Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(13)

The crypt suddenly seemed far away. Black spots swarmed my vision, and ringing filled my ears. “I haven’t been trained,” I heard myself say, my voice eerily calm to my own ears. “I don’t know how.”

“I’m sorry,” Sister Julienne whispered. Her eyes sank shut. “Goddess have mercy on us all.” Her hand slid from mine to fall limp on the ground.

For a long moment I couldn’t move. My thoughts turned gray and crawling. Then I remembered everyone in the chapel above, afraid, waiting, helpless. I doubled forward, bunching handfuls of my robes in unfeeling fingers.

I wasn’t in the habit of praying alone. I recited the sisters’ prayers out loud every day along with everyone else, but that was different, easier than coming up with my own words. I could barely talk to people; trying to talk to a goddess seemed like a bad idea. But I needed to know.

Lady. Please, if this is truly Your will, give me a sign.

Two things happened at once. There came a knock of metal against stone, and something cool and hard touched my knee. The reliquary had tumbled from Sister Julienne’s slack grip and had fallen against me, candlelight glinting in the opals’ depths.

Simultaneously, barely an arm’s length away, the soldier’s corpse exhaled. Mist poured in streams from his eyes and nose and mouth, gathering into a shape that hovered in the air above him. He had died, and the spirit that had possessed him was exiting his body. As soon as it re-formed, it would attack.

I had no more time to think, to hesitate, to doubt. The Lady had answered me—not once, but twice. Swallowing back bile, I took the reliquary and pried its latches open.





FOUR


For a heartbeat, nothing happened. The inside of the reliquary was lined with crimson velvet, so old that it had worn smooth and dark in places and reeked suffocatingly of dust. Saint Eugenia’s finger bone was slotted into a groove in the velvet, blackened as though by fire. I saw no evidence of the revenant bound to it, and more unsettlingly, felt nothing.

I was starting to wonder whether there was something I was supposed to do, a ritual to perform or a blessing to recite, when mist boiled upward from the bone and my world exploded into pain.

Sometimes, I sat on the dormitory’s roof before dawn to watch the bats return from the countryside. They roosted in the chapel’s bell tower by day, and just before sunrise they descended upon it in enormous flurrying clouds of black. That was what it felt like to take the revenant into my body—as though its essence funneled into me in a whirling, shrieking cloud, flashing dark behind my eyelids and battering the inside of my rib cage with a thousand wings. It was too much. I couldn’t contain it all.

A scream tore from my throat. Convulsions overtook my body. Through red streaks of agony, I felt my spine arching and my heels gouging the floor. Inside me, something howled, and my own thoughts disintegrated before the onslaught. My fingers twitched, then curled into claws.

I hadn’t thought it would feel like this, like being possessed again, a thousand times worse than the ashgrim. I remembered what Mother Katherine had said in the garden. I wasn’t a match for a high relic; the revenant was trying to overpower me.

I couldn’t let it. I forced a resisting arm downward inch by inch to reach for my misericorde. I wrenched it free from its sheath and pressed the flat of the blade against my wrist.

My skin sizzled where the consecrated metal touched. The dagger fell from my nerveless fingers and I collapsed, relieved, as the revenant’s power shrank back. But spasms still racked my body, and I couldn’t do much more than twitch and gasp against the flagstones.

That was when I heard the voice.

“Get up, human.” The rasping command came from everywhere and nowhere, slithering between the spaces of my thoughts. “Do you want to die? Get up!”

I wondered if I had lost my mind. Spirits weren’t supposed to be able to talk. Even while possessing me, the ashgrim had only expressed itself through simple urges, flashes of rage and hunger that I’d barely been able to tell apart from my own desires. Most of the time, it hadn’t even felt like a separate entity. But I remembered, touching Eugenia’s effigy, how different the revenant had felt compared to the less powerful spirits—

“If you don’t get up, I will make you. I’ll tear your mind apart, if that’s what it takes.”

Yes, it could speak. I heard myself laugh, a horrible mirthless croak.

“What’s wrong with you?” the voice hissed. “Are you mad? That’s just what I need, a deranged nun for a vessel.” And then, “Move!”

From somewhere inside me, the revenant pushed. I rolled over in time to see a spirit’s ghostly claws rake through the air where my face had been a moment before. Instinctively, I reached for my misericorde.

“No,” said the revenant. “Not that. Take the dead soldier’s sword.”

The sword lay within reach. Staggering upright, I eyed the heavy length of steel. “I’ve never—”

“That doesn’t matter. Pick it up. Now!”

I wasn’t about to start taking orders from a spirit, but I sensed movement nearby and knew I couldn’t hesitate. I lunged for the weapon, only to stumble an extra step forward when it proved impossibly light in my grasp, almost weightless. Normally my hand’s weakened muscles wouldn’t be able to grip something this heavy securely enough to use it in combat, but that didn’t seem to impede the revenant.