him to stop!’

‘Oh, sweet Saint Beatrix …’ He set his jaw and turned towards the circle. ‘Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi!’ Without stopping his constant mumbling, the magician prised open one eye to glare at them. ‘I order you to—’

Balthazar snatched at the air with one hand and the monk’s words were cut off in an awkward splutter. He bent over, clutching at his neck. He stared at Alex, eyes bulging.

‘The magician has stopped him breathing,’ said Baron Rikard, calmly.

Alex caught Brother Diaz as he sank to his knees, veins popping from his temples.

‘Let him go!’ she shrieked at Balthazar, but aside from his self-satisfied lectures on the history of ancient Carthage, he’d been ignoring her for weeks. Would’ve been quite the shock if he’d chosen to start paying attention now. He stood with lips curled back, somewhere between a grimace of pain and a smile of triumph, his robes torn by a wind from nowhere.

‘Help me!’ she shrieked at Baron Rikard, one hand up to shield her face from the whipping grit.

The vampire didn’t help one bit. ‘You’re supposed to be taking a throne. You can’t bring one wizard into line?’

The circles were glowing now, scorching the floorboards. The severed head kept shouting nonsense. Brother Diaz knelt, face turning purple.

‘What do I fucking do ?’ screamed Alex.

‘Heave …’ called Erik, calm at the tiller, pipe clamped in his yellowed teeth. ‘Heave …’ Calling the pace, chopping time into moments, his voice calming her thudding heart to its slow rhythm. ‘Heave …’

Gods, just the sea-smell and sail-snap and chill spray fresh on her skin. She’d forgotten how much she loved this. Forgetting was a talent of hers. Forgetting could be a gift. But it could be a curse, too. Who told her that? Some grim-faced knight she knew. But where’d she met him? She’d stopped looking for the patterns in things. She let it wash over her now, like the tide after dusk.

‘Row, then,’ said Halfdan, frowning down at her. ‘Life’s painful enough without getting in your own way.’

‘Aye. Row. ’Course.’ She always pulled her weight. She wrapped her calloused hands around the time-polished oar and set all her strength to it.

It was growing dark, the sky bruised with stormy colours. They’d best pull for shore, but she couldn’t remember where the shore was. Couldn’t remember if there was a shore, even. Had they always been out here? Out on the unquiet sea, with all that vast and unknowable deep beneath them?

‘Don’t look too far ahead,’ said Olaf, beside her, and Vigga laughed, but when he turned the far side of his face was gouged with claw marks and his eye was a red and weeping hole.

‘What happened?’ she whispered.

‘You did,’ he said, and his cupped hands held a slop of his own guts.

‘You can hate a shipmate and still row the same way,’ said Erik.

‘Aye.’ Vigga nodded hard, fighting to swallow her terror and stay hopeful. ‘That’s true. I say it often.’

‘But you rowed us off the edge of the fucking world.’ The words smoked from his blue-black lips. Maybe he got away from her but froze out in the snow? She’d always known the ones who got away couldn’t have got far.

‘It wasn’t me,’ said Vigga, and she was crying, ‘it was the wolf.’

She floundered from the surf onto the shore, salt spray and salt tears on her face. A dark shore under a dark sky, angry waves chewing at black sand. A track led off the beach, overgrown with thorns, between two great stones set up on end as if by giants’ hands, and on the stones were warnings carved. The same warnings on her face, on her arms, on her back.

‘I know this place,’ she whispered.

‘Of course,’ said Halfdan, making for the stones. His throat was a great dripping red wound, and when he spoke, he blew bloody bubbles from his nose.

‘I don’t want to go,’ she said.

‘But you did go.’

She tried to run but her feet took her the other way, towards the path. Towards the wolf.

‘Get inside and stay inside.’ They jabbed at her through the bars of the cage, iron glowing hot and stink of burning, and she scrambled for the corner, trying not to see the blood all up her arms and feel the blood under her nails and taste the blood crusted to her lips. She burrowed into the stinking rags, trying to hide herself, trying to hide from herself.

