Chapter 2
Ilan
There was little pleasure in burning a man when it produced such dismal results. The High Inquisitor scowled at the pinkened strips along the shaking merchant’s forearm, skin that would soon shrivel to blisters.
‘I’ve already told you everything,’ the man gasped. ‘The cheating I’ll give you, but I didn’t have anything to do with that girl’s murder. Mercy. Please.’
Ilan’s lips thinned at the impotent plea.
He set the iron rod back in the fire, gaze lingering on the steady orange smoulder that gave the windowless room a smoke-tinged glow of golden holiness.
He’d been sure of this lead. Multiple witnesses had testified they’d seen the man prowling Silgard’s dank riverbank in the mornings, right where the latest death had been.
The man himself had confessed to sabotaging his neighbour’s eel traps so readily Ilan had been sure it was a ruse.
But he really was just that easily cowed, a cheat wanting to be the only option for serving eel pies when the city opened its doors to celebrate the Incarnate’s return from the war front.
Failure scored him as surely as the marks he’d left on the crook, and Ilan let his hand linger on the metal until the heat stalked back up it, ready to scald.
‘Hold out your hand.’
The merchant uncurled his tense fingers, wincing as if expecting to have them broken.
Ilan fished a piece of consecrated glass from his pocket and placed it on the man’s sweat-slick palm, murmuring a cleansing invocation.
The misshapen piece, broken off an older miracle and worn smooth by years of sinners’ touches, glowed with soft light as it read the man’s soul.
The taint of guilty Shadow present before Ilan’s care had been brushed away by the man’s confession like the soil covering a buried gem.
A small satisfaction eased the knot in Ilan’s stomach.
At least he’d set one part of the city right tonight.
He untied the ropes binding the man’s forearms to the table and gestured to the burns.
‘Find a mercy priest to tend to that before it blackens.’
With luck it would scar, a daily reminder of what Asten thought of swindlers, and save him work in the long run.
The man half-sank before he stood, his run out of the purification room more of a stumble. He was replaced in the doorway by a long-faced novitiate, one burn-reddened hand curled on the door frame.
‘Yes?’
Ilan didn’t bother to temper the sharpness in his voice.
It was late, and the driving energy that came with his calling was fading.
Chasing whispers and paranoid suspicions was long and haggard work, even before the physical acts.
Bodies in pain, souls desperate for escape, were also closest to the divine, their confessions the most likely to save.
But getting them there was exhausting and left tired grit behind his eyes.
The boy averted his gaze from the whips and ropes that dragged the misguided back onto the path, focusing instead on the floor.
‘It’s the latest corpse, Inquisitor. We’re sending it out tonight.’ His voice cut off as his teeth worried at his lower lip. ‘No one wants to give her rites. They say she shouldn’t have them.’
Of course. The congregational priests whose prime virtue was Obedience joined the Faith to cocoon themselves away from sin, not confront it, and it showed in the distance they put between themselves and his work even as they praised it.
A thousand hymns and confessional comforts didn’t do a darkened soul the good of one well-timed strike.
And now that discomfort at reality was leaving a dead girl disrespected.
‘Fine.’
If he couldn’t yet give her justice, peace was the least he could offer.
He followed the boy out and into colder and deeper parts of the cathedral, the stone halls narrowing to squeezed passages and a low slanting roof.
It was a blessed thing the killer had decided to take up his sport in an icy season, but the hold still stank with the lingering sour of rotting bodies; the wine merchant the week before, and now this girl.
The novice passed him a hand cloth doused in altar oils, but the sandalwood wasn’t strong enough to keep the stench at bay, and Ilan’s head throbbed.
‘Has she at least been given a deliverance writ?’ he asked as he approached the corpse.
The murdered girl – Kovács Lili – had lost any charm she had in life.
Ilan slid her eyelids shut to cover the last bit of her empty stare and smoothed her pale blonde braids over the jagged rat bites on her ears.
She was from the north; his mother used to plait his hair much the same.
She could have been one of his sisters if he didn’t look too closely.
Or even Ilan himself, before he’d realised he was no one’s daughter.
The boy stared at the body, face twisted in discomfort.
‘Well?’
He finally bowed, and Ilan let the hesitation in it slide. ‘No, Inquisitor.’
‘We respect those delivered, no matter how they got here. You haven’t even kept the vermin away.’ He picked up the corpse’s arm, turning to look at the palm where shallow cuts festered. She’d made a brave attempt to defend herself. ‘Bring me paper.’
He inspected the blackened wounds with pursed lips as the boy scurried off, then traced his fingers along the carved flesh under her collarbones, turned into a macabre decoration of dribbled blood dried to black garnet and citrine-yellow pus.
