Page 63 of The Devils

Evil Friends

Alex stood, staring at nothing, her handmaidens buzzing about her. Seemed as if she’d been standing still all day while people buzzed about her. Babbled at her, around her, over her. Wheeled her about like a plaster statue of the Saviour on festival day. Dressed her and stripped her like a tailor’s mannequin. Plonked different headwear on her like she was a hatstand. It was only that morning they’d been stitching her into this dress, embroidered all over with prayers. Now they were cutting her out of it.

She hardly knew whether she was dizzy from the applause, worn out from the expectations, terrified at the idea of ruling an Empire, or panicking at the idea of enduring a wedding night. She wanted to laugh, be sick, hide under the bed, and run for the docks all at once.

‘I’m Empress of Troy,’ she muttered to herself, for about the hundredth time.

‘Without doubt, Your Resplendence.’ Lady Severa oversaw the undressing the way you might watch an heirloom be unpacked from a crate. Might’ve been reassuring to think she was now Alex’s aunt-to-be, except that right away put her in mind of her own recent marriage, and that brought on a fresh urge to sprint for the door.

‘I’m Empress of Troy …’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘And my husband’s on his way.’

‘I fear this cannot be quite how you dreamed of your wedding night.’

Alex snorted. ‘Honestly, I never dreamed I’d live past twenty.’ Honestly, she still wouldn’t have put good money on it.

‘You need not worry. Zenonis and Placidia will be outside the door. I and Duke Michael are only on the floor below.’

‘So if my husband tries to stab me, you’ll get here in time to stop the dagger?’

‘Your husband will not stab you,’ said Lady Severa. ‘Not with a dagger, anyway.’

‘Not with a dagger …’ murmured Alex as one of the girls – Cleofa, she thought, or maybe Athenais – sawed through a seam on her dress, and another scattered handfuls of flower petals across the carpet.

Lady Severa delicately cleared her throat. ‘You are not … a virgin?’

Alex snorted even louder. ‘Not even in the neighbourhood.’

‘Good. Good.’

‘Shouldn’t a bride be one, ideally?’

‘Ideal is not always … ideal. You will have some sense of what to expect, at least.’

‘Bad as that?’ Alex took a shuddering breath, and blew it out, to the sound of ripping stitches. ‘Feel like I’ve been changing into something new for months. Now I’ve got to change into something else again. I don’t even know what.’

‘Transformation … is a part of life,’ said Lady Severa. ‘Frightening, but necessary. Beautiful, even. The caterpillar becomes the butterfly.’

Alex swallowed. ‘Butterflies don’t live long.’

There was certainly a flavour of doomed moth about the silk gown they draped around her, falling off the moment it was on, wafted about by the breeze from the open windows and leaving precious little to anyone’s imagination.

There was a knock at the door. Probably just an ordinary knock, but it sounded as heavy to Alex as coffin nails being thumped in. One of the girls – Placidia, she thought, or maybe Zenonis – glided off to answer while the others went into a frenzy of last-moment tugs, plucks, flicks, and brushes, as if slapping a little colour into her cheeks would make the difference between a blissful marriage and a lifetime of torture shackled to a shit.

They perched a circlet of golden leaves on her head, a thing that couldn’t decide whether to be alluring or commanding, which was a highly suitable piece of headgear, since Alex was wrestling with that decision herself and had no idea how to come at either one. So as the door opened, she ended up sort of leaning against one of the bedposts with her arms folded, slightly frowning but also with one eyebrow cocked. Like a grumpy cook who’d been waiting too long for the baker’s boy to arrive.

Arcadius stood in the doorway, wearing not a gauzy tissue but the magnificently embroidered tunic, stiffly starched shirt, and highly polished boots he’d been married in. He bowed, very elegantly, which was a relief, as it’d be a shame to be murdered by someone with bad manners.

‘Your Resplendence. Or should I say …’ He glanced up, with the hint of a smile. ‘My wife?’

‘Your Grace. Or should I say …’ It was somehow hard for Alex to wrap her teeth around the phrase. ‘My husband.’

The last of the girls – Athenais, she thought, or maybe Placidia – tossed a last handful of petals then whisked the doors shut, sealing the two of them – husband and wife, Empress and consort, Alex and the man she’d taken till a few days before for her most dangerous enemy – in her bedchamber, alone.

Great.

