Read <i>The Devils</i> by Joe Abercrombie: Chapters 7-9

Holy work sometimes requires unholy deeds…

Join us every Monday in April for an extended preview of The Devils, a brand-new epic fantasy from author Joe Abercrombie featuring a notorious band of anti-heroes on a delightfully bloody and raucous journey. The Devils publishes May 13, 2025 with Tor Books—find previous excerpts here.

Chapter 7
The Start of a Bad Joke

Balthazar delivered a weighty sigh, but nobody noticed.

His current predicament gave him a great deal to sigh about: the ghastly mattress, the dreadful food, the frigid damp and unspeakable odour of his lodgings, the outrageous denial of clothing, the abominable absence of intelligent conversation, the heart-rending loss of his beautiful, beautiful books. But after long reflection he had come to the conclusion that the very worst thing about being forced to join the Chapel of the Holy Expediency… was the mortifying embarrassment.

That he, Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi, learned adept of the nine circles, suzerain of the secret keys, conjurer of unearthly powers, the man they dubbed the Terror of Damietta—or at least had dubbed himself the Terror of Damietta in the hope that it would stick—one of the top three necromancers in Europe, mark you—possibly four, depending on your opinion of Sukastra of Bivort, who he personally considered an absolute hack—should have been apprehended by buffoons, tried and condemned by dullards, then pressed into humiliating servitude alongside such abject morons as these.

He glanced sideways with an expression eloquently communicating his utter disgust, but nobody was looking. The ancient vampire, presumably rendered decrepit by being starved of blood, slumped in a chair looking as fashionably bored as a wisp-haired skeleton could. The elf stood, thin as a length of pale wire, face obscured by a shag of unnaturally ashen hair, motionless but for a constant and deeply irritating nervous twitching of her long right forefinger. Their chief jailer, Jakob of Thorn, looked on from the corner with arms tightly folded: a war-worn old knight who appeared to have spent a sizeable portion of his life being crushed in a mangle, an experience that had clearly squeezed all sense of humour out of the man. Then there was the supposed spiritual shepherd of this congregation of the disappointing: Brother Diaz, a perpetually panicked young idiot from a little-known and less-regarded monastic order, who wore the expression of a man who cannot swim on the deck of a rapidly foundering ship.

An ineffectual priest, an enervated knight, a misanthropic elf, and an antique vampire. It sounded like the start of a bad joke to which the tragic punchline was yet to be revealed. One might at least have hoped for an awe-inspiring venue: some sculpture-crusted sanctum whose marble floor was inset with the ideograms of saints and angels. Instead, they got a draughty little box in the guts of the Celestial Palace, whose one window had a view of a nearby wall sporting a muddle of leaky drainpipes.

The choice at Balthazar’s farce of a trial had been atonement for his trespasses through service to Her Holiness or burning at the stake. At the time it had seemed a no-brainer, but he was beginning to suspect that, in the long run, immolation might prove to have been the less painful option.

That he, Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi, who had made the dead his playthings and the storm his steed, who had forced back the borders of mortality itself and bent the arch-demon Shaxep to his will—or at any rate wheedled a few favours from her and survived—was not only reduced to wretched slavery, but slavery of this intensely banal and brainless variety.

He was preparing a sigh so explosive that someone would be forced to finally acknowledge his discomfort when locks rattled and the door was thrown wide.

A gaggle of acolytes trooped in, each wearing a white habit, a countenance of otherworldly piety, and a prayer-shawl stitched with phrases from the scriptures. One struggled beneath a heavy wooden frame strapped to his back, a giant book held open upon it, a second scattering ink as he strove to follow and write on the towering pages at the same time. A third had a great round wreath of flowers about her neck that almost brushed the floor. A fourth clutched the silver circefix he wore in one hand, a sheaf of prayer-sheets in the other, glassy eyes rolled to the ceiling, lips in ceaseless motion as he burbled an endless orison for the blessings of Almighty, Saviour, and all the Saints.

“Here come the clowns,” wheezed Baron Rikard, wobbling upright on his cane—if one could use the word upright when he remained so hunched his nose was barely above his belt.

The acolytes parted to reveal two grey-haired women: cardinals, by their crimson sashes and skullcaps, not to mention the jewelled circles they wore on jewelled chains. One was exceedingly tall and graceful, gazing beneficently about like a rich woman come to distribute alms to the poor. The other tended towards the short and solid, with a wrinkled brow and flinty gaze. These, Balthazar deduced, were none other than Cardinals Zizka and Bock, the opposite poles of the leadership of the Church, Heads of the Earthly Curia and of the Celestial Choir. At first glance, he was less than impressed.

“D’you mind?” The two old women were elbowed aside by a ten-year-old girl in simple white, who planted her hands on her hips and surveyed the unwilling congregation with a critical cocked eyebrow.

Here she was, then: Benedicta the First, the Child Pope. The election of a new Holy Mother was never without controversy but this particular choice, being decidedly under parenting age, had caused widespread fury and denunciation, the excommunication of three rebellious cardinals and some dozen bishops, and nearly ushered in yet another full schism in the Church, whatever her supposed magical potential.

“From folly to farce,” murmured Balthazar under his breath. He had never had much patience for religion. What was it, really, but superstition with money?

“Sorry, everyone!” sang Her Holiness, not sounding sorry at all. “The Frankish ambassador brought me a bird and it was so funny-looking! What was it called?”

Cardinal Zizka looked almost as humiliated by this pantomime as Balthazar. “A peacock, Your Holiness.”

“Lovely colours. Have you been waiting?”

“No, Your Holiness.” Brother Diaz flashed a servile smile and bowed as low as any penitent. “No, no, no, no—”

“Yes,” drawled Baron Rikard, examining his yellowed fingernails. “But what choice do we have?”

Her Holiness only smiled the wider. “Well, if you were Pope people might bring you a peacock but you’re a vampire so tough.”

The baron issued a long sigh. “Out of the mouths of babes…”

There was a barely audible groan from the corner and the mumbling acolyte tottered, prayer-sheets sliding from his nerveless fingers and flapping across the floor in the draught. He slumped onto his side in a faint and one of his colleagues instantly took over, clasping her hands and rolling her eyes to the ceiling, smiling lips moving in ceaseless prayer. Balthazar was caught where he spent much of his time: somewhere between contempt and envy. He might know it was all flimflam, but to believe a lie was as comforting for the believer as to know the truth. For an instant he could not but wonder—is it truly better to be a woebegone cynic than an ecstatic dupe?

Bock was fanning the insensible acolyte with a sheaf of the fallen prayer-sheets, but one, by chance, had come to rest beside Balthazar’s bare foot. It was scrawled with pieties on one side, but he noted with no small measure of excitement that the other was entirely blank. In the confusion it was a simple matter to slip his foot sideways and cover that scrap of paper. He could not quite keep the triumphant smile from his face as he felt it crackle beneath his sole. He would free himself from this humiliation and extract a vengeance to make the martyrs weep! They would all rue the day they dared cross Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi!

