I was still holding the book. I glanced back at the entries before and after the missing page. The final entry read, Year of Our Lady 1155, A tapestry depicting the Battle of the Lakes. And the next, after where the page had been sliced out: Year of Our Lady 1155, A marble statue of Saint Agnes.
I thought aloud, “Whatever it was, we know it was given to the cathedral in 1155, around fifty years after the War of Martyrs ended.” That didn’t help narrow things down much. I slid the book back onto the shelf and turned to go, picking up the lantern.
A flash of gold caught my eye. The light had reflected from another book, its pages shining brilliantly even through a layer of dust. I paused.
“You don’t need to look at that,” the revenant said hastily, which made up my mind. I turned back, raising the lantern.
It was an illuminated manuscript. I had seen illuminated manuscripts in Naimes, but never one like this. Unable to help myself, I leaned closer.
The open pages depicted a swirling mass of gaunts, painted in vivid color and shining with gilt. The scene seemed to move dizzily before my eyes. At any moment one of the gaunts’ heads might turn, its grasping hands might close, the withered stalks of grain woven around the border might rustle in the wind. I felt like if I leaned too close, I might tumble into the image as though through a window.
“The Great Famine of 1214,” I said under my breath. The picture didn’t need words. I simply knew, such was the skill of its creator.
With careful reverence, I removed one of my gloves and set my fingertips to the edge of the thick vellum page. Another illustration awaited me on the next, this one of a plague specter trailing its miasma as intricate designs through a mazelike array of city streets. The closer I looked, the more details I picked out. A cat peeking from a window. A child’s doll abandoned on the cobblestones. Three rats investigating a spilled tankard.
Now that I had started looking, I couldn’t stop. I turned more pages, each seeming to breathe with life, even as they depicted images of Death. An ashgrim, its fire-blackened skull half-concealed within a whirl of smoke and silver embers. A diagram highlighting the differences between a witherkin and a wretchling, enclosed in interlocking circles whose scrollwork seemed to spin like wheels before my dazzled eyes. I paged past shades and feverlings, undines and furies. The whole time, at the back of my mind, I wondered what was here that the revenant hadn’t wanted me to see.
Then I reached the manuscript’s final section. The introductory page was ornately lettered, shimmering with gilt. It read THE SEVEN REVENANTS, HERALDS OF DEATH.
SIXTEEN
Silence came from the revenant.
I thought of the faded tapestry in Naimes, the one of Saint Eugenia confronting the revenant, and knew I had to look, even if I ended up regretting it. Slowly, I turned the page.
The spirit that confronted me was unlike anything I had seen before. It was a skeletal, six-winged figure radiating a starburst of lines that I took to signify light, like the rays of the sun. A halo shone behind its head. It wore a half-melted crown, the gold dripping in shining rivulets down its skull. At the bottom, letters read CIMELIARCH THE BRIGHT.
I turned the page. The next revenant lurked in a pall of shadow, only the bones of its arm and hand clearly visible, holding a set of scales. This one was labeled ARCHITRAVE THE DIM.
A chill crawled down my spine as I turned more pages, met each time with unearthly skeletal figures, veiled or crowned or holding objects—the scale, a sword, a chalice—and all of them winged, some with a single pair, others more. And beneath them, spelled out in gilt: CAHETHAL THE MAD. OREMUS THE LOST. MALTHAS THE HOLLOW. SARATHIEL THE OBSCURED.
“You have names,” I realized aloud.
“Names given to us by humans,” it said in distaste.
I gazed at Sarathiel the Obscured, taking in its remote, beautiful countenance, the eyes serenely half-closed. A fine crack ran diagonally across its features, dividing them in two, as though its face were a porcelain mask. Mist poured from the tipped chalice held in its skeletal hand, pooling beneath its silver pinions. Three sets of wings framed its body, one pair spread and the others folded. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that revenants had wings—I had felt them. But the images almost defied comprehension.
No one knew how the revenants had been created. Perhaps they weren’t human souls. Maybe there was nothing human about them at all.
The silence lengthened. At last the revenant said, “Sarathiel is the one who was destroyed by Saint Agnes. I hear that Oremus’s relic was destroyed as well when it stopped cooperating with humans, and Cahethal went insane and buried its last vessel beneath a rockslide. Cahethal’s reliquary might still exist intact, but if it does, it’s trapped beneath a mountain where the humans can’t reach it. There are only four of us left.”
I hadn’t heard any of that before. I’d known about what happened with Saint Agnes, but not the others. Only four high relics remained. That knowledge wouldn’t have troubled me a few months ago, when the idea of needing high relics to protect Loraille had seemed like something out of an old tale, but now it seemed woefully inadequate.
If Sarathiel, Oremus, and Cahethal were gone, that left Cimeliarch, Architrave, Malthas, and one other. I felt inexplicably certain that I hadn’t yet seen the revenant—my revenant.
I turned the final page.
RATHANAEL THE SCORNED, read the lettering.
Above it hung a skeleton twined in a ragged shroud, with two pairs of tattered, crowlike wings. Its fleshless skull grinned out at me, the eye sockets bound behind dark wrappings. It held an iron torch clasped in front of its rib cage, the top spiked like a crown, the flames roaring up, enveloping its body and wings in fire. The silver of its form had a dark, tarnished look like an old mirror, but I couldn’t tell if that was intentional or a result of the gilt flaking with age.
Some powerful spirits held objects, like riveners did swords. It represented something important about their nature, but I had no idea what the torch might signify and doubted the revenant did either—only how ironic it was that I’d ended up with the revenant associated with fire.
I absorbed its deathly visage, trying and failing to match it with the voice in my head. The revenant had devoured the populations of entire cities; it was also the entity who ordered me to eat my pottage.
“I’ll have you know that I’m very good-looking by undead standards,” the revenant remarked, after I had stared for a long time without speaking.
I frowned in annoyance. Just like that, the spell was broken. “Why are you called ‘the Scorned’？” I asked.
“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.