Page 33 of The Devils
Prone to Turmoil
‘Kick, damn it!’
‘What precisely do you think I’ve been doing for the past few exhausting hours?’ snarled Balthazar through chattering teeth. ‘Hanging here limp ?’
‘The word I’d use is …’ Baptiste narrowed her eyes as a wave smacked the side of her head and plastered soaking hair across her face. She blew it away with an explosive snort. ‘ Flaccid. Now kick!’
Balthazar issued a sound of elemental discomfort and redoubled his efforts to kick for the shore. Honestly, the use of the term shore was lending it too much dignity. It was a jagged jumble of rock that hemmed in a frothing inlet where the waves were funnelled and amplified, clapping against stone to send explosions of spray as high as a building, washing them straight back towards a watery grave whenever their raft made the slightest progress. Honestly, the use of the term raft was lending it far too much dignity, as it consisted of three of the stricken galley’s great oars, bound together with Balthazar’s belt at one end and Baptiste’s at the other.
‘Kick, I said!’
‘I am kicking!’ he snarled, immediately receiving a lungful of brine that left him choking. He had breathed more water than air since they entered this cursed inlet. It would have been a fitting irony had they wrestled with the freezing Adriatic for hours merely to drown within arm’s reach of land.
A last desperate effort brought them close enough for Baptiste to cling to a protruding knobble and heave herself onto the rocks.
‘Out!’ she hissed, face twisted into a rictus as she strained to keep her grip on the raft.
‘Do you suppose … I am trying … to stay in ?’
A wave buffeted Balthazar against stone and he had just the strength of mind to cling on by his fingertips as it surged away. The rocks were slippery with seaweed, crusted with razor-sharp barnacles, and he scrabbled at them with his bare feet, slipping, sliding, struggling desperately for purchase.
‘Ah … God … no … yes!’
He caught a stubborn limpet with his big toe and, trembling with effort, propelled himself upwards to finally roll gasping onto his back like a landed fish, shivering and quivering, thoroughly battered and bloodied from the ordeal. It was only with a stupendous effort of self-control that he was able to stop himself from weeping with exhaustion.
‘Thanks so much for the help!’ he screeched at Baptiste as he sat up.
‘You looked like you had it,’ she snapped, heaving their raft up onto the rocks.
‘It truly warms my heart to see you would rather salvage your oars – and without a boat to row with them, mark you – than help the man who moments ago saved your life !’
‘Well, I like this belt,’ she growled, undoing the buckle and pulling it slapping free. ‘As for saving lives, I could’ve sworn I saved yours twice. Gratitude costs nothing, you know.’
‘Gratitude?’ breathed Balthazar. She might be soaking wet and barefoot, but had at least emerged from the brine clothed from neck to ankles. Balthazar had kicked his own trousers off to move more freely in the water, and the wind was now giving him considerable cause to regret his choice. ‘I did not think it possible that I could be colder than I was in the sea . Now I discover my error!’
‘Doubt it’s your first, since you chose to hide in the hold of a sinking ship.’ And she glared at him as she wrung out a fistful of hair that immediately sprang into unruly curls. ‘Feel free to dive back in.’
‘Gratitude?’ hissed Balthazar, waving towards the bleak interior, the chilly sea, the spitting sky. He had barely the strength to speak but did not allow that to stop him. ‘For being shipwrecked God knows where on the barren Dalmatian shore?’
‘You’re alive, aren’t you?’ she snarled, with the strong implication that he was only so on her sufferance.
‘ Gratitude , she says! One could not hope to come upon a more forbearing man than I—’
She planted her hands on her hips and arched right back to bellow, ‘Ha!’ at the sky.
‘—but I feel it only fair to warn you that even my patience has a limit .’ He stomped to the oars, furiously waving his arms. ‘I have a belt ,’ and he ripped the damp thing free and shook it in her face, ‘but no trousers ! What am I to do , might I ask , with a belt but no—’
‘Belt your fucking jaw shut with it!’ screamed Baptiste, then clutched at her head. ‘I am the most easy-going woman in Europe—’
Balthazar planted his hands on his hips and arched right back to bellow, ‘Ha!’ at the sky.
‘—I’ve made common cause with witches, rubbed along with pirates, cooperated with trolls,’ she stuck her fingers in his face one by one, ‘humourless cardinals, arsehole aristocrats, even that bloody rotten ghost thing that was haunting the sewers in Genoa—’
‘Sad I missed that adventure.’
‘—I have yet to meet a fucking magician I liked and I’ve always found a way to work with the bastards, but I swear to God you … what?’ she snapped, frowning suspiciously at him.
He had begun to smile. ‘I could not help noticing that you grouped me among the magicians.’
She put her hands over her face. ‘I should’ve quit after Barcelona.’
‘You are warming to me! It was but a matter of time before you began to treat me with the deference due to one of Europe’s foremost arcane minds!’
Baptiste glared at the ground. ‘Saviour, I wish you’d drowned.’
‘Before long you will be boasting of having had me, for a brief time, as a friend and colleague.’
