Vespertine

by Margaret Rogerson

  “I only sense one human with a relic here,” it said once I’d straightened, heading off any possible conversation on the subject.

  “That’s probably the sacristan,” I said. It was his duty to look after the cathedral’s valuables in everyone else’s absence.

  Another door lay at the end of the hall. This time I emerged onto a high marble gallery that looked out over the darkened nave. There were no lamps here, but the huge windows cast fragmented pools of moonlight over the collection of holy objects lined up on display.

  I didn’t approach the balustrade, knowing that if I did I would bring the altar into view below, and I didn’t want to look at it again if I didn’t have to. I walked along the wall instead, watching my dim, distorted reflection ripple over the dented bronze of a church bell, probably recovered from an important chapel that had fallen during the Sorrow. Next I passed a saint’s yellowed linen smallclothes, reverently preserved beneath glass. Halfway down the gallery I encountered a giant wagon wheel, each of its spokes longer than I was tall. I paused to read the engraving on its plaque: A WHEEL OF THE SIEGE-ORGAN OF MARSONNE.

  I had read about the siege-organ before: a colossal pipe organ mounted on a wagon drawn by two dozen draft horses, its consecrated pipes unleashing a thunder of holy sound that disintegrated any spirit within range. Though powerful, it had proven impractical to use in battle, its delicate valves and bellows constantly breaking as it bumped over the roads of Loraille. It now stood in Chantclere’s cathedral, stationary forevermore, probably used to blast shades out of the vault every evening.

  As I stood gazing at the wheel, a chill crept over me. I had an eerie premonition of spirits swarming the countryside unchecked with only antiques left to battle them. Of the pipe organ’s ancient, groaning bulk dragged beneath the sky for the first time since the War of Martyrs, dusted off like the harrow, turned to as a last resort. That could be Loraille’s fate if I failed.

  We made it the remainder of the way to the living quarters without incident, except once when I had to hide to avoid the sacristan. I watched him go past through the crack behind a door, muttering endearments to the raven on his shoulder, its loud croaks and warbles a counterpoint to the quiet scuff of his velvet slippers. The candles flared to life at his approach and snuffed out one by one after he had gone.

  The clerics dwelled in private chambers in a wing of the cathedral that reminded me of a dormitory, though vastly better appointed. I found a lantern and used its light to peer inside the doors I found ajar, discovering that some were full apartments with their own sitting rooms and garderobes. The revenant directed me past them and down a few more halls, where the surroundings grew noticeably plainer. When it guided me to Leander’s room, at first I thought it had made a mistake.

  Like most of the other chambers, the door wasn’t locked. I found myself in a plain cell with a single bed and a tiny latticed window, bare of decoration except for a small painted icon hanging on the wall above the writing desk—Saint Theodosia, the patron saint of Chantclere. The room looked unused, the wardrobe shut, the bed neatly made.

  I looked around, frowning. “Are you sure?”

  “It might not belong to him, but he’s certainly sleeping here. The stench is unmistakable.”

  Skeptically, I set down the lantern and opened the wardrobe. Leander’s clothes hung within: two sets of severe black travel robes and an empty space for his full regalia. There weren’t any signs to suggest that he shared the room with another priest or priestess, a friend or lover he visited from his own more lavish quarters. The room belonged to him and him alone.

  As a confessor, he should have had his pick of any apartment he wanted. He wouldn’t have been forced to take this room. For whatever reason, he lived here by choice.

  Thrown off-balance by that idea, I searched his robes, which looked oddly lonely hanging amid the unused space inside the wardrobe. I found nothing, but once accidentally stuck my finger through a rent in the cloth whose placement matched the wound he had received from one of the traps in the sacred chambers. Judging by its size, he had been injured more badly than I had thought. Afterward, I fruitlessly checked the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe, which contained his smallclothes, undershirts, stockings, and a pair of black leather gloves. On the revenant’s advice, I felt across the drawer’s underside. Still nothing.

