Page 58 of The Devils

Clean Inside

Vigga jerked awake with a sneeze that made her head throb and her belly ache.

She hawked and spat and scraped hay from her tongue. She could hardly tell where hay ended and tongue began, and she was stark naked and could taste blood. None of that was unusual, but one thing did puzzle her.

If she was awake, why was she snoring?

There was a snort, and the haypile shifted, then humped, then fell away.

‘Ah,’ said Vigga as a man was revealed.

He had no clothes, either, and hay in his hair, and he stared down at himself with an almost tearful look of confusion. ‘What happened?’

Vigga narrowed her eyes. She hated remembering things at the best of times. ‘Did I lose at dice?’ For her, to play at dice was to lose at dice. ‘Did I fall in a fountain?’ For her, to go near a fountain was to fall in it. ‘Did I punch a camel?’ For her—

‘Who are you?’ he whimpered, crossing his arms nervously over his chest.

‘Sometimes …’ Vigga gently patted his face. ‘It’s better not to know.’ And she clambered from the hay and sprang down to the floor of the stables, the hard-packed earth covered in slits of brightness as that prying oaf the sun peered through the gaps between the boards.

One leg of her trousers turned out still to be rucked up around her ankle, which was lucky, but she slipped as she tried to get her foot in the other leg, which wasn’t, as she rolled through something she thought was horse dung but could just as easily have been her own. Some style of dung, anyway. What’s it matter, once it’s in your hair?

‘Damn it,’ she grumbled, pulling on one boot. She saw the other peeking from beneath a horse trough and she stepped over and dunked her head in, the cold water kissing at her face then streaming from her hair as she pushed it back, shivering most pleasantly. A horse regarded her from a stall.

‘Mind your manners!’ Vigga blew a mist of drops at it. ‘Has no one told you it’s rude to stare?’

It turned away with a nicker she didn’t know the meaning of, but she’d a worry the horse had won the argument. She became aware of a ripe odour, even for a barn. Sniffing at her pits she learned, to no one’s surprise, that she was herself the source, so she had a quick splash and scrub before strolling for the doors.

A last sad and rumpled garment lay in the strip of brightness in front of them. Sometimes after she’d been fucking, she’d find her clothes all neatly folded up, which was strange, as she never remembered doing anything but leaving ’em where they dropped, but nice, ’cause it was sort of like putting on new clothes. But that hadn’t happened this morning, sorry to say. She pushed her bottom lip out as she turned the straw-stuck thing this way and that, trying to make sense of it.

‘This isn’t my vest,’ she muttered. But it was the only vest to hand, so she struggled into it with a complaining creak of stitches, the leather threatening to split under her arms.

‘Are there any clothes for me?’ The man peered from the hayloft with his hands cupped around his balls.

‘What am I?’ grunted Vigga, catching the handles of the stable doors. ‘A tailor?’

‘I don’t know what you are!’

‘Not a tailor.’ And she yanked them open. ‘Gah!’ She shielded her eyes against the blinding sun, stumbling out with one eye shut and the other blinking wildly.

A canal, maybe? A cobbled roadway on each side, busy with people, little bridges over fast-flowing water. Buildings with tiled roofs and tall windows, shops and houses and there a church with the little faces painted around the door and there—

She began to give a long, low growl at the back of her throat, the wolf padding up ever so suspiciously behind her ribs and she couldn’t blame it one bit. She brushed through the traffic and stomped over a bridge to a tavern of sorts, folk perched at tables outside.

‘Why are you here?’ she snapped.

‘Waiting for you.’ Baron Rikard picked at a loose thread on his embroidered shirt, the cuffs rolled up loosely to his elbows, the front hanging open to his navel, exposing a slice of sinewy stomach, pale as polished ivory. ‘Someone had to make sure you perpetrated no outrages. Or should I say, no further outrages. What you did in that fountain last night … merciful Saviour.’ And he took a glass of wine between finger and thumb, swilled it for a moment beneath his nose like quite the fucking connoisseur, licked his lips with a kind of needy shiver, and closed his eyes to sip.

Not wine. Vigga caught a salty waft and the wolf dribbled hungrily, thoughts of the good meat flooding hot and guilty from the dark corners of her mind. Without looking, Baron Rikard slid a plate towards her with the back of his hand. A large joint sat on it, swimming in bloody juice. ‘I ordered for you.’

Vigga’s mouth flooded with slobber of her own, but her pride held her back. ‘So you think I’m a dog?’ she snarled.

‘Since when have you cared about my opinion?’ Rikard arched one black brow. ‘The better question is – do you think you’re a dog?’

Vigga glared back at him, but the joint kept smelling the way it smelled, and her hunger was vast and her pride extremely threadbare, so she stepped over a stool and sat, snatched up the joint, and began ripping into it with her teeth. The baron watched her with that smug grin, which was one of his most enraging looks.

‘So that’s one question answered,’ he murmured.

‘Can I get you … anything else?’ A serving girl leaned over the table, staring at Rikard with huge, damp, adoring eyes. ‘Anything at all?’

‘No, no, my dear.’ The baron smiled as he leaned towards her. ‘You’ve done so much already.’ And he damped a handkerchief with the tip of his long tongue, and dabbed away two little specks of blood above her collar. The girl gave a kind of desperate sigh when he touched her, eyelids flickering.

