Brother Diaz tumbled sweating over the threshold, slipped as he turned, seized one of the doors while Baptiste grabbed the other, both straining against the ancient wood, both growling with the effort, both with boots sliding on marble polished by centuries of pilgrims’ feet.

He snatched a glance down the darkened avenue that led from palace to Basilica, saw Vigga approaching with an elegant step quite unlike her usual stomp, Lady Severa at her shoulder. As if their odds against a werewolf and a sorceress hadn’t been impossible enough, it looked as if they’d picked up a company of sympathetic Palace Guard on the way.

‘They’re coming!’ he gasped.

‘I fucking noticed!’ snarled Baptiste, elaborate hinges squealing in protest.

‘Push!’ groaned Brother Diaz, setting a shoulder to his door as it began to shift.

Baptiste twisted around to press her back against hers. ‘What the fuck does it look like I’m doing?’

‘Don’t swear … in church!’

The two doors met with a clatter and Baptiste slammed three iron bolts across while Brother Diaz hauled up the great wooden bar that stood against the frame. It had the first line of the ‘Our Saviour’ carved into the back, but that made no noticeable difference to its weight.

‘Help …’ he wheezed, just about getting the end off the ground, every joint trembling with effort as he staggered one way, then back the other, ‘me …’

‘What the fuck …’ grunted Baptiste, catching the other end a moment before it toppled and crushed him flat. ‘Does it look …’ hefting it onto her shoulder and bending at the knees, ‘like I’m doing?’

They heaved it up together, managed to guide it sideways as it fell, Brother Diaz snatching his hands away as it dropped into the wrought-iron brackets. He was about to flop gasping against it, utterly spent, when a great thud rattled the doors and made him stumble back.

‘Will it hold?’ he whispered, shuffling away as dust filtered down.

‘Against Vigga?’ Baptiste shuffled away with him. ‘I wouldn’t want to bet your life on it.’

Another blow echoed through the Basilica and made Brother Diaz jump, the bar trembling in its brackets.

‘Who beats on the gates of God’s own house?’

He reeled around to stare into the lined face of Patriarch Methodius, in full regalia as Supreme Head of the Eastern Church, the very embodiment of spiritual authority. He was accompanied by a retinue of two canon priests, a trio of monks whose lips moved constantly in silent prayer, a boy holding a giant candle and another struggling with a giant, jewel-studded copy of the scriptures.

Behind them, scared little knots of nuns, servants, and bureaucrats were cowering beneath the icons. People who’d fled to the Basilica seeking sanctuary from the violence that had broken out in the heart of Troy. People who’d had the very same idea as Brother Diaz, in other words.

‘Your Beatitude!’ He felt a surge of relief strong enough almost to produce tears.

‘What brings you here in such disarray, my son?’

‘Desperate need!’ Brother Diaz was obliged to plant his hands on his knees as he struggled to get a proper breath. ‘Fighting, in the Hanging Gardens. In the Palace itself!’ As if to add urgency, the door shuddered at another blow. ‘Treachery and treason, against the rightful Empress Alexia, crowned by you in this very Basilica only hours ago. Lady Severa pursues us and she’s … she’s …’

‘A very good liar,’ muttered Baptiste.

‘A sorceress!’

Many of the refugees shrank back still further as the word rang out, but the Patriarch looked entirely unmoved by this horrifying revelation. ‘I am well aware.’

‘Wait …’ Brother Diaz swallowed. ‘What?’

‘Lady Severa was the first of Empress Eudoxia’s apprentices. Many more followed.’

The door rocked again, even more violently. Baptiste gave it a nervous glance as splinters scattered from the shuddering brackets.

‘And you are …’ Brother Diaz swallowed again. ‘Fine with that?’