‘I am wrong,’ she whimpered, huddled. ‘I am evil.’ Like she could curl up so tight she’d vanish into herself and hurt no more. ‘I am filthy. Mama, please. I love you.’

‘I love you, too,’ said her mother, tugging at her scalp as she braided her hair, and Vigga thanked the gods she was home. Though it was strange they had such a grand dining table. She didn’t see how it could even fit in the little house. ‘I love you, and I’ll always be with you.’ And she finished a braid, and patted it, and sighed. ‘But see where it got me. Loving you is gold down a well. Loving you is a death sentence. The wolf is an excuse, and not even a good one. You were an animal before the bite.’

‘Don’t say that. You never said that.’

‘But you know I always thought it.’

That hurt. She bit her lip and turned away with the wasted tears tickling her face. Clenched her fists and scowled into the dark country beyond the wrecked boat, its wind-sculpted timbers like the bones of a dragon’s carcass.

The wolf prowled, outside the ribs of the wreck, inside the ribs of her chest. She saw the gleam of its eyes, in the blackness beyond the torchlight. The slinking, smouldering fury of them. The terrible hunger of them, never satisfied.

‘Fucking wolf!’ she screamed at it. ‘Fucking thief! You stole my life!’

Wolves have no use for words. Only howls and hunger. Padding, padding, so soft on its paws, stalking her, biding its time. Waiting to give her the terrible gift, the wonderful curse, the bite that would be the end of her and the start of her.

She crouched among the mangled corpses of her shipmates. ‘You won’t make a slave of me.’ She stood, fists clenched. ‘I’ll make you wear the muzzle! I swear it!’

And the rage burned up hot and fierce and irresistible, and she rushed into the dark.

The sun was sinking. A bloody sunset over a valley of blasted mud, of splintered stumps. Columns of dark smoke towered into the wounded heavens. Specks of ash rained down like snow.

‘State of this,’ muttered Jakob, limping on.

The path slunk into a forest. But not of trees. Of sharpened stakes, hammered into the earth, point up. Of swinging gibbets and studded racks and dangling chains. Of great wheels like the one on which the Saviour gave her life for all humanity.

In the distance there was a tapping. Tap, tap, tap.

On some of the stakes, corpses were spitted. Displayed as warnings. Elves at first, who’d come to bring terror to mankind, and found terror. Enemies of God, who’d come to teach bloody lessons, and never guessed how apt a pupil would await them.

But God has many enemies, and not all are elves. As Jakob struggled on, he saw men among the skewered. Then women. Then children. More of them, and more. Here was where the holy path had led them. The conclusion of the righteous cause. The better world they’d set out to build. A forest of the dead.

The hammering drew closer. Bang, bang, bang.

Jakob’s wheezing breath was raw with smoke. The road was become a sea of rutted mud, swimming with corpses, with parts of corpses, so he couldn’t move without treading on a leg, a hand, a face. He wished this was the worst he’d seen. The worst he’d done.

Light through the gloom, the fingered shadows of stakes stretching towards him, a bonfire burning in a clearing ringed by impaled bodies, twisted and tortured bodies, bodies in the armour of the Iron Order and the Golden Order. His order. For the enemies of God are everywhere. Are everyone.

The hammer pounded louder, each blow a pulse of pain at his temples.

A wind whipped up, dry and scalding, ripping at the torn clothes of the dead men, the torn hair of the dead women, sucking the flames sideways to reveal an armoured figure, squatting by a stake, hammering wedges at the base to keep it steady.

One last blow of the hammer and he stood, his back to Jakob.

He wore the grand white cloak, embroidered with the double eagle, and the Circle of the Faith that Her Holiness had begged them to add, and the chips of blessed mirror to reflect Black Art back at its accursed practitioners, but the hem was stained red. Knee-high, as if it had been soaked in blood. It had been.

‘Thought I’d find you here,’ said Jakob.

