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.