Methodius narrowed his eyes. ‘My predecessor, Patriarch Nectarius, was a man of the highest moral calibre. When Eudoxia seized the throne, he objected in the strongest terms. His tomb, downstairs in the crypt, is empty. There was nothing left to bury. When I was selected to succeed him, I was left with no choice but to do what was … expedient. Something you should understand only too well.’

Brother Diaz cleared his throat. It was true that, when it came to an impassioned stance against the use of Black Art, he didn’t find himself on quite the firm theological ground he used to. The door quivered again, and he wondered whether he might be able to hide behind that giant book. He decided yes. But not for long.

‘And Empress Eudoxia,’ the Patriarch went on, ‘for all her manifold and manifest faults, kept the Black Art in the Athenaeum …’ he indicated the door, even now shuddering at another blow, ‘and left the house of God to God. And to his properly appointed servants.’

‘The ones she didn’t murder,’ said Brother Diaz.

‘Well, while those ones are doubtless adorning heaven, they really were left unable to influence earthly events one way or another, wouldn’t you say?’

Brother Diaz was experiencing a familiar sinking feeling. ‘Your Beatitude, all I want – all any of us want – is to see the Saved once more united against the enemies of God,’ he was aware of a needy whine in his voice but couldn’t seem to get rid of it, ‘the Eastern Church joined with the Western as one family—’

‘You would see the Eastern Church subordinated to the Western!’ thundered the Patriarch, in full self-righteous sermonising style. ‘You would see us bow down to women. Be led in prayer by women. Be christened, confirmed, and buried by women! You would see us kneel before a little girl! A puppet in stolen papal white!’

‘Our own Saviour was a woman!’ said Brother Diaz, moving from wounded disappointment towards nettled indignance. Progress of a kind, perhaps. ‘God’s daughter, who gave her life for our salvation.’ He pointed at the expanse of stained glass above the altar. ‘She’s on your window.’

‘And the window is the proper place for her,’ said the Patriarch, without so much as a pause, ‘not dictating Church policy! No, Brother Diaz!’ He raised his arms towards the thousand thousand images that covered every wall. ‘The angels look down in despair upon your betrayal of our faith! I will not suffer it! Lady Severa has given me assurances as to the status of the Eastern Church.’ And he waved his priests forwards as another booming blow echoed down the nave. ‘Open the doors, my friends!’

Brother Diaz stopped one of the priests dead with a hand on the chest. ‘The devils are at your gates!’ he snarled, spurred finally from nettled indignation to outraged disgust. ‘And you’d invite them in?’

‘The devils are already within!’ bellowed Methodius. ‘I would admit the broom to sweep them out!’

‘Oh, fuck this.’ And Brother Diaz punched the Patriarch right on the point of his chin. He toppled straight back, his expansive headdress bouncing off and rolling down the aisle, his arms spread out wide, just like those of the Saviour on the window above.

Everyone stared, astonished. No one more so than Brother Diaz himself.

‘I knocked out the Patriarch of Troy,’ he whispered.

‘I saw.’ Baptiste peered over his shoulder at the stricken Pontiff. ‘Maybe there’s hope for you yet.’

There was an almighty crash behind them and Brother Diaz spun to see the bar, already bending, shatter in a shower of loose fibres, one of the brackets ripping free and clanging away among the pews.

The doors wobbled open and Vigga stepped through, bloody fists clenched, that dangling rune still pinned to her forehead. Lady Severa followed a few paces behind, matching her stride precisely, demonstrating the same impeccable dignity with which she’d followed Alex down the very same aisle to her coronation that afternoon. Palace Guards spread out around the far end of the nave and worked their way through the benches, crushing any meagre hopes of escape.

‘Should’ve stayed on the boat …’ hissed Baptiste, backing off towards the altar. ‘Knew I should’ve stayed on the boat …’

‘I don’t suppose …’ called Brother Diaz, weakly, as he followed her, ‘if I said we’d taken sanctuary in the house of God …’

Vigga and Severa spoke at once, with the same neat little smile. ‘I have honestly never taken my faith all that seriously, and I doubt your Viking friend goes even as far as lip service.’