Baptiste winced at the sky. ‘Saviour, I wish I’d drowned.’
‘In due course, we will – urgh.’ Balthazar bent over at a surge of nausea, spit rushing into his mouth. ‘Feeling a little – urgh.’
‘It’s the binding.’ Baptiste looked inland. ‘Princess Alexia must’ve survived.’
Balthazar was obliged to hunch over at another spasm. ‘Glad tidings pile one upon the next.’
‘We’ll have to find her.’
‘And how, precisely , do you suggest we do that? Any survivors could be scattered over fifty miles of shoreline! Urgh.’ And he was doubled over by an even more unpleasant pang, spit rushing into his mouth and his head spinning. ‘We would need a miracle to track her down.’
Baptiste bent to snarl the words right in his ear. ‘If only I had one of Europe’s foremost fucking arcane minds along with me!’
‘Divination is far from my strongest suit …’ Cold, sick, desperate, Balthazar did his best to remember what his strongest suit had been. To grope from the murk of his misery and, in spite of the adverse circumstances, the impossible task, the complete lack of resources, support, or even trousers, nonetheless grasp a solution. ‘But … perhaps … I could devise a ritual … given access to an appropriate confluence of energetic channels—’
‘A what?’
‘In layman’s terms, a stone circle.’
‘Druids?’ Baptiste looked far from delighted at the notion. ‘Those bastards take themselves way too seriously.’
‘I am no enthusiast for the moss-dwelling lifestyle, believe me , but needs must.’ He took a breath, straightened, shuddered as he swallowed the latest upwash of bile and sour salt water. With a plan of action that tended towards installing Princess Alexia on the Throne of Troy, the binding was loosening its singularly unpleasant stranglehold on his digestive tract. ‘There is an old circle near Niksic, if I remember correctly.’
‘All right, then.’ Baptiste nodded grimly. ‘We head east. Take our bearings. Find supplies.’ She glanced across. ‘Get you some trousers, maybe.’
‘Finally, you consider my needs.’
‘Can’t look at the twin twigs you dare to call legs a moment longer.’
‘I have been told I possess very finely turned calves.’
‘You clearly know some outrageous liars.’
‘Indeed I am in the company of perhaps the most egregious right now .’ Balthazar tossed his belt over his shoulder, contemplating the woods ahead. ‘We should be cautious. The country hereabouts is prone to turmoil.’
‘Well, we’re due some luck.’ Baptiste was already picking her way up the shore. ‘Maybe we’ve come at a peaceful moment.’
‘God damn it,’ said Balthazar.
The valley was a scene of carnage.
Corpses of men and horses were dotted on the slopes and clogged about a stream meandering through the boggy bottom. Balthazar counted several hundred, at a glance, and when it came to counting corpses, he boasted of no little experience. Arson had been inflicted on a nearby hamlet, reduced to tangles of charred beams and a few tottering chimney stacks. A veritable legion of avian carrion pickers had gathered in the air above, as well as several dozen of the human variety on the ground below, all keen to gorge themselves upon this unexpected bounty.
He looked sideways at Baptiste, also taking in the scene of what had evidently been a significant battle. ‘Peaceful moment, did you say?’
‘I said we’re due some luck. Never said we’d get any.’ And she strode off down the hillside, her hair, which had transformed, as it dried, into an unmanageable cloud blowing wildly around her.
‘Plainly there is a war in progress,’ muttered Balthazar as he hurried to catch up.
‘What gave it away?’
He took a hard breath. ‘Who do we think is fighting?’
‘Serbians?’
He took an even harder breath. ‘When in Serbia, a reasonable assumption. But which ones, against whom?’
Baptiste stopped, leaning towards a corpse. ‘Who are you fighting?’ she asked, then turned her ear downwards. The corpse made no reply. ‘Can’t get a thing out of him,’ she said, walking on.
‘Is it your purpose in life to frustrate and annoy me?’ grumbled Balthazar.
‘Only a hobby.’ Baptiste struck from the path, between the cadavers now thickly scattered in the trampled grass. ‘Get yourself some clothes, some boots, and anything else we can use.’
‘From the dead?’ asked Balthazar.
‘Doubt they’ll complain. She rolled a body as carelessly as a cooper might an empty barrel and began to root through the pockets with quick fingers. ‘You’re the last man I’d have thought would get coy around a carcass.’
‘My interest in the dead is to plumb the very mysteries of creation, not to procure loose change!’ But Baptiste was pretending not to listen. Balthazar gave a heavy sigh, hooked his hands under a corpse of approximately the right dimensions, and gingerly rolled it over. A young officer, clammy with morning dew, good looks somewhat spoiled by a yawning axe wound in his skull. Balthazar squatted and began to unlace one boot.
‘Damn it …’ The knots were exceedingly tight. Hardly surprising, perhaps. Balthazar would have tied his laces securely had he been charging into battle. Which he would, of course, never have been fool enough to do. ‘Damn it …’ His fingers were exceedingly numb. Hardly surprising, either, since he had spent the afternoon being buffeted in the ocean and those few clothes he had managed to retain were still damp with chilly seawater. ‘ Damn it …’
‘Well?’
