Balthazar hardly even knew why he was bothering to pick his way around the puddles. His boots were saturated, every footstep a waterlogged squelch. His repulsive hessian habit was spattered to the waist with filth. The pilgrim’s garment was, like so much that the Church produced, both functionally useless and aesthetically bankrupt, with the added indignity of making him appear to be fundamentally the same as everyone else, a misapprehension he had been striving to correct since a child. When he thought of his roomful of marvellous vestments, the pentagrams picked out in thread of precious metals – oh, the apron with all the little mirrors for the repulsion of demonic powers! – he felt moved to weep. Though, ever since his conviction for the crimes of creativity, free thinking, and increasing the sum total of human knowledge, he had felt moved to weep on an almost permanent basis.

No one would have noticed had he wept, of course. Firstly because the switchback tracks their so-called Blessed Company climbed into the mountains were littered with treacherous drops and required one’s constant attention; secondly because his enforced companions from the Chapel of the Holy Expediency were a cabal of self-centred misanthropic monsters who cared for no one’s comfort but their own; and thirdly because his tears would have been instantly obliterated by the thin rain that had been sprinkling the pilgrims’ gloomy procession for days, turning the already uncertain footing to claggy glue.

He had never been one for walking, opting mainly for a sedan chair if he really had to leave the house. Prayer had never ranked among his leading interests, either. He believed in God, of course, but, as a magician, they had never particularly got on. He believed in goats but desired no interaction with them. It was fair to say, therefore, he found a pilgrimage a bit of a slog.

In fact – once one had factored in the singing, the clapping, the mud, the blisters, the overweening smugness, the overwhelming hypocrisy, the mud, the rain, the interminable preaching, the atrocious mixture of hymns and crusading marches, the abhorrent slops served from the common cauldron, the mud, the constantly worrisome, frequently offensive, and occasionally repugnant company, and, of course, always, the mud – the whole business was more a peregrination to hell than to heaven.

The humiliation! That he, Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi, luminary of the necromantic community, should find himself wedged into this procession of imbecility, this unholy trudge from nowhere to nowhere, this unmerry march to physical discomfort, spiritual disappointment, and intellectual impoverishment. He caught the mournful clangour of a bell up ahead, its music muffled by the rain. A death knell for his deceased hopes and dreams, perhaps.

‘Let’s hurry it up,’ grunted Jakob of Thorn, frowning back with his sparse grey hair stuck to his scarred grey pickaxe of a head, doggedly determined to wring the maximum pain from every step so he could manfully conquer it.

‘You hurry it up, you deathless dunce,’ muttered Balthazar, though obviously not until the knight had limped well out of earshot.

‘You may wish to speak even more softly,’ murmured Baron Rikard, leaning close enough that Balthazar could feel the chill of his breath, even in the mountain air. ‘His pet elf is likely somewhere among us. One of her ears may be clipped but she misses nothing.’

‘Sage advice,’ murmured Balthazar, glancing suspiciously about. The vampire appeared a shade younger and more pleased with himself every day, and had the aspect now of a hale and handsome aristocrat in his early sixties, the once-dangling wattles of skin tightened around a noble jawline, dark hairs beginning to show in the silver of his beard. ‘You have plainly been indulging your particular appetites.’

The baron flashed the sorry-not-sorry smirk of a spoiled heir caught diddling the maid. ‘Is it so obvious?’

‘I have noted telltale pinpricks on the necks of several members of the company, and people do not as a rule get younger.’

‘Well …’ Rikard dropped his voice to an intimate purr. ‘I am a vampire. Drinking blood does rather come with the territory. But I am very gentle when I dine these days, I assure you.’ Merely the slightest hint of fang showed in his easy smile. ‘I only take what can be spared.’

‘The self-serving justification of every burglar, slaver, racketeer, and tyrant throughout history.’

‘Role models for the ages indeed. I would hardly have expected a leading member of your profession to object to a little …’ The vampire glanced back towards the file of pilgrims labouring up the steep path below them, ‘judicious exploitation of the cattle.’

‘As long as I notice no fang-holes about my own throat, why would I?’

‘Oh, I would never feed on someone to whom I had been formally introduced without express permission. It would be like eating a pet. Once they have a name it feels …’ The baron gave a fastidious shudder. ‘So crass.’

‘Still with us, then?’

