Page 43 of The Devils
My Greed Is a Famine
The count and countess had ridden off first, presumably to engage in a sexual escapade as intense as their recent hostilities. Balthazar could hardly have said which was the greater: his disgust or his jealousy. His own most recent sexual escapade was a hazy memory and, in all honesty, one probably best forgotten. The word escapade was, indeed, lending that particular misadventure far too much dignity.
The rival priests had departed still bickering over the legal jargon on an ancient deed, the centuries-long theological, financial, and political feud between the Churches of East and West a little too thorny to be settled in the bedchamber. The guards had dispersed to give notice of the cessation of hostilities and, on opposite sides of the valley, the two armed camps gradually collapsed in on themselves like punctured wineskins, soldiers streaming back towards their banal existences, lacking the imaginations to comprehend the privilege they enjoyed. Servants had finally carted away table and awning, labouring after their master and mistress, so that as the sun wallowed towards the hills and the shadows of the stones stretched long, the only evidence that the talks had ever taken place was a well-trampled area of grass and the skins from some exotic fruit the countess had at one point tossed aside. Balthazar wondered briefly about picking them up and scraping them out with his teeth, but decided that might still be beneath his dignity, even if that particular bar had sunk so low it was virtually subterranean.
As though to underscore that very point, Baptiste nudged Balthazar with the toe of one boot, the way a shepherdess might a stubborn goat. ‘Time to track down our wayward princess, then?’ She glanced towards Jakob, arms grimly folded, and Baron Rikard, leaning against one of the standing stones and picking his fangs with a sharpened twig. ‘Doubt anyone here’ll be put out by a little Black Art.’
‘It seems unlikely.’ Balthazar wearily stood, slapping the damp from the clinging seat of his dead man’s trousers, and sighed. More of a groan, in truth.
Setting about a ritual, however pedestrian, would once have been the source of almost boundless excitement. What would be the risks, the challenges? How could they be minimised, overcome? What was the most efficient form of words, the most potent arrangement of symbols, the most elegant set of gestures? Magic not just as a practical science but as an art, a spectacle, the highest form of self-expression!
Now he felt nothing but a faint irritation, a nagging disgust at how low he had fallen, and, of course, the ever-present sickly tug of the binding.
‘I will need something with a point,’ he said, and then as Baptiste and Jakob both reached for one of their implements of death, ‘something that will float in water, or better yet milk. The pointer of our compass.’
Baron Rikard held up his sliver of wood. ‘How’s this?’
‘A vampire’s toothpick.’ Balthazar plucked it from his hand without enthusiasm. ‘Grimly appropriate, I suppose.’
‘And then?’ asked Jakob.
Balthazar sank down at the very centre of the circle. ‘We bury it.’ And he began to tear at the grass with his fingers, ripping out a tiny grave in the damp earth, a few inches long, a few inches deep.
A grave for his hopes and ambitions. A grave for the man he had been. A very tiny one, of course, but then his stature was so very much reduced.
He lifted heavy hands to begin the gestures and could not but notice the filth under his cracked nails, smeared across his scabbed fingers, ingrained into the lines of his mottled palms, the angry scarring where he had, in Venice, attempted and spectacularly failed to cauterise the binding from his wrist. He used to have such beautiful hands.
‘If we find Alexia,’ he murmured, ‘what then?’
‘Get her to Troy,’ said Jakob, with his accustomed lump-hammer bluntness.
‘Braving hardship and hunger, contending with more deadly cousins, the unholy results of Eudoxia’s demented experiments, and assorted sorcerers, mercenaries, and monsters?’
‘More than likely,’ said the baron.
‘Without thanks, reward, or hope of release.’
‘I can tell you I don’t get thanked much,’ grumbled Baptiste.
‘A downward spiral,’ said Balthazar, ‘of loathsome humiliations.’
‘That’s the job,’ growled Jakob.
