Page 50 of The Devils

The Angel of Troy

Sunny sat up with a great deal of effort.

Her ribs throbbed worse than ever, with a bad mouth and a bad arm to boot, and she’d tumbled through a patch of nettles so to add insult to injury was stung all over, too.

She worked her way to her feet. Her trousers were torn and her leg skinned bloody but it still bent in the right places. She was in an old storeroom, maybe, roof long gone, storing nothing now but weeds and puddles. Angry noises echoed around her. Screaming and yelling, crashing and beating. The battle still going, then. She took a step towards the one doorway and froze.

‘Where are you …?’ It was a deeply unpleasant voice, between growling and singing. ‘I know you’re in here …’ Crooning, maybe, and who croons if they can help it? ‘No need to hide …’ She’d heard that voice before, around the fire when she first saw Sabbas, and she felt a pressing need to hide, and snatched the best breath she could, slipping into a ready crouch.

The end of his spear introduced itself first. That forked spear, edges of its twin blades jagged on the inside. Made her think of the hooks they used for catching the big fish, and she didn’t care to get hooked, and she spread herself against the wall tight as fresh plaster.

The spear’s owner appealed even less than his weapon. Very tall, and very lean, with lank hair hanging about his pocked face and a heap of mismatched stolen chains around his veiny neck.

‘You’re a tricky one, ain’t you?’ His eyes flickered about, horribly sly, horribly alert. Hard to move with all the weeds and the water, so Sunny stayed very, very still. ‘A very tricky one, but you’re not the only one …’

He swung his spear in a great arc, tip scraping the walls, then another, lower, and Sunny ducked the first, then shrank back into a corner and watched cross-eyed as the points of the spear whirled past her nose, the wind of it leaving an annoying tickle on the tip, and she had to wriggle it desperately, which only made it tickle worse. God, she wanted to sneeze now, and was fast running out of air, her face hot, the ear-tip she still had burning.

‘Where I come from …’ crooned the hunter, turning slowly away, ‘they call me the Man-Catcher, ’cause there’s no one I can’t lay my hands on.’

He lunged at the air, stabbing viciously left and right, high and low. She twisted sideways, sucking her stomach in, wincing at the pain in her ribs as the gleaming points whipped past her on one side, then even closer on the other, ever so nearly catching the loose tails of her shirt on one prong.

‘Why don’t you come out?’ he crooned again, prowling the room. ‘Show yourself.’

Why the hell would she do that? To a man with that croon? That grin? That spear? Not an attractive invitation at all . He began to turn away, slipping between the weeds, spear in one hand, each footstep soft and silent.

Sunny’s ribs were singing with pain. Her head was pounding, bright spots swimming in her vision. She forced herself to hold her breath a moment longer as he turned slowly, so slowly away, till finally his back was to her, and she gasped in air.

Just a twitch of his head. A glimpse out the corner of his eye, maybe. She was already gone again, but with a bark of triumph he was spinning, whipping something from behind his back.

It spread in the air like a great cobweb. On a better day Sunny might’ve been quick enough to slip from under it. But she was battered and spent and hadn’t eaten and couldn’t get a proper breath. The net flopped over her, far heavier than it looked, and she thrashed and kicked but there was no getting loose. The more she fought the more stuck she became, huddled in the corner on her knees, and she felt something sharp prodding at her side, and she stopped struggling.

‘Shush, shush, shush.’ He poked her with his spear again and made her grunt. No point holding her breath any more. Whether he could see her or not he could for damn sure see the net, so she let it wheeze away.

‘Ain’t that better?’ Sunny definitely didn’t think so as he squatted beside her and slipped long fingers through the netting. ‘Now will you look at this?’ Fucker was crooning more than ever as he pushed her head back, pushed her hair back, pinched the ear-tip she still had painfully between finger and thumb. ‘Might be from now on … they’ll call me the Elf-Catcher.’

