Page 49 of The Devils
Our Latest Last Stand
The first man’s eyes were just going wide as Jakob’s sword split his skull open.
Surprise is worth a thousand men. A sorcery that reduces the best-drilled company to a green rabble, the hardest-bitten knight to a pissing pageboy.
The next man could’ve raised his bow, could’ve turned and run, but all he did was stare. Only took a twitch of the reins to ride him down.
The Knights of the Iron Order had gone into battle with prayers on their lips, the ‘Our Saviour’ endlessly repeated till it lost all meaning, droning over the battlefield like bees over clover. It had been a habit with Jakob for a lifetime, snarling a prayer for mercy as he waded through gore, but down the long years he’d given up on prayers, then even on curses. Now he gritted his aching teeth and saved his breath, and left the higher purpose to those with more faith and fewer old wounds.
A man with a red beard charged at him, sweeping out his curved sword—
But it stuck in the sheath. He’d forgotten to slip the loop off the hilt. Jakob hadn’t made himself one of Europe’s most hated men by turning down gifts like that.
He missed Red Beard’s head but angled his swing so he still carved his shoulder wide open, flung him howling against a gravestone where rotten hands burst from the ground, rotten arms embraced him.
The dead were everywhere, eye sockets yawning empty, papery skin stretched over the bones, clutching, plucking, biting. Not the best fighters, but they surely gave a scare when they popped up uninvited. A man with the most ridiculous cloak Jakob ever saw – and he’d borne witness to some self-important drapery in his time – was jabbing at one with a gilded spear, but it was a poor choice of weapon against the already dead, and all he was doing was scraping shreds of rotten skin from its skull.
Jakob’s mount jumped a crumbling tomb and he struggled to stay in the saddle, gripping his reins with his aching shield hand, the battle hardly begun and his body already singing with pain. He was a forever casualty, eternally wounded. Luckily, the horse he’d neglected to return to Count Radosav was a formidable beast, well trained for war and still eager for the bloody business. It did most of the work.
The cloak-wearer had finally kicked free of the corpses and wrenched his own warhorse about. He lifted his spear and Jakob raised his shield to meet him—
The man gave a helpless yelp as his horse started forwards, saddle and rider both sliding off its flank and narrowly missing a mercenary stumbling between the gravestones, struggling to hold her trousers up with one hand while she beat desperately at a shambling corpse with the other.
Jakob had seen the strangest things happen in battle – impossible luck, or the favour of the Lord, depending on who you asked – but this much fortune looked a lot like the work of an invisible elf.
The graveyard had become quite the scene of chaos. He’d carved a bloody path through the enemy, or clung to a horse while it carved one, at any rate. Balthazar galloped past, jolting wildly in his own saddle. Baptiste followed, couched low, one hand gripping the reins, the other gripping her hat to her head. She was a very experienced rider, after all. Spent a month racing horses at the Hippodrome in Alexandria.
The hammering of hooves made Jakob think of his charge to lift the siege of Kerak. That evening he’d led twelve hundred men-at-arms into one of the strongest fortresses in Europe. This morning he led a necromancer in an identity crisis and a disgruntled jack of all trades into a monastery without even a door. A fitting summing up of his career.
He clattered into the cobbled yard, meaning to vault from his horse the way he had at Kerak, while the famished knights fell at his feet to give thanks to God for his prowess. His horse had other notions, though, still dragging at the bit, keen for action. He managed by some miracle to swing one leg over the horse’s hindquarters but his other foot caught in the stirrup, dragging him hopping through a great puddle in one corner of the yard, snarling curses.
‘Shit! Stop!’ He finally worked his foot free and crashed down on his side, taking a mouthful of weeds.
‘You’re alive!’ blurted Alex, still about the least likely Empress of the East you ever saw.
‘Well …’ He bared his teeth as he clambered up. ‘You can’t have everything.’
‘Thank the Saviour you’re here!’ Brother Diaz had lost his habit and gained a beard, shirt ripped and hair wild. He looked like a surprisingly upbeat beggar.
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world ,’ replied Balthazar, who looked like a surprisingly downbeat beggar.
