Vespertine

by Margaret Rogerson

  Halfway there. Two-thirds. Finally I reached the steps of the chancel.

  I waited as the woman in front of me lingered over the altar, ostentatiously signing herself as her lips trembled in prayer. A tear dripped from her chin onto the altar cloth. “The blood of Saint Agnes,” she whispered, touching the altar with shaking fingers.

  The stone did have dark marks on it, but they weren’t blood, not even old blood. After spending the past seven years around corpses, I would know. They looked more like scorch marks from a fire—as though at some point in its past, the altar had been engulfed in flames.

  Someone behind me coughed impatiently; another shuffled from foot to foot. Oblivious, the woman continued praying, tears streaming down her face in earnest. Occasionally we had gotten pilgrims like that in Naimes, ones who liked to put on a show. The sisters had always been able to tell they were faking it.

  At last she turned to leave, glowing as though the Lady had answered her prayers. I hoped not, because based on personal experience, I was fairly certain she wouldn’t like the results. I moved forward for my turn, tugging off my glove. I’d gone only one step before noisy tears erupted behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to see the woman sinking to the carpet, her face raised as though beholding a vision in the air.

  “Saint Agnes!” she cried in rapture. “I see you—I hear you! Reveal your message to me!”

  Everywhere, conversation halted. Across the pews, Leander began to turn.

  My stomach dropped. I ducked my head and reached for the altar, hoping the revenant could make do with a glancing touch before I vanished behind the line. I moved too quickly to react to its startled warning of, “Nun, wait—”

  My fingers brushed the stone, and pain exploded in my skull, worse than anything I had ever felt: a shrieking, red-streaked abyss, devouring thought and memory. For a moment I didn’t remember who I was or where, or why any of that mattered. All I wanted was to escape from the pain, even if it meant someone bludgeoning me over the head to make it stop. Something inside me was being torn apart, and the feeling was terrible beyond comprehension.

  I thought nonsensically of the whirlwind of bats descending on the chapel’s bell tower, only in reverse: siphoning out in unnatural backward flight, the solid, dark mass disintegrating into scraps of wind-whipped black, scattering away across the night until nothing was left.

  I realized someone was screaming, thinly and from what seemed like far away. I blinked until images swam into focus, their blurry edges haloed in light.

  I wasn’t the one who was screaming—it was the woman collapsed on the carpet while bystanders collected around her. She was still crying out to Saint Agnes, and like an awkward participant in her act, I had fallen to my knees in front of the altar with my red, scarred hand extended, plain for everyone to see.

  But no one was looking. Everyone was riveted by the drama unfolding at the center of the aisle, except for one. Across the aisle, behind the pews, Leander was staring at me. The lector he had been speaking to was saying something—asking him a question—but he didn’t seem to hear her as he took a step forward, slowly reaching for his onyx ring.

  I had to get out. Something had happened to the revenant, something terrible; I couldn’t feel its presence inside me at all. I scrambled up, away, pain driving through my skull with every step, and didn’t notice when my glove dropped from the folds of my cloak to lie forgotten on the flagstones.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Pillars reeled past; a saint’s face gazed down at me, pieced together in stained glass. A banded door, the darkness of a stair—and then came the choking clouds of incense, rushing into my lungs like fire. Statues reared from the gloom, staring tranquilly from their dark niches. Fleeing in half-blind desperation, I had stumbled into the cathedral’s crypt. I felt my way along the niches for a door. There would be a way out, a way into the catacombs.

  Staggering along, I almost collided with a pale candlelit shape in the smoke: a young woman in white, frozen in surprise. An orphrey.

  “Leave us,” said a voice from the stair, and she obediently turned and vanished, slipping past the tall, forbidding figure on the steps.

  “Artemisia,” Leander said. His face looked composed, but his eyes were rimmed in red. “Did you fall?”

  The revenant’s fate obliterated all other thought; everything else seemed trivial in comparison. I looked at him uncomprehendingly, and he repeated, “Into the river—did you fall?” I didn’t say anything, but my face must have given him the answer. He laughed, a breathless, disbelieving sound. “You didn’t. You played me for a fool.”