‘I’ve an offer for you!’ barked Jakob as the hunters spread out around the far end of the nave. The odds were desperate and his comrades were all cowering behind an altar with one crossbow bolt between them. The time had come to clutch at small chances.

‘What do you have I can’t prise from your corpse?’ snorted Sabbas, and several of his lackies chuckled along.

Jakob puffed out his chest and stretched to his full height. ‘Honour!’ he roared, the word bouncing from the ruined walls and bringing the laughter to a sudden halt.

There’d been a time Jakob had cherished honour more than virtue, valued honour higher than jewels. His lust for it had dragged him into the darkness, and there, among the bodies of his friends, he’d discovered its true value. But there are always men who need to learn that lesson for themselves.

‘You and me!’ He pointed down the ruined nave with his sword. ‘Here and now! To the death .’ He didn’t mention death came easier to some people than others. He’d sworn an oath of honesty, not an oath of blabbing every detail.

Sabbas glanced towards his hirelings, all looking back at him. All judging. There was no good reason to accept the challenge. There was scarcely even a bad reason. Only pride. But Jakob knew more than most about pride. He’d suffered from a near-fatal case himself in his youth. And he’d never in all his long life seen a man more bloated with pride than this fool in the golden cloak.

Sabbas lifted his chin, narrowed his eyes, and there was a long silence.

‘My Lord,’ murmured his valet, ‘you cannot—’

‘Shush.’ Without shifting his gaze, Sabbas reached out and snapped his fingers, and Jakob knew he’d reckoned right. Men born with every advantage often burn to prove they’ve deserved them all along. The valet took a sharp breath, then slid a spear into his master’s hand.

‘Your … colleagues … ’ Sabbas sneered towards the altar, ‘will not interfere?’

‘On their honour,’ said Jakob. Since they included a confessed thief, a convicted heretic, and Baptiste, he doubted their honour would stop them doing much of anything.

One of the sorceresses grunted her disgust. ‘ Never trust a necromancer. Let us—’

‘If they try anything underhand,’ snapped Sabbas, ‘you may bring the church down on their heads. Until then, stay out of it.’ He turned back to Jakob with an imperious toss of his head. ‘To the death, then!’

‘Not much of a duel without it.’ Jakob gave Sabbas’s hired men a slow look-over, then took a long sniff and spat onto the buckled flagstones. ‘Bit disappointed by your henchmen, if I’m honest. Your brother Marcian had been recruiting in a farmyard, your brother Constans at the bottom of a rock pool.’ He settled into a fighting crouch. Or at any rate the closest his knees would get to it. ‘Didn’t your mother give you any toys to play with?’

‘Oh, I received my full share of Eudoxia’s gifts.’ Sabbas had the smile of a man who never admitted to being wrong. ‘My brothers desired, like petty gods, to remake our mother’s experiments in their own image. Marcian goaded them into butchers to conquer for him. Constans dressed them up as pirates to steal for him. Neither lacked ambition.’ With his free hand, he undid the clasp on his gilded cloak. ‘But they had no vision at all.’ With one movement he flung it off, and with a great rustle and a wash of wind, he spread mighty wings across the nave of the church, their white-feathered tips almost touching the creeper-covered columns to either side.

‘ Now … ’ Sabbas planted one fist on his hip and struck the butt of his spear on the ground with a clang. A man. With wings. In a pose from a statue. ‘You see why they call me the Angel of Troy!’

Jakob burst out laughing. He couldn’t help himself. He coughed, burped a little sick, had to hold up his shield for indulgence while he swallowed it. ‘I’ve seen angels and demons, boy.’ He sighed, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. ‘The angels scared me more. I understood them less.’ He looked Sabbas up and down, and gave a snort of his own. ‘You don’t become one by stitching the poulterer’s offcuts to your back.’

Sabbas’s smile slowly faded into a glower.

‘We shall see,’ he said.

During the last few months of Alex’s life the insane had become standard, the horrifying unsurprising, and the impossible routine. But even she had to raise her brows at this.

