“I know, Artemisia,” she said, brushing a sweaty lock of hair from my face. “Remain strong. Help is on the way.”
Part of me clung to those words fiercely while the other part thought about biting the nun’s hand. She moved away before I could decide. Soon I was given more syrup and no longer had to think about anything at all.
* * *
As the battle raged on inside me, time lost its meaning. Sometimes the world was dark. Sometimes it was light. But eventually I noticed something different: a sense of movement, a jolting and juddering, my head swaying against a padded surface that felt too flat to be a pillow. Horses’ hooves clattered in my ears, and the space around me gave little squeaks of wood and metal and leather as it bounced and jostled around.
The hot, stifling air couldn’t belong to a wagon. A carriage? I tried to focus, but my thoughts slipped from my grasp, slimy and elusive. The syrup’s taste still coated my tongue, and I was already drifting away.
Later, I was woken by shouting.
Consciousness returned in a slow trickle of sensations, each one more unpleasant than the last. My head pounded. My skin felt greasy and itched beneath my robes. The carriage jerked along at a slower pace now than before, queasily bumping over every rut and rock on the road. I blinked until an expanse of dark, cracked leather swam into focus in front of my face. It smelled musty with age and incense. Under that there was another, fainter smell, like old meat mixed with dirty coins. Blood.
Four long gashes scored the leather, as though someone had clawed through it with their fingernails.
“Stay back!” a man’s voice commanded. “Clear the road!”
I shot fully awake, my heart hammering. I recognized that voice.
When I dragged myself upright, there came a heavy clink of metal and a drag against my wrists. Looking down, I discovered that I wore iron shackles, their cuffs engraved with holy symbols. The thick links of the chain attached to them lay coiled at my feet.
I was in a carriage, but not a normal one. It looked like the inside of a confessional booth. The tall, narrow walls were lined with tarnished metal, stamped to give the appearance of ornate molding, and the single arched window to my left was set with a perforated screen, a somber red glow filtering through. Locks covered the door on the carriage’s opposite side. The chain’s slack fed into a winch sunk into the middle of the floor, which I guessed could be tightened to restrain me.
I knew what this was. A harrow, a type of carriage that had been popular over a century ago, designed to transport people who were possessed—usually the most dangerous cases, in which a divine was needed to perform the exorcism. I knew about harrows only because I had seen illustrations in the scriptorium’s books. I hadn’t known that any still existed.
The revenant must still be inside me, even though I couldn’t feel it. Perhaps the harrow had driven it into hiding.
I breathed in and out, fighting the nausea brought on by the harrow’s relentless heat and motion. Then I eased myself to the window and peered through the screen. I almost jerked back when I saw the crowd outside, dozens of people, hundreds, all standing along the side of the road staring, their faces dirtied by travel and drawn with fear.
After a moment, I relaxed slightly, realizing that they couldn’t see me through the screen. They were only staring at the harrow as it went by. But my relief proved short-lived as I took in the children’s hunger-dulled eyes, the mud coating the wheels of the overburdened wagons, the dead mule that lay in a ditch, buzzing with flies. Smoke gusted past the screen, streaming from incense burners fixed to the harrow’s roof. The setting sun lit the smoke pink and soaked the crowd in ominous shades of crimson, throwing long shadows across the rutted field beyond.
As I watched, a woman drew her child toward her body and signed herself. A dark blighted mark stood out vividly on her arm.
These people must have fled their homes, which meant we were probably traveling through Roischal. There had been stories of families abandoning their villages, fearful of spirits and possessed soldiers, but in however much time had passed since the attack on Naimes, the situation had clearly gotten worse.
Lifting one of the heavy manacles, I pushed up my sleeve. The weals left by my dagger’s consecrated steel had healed to pale pinkish stripes. I’d lost a week, at least.
“Clear the road!” called the voice again. “Let us pass by the authority of Her Holiness the Divine!”