  “I thought you were used to that,” I said, and went back to feeling for the door.

  I hadn’t meant it as an insult, only the truth, but he seemed to take it as one. Steps rang against stone, and a hand closed on my shoulder and yanked me around. Spots floated in front of my vision as he bent to put our faces level. Now that he was closer, I saw that he wasn’t as calm as I had thought. His lips were bloodless, his expression strained, his eyes a wild, vivid emerald even in the murky gloom of the crypt. I remembered what Curist Abelard had said about confessors—that they eventually lost their minds.

  “You know about the altar,” he said, his hands gripping my shoulders, twisting up the fabric of my cloak. “Why were you touching it? What are you trying to do?”

  I was surprised he had to ask. “To stop you,” I rasped.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, looking pained. “Then I was right all along. You aren’t in control of the revenant, not completely. Whatever you are, you aren’t a saint. We’re alike in that, you see.” Something about that seemed to strike him as horribly funny. I thought he might laugh again, or even let out a sob, but instead he gave me a little shake and said, “Artemisia, whatever it’s telling you—whatever it has convinced you is true—you can’t trust it. You need to stop listening to it. It’s a monster.”

  Didn’t he understand? The revenant was no longer here. There was a raw, bloody place inside of me where it had been torn away. Through the pain, I focused on Leander’s face, so he would know that when I answered him, I meant it. “I know.”

  His eyes widened the instant before my head slammed against his nose with a sickening crunch. I barely felt it—which probably wasn’t a good sign—but he staggered and fell, half-catching himself against a saint’s statue. He touched his lips and looked at his fingers, then back at me.

  “You won’t escape from me again,” he said, and brought his bloody hand to his ring.

  This time, something happened that I hadn’t seen before. Silvery vapor came pouring out of the relic, boiling upward into a shape. And then I realized I had seen something like it once. This was what Mother Katherine had done in the chapel, when she had summoned her rivener outside of its relic to drive the other spirits back.

  I knew I was in trouble even before the spirit finished taking form: a robed figure draped in chains, its broad shoulders bowed beneath their weight. Nothing showed within its hood, not even pinpricks of light for eyes—only darkness. In one gloved hand, it held a bell.

  The shadowed hood regarded me, its attention weighted with a sense of somber despair, a silent crushing judgment. I redoubled my efforts to find the door. Without the revenant, I couldn’t fight it; I could only escape.

  But it didn’t attack. Instead, it turned, slowly, to look down at Leander.

  He had pulled himself up a little, his pallor sickly in the candlelight, sweat shining on his brow. When the hood turned to him, he gazed at it a moment frozen, as though seeing something terrible in its emptiness. Then he seemed to come back to himself. With trembling hands, he fed his censer a fresh cone of incense and held it aloft, shielding himself behind the smoke. And he bared his teeth, which were stained with blood.

  “You will obey me,” he said. “Subdue her.”

  The penitent turned back to me slowly, as though disappointed by the command. With every sign of great reluctance, it raised its bell.

  A
surface gave beneath my hand: a latch. I pushed through the door and slammed it shut behind myself just as the bell rang. The sound that reverberated through the wood was not the chime of a small hand-bell, but the deep, melancholy toll of a funeral bell—giant, cast in iron, held aloft with chains. The sound struck me like a physical blow, driving me to my knees. My vision grayed.

  An agony of guilt consumed me. I had failed the Lady. I had destroyed the revenant. Without its power, everyone in Roischal would die, and it was my fault. The revenant wasn’t coming back.

  “Revenant,” I begged, but still I felt nothing. I knew, somehow, that it wouldn’t have abandoned me like it had after the battle—not now, not like this. Not by choice. It wouldn’t leave me alone again.