‘He’s got wings,’ she muttered. Sometimes you just have to hear yourself say it. Explained the strange cloak, anyway. Probably had trouble finding anything that fit.

Sabbas rocked back then lunged forwards, fists clenched and legs braced while those impossible white wings beat, beat, beat, ever harder.

Alex narrowed her eyes against a storm of dust and grit and the odd loose feather. Jakob clung to his shield, straining to hold his ground in the gale, and Sabbas took a running stride and sprang into the air, wings giving one mighty flap as they bore him up over the nave.

He plunged down with an echoing screech, spear crashing against Jakob’s shield, cracking the rim against the old knight’s jaw and flinging him across the mossy flagstones.

Sabbas straightened, then with a snap of feathers spread his wings wide again. ‘I’ll give you poulterer’s offcuts, you ancient fucking remnant .’

‘What do we do?’ hissed Alex, peering over the altar stone. A couple of hunters were easing down the sides of the church, slipping through the shadows from one pillar to the next. Others were cranking crossbows, pulling out arrows, generally preparing to deliver a hail of death. And then there were the two sorceresses, watching the duel impatiently with their arms folded, ready and willing to blast them off the cliff or shake the whole building to bits.

‘Interfere and they’ll kill us,’ grunted Baptiste, who’d rolled onto her back, one foot in the crossbow’s stirrup as she strained at the string with both hands.

‘And if we don’t?’ asked Alex as Jakob slowly pushed himself up. ‘They’ll let us go? We can’t just cringe behind an altar!’

‘If you want to find somewhere else to cringe you have my blessing!’ snapped Balthazar. ‘I could use the cringing space!’ He jostled at Baptiste as she struggled with the crossbow. ‘Can you even bloody shoot one of those?’

‘Spent a summer as a gamekeeper,’ she growled. ‘Came second in an archery contest, actually.’

‘Why don’t you have your own bow, then?’ asked Brother Diaz as Jakob and Sabbas began to circle each other.

‘Because in case you hadn’t noticed ,’ veins popped from Baptiste’s neck as she arched back, hauling at the string, ‘they’re absolute bastards to load .’

The so-called Angel of Troy darted forwards, wings beating so his toes barely brushed the ground, lightning thrusts of his spear gouging the face of Jakob’s shield. The old knight growled as its point scraped from the rim and tore his shoulder, stumbled as it slipped under his guard and scratched his hip, slid onto one knee in front of the altar as Sabbas danced away, grinning.

‘Very good, Your Grace!’ called the valet, who’d tucked the spare spears under one arm so he could politely applaud.

‘Obviously!’ barked Sabbas, then turned to grin at Jakob as he clambered to his feet, spinning his spear nimbly in his fingers. ‘You don’t yield easily. I can admire that.’ And he struck the butt end against the flagstones with a clang that echoed from the high walls. ‘But I think you see your time is up.’

‘Lots of men told me that down the years,’ said Jakob. ‘I’m still here .’ He lunged but Sabbas caught his sword, blade screeching against his spear’s gilded haft.

‘I won’t deny you exist. So do ants and syphilis.’ Sabbas flung Jakob back. ‘And they’re about as likely to save your princess.’

Alex reckoned syphilis might well do for Sabbas, but not on a timescale that’d keep her alive. One of his wings flashed over, cracked Jakob on the shoulder and knocked him sideways, while the other struck him on the side of the head and sent him sprawling across the stones again. Sabbas rubbed at the bright scratch Jakob’s sword had left through the gilding on his spear.

‘Absolute vandalism .’ He leaned forwards, beating his wings again, whipping up a storm that made Alex shrink back, smiling like a boy at a trapped fly as Jakob strained into the wind with all his strength, feet scraping the broken flagstones, sliding towards the edge of the precipice—

Sabbas stopped suddenly and Jakob stumbled towards him, off balance, just as the Angel of Troy danced forward. ‘Take this !’ Sabbas smashed Jakob’s shield aside with the butt of his spear, ripping one plank loose from the bent rim, then lunged with the blade as Jakob blundered on, sticking the old knight right through his breastbone.