‘If I am not held captive in a literal lightless dungeon, I will yet face life imprisonment in the metaphorical oubliette of the papal binding, enslaved to the whim of a ten-year-old girl.’
‘She’ll get older,’ said the baron, brightly.
‘Being enslaved to the whim of a thirteen-year-old strikes me as little better.’
‘Likely a good deal worse,’ said Baptiste. ‘But you’re far from the first to find yourself in this fix.’
‘As you have made abundantly clear .’ Balthazar slowly rose, slapping at least some of the dirt from his palms. ‘A veritable procession of warlocks, witches, and wizards have passed through the Chapel of the Holy Expediency, and on to glory, riches, and success.’ He glanced at the unpromising faces of his three colleagues. ‘Oh, wait, forgive me, they are all dead .’
Baptiste rubbed impatiently at the back of her head. ‘You’ve been condemned by the Celestial Choir. What’s the alternative?’
‘The alternative?’ Balthazar gave a sad smile. ‘Honestly, I have been considering that very question ever since my abject failure to break the Pope’s binding in Venice was heaped upon my abject failure to break the Pope’s binding on the road.’ He felt its familiar tug now, the ugly twist of nausea, the acrid taste of bile, as if to twist the knife of his despair at this lowest moment. ‘I am a slave to fools, a banquet for lice, a joke for the amusement of morons. Everything I once valued has been stolen from me. My books. My dignity. My freedom. My future.’
‘It’s a tragic tale,’ said Baptiste, examining her fingernails.
‘But is there a point to it?’ asked Jakob.
‘I have nothing left.’ Balthazar turned towards the tallest of the stones: two great uprights with a third balanced on top, forming a crude gate through which the setting sun now shone. Here, at this convergence of channels, in this place where the boundary between worlds was thinnest. ‘And so … I have nothing left to lose.’
He thrust his hands high, making the sign of summoning with his dirty fingers, the form of welcome. Not really necessary, but why be a magician at all if one cannot indulge in a touch of theatre?
‘Wait …’ murmured Baron Rikard, the smooth skin of his forehead crinkling. ‘What are you—’
And Balthazar spoke the name.
There are, of course, excellent reasons why demonology is the most feared and hated of all the Black Arts. Even its most powerful practitioners, from the Witch Engineers of Carthage down, have frequently destroyed themselves, and not been shy over the quantities of innocent bystanders, animals, cities, and countryside they have taken with them. To force the least puissant infernal entity into the mortal world and bind it to one’s will, even with the most painstaking preparation, is a task fraught with peril.
But to bring a demon who wants to come?
Why, you only have to stand in the right place … and ask.
Baron Rikard’s expression turned in an instant to utter horror. ‘No—!’ But it was too late.
The door between worlds opened and the sun went out. Daylight, and all beyond the edge of the standing stones, was in an instant cancelled.
The door between worlds opened, three times man’s height, and still she had to stoop through.
A glimpse was all Balthazar caught. All he dared catch, before he wrenched his smarting eyes to the ground. A hint of the great antlers of twenty-nine points, black as phosphorescent ink, black as iridescent oil, dripping with finger rings and earrings and arm rings, festooned with glittering chains, flashing with pearls and jewellery, tributes, ransoms, and sacrifices from every culture beneath the night sky.
To bring a demon who wants to come, you only have to ask.
It is when they arrive that your problems begin.
With a gurgle of despairing terror Baptiste crumpled to her knees, clapping her hands over her face, rolled onto her side, and curled into a shivering ball.
Jakob stood frozen, mouth hanging open, scars picked out starkly on cheeks even more colourless than usual.
Only Baron Rikard retained the power of speech. ‘Stop, you fool,’ he gasped, one hand over his eyes, the other raised as if to shield him from the unholy spectacle, ‘send her back! Seal the door …’ His voice grew higher and higher until it was nothing but a squeak, then silence, a silence utter and complete, with no bee’s buzz, no bird’s call, no wind in the grass. Like the icy sea bursting through the holed hull of a ship, the demon spoke.