‘One more last stand,’ growled Jakob, hefting his shield.
‘Our third on this trip alone.’ Baptiste peered over the sill of a ragged hole that had once been a window. ‘When do we start calling them stands ?’
The battle thrill was fading. Like some ageing drunk’s revels, each time the joy was shorter lived, the pain and disgust rising quicker behind it. Jakob pressed himself to the stones beside the gateway, peering into the graveyard, where a score of hardened killers were getting over the shock and moving fast to fury as they hacked the last of Balthazar’s corpse-puppets into twitching pieces.
‘Oh God!’ Alex gripped her head with her hands. ‘This is just like the inn!’
‘No, no,’ said Balthazar, through gritted teeth. ‘The inn had a door .’
Sunny dropped into a recently opened grave to catch her breath, back of her skull against the leaning headstone. Honestly, the catching her breath wasn’t going great. Each in was a knife in the ribs, each out a hammer to the back. It’d be hard to hold it and move. It’d be very hard to hold it and fight.
But if you wait till everything’s perfect, you’ll never do anything.
For a generally dour man, Jakob of Thorn could surely make an entrance. His charge had left a couple of hunters dead and a few more rolling and howling and all in all sown quite the beautiful confusion.
Sabbas had snatched another spear from his valet – who was hurrying along behind his master trying to pluck free a corpse arm still clinging to his golden cloak – and was thrusting it angrily towards the monastery shouting, ‘Kill them all!’
Sunny would’ve very much liked to slip over and give him a kick in the sack, but she’d learned long ago not to force an issue. Patience was the foremost of the Twelve Virtues, the one from which all others flowed, as Brother Diaz would no doubt have boringly lectured. In the end, time gives everyone the kick in the sack they deserve.
For now, those sorceresses were a far bigger worry.
They’d linked hands and were walking out among the graves with their eyes closed. Where they passed, rocks were plucked from the ground and sucked from the graves, whirling into the air until the two of them were surrounded by a spiral of flying soil and spinning chunks of tombstone, the dead scoured to the skeletons or smashed to bonemeal by the hurricane of gravel.
Sunny held a big breath, then sprang from the grave and ran for the monastery, which was what most of the hunters were doing. The one whose laces she’d tied together had just managed to get them untied, so she shouldered him into an open grave as she passed, squeezed between two men in the gateway, elbowed one in the face then ducked under the furious punch he aimed at the other and slipped into the courtyard.
Things weren’t much less chaotic inside.
One hunter lay still, a red pool spreading around his head. Another crawled for the gate, gripping his leg and leaving a trail of red smears. Jakob was backing stubbornly across the cobbles towards the ruined cloister, crouching behind his shield, already with two crossbow bolts buried in the wood. The horse he’d ridden in was bucking wildly in the opposite corner, and from the glimpses Sunny got of Balthazar, Alex, and Brother Diaz, huddled together behind Jakob and his shield, they were every bit as panicked.
Two hunters – a big one and a small – were circling right and left, aiming to come at Jakob from two sides. The bigger was stepping over his dead comrade when the corpse sat up like he had a spring underneath him, brains spilling from his chopped-open skull, and sank his teeth into the hunter’s thigh.
Jakob stepped to meet the smaller, rammed him back with his shield. Baptiste darted from behind it, slashing his leg with one dagger, slashing his face with a second, but that left Alex and Brother Diaz in the open, clinging to one another.
A hunter knelt beside Sunny, aiming his loaded crossbow at Alex.
‘Got you, you little bitch,’ he whispered, and pulled the trigger.
Only nothing happened, ’cause Sunny had stepped up and wedged a finger behind it. She had to bite her lip as he squeezed furiously, grinding her finger between trigger and stock, but by then Jakob had shuffled back, his shield across the others.
‘What the hell?’ The archer lowered his bow to fiddle with the catch. Wasn’t hard for Sunny to nudge it down the rest of the way with her other hand then pull the trigger herself. He gave a great howl as the bolt nailed his foot to the ground, then Sunny ripped it from his hands and heaved the heavy thing spinning into the air, and Baptiste popped from behind Jakob’s shield to catch it, neatly as if it was an act rehearsed for the circus.