‘Ooooof …’ breathed Jakob as the spear’s red point slid from his back. He wobbled a moment, eyes bulging. ‘That’s … a bit sore.’ He coughed blood and dropped to his knees, battered shield and notched sword hanging limp in his hands.

Sabbas grinned as he ripped his spear free in a red gout, turning towards the altar. ‘Out you come, cousin …’ he sang.

Alex held her knife behind her back, hand sweaty on the grip as she started to stand, getting ready to coax out the tears. Look weak. Make them careless, draw them close. Then gut, groin, throat, with all the rage you can muster—

‘I said it was sore …’ came a voice from behind Sabbas. Jakob was on one knee, his shirt stained red around the rent the spear had made. He spat blood, then, leaning on his sword, slowly pushed himself up. ‘I didn’t say we were done .’

‘Never had one o’ your kind in my net before.’ The Man-Catcher, or the Elf-Catcher as he now was, gave Sunny a blast of breath that did nothing to improve her opinion of him. ‘Reckon you’ll fetch quite a price—’

‘I’ll make you an offer,’ came a voice.

The Man-Catcher whipped around, spear raised, quick as a scorpion with its sting.

Baron Rikard leaned against the wall, head back and eyes shut, a strip of sunlight across his smile. He looked a decade younger than when Sunny last saw him. A touch of grey in his neatly trimmed beard. A tasteful suggestion of crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. But very much a man at the peak of his powers. He rolled his head towards them, giving that look of detached, slightly melancholy amusement, as though none of this was terribly urgent.

‘I’ll give you your life for her,’ he said.

‘ My life?’ The Man-Catcher began to circle, spear held high, while behind his back his hand slipped towards his belt. Probably Sunny should’ve been trying to get free of his net, but she was tired, and sore, and had been making a lot of effort lately, and thought she could let the vampire get off his arse for once.

The baron pushed himself from the wall, handsome features slipping from that strip of sunlight and into shadow, dark eyes gleaming as he swaggered forwards. ‘Seems to me you’re getting a hell of a bargain but, really, I have never had any patience with—’

The Man-Catcher whipped another net from behind his back and threw it in one motion. It spread in the air, little brass weights on the edge making it a spinning circle.

‘—haggling.’ Baron Rikard merely stood there as the net flopped over him. Through the cords across his face, Sunny saw him sigh. ‘So … that’s a no?’

The Man-Catcher cackled with triumph as he lunged. His spear’s jagged blades sank into the baron’s chest – or would have, had he not in that instant become a cloud of black vapour, the net dropping suddenly, snagging on one of the spear’s prongs and hanging limp.

‘What the—’

The smoke whipped and spiralled, fanned by impossible breezes, formed tendrils that flowed towards the Man-Catcher, curled around him. He lashed out viciously, but how can you fight mist with a spear? It wafted about him, embraced him from behind, and suddenly was the baron once again.

‘Now who’s the Man-Catcher?’ His smile was very white, and very wide, and his eyes were very black, and very empty. The hunter struggled, but though he was much the bigger man, the baron’s arms scarcely moved. ‘I have defied God and his angels,’ he hissed. ‘I have bathed in blood and waded through gold. Kings … have abased themselves … at my feet. Do you truly imagine … you can stick me with a fork ?’

He swelled, rose up, his black hair stirred as if by a wind, his neck twisting like the body of a snake, fretted with trees of pulsing veins. His mouth unfolded, too wide, and wider yet, bristling with impossible legions of shining teeth, and Sunny squeezed her eyes shut, and turned her face away.

She heard the scream, and heard it gutter out into a whimpering, ecstatic gasp, accompanied by an awful sucking and slobbering.

When she dared to open her eyes the Man-Catcher lay bonelessly on the ground, eyes sunken, cheeks hollow, tooth marks in his neck yawning red and dry.

