“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.