This time, I felt a stir. “Stop,” the feeble voice whispered.
My hand paused. I felt my pulse beating in my throat. “Revenant. What happened to you?”
“The altar—made to destroy a revenant. That’s what killed… the other one. Sarathiel.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Talk about this… later.”
It thought I wanted to talk about the Old Magic. To resume planning again, to figure out our next step. I said, “I meant if there was anything I could do to help you.”
There came a long, uncertain pause. “Sleep,” it whispered at last.
* * *
I slept and woke and slept again, occasionally creeping back to the pool to drink. Whatever the altar had done to the revenant had hurt me, too, though I suspected what I was feeling was the revenant’s pain, just as it felt mine.
Time passed. Eventually I jolted to wakefulness in the near dark, in a cold sweat with my stomach in knots. I had a dreamlike impression of watching some rats go scurrying past—not a dream, I realized, as I heard telltale squeaking and scuffling, and felt the revenant’s senses chasing after their tails as they fled into some dark crevice.
“That’s impossible,” it hissed, as though it were arguing with someone nearby.
Under other circumstances, I would have been relieved to hear the revenant sounding better. But I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that I had walked in on it speaking to an invisible third presence, an impression heightened by the darkness and a prickling sensation of being watched. It was harder to see now—most of the shades had gone, possibly frightened away. I reached for the dagger and found it already in my hand.
“What did you sense?” I asked.
I almost regretted speaking. An unsettled silence came from the revenant, as though it hadn’t noticed I’d woken up and was disturbed by the failure of its own perception. Then it said, “Nothing. I was mistaken. I’m not entirely—myself.”
I didn’t need it to tell me that. Its presence felt tremulous and strange, like it had risen from a sickbed too early. If it were a person, I would make it lie down.
It went on feverishly, “There’s precedent, you see. Occasionally, in the relic, I used to sense things—things that weren’t there… Nun, we need to get out,” it said suddenly. “Back to the surface.”
I hesitated, wary. “The Clerisy’s going to be looking for us. Is there anything dangerous down here?”
It seemed to consider the question. Then it said, “Me,” in a low tone that made the hair stand up all over my body.
I rolled to my feet and made for the doorway at once, casting around for my marks on the tunnel wall. There. The scratches were illuminated by the wispy light of a lone shade, which fled as we approached, flitting ahead. In its fragile, quivering glow, I made out another scratch farther along the tunnel, then a third, marking a fork in the passageway.
“There’s a grate not too far from here.”
“Hurry,” the revenant said, and then a moment later, “Hurry, you wretched nun,” with more force behind the command.
“I almost thought you were done calling me that,” I said, gripped by the sick certainty that something bad would happen if it stopped speaking. Now it felt less as though the revenant needed to lie down, and more like I needed to keep it awake.
When it didn’t respond, I went a little faster, stumbling over the uneven ground. I could see the shade ahead of us, but my immediate surroundings were pitch-black. As its light receded, the tunnel grew darker and darker. Soon I would no longer be able to make out the marks. I searched for something to say, anything to break the silence.
“At least neither of us is afraid of the dark,” I gasped, out of breath.
Silence emanated from the revenant, and suddenly I remembered the way my hands had begun shaking in the ostler’s room when it had made me light a fire for no reason; how it had made me sleep with the loft’s door open, letting in the light.
My hands were starting to shake again now, and there was a terrible pressure in my chest like a fist closing around my lungs, slowly squeezing.
“You are,” I realized aloud.
“I suppose you find that amusing,” it said in a sinuous, deadly voice, with a suggestion of hysteria bubbling underneath.
“No,” I said, feeling extremely out of my depth.
“You’re a nun, after all. You’ll be glad to stuff me back into the reliquary as soon as you’re finished with me—”
“Revenant.”
“I know you will. It’s what all of you do, you loathsome nuns. It’s what Eugenia did—even after she promised—”
“Revenant!”
“—after she promised she wouldn’t sacrifice herself, and you’re just like her—you would throw your life away in an instant if you thought it would serve your accursed Lady—”
Its voice had increased in pitch. Dizziness churned through me; my heart was pounding shallowly and too fast. I thought I might pass out. “Revenant, calm down.”
“Calm down?” it hissed. “Calm down? Do you imagine that you can even begin to comprehend what the reliquary feels like, after a few years in a pathetic little human shed? I was trapped there for centuries in the silence and the dark. I’ll kill all of you before I let you put me back. I’ll kill all of you,” it snarled, and seized me like a dog with a carcass, driving me to my knees.
In an absurd twist of fate, the grate lay just ahead. I could see it now from my angle on the ground, a square of watery gray light in the tunnel’s ceiling. But I couldn’t get there, because the revenant was trying to possess me.
Its presence swarmed through me, foul and oily with malice, blotting out my senses. Blood thundered in my ears; the patch of sky showing through the grate pulsed from light to dark. I brought the dagger to my arm and heard my skin sizzle, but the revenant only thrashed harder. I tasted copper.
Before, in Naimes, I had thought that I’d fought it off at its full strength. Now I wondered if it had been holding back.
I was at its mercy. I didn’t even have the reliquary. When I had let Marguerite keep it, I had been placing my trust in the revenant as much as in her, because I had known that threatening to destroy the relic was no longer an option. I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it—not after coming to see the revenant as a person. I couldn’t have threatened it that way any more than I could have kicked that scared goat in Naimes to make it obey, or locked my own silent, shivering ten-year-old self back in the shed.
As it fought me, it kept repeating things like, “I’ll kill you all,” and “I’ll rend your miserable soul to shreds,” except it struck me suddenly that it might not even know what it was saying. I shouldn’t have told it to calm down, because it couldn’t, any more than I had been able to overcome the stink and heat of the effigy’s fire or ignore the people staring at me in Elaine’s house.
That was when I realized it wasn’t trying to possess me on purpose.
Not that the revelation helped; I still didn’t know what to do. Grasping, I thought of the goat again, the one that had been kicked and hit and yelled at until all it had known to do was bite. Talking to it had seemed to make a difference, even though it hadn’t understood the words.