‘I … am … invited .’ Her voice was thunder, far off. ‘Would you uninvite me, you parasite, you maggot, you leech ? Will you banish me ? You presumptuous husk ?’
‘No,’ gasped the baron. ‘Oh, no.’
‘I am Shaxep, Duke of Beneath. My greed is a famine . My envy a plague . My lust a flood . My fury a hurricane .’ The last word was lightning close at hand, and the demon spread her mighty wings and cast the stones into an even deeper darkness, the wash of honey-smelling wind tearing at Balthazar’s face, stinging tears from his eyes, leaving him gasping as black feathers and golden dust fluttered down around his feet and he wondered through his utter terror if perhaps this had not been his best idea.
‘I’ll be silent,’ whimpered Baron Rikard.
‘ Excellent choice,’ purred the demon, her satisfaction almost more terrible than her anger, and though Balthazar’s smarting eyes were fixed on the ground, he felt her gaze turn upon him, and his knees trembled. ‘And so, Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi … to business .’
Footsteps approached, soft, and slow, and at each one came the gentle crunch and crackle of frozen grass. ‘You have presumed to call me, and I have deigned to answer . Know that you teeter on the brink of doom . Know that you bargain with infinity . Know that your very existence dangles by a filament . So …’ She stopped before him, and her wings clicked and rustled as she folded them, and the jewellery on her antlers jingled and rattled, and then was still, and there was silence. ‘What do you need?’
Balthazar licked his lips. He was, it hardly needed to be said, a man who always chose his words carefully. ‘I seek your—’
‘Did your mother not teach you manners?’
‘I never knew my mother,’ he whispered.
‘That explains so much. When you ask a favour, look upon me.’
‘I dare not,’ he whispered, and he could feel the crackle as the tears froze on his cheeks. He could see her feet in the frost-rimed grass before him, her toes like a bird’s, the colour of blood from a slit throat, the talons long as daggers, painted with darkly glistening golden designs. ‘Lest your unearthly beauty drive me mad.’
‘Mmmmm.’ Her feathers clattered as she adjusted her wings. ‘I love it. Imagine having such delicious sycophancy on tap.’
‘I offer you that and more.’ He wobbled down to his knees. He clasped his hands. ‘If you can free me from my bonds.’
Shaxep clicked her tongue, tut, tut, tut , each one a nail hammered into his head. ‘My preference is for making slaves, man-child. If I free you from these shackles, you will have heavier ones to wear. An eternal debt to me.’
‘But those chains,’ he managed to gasp, holding out his trembling arm to show the burn on his wrist, ‘I will have chosen.’
‘As long as you never say … I didn’t warn you . Now …’ He felt her presence as she leaned towards him, and it was the best he could do not to void his bowels on the spot. ‘Let … me … see .’ A bitter chill, the hairs in his nose freezing, and more than the cold, the abject terror, and the ecstatic thrill, of being in the presence of a power from beyond the world. A power before which the very rules of creation must bend. A power to challenge the angels themselves—
‘No.’ There was a kind of irritated snort. ‘Sorry. Can’t help you. Not with that.’
‘Wait …’ whispered Balthazar. ‘What?’
‘I could do you limitless wealth, or turn your enemies to salt, or something? Pretty much anything. Just … not this.’
‘But … you’re …’
‘Duke of Beneath, yes, but there are rules, and there are limits.’ Shaxep gave a sigh like a winter wind, and her wings shivered, and gilded dust floated down. ‘The ambitious never realise until it is too late. Power is a cage, Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi.’
‘You can’t do it?’ he muttered. ‘ You? Can’t do it ?’
‘You think I’m happy about it ?’ And her voice was thunder once again, and he cringed in her towering shadow. ‘I did the whole “greed is a famine” speech and everything .’
