Solemnly, Sophia stepped forward to touch the effigy’s folded hands. The marble was shinier there, where countless pilgrims had touched it over the past three centuries.
Sister Julienne wasn’t watching Sophia. She was watching me, her eyes glittering through a tangled curtain of hair. “Your turn. Go on.”
Sweat itched beneath my robes from the heat of the candles, but the chill in my wrist intensified as I neared the shrine, its pain throbbing in time with my heartbeat. Bizarrely, I didn’t want to touch the effigy. The closer I got, the more my body tried to strain away from it without my permission; even my hair felt like it was trying to stand on end. I imagined this was the way most people felt at the idea of touching an enormous hairy spider, or a corpse. Meanwhile, here I was experiencing it instead at the idea of touching a holy shrine. Maybe there was something wrong with me after all.
The thought drove me forward like the punishing sting of a whip. I stepped onto the dais and planted my hand on the marble.
I regretted it immediately. The stone grabbed hold of my palm as though it were coated in birdlime. I felt a sudden, stomach-lurching plunge, and the crypt fell away into darkness. I saw nothing, heard nothing, but I knew I wasn’t alone. I was surrounded by a presence, something vast and ancient and hungry. I had an impression of feathers shifting in the dark, less a sound than a sensation—the stifling weight of imprisonment, and a devouring, anguished fury.
I knew what this presence was, what it had to be: the Fifth Order spirit bound to Saint Eugenia’s relic. A revenant, one of only seven that had ever existed, each now destroyed or imprisoned by the long-ago sacrifices of the high saints.
Slowly, I felt its regard turn in my direction, like a beacon sweeping through the dark. Terror squeezed my throat. I tore my hand from the sarcophagus and blindly stumbled away, nearly singeing my sleeve on the candles. Light and sound flooded back. I might have fallen if a bony grip hadn’t caught my shoulder.
“You sense it.” Sister Julienne’s voice rasped in my ear, puffing sour breath against my cheek. “You feel it, don’t you?” She sounded eager.
I gasped for air. The crypt’s candles burned on uninterrupted. Sophia was watching me in confusion, beginning to look alarmed. She obviously hadn’t felt anything when she’d touched the shrine. I had long suspected, but now I was certain—what had happened to me as a child had damaged me somehow, left an empty space inside. No wonder I had such an affinity for spirits. I had a place carved out for them already, waiting to be claimed.
I stared grimly at the floor until Sister Julienne released me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I answered, so clearly a lie that heat crept dully to my face as I spoke. I moved away and took Sophia’s hand. She looked genuinely frightened now, but when she clutched me back I realized with a pang of gratitude that it was Julienne who was scaring her, not me.
“Suit yourself,” Sister Julienne muttered, shuffling past us to open another door, beyond which lay the stair to the chapel, spiraling upward. “But you can’t run forever, girl. The Lady will do what She wants with you. She always does, in the end.”
TWO
News of the gaunt traveled quickly. The next day everyone was staring at me, trying to get a look at the blighted marks on my wrist. Mother Katherine had ordered Sophia and me to the infirmary after we’d come into the chapel, but little could be done for blight; it healed on its own over time, slowly fading to yellow like a bruise. I was given some tinctures for the pain and didn’t take them. I told no one what had happened in the crypt.
Life went on as usual, except for the staring, which I hated, but I was used to it. I’d grown skilled at avoiding it by taking convoluted routes through the narrow cobbled paths that wound between the convent’s buildings while I went about my chores. Sometimes the other novices shrieked when I appeared, as though I were skulking around specifically to frighten them—I was used to that, too.
But I couldn’t avoid them forever. We trained in the cloister’s enclosed courtyard three times a week, Sister Iris watching us like a hawk as we practiced forms with our censers and daggers, and there were daily prayers in the chapel. Then, every morning, the lichgate opened to admit corpse-wagons into the central courtyard.
For the past three hundred years, the Gray Sisters had carried out the sacred duty of tending to the dead. Souls that failed to receive the necessary rites would eventually corrupt and rise as spirits instead of naturally passing on to the afterlife as they had done before the Sorrow. When the corpse-wagons arrived, the most decayed bodies were rushed to the chapel’s ritual chambers, where they vanished beyond a consecrated door curling with smoke. Less urgent cases went to the fumatorium to be washed and wait their turn.
The fumatorium was named for its perpetual fog of incense, which slowed the process of corruption. The lower level, where the bodies were stored, was built underground like a cellar, dry and cool and dark. On the aboveground level, large clerestory windows filled a bright whitewashed hall with streaming shafts of light. We attended weekly lessons here, in a long room filled with tables that bore a strong resemblance to the refectory where we ate our meals. I kept that comparison to myself, however, because the tables were laid with corpses.
I’d gotten a young man this week, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, only a year or two older than myself. A faint odor of putrefaction hovered beneath the smell of incense seeping up through the floorboards. Around me, some of the other novices were wrinkling their noses and trying to persuade their partners to handle the more disgusting aspects of inspecting the bodies. Personally, I didn’t mind. I preferred the company of the dead to that of the living. They didn’t gossip about me, for one thing.
“Do you think she’ll pass the evaluation?” Marguerite was whispering, or at least thought she was. I could hear her from two tables away.
“Of course she will, but that depends on whether they’ll let her take it,” someone else whispered back. Francine.
“Why wouldn’t they?”
I opened the dead man’s mouth and looked inside. Behind me, Francine lowered her voice further. “Mathilde snuck into the chancery last week and read Mother Katherine’s ledger. Artemisia really was possessed before she came here.”
Several gasps followed this pronouncement. Marguerite squeaked, “By what? Did it say if she killed anyone?” Multiple people hushed her simultaneously.
“I don’t know,” Francine said, once the noise had died down, “but I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“I bet she did kill someone.” Marguerite’s voice throbbed with conviction. “What if that’s why her family never visits? Maybe she killed them all. I bet she’s killed lots of people.”
By now I had heaved the corpse over—difficult, without a partner—and was examining his buttocks. I really didn’t want to listen to this. I wondered what I could say to get them to stop. Finally, in the profound silence that had followed Marguerite’s speculation, I offered, “I would tell you how many, but I wasn’t keeping count.”
A chorus of shrieks erupted behind me.
“Girls!”
Everyone stopped screaming at once, except for Marguerite, who let out one final wavering bleat before Francine clapped a hand over her mouth. I saw that happen because I had looked up to watch Sister Iris swoop down on us from the other end of the hall. She looked straight-backed and severe in her plain gray robes, unadorned aside from a silver oculus pendant at her throat and a small moonstone ring that glinted against the dark-brown skin of her hand. Sister Iris commanded universal fear and respect among the novices, though by our age there was an element of pageantry to our terror. Most of us had figured out that she was a benevolent force despite her stern mannerisms and eviscerating glare. She had once stayed up all night in the infirmary when Mathilde had fallen gravely ill with sweating sickness, mopping her brow and probably threatening her not to die.