Zizka cleared her throat as the unconscious acolyte was manhandled into the corridor. “Shall we administer the binding, Your Holiness? You have a busy day.”

“Pffffft,” snorted Benedicta the First. “They’re all busy days. Being Pope’s not half the fun you’d think.”

“Most things aren’t,” murmured the elf, which, despite their occupying adjacent cells, more or less doubled the number of words Balthazar had ever heard her utter.

One of the acolytes knelt with a bowl of red ink, into which Her diminutive Holiness dipped her forefinger, then drew a simple line across the vampire’s wrist. With her middle finger, she did the same to the elf.

The Pope took one more step, and Balthazar looked into the face of the very representative of God on earth. A pale little girl with a large mole above one eyebrow, whose white skullcap struggled to contain a mop of brown curls. Balthazar had heard her described as the greatest arcane power to be birthed into the world for several centuries and been incredulous. He had heard rumours that she was being celebrated as the Second Coming of the Saviour herself and wanted to laugh. Now, looking upon her sacred person with his own eyes, he tended more towards weeping. If this unpromising child was truly the last, best hope of the world then it appeared the world was every bit as doomed as everyone said.

“Who’s the new boy?” She cocked her head as she looked up at Balthazar, putting her skullcap in imminent danger of falling off entirely. One of her acolytes hovered nervously, perhaps in hopes of catching it.

Brother Diaz cleared his throat. “This is Balthazar… er…”

Balthazar’s sigh of disgust bordered on a full groan. “Sham… Ivam… Draxi.”

“A sorcerer—”

“Magician,” he corrected, biting off each syllable. It might have come with greater gravitas had he not been wearing only a threadbare nightshirt provided for the interview, but he did his best to appear formidably mysterious even so, lifting one eyebrow to its full magisterial height and regarding the supreme leader of the Church down his nose, which was not difficult since she barely reached his stomach.

She tried to snap her fingers but she did not have the trick of it and made no more than a soft thwup. “Wait! You’re the one who makes corpses dance? A whole opera, I heard!”

“Well… only a first act, in truth. I was making amendments to the libretto when the Witch Hunters descended and, if I am entirely honest, I still cannot get the cadavers to sing. Certainly not in a manner that would please a connoisseur. More of a tuneful groan—”

“I’d love to see that!” cried Her Holiness, clapping her hands, and Balthazar had to admit her childish enthusiasm was rather charming.

“It would delight me to put on a performance—”

“Perhaps another time,” said Cardinal Zizka, drily.

Her Holiness rolled her eyes. “God forbid we should have any fun around here.” And she dipped the tip of her little finger in the ink and drew it across Balthazar’s extended wrist, by all appearances exceedingly pleased with her handiwork. “There!”

He waited expectantly for the rest. But there was no rest. That, it appeared, was the entire inscribed element of the enchantment. A line. Not even a straight line. Not even an even line. The blob of ink had at one side become a drip that was gradually sliding down his wrist. No circles within circles, no runes of the highest and lowest, no spiral of Sogaigontung with the sacred passages inscribed at the correct angle at each of the fifteen corners. A child’s finger painting, quite literally. Balthazar could hardly decide whether to feel delighted at how easily he would shrug free of this pathetic effort, or affronted that anyone might imagine it could contain a practitioner of his potency.

The prepubescent Pontiff had stepped back to consider the risible congregation of the Chapel of the Holy Expediency, one red fingertip pressed to her lips where it left a noticeable stain. She leaned towards Cardinal Bock. “What should I say?”

The Conductor of the Celestial Choir smiled upon her like an indulgent grandmother. “I don’t suppose it matters much…” It was the most Balthazar could do to stop his jaw falling open. This woman was supposed to rank among the most learned magicians in Europe! Now it turned out she was a worse hack than Sukastra of bloody Bivort. “But perhaps something like…” She took up the jewelled circle she wore around her neck and began to absently polish it on her sleeve, squinting to the ceiling as though she was only at that moment considering it. Balthazar outwardly goggled, inwardly boggled. The old bitch was making up the verbals on the fly! The wording of a solemn binding! The papal binding, no less! He struggled to imagine what his competitors, rivals, and outright enemies in the arcane fraternity would make of this when he told them. “I require you to conduct Princess Alexia to Troy… to obey the instructions of Brother Diaz… and to see her enthroned as Empress of the East.”

On the words Princess Alexia, she waved towards a young woman trying to hide behind the acolyte with the book. Balthazar narrowed his eyes at her as he swiftly assembled the sorry pieces of this unedifying puzzle. This resolutely unglamorous waif, with the starved and sickly air of a stray dog and the shifty eyes of a low-class pimp, was the long-lost Princess Alexia Pyrogennetos, daughter of Irene, now to be installed on the Serpent Throne of Troy as a papal puppet?

“From farce to fantasy,” he murmured in disbelief.

“I think that’ll do it,” mused Bock, breathing on her circefix before giving it another polish. “Anyone else have any thoughts? Cardinal Zizka?”

The Head of the Earthly Curia sourly worked her mouth, then sourly shook her head, as if she had a very great number of thoughts but forbore to give them voice.

“Here I go, then.” The Pope bunched her fists and squinted as she concentrated on the words. “I require you to conduct Princess Alexia to Troy, to obey the instructions of Brother Diaz, and to see her enthroned as Empress of the East!” She clapped her hands. “I got it in one!”

“Wonderful!” said Bock.

“Wonderful!” said the Pope, clapping again. “And then come straight back, of course.”

“Good point, Your Holiness,” said Bock. “Well remembered.”

The Pope’s face turned suddenly grave. “If you don’t give it your best, I expect you’ll feel very sick. And—” she wagged a stern finger at each of them in turn “—be nice to each other on the way. Because being nice… is nice. Is it lunch yet?” she asked, turning towards the door.

“Soon, Your Holiness,” said Zizka. “You must first apply the binding to the… missing member of the flock.”

“Oh, I love Vigga! You think she’ll let me ride on her shoulders again?” The Pope departed with a bouncing gait that bordered on skipping. “Then lunch?”
“As soon as you have given audience to that delegation of bishops from the Hanseatic League. They desire a ruling over the relationship between God, Saints, and Saviour—”

Her Holiness gave a long groan. “Boring!” And she was gone into the corridor, her acolytes trailing behind, one still praying, one still desperately trying to scribble in the giant book, one frowning furiously as she attempted to manoeuvre her huge wreath sideways through the door. The world’s most disappointing princess gave everyone in the room one last worried glance, then skulked after.

Balthazar rubbed gently at the red mark on his wrist. “That…” he could not help saying, “is all?”

“That’s all,” said Bock, simply. “You’ll leave tomorrow morning, with an escort of Papal Guard.” She waved one hand in a vague benediction. “May God bless your endeavour and so on.”

The baron flopped back into his chair, looking up from beneath his drooping lids. “Can God really bless such devils as we are, Cardinal?”