  As the bell’s echoes faded, a fragment of my wits returned. Knowing the door would earn me only a few seconds, I forced myself to stand. I was in the catacombs now, surrounded by bone-filled niches. I staggered to the nearest one and fumbled through the dry bones, hoping one of the clerics had been interred with their dagger. Nothing. I moved on to the next, feeling the ancient, cobwebby shroud crumble to dust at my touch. Shades flitted away, taking their silvery light with them, making fearful, gape-mouthed faces at me from the ceiling.

  The door opened just as my ungloved hand closed on something harder and smoother than bone. The bell tolled again, merciless, fogging my thoughts with misery. I tore the dagger from its niche, barely keeping my grip on it as I sagged against the wall. When I managed to look up, the penitent was advancing, with Leander behind it, censer in one hand, the other clenched in his robes over his heart.

  He met my eyes in determined anguish. A tear fell shivering from one eye, and more glistened on his lashes. As much as I hated him, I didn’t envy whatever the penitent was making him feel.

  I backed up a scuffling step, bringing the dagger in front of me in defense. Only then did I notice that I had grabbed it by the blade. I clumsily adjusted my grip, feeling as though I had never been trained to wield it.

  The penitent towered over me. It made no effort to avoid the dagger as I struck it again and again, the silver-edged wounds sealing almost as soon as I dealt them. Within the empty darkness of its hood, a shape began to resolve: a pale, blurry, indistinct smudge, like a face pressed against the outside of a window at night. As the blots of light and dark sharpened into focus, I saw that it was a face—my little brother’s, eyes wide with fear, mouth stretching wide in a scream. Before I could be certain of what I had seen, the face morphed instead into Mother Katherine’s, ghostly white and unsmiling. Dead. The misery was like a stone in my chest; I couldn’t breathe.

  The bell tolled on and on. The penitent’s face changed again. It became a skull, the eye sockets bound with frayed wrappings: the revenant, whom I had destroyed. My knees bent, and my vision swarmed black.

  “Yield,” said Leander from somewhere far away, speaking through his teeth, as though enduring incredible pain.

  The dagger slipped from my hand. I didn’t remember falling, but I found myself on the ground, my cheek against the dirt, my arm flung out before me.

  My vision dimmed and narrowed until I saw nothing beyond my own hand. Strangely, a welt marked my palm that hadn’t been there before. Struggling to think, I realized that it was where I had held the dagger by the blade. My scarred skin hadn’t felt the pain, but the consecrated steel had burned me.

  Impossible—but the welt was there. And its existence could mean only one thing.

  “Revenant,” I said. “Attend me.”

  Without hesitation, the presence lying wrecked and shattered inside of me gathered the last of its broken strength to obey. Power rushed into my veins, my limbs, my heart. My vision blazed white as I stood. I saw the penitent awash in a light a hundred times brighter than its own, its hood empty after all, and then I stepped through it.

  Vapor fell away around me. Silver flames danced over my cloak, bathing the catacombs in their radiance, chasing away the shadows.

  Leander was on the ground, braced against the tunnel’s wall. Tears streaked his uplifted face. In his eyes and slightly parted lips I saw fury and shame and horror mixed with tormented, fearful longing. That he might have been wrong; that he might be looking not at Artemisia of Naimes, but Saint Artemisia. He gasped a breath and tried to rise, only to slip back down. His eyes were fluttering shut; he was on the verge of passing out.

  “Kill him,” whispered a voice.

  I froze. The order sounded like it had been breathed directly into my ear: less a voice than a draft from an opened tomb, a hiss of cloth slithering over a grave.

  “If you let him live…,” the voice went on awfully, as though whispered from a deathbed, but this time I recognized it.

  “Revenant,” I said.

  It didn’t respond; it had used the last of its strength. The light faded as the silver flames burned lower and guttered and then died, throwing the tunnel back into shadow. Leander had lost consciousness, a fresh rivulet of blood trickling from his nose.

  A clanging sound came from the crypt, the upper door being opened, its latch released. Someone was coming. Even if by some miracle no one had sensed the revenant, the orphrey might have gone for help. I had to make a decision, and quickly.