‘I confess I feel a little …’ Arcadius cleared his throat, the first hint he might be suffering from some nerves of his own. ‘Overdressed.’ And he unbuttoned his glittering jacket, tossed it over a chair, and started rolling up his shirtsleeves. ‘Perhaps some wine would help us both … relax.’

Alex hadn’t been relaxed for a very long time. In fact, she couldn’t really remember ever being relaxed. But she doubted she’d ever been less relaxed than she was right then. ‘I wouldn’t say no,’ she muttered as wine gurgled from the jug into two glasses, glittering red and bloody with the sunset.

He advanced on the bed, holding one out to her. ‘Hell of a day for you.’

She took it, wondering whether you could see poison. ‘And it’s not over yet …’

He saw her hesitate. ‘If it was poisoned …’ And he took a slurp from his own glass. ‘I’d just have killed myself.’

‘You might’ve put the poison only on my glass,’ said Alex.

Arcadius raised his brows. ‘Exactly the sort of thing my mother would’ve done. You’re giving me way too much credit.’ He swapped Alex’s glass for his, then drank from that one, too. ‘Or perhaps not enough.’

She finally let herself take a sip. It did taste rather fine. But then the kind of poison a duke would use on an Empress you probably can’t taste any more than you can see. She perched herself on the bed. Tried to waft the tails of her hapless gown so they gave her legs a hint of cover, but it was like using a feather to hide a side of ham.

Arcadius watched her. ‘You seem a little …’

‘Ferrety?’

‘I was going to say jumpy.’

‘Well, your brothers all tried to kill me.’

‘I heard, and thought to myself … how gauche .’ He set off around the bed to the other side. ‘My one consolation is that they clearly weren’t terribly good at it. I did try to dissuade them, but though they were very different men they all three took after our mother in being impossible to dissuade from anything. But I can promise you, right now, that I …’ And Arcadius perched on the far side of the bed and looked earnestly at her. ‘Will never try to kill you.’

‘Sort of a minimum standard in a husband, really, wouldn’t you say?’

‘One that not every imperial consort in history has met, I fear.’ He hauled off one boot and tossed it aside with a clonk . ‘But I hope to clear it considerably .’ He grunted as he strained at the other boot. ‘I differed from my brothers in many respects, but perhaps the most important is that, although I was eldest …’ He finally got his boot off, and swung his feet up onto the bed, wriggling his toes. ‘I never had the slightest desire to be Emperor.’

Alex was a pretty experienced liar. Maybe she was among liars of a higher class than she was used to in the slums of the Holy City, but she didn’t think he was lying now. She took another slurp of wine and sat back against her cushions. ‘So you’re marrying me for love?’

Arcadius smiled. ‘You look ravishing, of course—’

‘A turnip would look ravishing with my servants dressing it.’

‘But a turnip cannot help me save the Empire of the East.’ He kept looking at her with that earnest, slightly amused expression. ‘For decades now, if not centuries, the leaders of Troy have been their own worst enemies. The city’s best children, eating each other. Struggling for power while weakening the whole, all in the shadow of an inevitable pointy-eared apocalypse . I want to return the Empire of my forefathers to glory. Together … perhaps we have a chance?’

She had to admit she liked what he was saying. And the way he was saying it. God, was she starting to actually like him ? That never ended well. ‘Arcadius—’

‘My friends call me Archie.’

‘They do?’

‘Believe it or not, I have quite a few.’

‘I do believe it.’

‘Why, thank you.’

‘You’re quite a charmer.’

‘Why, thank you.’

‘But I’ve known some very charming, very evil people.’

‘Well, evil people make the best friends, don’t you find? They’re prepared to do things for you that good friends never would.’

Alex, who’d been kept alive for the last few months by a gang of diabolical heretics, could hardly argue with that. ‘So you want us to be friends?’

‘Well, it seems preferable in a marriage to being enemies. I saw my mother make that arrangement with no fewer than four husbands, and it did not turn out well. Especially for the men involved. I see no reason to repeat the mistakes of our parents, do you?’

‘I barely knew my parents.’

Arcadius rolled his eyes to the ceiling. ‘God, I wish I’d never known mine. Are you trying to make me jealous, Alexia?’

‘My friends call me Alex.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘Believe it or not, there are hardly any, and most of them just left for the Holy City.’

‘If ever there were evil friends,’ said Arcadius, ‘I think you have some there.’

Alex found herself rather nettled by that. ‘No doubt they’re a … mixed bag.’