“In his hands, they say all tools are righteous.” Bock pushed her skullcap down towards her eyebrows so she could scratch the back of her head. “You know, I have always found it a paradox: there is nothing more freeing than being bound to a common purpose.” She gave Balthazar an oddly enigmatic smile, settled her cap again, slightly skewed, and left.

It was the most he could do to suppress an incredulous chuckle. A set of extremely dangerous fools, entirely incapable of working together, undertaking a journey of a thousand miles or more with the utterly impossible aim of installing that sulking milksop on the Serpent Throne of Troy? Thanks all the same, but Her infant Holiness could count him out. He would shrug off this tissue of a binding and be gone on the wings of the wind before anyone knew it!

He had to swallow a sudden, acrid burp, no doubt the result of the indigestible slop they fed him here. He entertained himself by imagining the moronic look on the moronic face of that smirking bitch Baptiste when she learned of his escape. When she realised she would be looking over her shoulder every moment of her life for his inevitable vengeance. He wondered what form of occult retribution would give him the greatest satisfaction, provide the most appropriate warning to others and the best metaphor for the humiliation he had suffered at her hands. This dunce of a princess could find her own way to—

—had Balthazar been punched in the stomach he could not have given vent to a more forceful fountain of vomit. It hit the floor perhaps four strides away, producing a crooked line of spatters all the way to his bare feet, and ended in an agonised, shuddering wheeze. He was left slightly bent over, tongue out, eyes watering, strings of drool hanging from his nose and his cupped hands full of his own sick.

“That’s the binding.” The elf had turned to regard him expressionlessly with those huge, unblinking eyes. “Works better than you’d think.”

Chapter 8
Hold on to Something

Alex clung to the reins so hard her hands ached and concentrated mostly on not falling off.

She’d ridden donkeys before, that autumn when she’d gone north to work at the harvest. Someone had told her it was good money for light labour and they’d been dead wrong on both counts. The horse they’d put her on was better smelling and a lot better behaved than the donkeys had been but also way higher, and riding side-saddle seemed like an open invitation to a broken skull. Every jolt had her panicking she’d slide off and get mashed under the monstrous box of a wagon rumbling along behind, which would’ve been a fitting end to this fairy tale.

Her lips were dry like she was running a badly thought-out swindle. Had to keep stopping herself tonguing them like a lizard. She could play a princess, couldn’t she? Far as she could tell, all they did was get scrubbed and combed and dressed and talked over like they weren’t there. A block of wood could’ve done the same job. She could play a block of wood, couldn’t she?

She’d played a cripple cured by a miracle and a simpleton cured by a tonic and an orphan who’d found a purse and an ever-so-helpful pilgrim’s child who knew a shortcut to a nice, cheap room. Just down that dark alley no don’t worry just a bit further it’s a really great room just a bit further. She’d even played a nobleman’s daughter once, though she’d overworked the accent and the mark had seen through it and she had to jump in the canal to escape a kicking.

She’d a worry there was worse than a kicking waiting at the end of this particular caper. She kept checking for ways out, but there were armed men all around—hard bastards with hard faces and lots of hard metal to hand, the circle of the Saved on their surcoats. Duke Michael said they were there to protect her, but her history with men—and armed men especially—and armed men of the Church especially—left her far from reassured.

In fact, if you wanted to see the goddamned opposite of reassured then look no further, here it sat, riding a giant horse side-saddle.

She took a hard breath. Tried to settle her nerves. Panicking bakes no cakes, as Gal the Purse was likely even now telling a new batch of orphans. We all need something to hold on to. For Alex it was sharp wits and never staying down. So her plans had done like turds in a storm and turned to stinking slurry. Plans do that. That’s when you squeeze out some new ones.

All she had to do was bide her time and get what could be got, stay on her toes, and be ready to vanish. There’s no talent like not being there when things turn sour. She’d always liked to think of herself as a loner, self-reliant as an alley cat, but everyone can use a friend from time to time. Who knows when you’ll need someone to soak up the blame?

Her uncle, if he really was her uncle, was riding at the head of the column with the baffled-looking priest and the grey knight who never smiled and the woman with all the hats who smiled too much. Alex couldn’t see what use the ancient bastard on the roof of the wagon could be. He looked like a corpse in a coat. Not even a fresh corpse. Not even a nice coat. And the man with the ridiculous sneer who’d talked about making the dead dance spent all his time glaring at his wrist. There was a maid along, who rode like she was born side-saddle, but she combed and powdered and dressed Alex with such silent disdain you’d have thought she was the princess and Alex the maid.

Which left the elf.

Alex never saw one before, in the flesh. Folk said they were the enemies of God, and that they ate people, and scared children with stories about them, and preached new crusades against them, and burned dummies of them on holidays. When it came to getting blamed, elves were the best. She was a pointy-eared blame-sponge, right there in easy reach. So Alex gripped on tight and nudged her horse over.

“So…” she began. Usually, once Alex set her mouth off, it pretty much kept going on its own. But when those strange eyes turned on her, so big they hardly looked real, the only words she could find were, “…you’re an elf.”

The elf’s head dropped to one side, swaying gently with the movement of her horse, her neck long and slim as a bundle of pale twigs, and she opened those eyes even wider. “What gave it away?”

“Oh, I am a very perceptive person,” said Alex. “Something about the accent, maybe?”

“Aaaah.” The elf looked back to the trees. “Another reason to keep my mouth shut.”

If Alex could be put off that easily she’d have starved years ago. “I’m Alex.” She risked letting go the reins to hold out her hand, wobbled and had to grab her saddle-horn, then held it out again. “Or… Alexia Pyrogennetos? Not really sure who I am right now…”

The elf considered her hand. She considered the guards. Then she reached out and shook it. For some reason Alex had expected those long, thin fingers to feel cold. But they were warm, like anyone else’s.

“Sunny,” she said.

“Really? Short for something… elf-y?”

“Sunnithilien Darktooth.”

“Really?”

The elf slowly raised one thin white eyebrow.

“Not really,” said Alex.

“Sunny’s what they called me in the circus.”

“You were in a circus?”

“I trained lions.”

“Really?”

The elf slowly raised that thin white eyebrow even higher.

Alex winced. “Not really.”

“I was dragged around on a chain and people booed and threw things at me.”

“That… doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“They seemed to enjoy it.”

“I meant for you.”

Sunny shrugged. “Even bad shows need a villain.”

They rode on in silence, the guards clanking in their saddles, the axles of the big wagon grinding away. Alex was a loner, of course. But she found she was enjoying the company. “I’d heard elves were all bloodthirsty savages,” she said.

“I’d heard princesses were all beautiful fools.”

“Give me a chance. I’ve only been a princess for a few days.”

Sunny raised that brow again. “And already so good at it.”

* * *

Balthazar glared at the binding. He had been glaring at it almost without interruption since the moment of its application. It appeared to be no more than a rusty smear, but his constant bubbling nausea, occasional bouts of projectile vomiting, and on one memorable occasion—when his thoughts turned to how he might escape its magical shackles by engineering the death of Princess Alexia by poison—a truly explosive episode at the other end of the digestive tract, left him in no doubt as to its considerable puissance. There was nothing Balthazar hated more than a riddle he could not unravel.

