Warmth radiated from them even from a distance. I felt a shivering cramp in my stomach. A straining urge to get closer, 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.