‘Where else would I be?’ The Grandmaster of the Order turned, and they looked at each other, across that graveyard, that slaughteryard, that gathering of lessons. Jakob had forgotten what he’d once been. At his best. At his worst. How handsome and how proud. How strong and how straight. Certainty shone from his younger self like a beacon. A man other men would follow into hell. Which was exactly where he’d led them.

‘I’ve been waiting.’ The Marshal of Danzig stepped slowly across the clearing with the faint click-clack of gilded armour. Moving with such ease. Such authority. Such lack of pain. ‘It’s so hard to get the help. Who knows that better than you?’ And he raised his arms towards the impaled Templars ringing the clearing. ‘So few people have the vision, and the courage, and the will to pursue what they know to be …’ He closed his eyes, as if searching for the word. ‘ Right … all the way to its end. All the way here .’ And he opened his eyes again, bright with belief. ‘But you do. We both know you do.’

‘What have you done?’ whispered Jakob.

‘What have we done? We have dug out the filth. We have burned out the rot. You cannot make a better world by sitting there and crying about it, old man. You have to get your hands dirty.’

‘Bloody, you mean.’

‘Don’t play the innocent with me,’ sneered the Emperor’s Champion. ‘There’s nothing worth a damn that has no blood on it. Don’t you dare pretend there is some great gulf between us. A few years, and a few wars, and a few corpses—’

‘And a curse.’

‘A curse? You cannot die! What a gift . What an opportunity . What became of your dreams?’

‘They became this nightmare,’ growled Jakob. ‘It must end.’

‘Doing right has no end. You were a great man with a great purpose. Now you are a twisted tree in the service of a little girl. Choked by guilt. Chained by regrets. No one wants to see doubts , Jakob of Thorn.’

‘I have my oaths to sustain me.’

‘Just words. Just breath.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Like that you can be free of them.’

‘I will redeem myself,’ snarled Jakob, voice cracking. ‘I have sworn it. I will live by the Twelve Virtues.’

The Papal Executioner snorted. ‘Twelve surrenders, listed by cowards, so they could sell bones to fools.’ And he set one hand upon the pommel of his headsman’s blade. A silver skull, a reminder that death awaits us all. ‘The Saviour did not stop the elves with virtues. She did it with the sword .’

Jakob slowly wrapped his fingers around his sword’s grip, and slowly drew it. ‘Then I will stop you with the sword.’

And steel rang as the blade slid free of the scabbard and glinted with the colours of fire.

He had known it would come to this. It always did.

And he was glad it had come to this. He always was.

‘At last.’ A smile twitched the mouth of the Grandmaster of the Order. ‘ There is the man I know.’

Balthazar’s head spun, his mouth watered, his vision blurred. From his efforts to fight the binding, or to control the forces he was conjuring, or the added necessity of pinching Brother Diaz’s windpipe shut, or the distraction of the severed head babbling the deluded gibberish of the idiots flailing about in the magic box, it was impossible and frankly unnecessary to decide.

All that mattered was that he hold his nerve, and his stomach, and his makeshift apparatus together for a few moments more.

Princess Alexia hunched over Brother Diaz’s huddled shape just outside the conjurer’s rings, one arm up to ward off the tornado of grit and splinters whirling about the room. Over the roar of wind, the clatter of rubbish, the high-pitched singing of the circles, glowing red-hot as the gathered energy threatened to rip their screws from the floor, he heard her squeal, ‘Let him go!’

‘I refuse !’ screamed Balthazar, making the sign of command over his wrist and bringing all those years of study, all those stored-up resentments, all that hard-won power together in this one instant.

There was a flash of blue-white fire, a searing pain, a smell of burned flesh, and the red streak across his wrist was singed to a charred blister.

‘I’m free of you!’ he screeched, detritus whipped up by his double ritual raining down around him, the flush of triumph overwhelming the throbbing pain in his wrist. ‘I’m free, you stupid—’

Vomit fountained from his mouth, his nose, more than likely his ears, sprayed the wall, spattered hissing and bubbling on the still-glowing rings, and left a long trail of splats and dashes all the way across the old floorboards to his very toes. He dropped to his knees, breath driven out in an agonised wheeze. He heard a footstep and looked up through watering eyes to see Princess Alexia had stepped into the circle with him.