‘This was your plan?’ Sunny heard Brother Diaz squeal as she ducked around the stricken archer and headed for the others, lungs burning with the need for a breath.
‘Why do I have to be the one with the plan?’ growled Jakob, backing under one of the arches of the cloister. Its roof had long ago fallen in, leaving the bare rafters poking at the sky. ‘What’s your plan?’
He set himself to meet a short, wide bastard pounding across the yard, but Sunny stuck out a boot and hooked his leg as he charged past, turning his war cry into a shocked whoop and leaving him tottering, so Jakob could sidestep and take the back of his skull off with one neat swing. Sunny slipped around the old knight, pressing herself against his back to take a breath. Felt pleasantly familiar, leaning on him. Like leaning on your favourite tree.
‘Good to see you,’ she muttered.
‘Good to not see you,’ Jakob grunted back.
She felt the jolt through his shoulders as he took a blow on his shield and she breathed in and spun away. A weaselly hunter had got around his side, pulling his spear back to thrust, and Sunny caught the haft, digging her heels in hard. He got quite the shock when the spear didn’t move and, since she couldn’t hold the spear and her breath at once, an even bigger one when he looked around to see her dragging on the end of it.
He let go of the spear and Sunny stumbled back, smacking herself right in the mouth with the butt. The weaselly one turned on her, pulling an axe. ‘You fucking—’
Baptiste clubbed him over the head with the stirrup on the end of the crossbow. He stumbled towards Sunny, dropping his axe to clutch his skull, and Jakob smashed him with the rim of his shield, flung him against one of the pillars to bounce off, reel straight into Sunny and send her rolling through a puddle.
‘You see that?’ A tall one was looking right at her. Or right where she’d been when she snatched the last breath. He levelled his spear, frowning at the telltale ripples on the puddle’s surface.
‘Where’d it go?’ snapped a short one, and he lashed at the air with a mace, one way then the other. The beaked head came within an inch of Sunny’s nose as she jerked away, sloshing through the puddle again. Her back hit the wall and she only just held on to her breath, ducked under the darting point of the tall one’s spear. The short one came at her swinging, but he favoured a wide-legged stance, so she could drop under his mace, slither between his boots, and come up behind him on dry ground, take a quick breath while his tall friend was looking the other way, then kick him right between the legs hard as she could manage.
Sunny did her best work blowing with the wind, so when he doubled over, she used those two as a human stepladder, planted her right boot on his backside, her left on the back of his head, then her right on the tall one’s shoulder and sprang. She sailed through the air still with her breath held, caught the crumbling head of one of the pillars, swung herself up onto the top of the ruined colonnade, lungs bursting, then rolled onto her back and lay there, staring at the white sky, trying to breathe silently in spite of the aching through her ribs and the stinging through her mouth and the burning in her hands and the bruising across her chest where she’d caught the wall and hoping to hell no one saw her feet sticking up.
She could hear the fight still raging, weapons clashing, men swearing, wounded howling, Sabbas snarling, ‘For pity’s sake kill the bastards!’
She took one more breath, held it, and scrambled up.
On her left the broken roof of the cloister, and between the rotten rafters she could see Jakob beside a doorway, shield up while the others scrambled through. On her right the yard, hunters pointing, shouting, converging on the congregation of the Chapel of the Holy Expediency.
Sunny snatched up a loose stone and threw it at a crossbowman. It missed but went close enough to his head that he flinched and his bolt flew wide. Another archer spun, waving his bow towards the rafters, and Sunny thought it prudent to move, scurrying along the roof of the ruined cloister, snatching every loose chunk of masonry she could find and flinging them among the hunters, making men reel about in surprise.
Folk don’t always think to look upwards, but the narrowed eyes of one of those twins were fixed on the top of the colonnade. ‘Up there—’
The next stone caught her right on the forehead, sent her reeling back into a wall with a shrill cry. Sunny felt there was poetic justice in hitting a geomancer with a rock, but her sister didn’t see the funny side.
She thrust her palms towards the wall with a scream of fury and summoned a storm of dust and splinters. Sunny had upped the pace, pounding along the top of the cloister, but the edge of the blast still raked her side, scratched her cheek, nearly tore her off her feet.