He held that unprepossessing smudge ever closer to his face until he squinted at a blur. Might there be tiny runes disguised there? Inscribed onto the girl Pope’s fingertip before she touched him and by some unknown method transferred? Imprinted elsewhere upon his body while he slept? Between his shoulder blades or on the soles of his feet or maybe on the rear of his scrotum where no one was likely ever to check? Certainly no one had checked there lately, it galled him to admit. Inkless runes, impressed with a brass wire? Finger-figures that had not even made contact with his skin? Might that wilfully enigmatic ass of a cardinal, Bock, have woven some extra enchantment while he was distracted? However absent-minded she had seemed in the moment, she was reputed to be a formidable practitioner. It would not have been the first time he had committed the error of judging too much on appearances.

He took a hard breath, tried to pare away all emotion and apply unflinching logic. We all need something to hold on to. In Balthazar’s case it was his mastery of the magical sciences and his formidable powers of reason. For everything there is an answer! He sifted once more through every instant of that interview, bitterly wishing that he had his pristine copy of al-Harrabi’s Six Hundred Abjurations, and those superb German lenses, and was not perched atop a bouncing wagon.

It was the type of lumbering, absurdly over-engineered conveyance in which one might safely convey a valuable cargo, with a rail about its high roof, a seat at the front for the sullen driver, and a bench behind for passengers. It was difficult to be sure over the whirring of the iron tyres, but Balthazar occasionally fancied that he felt something large shift in the windowless compartment under his feet. They had not even bothered to chain him to the bench, apparently relying on the binding to prevent his escape, a decision they would come deeply to regret. It would take more than some precocious infant’s finger daub to keep him down—

The thought caused another wave of nausea, obliging him to tear his wrist away from his face, struggling manfully to keep his breakfast on the inside of his body while he assessed the rest of the convoy. There were twenty-one well-armed Papal Guardsmen in attendance, but Balthazar made little room for them in his calculations. Men of violence are easily outwitted. Strength, after all, can be found in plenty among the beasts. It is thought, knowledge, science—and of all sciences the harnessing of magic—that mark mankind as superior.

He glanced towards the head of the convoy, but that gloomy plank Jakob of Thorn, that smirking pirate Baptiste, and that wilting dishrag of a monk were busy blabbing away to the Duke of Nicaea. The cut-price princess, meanwhile, appeared to be striking up an unlikely friendship with the taciturn elf. The princess and the elf sounded like a cautionary fable Balthazar had no interest in reading, let alone witnessing in the flesh.

The vampire, now apparently asleep at the other end of the bench, was a different prospect. Plainly he was a venerable example, which made him powerful, cunning, and deeply dangerous at a minimum. The only member of this laughless farce that Balthazar judged to be a threat as an enemy… and therefore the only one who might be of any real value as an ally.

He leaned over, making sure to maintain a prudent distance, held up his wrist, and murmured, “What is the trick of it?”

One of the baron’s dim eyes opened a slit, one snowy brow edging upwards, its excessively long hairs fluttering in the breeze. “Pope Benedicta’s binding?” he croaked.

“Yes, the binding.”

Baron Rikard closed that eye again. “It is said that she is the most promising arcane power to be born into the world in centuries.”

“Huh.” As a highly promising arcane power himself, Balthazar saw no evidence of it.

The corner of the baron’s mouth twitched in amusement. “I have even heard it suggested she is the Second Coming of the Saviour herself.”

“Very droll,” grumbled Balthazar, who was in no mood for levity.

“Well, you’re the magician.” The vampire’s eye opened that slit again. “You tell me the trick.”

Balthazar sourly worked his mouth. Something he was doing a great deal lately. “Have you tried to break it?”

Now the vampire’s other eye eased open. “Pope Benedicta’s binding?”

“Yes, yes, the binding!”

“I have not.”

“Why not?”

“Perhaps I am exactly where I would like to be.”

Balthazar snorted. “Starved, withered, and in transit to Troy by arse-numbing wagon?”

The baron took a creaking, crackling breath, and let it sigh away. “Estella of Artois was sure she could break it.”

“The name is not familiar.”

“A sorceress who occupied your cell beneath the Celestial Palace for a time. She spent months trying. Yammering charms night and day, swearing she’d find the secret. When she wasn’t being sick, that is.”

“Did she succeed?”

“Do you see her here?”

“So she did succeed!”

“Oh, no.” And the baron stretched out with a faint clicking of aged joints and shut his eyes again. “She died, and they burned her corpse, and said, ‘We must get a new sorcerer.’ And here you are.”

“Magician,” growled Balthazar. “The binding killed her?”

“Oh, no. A giant fell on her.”

This seemed to pose more questions than it answered, but before Balthazar could formulate another he was distracted by the elf.

“Hold on to something,” she said as she rode past, then cantered on towards the head of the column.

Balthazar frowned after her. “What did she mean by that?”

“Not everything is a riddle.” The old vampire wrapped the gnarled fingers of one liver-spotted hand firmly around the rail, regarding Balthazar from beneath his withered lids. “Sunny is, in some ways, your opposite.”

“Meaning?”

“She doesn’t say much. But when she does, it’s worth listening to.”

* * *

“And tell me,” said Duke Michael, “how did a monk come to minister to this particular flock?”

“Honestly, Your Grace…” There had been a time, not so very long ago, when Brother Diaz would have fumbled for a self-serving falsehood, but frankly his heart wasn’t in it any more. “I’ve no idea.”

Duke Michael smiled. “I hear the actions of our Lord are mysterious. Sometimes, it seems, his Church is even more so.”

“A month ago, I thought myself quite a clever man…” Brother Diaz remembered with painful clarity how clever he had felt in that final interview with the abbot. How pleased with the outcome of all his scheming. How pettily triumphant as he swept past his brothers in the refectory, doomed to remain prisoners in that solemn temple to boredom. Now he wondered if the abbot had known what was coming. If his brothers had been in on the joke, laughing behind their roughspun sleeves at him the whole time. “Now I realise I’m a fool.”

Duke Michael’s smile grew wider. “Then you’re wiser than you were a month ago, Brother Diaz. For that you can be thankful.”

He saw precious little else to be thankful for. Since he was made Vicar of the Chapel of the Holy Expediency, Brother Diaz’s whole mouth had erupted with a plague of ulcers that might’ve served as a martyr’s ordeal. They were unfeasibly, unreasonably painful, yet he somehow couldn’t stop tonguing at them to remind himself just how painful they were. He’d dabbed them with holy water from the font in which Saint Anselm of the Eyes had been baptised, but if anything, they hurt more afterwards. It seemed ulcers were another nuisance he would have to accept now, as a routine part of life. Like saddle-sores, damp clothes, and ensorcellment by vampires.

“I thought they died in sunlight,” he murmured, wistfully.

“A myth,” growled Jakob of Thorn. “Baron Rikard quite enjoys it.”

