Charles swore and began unbelting his sword, but the damage had been done. “Calm down,” he urged. “He isn’t going to hurt you,” but no one was listening. I could see that he was trying to help, but it was only making Jean more upset. At least one friend had already died because of him, and the agitated mob too closely resembled another battle.
“Stop,” I grated out. No one heard me, either. I shoved my way through the crowd until I reached the space in the middle and planted myself in front of Jean. “Stop!”
I couldn’t remember the last time I had shouted. It hurt, as though my voice had been torn raw from my chest. Everyone quieted and looked at me in confusion.
Thankfully, no one was staring at Jean any longer. Unfortunately, now they were all staring at me instead.
After what they had lived through, I couldn’t blame them for being afraid. Some of them had seen groups of possessed soldiers ransacking their towns, killing people they loved. I knew what it felt like when something reminded you of terrible things that had happened to you. But more than that, I knew what it felt like to be Jean.
The mutterings were starting up again. My harsh question cut through them like a knife. “Do you know how he got like this?”
No one answered, but at least they went quiet again.
“He was a soldier,” I said. “He was fighting to save your lives.”
That seemed to penetrate. Shame colored many of their faces; a few people looked away. Then a defiant voice piped up, “Artemisia of Naimes saved us.”
I searched the crowd until I found the man who had spoken. “Maybe. But if he hadn’t fought for you first, you would have been dead by the time she got there.”
I hadn’t meant for that to sound like a threat, but apparently it did. He took a step back, bumping into the person behind him. Then he muttered something that sounded like an apology and slunk off with his head down.
“Oh, I really need to see what you look like when you do that,” the revenant said.
As quickly as it had formed, the crowd’s remaining energy evaporated. They weren’t bad people, just people who had been through too much. They left quietly, helping up the bystander who had been knocked to the ground, some shooting guilty looks at Jean, who was hunched over with his arms in front of his face as though to fend off a blow, unresponsive to Charles’s careful efforts to lower them. I was watching everyone disperse when my back prickled—the telltale warning of a stare boring into me.
It was Marguerite. She was looking at me with wide eyes and a slightly parted mouth, as though she wanted to say something.
Whatever it was, I didn’t want to hear it. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I turned away and vanished with the crowd.
* * *
“Artemisia.”
It was dark, and Marguerite had woken me by shaking me. At first I had the mortifying thought that she wanted to talk about what had happened with Jean. I considered pretending to still be asleep, but that wasn’t possible because I had flinched violently when she’d touched me, and she definitely knew I was awake.
I felt her silent, hesitant presence hovering over me. I braced myself and rolled over. The lanterns burned low behind her, turning her hair into a frizzy glow around her darkened face. It was the dead of night, and everyone else was asleep.
“You need to hide,” she whispered. “Leander is here. He’s searching for something.”
Searching for you, her expression said, though she wasn’t meeting my eyes. She pushed a bundle into my bandaged hands and withdrew, waiting. Relief flooded me when I saw what it was: my gloves, the one item the sisters hadn’t yet returned to me. I made short work of tearing off the bandages and tugging the gloves on in their place. But I shook my head when Marguerite glanced questioningly at my boots. It would take my scarred hands too long to lace them, and I didn’t want her to watch.
“The graveyard,” I said.
Marguerite had always hated going into the graveyard in Naimes. She shivered as she walked with me across the darkened grounds, even though I was the one walking barefoot, the pebbled earth icy beneath my feet. Once she almost shrieked when a windblown leaf skittered across her path, and I realized she’d thought it was a spider. Marguerite was terrified of spiders; this had proven one of our earliest points of contention, just days after we started sharing a room. I had only wanted to show her that they were harmless, but when I had tried to demonstrate that by picking one up and offering it to her, she hadn’t spoken to me for a week.
She paled when I tugged her toward a mausoleum, a dark, ominous shape with its gate standing slightly ajar. Shade-light shone through the rusty bars, outlining the withered flowers that littered its steps in silver.