  I bent to pick up the dagger. I could kill Leander. It wouldn’t be difficult. I knew exactly where to put the blade and how hard to push it in. In certain scenarios, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But he wasn’t crouching over the altar, about to awaken a sinister ritual. He wasn’t hurting anyone; he wasn’t even conscious to defend himself. I would have to kill him as he lay helpless and bleeding, stripped of his defenses, collapsed against the wall of the catacombs like a martyred saint.

  I didn’t know what the Lady wanted me to do. There were no candles here, no signs. I was alone.

  In the crypt, a voice called out. I turned and ran.

  I stumbled through the tunnels, my path illuminated by shades. They tangled themselves up in the corners as I passed, the holes of their mouths and eyes frozen open in silent screams. I went through doors and branching passageways until the niches grew older and then vanished altogether, replaced by bare earth shored up with portions of stone walls. Remnants of the old city, its ruins buried beneath the streets.

  Once, a grate in the ceiling opened into the world above. Bright light and noise poured down into the tunnel, voices shouting, the rattling of carts. I cringed away from it and continued stumbling along like a wounded animal looking for a place to die.

  The revenant didn’t speak again. Every once in a while I touched the dagger to my arm, just to make sure it was still there.

  Eventually I found a grate that opened to a quieter part of the city, one I might be able to use without being spotted, but I had no idea how to move its thick iron bars without the revenant’s help. I made scratches on the walls with my dagger so I could find my way back, and kept going.

  I heard the trickling of water and thought I had better drink, or the revenant would be angry with me when it recovered. I didn’t allow myself to consider the alternative—that it wasn’t coming back, not the way it had been before.

  Following the sound, I limped through a doorway that was half tumbled-out rock. Shade-light cast an ethereal glow over shapes that might have once been arches and pillars, and glittered brightly from a pool on the ground. Drawing closer, I saw that the water bubbled up from a spring with pieces of masonry scattered around it, the remains of an ancient fountain. I crouched and took cold, metallic-tasting gulps from the cracked stone basin, the water glimmering with the reflections of the shades, its ripples dashing my reflection to pieces. In some of them I saw Artemisia. In others, only Anne.

  I didn’t want to stay, but I didn’t think anyone would find me in this place—not after the twists and turns I had taken in the catacombs. And I had nowhere else to go that I knew would be safe. I dragged myself to a corner and huddled there, gripping the dagger tightly. Silence pressed in. Without thinking, I moved the blade toward
my arm, already patterned with welts.

  This time, I felt a stir. “Stop,” the feeble voice whispered.

  My hand paused. I felt my pulse beating in my throat. “Revenant. What happened to you?”

  “The altar—made to destroy a revenant. That’s what killed… the other one. Sarathiel.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Talk about this… later.”

  It thought I wanted to talk about the Old Magic. To resume planning again, to figure out our next step. I said, “I meant if there was anything I could do to help you.”

  There came a long, uncertain pause. “Sleep,” it whispered at last.

  * * *

  I slept and woke and slept again, occasionally creeping back to the pool to drink. Whatever the altar had done to the revenant had hurt me, too, though I suspected what I was feeling was the revenant’s pain, just as it felt mine.

  Time passed. Eventually I jolted to wakefulness in the near dark, in a cold sweat with my stomach in knots. I had a dreamlike impression of watching some rats go scurrying past—not a dream, I realized, as I heard telltale squeaking and scuffling, and felt the revenant’s senses chasing after their tails as they fled into some dark crevice.

  “That’s impossible,” it hissed, as though it were arguing with someone nearby.

  Under other circumstances, I would have been relieved to hear the revenant sounding better. But I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that I had walked in on it speaking to an invisible third presence, an impression heightened by the darkness and a prickling sensation of being watched. It was harder to see now—most of the shades had gone, possibly frightened away. I reached for the dagger and found it already in my hand.

  “What did you sense?” I asked.

  I almost regretted speaking. An unsettled silence came from the revenant, as though it hadn’t noticed I’d woken up and was disturbed by the failure of its own perception. Then it said, “Nothing. I was mistaken. I’m not entirely—myself.”