‘She has been baptised, in fact,’ said Brother Diaz.

‘Twice,’ offered Baptiste.

‘Even so. I doubt this would be the first church she has desecrated.’ The Patriarch’s entourage had backed away, now the boy dropped his candle and ran for it, the rest of them scattering beyond the altar, where the nuns and servants had gathered fearfully like sheep herded into a pen. ‘Now,’ said Lady Severa and Vigga, together, ‘I think it would be best if you surrendered.’

‘We can expect good treatment, can we?’ asked Baptiste.

‘Let’s say better than if you don’t surrender.’

Brother Diaz swallowed. ‘A quick death, then.’

‘It sounds a cliché, but when you’ve seen the slow deaths I have …’ Severa and Vigga both puffed out their cheeks. ‘You really start to see the value.’

Vigga stepped forwards, over the supine Patriarch.

‘Should’ve stayed in the Holy City …’ muttered Baptiste.

Brother Diaz winced, shrinking back, turning his face away—

There was a blast of wind from nowhere, Vigga’s hair was blown wildly around, and the needle and its rune-stitched cloth suddenly whipped from her forehead and were whisked away on the breeze.

‘It works!’ someone yelled. One of the guards had sprung from among the pews, heels of his hands pressed together and thrust forwards. ‘Earth and air! A common structure to all matter!’ The voice, not to mention the tone, sounded strangely familiar. ‘I am a genius!’

For perhaps the first time ever, Baptiste looked surprised. ‘Balthazar?’ she asked.

The guard pulled off his helmet and pushed back damp hair to reveal the delighted face of one of Europe’s foremost necromancers. ‘Saving the day once again!’

‘Why are you wet?’

‘The ship cast off. I was obliged to swim.’

‘Wha ’appen?’ Vigga rubbed at her forehead like a woman waking from a drunken slumber. ‘I dreamed I was a lady.’ She peered down baffled at the Patriarch, lying between her boots. ‘Who’s this bastard?’

‘You came back?’ snarled Severa, glaring at Balthazar in furious disbelief. ‘Why?’

He gave an airy wave. ‘Call it a matter … of professional pride.’

Baptiste slid a dagger from her boot, another from her back somewhere, and dropped into a waiting crouch. ‘You couldn’t let me have the last word, could you?’

‘I absolutely could not,’ said Balthazar. ‘Mistress Ullasdottr?’

Vigga glanced over at him. ‘I like the sound o’ that.’

He narrowed his eyes at the guards. ‘Would you mind giving me some corpses to work with?’

Vigga held one fist with the other, cracked her knuckles, and showed her pointed teeth. ‘Oh, that’d be my fucking pleasure.’

Alex stumbled from the stairway and blinked in the glare at the top of the Pharos for the second time that evening, a good deal more battered, burned, sweat-stuck, and bloodstained than she’d been the first time and at about the same level of mortal terror. Saint Natalia’s Flame still blazed in its brazier, bringing a merry sparkle to her dead husband’s gaudy wedding tunic. So it looked like she’d die warm, at least.

‘We’ve run out of tower,’ she mumbled.

Sunny scurried to one of the archways and peered over the parapet. ‘Maybe we could climb down the side—’

Alex hardly knew whether to laugh or cry at the thought of doing it again. ‘They’d catch me for sure.’ And she preferred to die somewhere with a floor. ‘You go.’ She put her hand on Sunny’s shoulder, blood crusted under the nails. She tried to smile, but it wasn’t easy. ‘You can’t save everyone.’

‘I just want to save you. We can still—’

‘You’ve done more than I could ask for. Far more than I deserve.’

Sunny kept shaking her head. ‘No.’

‘Please. Let me be noble. This once.’ She held up her chin, hoping Baron Rikard would’ve been proud of her bearing. ‘Let me … deserve it. What I stole. Her birthright. Her name.’