‘I am told there is a particularly dangerous vampire, as well as a particularly violent werewolf and a supercilious tamperer with the dead.’

Alex wrapped her gown, such as it was, a little more tightly around herself. ‘We’ve all got our shortcomings.’

‘Oh, I am well aware. Flaws I have aplenty, but hypocrisy isn’t one of them.’ He gave a sigh. ‘I sense you’re not exactly raring to consummate our alliance, and I take no offence, I share your reticence.’ He held up a hand. ‘A matter of taste rather than quality, I assure you. Might I hazard a guess that you … perhaps …’ And he raised his brows high. ‘Prefer rings to fingers, as it were?’

Alex raised her own brows to match. ‘While you, maybe, are more of a finger man?’

‘It seems my wife is as perceptive as she is beautiful.’

‘That a fancy way of calling me dumb and ugly in one breath?’

Arcadius held her eye. ‘ Quite the opposite, on both counts.’

‘Well, the bed’s big enough that we could share it every night and probably never see each other again.’

‘I’ve heard it said the secret of a good marriage is a broad mattress.’

‘We’ll have to meet in the middle sooner or later. There’s been some talk about …’ Alex cleared her throat, ‘ heirs .’

‘Ah, yes. Born here, beneath the flame, as you were. Between the two of us … I feel sure we can devise a method that will keep our mutual repugnance to a minimum.’

This was turning out more civilised than Alex had dared to hope. ‘There’s more than enough repugnance around without us adding more.’

‘My very feelings.’ Arcadius plumped one of the cushions with the back of his hand and draped himself luxuriantly against it, looking towards the ceiling, night-sky blue scattered with golden stars. ‘Perhaps … a little assistance from those we find more personally appealing? And a curtain of some sort?’

‘With a hole?’ murmured Alex, lying back to look at it herself.

Arcadius twisted towards her, making a ring with his thumb and forefinger and grinning at her through it. ‘Only a small one. And perhaps some manner of fragranced lubricant.’

‘Sounds like quite a party.’

‘Looks like quite a party,’ said Vigga, gazing wistfully back towards the quay, lit with torches as the sun sank, noisy with raucous music, cheers, and laughter, crowded with colourful revellers celebrating the brave new era. An era the Chapel of the Holy Expediency had helped bring in but could never be a part of.

‘Shame we’re not invited,’ grunted Brother Diaz, trudging towards the gangplank. ‘My name’s Diaz! I believe passage to the Holy City has been secured for us.’

The man who, by his hat, was the captain, took in Jakob, stonily glaring, Baptiste, jauntily grinning, Baron Rikard, languidly leaning, Balthazar, fastidiously sneering, Vigga, looking exactly like a Viking werewolf would, and finally and with the greatest suspicion of all Sunny, her face hidden in the shadows of her hood but for tufts of pale hair. It would have been far better had she vanished from sight entirely but she seemed reluctant to do it, or talk, or acknowledge anyone at all. In fact, if elves were capable of being depressed, Brother Diaz would likely have put her in that category.

The captain leaned to spit over the ship’s side. ‘Hope I don’t regret it.’

Baron Rikard sighed. ‘I fear you will find, as we all must, that hope and regret are sisters eternal.’

There was a brief silence. Brother Diaz thought the vampire might have waxed a touch too philosophical for the audience.

‘We’re ready to go,’ grunted Jakob, always ready to bring things down to earth.

The captain looked back to a list nailed to a board. ‘Wish I was. But as you can see …’ as a sailor brushed past Brother Diaz with a barrel over her shoulder, nearly knocking him into the sea, ‘we’re still loading. All this business with the new Empress. It’s held everything up.’

‘It’s held me up for six months,’ snapped Balthazar, stepping past Brother Diaz and across the gangplank. ‘We will sit up there on the aftcastle while we wait.’

‘I’d rather you—’

Vigga grinned down at him. ‘I can sit on you instead. If you’d rather.’ As ever with her, it was hard to tell threat from proposition.

The captain took it as a little of both. ‘No, no, the aftcastle is … all yours.’

‘Grand,’ said Vigga. ‘Just sing out. If you change your mind.’

‘This certainly has been one of the Chapel’s lengthier assignments,’ the baron was saying as he tripped up the steps.

‘But our priest survived!’ Baptiste slid down the mast till she sat with her back against it. ‘Has that ever happened before?’

‘Mother Pierraud lasted three missions,’ said Jakob. ‘But that was before your time.’