Balthazar could not help one glance as she turned away. He glimpsed her back, crimson knots of muscle between the vast shadows of her wings, scored with gilded marks, rings, arrows, symbols, hypnotic spirals of impossible geometry, and in the midst a great wound, endlessly leaking tears of molten gold. She stopped in the doorway and turned back, the chains and crowns and bracelets chiming, and he tore his eyes away, lest he meet her gaze and see there the answers to questions no mortal should even conceive of, and at once be driven mad.
‘I am interested in the soul, though,’ she said. ‘It’s actually quite a good one. So, you know. Do call. If you need something else.’
The door closed, and the sun was lit as sharply as snapped fingers, and it was once again a pleasant evening, bees, birds, and all, the warm sunset touching the western hills with rosy light.
The only change was the black feathers scattered everywhere. Black feathers, and golden dust.
‘Oh God,’ sobbed Baptiste, and she crawled a little way through the grass and was noisily sick.
‘What did you do?’ snarled Baron Rikard, seizing Balthazar by his shoulders and giving him a furious shake.
Balthazar hardly saw him. Hardly heard him. ‘She couldn’t do it,’ he whispered, holding up his wrist and staring at the burn.
‘I saw her,’ whispered Jakob, tears leaking down his face, wide eyes fixed on the empty archway in which there was nothing now but the sunset. ‘I saw her.’
‘Even Shaxep …’ breathed Balthazar, ‘couldn’t do it.’ He blinked into Baron Rikard’s face. ‘There must be some trick … it cannot truly have been her!’
‘Not her ?’ screeched Baptiste. ‘The place is covered in demon quills !’ And she threw a furious hand at the obsidian feathers scattered across the grass, even now melting into smears of iridescent pitch.
‘She struck some other deal, then,’ muttered Balthazar. ‘With Cardinal Bock, maybe … to deceive me!’
‘A cardinal struck a deal with a demon,’ muttered Baptiste, ‘because that’s how important you are, you reckless lunatic !’
‘I will find it out …’ whispered Balthazar, scratching absently at his wrist. ‘I will get to the heart of it. I will . I must .’
‘The trouble with clever people,’ muttered Jakob, rubbing his scarred hand across his scarred face to wipe away the tears, ‘is they think everything must be clever.’ He looked over at Balthazar. ‘But this is simple. There is no scheme. There is no trick. Pope Benedicta’s binding is too strong even for a Duke of Hell to break.’
‘Oh, of course !’ screeched Balthazar, voice dripping scorn. ‘Because, I suppose, that ridiculous child really is the Second Coming of the Saviour, therefore her pathetic binding is the word of God himself !’
A joke, of course. The most ludicrous joke of which he could conceive. But no one laughed. Baptiste glared at him, wiping her mouth. Jakob glowered at him, hands on hips. Even the endlessly smirking Baron Rikard had not the hint of a smile.
‘Wait …’ Balthazar took a hesitant step away, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling. ‘You can’t really believe that …’ He stared at Baron Rikard, surely among the least credulous creatures he had ever encountered. ‘ You … can’t really believe that?’
‘I still had my doubts.’ The vampire licked one pointed tooth with the tip of his tongue. ‘Until now. But the insane extremes of your efforts to prove the binding can be broken have ended up proving the exact opposite. Shaxep could not do it.’ He gave a helpless shrug. ‘What higher power is there?’
Balthazar felt dizzy. He wanted desperately to deny it. To heap scorn upon it. He opened his mouth to do it, but for a moment nothing emerged. In the end he forced out a bark of shrill laughter, and of all the false chuckles he had vomited up that day it was the least convincing. ‘Well, if the Saviour walks among us again,’ he said, less cutting barb than desperate squawk, ‘I suppose the Last Judgement must be at hand!’
The silence stretched.
‘Finally,’ grunted Jakob of Thorn, wearily turning away. ‘He gets it.’