Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(77)

“Show me!”

“Nun—”

Worriedly, Charles called out to someone, “I think she’s delirious!”

Perhaps the revenant feared that if I didn’t shut up, someone would figure out I was talking to it. It relented, and my vision shifted. This time I was prepared to see the world through its senses—or thought I would be. But there was more than just the translucent, smoked-glass tint to the world, the muffling of scents and sounds. Something impossible was happening in the square. Silver forms were darting through the crowd, hunting, swooping toward the soldiers and the clerics on the platform. Spirits.

“Blight wraiths,” the revenant supplied.

But where had they come from?

Anticipating the question, it tugged my eyes toward the spirit we had exorcised. It hovered above the crowd, invisible to the Unsighted multitude below. Pointed slippers encased its skeletal feet; lavish robes hung from its emaciated frame. A miter crowned its head, the trailing ribbons framing a withered face, the desiccated skin stretched tightly over bone, giving its hollow-cheeked visage an expression of sour disdain.

Below it lay a scattering of large black lumps on the cobbles, like doused coals—bodies.

As I watched, it bent to lay its thin hand on the head of a passing woman as though in benediction. The moment it touched her, she collapsed to the street, dead of blight. It assumed a stance of prayer above her, and the golden light swirling within her chilled to cold, lifeless silver.

A white vicar.

These were the worst of the Fourth Order spirits, risen from clerics who had met violent ends. They were so feared that even clerics who died of natural causes were given elaborate rites to protect their souls from any risk of corruption. Supposedly, their kind had been eradicated from Loraille centuries ago.

The white vicar pointed, and the silver funneled out of the dead woman’s body, taking shape as it went. The newly formed wraith joined the others streaming through the crowd.

The revenant must have decided I’d had enough, because my senses flooded back in a roar of fire. The effigy had transformed into a tower of flame, lapping out folds of greasy black smoke, the heat of it blistering my face even from across the square. Everything was lit red with deep blue shadows in between, and embers swirled in the air overhead.

My eyes caught on a soldier engaging a blight wraith nearby, its silver glow illuminating the openmouthed terror on his face. I wasn’t conscious of reacting, but I must have tried to throw off Charles’s grip. Another soldier came into view, steadying me, blocking the wraith from sight.

“Nun,” the revenant snapped. “Nun! You’ve done enough. Let them help you.”

I shook my head, both in denial and in a hopeless attempt to think. As though jostled loose, a terrible thought sprang into clarity. “Charles.” My fingers tightened on his back. “Where are Marguerite and Jean?”

“They’re together,” he said into my ear. “They’re safe. I left them behind on the—” He broke off, perhaps realizing that that had been before the white vicar, before the wraiths. They might have been safe on the awning before, but they weren’t now. He stopped and scanned the people streaming past.

“Charles,” shouted the other soldier, barely audible through the din. “We need to go! We have our orders.”

Charles didn’t seem to hear. He had gone rigid. I followed his line of sight.

A possessed soldier had backed a group of people against a building. I couldn’t tell whether they were city folk or refugees, or a mixture of both; soot streaked their faces and clothes from the flying embers. The light made everything strange, like a scene from a nightmare. I wouldn’t have recognized Marguerite and Jean if it weren’t for Jean’s distinctive size—even hunched over, he was the largest person in the square.

Startlingly small in comparison, Marguerite had placed herself in front of him and the others, her arms spread as though trying to protect them from the thrall. I wondered what she thought she was going to accomplish. Even if she were armed, she wasn’t any good at fighting. The thrall would kill her more easily than a kitten.

I was already moving, throwing off Charles’s slack arms. If the other soldier tried to intervene, I didn’t feel his touch. I didn’t feel the people who ran into me or shoved me or trod on my boots. I only grew aware of the revenant speaking at the very end.

“Keep going,” it was urging sharply. “Don’t fall over, you horrid nun. You’re almost there.” And then it said, “Grab him.”

When the thrall saw me coming, he started to bring up his sword, but his angle was poor. I seized his arm and wrenched it, and the sword went clanging to the ground. Before he could think of rushing me, I planted a hand on his face and drove him down. With the revenant’s strength, he went easily, and the spirit came boiling out from his mouth and nose and eyes, streaming between my fingers. I wasn’t sure if the revenant had exorcised it, or if it was so desperate to escape that it had abandoned its vessel on purpose.

The revenant said viciously, “Don’t let go,” and I felt the spirit being drawn inward, into me, siphoned up like breath, until all that remained of it was a cold half-sated hunger numbing the pit of my stomach like frost. The revenant had devoured it.

There was a pause in the square—a brief cessation of noise, in which I heard a strange gasping, sighing exhalation. Marguerite’s hands were on me, helping me to my feet, her astonished face lit silver, and then I saw it: across the square, the blight wraiths were abandoning their vessels en masse, pouring upward as pillars of light. I stared in confusion, wondering if the Lady had intervened with a miracle. Awe swept coldly over my body.