‘What became of her in the end?’

Jakob leaned on the rail, frowning out at the sea. ‘Best not to dwell on it.’

Any feeling of triumph at seeing Alex finally crowned was steadily fading as Brother Diaz considered his future prospects. ‘What will be next … do you think?’

‘One thing about life in the Chapel of the Holy Expediency,’ said Baptiste. ‘You will never guess what’s next.’

‘Demons in Dusseldorf?’ mused Jakob.

‘Witches in Wexford?’ grunted Vigga.

‘Goblins in Gdansk?’ ventured Balthazar.

‘Gdansk is lovely this time of year,’ observed the baron.

‘Maybe I’ll put off the retirement.’ Baptiste looked thoughtfully towards the setting sun, the gold glimmering on the water. ‘See how one more turns out …’

‘Every time,’ said Jakob, shaking his head. ‘She moans all the way, then stays for one more.’

‘The only thing we can be sure of,’ said Rikard, ‘is that it will be a dirty job.’

‘How could it be otherwise?’ Brother Diaz looked gloomily towards the celebrations on the quay. ‘For the clean jobs, Her Holiness has other servants.’

‘Well, first step on any successful sea-journey …’ Vigga slid out a bottle of spirits, and with a flick of her thumb sent the cork spinning into the sea. ‘Let’s get shitfaced.’

‘First step in any successful alliance,’ said Arcadius, ‘I suggest we get outrageously drunk.’

And he slid from the bed and strode for the door. Alex wriggled into her cushions and drained her glass. She’d always thought she didn’t like wine. Now she realised she didn’t like bad wine. Turned out she liked good wine quite a lot.

‘More wine, if you please!’ her husband roared into the corridor, then swaggered back grinning towards the bed. ‘I find there are few ills more wine won’t help with.’

‘Axe in the head?’ asked Alex.

He thought about that and shrugged. ‘It’ll make it no worse.’

One of the handmaidens padded in behind him, eyes on the floor. Placidia, Alex was almost sure, a fresh jug balanced on her silver tray.

‘What if this one’s poisoned?’ she asked, drunk enough to joke about it. Or half-joke, maybe. The last thing she’d ever expected from her wedding night was happening – she was actually starting to enjoy it.

‘Paranoia would generally be thought deplorable in a wife.’ Arcadius snatched the jug from the tray and took a swig straight from the spout. ‘But in an Empress, it’s positively essential. Wouldn’t you say?’ He glanced at Placidia, and his brow wrinkled. ‘Do I know you?’

‘This is Placidia,’ said Alex. ‘She’s from an unimpeachable family.’

‘Unlike the rest of us … I’ll remember in a moment …’

Placidia glanced up, and Arcadius snapped his fingers. ‘I’ve got it! With black hair, you’d be the absolute image … of one of my mother’s … apprentices …’

‘Oh.’ Placidia tipped her head to one side, and tossed her tray away, and it hit the marble with a harsh clang and spun round and round on its edge. ‘How fucking tiresome,’ she said.

‘Wait …’ Alex held on to one of the bedposts to pull herself up to sitting. ‘What?’

Zenonis slipped her head around the door. Alex never saw her smile before, but she was smiling now. A bright and hungry smile. And one side of her face was all dotted with blood. ‘Did they work it out?’

‘Wait …’ Alex almost whimpered. The pleasant warmth of drunkenness was rapidly draining and chilly terror was washing in behind it. ‘ What? ’

Arcadius took a step back. ‘Oh no …’

Placidia gripped him by the wrist. ‘Oh yes .’

‘Ah!’ He tried to pull free, face twisting in pain. ‘Ah!’ His arm had turned pale where Placidia held it. A fur of frost, spreading from her hand, veins bulging blue-black on his skin. The jug slipped from his grip and shattered, a slush of half-frozen wine oozing from the wreckage.

He turned to Alex, very slowly, and with a strange creaking. ‘Run …’ he whispered, and the word turned to a puff of smoke on his grey lips, ice spreading across his cheeks, eyes turning milky pale.

‘Fuck!’ screeched Alex, scrambling from the bed, getting tangled in the covers and sprawling across the floor in a shower of cushions.

‘Born in the flame?’ Zenonis stalked towards her, teeth bared, hair stirred by a hot draught from nowhere. Just like the pyromancer at the inn, and the terror of that memory caught Alex now and choked her. ‘You can die in the—’

‘Fuck you !’ Alex flung her empty wine glass and it bounced from Zenonis’s cheek and shattered on the wall. Alex spun, slipped, scrambled on all fours for the chapel, bare feet skittering on the marble.

