The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)
Page 11
She swung another slap to shut his lying mouth, but he caught her hand as it came around, jerking her close. For a moment their faces were almost touching, and she wanted nothing more than to gouge out his lying eyes.
Then he kissed her.
Her eyes flashed wide open. For a moment she was swept along, kissing back, and her mind filled with moments of joy and sadness in the Abbey that she didn't remember, running around after hawkenberry petals, standing over an empty grave. Then, just as suddenly as he'd pulled her in, he let her go.
She staggered backward. There was a surprised expression on his stupid face, which only angered her more. 'Why are you so surprised', she wanted to shout up at him, 'you're the one who kissed me!' She wanted to rake at his face for his insolence, wanted to seize hold of him and make him kiss her again.
He turned and left before she could do either.
* * *
They didn't speak again. Feyon curtseyed as he left with the Abbess, but Sen felt the anger burning off her.
They rode back in silence.
The Duke had given them nothing, claiming all his searches had led to naught, though he made vague promises to put fresh inquiries out, to sound his battalions of enlisted men, but Sen knew he would do nothing. The man was terrified; of Sen, of his own wife, of the Abbess. Everything scared him, as already he was taking the largest risk of his life, in having their only remaining daughter stay at the Abbey with the boy from Avia's prophecy.
The Duke Gravaile wouldn't find his mother for him.
It had taken all Sen's self-control not to lash out at him, at them both; the Duke and Duchess. They'd lied not only to Feyon, but now they'd lied to him too. They'd made promises they couldn't keep, all so they could pay lip service to a vision they believed in, but couldn't fully commit to.
It was confusing. Where did the lies end and the cowardice begin?
The brougham carriage clattered away, and the city beyond grew noisome as before, but now it barely touched the muddle in his head. The Abbess attempted to draw him out, but he didn't respond. Once back at the Abbey he ignored the supper call to the refectory and went to his room, where he laid on his cot and stared up at the ceiling.
Why had he kissed her?
There were lots of other questions, but that was the one that filled his mind now. He remembered it vividly, the soft touch of her lips, the anger in her eyes turning briefly to passion, then back to anger again. Was that real? Was anything real any more?
She was beautiful, of course, but it wasn't a real beautiful. The lie was true, though, in a strange way, giving her brokenness a kind of beauty. He thought back to the images of the death of her sister, screaming and bloody in the street, and recoiled. The Adjunc had done that for just one small birthmark. It was the fate that awaited him, that awaited every Sister in the Abbey if he was ever found there. It was why he had to leave.
Tonight.
After they'd all gone to sleep. It would be easier, and give him time to prepare. Right now he was too confused, would slip up at the first intersection and be unmasked. The Adjunc would come and the Sisters would die. A few hours only was all he needed, to put Feyon aside and focus on what mattered, to get his head straight enough to run well.
The evening grew dark around him. Gellick, Alam, and Daveron filed in from their lessons. Alam tried to talk to him, but he didn't answer. It didn't seem possible now. A divide had grown up between them; they were on one side and he was on the other, and the gap was only growing wider.
He'd leave, and find a quiet place where he could hide, and learn to adjust to the chaos of so many different minds. The Abbey would finally be safe.
Silently, after the breathing of the others had smoothed out and Gellick had finished his Hax, he began to pack a bag.
* * *
Feyon seethed in the doll room. That he had spoken to her that way was an insult deeper than she had ever borne. He had called her a joke. He had stolen her first kiss. Then he had told her what had happened to her sister.
She had never forgotten it, not really. She'd only convinced herself to believe her sister had gone far away, because the alternative was too horrific. Her parents had forced the lie down her throat, hoping to keep the worst of it from her, but it had definitely happened. Holding her sister's doll in her hands with the jagged blue mark on its back upmost, she could not deny it.
The Adjunc had flayed her sister alive in front of their own gates. She was not over the seas, but dead. For so long Feyon had dreamed of her playing in some foreign land, visiting with princes and riding giant beetles, like it was all a game. Now, with the glassy gaze of so many of her forbears staring down, she couldn't pretend any longer.
And she hated Sen for it.
He thought he was so truthful, but in truth he was the one the Adjunc should have gone for, not her sister. He was a maze of scars, a thumb in the King's eye, and her sister had been just a girl with one odd mark. She had only been seven years old.
She wept, and the tears hardened her resolve. He would pay. They would all pay for laughing at her, for treating her like some common Induran, putting her in that zoo with a Deadhead and a Balast, as if caste no longer mattered. She was a lady of the Roy, a Gravaile, and she would not allow it.
Through the churn of emotions, she saw the path forward. There had to be redress. The law of caste had to mean something, if it had taken her sister for just one mark. Long before the dawn she slipped out and took a brougham to the Haversham, where she found what she sought.
THE CATHEDRAL II
Sen was walking along the gravel path to the graveyard, heading for the wall, when he felt the change in the air. It began like the rumble of a distant storm; a faint clap of far-off thunder, a flash of light that could be a trick of the eye. He stopped and listened, stretching his thoughts outward from the early morning calm of the Abbey, wafted with cold winter fog and the sleepy dreams of the Sisters.