Sunny shrugged her off. ‘I said no.’

‘Aw, please don’t argue.’ Cleofa came grinning up the steps. So at least someone was enjoying themselves.

‘We will happily kill you both.’ Athenais stepped from behind her. ‘In fact, we might have to insist on it.’

Sunny sprang, blinking out of sight, but Cleofa spoke that word again, the flame flickering as mist formed from nowhere. Athenais barked like an angry dog, and Alex stumbled back as Sunny crashed into the pillar beside her and crumpled on the ground in a groaning heap.

‘An elf,’ said Placidia, sauntering between the other two, frosty smoke curling from her blue lips. ‘Who can go unseen.’

‘We should take it apart,’ said Zenonis, coming last into the gallery to complete the handmaidens’ reunion, ‘and see how it works.’

Alex stepped in front of Sunny, fists clenched. ‘Let her go. Please—’

‘You’re in no position to negotiate,’ said Cleofa, lip curled with disgust.

‘Empress of vermin,’ spat Athenais as they closed in.

‘The only question—’ said Zenonis.

Placidia held up her hand, chilly rime smoking on her fingers. ‘Is whether we should freeze you like your erstwhile husband—’

Zenonis waved towards Saint Natalia’s Flame and Alex shrank back as it flared up brighter than ever. ‘Or burn you to a greasy cinder.’

‘We could throw her from the tower?’ offered Cleofa.

‘Let the ground do the work.’

‘And we needn’t dirty our hands with her.’

Placidia frowned towards the night sky beyond the archways. ‘Do you hear that?’

And suddenly the gallery was alive with flapping bats.

Alex clung to Sunny as the tiny beasts circled, tighter and tighter, the four sorceresses ducking and slapping and cursing at them, until they formed a fluttering knot directly in front of her, and became, in an instant, Baron Rikard.

The vampire raised one urbane eyebrow at Sunny, sprawled on the ground, Alex, crouching over her, then at the four sorceresses, ready and willing to unleash all the powers of hell against them. He issued a long-suffering sigh.

‘Ladies,’ he said.

‘Fucking took you long enough,’ whispered Alex.

‘I believe I have told you it is always considered rude to arrive early to a party.’

‘The etiquette instructor,’ hissed Zenonis, in a ready crouch, heat shimmering from her fingers.

‘How apposite,’ said the baron, ‘since a lesson in manners appears to be necessary.’ He calmly watched the four handmaidens spread out in a crescent around him. ‘I take it you are the missing members of Empress Eudoxia’s coven?’

‘We were once her students,’ snarled Athenais.

Placidia proudly tossed her head, frosty mist shaking from her hair. ‘And now we are adepts of Black Art!’

‘So you think you know darkness?’ The baron gave a sad smile, showing the very points of his teeth. ‘Then it is only fair that I warn you …’ There was something fascinating in his tone. Alex couldn’t look away from him. ‘That in the eastern part of Poland …’ It was as if a light shone from him, so bright and beautiful that even Saint Natalia’s Flame seemed dim in its presence. ‘Where my wife once had her estates …’ Alex stared, mouth open, desperate to hear each word, each syllable, each breath and inflection. ‘They serve a certain kind of dumpling …’

Jakob hobbled into the throne room, each breath caught between growl and whimper. He half-leaned on, half-collapsed against the nearest pillar, forearm on the cool marble, gasping as he shook one leg out, then the other. He tried to wriggle away from the aches in his hips, and failed, as he’d been failing for years. Finally, he blew out a long breath, and wiped the sweat from his prickling face, and frowned towards the Serpent Throne.

‘How very unsurprising,’ he grunted.

Duke Michael sat at ease where only Emperors sit, his drawn sword placed point down while he turned the pommel back and forth between finger and thumb. ‘A good twist, once revealed, should seem obvious all along. Should seem … inevitable, even.’