“I’m fine here by myself,” I told her. “You can leave.”
She shifted from foot to foot, her cloak drawn tightly around herself. She seemed like she wanted to argue. I hoped she wasn’t going to offer to stay with me. As surprisingly generous as that would be coming from Marguerite, I imagined it would increase my chances of getting caught substantially.
I peered more closely at the mausoleum and said, trying to sound enthusiastic, “I bet it’s full of spiders. I can’t wait.”
That was all it took to send her scurrying back across the grounds.
I slipped through the open gate into the mausoleum. The floor was damp and gritty, with slippery mats of decaying leaves piled in the corners. Small mortar-sealed drawers lined the walls to the ceiling, filled with cremated remains. The shades swirling around them reached for me, then shrank away, making horrified faces. I guessed that they had sensed the revenant. Despite myself, I felt bad for them. They had only wanted a little of my warmth.
“Merely out of curiosity, when choosing a hiding place, do you always select the most unpleasant option available to you?”
I took in our surroundings. “Revenant, you’re dead.”
“That doesn’t mean I like being around other things that are dead,” it snapped, which I supposed was fair enough; I usually didn’t like being around other humans, either. We waited in uncomfortable silence for a time before it said without warning, “I can sense the priest. He’s walking in this direction, speaking to a nun.”
My breath stopped. I had expected Leander to check the dormitory, the refectory, the infirmary. Not to be here.
Voices carried faintly in the cold air. I climbed onto the molding and hoisted myself up, finding fingerholds in the crumbling mortar, to peer through the tiny barred window set into the mausoleum’s wall. Darkness blanketed the graveyard, but I picked out the dim movement of two figures walking along a path. The sister’s gray robes were easier to make out. If it weren’t for Leander’s pale skin and golden hair, he would have blended completely into the night. He seemed to be heading somewhere with purpose. I relaxed slightly as it became apparent that he wasn’t searching for me; he was in the convent on some other business.
Hardly sleeping. Wandering at odd hours. If he wasn’t here for me, his visit had to be related to the Old Magic.
“I can’t hear what they’re saying,” I said in frustration.
“I can.”
The revenant paused, and then the world around me changed. The walls of the mausoleum grew smoky and translucent, like stained glass. I no longer needed to peer out the tiny window; I could see straight through the stone around me to the graveyard and the tombstones beyond, their outlines shifting like vapor trapped in overturned jars. I could see the shades swirling inside the other mausoleums, unimpeded by stone, their forms a bright mercurial silver. And in the distant buildings of the convent—the dormitory, the infirmary—golden lights shone like candles, except they weren’t candles; I watched one glide slowly past a neat row of other lights, and realized it was a person, a sister patrolling between the pallets of slumbering refugees. They were souls—living souls.
Warmth radiated from them even from a distance. I felt a shivering cramp in my stomach. A straining urge to get clo
ser, as though I were lost in the cold on a winter’s night, lured by the distant heat of a fire.
I gripped the bars, my hands no longer flesh, but shadows veined with gold. “What did you do to me?”
“This is how I perceive the world, at least partly. Oh, calm down, nun. If you were trained, you would have learned how to do this. It’s a basic skill. Even clerics with shade relics can do it, though naturally a shade’s senses pale in comparison to mine.” I opened my mouth, and it chided, “Be quiet and listen.”
I steeled myself, searching the phantasmal graveyard until I regained sight of Leander and the sister, now a pair of shadowy figures whose souls lit them from within like lanterns. A poisonous-looking red haze clung to the censers hanging from their belts—incense, I guessed. Their voices rang as though echoing down a long tunnel, slightly distorted but much louder than before.
“It must be tonight,” Leander was saying, sounding annoyed.
“Can you not consult the cathedral’s records?”
“I tried that first. The documents I seek are unavailable.” Or, I inferred, someone had noticed he was poking his nose into subjects he shouldn’t and had locked the texts away.
“Then go to the scriptorium, Your Grace. That is where we keep our writings.” Though I couldn’t see the sister’s expression, her steady voice held an undercurrent of fear.
