Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(63)

“What do you—”

“Pastor Charles,” Belle interrupted. “I called you earlier about a request.”

“Ah, yes.” He nodded. “And this is Maia Finley.”

Despite his incredibly twisted point of view, he seemed nice enough. I shook his hand. “I don’t agree with you at all, but it’s nice to meet you.”

“Come.” He flicked his head toward the front of the church. “We’ll take her to the cellar.”

We followed him through a door at the rightmost corner of the church, which he opened with a key. He continued to explain his philosophy as he led us down the corridor.

“The common perception of the Deoscali is that we worship phantoms. And you’re not wrong.” His white robes skidded across the stone floor. “It’s a common perception among the Deoscali as well. But this is only a corruption of the true teachings handed down to us—the teachings of Emilia Farlow, the originator of our church.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Which are?”

“That it is the spirits who are agents of life, death, and fate. Not the phantoms. You see, we Deoscali are a relatively new religious group. The practice of worshipping phantoms began just shortly after the phantoms appeared themselves, but it quickly devolved into the blood-worshipping cult you’ve probably grown to disdain. I, too, once fell prey to this ideology.” And he looked like he regretted it. He shook his head. “Many view Effigies as the enemy. Groff grew up believing this. He only recently joined us here at this church. An uncomfortable amount of Deoscali have even come to believe in the terrorist Saul as a kind of a prophet, an envoy of the phantoms.”

Saul, a prophet. It really didn’t take much to get people to believe in garbage.

“I’ve been trying to rehabilitate some of these wayward thoughts. One can only hate the Effigies if you worship the phantoms. But the phantoms are not the spirits. The spirits only exist in the world as silent shadows, protecting the world without ever being seen.”

“A world of shadows . . . ,” I whispered as Saul’s words from that night in Marrakesh bubbled up in my memories.

“As I said, they are agents of life, death, and thus fate, existing all around us, existing in us, connecting us in a cosmic chain crossing space and time. They only become phantoms when something provokes them: a great sin, a great evil. The phantoms are a manifestation of that imbalance. Only then do they become beasts of nightmare.”

It felt like semantics, a way to ease the guilt of worshipping monsters, but he was earnest enough as he spoke.

“Oh, yeah?” He was probably so into his own babble, he didn’t notice the mocking edge I’d slipped into my voice. He didn’t show one way or another. An eerie serenity possessed him as he spoke about his beliefs. Creepy, to say the least, but maybe all religious types were like that. “So then, what are we?”

“The Effigies.” Pastor Charles breathed a sigh as he considered us as if we were the one puzzle he hadn’t yet cracked. “Farlow’s writings spoke at length about the spirits and the phantoms. But only one time did she ever refer to the four of you.”

“And what did she say?”

“That you were blessed.” Pastor Charles grinned down at me. “Perhaps it was the spirits that gave you your gifts. Perhaps you’re more connected to them than any of us will ever be.”

My family was never that religious. While many had taken to the refuge of the steeple to explain the existence of the phantoms, others like us chose to just take things as they were, but for me at least, I’d always figured there was a god. God. Magic. Spirits. Effigies and monsters. What was true? Or was it all true in this world where the impossible was possible?

I shook my head. “So what’s in the cellar?” I asked as we turned a corner and started down a flight of stairs.

“I met Natalya, the fire Effigy before you, about a year before her unfortunate death,” Pastor Charles said, and I felt Belle go rigid beside me. “She was curious about my views, about why my teachings differed from the usual discourse of the Deoscali. And one day, during our discussions, I showed her this.”

The cellar looked more like a crypt. A small, square room, it was built entirely of gray slabs of stone, dark but for the sunlight streaming through one clover-shaped window.

But there was something else about this room, something I couldn’t name. A silence hung in the air, so heavy I could feel it whispering against my skin. And when I breathed in, something primal in me lifted its head and groaned, a slight tremor stirring me from the inside.

“What is this place?” I asked, staring down at my tingling hands as if I’d never seen them before. At the far corner of the room, one of the stone slabs had writing etched into it, but I couldn’t make out the words from here.

“It feels wonderful, doesn’t it?” This time, when he lifted his head and closed his eyes, I understood why. There was something here, something that cast shadows of stillness over us. “Many years ago, when I was still young and misguided,” Pastor Charles said, “I was fortunate enough to go on a spiritual pilgrimage with a traveling sect of the Deoscali. It’s where I learned to return to the old teachings of Farlow. And where I learned there are many secrets in this world. Secrets beyond the old dichotomy of phantoms and Effigies.”

“He calls this cellar the Listen,” Belle told me, gesturing toward the chamber. “It’s the same as I remember it. You can feel the cylithium here, can’t you?”