‘The uncle?’ Jakob gave a weary snort. ‘That’s your twist? It’s always the fucking uncle.’

‘You must have seen it coming, then?’

‘Well … no.’ Jakob had sworn an oath of honesty, after all. ‘But I’ve always been suspicious of good people and trusted the evil ones. Maybe I understand them better.’

‘It’s a very human failing,’ said Duke Michael. ‘Virtue, honesty, and forgiveness. All fine in theory but just so bloody boring. Give me ambition, deceit, and revenge! There’s a glamour to them, isn’t there?’ He gave the serpent-carved arm of the throne a fond stroke with his fingertips. ‘Deplore the tyrants and conquerors all we like, mouth along with the platitudes with the rest of the hypocrites, but do you think, alone in the darkness, men dream of doing good?’ He looked up at Jakob. ‘Perhaps some do. Brother Diaz, and his harmless ilk. But I can tell you I don’t. And I’m damn sure you don’t, either. Perhaps the lesson is … we can’t ever really change who we are.’

‘I’ve been trying. For a long time.’

‘Any success?’

‘To my great regret, not much.’

Duke Michael smiled. ‘Show me a man who regrets nothing and I’ll show you a man who’s achieved nothing.’

‘Where’s Alex?’

‘Upstairs. Her handmaidens are seeing to her every need. And the rest of your lost, cursed, and damned congregation?’

‘Held up below. I’ll have to do.’ Jakob tried to make that last phrase a growling threat, but he ran out of breath and it finished in an old man’s wheeze.

Duke Michael didn’t laugh, though, as he stood. ‘The infamous Jakob of Thorn? Grandmaster and Witch Hunter, crusader and Templar, champion and executioner? Who could be disappointed in such an opponent?’ He began to come down the steps, sword in hand. ‘I mean to say … how many deaths are you responsible for? A thousand?’

Jakob said nothing, only pushed himself from the pillar.

‘Two thousand?’

Jakob said nothing, only squared his shoulders.

‘Ten thousand?’

Jakob said nothing, only limped towards the throne.

‘And there I was …’ Duke Michael sank into a ready stance. ‘Thinking I might be the villain.’

Vigga struck a guard with such colossal force his own mace was left buried in the front of his crumpled helmet. Balthazar caught him, metaphorically, before he hit the ground and, to the consternation of his companions, whisked him back to his feet like a puppet with every string pulled at once.

He proved challenging to operate with his face entirely caved in, but served as an effective meat shield as other guards tried to stab Vigga with their spears, and after a few thrusts ended up a waddling mace-headed pincushion, broken hafts sticking out of him in every direction.

By then Vigga had generated several more corpses and Balthazar was already tossing them leaking, hopping, and in one case biting into the fray. Ah, the joy of the freshly deceased! He could acquire a going concern, as it were, and launch them directly into action. No risk of them falling to pieces in transit, and since they had been intent on violence prior to expiry, it really was the simplest thing to redirect the echo of those urges towards their own comrades.

So it was they fought a running battle through the Hanging Gardens, down tree-lined ways, between neat rows of shadowed greenery, over picturesque bridges and around splashing fountains. They spattered one of the wonders of the world with gore, rent the dusk with screams of fury, groans of pain, wails of horror. They fought through darkness lit by torches, by fire, by flashes of magic. They fought to the death and, in many cases, beyond. They drove Lady Severa and her guards across the top of the Pillar, from the doors of the Basilica towards the darkened outline of the Athenaeum, the dead hopping, crawling, lurching, and lumbering after.

When Balthazar first encountered Vigga, he had considered her a barbarian one cut above, or possibly one below, an animal. But costly experience had forced him to concede that, in savage circumstances, a barbarian is just the ticket. Demanding from people qualities entirely opposite to their nature is a sure road to disappointment. Vigga was entirely fearless, unshakably loyal, and excelled beyond any living thing Balthazar had encountered in causing violent death. Once you scraped away their mutual repugnance and focused on the professional, they suited each other splendidly.