I shifted until the speaker came into view, riding ahead of the harrow on a magnificent dapple-gray stallion, his black robes untouched by the filth.
The faces turned his way reflected both fear and desperate hope. My attention caught on a man arguing with his family. I willed him not to do whatever it was he was thinking of doing, but then he stumbled out onto the road, jogging to keep pace with the stallion. He looked dirty and unkempt beside the rider’s austere magnificence.
“Please, Your Grace, we’ve been driven from our homes—and we were turned away at the bridge at Bonsaint—”
The tall, golden-haired figure turned slowly to look down at him as he rambled on, unaware of the danger.
“We’re traveling north. There’s word of a saint in Naimes. They say she carried the relic of Saint Eugenia into battle and defeated a legion of spirits… and that she has scars, that we will know her by her scars. Please, is it true?”
Instead of answering, the rider made a subtle motion with his hands. The man toppled to his knees as though felled by an axe. In the crowd, someone screamed. As the harrow drew closer, I saw that the man’s face was contorted with guilt and anguish, and he was clutching helplessly at the pebbles on the road. “Forgive me,” he gasped over and over as the harrow rumbled past, spraying mud on him with its wheels.
The priest had changed since I’d last seen him. His pale, imperious features had frozen to the cold hardness of marble. He rode stiffly, as though he were favoring an injury beneath his robes, and dark shadows bruised the skin beneath his eyes. Saint Eugenia’s relic hung from a chain around his neck, the reliquary’s opals sparking fiercely in the fading light.
The man on the ground hadn’t recognized it. He’d had no idea that the relic was right in front of him or that the person they sought was chained inside the harrow, heading past them in the opposite direction.
By chance, the priest glanced toward me, and our eyes met through the screen. His hands tightened on the reins. Without expression, he spurred his mount onward out of sight.
Confessor Leander. That was what the page had called him. I couldn’t forget what he had said right before he’d used his relic on me. It was the same thing I would have tried to convince myself about the shackles, the harrow, the locks on the door. This is for your own good.
* * *
“Revenant,” I said into the dark. Again, nothing answered.
I’d been trying for hours. Night had fallen outside the harrow, and finally we’d passed the last of the wagons, only that hadn’t necessarily been an improvement—the abandoned villages had come next, their rooftops black against the darkening sky, the doors of houses hanging askew on their hinges, and the streets littered with refuse and occasionally bodies. I knew the priest had to have seen them too, but the harrow never slowed down.
No one was going to bless those bodies. Soon their souls would rise as spirits.
With that I knew for certain that whatever was happening in Roischal, the Clerisy couldn’t stop it. Perhaps they’d sent soldiers to help at first, but the soldiers had only gotten possessed and killed more people, which meant more spirits, then more soldiers to fight those spirits, then more thralls. Everything was going to keep getting worse.
“Revenant,” I tried again.
Silence.
Eventually, we stopped to change out the horses. I didn’t see much, because shortly after the harrow came to a halt, a torturous grinding sound vibrated through the walls, announcing the tightening of the winch. Once the chain had been pulled taut, tugging me down to the floor, someo
ne shoved a chamber pot and a tin cup of water through a slot in the bottom of the door. I made use of them both and then nudged them back toward the slot with my shoe. The hand that retrieved them was gauntleted with consecrated steel. Moments later, we started moving again.
I pushed aside my physical discomfort and closed my eyes, trying to concentrate, which wasn’t easy with the way the harrow slammed over every rut in the road, rattling my teeth and bouncing the chain. I focused on remembering what the revenant had felt like—the roiling darkness, the seething anger, the prickles of annoyance and grudging approval—the heady rush of its power flowing through me.
There. A presence lurked deep inside my mind, like a drowned thing floating in the water at the bottom of a well. It wasn’t moving. Carefully, I imagined doing the mental equivalent of poking it with a stick.
“Stop,” the revenant hissed feebly. “That hurts.”
My eyes flew open. “What happened to you?” I demanded.