‘Ooooooh,’ purred the baron, eyelids fluttering, wiping the blood from his cheeks, ‘a heady draught …’ slurping at his fingertips like a child licking away the last traces of some sweetmeat. His eyes flicked open, dark as a yawning grave, empty as the eyes of a stalking cat, and his blue lips twitched back from his fangs, and for a moment Sunny felt she looked into the pit of hell.

Then he smiled.

So radiant a smile that even she, who didn’t much care for humans, or men, or vampires, and certainly not people whose faces were splattered with gore, felt a faint ache of attraction, and wondered what those white arms would feel like around her, wondered what those white teeth would feel like inside her meat, wondered if the most terrible monsters were among them, and had always been among them.

‘One cannot expect manners from man-catchers. Still less from elf-catchers, apparently.’ She’d never seen the baron look so young, and even through her relief that felt ever so slightly worrying. He bowed gracefully, a sweep of raven-black hair falling across his face, and Sunny felt sad that so beautiful a thing should be hidden for even that long. ‘But for my own breach of etiquette, I can only apologise.’

‘Accepted.’ Sunny held up her hands, swags of netting draped off them. ‘Now do you think you could help me out of this bastard net?’

Sabbas stared at Jakob, impaled yet still alive, for just a moment. Then, perhaps understandably, he decided he’d had quite enough of that.

‘Kill them all!’ he screamed, wings flapping nervously as he scrambled backwards.

Alex heard a bowstring, shrank down as an arrow pinged from the corner of the altar and went spinning past her ear. The hunters were edging closer. One had made it to a pillar no more than ten strides off.

‘Oh, fuck it,’ groaned Jakob as a bolt thudded into his thigh, and he tottered a step and went sprawling. Brother Diaz caught his wrist, Alex caught his back, and with a mutual groan they rolled him over, sprawling behind the altar together as a hail of dirt blasted its side, bits of shattered masonry bouncing over the brink and down the long drop.

‘That damned aeromancer!’ Balthazar squirmed back, hands over his head. ‘She’ll blow us off the cliff!’

‘I …’ snarled Baptiste as she finally heaved the crossbow’s string over the catch. ‘Think …’ She slotted the bolt into place and rolled up to her knees, bringing the stock to her shoulder in one smooth motion. ‘ Not. ’

She pulled the trigger, there was a loud whipping sound, and as Alex slithered up to peer over the top of the stone, she saw the sorceress with the glass chain stumble back a step. She wobbled a moment. She blinked. Alex realised the bolt was buried right between her eyes. She toppled to the ground.

‘No!’ screeched her sister. Her lips curled into a furious snarl. Her fists furiously clenched. Her eyes furiously narrowed as she looked up at the altar.

‘Oh God,’ muttered Alex as dust began to spiral up around the woman’s robes.

The ground trembled. A few flagstones buckled upwards. Some loose masonry tumbled from the tops of the lofty walls. Alex twisted back around, sinking down between the others, squeezed in shoulder to shoulder, and watched a couple of ragged flagstones at the edge of the cliff shake loose and fall away.

‘You shot the wrong sorceress!’ wailed Balthazar. ‘That damned geomancer will shake this whole place to splinters!’

‘It was your fucking idea!’ snarled Baptiste, throwing down her empty bow. ‘If only we had a sorcerer of our own!’

‘ Magician! ’ he nearly screamed back at her. ‘But I need corpses to work with!’

Sabbas was waving his wings about to keep his balance, bellowing at the sorceress, but she was standing over her sister’s body taking not the slightest notice. The ground was shaking too much now for archery and the hunters were scrambling for safety, one putting his shield over his head as more stones pinged down. On the upside, the arrows had stopped coming. On the downside, it looked as if the whole back half of the church would soon be crashing down the mountainside, and they’d be in it.

‘We’ll all be corpses soon enough,’ whimpered Alex.

‘Corpses …’ Brother Diaz’s eyes went wide. He twisted to shriek over the altar. ‘Is that the best you’ve got? The ground shakes more when I fart !’