She tottered along that narrow strip of crumbling wall, each step more wobbly than the one before, then her foot landed on a loose stone and she nearly fell, no choice but to suck in a desperate breath.
‘There!’
The colonnade flew apart under Sunny’s boots and she was in the air, thrashing, falling, clutching at nothing. The ground did what the ground always does and rushed up to meet her, and she went rolling through a patch of brambly nettles and slid to rest clutching her ribs, gravel raining down on her while she gave a long groan.
They burst through the door, their desperate gasps falling muffled. The gloom was Stygian after the brightness of the yard, shafts of light from narrow windows swirling with dust. As Balthazar’s eyes adjusted, he saw a long hall, crowded with decayed cots in cobwebbed ranks. The infirmary, he concluded, where monks had offered succour to the doomed victims of the epidemic until the bitter end.
Out of the frying pan, into the plague house.
Jakob threw his shield aside and his shoulder against the door, heaving it about as closed as a door in its condition was likely to get. It was every bit as ancient and gnarled as the knight himself, chinks of light showing through the warped planks and much of the ironmongery consumed by rust. Brother Diaz, scrabbling at the latch, was discovering that it had no functioning lock and only one extant hinge.
‘It doesn’t work!’ blathered the monk.
‘I see that,’ growled the knight. ‘Get something to wedge it with!’
Balthazar was scarcely listening. His mind was still racing after observing those twin sorceresses: practitioners of geomancy and aeromancy, two supposedly opposite disciplines, not only working in highly effective harmony, but apparently employing identical techniques to influence their chosen element …
‘Anyone hurt?’ grunted Jakob.
‘Anyone not hurt?’ snapped Baptiste. She had set down a large crossbow to plant one boot on Jakob’s fallen shield and tug at the bolts buried in its face.
‘The use of magic …’ Balthazar put the heels of his hands together, thrusting them thoughtfully forwards, just as those twins had. ‘To create a wave though matter …’ He had seen it done with water, but this … could it be that Hasdrubal and Cellibus, so long accepted as the highest authorities on the nature of the elements, had made a fundamental misapprehension? That earth and air were not in fact opposites, but somehow composed of the same stuff …?
‘Is Sunny in here?’ Alex was squeaking.
‘She’s got better sense,’ growled Jakob.
‘At least we’re back together.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Baptiste. ‘Would’ve been a shame to die separately – damn it!’ One of the bolts snapped off in her bloody hands, and she pulled a dagger to dig at the other one.
‘My God …’ whispered Balthazar. He felt himself trembling on the brink of an awe-inspiring epiphany. Could it be possible … that all matter had some fundamental nature in common? That—
A powerful blow rattled the door on its one hinge and shook him from his reverie. ‘Sweet Saint Beatrix …’ whimpered Brother Diaz, wedging himself against the wood beside Jakob, heels of his ruined boots scuffing tracks across the filthy floor as the door shuddered from further blows.
There had been an instant, on first seeing princess and monk huddled in the monastery’s gateway, when Balthazar had felt an unexpected sense of pleasure to find them alive. Within a few mere moments of their reunion, however, he was remembering why he had liked this half of the congregation almost as little as the other.
‘Oh, Sweet Saint Beatrix …’
‘I very much doubt she will get us out of this,’ snapped Balthazar. Many of the dilapidated beds were still occupied. Those beyond help, he supposed, when the monastery was abandoned. ‘Once again, it will be left to Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi to save the day!’ He ripped back the moth-eaten remnants of a blanket in a shower of dust to reveal the most unpromising, desiccated corpse, frozen in twisted death-throes.
‘Ugh,’ said Alex, shrinking back. ‘They died of plague?’
‘If we get the chance to die of plague I will count it a miracle .’ Balthazar began to pull up the dead. He had no time for his usual respectful coaxing and was obliged instead to yank what remained of their organs into life, snatching them rudely from their last rest and onto their feet.
‘Ugh,’ said Baptiste as a corpse floundered from its rotten bed beside her, leaving one leg behind. It hopped a step then tripped over another body, both of them sprawling among the cots.
