Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

I fought down a surge of anger. Trudie had been a tower of strength out at Royal Oak, but every time I got close to lowering my guard around her her she pulled something like this.

‘Rafi is an old friend who got ram-raided by a demon,’ I said, deadpan. ‘Juliet is a demon I happen to like. I don’t see the analogy.’

Trudie saw the warning in my look, but she had no intention of backing down. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do. You just don’t want to. If you anthropomorphise these things, you blind-side yourself. You start expecting them to behave like people.’

‘Well, I haven’t given up on you yet,’ I pointed out.

Surprisingly, the sucker punch seemed to hurt her. She affected a laugh but blinked a few times quickly and looked away. I’d been seeing her as Joan of Arc up until then: armoured in righteousness, no time for losers. It was a surprise to find that the armour had weak points.

‘They’re our enemies,’ she said, automatically adjusting the strings around her hands. ‘They torture and they kill and they poison everything they touch. I don’t understand why you don’t see that.’

‘And I don’t understand why you think you already know all the answers,’ I said, but with a lot less heat. ‘Look, the point about Juliet is that she doesn’t always kill when she can, or when she wants to. She didn’t kill me, two years ago. That was what broke the ice between us.’

I could see she wasn’t the slightest bit convinced, and for some reason, now, I wanted to plant the seed of a doubt. ‘Trudie,’ I said, ‘think about this. There’s a difference between Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark. Have you ever been to Ararat? It’s in Turkey. You can go up there on a day trip, take a picnic. But does that prove that Noah washed up there when the flood waters fell?’

Trudie was giving me a blank stare. ‘You think I’m a literalist?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You think I believe every word of the Bible is infallible truth?’

‘No. I just want you to see the difference. Ararat exists, but it doesn’t prove Noah, or the flood. Now we know that Hell exists too. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that you, or Gwillam, or any other Christian soldier, knows what Hell is. Gossip isn’t fact, and when it comes to Hell, the Bible is just the Hello! magazine of the ancient world.’

This was too much for Trudie. She gave a wordless yell of exasperation. ‘Castor, you don’t have to believe the Bible; you just have to believe the evidence of your own eyes. Ajulutsikael may wear a dress and have a nice arse but it was never a baby or a child or a teenage tearaway or anything you’d see as female. It’s nobody’s daughter, nobody’s mother. It’s a woman the way a stick insect is a stick. No, in the way a praying mantis is a leaf. The moment you forget that—’

She stopped dead in the middle of the sentence, looking past me towards the door of the room. I turned involuntarily, following her gaze. Pen was framed in the doorway. Sue had already taken a few steps into the room, but had then stopped dead, brought up short by Trudie’s wall of words. Now she came forward again.

The colour had drained out of her face; even her lips were white. For a moment she had the ivory pallor of Juliet herself. Her fists were clenched at her sides, her body so rigid it looked like it would ring out with an A sharp if you touched it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Trudie faltered. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

‘A stick insect.’ Sue’s voice was an ugly, grating thing. ‘A praying mantis. What have you . . . What did you ever touch? Who have you . . . loved and cared for and, and, and lain with, you twisted bitch? How dare you stand there and pass . . . pass judgement on my . . . wife ?’

On the last word she launched herself at Trudie in a flying leap. Trudie had six inches on her, and had been trained by the excommunicate sergeant majors of the Anathemata to hold her own against men and demons, but she didn’t fight back as Sue went for her, punching and clawing; she just raised her arms to protect her face.

It was a tricky job to disentangle Sue from Trudie without hurting her, but Pen and I managed, taking an arm each and half-lifting her off the floor to take away her leverage. Trudie took a hurried step back, lowering her en garde .

‘I’ll wait outside,’ she said, and then to Sue, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’

She fled out of the room and up the stairs. When the street door slammed behind her, we carefully let go of Sue and stepped away from her. Anger and indignation had done her a power of good. She looked more like herself than she had at any time since I’d found her nursing her black eye three days before.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m calm.’ A second later she exploded with another ‘Bitch!’ – which showed us exactly how calm she was, and probably brought her lifetime tally with that word up to two. Pen took her into a consoling embrace.

‘I’ve got to get back out there,’ I said to Pen. I thought of explaining why, but ‘Asmodeus is underground’ wasn’t a revelation that could help her very much. She couldn’t join the hunt, and the thought of Jenna-Jane’s exorcists combing the streets for Rafi would just make her miserable. ‘Back on the case,’ I finished lamely. ‘I’ll come by again later, if I can. Will you be okay here?’

Pen nodded to me over Sue’s head, and I cravenly left them to it.

‘Call Leonidas!’ Pen shouted to me as I was on my way up the stairs to ground level. I turned around and went back down.

‘That’s the guy from 300 ,’ I pointed out. ‘Gerard Butler.’

‘Something like that, anyway.’

‘Anastasiadis?’

‘Exactly.’

Progress on the journals? Some good news would have been pretty welcome right then. I joined Trudie out on the street and asked her if she’d give me a minute or two to make the call. She still seemed a little shaken up by the storm she’d provoked from Sue.

‘Take as long as you need,’ she said, and walked off to the end of the drive, out of earshot.

Anastasiadis’s secretary spoke only Macedonian, so all I could do was repeat my name until she gave up and put me through.

‘Mr Castor.’ The lawyer sounded tired and dispirited. But then given what day it was, that was hardly surprising. I looked at my watch. Allowing for the time difference, it must have been about three hours since Jovan walked the last mile.

‘Feeling rough?’ I commiserated. ‘You did everything you could, man. Like you said, Jovan’s cards were marked in advance. They probably put the execution on the docket before they fixed up a trial date.’

‘That is why I called you, Mr Castor.’ Anastasiadis’s tone was grim. ‘There was no execution.’

I blinked. ‘What? You mean the pardon came through, after all?’

‘That is not what I mean. Jovan Ditko was murdered last night. Someone broke into Irdrizovo Prison, tearing a gate off its hinges, and killed him in his cell. It was not quick, and it was not clean. There was . . . mutilation. His eyes, in particular . . .’

I didn’t hear the next few sentences, because the momentary paralysis of shock had allowed the phone to slip through my fingers. I had to flail and lunge to retrieve it before it hit the ground. When I got it back to my ear, the lawyer was still describing what had been done to his client before – or perhaps, to take an optimistic view, after – he died. I cut him off in full flow. I could fill in the details without any help from him.

‘Did they catch anyone?’ I demanded. But he’d already answered that: you don’t say someone broke in if you know who the someone is. ‘See anyone?’ I amended.

‘Neither,’ Anastasiadis said. ‘The other prisoners in the block heard – it would have been impossible not to hear – and they screamed for the guards. But the guards feared a riot, which is a very common thing on the night before an execution, so they did not come. He was found when they came in the morning to take him.’