The sorceress gritted her teeth, sweat streaking her shaved head. She raised her trembling fists and the ground trembled with them, flagstones pinging apart with little showers of rising dust.

‘Are you trying to make her angrier ?’ squeaked Alex.

‘Four plagues in a decade …’ breathed the monk. ‘Too many dead for the graveyards.’

‘You could pick a better moment for the history lesson ,’ snarled Balthazar, hunching down as mortar began to shower from the vaulted arches above.

‘They buried them in pits by the hundred. In every inch of consecrated ground they could find …’

Jakob’s eyes narrowed. Balthazar’s went wide. Alex’s rolled to the ground. Earth was shaking loose from the flagstones, worn by time, and weather, and the passage of monks’ feet. But on some she could still make out the faded epitaphs.

‘Plague dead?’ muttered Balthazar. ‘Decades buried?’

Alex grabbed him by the shirt. ‘You’re saying you can’t do it?’

‘They’ll be too old.’ The magician squeezed his eyes shut. ‘They’ll be too deep!’

‘Too deep ?’ Alex dragged him close, giving him a savage shake. ‘Who does this bitch think she is?’ His jaw clenched. ‘That she can get the better of Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi ?’ His nostrils flared. ‘The best necromancer in Europe ?’ His eyes snapped open. ‘Above a giant fucking tomb ?’

He slapped her hands away. ‘I … think … not .’

Balthazar sprang onto the altar stone. Chest out, shoulders back, feet planted wide, he faced this glorified earth mover, thirty strides of shuddering flagstones between them.

He issued the bluntest of challenges. He dared all comers. With no subtlety and no subterfuge he forced his mind downwards, through stone, and soil, and root, into the foundations of the monastery, vibrating now with magic, and there he found the dead.

There was a grinding beneath his feet and with an almighty crack the altar stone split in two, one half tipping towards the brink. He stumbled, his concentration faltering—

Someone caught him around one leg. Princess Alexia, her jaw grimly set. Baptiste seized his belt on the other side, and her eyes met his for just an instant, and she gave him the slightest nod.

Balthazar turned to face the surviving sorceress. This would be a feat of necromancy discussed with awe in magical circles for decades to come! And this tower of geomantic self-regard never guessed that she was acting as his assistant. He let his lips curl back from his gritted teeth and put forth all his power.

The dead were reluctant. So deeply buried. So long entombed. But Balthazar would not be refused. He demanded. He commanded . He would do it without book or circles, without rod or rune or blessed oil, without even words . He would not stroke them up with tender caresses, he would rip them from the clutching earth by force of will.

‘Obey!’ he hissed.

One of the vaults above cracked apart, masonry crashing to the trembling ground. Sabbas tottered back, wings curled over his head as a shield. The shriek of one of the hunters was suddenly cut off as he was crushed under a boulder the size of a cow.

No dead thing was beyond Balthazar’s reach. However deep. However ancient. Be they rotted fragments, he would yet knit them together. Be they nought but grave wax, he would yet mould them to his purpose.

‘Obey!’ he snarled.

Eudoxia’s student redoubled her efforts, straining forwards, her face a snarling rictus, and the quaking of the ground grew yet more violent, stones raining down as the walls of the church shook themselves apart.

He did not even need whole bodies. He saw that now. He had fallen short, of all things, in ambition . He had allowed himself to be made small . He had given in to doubt . But that was over .

Cracks shot out across the ground, weeds thrust into the air, stones parting, toppling inwards.

‘Obey!’ he screamed.

With a noise like the end of creation the floor of the tortured nave collapsed inwards and, as if it was a breach in the ceiling of hell itself, the dead came boiling from beneath.

‘Sweet Saviour,’ whispered Brother Diaz, hardly knowing whether to clap his hands over his eyes, ears, or nose.