“You did,” it answered. “But right now… the shackles you’re wearing. They’re Old Magic. Designed for me… for revenants.”
Terror lanced through me. Pulse racing, I lifted the heavy, clinking shackles and studied them in the orange light that juddered through the screen, cast by a lantern swinging outside. Slowly, my heartbeat calmed. The revenant had to be confused. The shackles did look old, but the engravings…
“Those are holy symbols,” I said.
“Suit yourself, nun.”
I had expected it to argue with me. Instead, it sounded listless, defeated. For some reason, I didn’t want that. I almost wished I hadn’t woken it up.
“I need to talk to you.” I shifted back to the window so the revenant would have a view of the nighttime forest rolling past. “I need to know what’s happening out there.”
“How should I have any idea? I’ve been imprisoned inside a moldy old saint’s relic for the past century.” Finally, I detected a note of annoyance in its weak-sounding voice. “You’re a fool for trying to speak to me.”
That was probably true, but at present, I didn’t have any better options. Even if it lied to me, I might learn something useful. “Can’t you sense anything?”
My only reply was a prickly silence. Most likely, the shackles were suppressing too much of its power.
Frustrated, I began to turn away—and then something caught my eye beyond the screen. In the darkness of the forest, a wavering light had bloomed. More followed, like ghostly candles lit by an invisible hand. And they kept appearing, unfurling ahead of the harrow, lighting up the forest with their pale silver glow. I felt like we had joined one of the legendary funeral processions of Chantclere, during which thousands of votives were lit along the streets to lead the mourners onward.
But the lights belonged to wisps, First Order spirits that were waking as we passed, alerted by the life and movement of the carriage. Wisps rose from the souls of dead children and were the only type of spirit known to be completely harmless. Even shades caused headaches and malaise if they accumulated in large enough numbers—but no one had ever been hurt by wisps.
More and more lights bloomed. I had never seen so many in one place. I pictured the thin, frightened faces on the side of the road, the bodies abandoned in the towns. Children were dying. They were dying unblessed, in numbers I couldn’t imagine.
“Nun.” The revenant’s voice sounded insistent. I wasn’t sure how long it had been trying to get my attention. “That metal is consecrated. Nun? Are you listening?”
I felt a strange tingling in my palm and realized I had pressed it against the screen. When I withdrew my hand and looked at it, the revenant let slip a ripple of shock.
“You’ve hurt yourself!” it hissed.
“No. That’s how it always looks.” I showed it my other hand, the scars webbed and shiny in the harrow’s dim orange light.
A long silence elapsed. The revenant must not have noticed my hands while they had been covered in blood in the chapel. I expected it to mock me, but it only said, in an odd tone of voice, “There are a few blisters. Don’t do that again.”
“I won’t if you help me,” I replied.
It paused, startled. Then its fury boiled up like a storm, a snarled black cloud of resentment and spite. But it couldn’t do anything while I wore the shackles. I felt its rage break ineffectually against me and subside in a thwarted wave.
“Look out the window,” it snapped, giving in. “If I’m going to sense anything, it needs to be through your pitiful human eyes.”
“We’re traveling south through Roischal,” I explained as I turned back to the screen. “We’ve passed hundreds of people fleeing their homes.” Briefly, I filled in some of the details I’d noticed, like the blighted injuries and the bodies in the villages. “I heard stories in Naimes, but it’s worse than I thought—it’s getting worse quickly.”
I felt the revenant scanning the countryside. It wasn’t trying to control the movements of my eyes, but I was aware of a bizarre doubled alertness as it shared them with me, and I knew somehow that it was observing more than I was capable of seeing on my own. Its attention caught on a distant sword-flash of silver, the moonlight glancing off a broad flat ribbon winding through the hills.
“That must be what you humans call the Sevre,” it muttered to itself. “I’ve always loathed that river…. Such a wide span of running water is difficult even for revenants to cross….” It lapsed into silence as it looked around some more. “Well, I don’t see anything useful,” it informed me at last, with a sort of nasty cheer. “How tragic.”
