Vespertine

by Margaret Rogerson

  “Let’s just say the other revenants don’t like me very much. Or didn’t, as is ever so tragically the case for some of them.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  “You haven’t met them, nun. I consider it a compliment.”

  Curious, I closed the manuscript to see what it was called. The gold lettering spelled out a familiar title. On the Hierarchy of Spirits.

  “This is the work of Josephine of Bissalart,” I said in surprise. That explained why it was locked away. Josephine’s work was brilliant but tainted. She had gone from the celebrated scholar who had sorted the spirits into their five orders to a heretic pursued by the Clerisy for her increasingly deviant beliefs. She had narrowly avoided execution by first sheltering in a convent, then escaping on a ship to Sarantia.

  Running my fingers over the title, I wondered for the first time what those beliefs had been. Whether, if I heard them, I might find something to agree with.

  A sound drew me from my thoughts—a long, slow scraping, like two pieces of metal grinding against each other. Startled, I jerked my glove back on and glanced around. At first the room appeared unchanged. Then I saw it.

  The dreadnought’s helmet had turned. It was looking directly at me.

  “Run,” the revenant shouted. “Run!”

  I slammed my shoulder against the door and dove from the room. Perhaps I should have grabbed something to use as a weapon, but just as quickly I realized it wouldn’t have mattered; even a sword wouldn’t be strong enough to withstand a blow from that flail.

  Heavy footfalls shook the ground behind me as I dragged the unconscious sister out of the way—“Leave her!” spat the revenant, but I couldn’t let her die—and pelted up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time, my lungs already on fire.

  I was faster than the dreadnought. But unlike me, it wouldn’t tire. The tortured groaning and squealing of rusted plate chased me up the stair’s spiraling turns. At the top, I burst out into another corridor and tore down its length, statues flashing past. “Don’t step on that flagstone,” the revenant hissed, wrenching me aside.

  Abruptly, without warning, the din of crashing armor ceased. I risked a quick glance over my shoulder. My feet pattered to a stop.

  The dreadnought had halted at the top of the stairwell. It stood with a slumped-over posture, one shoulder lower than the other, dragged down by the weight of the flail. Even then, its helmet almost scraped the ceiling. Its monstrous bulk filled the corridor, swallowing up the shade-light. If I looked closely, I could see through the bars of the helmet’s grille into the hollow space behind them.

  Somehow it was worse seeing the dreadnought like this, knowing that any second its armor could twitch, move, explode violently into action. “Is there a trap ahead?” I asked under my breath. “What is it doing?”

  “It didn’t animate of its own accord. Someone’s controlling it—they commanded it to stop.”

  Slowly, I backed away. I turned sideways, shuffling along so I could watch my path and the motionless dreadnought at the same time. Soon I reached the next intersecting corridor. It was the one with the portcullis trap, I remembered, and a sense of foreboding gripped me even before I approached the corner and saw that the portcullis had dropped, its bars blocking off the exit route. A black-robed figure waited on the other side.

  I barely swerved back in time to hide myself. Peering out from behind the corner more cautiously, I saw Leander’s lips curve into a thin, rueful smile that quickly fell away, replaced by a meditative expression. Only his eyes looked alive in a face turned as still as marble. When he spoke, his voice was unexpectedly soft.

  “I knew I was being followed. Show yourself, and I’ll call off the dreadnought. I truly would prefer not to harm you.”

  He opened one of his hands. On his palm lay a key. It was large and blocky, with one square tooth at the end. I gathered it wasn’t the key he had taken from the sister to gain entrance to the chambers. After revealing it, he tucked it away behind his back.

  The revenant winced. If its senses hadn’t been muffled, it would have been able to tell that Leander had tampered with the dreadnought.

  “Are you certain?” Leander asked. A few heartbeats had passed. He waited a moment longer, then turned. He said over his shoulder, “Very well. If you insist.” Resting against the small of his back, his hand closed around the key.

  Metal shrieked as motion erupted behind me.