  We searched beneath the mattress, under the desk, behind the icon of Saint Theodosia. We paced the room for loose floorboards. I was starting to wonder if he hadn’t kept the page—if he had tossed it down a well or burned it—when the toe of my boot struck something that went sliding under the bed.

  Bending to retrieve it, I discovered that it was a slim, ordinary prayer book. I turned it upside down and shook it, but nothing fell out. Rifling through its pages likewise yielded nothing. It contained columns of common prayers, its margins crammed with notes written in a precise, angular hand that I guessed belonged to Leander. The only other writing belonged to a dedication inside the cover: Study hard. I’ll see you soon. —G. Frustrated, I sat down on the bed.

  But the revenant seemed interested. It urged, “Take another look at those notes. The ones near the end.”

  Of course. Back home, novices had passed notes to each other during lessons by writing inside prayer books and swapping them around when the sisters weren’t looking. Scanning the pages, my eyes caught on a particular phrase.

  Leander had written, A. of N.—not possessed? Deceived by R.? What does it want? Biding its time? No mass murder thus far.

  “Not for lack of enthusiasm,” said the revenant, at the same time I realized the “R” stood for either “revenant” or “Rathanael.” Given Leander’s status, not to mention the research he had been doing, it wasn’t surprising that he knew the revenants’ names and which one was bound to Saint Eugenia’s relic. Still, the idea made me uneasy.

  The next several lines of notes were crossed out too thoroughly to be legible; the revenant emitted a flicker of irritation. Then they continued in an unsteady hand, the ink blotted: A. not deceived—willing ally? Underlined, In control?

  That was where the writing ending. A bloody thumbprint marked the bottom of the page. He must have scribbled those final notes today after our encounter in the catacombs. I sat looking at the thumbprint for a moment, imagining Leander stumbling into the room, scrawling those words, the book falling from his fingers to the floor. Unsure what compelled me, I drew back the bed’s neatly made coverlet.

  Blood spotted the linens. When I had fought Leander earlier, he had already been wounded, perhaps seriously. He couldn’t have gone to a healer without drawing attention, so he must have treated the injury himself, alone. Concealed the evidence beneath his spotless robes, his carefully made-up bed. Hidden it from everyone but me.

  His voice echoed in my mind: You know about the altar. The dark thoughts circled. I couldn’t put them off any longer.

  “There’s something I want to know,” I said. “How did Saint Agnes die trying to bind Sarathiel if the altar destroyed it instead?”

  “The altar was part of the binding ritual,” the revenant replied, distracted. Its attention was still roaming back and forth over the crossed-out portion of Leander’s notes. “Or at least, it was intended to be. Whoever created it failed to draw the runes properly, with catastrophic results.”

  I thought again of the scorch marks on the altar, the fire-blackened appearance of Saint Eugenia’s relic. The ashes sprinkled on the robes of the clerics. I remembered the way the revenant had spoken in the convent’s underground vault, choosing its words so carefully, leaving too many things unsaid.

  And I thought of holy symbols, revealed to the saints as shapes written in divine fire.

  My voice sounded hollow as I asked, “Why was she trying to bind a spirit with Old Magic?”

  Silence fell, the revenant realizing what it had revealed too late. After a moment it ventured, “Nun, what you need to understand about Old Magic is that it isn’t inherently evil
. It’s merely a source of power. A forge can be used to create a sword, or one of those things you humans use to dig around in the dirt—”

  “A plow,” I said.

  “Yes, whatever that is. My point is—”

  “The saints used Old Magic. They did, didn’t they?”

  I felt the revenant considering and discarding a number of complicated replies. Then it said, simply, “Yes. If it’s any consolation, your kind would have been obliterated otherwise. And Old Magic hadn’t been declared a heresy yet, though it was swiftly falling out of favor.”

  I sat staring at the bloodstains. “It was wrong.”

  “What?”

  “Putting spirits into relics. It was wrong. Whoever came up with the idea—they were wrong.”

  “The Old Magic—”

  “I don’t care about the magic. That isn’t what made it wrong. Destroying spirits—that has to be done. But trapping them in a relic is different. It’s cruel. I didn’t know that before, but I do now.”

