She said in her gentle voice, concerned, “I noticed you had gone missing—I grew worried. I called an early end to the procession. You’ve been so unlike yourself these past days.” She noticed me first, followed by the casket in Leander’s hands. Her eyes widened. “What are you doing?” She dismissed the attendant with a gesture.
Her beseeching gaze lingered on me; I saw the moment she figured out who I was. She looked back at Leander in shock. “Leander, you must put that down,” she said softly.
“I know everything,” he replied, unmoved.
“You don’t understand. Please.”
It came to me in a flood. Someone had tampered with the cathedral’s records. Someone had repeatedly sent Leander away from the city to hinder his investigation. Only one person in Bonsaint had the authority to issue such commands.
Perhaps someone had even purposefully moved the casket’s lid and left it ajar.
The Divine lunged for the casket with a cry of despair. At the same time, Leander dove back out the door. Together, we slammed it in her face.
A pause followed. Leander wore a look of disbelief at what he had just done. I imagined the Divine standing on the other side, stunned, having probably never been treated with that much disrespect at any point in her entire life. Then she let out a shout and started banging on the door.
“The bench,” the revenant said. I left Leander with his back against the door to grab the wooden bench standing against the wall nearby. It had to be at least twice a man’s weight, a huge old antique bulging with carvings, but the revenant wasn’t trying to hide itself now. When I finished dragging it into place, Leander was staring at me.
“This way,” he said, emerging from his trance. He wheeled back toward the nave, his robes flying behind him as his pace broke from a jog into a sprint. Behind us, the door shuddered ineffectually with blows from the Divine’s fists. Then all fell silent.
“I doubt that’s a positive development,” the revenant remarked, right before wood exploded across the transept.
I paused to look over my shoulder. The Divine stumbled from the wrecked doorway wearing an expression of piteous shock, clutching a bloody-knuckled hand to her chest. From her robes, she had drawn forth an amulet set with an amber stone—a rivener relic. She drew up short when she saw the sacristan’s body. “No,” she whispered, in what seemed like genuine grief, then looked back at us with red-rimmed eyes. She began to raise her scepter.
The revenant blazed to its full power so quickly that I staggered and had to steady myself against a pillar. Silver flames rolled over my cloak, dripping ghostly embers onto the carpet.
“Run,” I told Leander.
The fury’s shriek rippled across the cathedral, summoning a wind that lifted the draperies and sent dust streaming from the chandeliers. The noise ground harmlessly in my ears, held back by the revenant’s power. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Leander vanish into one of the doors in the opposite transept.
With a cry of frustration, the Divine flung out her other hand. The pews beside me burst into kindling. As I leaped behind a pillar to avoid the flying shards, the candelabra fixed to the pillar’s side violently erupted into flame, roaring toward the vault in a twisting column of fire. When I stumbled back, another pew exploded in my path. The Divine was panting, her white and gold vestments smeared with blood.
No one could wield more than one relic at a time, not even a Divine, but she was switching from one to the other so rapidly she might as well be. And she was incredibly strong—I had never heard of an ashgrim relic being wielded like that before. My cheeks still stung from the heat.
But her relics also gave her weaknesses, as I knew intimately from my time with the revenant. I scrambled toward the sacristan’s body and yanked at the censer attached to his belt. As I had hoped, the incense was lit; he must have noticed something amiss before he died.
“What are you doing?” The Divine sounded upset. She had paused, the rivener amulet clenched in her hand. “Please, leave him alone.”
She couldn’t attack me with the rivener’s power without potentially mangling the sacristan’s body, and she wasn’t willing to risk that, I noted with surprise. I finished tugging the censer free, then charged her.
“Stop!” she cried, throwing out her hand.
A fissure split the floor in front of me, fracturing the flagstones. It wasn’t a calculated attack; I barely stumbled as the cracks raced beneath my feet toward the sanctuary, zig-zagged up the steps, and struck the altar with a great clap of sundered stone, breaking it in two. The Divine froze with her hand still outstretched, staring in horror at what she had done. Then I tackled her, and she went down in a tangle of robes.
We clawed at each other like a pair of brawling novices. Holding my breath, I shoved the censer close to her face; she coughed and choked on the smoke. When she turned her head aside, I drew my dagger. Her grip on me slackened as she felt the misericorde’s point press against her throat.
“Please,” she whispered, hoarse from the incense. Tears glittered in her eyes. “I’ve waited for so long. This isn’t—this isn’t fair, this isn’t how it was supposed to happen…”
She trailed off, distracted by a flicker of motion. Leander had reappeared in the transept, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder. Looking hunted, he swiftly crossed to the other side and tried a different door. I guessed that the clerics returning from the procession had blocked his escape route. By now they had to be sensing some of the chaos transpiring in the chapel.
We were nearly out of time. I knew the clerics wouldn’t pause to listen to our mad-sounding story, not after they discovered us attacking the Divine.
Thinking furiously, I didn’t react quickly enough when she wrenched an arm from my grasp. Too late, I noticed that she was still holding the scepter. The fury’s shriek rippled past, distorting the air with its power. Across the nave, Leander fell to his knees. The casket tumbled from his hands.
As though time had slowed, I watched it bounce once and then split open, flinging Saint Agnes’s ashes in a powdery spray across the carpet.
We all sucked in a breath, staring. A heartbeat passed. The ashes looked utterly harmless. Then something vast and silver erupted from them like a great flower opening, a bloom of wings unfurling. The force of it flung me aside as though I weighed nothing. My head cracked against a pew, and my vision exploded white.
Through the ringing in my ears, a thread of sound emerged, whining like a mosquito.
“Nun, get up,” the revenant urged, shrill with panic. “Get up!”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even blink. The scarlet threads of the carpet swam into focus in front of my nose, each individual filament lined in silver.
“Nun!” The revenant shook me frantically.
A cool breeze stirred my hair. I had the impression of something colossal bending over me as I lay stunned on the floor, studying me as though I were an insect. I recalled how Sarathiel had looked in the illuminated manuscript, its serenely masked face and half-closed eyes, its multitude of wings. Monstrous but somehow also holy—a figure that could be cast in bronze above an altarpiece, worshipped as much as feared.
The revenant was still trying to rouse me. “Artemisia!” it shrieked, and then its presence flooded my veins like fire.