Indeed, the ancient vampire was virtually basking on the wagon’s roof, head back and swaying on a brittle-looking neck. It was an exceptionally heavy wagon, riveted with iron, its whole back one windowless door secured by a great bolt at each corner, operated by a single lock.

He didn’t want to ask but couldn’t help himself. “What is… in the wagon?”

“A last resort,” said Baptiste, showing her gold teeth. She rode the way she talked, which was to say loosely and with a perpetual smirk. “If our luck holds, you’ll never need to know.”

Brother Diaz’s luck hadn’t been the best of late. He took a hard breath, pressing at the lump under his habit where the vial of Saint Beatrix’s blood lay against his skin, and offered the keeper of the Saviour’s sandal yet another silent prayer for his survival. We all need something to hold on to, and he determined to make faith his anchor. He was an ordained monk, after all, however little he’d wanted to be one, so it was probably high time. Was it not the foremost of the Twelve Virtues? The one from which all others flowed? He would keep faith. That the Almighty had a plan. That he had a role in it. Probably not a leading one. An untaxing walk-on would be fine. He managed a watery smile, but it made the ulcers hurt, so he stopped.

“Are you related,” Duke Michael was asking, all airy good humour to Jakob’s stony gloom, “to that Jakob of Thorn who was Champion of the Emperor of Burgundy?”

The knight’s already narrowed eyes narrowed by the smallest fraction. “Thorn is a large city. Lots of Jakobs there.”

“True,” said Brother Diaz, who vaguely remembered reading the name himself in a dusty account of the Livonian Crusades he’d come upon while reorganising the library. “I believe there was a Jakob of Thorn who was Grandmaster of the Golden Order of Templars.”

“And wasn’t there one who was the Pope’s Executioner?” Baptiste looked faintly amused, as if enjoying a private joke. “Or was that a Janusz of Thorn? Or a Jozef?”

“Jakob.” Brother Diaz recoiled as he found himself looking into the wrongly proportioned face of the elf at uncomfortably close quarters. It seemed she could even ride in uncanny silence.

“Sunny,” said Jakob.

She spoke in a bland drone, hardly moving her lips. “We’re being followed.”

“What?” Brother Diaz spun one way in his saddle, got stuck, then spun the other, staring wildly into the trees behind them. “I don’t see anyone!”

“I try to give the warning before everyone can see the danger,” said the elf.

Duke Michael’s smile had faded. “How many?”

“Three or four dozen. They’re keeping pace half a mile back.”

The only hint of concern Jakob showed was the working of a muscle on the side of his scarred face. “Anyone ahead?”

The elf pursed her strangely human lips, narrowed her strangely inhuman eyes, and cocked her head on one side for a moment. “Not yet.”

Brother Diaz chewed at one of his ulcers. “Surely you don’t expect… trouble…” Saints and Saviour, why did he have to use that word, it was as if saying it made it more likely, “so close to the Holy City?”

“I expect everything and nothing,” said Jakob, “especially since I took this position. Baptiste! Is there anything defensible on this road?”

“A walled inn south of Calenta. The Rolling Bear. Couldn’t tell you the origin of the name. They say the Emperor Karl the Unsteady slept there on his way to be crowned by the Pope. Interesting story, in fact—”

“Maybe later,” said Jakob.

“If we’re still alive,” added Sunny.

* * *

Something untoward was happening. The column had accelerated, the wagon jolting even more wildly than before. Duke Michael had dropped back to whisper urgently to his hapless niece. The guards were loosening weapons and scanning the trees. Balthazar had planned to wait for darkness and a halt, but the wise man stands always ready to seize the moment.

He turned his back on the driver and surreptitiously slipped the prayer-sheet from his sleeve.

“What are you about, magician?” murmured Baron Rikard, with a flicker of interest.

Balthazar smoothed the paper out on the wagon’s roof, placing his red-streaked left wrist precisely in the centre of the circle of power he had inscribed upon it. “I am breaking this risible excuse for a binding.”

A wave of nausea swept over him at the thought, but he was fully prepared and fought it down.

“Where did you get the paper?” enquired the vampire.

“That fainting acolyte dropped a prayer-sheet. I secured it.”

“Nimble. And the pen?”

“I improvised with a strip of toenail.”

“Resourceful. The ink is of an unusual consistency.”

Balthazar paused in calibrating the angle of the diagram relative to his wrist and frowned over at the vampire. Blood would have been the obvious choice, with the advantage of a certain gothic charm, but after an exceedingly uncomfortable half-hour spent trying to scrape, scratch, and abrade himself on the walls of his cell he had given up and gone in a different direction. “We are the Chapel of the Holy Expediency,” he snapped. “I did what was expedient.”

The baron further wrinkled his already wrinkled nose. “I thought there was an odour.”

“No doubt you have smelled worse,” grumbled Balthazar. It was hardly his usual immaculate penmanship, everything somewhat lumpy and crooked. But when one is forced to employ a toenail to draw runes with one’s own excrement one must settle for less-than-optimal results.

He choked back another surge of nausea as he made a final tweak to the orientation. A circle of this crudity, unquartered and lacking a ritual tablet, should ideally point north, of course, but that was rather difficult to ensure atop a moving wagon, especially with the driver heartily snapping the reins for more speed, wind plucking at the corners of the prayer-sheet. Balthazar wished he had his silver pins, his lodestone and plumb lines, his glorious clock and compasses, the set of bronze conjurer’s rings he had commissioned from that metallurgist in Baghdad, but he supposed the Witch Hunters had destroyed it all, the utter barbarians—

“Is it raining?” murmured Baron Rikard. The sky was indeed beginning to spit, and soon enough fat drops were whirling down from the strip of grey between the treetops.

“God damn it,” hissed Balthazar. The limitations of human faeces as ink were becoming starkly apparent. Several of the runes were already in danger of becoming blurry. It would have to be now or never.

He formed the sign of command over that cursed red stripe and began to pronounce the three charms he had devised: one of softening, one of untying, one of cleaving. Simple and to the point, there was no one here to impress. A modest three words each, each thrice repeated, elegant in their crystalline simplicity. He drew the letters in his mind’s eye, felt them gather power, an excited pressure in his chest, a tingling at his fingertips. Even under these circumstances he felt the intoxicating joy of working magic, of using his wit and his will to bend the very rules of reality. He closed his eyes tightly as he spoke the last word, raindrops cold on his face, heartbeat loud in his ears, hissing out each syllable with furious concentration.

“Did it work?” asked the baron.

Balthazar lifted his arm, glaring at that rusty mark on his wrist. “I think so.” And he began, for the first time in some time, to smile. “I think so!” His delighted cackle was torn away by the rushing wind as the wagon sped ever faster. He was Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi, not only one of the top three necromancers in Europe, but the man who broke the papal binding, outwitted Cardinal Bock, and strolled away from—

The vomit showered from his mouth, sprayed the roof, spattered his shirt, and clipped the baron’s sleeve before he was able to twist and direct the lag-end down the wagon’s side. His stomach was wrung out in an agonising knot, his eyes bulging as he choked, drooled, wheezed his insides out onto the rushing road.