‘Ugh,’ said Brother Diaz as crumbling cadavers flopped against the door to either side of him. The jaw dropped from one immediately, falling on the monk’s shoulder, and he brushed it away with a shudder of horror.
‘I am doing the best I can with the materials available!’ snarled Balthazar, plucking up more corpses to limp, lurch, and hobble towards the door. ‘Would a little appreciation be too much to ask?’
Sweat tickled his face at the effort, but they were too old, too dry, their tendons brittle as straw. One’s head fell off while it was rolling out of bed. Another disintegrated as it walked, until it was one arm dragging a rag-covered ribcage. Perhaps if someone had needed their laces tied it could have lent a hand but was of minimal utility in a fight to the death.
‘This is your best?’ spat Baptiste, digging away at Jakob’s shield with her dagger. ‘Thought you were Europe’s top necromancer – ha!’ As the last bolt came free and she thrust it up in triumph.
‘These corpses are part mummified !’ Balthazar dashed sweat from his face. ‘They’re all papery ! If I had some time to prepare —’
‘Shall I ask them to give us an hour ?’ snarled Jakob as the door jolted open a crack and he twisted to try and heave it shut again. ‘Check that doorway!’
Alex scampered towards an archway at the back of the room then froze, staring at the ground. ‘That looks bad.’ Dust was rising, agitated by a draught that could not be felt. There was a faint hiss as the loose plaster scattered on the floor began to vibrate, and then to lift, too. ‘Is that bad?’
As if in answer there was a loud bang, cracks shooting across the wall. Five cracks, radiating outwards in the shape of a star. ‘Fascinating …’ murmured Balthazar. One of those twins might have been the most gifted geomancer he had ever seen practise. If Eudoxia’s students were capable of such feats, he began to wonder whether the Empress herself really had been able to throw lightning—
‘Fascinating?’ Baptiste shoved past with stolen crossbow in one hand and salvaged bolt in the other. ‘Or fatal?’
‘A little of both,’ Balthazar was forced to admit. ‘We should perhaps relocate …’
‘To where?’ screeched Brother Diaz.
For once, the monk had a point. From what Balthazar had been able to tell as they hurtled towards the monastery – against his clearly expressed better judgement – it occupied the terminus of a ridge with precipitous cliffs on two sides. No doubt a marvellous position for the contemplative isolation of the monks who long ago inhabited the place, but by no means an advantage for a ragtag band of convicted heretics attempting to flee for their lives. In all likelihood, they were retreating towards nothing but a very long drop.
Still, as those cracks spread, vibrating splinters of stone and mortar floating free and whirling towards the ceiling, Balthazar found that he much preferred the idea of a long drop some distance away to a colossal weight of falling masonry right on top of him. They could worry about the drop when they were plummeting down it, which was more or less what they had been doing ever since they left the Celestial Palace. The Chapel of the Holy Expediency was a think-on-your-feet sort of institution.
‘Anywhere!’ roared Balthazar. ‘They are bringing the walls down!’ And a couple of blocks shook loose and tumbled to the ground, where they continued to tremble.
‘Go!’ snapped Jakob at Brother Diaz.
‘Sweet Saint Beatrix …’ whimpered the priest, then he released the door and ran for it.
‘You too,’ said Balthazar, grabbing Jakob’s dagger-wounded shield by the straps. The weight of it took him aback for a moment, he had to admit.
The old knight still strained against the door, Balthazar’s corpses crumbling around him, his boots sliding through a mass of their broken pieces. ‘Get the princess away.’
‘This is no time for heroics .’ Balthazar cringed as one of the rafters split with a deafening crack, light suddenly stabbing through holes in the roof. ‘Whatever sins you have committed will not be atoned for under a hill of rubble!’
Jakob’s narrowed eyes glinted in the half-light. ‘Didn’t know you cared about my sins.’
‘A purely selfish decision! My chances are better with you holding a shield for me.’ And he shoved the thing at Jakob. ‘Now can we please make an exit before the entire monastery comes down on our heads?’