“Not all of them,” he said.
“I’m not certain… This isn’t allowed. Only sisters are permitted…”
Leander’s figure stopped, and turned.
“Yes, Your Grace,” she said in a cowed murmur. I couldn’t tell what had transpired between them, but watched as she passed him something—possibly a key. Head bowed, she departed.
Now that Leander walked on alone, I noticed something different about his appearance. Darkness billowed around him like a cape fashioned from living smoke. As it moved, it left a smoldering trace on whatever it touched—the path behind him, the overhanging branches—as though they had been licked by flame. My skin crawled at its wrongness.
“Is that Old Magic?” I asked.
“Yes. A residue.”
I watched Leander disappear behind a mausoleum, his soul’s light obscured by a tangle of shades. “Wherever he’s going, we need to follow him.”
“The trail he’s leaving will show you the way.”
I had expected it to protest, but beneath its wariness I detected a shiver of interest, even excitement. It wanted to know what Leander was up to as badly as I did—but perhaps not for the same reasons. I’d had an inkling of its fascination with Old Magic before, but now I knew for certain. I would need to be careful of more than just Leander on this errand.
I stole out of the mausoleum, following the trail of shadow. To the revenant’s senses, the graveyard lay colorless beneath a chalky moon. The living smells of damp earth and moss had bled away, replaced by a stale odor of nothingness. I was aware of the grass pricking my bare feet, but numbly, as though my feet were frozen almost past the point of sensation. The wavering outlines of the graves disoriented me; I had to focus to keep my steps from weaving. If this was how spirits experienced the world, I wasn’t sure I could blame them for seeking human vessels.
A prickle traced my spine as I grew aware that I wasn’t alone. Someone nearby was disjointedly mumbling a prayer in a frail and broken whisper—“Lady… watch over… Have mercy…”—and I cast around for the light of another person’s soul until the revenant instead drew my attention to an amulet lying at the foot of a tombstone. I realized that the voice belonged to a long-ago nun, just like the lichgate, its prayer fractured upon the amulet’s reforging.
Leander’s trail ended at the high, overgrown wall that bordered the cemetery. The traces of Old Magic seemed to vanish straight into the ivy. That was all I could observe before a wave of dizziness left me sagging against the nearest gravestone. “Revenant,” I managed.
Warmth returned; sound and sensation came rushing back. I pressed my forehead against the gravestone out of a sudden need to prove to myself that it was real. The lichen plastering it was wet and green-smelling, the rough stone reassuringly solid. I sucked in desperate gulps of air, disturbed by how badly the experience had affected me.
“Most humans aren’t able to withstand a spirit’s senses for more than a few seconds at a time. That wasn’t bad for a first attempt. You’ll get better at tolerating it if you practice.”
“I’m not sure I want to,” I answered honestly.
“Probably for the best. Some of my vessels wouldn’t have noticed incoming danger if it had cartwheeled naked in front of their noses.”
I could guess where this was going. “And they all ended up dying in gruesome ways?”
It didn’t answer. A sarcastic remark didn’t seem to be forthcoming. For some reason I remembered asking it, before Bonsaint, how many of its vessels had died. Finally it said, “They were trained not to listen to me. They didn’t hear.”
“You can’t have let that stop you.” Not the revenant. The idea was laughable.
“Oh, but I did.” Its voice held a note I couldn’t interpret, almost dangerous, like the silky way it had spoken last night outside the kitchens. “There’s a technique to block out a spirit’s voice entirely. Would you like me to share that with you, too?”
My skin crawled. I imagined it raging at its vessels. Then pleading. Shouting warnings that fell on indifferent ears. No wonder it had been surprised when I had answered it in the crypt. How long had it gone without speaking to someone before me?
“No,” I said.
Silence. I couldn’t guess what the revenant’s purpose had been in asking that question. I only had a sense of danger narrowly averted and an inexplicable knot in my chest at the idea of its vessels treating it that way. Before I could pursue the feeling too closely, it offered in conciliation, “Look over there. The priest went through a door.”