“Apparently not,” observed Baron Rikard.

Balthazar tumbled back onto the bench with a whimper, his shit-daubed prayer-sheet crushed in one fist, sick burning every passage of his face. Gods and devils, was it coming out of his eyes?

“Fucking fuck!” he screeched.

The driver twisted in his seat. “Settle down back—” And an arrowhead burst from his throat, stopping a mere few inches from the tip of Balthazar’s nose, thick streaks of blood caught by the wind and snatched away.

The driver tottered up on his speeding wagon, peering down cross-eyed at the arrow’s red point. He spluttered blood into his beard, then his knees crumpled. He toppled sideways, bounced once in the road, then flopped bonelessly over and over, one of the guards having to swerve his horse around him.

“We’re under attack!” gasped Balthazar.

“Mmmm.” Baron Rikard had somehow managed to maintain his leisurely sprawl all the while, as if enjoying a pleasant ride in the country. He nodded towards the empty driver’s seat. “Perhaps you should take the reins?” The four horses were still going at a gallop, straps and harness flapping wildly, urged on by the frantic riders all around them.

“God damn it!” gasped Balthazar as he scrambled over the bench, slipped, and was caught for a moment splay-legged, its vibrating back battering him in the balls. A couple more arrows shot from the trees, one zipped overhead, another stuck wobbling into the side of the driver’s seat a moment before he slithered into it.

Fortunately, the reins had snagged on the brake lever and, straining with his bouncing fingertips, he was finally able to catch them. Unfortunately, he had not the slightest idea what to do once he had them. “What do I do?” he shrieked.

“I’m a vampire!” roared the vampire. “Not a coachman!”

The trees rushed past at a frankly terrifying speed, the horses’ manes streaming, Balthazar’s teeth rattling in his head. He bit his tongue at a particularly savage jolt, the taste of blood joining the taste of sick and doing nothing to improve it.

One of Duke Michael’s servants was shot from his horse and tumbled across the road, the wagon’s heavy wheels crunching over the man before Balthazar could even decide not to bother trying to avoid him.

The wind was whipping tears from his eyes now, the road a sparkling blur. Up ahead Duke Michael had his niece’s bridle while she clung to her saddle. Balthazar caught a glimpse of her horrified face as she stared over her shoulder. He glanced back, too, and saw riders behind them. There was something odd about their shape. Were those horned helmets?

The wagon bucked wildly and he was obliged to turn from the terrors behind to the even more pressing ones ahead. He saw a wall among the trees, its gate bouncing wildly along with the rest of the maddened world, on the outside of a bend they surely had no chance of taking.

Baptiste was screaming at him over the screaming of the wheels. “Slow it down!”

“Fucking how?” screeched Balthazar.

“Hold on to something.” Baron Rikard reached past him and, with both liver-spotted, knobbled fists, gripped the brake. There was a shrieking of tortured metal as he hauled on it, sparks spraying.

Balthazar glimpsed a man in the gateway, mouth and eyes wide open, before he dived aside and they were through into the yard, mud showering up as the wagon tipped onto one set of wheels. One of the horses tripped, twisted, then went down in a chaos of flapping straps and flying dirt. Its partner charged on, dragging the team sideways, and the wagon plunged past them, unstoppable.

“Oh God,” mouthed Balthazar. He’d never cared much about God, but no other words seemed quite to fit the circumstances.

The half-timbered wall of an inn came charging at them. Balthazar’s rump ended its brief and uneasy partnership with the driver’s seat… and he was flying.

Chapter 9
No Room at the Inn

Bar the gates!” bellowed Jakob.

He wondered how often he’d roared that order. The besieged castles, the surrounded towns, the desperate defences. But that led to wondering how many had turned out well.

In a leader, no one wants to see doubts.

His teeth were always gritted but he gritted them harder. He gathered himself for the hero’s effort of lifting his right leg over the saddle, lunged at it too hard, got it caught, and had to drag it the rest of the way with both hands. He slid down with all the control of a felled tree going over and with about as much bend at the joints, stumbled as his boot hit the dirt and his throbbing knee threatened to buckle.

God, riding hurt these days. Almost as much as walking.

He straightened with a snarl. He hobbled on through the flitting rain. His flesh, so battered and broken, so often torn and stitched back together, was prone to fail. It was only a stubborn refusal to fall that kept him limping on. His refusal to fall, and his oaths.

“Arm yourselves!” he barked as two guards heaved the gates shut on screeching hinges. At least his voice still worked. “Or get indoors!” A boy with a grooming brush stood frozen, and Jakob took his collar and steered him scampering towards the inn. “See to the wounded!” It was an old habit, to take command. “Tether these horses!” To crush chaos into order with any tool available. “Anyone with a bow to the walls!” He’d always had something in him that men would obey, and that was lucky.

It was only keeping them going that kept him going.

The wagon had gouged a ragged scar through the mud as it tipped over, then crashed through the front of the inn on its side. But the locks had held, thank God and Saint Stephen. They were very good locks. Jakob had made absolutely sure of that. One horse was still kicking weakly near the wreckage, hooves scraping the ground. Too dazed to realise it had run out of road. Or too stubborn to accept it.

States of mind Jakob understood all too well.

It had been his task, long ago when he was a squire, to give the wounded horses mercy. Templar’s mercy, that was: one blow, between the eyes. You learn to spot the lost causes and cut them loose. Like anchors from a foundering ship. Reckon up the strength you have left and save what can be saved.

“Where’s the baron?” Jakob caught Baptiste by one embroidered lapel. “What about the new boy? The corpse-tickler?”

She shook her head bitterly. “I should’ve quit after Barcelona.”

Jakob frowned towards the gate as the guards wedged the mossy bar into the rusted brackets. Frowned at the creeper-coated walls, the crumbling battlements. Frowned at the one leaning tower, the ivy-coated stables, the inn itself. He considered the few strengths of their position, the many weaknesses. “We should all have quit after Barcelona. Did you see who was chasing us? Your eyes are better than mine.”

“I saw them,” she said, jaw working.

“How many men?”

“Enough.” She must’ve lost her hat on the road along with her sense of humour, mass of curly hair glittering with raindrops. “But I’m not sure they were men…”

The captain of the guards was trying to untangle himself from his surcoat. The gold thread that made the circle of the Saved had come unravelled, caught on his armour. “Who’d dare attack us?” he was muttering, fingers trembling as he fussed at the knots. “Who’d dare attack us?” He was a young man, too young for this, with one of those wispy moustaches young men grow, thinking it makes them look older when really it makes them look younger than ever. But Jakob tried not to judge people for their poor choices.

He’d made a lifetime of them, after all.

“We’ll soon know.” He slid out his dagger and sawed through all that loose thread with one decisive cut. “Bows on the walls, Captain, right now.” The man stared back, blinking, and Jakob caught a fistful of his surcoat and dragged him close. “No one wants to see doubts.”