  “There has to be another way out,” the revenant spat as I ran. “Try those stairs,” it ordered. “Turn left. Left! Watch out!”

  Something flashed past my face and thunked against the opposite wall—a crossbow bolt, I thought. I couldn’t look. My feet had lost sensation; every breath burned. Even if the revenant unleashed its full power, its fire’s soul-devouring ability would be useless against an empty suit of armor. It could temporarily increase my strength, but I was still made of flesh and blood. And my endurance was flagging; the dreadnought was catching up. The deafening clamor of its stride filled my ears. I could taste its hot stink of rusted metal.

  I veered into another hallway and found it looked familiar—I had traveled down it before. The stair leading up to the graveyard lay at the end. My heart leaped with hope.

  Then the mace slammed to the ground behind me, cracks racing through the flagstones beneath my feet. The dreadnought swung again; shards of stone went flying. I threw myself away, and didn’t recognize my error until too late. A statue’s patient half smile filled my vision. Metal glinted in the dark.

  “Careful!” the revenant shrieked as I dodged the blade: a misericorde clasped between the saint’s folded hands, sharpened to a deadly point.

  I skidded, rebounded off the wall, and lunged for the stair as the dreadnought’s next impact narrowly missed my head. Pieces of what had once been a statue hailed down, throwing powder and fragments of rock across the steps. I scrambled over them, ignoring the bruising gouge of the stone pieces, dizzily chasing the spiral upward.

  There, at last, stood the door. But we weren’t safe yet. My survival hinged upon whether Leander had left it unlocked behind him. He might not have bothered, trusting the dreadnought to finish me off. Or he might have left it unlocked deliberately, granting me one last chance to escape, like a cat toying with a mouse.

  I flung myself against the door, and it sprang open, tumbling me out into the graveyard’s damp. I didn’t have time to feel relieved. I threw my weight back against it, trying to force it shut.

  Metal clashed against the other side. The dreadnought’s helmet appeared in the gap. It pushed relentlessly as the revenant fed an answering burst of power into my body—the best it could do, I guessed, without alerting the entire city to its presence. The armor’s joints squeaked, then groaned, but the extra strength wasn’t going to be enough. I was weakening. The nearness of the door’s consecrated iron blazed against my face like heat radiating from an oven.

  Suddenly there were hands braced on the door beside me, muscles straining as they pushed. Another pair, much smaller, joined them on my other side. Inch by torturous inch, the door creaked shut. It thudded into place.

  I looked up, meeting Jean’s and Marguerite’s wide eyes.

  “What was that?” Marguerite bleated. I clapped a gloved hand over her mouth.

  “Dreadnoughts are too stupid to tell a door apart from a wall,” the revenant hissed into the ensuing tense silence. “If it loses sight of you for more than a few seconds, it will think you’ve escaped.”

  I stood there waiting, barely breathing, until I heard metal scrape against stone, ponderous steps moving away—the dreadnought retreating.

  I dragged Marguerite down with me as my legs wobbled and gave out. Jean reached to catch us before we hit the ground, then suddenly balked. He backed up skittishly, his big hands held uselessly aloft as though he feared they might betray him.

  A pang of sympathy shot straight to my core. I knew what that felt like—the horror of your own body turning on someone without
your permission. In Jean’s case, he hadn’t merely hurt people. He had killed them. It would take him a long time to regain trust in himself, if he ever did.

  Marguerite was glaring at me. I took my hand away. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve before saying, “I saw the priest on my way back to the infirmary, and I knew you were going to get into trouble.” She looked uncertainly at Jean, who had curled into a huddle against the wall. “I didn’t know who else to ask for help.”

  “It’s good you chose him. I don’t think anyone else in Bonsaint would have been strong enough.”

  “Strong enough for what?” she demanded. “What was that? What was the confessor doing?”

  Reflexively, I glanced up at the graveyard, wondering if he was about to come swooping down on us.