The streets nearby were silent, the surrounding townhouses just beginning to bustle as servants woke and lit fires for their masters. Down by the Haversham there was the usual slow burn of hawkers and hustlers setting up their timber frame stalls and laying out their goods, muted by distance.
Then there was something else. Seconds passed as the sensation grew stronger, until it moved from a feeling in the air to an actual sound he could hear, as a hundred feet stampeded off the Haversham and began the last sprint up Aspelair to the Abbey.
Sen's jaw dropped slack.
A cold wall of Adjunc.
For long seconds he stood frozen, feeling the same terror he'd felt a day earlier on the Haversham, looking into the pus-yellow eyes of just one of them. But this was more than one. This was dozens, all charging his way.
He jolted to action, sprinting back to the sacristy, where in glimpses down the white chalk path he could see their indistinct forms through the gate's railings, galloping out of the pre-dawn dark. They were a chaotic storm of lolling torsos in the fog, their many legs stamping, their dead eyes catching the moonlight like winking stars.
At the sacristy watch house he shook Sister Lallitac awake, shouted the warning in her bleary face, then seized the alarm bell-rope and yanked it. Loud peals rippled out through the mist, and Sen sprinted on, while behind him the Adjunc were closing on the gates already.
His mind raced ahead as he sped down the cloisters and into the shadow of the cathedral, darting along the swerves of the gravel path with his heartbeat meshing into the deep rumble of the Adjunc. His old hiding place flashed to mind but had to be dismissed; the Abbess' chancel was where he'd always gone before when the Adjunc came, tucked underground in the vault with Sister Henderson for a day and a night, while monsters ransacked the grounds above.
But they'd always had warning of a raid before. There was no warning now, no time, and his gaze flashed to the wall. In the simmering cold of their approach he couldn't tell if there was another troop closing in from that direction.
The alarm bell tolled madly
, and back down the grounds he heard the first crashes of meat on metal as the Adjunc struck the gate. It wouldn't last long.
He found himself back in the wintry clearing by the filled-in hole of his mother's grave, panting and looking to the wall. There was no other choice, he just had to hope they didn't pick him off fleeing in the streets. The punishment for the Sisters would be no less. He started through the graves, then stopped as his foot caught on the loose mound of soil, and a new idea came. He remembered a night many months back, spooning dirt out of a hole to bury windblown dust.
He turned and sprinted back the way he'd come. In seconds the northeastern buttress loomed out of the mist before him, and he wasted no time leaping for the pillar's top. He was taller now and it was easier to haul himself up, rising to his feet on the long thin buttress arch that bridged up to the cathedral body.
One of the Adjunc wailed from the bottom of the grounds. The sound was inhuman and chilled his blood, like the phantom wail of a wyvern. There was no time to play it safe now; with his arms outstretched for balance he ran along the narrow arch. The stone was slick with the night's mist, and he slipped several times, barely catching himself from a drop to the railing spikes below.
Halfway up, a shearing metal crash spat through the gloom as the gate gave way. The mist-muted Abbey alarm bell stopped abruptly, replaced by the awful drumbeat of the Adjunc flooding into the grounds.
Sen hit the cathedral roof and ran on, chased by bestial, drowned wails. Behind him the freezing chill of the Adjunc flooded the Abbey, rising up the walls and spreading terror through the Sisters. He felt the brief spike of Sister Henderson's fear, and faintly heard her voice ringing out across the cloisters, "Where's Sen?"
There was nothing he could do. He reached the roof and dashed to the tower base, slipping over the mist-damp lead, then began to climb. Already the morning mist was clearing as the sun rose, and he prayed to the Heart that no one would see him from below.
It took what felt like a very long time, clambering with his back to the world and his chest heaving, fingers cramping, but could only have been moments before he crested the square apron top to lie flat and panting on the dew-wet grass. He chanced a peek over the edge, and looked down through the clearing air on a swarm of Adjunc crawling the grounds like grotesque gray ants, batting Sisters out of their way. They thrust Gellick and Mare to one side, beat back the Abbess as she spread her wings for attention, and brought fear with them like seaweed carried on an incoming tide.
The suffering of the Sisters rose up to him in waves, and there was nothing he could do. One of the beasts looked up and he rolled onto his back, trying not to breathe or make a sound, though there was no way they could hear him. Still, he had to be quiet. He had to be invisible. Like every time before, he had to hide himself away while others protected him from the monsters below.
* * *
Intermittent screams rang out. Clouds drifted overhead, into the black mouth of the Rot, which swallowed them down. Sen focused on it, the only distraction from the grief rising up from below.
The screams had been much worse, earlier.
"They're gone."
The sound startled him, and Sen jerked to full wakefulness, feeling disoriented, sickly, and weak. Long hands stilled him and held him in place. It was Alam, kneeling in the grass beside him. Sen rubbed his eyes and studied his friend. Alam's eyes were haunted, and Sen felt the misery glowing off him.
The sky above had grown dim; the whole day had passed already. Echoes of what had happened came back to him like a bad dream. He remembered the bursts of pain that had to be Sisters dying. He wanted to vomit, but there was nothing in his stomach.