“Right… bows.” And he started pointing men towards the stairways. Shove tasks in their face so they don’t notice death waiting, just beyond.

Jakob slowly stooped. Scraped up a handful of dirt. Rubbed it between his sore palms, between his aching fingers.

“What’re you doing?” asked Princess Alexia.

She looked even less like royalty than usual. Her wet hair had come loose and stuck to her pale cheek, clothes mud-spattered and one bony hand twisting the other. But Jakob learned long ago that you can’t judge someone’s quality by looking. They can find grace and greatness in the strangest ways, at the strangest times. Grace and greatness were out of reach for him now. Sunk in the past. But perhaps he could make the room in which others could find them.

“An old habit,” he said, slowly straightening. “Learned from an old friend.” An old enemy. He thought of Han ibn Khazi’s face as he rubbed the desert dirt between his palms. That impossible smile while all around him men raged and wept. An eye of calm in a hurricane of panic. “Know the ground where you make your stand. Make it your ground.” Jakob gave her the closest thing he could to Khazi’s smile. Even if it hurt that old wound under the eye. The one Khazi had given him. “Courage, Your Highness.”

“Courage?” she whispered, then flinched at a great bellow outside the walls. It hardly sounded like a man’s voice. More like an angry bull’s.

“Or better yet, fury.”

“Good advice,” said Duke Michael, drawing his sword. You could tell from the way he held it—loose and easy like a joiner holds his hammer—that it was far from the first time.

“Protect your niece.” Jakob clapped him on the shoulder as he headed towards the gates. They rocked under a great blow from outside, the bar jumping in its brackets.

It reminded him of the siege of Troy, in the Second Crusade. The earth-shaking blows of the ram against the thrice-blessed doors. Splinters flying from the bars, thick as ships’ masts. Witch-fire flickering between the timbers as Bishop Otho, soon to be Saint Otho, roared out prayers to each archangel in turn, the battle-songs of the elves outside the walls providing an unearthly accompaniment.

It reminded him of the battle in the Ratva Bog. The roughness of the dirt against the grip of his sword. The flitting rain in his face and the air cold and sharp and clean in his lungs.

It reminded him of the day they stormed the tower at Corgano, that acrid, acid smell of burning thatch, the squeals of the wounded, the panic of the dying.

But you reach a certain age, everything reminds you of something.

The gates shuddered again.

“What shall I do?” asked Sunny, falling in beside him.

“Live through it.” Jakob grinned at her. Grinning at an elf. How things change. “It always turns to shit, eh, Sunny?”

“Usually takes a bit longer than this.” And she pulled up her hood, sucked in a deep breath, and vanished. For a moment he could see a kind of space in the rain where she was. Or where she wasn’t. Then even that was gone. It was coming harder, now, wind swirling through the yard and making the cloaks of the guardsmen flap, making the sign of the Rolling Bear dance on its one creaking chain.

Jakob shrugged his shield from his back. Winced at the twinge in his shoulder as he slid his left arm through the straps. “Steady!” The half-roar, half-growl he’d honed to a deadly edge on a hundred battlefields. “Steady!”

You can stack your doubts high before. You can polish your regrets up after. But while the fight’s on, your purpose must be pure. Kill the enemy. Don’t die yourself.

He drew his sword. Winced at that old ache in his fingers as he gripped the hilt.

How things change. But how things stay the same.

Another bellow from beyond the gates. Another crashing blow on weathered wood.

“Ready!” he bellowed.

The oaths would keep him standing when his flesh failed. When his courage failed. When his faith failed.

The world could burn to ash and blow away and all could be lost, but his word would still stand.

The gates rocked again.

* * *

“Alex, are you hurt?”

She heard the words but couldn’t make the bastards mean anything. She stared dumbly at Duke Michael, or her uncle, or whoever he was. “Eh?” And she flinched as mud flicked her face.

The yard was chaos. Horses dragged to the little stable that couldn’t hold half so many, manes tossing, hooves thrashing, soldiers yelling and yammering, rushing to the walls.

One guard might’ve been younger than her and his helmet had a broken buckle. Kept falling over his eyes, and he’d push it up, and straight away it’d fall again.

The rain was pissing down now, spattering from a broken gutter. A guard was pulled from his saddle, hands gripping a snapped-off arrow-shaft in his belly.

“Is it bad?” he was snarling. “Is it bad?”

Alex was no surgeon but she was pretty sure an arrow in you wasn’t good. Arrows are really sharp and your body’s just meat.

Her uncle had her by the shoulders, was giving her a shake. “Are you hurt?”

He was staring at her saddle, and she saw it had an arrow sticking out of it, too. Dark wood, and surprisingly long, the flights with a beautiful stripe to them.

“Oh,” she said. If she’d been sitting astride, it would likely have gone through her leg.

They had that guard on the ground, were dragging his mail coat up, padded jacket underneath sodden with blood, white skin slick with blood, and her uncle’s servant Eusebius was wiping the wound with a rag, and more blood was welling out, and he was wiping it, and more blood came, and more.

“Oh,” she said, again, and she found she was gripping her own belly, right where his wound was. Her knees were all wobbly, and her hair was stuck across her face, and she felt sick. Every instinct was screaming to run, but where to?

“How many of them?” someone shrieked.

“Where are the arrows?”

“God help us!”

“Steady!” roared Jakob of Thorn, and Alex flinched as the gate shuddered, and took a nervy step backwards to nowhere, then spun about as something crashed into the ground behind her.

One of the guards had fallen from the wall. Or been thrown. Because now someone jumped down on top of him. Dropped spear-first, nailing him to the ground through the chest.

Someone. Or something. It straightened before Alex’s smarting eyes, leaving its spear stuck where it was. Instead of a man’s nose it had a long snout, covered in tawny fur, one pointed ear sticking up and the other flopped over with a black tuft on the end. It glared at Alex with amber eyes. The eyes of the foxes she used to see on the rubbish tips at night, watching her outraged, as if to say, What are you doing in our city, bitch?

“Saviour protect us…” she heard Brother Diaz breathe.

Alex stood frozen as the thing swept a curved sword from a belt bristling with weapons, bared vicious little teeth, and gave a high yip of hatred as it swung at her.

There was a scrape of steel as Duke Michael barged her sideways, catching the sword on his, steering it wide so the point just missed her shoulder. With a flick of the wrist, he switched from parry to thrust, stepping forwards so his blade punched through the fox-man’s studded leather jerkin, then whipped back out.

Hard to tell his expression, on account of the brown fuzz on his face, but he made a sort of squeal and fell to his knees. His sword clattered down as he clutched at the wound, blood flooding between his furry fingers.

“Into the inn!” Duke Michael jabbed a finger at two of the guards. “You and you, with us!”

He bundled Alex through a doorway, into a low common room with crooked rafters, smelling of onions and disappointment. A miserable place even by Alex’s standards, which till a few days ago had been some of the lowest in Europe. Didn’t help that the wagon had smashed a ragged hole through the wall and brought down a chunk of ceiling. A chubby man cringed behind a counter covered in broken plaster.

