Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(96)

She trailed off, distracted by a flicker of motion. Leander had reappeared in the transept, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder. Looking hunted, he swiftly crossed to the other side and tried a different door. I guessed that the clerics returning from the procession had blocked his escape route. By now they had to be sensing some of the chaos transpiring in the chapel.

We were nearly out of time. I knew the clerics wouldn’t pause to listen to our mad-sounding story, not after they discovered us attacking the Divine.

Thinking furiously, I didn’t react quickly enough when she wrenched an arm from my grasp. Too late, I noticed that she was still holding the scepter. The fury’s shriek rippled past, distorting the air with its power. Across the nave, Leander fell to his knees. The casket tumbled from his hands.

As though time had slowed, I watched it bounce once and then split open, flinging Saint Agnes’s ashes in a powdery spray across the carpet.

We all sucked in a breath, staring. A heartbeat passed. The ashes looked utterly harmless. Then something vast and silver erupted from them like a great flower opening, a bloom of wings unfurling. The force of it flung me aside as though I weighed nothing. My head cracked against a pew, and my vision exploded white.

Through the ringing in my ears, a thread of sound emerged, whining like a mosquito.

“Nun, get up,” the revenant urged, shrill with panic. “Get up!”

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even blink. The scarlet threads of the carpet swam into focus in front of my nose, each individual filament lined in silver.

“Nun!” The revenant shook me frantically.

A cool breeze stirred my hair. I had the impression of something colossal bending over me as I lay stunned on the floor, studying me as though I were an insect. I recalled how Sarathiel had looked in the illuminated manuscript, its serenely masked face and half-closed eyes, its multitude of wings. Monstrous but somehow also holy—a figure that could be cast in bronze above an altarpiece, worshipped as much as feared.

The revenant was still trying to rouse me. “Artemisia!” it shrieked, and then its presence flooded my veins like fire.

Suddenly, I could move. My arm stretched out. My hand gripped the pew. I pulled my feet under myself and stood. Except it wasn’t me controlling my body; it wasn’t me who lifted my head to the nightmare hanging suspended overhead, the ravaged face of Sarathiel.

“This is my human,” the revenant snarled through my mouth, and blazed into a torrent of silver flame.

As the ghost-fire roared up around me, obscuring my vision, I felt strangely calm. I tried to make sense of what I had seen. The six wings, some half-furled and others spread, their ghostly immensity stretching from balcony to balcony. The singed edges of the pinions, blackened and curled. And the terrible face, where the diagonal crack in the mask had split and one half had fallen away, leaving it preternaturally beautiful on one side, a bare and grinning skull on the other.

When the flames cleared, Sarathiel was no longer there. Silver embers danced in the air above the nave, winking out one by one. The disturbed draperies settled back into place with whispers of silk against stone. Except for the epicenter of destruction around us, the cathedral looked eerily untouched, peaceful in its darkened majesty. From the stained-glass windows stretching above, Saint Eugenia gazed down with a hint of a smile.

Then, voices. Shouts of alarm. The thump and groan of the cathedral’s doors shuddering open, bringing into view the shimmering glow of hundreds of candles gathered outside. At the periphery of my vision I had vague impressions of shocked faces lining up along the gallery, but I couldn’t see them properly. My eyes weren’t looking in that direction. When I tried to make them do it, nothing happened.

Leander stirred. My head jerked around sharply at the first sign of movement. I watched as he attempted to climb to his feet, slumped down as though he were exhausted or had forgotten how to stand, then tried again.

The Divine gave a little cry and hurried over, her bloodstained skirts bunched in her hands. She helped him upright, clutching at him.

“That has to be the most idiotic human I’ve ever seen,” the revenant marveled in disgust, in my voice, out loud.

If the Divine heard it, she gave no sign. She was too busy tenderly lifting Leander’s face, looking into his eyes. “Sarathiel,” she breathed.





TWENTY-FIVE


No one else was close enough to hear her say it. The clerics were arrayed along the galleries and balconies, standing in the shadowed arches around the nave, emerging from cover like timid creatures after a storm. The cathedral guards reacted first, starting forward with a coordinated clanking of armor. The Divine looked up and noticed her audience for the first time. She was cradling Leander’s head protectively, lost in her own world.

“Stay back!” she called out breathlessly. I didn’t think she was faking her distress.

Shocked murmurs filled the vault. At once, I saw how this scene appeared. The clerics had sensed a revenant, but they thought it was my revenant, its power too entangled with Sarathiel’s to be told apart. The sacristan lay dead nearby, with his censer at my feet; the Divine was bloody and distraught, Leander seemingly injured. Behind us, the altar had been sundered in two. And I was the only person who could be responsible.

I took a step forward, nearly lost my balance, and caught myself against the back of a pew. At least it felt as though I did; but it was the revenant making me move, each action accompanied by a clutch of uncertainty as I discovered what my body was about to do.