Baptiste stood over him, hands on hips. She had procured a pair of shiny horseman’s knee boots complete with brass spurs, and an extravagant military coat only lightly splattered with blood from a hole above the breast, beneath which the hilts of four assorted daggers bristled from a purple sash. Apart from a few damp curls, which he suspected she had left loose on purpose, she had managed to contain her ever rebellious hair in a leather forester’s cap sporting a bedraggled feather.
Balthazar gazed up, astonished. However much he might have wanted to, there was no denying that, yet again, she looked spectacular. ‘How the hell have you managed all this? I haven’t even got his boots off yet!’
She worked the sash down her hips for a more rakish tilt. ‘I spent a bit of time as a corpse-robber.’
‘How incredibly unsurprising,’ he muttered, deeply conscious of how ludicrous he must look at that moment by comparison, picking angrily at the knots on the other boot then cursing as he bent a fingernail the wrong way.
‘During some local unpleasantness in Prussia.’ Baptiste rolled up her embroidered cuffs. ‘It’s more art than science, really, you’re just …’ And she narrowed her eyes and rubbed her fingertips against her thumbs. ‘Feeling out the good stuff.’ She slid an overblown man’s signet ring onto her middle finger. ‘What d’you think?’
‘I think you’re ready to seal some very important letters.’
‘Not for the first time. I used to melt wax for the Duke of Aquitaine, in fact.’
You amaze me,’ he forced through gritted teeth, tugging harder at the knots.
‘He’d sign hundreds at once,’ she said, bending over a face-down corpse. ‘Administrative nonsense, mostly. Couple of love letters. Got through a lot of wax.’ She gripped both trouser legs. ‘After a day of that you’d end up with sticky fingers, I can tell you.’
‘A regular occurrence for you, I have no doubt.’
‘Didn’t last long at it.’ And Baptiste whipped the trousers clean off with one skilful jerk. ‘The duke could be rather handsy.’
‘Dukes often are, I understand – ah!’ As the knots finally gave and Balthazar was able to work the second boot from its dead owner’s foot.
Baptiste tossed the trousers to him. ‘Those should fit you.’
He was obliged to sit in the sodden grass to wriggle into them, unpleasantly clammy about the thigh, then started dragging on the boots. ‘Damn it … blast it … bloody things are too small!’ He flung one away and it bounced through the grass, rolling to a stop at the feet of one of the human carrion: a particularly ill-favoured example of a generally ill-favoured profession, sporting a bumper crop of facial warts. He looked from boot to Balthazar with a belligerent scowl.
Balthazar scowled back with no greater affection as he stalked barefoot to another body and squatted beside it. ‘I generally adore receiving unexpected visitors, but I find burglarising the dead is like taking one’s toilet, best done without an audience.’
The man gave a squint of warty befuddlement. ‘This is all ours,’ he grunted.
‘Impressive.’ Balthazar glanced about the valley. ‘You killed the whole lot?’
‘No, but …’ The wart collector folded his arms, waxing more bellicose by the moment. ‘We found ’em.’
‘It’s a battlefield. You can’t lay claim to it like a gold strike. We’re not subject to mining law here. Baptiste, could you explain to this gentleman?’
‘He with you?’ growled the man whose warts had warts.
Baptiste produced an expression of intense innocence. No mean feat from a woman freshly decked out in dead men’s finery. ‘Never saw him before,’ she said.
Balthazar gritted his teeth. ‘My thanks for your unflinching support.’
Perhaps half a dozen corpse pickers had gathered now, a couple brandishing weapons salvaged from the fallen. A woman with an old cloth wrapped around her head pointed at Balthazar with a short sword. ‘Who the fuck does this bastard think he is?’
‘Aye.’ The warts around the man’s mouth performed an intricate dance as his lip twisted. ‘Who the fuck d’you think you are, bastard?’
Balthazar frowned. Perhaps finally putting trousers back on, albeit those of a dead man, had restored some hint of his old confidence. Perhaps Baptiste’s many barbs had finally worn through his frayed patience. Or perhaps he had simply endured one humiliation too many, and the contempt of such contemptible dregs as these was too much to bear. A bubble of cold fury rose within his breast, while in the grass around his feet the dead began to twitch in sympathy.
‘Who do I … ’ Balthazar slowly rose, and the thieves shrank against each other in predictable horror as perhaps two dozen corpses jerked, wobbled, and tottered up with him, all apart from one unfortunate trooper who had lost a leg and kept falling over. ‘… think I am ?’
The blade dropped from the woman’s limp fingers as the young officer turned towards her, fluid bubbling from his nose as his lungs spluttered into reflexive action with a sound like a punctured bellows, a string of brains hanging from the yawning wound in his skull.
‘My name is Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi.’ He pronounced each syllable with withering precision. ‘And you should know that I teeter on a lethal precipice at the very limit of my patience. Now …’ He stepped towards the stunned wart collector, so close their toes were almost touching. It appeared, from a cursory assay, that their feet were of comparable dimensions. ‘I think you may be wearing my boots .’