Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(102)

That struck a nerve. It stopped and looked up at me through a cage of Leander’s fingers. Deep within his devastated green eyes, I saw something familiar gazing back at me. Pleading.

“But you have found out, haven’t you?” I heard the words as though they were spoken by someone else, hollow and cold. “Too late.”

Sarathiel—or Leander, I couldn’t tell—took one ragged, struggling breath, then another. Leander’s face twisted. A sob wrenched from his chest.

I didn’t dare breathe. “Leander?”

His face lifted: pale, emotionless, streaked with tears. “No.”

I didn’t have time to react. The Divine’s body tumbled to the floor between us with a sick, heavy thump. Ignoring it, Sarathiel lunged forward to seize me, Leander’s fingernails digging into the flesh of my arms. It bent his head over my shoulder, turning his face toward my ear.

“I do not need you to speak,” it said, Leander’s breath hot on my neck. “Rathanael will do that for you. Won’t you, Rathanael? I’ll put your vessel in a little dark room and see how long it takes you to go mad and scream the truth. Or perhaps I will try something else. I will carve off all your vessel’s fingers, one by one. Then her nose. Her eyes. It may not make the vessel talk. But it will make you talk.”

A knock came on the door. Sarathiel stopped, panting.

“What?” it inquired, still crouched over me.

“The search—the search has been successful,” a voice on the other side stammered. “We’ve found someone willing to speak to the Divine.”

Sarathiel made no visible effort to calm itself. It simply was calm, as though it had closed a pair of shutters over Leander’s face. Eerily like him, it smoothed his black robes as it stood. It stepped neatly over the Divine’s sprawled body on its way across the room.

“The Divine is not to be disturbed,” it said. “She is resting. I will meet them in the hall.”

After it had slipped out the door, I snuck over to place my ear against the wood. Outside I heard a familiar teary, quavering voice. Marguerite. She was sobbing, “I know where it is. I can take you to the reliquary.”





TWENTY-SEVEN


I didn’t know where we were going. Marguerite wouldn’t look at me during the walk through the cathedral, her tearstained face downcast. Occasionally I heard her sniffling, and wondered if someone had hurt her. She had been taken away for questioning while I had been returned to the tower for several more hours to wait, watching the red stain of dawn bleed into the horizon beyond the window’s bars, imagining her being tortured, picturing the Divine’s forces converging on Saint Eugenia’s reliquary and destroying it in hundreds of different ways. “Sorry,” she had repeated tearfully, “I’m sorry,” as they had led her away.

Now I felt as though I were on my way to an execution. The shackles weighted my wrists like millstones. Soldiers from the city guard marched around me, surrounded by a company of the heavily armored cathedral guard, their combined footsteps rapping crisply from the walls.

“Sarathiel has been busy,” the revenant observed. “All those knights are thralls.”

I snuck the cathedral guards a sideways glance. They were moving a little stiffly beneath their armor, but with their helmets on and their visors lowered, I couldn’t see any sign that they were possessed. The same appeared true of the soldiers marching obliviously at their sides.

I was sure they believed they were acting on the Divine’s orders. For now, her absence didn’t seem suspicious. Sarathiel had spoken to the attendants and left behind the possessed orphrey so that it would seem she had company in her chambers as she slept. It had until early afternoon, perhaps, before someone grew concerned and insisted on checking on her.

The cathedral’s brooding stone corridors gently yielded to morning light, which striped the floor as it spilled through the windows and filled the air with a soft, rosy glow. Sarathiel paused once to lay Leander’s slender hand on a marble bench beside a window. Bathed in its radiance, his pale, finely sculpted face a contrast to the severity of his black robes, he looked like a painting, transported outside of time. I wondered if this was a place where the Divine had often sat in prayer. When Sarathiel finally turned away, I couldn’t tell for certain, but I thought Leander’s hair shone whiter.

We passed through the arches of the cloister and into a courtyard. The sun hadn’t reached it yet, blocked by the cathedral’s surrounding bulk. A damp, moldering chill pervaded, as though hundreds of dreary autumns and bitter winters lingered in the ancient stone. Ravens roosted above, dark blemishes dotting the buttresses and grotesques. They shifted restively, but didn’t raise an alarm.

“Interesting,” the revenant observed. “It seems they can’t easily sense the spirits through the knights’ consecrated armor. I doubt Sarathiel planned that—it never was one of the cleverest of us revenants. Once, when we were a good deal younger, Malthas and I nearly convinced it to try possessing a duck.”

I couldn’t tell whether it was prattling out of nerves, or a vain attempt to cheer me up. I had spent much of the walk trying to recall how it felt to be alone inside my head. Not long ago, the quiet would have come as a blessed relief. Now the idea seemed bleak beyond imagining. Perhaps, with the Lady’s mercy, the revenant and I would find each other again in the afterlife.