  The revenant was very quiet. “You would have died,” it said at last. “All of you.”

  Where my emotions should have been, there was a hard black lump inside my chest, burning like a coal. “Maybe we should have.”

  I felt it digesting my reply. Then it said, “Check the book’s binding.”

  I suspected it merely wanted to distract me, but I checked anyway. As I ran my fingers over the binding, I reflected that I wasn’t surprised—only bleakly disappointed. If someone could bind a spirit through sheer force of will and the Lady’s grace alone, then I would have done it to the ashgrim. I would have burned all of myself, not just my hands, to be rid of it. I thought of Eugenia’s smiling face—that doesn’t look anything like her—and thought of the vendors hawking my blood and hair and clothes and wondered who she had truly been, if she had thought of herself as a saint or just a girl, if she had been glad to immolate herself so that the only thing people could take from her was the one she could control. I could ask the revenant. Perhaps after this was over, I would.

  But for now I’d found where the stitching had been cut, creating a hidden pocket between the two sheets of parchment that made up the prayer book’s back cover. Pressed within, revealed by an uneven edge of sliced vellum, was the missing page.

  I tugged it free and moved to Leander’s desk stool, bringing it to the lantern’s light. The revenant read faster than I did, but it could only read the writing that my eyes were focused on. It jerked my gaze down the page until it reached the entry: Year of Our Lady 1155, A small casket crafted of gold and ivory, set with twelve rubies and eight sapphires, heretofore stored in Chantclere, containing the Holy Ashes of Saint Agnes.

  “Those fools,” it hissed. “Those festering imbeciles! They should have scattered her ashes in the Sevre, the ocean—they shouldn’t have kept them!”

  I was getting a bad feeling. “Revenant, what did you sense in the tunnels?”

  “I thought that I had imagined it. The darkness, the silence—after a time, I start seeing things that aren’t there….” A tremor ran through it. “I sensed another revenant. Here, in the city.”

  For a moment, the words didn’t make sense. I stared at the page, its text suddenly incomprehensible. “You don’t mean a revenant bound to a relic.”

  “No. I felt Sarathiel’s presence. Impossible, of course, unless it wasn’t truly destroyed; unless it was merely weakened to the point that it seemed to be and has been hiding in the ashes for the past three hundred years, slowly rebuilding its strength.”

  “Spare relics that aren’t used very much are often stored inside the altar, beneath the altar stone.” My thoughts had begun careening like a wagon down a hill, gaining speed. “The casket might be there too. But wouldn’t someone have sensed it? They use the altar every day.”

  “Weakened, its presence may not have been noticeable. As it recovered, it would have regained the ability to hide itself. Out of all of us, Sarathiel was always the best at concealing its presence.” I remembered its page in the manuscript—Sarathiel the Obscured, its tipped chalice pouring mist. “The better question is how it’s managed to recover in the first place. It wouldn’t have been able to heal without consuming life of some kind….”

  “The rats,” we both said at the same time. I found that I was standing, the stool toppled over. I hadn’t heard it fall.

  Leander had found dead rats, the curist had said, their bodies unmarked. I wondered how many rats had been discovered dead inside the cathedral over the centuries, a few here, a few there, and no one had paid them any mind.

  “We need to destroy it now,” the revenant said urgently. “Before it takes a human soul. That’s when it will have enough strength to leave the casket, and it will act soon. It almost certainly knows I’m here—”

  It stopped at a faint sound. Somewhere in the cathedral, echoing, came the panicked cries of a raven.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I was halfway to the chapel before I realized I had left the lantern behind in Leander’s room, but there was enough moonlight to see by, to take the stairs down from the gallery two at a time. A raven was flapping in circles above the pews. “Dead!” it screamed. “Dead!” Its shrill voice rang from the high, shadowed vault.

  The stairs let me out into the transept. When I reached the nave, I drew up short. The sacristan lay collapsed at the center of the aisle, just shy of the sanctuary’s steps, in a heap of crimson velvet. His eyes were still open, his waxen face frozen in an expression of surprise. And behind the altar, an almost perfect match for my vision in the stable, stood Leander: his robes swallowed up by the dark, the casket in his hands. The altar’s slab had been pushed a few inches to the side, revealing a hint of the cavity where it had rested.