Alam's eyes were brittle; close to tears.
"How many?" Sen asked.
"Sister Henderson," said Alam. The words came hard. "She's dead."
Sen only looked at him. It couldn't be real. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. This was still the nightmare, all of it the nightmare, just another of his mother's awful tests. "She's not," he said.
Alam put his hand on Sen's shoulder. "I'm sorry, Sen. She thought you were hidden in the chancel, and tried to stop the Adjunc from getting in. They killed her at the door."
It was too big a thing for Sen to comprehend. Sister Henderson couldn't be dead. She was too alive, too bright, and the Adjunc had never killed a Sister before. There were always some bruises, some indignity, but no one had ever died.
"You're wrong. She's just injured."
"I saw her, Sen. She killed two Adjunc before they knocked her down. She's dead."
Sen turned to the side and gagged, but nothing came up.
Alam waited, as Sen spat and wiped his mouth, as he skipped over grief and went straight to anger.
"How?" he asked. "I was about to leave. How did they know? They've never raided like that before, with no warning."
Alam's face became pained. He winced, eyes narrowed, unwilling to say.
"Who told them?"
"Feyon," Alam answered, the word coming out like a bark. "She was at the gates in her brougham, watching. She pointed the chancel vault out to the Adjunc. She didn't know about up here, though."
Sen felt like the Rot must have swallowed him already. Anger vied with guilt and they both drained away together, leaving him empty. Feyon had done this. It was such a waste, and it was his fault. He'd gone to Feyon's house filled with anger, and let it out on her, and this was the result.
Resolve settled on him like a cold rain.
"I'm leaving right now."
* * *
Down in the grounds the Adjunc were gone, but the violent signs of their passage remained. The grass and vegetable patches were in ruins, trampled by their many feet, the gates still lay mangled on the chalk, while many windows in the sacristy, habitry and cathedral were broken, with doors hanging splintered in their frames. Sisters moved about in a daze, some knelt in clumps praying to the Heart, nursing wounds, wiping blood from weary faces.
As Sen passed by they came to him, sobbing and praying. They ran their hands through his hair and touched his cheeks, as though he were Saint Ignifer returned.
"I'm sorry," he told them, as he passed, their relief running through him like an accusation. "I'm so sorry."
The infirmary was filled with bodies; black cassocked women that had been all he'd ever known, now lying on cots in pain, their faces black and bruised, their limbs twisted, bones broken.
He saw the Abbess tending to the injured, laid down in long rows. She was lurching unevenly, and as he drew closer he realized that her antennae had been cut down to stubs. Trails of dark blood ran down her domed face.
She had been punished for his crime. The vertigo rising off her made him feel nauseous. She saw him and came lurching over like a drunk, her wings spread and holding to beds as she passed for balance. Still, she touched his face and smiled with such relief that it broke him apart.
"Thank the Heart you're alive."
"I'm sorry," he began, but she pressed her finger to his lips. She took his hand and led him through the hall, down past all the broken Sisters, to one quiet bed in the corner wrapped over with white sheets, beneath which lay the muffled outline of a body, or a body's parts.
"Sister Henderson," he said.
The Abbess nodded slowly, sending waves of nausea through them both. A long moment passed, as he looked at a single bloodstain blooming through the sheet.
"We'll put her in your mother's grave," the Abbess said, bracing herself on his shoulder. "If you'll accept it. She was like a mother to you."
He nodded numbly. It was right. She deserved the grave more than his mother ever had.
"Can I see her?"
The Abbess shook her head. "There's nothing left of Sister Hen to see. The Adjunc tore her to shreds."
She led him back out of the infirmary, into the dusk-dappled grounds, and he followed numbly. The tracks of the Adjunc were everywhere in ripped cloth and torn grass; a violation that dug into the very fabric of his home.
At the gates, his friends were waiting. Alam, Mare, Gellick and Daveron.
"I'm sorry," he said to them. There wasn't much else to say. He wanted to explain, to give them something meaningful as he said goodbye, but he had nothing left to give. He looked at each of them. "I'm sorry it ends like this."
"It was our choice to stay here," Mare answered defiantly. "Not yours."
"Alam," he began, but could think of nothing else to say. He held the Spindle's eye for a long moment, then they shook hands. Gellick pulled him into an embrace, crying jewelly tears from his emerald eyes, though he probably didn't really understand what was going on. Daveron gave him the slightest of nods.
Then the Abbess steered him on.
"Goodbye, Sen," Gellick called after him. He didn't have the heart to look back.
Standing between the twisted metal of the gate, in chalk trails scored by Adjunc feet, the Abbess dropped on one knee and spread her warm brown wings about him, cowling them in shadow, just as she always had when he was a child. She held his face in her clawed hands.
"Find your mother," she said. "Make this worth it."
Then she was walking unsteadily up the path, using her wings for balance, the lower edges trailing in the chalk and snow. The Abbey lay broken around her. Sen nodded to his friends as a final apology and farewell, then stepped over the gates and into the city, leaving the Abbey behind.
BOOK 2. THE SPIDER
ALAM II
Tears ran down Sen's cheeks.