Approaching the wall, I saw that it was right. Stairs led down beneath an ivy-choked archway, with a door hidden at the bottom, swallowed up by leaves. What I could see of it was ancient and rust-clad, forged from consecrated metal. I knew, somehow, that it was an entrance to the convent’s sacred chambers, even though I had never seen such a door in Naimes.
But then a memory surfaced—flashes of an unfamiliar passageway, of statues watching me with unseeing marble eyes as someone carried me past. Of a table covered in chains, the air hot and foul with incense and thickened by the coppery stink of drying blood.
I had been inside the sacred chambers before. Mother Katherine had taken me there on the night of my exorcism.
I stepped back from the wall, sickened.
A flutter of wings sounded nearby, accompanied by a flash of white in the darkness. Trouble circled once overhead and then landed in the ivy above the door. He regarded me in rare silence, his gaze expectant. The message was clear.
A surge of bitterness overcame me. If the Lady willed it, I would go. Moving quickly so I wouldn’t lose my nerve, I descended the steps and reached for the door. Leander hadn’t locked it behind himself. It swung open heavily, revealing a curved, poorly lit stair beyond.
“Be careful,” the revenant warned as I stepped over the threshold. “This place isn’t welcoming toward the Dead.”
FIFTEEN
My senses aren’t going to work well down here,” the revenant went on. “Too much consecrated stone. Move slowly, and I’ll warn you if I notice anything unusual.”
The stair reminded me of the one that led down to the crypt in Naimes, winding deep beneath the earth in a tight spiral. Except this one was clearly even older, the stone pitted like an old bone where it wasn’t worn smooth with the passage of feet. The cobwebby shades that haunted it were slow-moving and almost featureless, barely reacting as I ducked between them.
I descended carefully. A corridor awaited me at the bottom, the low ceiling ribbed in an unfamiliar style. Here and there a statue of a saint stood in a niche, hands clasped in prayer. Age hung in the
air as thickly as dust. More shades floated overhead in misty, motionless tangles, as though time itself had congealed them.
“They’re old,” the revenant explained. “Shades have little in the way of conscious minds to begin with, and even that fades in time without human company.”
The thought of the shades’ minds slowly eroding chilled me in a way my surroundings hadn’t. I wondered if it would be a mercy to destroy them. But I couldn’t—I needed their light to see.
I pitched my voice low, gripped by the eerie feeling that speaking too loudly might wake something that was sleeping. “Which way did the priest go?” To my left, there was a shadowed archway; to my right, another stair.
“There.” It drew my gaze to a spatter of fresh blood on the flagstones straight ahead.
It could only belong to one person. I paused to look more closely at our surroundings, but I didn’t see anything that might have injured Leander. I felt the revenant doing the same. Its attention lingered on the statues.
“Take a look at the third statue on the left. Be careful.”
I started forward, grateful I wasn’t wearing boots. My bare feet made it easier to move without a sound. As I neared the statue, the marble saint’s lips seemed to curve in a secretive smile. Its eyelids seemed to lower demurely. Only a trick of the light, I told myself, like Saint Eugenia’s effigy in the crypt of Naimes.
“Stop!” the revenant hissed suddenly, sinking in its claws. “Don’t step on that flagstone.”
I pulled my foot back. It didn’t take me long to work out what the revenant had seen. The center of the corridor had weathered centuries of traffic, but the flagstone I had nearly stepped on looked noticeably less worn than the others.
“A trap. There will be more. The Clerisy built a number of places like this during the War of Martyrs.”
My mouth was dry. The statue continued to regard me with its subtle half smile, as though waiting patiently for me to take another step. “Why?”
“One of my vessels seemed to think they were designed to slow down invading thralls, but I suspect that the Clerisy was just going through an especially sadistic phase in the twelfth century. Keep going, nun. That statue is giving me hives.”
Vespertine Page 18