Brother Diaz blundered through the doorway and straight into Alex, the pair of them sent sprawling on the buckled flagstone floor of an abandoned church. The heart of the monastery, into which the monks had trooped three times a day to chant psalms. The only songs now were from the birds nesting in the crumbling bell tower.
Most of the walls still stood to their original height, filigree stonework surviving in empty windows, patches of plaster showing traces of rich frescoes, but the roof was long gone. Some of the great vaults held above, black against the brightness. Others had fallen, reduced to scattered masonry overgrown with bramble. The altar stone was yet in place, a block of black basalt much like the one in the monastery where Brother Diaz had been imprisoned. Where he’d imprisoned himself.
Beyond the altar, in happier times, stained glass would have shown the ascent of the Saviour to heaven, or the acts of the saints, or the angels marching to righteous war, a glimpse of the divine brought to earth. Now there was only cloud-scattered sky. The monastery had plainly given way to subsidence since the Long Pox, and the entire back wall of the church had collapsed off the cliffside, ragged paving slabs hanging in empty air.
Brother Diaz scrambled up, then spun about as the grinding of the unquiet earth behind became a rumble that made his teeth buzz.
Alex clutched at his arm. ‘Where are the others?’
‘Coming,’ grunted Baptiste, her salvaged crossbow bolt between her teeth, struggling with both hands to heave back the string. ‘Shit!’ It snapped from her grip, leaving her flailing her grazed fingers.
The rumble became an ear-splitting crash and Brother Diaz stumbled back, coughing, as dust billowed from the doorway and out into the ruined nave. A few soft clatters followed.
They held their breath.
Then Jakob limped from the murk, battered shield on one arm and the other over Balthazar’s shoulders, both of them covered in blood and dust.
‘Thank the Saviour,’ breathed Brother Diaz, starting forwards to help them.
‘Thank her when we’re in Troy,’ groaned Baptiste, crossbow’s stock wedged into her stomach in her latest effort to load it.
‘This way!’ Alex was running down the abandoned nave towards a low doorway where the back of the church had fallen away. Brother Diaz set off after her, past the altar, its surface worn to a glassy polish by centuries of services thrice a day.
‘Careful!’ growled Jakob from behind, dissolving into wheezy coughing as Alex picked her way along the ragged edge, the sky yawning wide beyond, a few flags still clinging on where weeds and sapling trees had taken root—
With a crash a whole section dropped into nothingness. Brother Diaz caught a glimpse of Alex’s face as she slid with it, legs over the edge, hands scrabbling desperately at the buckled floor.
He lunged, jaw cracking the ground, and caught her wrist, the two of them staring helplessly at each other as he slid after her, the long drop swinging into sickening view before him, not entirely sheer, but more than sheer enough, jagged rocks falling away to the forest far below, Alex’s boots sending stones bouncing down as she kicked desperately for a foothold—
Something cut into his stomach. Baptiste, catching his trousers. He heard her growl as she dragged at him, growled himself as he hauled at Alex’s wrists, teeth furiously clenched. He heard Balthazar groan as he caught Baptiste and added his own weight to the human chain. Alex began to inch upwards—
There was a popping, a tearing – Brother Diaz might refuse to let go but his salvaged trousers were less bloody-minded, he could feel himself slithering free of their ripping waistband. He gave one more desperate heave. Alex snarled, wriggled, finally caught a solid foothold, and came slithering back over the crumbling brink.
The four of them collapsed against the altar stone in a sweaty, dusty, wheezing tangle, staring towards the long drop.
‘The other way,’ gasped Alex.
‘Don’t think so,’ said Jakob, backing towards them, shield up.
Men were coming through the old main door of the church, and not to pray. Hunters. Some of them bloodied. All of them angry. At least a dozen. Brother Diaz was in no state for an accurate count. The twin sorceresses came with them, their identical deadly glares directed towards the altar. Slow clapping echoed from the bare stone walls, and Sabbas followed. He still wore that absurd high cloak, his valet scraping along beside him, covered in dust, clutching three spears to his chest.
‘A brave effort!’ called Sabbas as Alex dragged Brother Diaz down behind the altar, hard stone on one side and empty sky on the other. ‘But you appear to have run out of road!’