‘I—’ he croaked.

Her fist cracked into his nose and sent him sprawling in his own sick where he was promptly sick again, all over himself. Beyond his own groaning retches he could hear Baron Rikard laughing.

‘At last!’ gurgled the vampire. ‘ There is that regal authority, Your Highness!’

‘Fucking help them!’ snarled Princess Alexia, standing over Balthazar with her small but shockingly hard fists clenched.

‘I order you …’ wheezed Brother Diaz, who had struggled purple-faced to his knees, ‘to help them.’

‘I will!’ sobbed Balthazar. ‘I obey, I submit, ever your humble servant.’ He felt his gorge – and it was astonishing that any gorge remained within him – rising once again, a long string of bitter bile dangling from his lip as he swept the rubbish from the table, knocking the still-mumbling head rolling across the dusty floor, fumbling desperately though the pages of Kreb’s Illusions with two vomit-covered fingers, whimpering at searing twinges in his burned wrist and his knotted stomach and, worst of all, his mangled pride.

He began to suspect he had soiled himself.

One moment, Vigga was wrestling with the wolf. The next, she was strangling a grey-faced old man with a bloody nose.

‘Wait …’ she grunted. ‘I know you.’ It came out a bit snarled, like there were too many teeth in her mouth for talking.

‘Ccchhhh,’ he rasped.

‘Ah.’ She let her hands relax, which took some effort, and he dragged in a breath.

‘Vigga,’ he whispered, and started to cough. Vigga tried to clap him on the back, felt a stab of pain in her shoulder, and saw her arm was streaked with blood. He was holding a sword, and that was bloody, too.

‘You sworded me!’ she said.

‘Well, I thought you were me.’ Jakob hooked a finger in his twisted collar and tried to tug it loose.

‘Huh. I thought you were me.’

‘So.’ Sunny tore a strip from one of the old corpses’ clothes and started to bind Vigga’s shoulder. ‘At least you hate yourselves more than each other.’

‘The cornerstone of any friendship,’ said Vigga. She preferred to bleed till it stopped by itself, but if a bandage made Sunny happy, she could indulge her. ‘Why do you care about being throttled so much? You can’t die.’

‘Breathing’s one of the few pleasures I have left,’ said Jakob, voice fading to almost nothing at the end.

‘I’m retiring after this,’ said Baptiste, bent over in the corner with her hands on her knees. ‘I’m out. I’m done.’

‘You say that every time,’ wheezed Jakob. He looked over at Vigga, and there was something haunted in his eyes. Even more than usual. ‘What did you see?’

Vigga licked her lips. ‘My mother, who I let down. And my shipmates, who I killed. They said folk had to be warned about me …’ She felt a lump in her throat, hard to swallow. ‘I’ve let the wolf be my master. I think, starting today, I must put a muzzle on it. What did you see?’

Jakob was frowning even more than usual. ‘Only the truth,’ he whispered.

Vigga wasn’t listening, though. Among the rotten food on the table was something she hadn’t noticed before. A white box, facing that one fallen chair. Like someone got quite the shock when they opened it.

‘Would you look at that?’ She grinned as she walked over, making Sunny cluck as she hurried after, still trying to tie the bandage. The floor was covered with a crunchy carpet of dead flies, sticking to the soles of Vigga’s bare feet with each step.

There was a star inlaid on the box’s lid. Felt light when she picked it up. Like it was empty. She gave it a good shake but nothing rattled.

‘Careful!’ snapped Jakob, and straight away fell into a coughing fit.

‘Ah, stop carping!’ said Vigga as Baptiste took her turn clapping him on the back. ‘Always comes out all right, doesn’t it?’

‘It never does.’ Jakob narrowed his eyes at her as he slowly, painfully straightened. ‘Have you forgotten what we saw already?’

Vigga looked puzzled. ‘What did we see?’

‘My God …’ He stared at her, awestruck. ‘What a gift.’