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 of 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.
- JOE ABERCROMBIE, The Devils
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Balthazar's POV is by far my favorite thus far. He's the most entertaining necromancer in speculative fiction since Steven Erikson's Bauchelain and Korbal Broach!
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