Slowly, I raised my hand toward the screen.
“Stop! Fine! Have it your way, nun. There’s one thing I know for certain. The attack we fended off—the spirits weren’t targeting your convent at random, or even just to kill some nuns, more’s the pity. They were sent there to destroy my relic.”
I sat up straighter. “What?”
“Do I need to speak more slowly for your pathetic meat brain to keep up? They were sent there to destroy my relic. Almost certainly because I was the closest thing powerful enough to stop them.”
A pit opened in my stomach. Sent there, the revenant claimed. Something had sent them to Naimes, like an officer commanding an army. I remembered the way the thralls had roped their horses to the lichgate, cooperating with one another, just like they were following orders.
I ventured, “The fury—”
“It wasn’t the fury. Furies are solitary by nature; it wouldn’t have gotten involved unless someone forced it to. And someone did force it—those spirits reeked of Old Magic.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You asked for my help. It isn’t my fault if you don’t like what I have to say.”
“Old Magic hasn’t been practiced in hundreds of years. It’s heresy.”
“So is talking to a revenant, and you seem to be managing admirably.” Its voice dripped with sarcasm.
“That isn’t what I meant.” I swallowed, my throat dry. “No one would dabble in Old Magic after the Sorrow. No one would be that—”
“Stupid? If there’s one thing I can always rely upon, it’s the reassuring dependability of human idiocy. Give your kind a century or so, and they’ll happily repeat the exact same mistakes that nearly wiped them all out a few generations before. The spirits smelled of Old Magic; that’s all I know. What you do with the information is up to you.”
I gazed out the window in silence, watching the wisps glitter among the trees. The revenant had been wrong about the shackles. Maybe it was wrong about this, too.
But what if it wasn’t?
The Clerisy had spent the decades following the War of Martyrs purging all traces of Old Magic from Loraille. Even after the war had been won—the spirits driven back, the seven revenants imprisoned—the cause of the Sorrow remained. Left to fester, it could rise again. An even larger cataclysm could result.
The worst thing about the Sorrow was that it had happened by accident. The Raven King had s
o badly feared death that he had doubted the promise of the Lady’s afterlife. He had been attempting a ritual to grant himself immortality when he had, instead, inadvertently shattered the gates of Death. In doing so, he had granted a worldly existence beyond Death to all. Immortality, of a kind—but a terrible un-life, a cursed half-life. Such was the evil of Old Magic. It twisted back on its users, granting them what they sought in the worst way imaginable. It was a perversion, unfit for human hands.
Maybe the revenant wasn’t confused—maybe it was trying to deceive me. But it stood to gain nothing by lying. We were enemies turned fellow prisoners, bound by the same set of chains.
And if it was right…
“Suppose you’re telling the truth. Why would someone force spirits to attack? How would it benefit them?”
“Why do humans do anything?” it snapped in reply. “You’re far better equipped to answer that question than I am.”
I wasn’t certain that I was. Already, I found the revenant easier to have a conversation with than Marguerite or Francine. Deciding not to voice that dismal thought aloud, I looked down at the shackles around my wrists. “After you’re exorcised from me, what’s going to happen to you?” The answer seemed obvious. “Someone else will wield your relic, won’t they? Someone who has training and can come back here and stop this.”
It didn’t answer for a long time. I began to get a bad feeling. Then it asked, “How old was the aspirant who died in your crypt?”
Aspirant—it had used that word to describe Sister Julienne before. “I’m not sure. Old.” An image surfaced of Sister Julienne shuffling through the catacombs, her cobwebby hair hanging past her waist. “Eighty, at least.”
I felt a strange pinch from the revenant, a pang of some nameless emotion, quickly suppressed. “She might have been the last. I don’t think the Clerisy is training vessels for me any longer. The last two, or three—they were nearly useless. I suspect that over time, the knowledge of how to wield me has been lost.”
Vespertine Page 6