Vigga growled with disgust around her latest near-raw mouthful.

‘Pray don’t mind my … associate.’ The baron sighed. ‘She is what she is.’

‘And proud of it,’ grunted Vigga, who couldn’t have been less proud of it.

Rikard upended his glass, then licked out the inside, then carefully set it down, and tossed a couple of coins beside it. ‘Hard to believe those might have the face of our little Alex on their backside soon,’ he said, stepping from the table and walking on, leaving the serving girl staring after him, hands clutched to her chest.

Vigga shook her head as she followed, stripping every shred from the bone with her teeth, but something about the street was confusing her – it seemed to end, some distance ahead, at a riot of greenery with tall towers above, like the one on top of the Pillar. But that had been very high up, and this was if anything below them, and there was so much sky everywhere …

‘Where are we?’ She peered around the corner of the tavern and recoiled in horror. Beyond a low rail was a dizzying drop towards the city, the harbour wall beyond it, the sea beyond that, all far, far below, and Vigga felt a lurch of sickness, dropping her bone and clinging to the corner of the building.

‘On the Grand Aqueduct, of course.’

‘I don’t like heights!’ She shuffled back from the brink and someone nearly walked into her.

‘It has withstood civil wars, collapsing Empires, and invading elves,’ said the baron, airily. ‘I daresay it will bear even your considerable weight.’

‘Not all of us can turn into bats,’ snapped Vigga. She couldn’t shake the memory of the aqueduct from below, how delicate the arches, how teetering the little houses clinging to the top. These houses.

‘You don’t like heights and you don’t like crowds,’ said Rikard. ‘Honestly, you really have ended up in the worst city. But never fear, we won’t be staying much longer. Our mission approaches its conclusion, after all! Unless there are some points of protocol you would like to review in connection with Princess Alexia’s coronation?’

Vigga squinted at him. ‘Points o’ what, now?’

‘I will take that as a resounding no ,’ said Rikard, swaggering on. What would you even call that walk of his? A flounce? A prowl? A prance? No weight in his heels, hips swaying, somewhere between snake and man. The most annoying thing was it gave Vigga no choice but to do the opposite, and lumber along slouching like a grumpy savage. The baron smirked at her as if he guessed her thoughts.

‘You know, you stomping around like a bull with sore balls doesn’t make me look worse. If anything, it only highlights my grace and refinement. The way pretty people often choose ugly friends so they’ll stand out like a diamond in the dung.’

‘Don’t tell me how to walk,’ grunted Vigga.

‘Oh, I’d never try to change you, even if I dared dream it was possible. Entirely repugnant you undoubtedly are, but no one could deny you are a true original.’

Vigga frowned. ‘That a compliment?’ Should you be pleased or insulted at a compliment from someone you hate?

‘Of a kind. We justifiably detest each other, but … wouldn’t the world be dull without you?’ A well-dressed woman stepping from a shop fainted against the doorframe with a breathy moan as the baron passed. ‘Look at the two of us. A pair of monsters.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Vigga. ‘I’ve collared and muzzled the beast in me.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘Do you see fur?’ She held up her bare arms. Some downy hair below the elbows, true, but nothing you could call fur .

‘You did not look especially collared at that inn near the Holy City,’ observed the baron.

‘I’d been locked in that wagon for days.’ Vigga gave a dainty sniff. ‘Who could blame me for stretching my legs?’

‘You did not look very muzzled on that galley in the Adriatic.’

‘Brother Diaz begged for help and I chose to save his life. I chose. That is the point.’

‘And at the Monastery of Saint Sebastian?’

‘That Dane let out his wolf, so I let mine out to play with it.’ Vigga felt a little tickle at the thought, in fact. ‘The wolf’s not gone and never will be gone, I know that, but I choose when to be the wolf. Not gothis with irons or cardinals with whips, not you or Jakob of Thorn, not even the moon,’ and she couldn’t help a shiver at the lovely thought of it, so fat and silvery, ‘and definitely not the wolf. I choose. The rest of the time I will be nice, and safe, and clean.’

‘Clean?’ The baron raised one brow at her. ‘Is that dung in your hair?’

Vigga scraped angrily at it, pulling a few strands out and getting them tangled up with the dung on her fingers then waving her hand around as she tried to flick the mess off. ‘Not on the outside! You can be clean … inside .’ And she jabbed at her breastbone with two fingers and may have got a bit of dung on her vest. Or whoever’s vest it was. But the point was made, because the wolf slunk away when ordered, meek as a puppy. ‘See? That’s not a wolf’s chest, that’s a woman’s chest, and, as it goes, a pretty spectacular example, though I say so myself.’

‘Do you indeed?’

‘I do,’ she said. ‘Indeed.’

‘Well, if you are clean inside …’ A passing woman caught the baron’s eye and tottered as if she’d been slapped, eyelids fluttering. ‘I congratulate you …’ He leaned towards her, lips curling back, touching his tongue to the point of one fang, eyes fixed on her throat—

Then he tore himself away and walked on. Vigga heard him mutter under his breath.

‘I wish I was.’