Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(84)

“Was that your doing?” the revenant asked. “On second thought, don’t tell me. I suspect I’m better off not knowing.”

A mood of almost delirious relief suffused the cathedral as the service ended and the congregation began to stand. As I had hoped, people were already queueing up along the aisle, bending one by one to touch or kiss the altar. From the shuffling movements on the balcony around me, it seemed we would join the end of the line.

I silently willed Leander to leave, but he remained in the nave, conversing with a lector. Eventually I had no choice but to merge with the descending crowd. If I waited until I was one of the last to reach the altar as the cathedral emptied, I would risk drawing his attention even more.

I kept an eye on him as the line inched forward. His back was turned to the aisle. Worshippers still sat scattered in the pews, their heads bent in solitary prayer. I watched them gradually depart as I made my halting progress up the aisle.

Halfway there. Two-thirds. Finally I reached the steps of the chancel.

I waited as the woman in front of me lingered over the altar, ostentatiously signing herself as her lips trembled in prayer. A tear dripped from her chin onto the altar cloth. “The blood of Saint Agnes,” she whispered, touching the altar with shaking fingers.

The stone did have dark marks on it, but they weren’t blood, not even old blood. After spending the past seven years around corpses, I would know. They looked more like scorch marks from a fire—as though at some point in its past, the altar had been engulfed in flames.

Someone behind me coughed impatiently; another shuffled from foot to foot. Oblivious, the woman continued praying, tears streaming down her face in earnest. Occasionally we had gotten pilgrims like that in Naimes, ones who liked to put on a show. The sisters had always been able to tell they were faking it.

At last she turned to leave, glowing as though the Lady had answered her prayers. I hoped not, because based on personal experience, I was fairly certain she wouldn’t like the results. I moved forward for my turn, tugging off my glove. I’d gone only one step before noisy tears erupted behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to see the woman sinking to the carpet, her face raised as though beholding a vision in the air.

“Saint Agnes!” she cried in rapture. “I see you—I hear you! Reveal your message to me!”

Everywhere, conversation halted. Across the pews, Leander began to turn.

My stomach dropped. I ducked my head and reached for the altar, hoping the revenant could make do with a glancing touch before I vanished behind the line. I moved too quickly to react to its startled warning of, “Nun, wait—”

My fingers brushed the stone, and pain exploded in my skull, worse than anything I had ever felt: a shrieking, red-streaked abyss, devouring thought and memory. For a moment I didn’t remember who I was or where, or why any of that mattered. All I wanted was to escape from the pain, even if it meant someone bludgeoning me over the head to make it stop. Something inside me was being torn apart, and the feeling was terrible beyond comprehension.

I thought nonsensically of the whirlwind of bats descending on the chapel’s bell tower, only in reverse: siphoning out in unnatural backward flight, the solid, dark mass disintegrating into scraps of wind-whipped black, scattering away across the night until nothing was left.

I realized someone was screaming, thinly and from what seemed like far away. I blinked until images swam into focus, their blurry edges haloed in light.

I wasn’t the one who was screaming—it was the woman collapsed on the carpet while bystanders collected around her. She was still crying out to Saint Agnes, and like an awkward participant in her act, I had fallen to my knees in front of the altar with my red, scarred hand extended, plain for everyone to see.

But no one was looking. Everyone was riveted by the drama unfolding at the center of the aisle, except for one. Across the aisle, behind the pews, Leander was staring at me. The lector he had been speaking to was saying something—asking him a question—but he didn’t seem to hear her as he took a step forward, slowly reaching for his onyx ring.

I had to get out. Something had happened to the revenant, something terrible; I couldn’t feel its presence inside me at all. I scrambled up, away, pain driving through my skull with every step, and didn’t notice when my glove dropped from the folds of my cloak to lie forgotten on the flagstones.





TWENTY-TWO


Pillars reeled past; a saint’s face gazed down at me, pieced together in stained glass. A banded door, the darkness of a stair—and then came the choking clouds of incense, rushing into my lungs like fire. Statues reared from the gloom, staring tranquilly from their dark niches. Fleeing in half-blind desperation, I had stumbled into the cathedral’s crypt. I felt my way along the niches for a door. There would be a way out, a way into the catacombs.

Staggering along, I almost collided with a pale candlelit shape in the smoke: a young woman in white, frozen in surprise. An orphrey.

“Leave us,” said a voice from the stair, and she obediently turned and vanished, slipping past the tall, forbidding figure on the steps.

“Artemisia,” Leander said. His face looked composed, but his eyes were rimmed in red. “Did you fall?”

The revenant’s fate obliterated all other thought; everything else seemed trivial in comparison. I looked at him uncomprehendingly, and he repeated, “Into the river—did you fall?” I didn’t say anything, but my face must have given him the answer. He laughed, a breathless, disbelieving sound. “You didn’t. You played me for a fool.”