Vigga turned enemies into corpses, and Balthazar turned corpses into friends.

She hurled a man bodily through the air where he crashed into a tree trunk, spraying splinters. Balthazar snatched him up, but he was crooked as a chicken leg, his pelvis pulverised, and in any case Severa slashed furiously at the air and sliced him and another walking corpse in half at the waist. One pair of legs dropped instantly while the other waddled on a few steps. The corresponding top half, meanwhile, clawed its way through the grass towards her wheezing, for some reason, ‘I found one, I found one,’ and unwinding a trail of glistening innards.

Baptiste and Brother Diaz skulked along behind, awestruck. Or possibly horror-struck, but really, is there a significant difference? Balthazar had never felt more powerful, his heart pumping scalding steam, his thoughts fast as searing lightning, his senses honed to a razor’s edge.

On the lawn before the Athenaeum, Lady Severa spun, searing the darkness with a jet of fire so hot it cooked the stripe of grass beneath it brown. Baptiste gasped, Brother Diaz squealed in horror, but, for once, Balthazar had come prepared. He stepped in front of the helpless pair, whipping out his paper, its circles inscribed using borrowed draughtsman’s instruments.

He mouthed the five-part incantation, never halting, never doubting, and Severa’s flames were sucked into the centre of the diagram, the runes beginning to glow through the back of the paper. Balthazar’s fingertips smarted from the heat, but he refused to let go. Severa’s sorcery was raw and furious, but he controlled it, he contained it, he overcame it! She might be a true artist, all instinct and passion, but he was a calculating engineer and composed his counterspell as a spring: the more force it absorbed, the more it would deliver. So when the onslaught was finally exhausted, his ears still roaring with its noise, his throat still smarting with the tang of sulphur, he merely had to speak one word and the fire burst from between his hands with thrice the intensity.

Severa’s eyes went wide for an instant before she dipped her head and pressed her hands together. The inferno divided, flames roaring to either side of her. Two guards fell incinerated in the smoking grass, their armour glowing as if from the forge. Severa herself staggered back, singed hair stuck to her face with sweat, her dress faintly smouldering. A tree behind her blazed like a torch, pine cones popping, sap exploding from the splintering trunk, casting a mad, flickering glare over the scene of carnage.

Balthazar did not pause. He tossed his toasted paper aside and dragged upwards, the freshly burned bodies already rising, still smoking as they began to stumble towards her, smouldering arms outstretched.

‘Sweet Saint Beatrix,’ whispered Brother Diaz.

The Palace Guard were doubtless brave and experienced men, but even the best of the living have only so much fight in them. The survivors fled, throwing aside their weapons. Lady Severa retreated, backing up the steps towards the doors of the Athenaeum, teeth gritted, hands raised, as the pitiless dead closed in. The dead and Vigga, growling softly in her throat.

‘To be so inconvenienced …’ She curled her lip as she swept them with a deadly glare. ‘By this … clown show.’

‘You are a formidable practitioner!’ shouted Balthazar as he watched for her slightest move. ‘But you must see you are outmatched. It is over!’

‘On the contrary, we are just beginning.’ Without taking her eyes from Balthazar, she turned her head to call over her shoulder. ‘Release the leftovers!’

There was a grinding of metal from within the Athenaeum, and to either side of the steps those barred gates trembled, then began to rise. Did Balthazar see something glinting within? Something unfurling in the gloom of the abandoned menagerie? Something huge, a throbbing groan emanating from the darkness, neither animal nor human, but less than either.

He had become so carried away with his own power, he had forgotten Eudoxia’s failed experiments.

‘Oh dear,’ he said.

As the barred gates rose, another began to drop across the Athenaeum’s entrance. Without thinking, he sprang up the steps two at a time, rolling beneath its spiked skirt a moment before it crashed shut.