Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(3)
“I’m not a baby,” she protested, brave now that the danger had passed. But as I poured her onto the ground, she abruptly seized my robes, jolting a stab of pain from my wrist. “Look!”
Light seeped into the tunnel ahead, throwing a crooked shadow across the wall. It was accompanied by the sound of hoarse, indistinct muttering. Relief flooded me. I knew of only one person who would be wandering down here talking to herself.
“Don’t worry. It isn’t another spirit. It’s just Sister Julienne.”
Sophia clutched me tighter. “That’s worse,” she whispered.
As Sister Julienne shuffled into view, still muttering, her face hidden by draggled waist-length hair lit white by the lantern, I had to admit that Sophia had a point.
Julienne was the convent’s holy woman. She dwelled as a hermit in the chapel’s crypt, watching over the holy relic of Saint Eugenia. Her unwashed robes reeked so pungently of sheep’s tallow that my eyes began to water at her approach.
Sophia stared, eyes wide as saucers; then she knelt and scooped up my dagger, silently pressing it into my hand.
Sister Julienne didn’t seem to notice. We might as well have been invisible. She shuffled past us, close enough that her hem trailed over our shoes, up to the niche that Sophia had just vacated. I strained to make out what she was mumbling as she poked the disturbed bones back into order.
“Heard it down here for years, moaning and wailing… finally quiet now… Sister Rosemary, wasn’t it? Yes, yes. A hard year, a terrible famine, so many dead…”
My skin prickled. I didn’t know of anyone named Sister Rosemary. But I suspected that if I checked the convent’s oldest records, I would find her.
Sophia tugged on my robes. She whispered in my ear, without taking her eyes from Sister Julienne, “Is it true she eats novices?”
“Ha!” Sister Julienne exclaimed, wheeling on us. Sophia started. “Is that what they’re saying about me now? Good! Nothing better than a nice, tasty novice. Well, come along, girls, come along.” She turned and began to shuffle back the way she had come, the lantern swinging in her wrinkled hand.
“Where is she taking us?” Sophia demanded, following reluctantly. She still hadn’t let go of my robes.
“We must be going through the crypt. It’s the safest way back to the chapel.”
Truthfully, this was only a guess, but as Sister Julienne took us through a series of doors fitted into the roughly hewn tunnels, it seemed increasingly likely. I was sure of it when we reached the final door, a heavy black monstrosity of consecrated iron. The lantern’s light leaped over its banded surface as Julienne opened it and ushered us inside.
The air eddied with ribbons of incense smoke, so thick that my eyes stung and Sophia coughed into her sleeve. We had entered a stone chamber, pillared and vaulted. Robed statues stood in the archways between the columns, their hooded faces shadowed despite the candles that guttered at their feet in puddles of dripping wax. Sophia peered around suspiciously, as though searching for a cauldron hidden in one of the corners, or maybe the gnawed bones of past novices scattered across the floor. But the flagstones were bare except for the holy symbols carved here and there, their shapes worn nearly invisible with age.
Sister Julienne let us gawk for a moment, then impatiently beckoned us onward. “Touch the shrine now, for Saint Eugenia’s blessing. Be quick about it.”
The shrine dominated the middle of the crypt: a white marble platform with a life-sized effigy of Saint Eugenia lying atop the lid of the sarcophagus, her beautiful stone face serene in death. The candles arranged around her body cast a shifting glow over her features, lending her a faint enigmatic smile. She had died a martyr at fourteen years of age after sacrificing herself to bind a Fifth Order spirit to her bones. The spirit was said to have been so powerful that it burned her entire body to ash except for a single joint of her finger, a relic that now rested inside the sarcophagus in unseen splendor. It wasn’t like the minor relic in Sister Lucinde’s ring, useful for lighting the occasional candle. It was a high relic, wielded only in times of desperate need.
Solemnly, Sophia stepped forward to touch the effigy’s folded hands. The marble was shinier there, where countless pilgrims had touched it over the past three centuries.
Sister Julienne wasn’t watching Sophia. She was watching me, her eyes glittering through a tangled curtain of hair. “Your turn. Go on.”
Sweat itched beneath my robes from the heat of the candles, but the chill in my wrist intensified as I neared the shrine, its pain throbbing in time with my heartbeat. Bizarrely, I didn’t want to touch the effigy. The closer I got, the more my body tried to strain away from it without my permission; even my hair felt like it was trying to stand on end. I imagined this was the way most people felt at the idea of touching an enormous hairy spider, or a corpse. Meanwhile, here I was experiencing it instead at the idea of touching a holy shrine. Maybe there was something wrong with me after all.
The thought drove me forward like the punishing sting of a whip. I stepped onto the dais and planted my hand on the marble.
I regretted it immediately. The stone grabbed hold of my palm as though it were coated in birdlime. I felt a sudden, stomach-lurching plunge, and the crypt fell away into darkness. I saw nothing, heard nothing, but I knew I wasn’t alone. I was surrounded by a presence, something vast and ancient and hungry. I had an impression of feathers shifting in the dark, less a sound than a sensation—the stifling weight of imprisonment, and a devouring, anguished fury.