“What’s happening?” he squeaked.

“A man,” burbled Alex, mindlessly, “and a fox.”

“Eudoxia’s cursed experiments,” spat her uncle. He caught the innkeep by his stained apron and dragged him close. “Where’s the back door?”

The man pointed a trembling finger into the darkness beside the fireplace, where a couple of logs sputtered in the blackened hearth. Eusebius padded towards it, sliding out a hatchet.

Duke Michael pressed something into Alex’s limp hand. A dagger, crosspiece like a snake, red jewels for its eyes. “Take this.” He squeezed her fingers closed around the grip. “And be ready to use it.”

He led her across the common room, his sword gleaming red in his other hand. Two patrons cringed under a table. A serving girl with a big birthmark was pressed to the wall, gripping a jug in both hands.

Someone was screaming outside, metal scraping, honks and bellows like a farmyard on fire, the crashes of whatever heavy thing was beating on the gates, the smaller of the two guards flinching at each blow. The maid was sticking close behind him, her bonnet all skewed and tears streaming down her face, clutching the bag that held the combs and oils and pretty powders that were suddenly a relic of a vanished world.

Seemed Alex wasn’t the only one whose plans had turned to shit.

Eusebius had made it to the back door, was leaning against the chimney breast with one hand on the bolt. Ever so cautiously he eased it open, a strip of light down the side of his bald head as he peered out. He gave his master a nod.

Duke Michael licked his lips, spoke softly. “Stay close to me.” He looked around as Eusebius eased the door wider. “And get ready to run—”

The two-log fire blazed up suddenly and the door blew off its hinges.

Alex’s hair was lashed in her face by the draught, the low room flooded with crazy light.

Duke Michael was flung away like a toy, his sword clanging into the corner.

The maid shrieked, dropping her bag, bottles and powders spilling.

A woman slipped in through the scorched doorframe. She was very tall, and very lean, and she wore robes stitched with arrows and circles of runes, and her eyes shone with the reflections of the little fires now burning all about the room, and no one ever looked more like a sorceress.

“Not interrupting, am I?” she asked as Alex stumbled back, tripped over the hem of her dress, and went sprawling.

The big guard shouted something as he stepped forwards, then all at once went up in flames, his circle-marked surcoat on fire, his hair curling and twisting and drifting off him like burning straw.

Searing lines shot through the dark. The serving girl screeched, thrashing on the ground, legs on fire. The smaller guard turned to run. The sorceress pointed at him and he fell, crawled, his armour glowing like horseshoes on a smith’s anvil, then his surcoat caught fire and he wriggled and howled and clawed at himself, steam clouding from his back.

Alex scrabbled away on her arse, through the mess of the maid’s broken bottles, not even able to get the breath to scream, choked by the stink of char and burned flesh and the flowery notes of spilled perfume.

She still had the dagger in her sweaty hand but she never thought of using it. She only held on ’cause she’d forgotten how to make her hand come open.

The sorceress’s bright eyes flicked towards her, and she smiled.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

* * *

Brother Diaz prayed.

It was hardly the first time. Prayers are to a monk as stones to a mason, after all—you really can’t do the job without them. Back at the monastery he’d filed into the church dawn, noon, and evening, occasionally led a service for the locals, a couple of baptisms, one slightly anticlimactic funeral. But he’d done plenty of private praying, too—that he might finally make a mark, make his brothers jealous, make his mother proud—and he liked to believe he was really rather good at it. Congratulate himself on his thorough knowledge of the psalms.

It was only in this moment of mortal terror that he realised: his mouth might have said the words, but his heart had never really been in it.

His heart was in it now.

“O God,” he gasped, clasping his hands to make one trembling fist and turning his eyes to the spitting heavens, “O Father, O light of the world, bring down your cleansing fire and deliver us from darkness.”

The inn’s gates were rocked by a crashing blow, another great splinter flying from the back and bouncing across the yard to clatter into the stricken wagon.

“Steady!” growled Jakob of Thorn.

How could anyone be steady while under attack by creatures that were neither man nor animal, but some unholy fusion of the two? The misshapen corpse of the one Duke Michael had killed lay in a slick of blood. It had surely stood on two legs, surely wielded human weapons, but those eyes, still goggling at the sky, were undeniably fox-like. Saviour’s breath, those fuzzy ears!

Brother Diaz fell to his knees in the mud, clutching the wooden circle he wore around his neck, symbol of the Saviour, through which one finds the passage to heaven. “O Holy Daughter, O blessed sacrifice, in your infinite mercy, protect us.”

A huge figure, strapped with plates of spiked armour, had climbed onto the parapet and was swinging a great axe at two of the Papal Guards. Brother Diaz had thought at first he wore a horned helmet but now, squinting through the drizzle, it was evident the horns grew from his head. He bellowed into the rain, and with his next swing smashed one of the guards screaming off the wall in a shower of blood.

If humanity was fashioned in the image of God, what monstrous corruptions of his holy purpose were these? Brother Diaz had read rumours of such things in the monastery’s more fantastical volumes, but always far from the righteous light of the Church, lurking at the edges of the map where the cartographer was just squiggling guesses.

He fumbled in his collar and drew out the silver vial, the sacred blood of Saint Beatrix, and gripped it and the holy circle together. Clearly, he needed every scrap of divine assistance he could get. “O Blessed Saint Beatrix, lend me your unconquerable faith, your dauntless courage. Forgive my weakness and stand by me in my time of trial.”

Someone screamed. One of the guards, shot with an arrow, and he toppled from the wall and crashed through the thatched roof of a lean-to shed to lie weakly groaning in its wreckage. Something sprang over the battlements and onto the walkway where he’d stood. A woman with a bow in her hands, another over her back, and at least three quivers of arrows slung about her person, but with great, long, folded legs like a rabbit’s.

This was no crusader fortress, bolstered by the White Art of the Faith, merely a badly maintained inn, its crumbling wall scarcely taller than a man. Brother Diaz squeezed his eyes shut and prayed more fervently than ever before, tears squeezed from beneath his prickling lids.

“I know I am an unworthy vessel, stained with lust and lechery, but fill me with your blessed light, let me not fear, let me not—”

At a final crashing blow one of the brackets tore from the wall in a shower of dust, the splintered bar flew back, the broken gates shuddered inwards, and the prayers died on Brother Diaz’s lips.

Jakob of Thorn stood framed in the open gateway, grey and stubborn as a wind-bent tree, dwarfed by the monster that now stooped under the high arch.

A towering beast, draped in rusty chain mail and with a great studded club in its furry fists. A goat-legged, goat-headed, goat-horned abomination, bristling with weapons. It stretched out its neck, slotted yellow goat eyes popping, and gave a furious, thunderous, earth-shaking bleat.

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The Devils

Joe Abercrombie

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The Devils

Joe Abercrombie

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Excerpted from The Devils, copyright © 2025 by Joe Abercrombie.