Suddenly, I could move. My arm stretched out. My hand gripped the pew. I pulled my feet under myself and stood. Except it wasn’t me controlling my body; it wasn’t me who lifted my head to the nightmare hanging suspended overhead, the ravaged face of Sarathiel.
“This is my human,” the revenant snarled through my mouth, and blazed into a torrent of silver flame.
As the ghost-fire roared up around me, obscuring my vision, I felt strangely calm. I tried to make sense of what I had seen. The six wings, some half-furled and others spread, their ghostly immensity stretching from balcony to balcony. The singed edges of the pinions, blackened and curled. And the terrible face, where the diagonal crack in the mask had split and one half had fallen away, leaving it preternaturally beautiful on one side, a bare and grinning skull on the other.
When the flames cleared, Sarathiel was no longer there. Silver embers danced in the air above the nave, winking out one by one. The disturbed draperies settled back into place with whispers of silk against stone. Except for the epicenter of destruction around us, the cathedral looked eerily untouched, peaceful in its darkened majesty. From the stained-glass windows stretching above, Saint Eugenia gazed down with a hint of a smile.
Then, voices. Shouts of alarm. The thump and groan of the cathedral’s doors shuddering open, bringing into view the shimmering glow of hundreds of candles gathered outside. At the periphery of my vision I had vague impressions of shocked faces lining up along the gallery, but I couldn’t see them properly. My eyes weren’t looking in that direction. When I tried to make them do it, nothing happened.
Leander stirred. My head jerked around sharply at the first sign of movement. I watched as he attempted to climb to his feet, slumped down as though he were exhausted or had forgotten how to stand, then tried again.
The Divine gave a little cry and hurried over, her bloodstained skirts bunched in her hands. She helped him upright, clutching at him.
“That has to be the most idiotic human I’ve ever seen,” the revenant marveled in disgust, in my voice, out loud.
If the Divine heard it, she gave no sign. She was too busy tenderly lifting Leander’s face, looking into his eyes. “Sarathiel,” she breathed.
TWENTY-FIVE
No one else was close enough to hear her say it. The clerics were arrayed along the galleries and balconies, standing in the shadowed arches around the nave, emerging from cover like timid creatures after a storm. The cathedral guards reacted first, starting forward with a coordinated clanking of armor. The Divine looked up and noticed her audience for the first time. She was cradling Leander’s head protectively, lost in her own world.
“Stay back!” she called out breathlessly. I didn’t think she was faking her distress.
Shocked murmurs filled the vault. At once, I saw how this scene appeared. The clerics had sensed a revenant, but they thought it was my revenant, its power too entangled with Sarathiel’s to be told apart. The sacristan lay dead nearby, with his censer at my feet; the Divine was bloody and distraught, Leander seemingly injured. Behind us, the altar had been sundered in two. And I was the only person who could be responsible.
I took a step forward, nearly lost my balance, and caught myself against the back of a pew. At least it felt as though I did; but it was the revenant making me move, each action accompanied by a clutch of uncertainty as I discovered what my body was about to do.
My head was pounding, my stomach a sour knot of terror and fury. An image assaulted me of the city going up in a pillar of silver flame, the soul of every soldier and cleric and civilian in Bonsaint extinguished like candles, blazing so brightly that even the holy sisters in Chantclere would turn their eyes northward in fear. No one would be able to touch us then—not the Clerisy, not Sarathiel. My fingers tightened on the pew’s back until the wood splintered.
Once, I had believed that this was what the revenant wanted. Now I felt the trembling in my arms and knew that it was afraid. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I reached out anyway—a silent offer to take over again, like an extended hand. The revenant hesitated. Then, in a grateful rush, it withdrew.
The next breath that I drew in was a breath at my command. Experimentally, I tried turning my head to look at the clerics on the balcony, and my body obeyed.
Their expressions of dread turned to confusion. A ripple of relief passed through the cathedral. They could no longer sense the revenant.
“They can’t sense Sarathiel, either,” the revenant said, its presence inside me a roiling tangle of emotions. “It’s hiding itself. It will try to impersonate the priest.”
Nearby, the Divine had succeeded in drawing Leander to his feet, though he was still leaning heavily against her. “Confessor Leander is unharmed!” she called out. “He will—he will recover from the attack. Bring the shackles of Saint Augustin, quickly. Artemisia of Naimes—” She broke off, listening as Leander murmured something against her breast. Then she finished, “Artemisia cannot control Saint Eugenia’s relic.”
I wondered what he had said to her—or rather, what Sarathiel had said to her. Clerics scattered at once to do her bidding.
In the following hush I grew aware of a dull, muted rumble, like the crashing of surf against a distant shore. It was coming from the candlelit crowd gathered outside the cathedral’s doors. Their movements were restless, threatening to press inside. They were beginning to chant a word. At first I couldn’t make out what it was, but a familiar cadence emerged as more voices joined in and the rhythm strengthened, thrumming through the chapel like a pulse.
“Artemisia. Artemisia. Artemisia.”
The wind shifted direction, blowing in a gust of night air that smelled of smoke and sweat and the wild places beyond the city, untouched by humankind. And with it came a dangerous energy, the unleashed violence of a building storm. I felt it prickling across my skin; I could almost taste it. The hair stood up on my arms.
“Artemisia. Artemisia! Artemisia!”
“Close the doors!” ordered the Divine, wide-eyed.
Guards scrambled to obey, dimming the noise to a muffled thunder. The bar fell into place with a reverberating thud that reminded me of the day the thralls had attacked in Naimes. Then, the doors hadn’t succeeded in holding back the Dead. I wondered if they would hold back the living now.
I didn’t dare try speaking to the revenant. There were too many people watching me; they might see my lips move. All of them ignorant of how close they were to death, trapped inside the cathedral with an unbound Fifth Order spirit. I felt as though I were an open flame held aloft beside dry kindling. One wrong move could ignite everything.
The Divine worriedly touched Leander’s cheek, smoothed back his hair. He tolerated this for a moment, then looked at me. No—it looked at me. Leander’s face appeared the same, but something dead and ruined and ancient gazed out from within his eyes. He stepped toward me, the Divine clutching at his arm.
“We must not kill her,” the Divine whispered. “You promised there would be no more killing. What did you do to my sacristan? When I moved the casket’s lid for you—”
Leander’s expression was implacable, serene. “One life. That was all I required. And he was old, Gabrielle. I could sense his strength ebbing—he wouldn’t have lived out the winter. He would have made the sacrifice himself if he had known the truth.”