Balthazar frowned up to see Baptiste sitting above him on a crumbling wall overlooking the path, one leg gently swinging. She had cinched in her pilgrim’s habit with a worn hunter’s belt cocked at a slant, and added brass-buckled knee boots, a chain sporting holy circles of several different materials, and a hat improvised from a folded scrap of waxed canvas. The effect should by all rights have been absurd but, to his great irritation, she looked sleek as a witch’s cat. She never appeared to exert any effort, but nonetheless arrived everywhere first, and always with that damned supercilious smirk that felt like a living reminder of all his recent humiliations.

‘Were you hoping I had slipped and plunged to my death?’ he grumbled.

‘A girl can dream.’ She reached behind her head, tipped her hat forwards with one finger, and directed a stream of water from the brim to spatter down the front of his habit.

Balthazar ground his teeth as he fumbled for a rejoinder. Her brazen boasting. Her limitless self-aggrandisement. Her tedious harping on her matchless experience. Once he was free of this damned binding he would give her an experience she would not soon forget. She would experience his ruthless retribution! A stern chastisement! A veritable spanking, bent helpless across his knee. And she would look back, over her shoulder, still with that smirk, most likely, and beg for more, and they would nip and bite and scratch at one another like witch’s cats coupling, and she would whisper his name, pronounced correctly, her breath hot on his ear, and—

‘Wait …’ he muttered, ‘what?’

She looked suspicious. ‘What do you mean what?’

‘What do you mean what!’ he demanded, far too loud, as if one could turn abject drivel into triumphant repartee by volume alone, then strode on up the path towards the latest false summit before Baptiste could reply, hoping no one noticed the stiffness of his gait or the sudden colour in his cheek. He would keep his silence. Yes. He would not take the bait. This was not retreat, it was victory through towering dignity! No matter the provocation, Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi always took the high road!

Though it seemed rarely to lead him anywhere that anyone would want to go. ‘Another bloody shrine?’ he groaned.

This one, wedged into the sodden saddle at the highest point of the pass, consisted of a squat bell tower beside a cave, likely used as a temple by worshippers of other gods long pre-dating the Saviour’s teachings. Say what you like about the Saved, they were masters of setting up in other people’s houses and pretending they were the architect. Lying was a sin, apparently, unless you did it outrageously and persistently enough, in which case it qualified as scripture.

‘Another bloody shrine,’ echoed the baron, a picture of suave disdain. ‘I would pray for God to have mercy upon us, but I fear he takes little note of the entreaties of vampires.’

‘I fear he is equally deaf to necromancers,’ grunted Balthazar.

‘I fear he is equally deaf to everyone. Will you be queuing up to view the relics?’

They laughed together. The world was, it hardly needed to be said, divided into enemies and those that could be made use of. The baron might well have been the most dangerous monster in this monstrous company, but if Balthazar had learned one thing during his storied career in the magical sciences, it was that the worst monsters often made the best allies.

‘Once the discerning spectator has viewed one jar of holy dust,’ he observed, ‘he finds little to entrance him in another dozen.’

‘And yet I note you have not abandoned our Blessed Company. Do I take it you have given up on breaking Her Holiness’s binding?’

‘Given up?’ Balthazar glared down his nose at the vampire. ‘Giving up is not something I do.’ And he worked his wrist deeper into his ragged sleeve, where that infernal red streak could no longer offend his senses. ‘Though I will concede, reluctantly … as far as the power of Her Infant Holiness’s binding is concerned … I may have made a minor misjudgement.’

‘I believe humility stands among the Twelve Virtues.’ Baron Rikard pressed pious hands to his heart. ‘Perhaps our pilgrimage is already working wonders upon your immortal soul.’

‘I will overcome this enchantment, believe me.’ Balthazar glanced carefully about, but no one was listening. They never were, lately. ‘I merely need the correct tools. Appropriate books, charts, reagents, habiliments, conjurer’s circles, and so on. Possibly … a staff.’

‘Robes, rods, magic rings?’ The baron glanced significantly towards the many walking sticks, holy symbols, and sackcloth habits to be seen among the crowd of pilgrims. ‘Well, you’re the wizard …’

‘Magician.’

‘… but one is forced to wonder if there is quite so much water between magic and religion as its practitioners would like one to believe …?’

‘The difference,’ snapped Balthazar, ‘is that magic works.’

‘Yet here we have one of Europe’s foremost necromancers, obliged by the Pope’s binding to attend a pilgrimage.’ The vampire strolled on towards the cave, where the queue of faithful was beginning to diminish. ‘I may give the relics a passing glance after all …’