  “The priest is gone,” the revenant said. I got the impression that if it had its own body, it would be collapsed beside us against the door in an attitude of stunned exhaustion. “Next time, nun—not that I expect there to be a next time—remind me not to call a dreadnought an antique.”

  My spine prickled. In the ivy-draped darkness of the stairwell, Marguerite was watching me.

  “You’re doing it again,” she said. “You’re listening to it.”

  My stomach turned over. “If you tell anyone—”

  “I wasn’t going to.” She frowned, avoiding my eyes. “You obviously aren’t possessed.”

  “How do you know?”

  I could tell she was frightened; she was gripping her pocket again, the one she kept her amulet inside. But she said defiantly, “I shared a room with you for almost seven years. You’re just as weird and creepy as you were before. Being possessed by a Fifth Order spirit would probably make you less weird.”

  “Astonishingly,” the revenant said, “I find myself agreeing with this pink human a second time.”

  “And anyway,” she muttered, “you know things that only you would know. Like how much I hate spiders.”

  She was taking this much better than I had expected. “Thanks,” I said after an awkward pause, also avoiding her eyes.

  In a sudden decisive movement, she clambered to her feet, standing over me. She took a deep breath, then extended her hand. I stared at it. In all the years I’d known her, I couldn’t remember her ever willingly offering to touch me.

  “Will you tell me what you’re doing? I want to know. I promise I can keep it a secret.” She stubbornly lifted her chin. “And I might—I might be able to help.”

  I continued to stare at her, nonplussed.

  “Believe it or not, I do actually have a brain,” she said, turning a little redder. “And you need help. Whatever you’re up to, you can’t do it alone.”

  “I have the revenant.”

  I felt it stifle its surprise—for some reason, it hadn’t expected me to say that—as Marguerite retorted, “That’s not enough.”

  “It’s gotten me this far,” I said.

  “Can a spirit cover for you if you go missing from the infirmary?” she challenged. “Or if you pass out and someone sees your hands? Does it know all the latest news in the city? It isn’t just gossip, you know,” she said with unexpected heat. “Sometimes it’s useful information. There’s nothing wrong with paying attention to what’s going on around you.”

  I leaned back, wishing the ground would swallow me whole. I recognized the signs that Marguerite was getting emotional about something, but as usual, I couldn’t tell what.

  When I didn’t answer, she made a frustrated sound. Clearly releasing a long-pent-up grievance, she declared, “Just because you can survive by being scary and intense all the time doesn’t mean you should judge everyone who can’t.”

  So that was what she was angry about. I looked from her face to her extended hand and back again. The truth was, she had come to my rescue twice now. She had helped hide me, and tonight she had probably saved my life. All that time in Naimes, I had underestimated her.

  Reluctantly, I took her hand.

  SEVENTEEN

  Marguerite and I sat opposite each other on the stable’s floor with a lantern flickering between us. I had just finished relaying everything I knew to her, ending with the revenant’s explanation of the dreadnought. She had watched me in horrified fascination the entire time, her expression exaggerated by the flame lighting her face from beneath.

  “It really said all that?” she squeaked.

  If only she knew. “It said a lot more. I’m only sharing the important parts.”

  She looked away, chewing her lip. She still had a death grip on her pocket. I considered telling her that her amulet wouldn’t protect her from the revenant, but I didn’t want her to take it as a threat, so I didn’t say anything. I waited.

  “It’s—you know, it’s smart?” she asked finally. “Like a person?”

  It is a person, were the first words that jumped to mind. Instead, I said, with the revenant’s indignation needling me to speak, “It thinks humans are all idiots.”

  “That’s an understatement,” it hissed.

  I wasn’t fooled by its nasty tone. Now that Marguerite knew about it, I could tell it was secretly enjoying having a conversation with someone new, even with me acting as the intermediary. For a being who liked to talk so much, going for hundreds of years without anyone listening to it must have been torture.

  “I thought it would be more like…” Marguerite shook her head. She took a deep breath, collecting herself. “Never mind. So you think you can use Jean to help find out where Confessor Leander has been practicing Old Magic. And it really won’t hurt him?”