  I drew my dagger. “Put it down.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he replied. He didn’t seem surprised to see me; there was no emotion in his voice at all. “I went to some effort to leave the procession unseen, and this might be my only chance. Do you understand how rarely the cathedral is empty? It’s a pity about the sacristan, though I never did like him.”

  “Put it down,” I repeated, stepping over the body and onto the stairs.

  “Are you going to fight me?” he asked, remote.

  “Don’t,” the revenant interjected tightly. “Sarathiel is still confined to the ashes, but it’s nearly strong enough to escape. If there’s a struggle—if the casket falls…”

  “If you do, you’ll win,” Leander admitted. Drawing closer, I realized I had been wrong about his lack of emotion. His hands were steady around the casket, but now I saw the strain in his eyes, vivid against his bruised face. He was trying his best to hide it, but he was afraid.

  I mounted the last step and faced him across the altar. He took an immediate pace back, putting himself against the altarpiece. I stared at him, trying to figure out how to take the casket.

  “Talk to him,” the revenant urged.

  I raised my eyes to Leander’s face, at which he was unable to hide a flinch. I asked, “Why did you lie about what happened in the crypt?”

  He swallowed, noticeable only by the slight movement of his collar. “The answer to that is complicated.” He hesitated. “The most practical reason, perhaps, was that I didn’t wish the death of any cleric who tried to apprehend you.”

  “I’m not the one who’s been killing people.”

  “What?” For an instant, he looked thrown. Then his face shuttered. “Believe what you like of me, but I’ve never used my relic to take a life.”

  “I was talking about the Old Magic,” I said. “Or does murder only count if you commit it with your own hands?”

  “You thought—” He broke off as though unable to finish. He glanced at the sacristan, then back at me. He began again, slowly, with a very strange expression on his face, “You thought I’ve been practicing Old Magic?”

  I already knew he was a skilled liar, or at least he was talented at concealing the truth. I didn’t believe
his act for a moment. But the revenant gave a forceful hiss, as though letting out a swear. “Nun, ask him if this is the first time he’s touched the casket.”

  I repeated the question aloud, and Leander gave me the same narrow, piecing-things-together look he’d given the Divine earlier. “No,” he said carefully. “I examined it the night I returned to Bonsaint after you escaped from the harrow. I had been meaning to take a closer look at it for some time.” That was the night of the vision—the point at which he had started smelling of Old Magic. “I thought it was strange,” he went on, seeming to take my silence for permission to continue, “that all records pertaining to it seemed to have mysteriously vanished from the cathedral’s archives.”

  Was that what I had seen in the vision? He hadn’t been practicing Old Magic. He had been straightening after touching the casket. Looking at it now, I noticed for the first time how firmly he was holding it shut.

  “Do you know what’s inside?” I asked, not meaning the ashes.

  He met my gaze. Beneath his forced calm, I saw a bottomless well of horror. “As of two nights ago, yes.”

  “I was wrong,” the revenant said. “The smell of Old Magic has been coming from Sarathiel—from the ritual that nearly destroyed it. It’s been leaving a trace on everything it touches. It’s been in command of the spirits all along. The attack on Bonsaint may have been a response to the priest discovering its reliquary.”

  Leander asked, “Is Rathanael saying something to you, or are you just thinking? I can’t tell. Your face is very hard to read.”

  The question’s directness sent a ripple of shock through me. But if he meant to throw me off-balance, that wasn’t going to work. “It doesn’t like being called that,” I said.

  He let out a soft, disbelieving laugh. He was looking at me in a way I didn’t understand—an intense, burning look, as though I were the only thing that existed in the world. Around us, time seemed to have stopped. Shafts of moonlight streamed through the stained-glass windows, and motes of dust winked within them like particles of frost. “In the crypt, you said you wanted to stop me. When you said that, you meant—”