‘Oh God …’ She snatched one last panicked look over her shoulder as she stumbled for the secret panel, fumbled for the hidden catches.

Arcadius was frozen, pale cheek glittering with rime, cold fog rising from hair turned furry white with frost. With a snarl, Placidia slapped him, and his whole body shattered into splinters, chunks of pink ice bouncing across the polished floor. She glared at Alex and tossed her husband’s frozen hand over her shoulder.

With a click the secret door popped open and Alex blundered through, clutching at the doorframe.

Zenonis was up, face streaked with blood from a gash on her cheek. A tapestry behind her began to blacken and smoke as she raised her hands and a blinding wave of fire shot out.

Alex slammed the door shut as it flickered around her, heat shocking as a punch in the face. She stumbled back through the blackness, slapping at the singed tails of her gown, coughing on the stink of sulphur.

‘Oh God …’ She had just the presence of mind to fumble the lamp from its little alcove. ‘Oh God …’ She lifted the hood and brought it down, over and over, till the flame puffed into life. ‘Oh God …’ Was the door starting to glow? Was smoke curling from the back? Was it getting warm in the little corridor?

She staggered, clawing cobwebs away, to the little room with the little window where she’d had her last bitter little conversation with Sunny. How she wished Sunny was here now, but they were all gone. Sunny, and Jakob, and Vigga, and Brother Diaz even, all well on their way back to the Holy City—

Duke Michael! His rooms were on the floor below. The guards would still be loyal to him. She ran to the narrow stair, stone cold against her bare feet, and took one step down—

Sounds echoed from below. Scraping footsteps? Was someone coming up?

‘Oh God …’ She could smell burning. A scratch at the back of her throat. She clutched a flimsy handful of her gown in one hand, lamp in the other, blundering up the steps two at a time, her bare shoulder scraping the wall. The golden wreath had slid down over her eye and she tore it off and flung it bouncing down the steps.

She shoved open a door and tumbled into the throne room, lit by four hanging lamps, sun sinking beyond the great windows and staining the Serpent Throne a bloody red. She scrambled for the great bronze doors, hauled on one of the handles. As it came open a crack, she heard a distant scream beyond, the crackle of flames. Was that delighted laughter?

She backed off, staring wildly around. Tapestries, statues, weapons bracketed to the walls. Nowhere to hide. Beyond the throne, the narrow stair climbed upwards. The stair to Saint Natalia’s Flame. She ran to it, dragged herself up it with hands as well as feet, on all fours like a dog. The dog Empress, her panting breath echoing about her.

She blundered blinking into the gallery at the top, brighter than daylight, Saint Natalia’s Flame blazing up from the bowl at its centre. She shrank away as a dark figure rounded on her, but it was only a Sister of the Flame in her red hood, sworn to silence, sworn to keep the brazier forever lit.

Nothing else but the cords of wood stacked about the parapet and the two dozen archways beneath the mirrored dome … and the dangling chain. The one that would warn the city the elves were coming. Alex stood a moment, staring at it. But it wasn’t like there was much left to lose. The nun’s eyes went wide as she stretched up to grab the end and jerked it down. The hopper above dropped open and with a pop, a fizz, and a shower of foul-smelling sparks, a stream of powder poured into the brazier.

A stream of black sewer-water poured into the sea, and Balthazar watched, fascinated, as the ripples spread, were subsumed by the incoming waves, slapped against the harbour wall, and rebounded, splitting and merging in an intricate dance.

His mind returned once again to the sorcerous twins they encountered at the Monastery of Saint Sebastian. Their identical technique, with opposite results. Waves. In earth. In air. A common structure to all matter … He could not shake the notion. It was so perfect, so beautifully simple, so consistent with the ordered universe in which he still insisted on believing. Could one magically induce a wave through anything with the right—

‘What’s that?’ asked Sunny. Balthazar followed her long finger, looking up towards the top of the Pharos. There, at the summit, bright in the gathering dusk, Saint Natalia’s Flame was burning blue.

Brother Diaz frowned towards it. ‘I thought they only did that for an elf invasion?’

And Balthazar experienced that familiar sinking sensation. The one he had felt each time he tried to break the binding and realised he had failed. The one he had felt when the Celestial Court read the verdict. When the Witch Hunters sprang out of hiding in the graveyard.