God, the unholy sight! Jaws dropping from skulls, worms falling from eyeholes, shreds of clothes still hanging from mouldering bodies, or shreds of flesh still hanging from blackened bones. Buried together, rotted together, he couldn’t say which limb belonged to what, a formless mass of teeth, nails, hair, corroded earrings, rusted belt-buckles, many fingered, many mawed, crumbling even as it rose and bursting up afresh.

Heavens, the unholy stench! He once attended a beatification investigation where one Brother Jorge had been exhumed, his corpse supposed to be incorruptible. It had proved otherwise, several monks of his order reeling from the tomb. That stench was the tiniest fraction of this one, a grave far older, far larger, closed in haste and violently rent open, its air unbreathable, unbearable, indescribable.

Saviour, the unholy sound! Did the cursed mass thunder like a stormy sea upon a bitter shore? Did it groan with infinite pain? Did it howl with mindless rage? Did it mewl through a hundred tongueless, lipless mouths to be released from this world and returned to hell? Or did Brother Diaz only hear the thunder of the collapsing church, the desperate wails and squeals of the hunters as they scrambled to escape the horror?

‘Oh God,’ he heard Alex say.

The ground gave way beneath the sorceress and she plummeted into the pit along with her dead sister, the valet shrieking as he slid after them, and yet the earth kept shuddering, as if with revulsion at the spectacle, broken flagstones toppling from the ragged edge at the back of the church and down the long drop. The strip of floor between altar and cliff, on which Brother Diaz and his companions were cowering, was rapidly narrowing.

The stones fell away beneath three hunters and they dropped into the foetid vortex. Others scrambled back as arms reached blindly for them, as if in terrible jealousy, as if in terrible need. They were embraced, enveloped, dragged screaming towards the brink, clawing uselessly at the ground with their fingernails, hacking pointlessly with their weapons at what was already decades dead.

An ear-splitting crack came from above and the top of the church’s bell tower broke free and plunged downwards, crashed into the wall of the nave, chunks of stone scattering across the shuddering ground, the wrought-iron holy wheel that had topped it clanging wildly away.

One pillar crumbled, the arch above and a whole section of wall sliding into the pit. The altar stone had already split, and with a grinding shifted further. Alex stumbled and Brother Diaz caught her, braced her as she was bracing Balthazar.

Sabbas gave a desperate screech, his great wings beating, sending a blasting wind through the ruin. He got off the ground as it fell away beneath him, a stride or two, perhaps, but from the blind hunger of the dead there was no escape.

Their flailing hands caught his ankle, pawed at his knees, clutched at his clothes, a writhing mountain of them, falling apart even as they clambered up each other. One came apart at the joints, leaving a rotted arm dangling from his belt.

He kicked furiously but they caught one wing and he screamed as they ripped fistfuls of feathers from it, the other still beating wildly. The legion of the long dead clawed at him, bit at him, and the self-styled Angel of Troy was dragged down, bloody and squealing, into the rotting embrace of the damned.

His despairing wail became a desperate howl, then a muffled groan as that corrupted mass of rot closed over him, and finally was cut off.

With a gasp Balthazar sagged onto his knees on the broken altar.

Corpses and bits of corpses, still writhing from the pit, flopped back, crumbled, and were still.

A hunter goggled from behind one intact pillar, then with a whimper flung his crossbow away and fled sobbing.

A few stones fell from the edge of the great pit that had once been the abbey’s nave, and clattered down inside, and all was still.

Alex kept clinging to Balthazar’s leg, tears running silently down her stricken face. Baptiste was on the necromancer’s other side, eyes wild behind tangled curls, trying to say something, but each quick breath turned to a meaningless gasp.

Jakob grunted as he let his sword clatter down, then slowly toppled back to lie with arms spread wide, watching the clouds drift across the sky.

Brother Diaz realised he was still gripping the broken altar stone with one hand, desperately tight, and his mouth was locked as if in a silent scream, and with a mighty effort he forced his fingers to relax and dashed the tears from his eyes.

‘Fuck,’ he breathed.