  I followed her gaze to Jean. He was sitting outside the candlelight, gazing forlornly at the horse in the nearest stall with his hands knotted in his lap. Despite his size, he looked like a little boy who wanted to pet the horse but had been denied permission. “The revenant says it won’t.”

  “And you believe it?”

  That was a good question. I still didn’t know why the revenant was so interested in Old Magic. However, I could say with complete certainty, “If the revenant wanted to possess me and kill everyone, it would have already tried. That isn’t what it wants.”

  I felt a startled hitch from the revenant, and then it went very still. Apparently it hadn’t realized that I was onto it. That was what it got for assuming all humans were idiots.

  Fortunately, Marguerite seemed reassured. She rose and went to Jean, moving carefully, as though approaching an injured animal. “Jean,” she said softly, reaching for his shoulder. She flinched when he turned to face her. Then she set her jaw in determination and completed the gesture, her hand tiny against his bandaged shoulder. “Will you come sit down with us?”

  He rose, startlingly big in the stable’s gloom, shedding pieces of straw. He stared down at her hand as though he barely recognized what it was, but he still allowed it to guide him. Marguerite settled him onto the floor opposite me and then looked up with a question in her eyes. Her mouth was pressed small, her brows furrowed.

  “How does it work?” she asked.

  The revenant said, “All you need to do is touch him, and I’ll get an impression of the place where the ritual was cast. I doubt either of us will recognize it—some hideous dungeon filled with whips and chains, I expect; you would never believe what priests get up to in their spare time—but I’ll be able to trace its direction, and we can follow it to the source.”

  I wasn’t sure how much of our earlier conversation Jean had overheard, if any. I shook my head at Marguerite, requesting her silence.

  “Just touch him,” the revenant prompted. “I’ll do the rest.”

  I tried to move, and found that I couldn’t. Jean was sitting there looking at the ground, showing no indication of being aware of what was happening. He might not feel anything I was about to do to him, but it felt wrong to use him without his knowledge.

  “I’m like you,” I told him impulsively. “I got possessed, too. By an ashgrim.”

  That broke through the fog. He looked up, his
dark eyes meeting mine. It was the first time he had truly looked at me. I could see the pain deep within his gaze, the tortured hope, like an open wound. My chest tightened.

  He needed to know. If I was going to use him for this, he deserved to know everything. “What are you doing?” the revenant hissed as I stripped off my gloves.

  I held my hands out for Jean to see. I was so used to their appearance I rarely looked at them closely, but now I saw them as a stranger might, red and oddly wrinkled in the candlelight, the left permanently curled, missing the fingernails on the last two fingers. Those fingers were the most badly burned, left with only shiny knobs of flesh at the shortened tips.

  Out of the periphery of my vision, I saw that Marguerite was holding her breath. Jean’s own hands reached out very slowly to cradle mine, holding them as though they were something precious that might break. No, not that. As though they were unbreakable—the one thing in the world that he knew he couldn’t hurt.

  “My name is Artemisia of Naimes,” I said.

  He didn’t react. Wet tracks shone on his cheeks beneath the craggy line of his brow. He already knew. An echo of a voice came back to me, the man on the road to Bonsaint. She has scars. We will know her by her scars.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I should have gotten there faster.” He was shaking his head, but I went on, my voice harsh. “I should have stopped what happened to you. I’m trying to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. But I need to do something to you to figure out how. Will you let me?”

  A tear dripped to the ground between us, a dark blot in the dirt. He nodded.

  I gripped his hands in mine.

  The stable shifted. The walls turned to smoke-colored glass; the horses in their stalls became dark shapes threaded with gold. That was all I was able to observe before the floor opened up and the stable dropped away.

  I plunged silently into darkness. In the void, a vision materialized before me. Shards of color reared upward from the emptiness, assembling themselves into seven tall, narrow shapes. A plinth of some kind lay below them, blazing white. A bent figure straightened neatly from behind it, tall, slender, dressed in black. His hands were filled with shadow.