‘Something’s wrong,’ growled Jakob. Some of the revellers on the quay had noticed, too, pointing up, gabbling excitedly.

Balthazar winced. ‘Nothing that need concern us, surely?’

‘Alex is in trouble.’ And Sunny sprang down from the aftcastle onto the deck, striding past the captain as he ordered the hatches shut on the last of the cargo.

‘We don’t know that,’ wheedled Balthazar. ‘She can’t know that!’

‘If there’s nothing to worry about,’ grunted Jakob, sliding a few inches of steel from his scabbard, then slapping it home with a snap, ‘we’ll soon be back.’

‘She’s Empress of Troy,’ whined Balthazar, ‘she’ll always be in trouble. We cannot rescue her from every little thing!’

‘I won’t ask anyone else to come—’

‘I’m coming,’ said Brother Diaz, gripping at the vial he kept beneath his habit.

‘It could be dangerous,’ said Jakob.

Vigga grinned as she stood, slapping the seat of her trousers. ‘Where’s the fun in safe?’ Baptiste was clambering up from her place against the mast as well.

Balthazar gave a tremendous snort as he watched. ‘I can trust that you at least will be taking no risks with your person?’

‘The time comes …’ Baptiste gave her daggers a quick check, then glanced up towards the Pharos, setting her jaw. ‘You have to stick your neck out.’

‘ What? ’ For a moment, Balthazar could only stare at her. ‘Well, I am not going, and that’s that !’

‘Of course you’re not.’ And she gave him a friendly clap on the arm and hurried down the steps to the deck. For once, there was no trace of rancour in it. No disgust and no contempt. And yet it managed, somehow, to be the most stinging thing she had ever said to him.

‘You’ve been demanding we go for hours!’ shouted the captain as he watched them clatter across the gangplank. ‘Now we’re ready you want to stay?’

‘Well, we won’t bloody wait for you!’ Balthazar bellowed after them. He rounded on Baron Rikard, still leaning against the ship’s rail, just as he had been when they first noticed the colour of the flame. ‘I am comforted to see that you at least have retained your perspective.’

‘Always,’ said the vampire, watching the others hurry along the quay with his customary faint amusement.

‘For months I was bound to protect that hopeless girl and struggled with my every resource against it. I flatly refuse to continue the struggle now I am bound to leave her to her own devices!’

‘An entirely rational decision. I would expect no other.’

‘What are they thinking ?’

‘Who can say? Each of us makes our own choice, in the end, for our own reasons. Alone. With our consciences.’ Rikard showed his fangs as he grinned. ‘Such as they are.’

‘Well, quite,’ grumbled Balthazar, nodding along. ‘Absolutely.’

‘That’s why I’m going, too.’

Balthazar stared at the baron. ‘ You? ’ He stared at the Pharos. ‘ There? ’

‘Empress Alexia might be in trouble.’

‘But … you’re a vampire!’

Rikard laid gentle fingertips on his chest. ‘So I can’t care ?’

Balthazar gaped even wider than he had at Baptiste. ‘All this time you studied my efforts to break the binding … you encouraged my efforts … so you could break it yourself—’

‘That’s what you thought?’ Rikard gave a suave little chuckle. ‘I encouraged your efforts because I found them hilarious. To be fair, you came closer to breaking the binding than any other magical practitioner I have known. Which is to say, nowhere near. But I never wanted to break the binding myself. I never needed to.’

‘But … what …’

The vampire rested a gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘The problem with clever people is they think everything must be clever. The binding works on the soul , Balthazar.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m a vampire. I don’t have one.’

‘But if the binding doesn’t affect you …’ Balthazar groped for the words like a blind man for the privy. ‘Then … you … chose to come here?’

‘When one reaches my age …’ The baron gave him a parting pat. ‘One needs something to do with one’s time.’ And he exploded into a cloud of bats that clattered off screeching into the evening.

‘Saviour protect us …’ The captain had chosen that moment to clamber onto the aftcastle. Now he was numbly making the sign of the circle over his chest. ‘Cast off!’ he howled towards his men. ‘We’re leaving now !’

Balthazar turned back to the quay. ‘Well, I won’t bloody do it!’ He screamed furiously at the evening. ‘I’ve done what was asked of me. I’ve done more than was asked of me. You can’t make me go!’

Even though no one was asking him to.