Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(92)

“The altar was part of the binding ritual,” the revenant replied, distracted. Its attention was still roaming back and forth over the crossed-out portion of Leander’s notes. “Or at least, it was intended to be. Whoever created it failed to draw the runes properly, with catastrophic results.”

I thought again of the scorch marks on the altar, the fire-blackened appearance of Saint Eugenia’s relic. The ashes sprinkled on the robes of the clerics. I remembered the way the revenant had spoken in the convent’s underground vault, choosing its words so carefully, leaving too many things unsaid.

And I thought of holy symbols, revealed to the saints as shapes written in divine fire.

My voice sounded hollow as I asked, “Why was she trying to bind a spirit with Old Magic?”

Silence fell, the revenant realizing what it had revealed too late. After a moment it ventured, “Nun, what you need to understand about Old Magic is that it isn’t inherently evil. It’s merely a source of power. A forge can be used to create a sword, or one of those things you humans use to dig around in the dirt—”

“A plow,” I said.

“Yes, whatever that is. My point is—”

“The saints used Old Magic. They did, didn’t they?”

I felt the revenant considering and discarding a number of complicated replies. Then it said, simply, “Yes. If it’s any consolation, your kind would have been obliterated otherwise. And Old Magic hadn’t been declared a heresy yet, though it was swiftly falling out of favor.”

I sat staring at the bloodstains. “It was wrong.”

“What?”

“Putting spirits into relics. It was wrong. Whoever came up with the idea—they were wrong.”

“The Old Magic—”

“I don’t care about the magic. That isn’t what made it wrong. Destroying spirits—that has to be done. But trapping them in a relic is different. It’s cruel. I didn’t know that before, but I do now.”

The revenant was very quiet. “You would have died,” it said at last. “All of you.”

Where my emotions should have been, there was a hard black lump inside my chest, burning like a coal. “Maybe we should have.”

I felt it digesting my reply. Then it said, “Check the book’s binding.”

I suspected it merely wanted to distract me, but I checked anyway. As I ran my fingers over the binding, I reflected that I wasn’t surprised—only bleakly disappointed. If someone could bind a spirit through sheer force of will and the Lady’s grace alone, then I would have done it to the ashgrim. I would have burned all of myself, not just my hands, to be rid of it. I thought of Eugenia’s smiling face—that doesn’t look anything like her—and thought of the vendors hawking my blood and hair and clothes and wondered who she had truly been, if she had thought of herself as a saint or just a girl, if she had been glad to immolate herself so that the only thing people could take from her was the one she could control. I could ask the revenant. Perhaps after this was over, I would.

But for now I’d found where the stitching had been cut, creating a hidden pocket between the two sheets of parchment that made up the prayer book’s back cover. Pressed within, revealed by an uneven edge of sliced vellum, was the missing page.

I tugged it free and moved to Leander’s desk stool, bringing it to the lantern’s light. The revenant read faster than I did, but it could only read the writing that my eyes were focused on. It jerked my gaze down the page until it reached the entry: Year of Our Lady 1155, A small casket crafted of gold and ivory, set with twelve rubies and eight sapphires, heretofore stored in Chantclere, containing the Holy Ashes of Saint Agnes.

“Those fools,” it hissed. “Those festering imbeciles! They should have scattered her ashes in the Sevre, the ocean—they shouldn’t have kept them!”

I was getting a bad feeling. “Revenant, what did you sense in the tunnels?”

“I thought that I had imagined it. The darkness, the silence—after a time, I start seeing things that aren’t there….” A tremor ran through it. “I sensed another revenant. Here, in the city.”

For a moment, the words didn’t make sense. I stared at the page, its text suddenly incomprehensible. “You don’t mean a revenant bound to a relic.”

“No. I felt Sarathiel’s presence. Impossible, of course, unless it wasn’t truly destroyed; unless it was merely weakened to the point that it seemed to be and has been hiding in the ashes for the past three hundred years, slowly rebuilding its strength.”

“Spare relics that aren’t used very much are often stored inside the altar, beneath the altar stone.” My thoughts had begun careening like a wagon down a hill, gaining speed. “The casket might be there too. But wouldn’t someone have sensed it? They use the altar every day.”

“Weakened, its presence may not have been noticeable. As it recovered, it would have regained the ability to hide itself. Out of all of us, Sarathiel was always the best at concealing its presence.” I remembered its page in the manuscript—Sarathiel the Obscured, its tipped chalice pouring mist. “The better question is how it’s managed to recover in the first place. It wouldn’t have been able to heal without consuming life of some kind….”

“The rats,” we both said at the same time. I found that I was standing, the stool toppled over. I hadn’t heard it fall.