The script of this killing was in the language of the ether, the message a corrupted and Shadow-touched one he couldn’t read, no matter how many times he traced the words peeled in her skin.
The bodies had begun appearing after the shortest days of winter. People still murdered even in Silgard; holy walls couldn’t stop rash impulses and elements of jealousy or rage. This, however, was something new.
The Church had ruled the first death a singular event; unsettling, but within the realm of reason.
The second, not two weeks later, raised eyebrows and pulled together late-hour meetings.
The third, and the Church closed ranks, citing potential panic if word got out that someone was killing citizens and marking them as unholy.
Now they were on four, perhaps five, and he was no closer to finding out who was responsible.
Prelate Abe and his council had suggested sabotage from the broken territories or perhaps the Apostate cults springing up in the wake of war using dark imagery to terrorise.
Madness was always a suspect, as was vendetta, though the killer had a wide reach, and there was no clear link between the victims save the manner of their deaths.
The families all denied their loved ones had enemies or dark interests; death made a saint of everyone. There were never any witnesses.
The novitiate trotted back and passed over a crisp sheet of paper, the pale surface starkly bright in the flickering shadows of the room.
It wasn’t the vellum used for holy manuscripts or even the parchment of the Incarnate’s letters and missives, but it was fine enough for something that would be ashes by the morning.
Ilan wrote the girl’s name in a careful hand and inscribed an intercessory prayer beneath.
If there were a particular saint or angel she wanted to lead her, there was no way of asking now, and any fresh blood that would have sealed the request had been emptied into the river to flavour the carp.
He touched her cool forehead and penned in the name of Sainted Vasya.
This girl was also a child of Saika, and their home territory’s most beloved saint should be willing to lead her soul across, far as they were from her.
He folded the paper and placed it on Lili’s chest, her arms too stiff to be bent to hold it.
A memory flashed; another body with arms folded, and leather cuffs, and snow-heavy pine branches scratching at the windows as they prepared the body to burn.
It was said to be a blessing for anyone to die in Silgard, in the sight of the spires of the grand cathedral and heart of the Church, but he’d wager she would have rather been delivered while looking at peaks and ice.
For a too-brief moment, a sharp memory of the forest scent of Saika, wild and evergreen and seven years behind him, chased out the scent of death.
‘Send a message to the Servants of the Road that we’re done with the body and put her out,’ he said. ‘I’ll let her parents know when I speak to them.’
He turned and left the disquiet of the cell-turned-morgue, but childish whispers chased him.
‘—lost Asten’s favour.’
Ilan turned, the snap of his boot heel on the stone enough to silence, but not to erase what he’d just heard. The two novices skulking behind Ilan bent together under his gaze. Likely shirking their duty.
‘Did you have something to add?’
One of the boys was shaking his head, and the other put his back to the wall as if he could blend his oak brown robes into the grey stone.
That was the one who had spoken. Ilan grabbed his wrist, and though they were nearly the same height, the boy folded in on himself as if to protect his viscera, his already pale face a shade close to Lili’s.
‘No, Inquisitor.’
Ilan’s reflection looked back at him in the gleam of widened, frightened eyes. He pulled out the blessed glass and forced it against the boy’s skin, where it clouded with the grey stain of lies.
‘Would you like to answer again?’
The boy jerked like a hooked pike, and his thrashing was equally futile. ‘It’s not what I’m saying! But you must have heard that the Seal is . . . It’s weak.’
Of course it was weak: the city was too troubled for it to be otherwise. Ilan nodded at the glass, darkening by the second with the boy’s fear.
‘Our blessing remains.’ There hadn’t been so much as a stutter in the glass, or any of the powers of the Church. If the power of Arany’s sacrifice was waning . . . well, he measured the city’s balance of vice and virtue. He would know. ‘We can’t make any judgement beyond that.’
If the boy were wise, he would drop the matter.
He was still too much of a child to be wise.
‘But it’s been almost two months and so many people are dead, and the congregational priests are saying you’re going to have a replacement, and if Asten really has called you—’
The force of Ilan’s hand took the end of the sentence. Blood bloomed from a dry crack in the boy’s lips, parted in shock from the smack.
Ilan made a loose gesture of blessing over the wound and dropped his wrist. Congregants called him the Holy Wolf for his viciousness. What they seemed to forget was that creation itself had been an act of gloried violence. It was only right that a certain amount was still required to keep it pure.
‘Apologies, Inquisitor,’ the boy mumbled, tongue darting over the seeping red.
‘Watch what rumours you listen to. All our souls are at risk – be thankful I just corrected yours.’
The boy bowed, and Ilan nodded.
There was silence as he left, but the disquiet in Ilan’s mind echoed louder than any words.
A replacement. Unlikely. The Prelate would have warned him if things were truly bad enough to threaten his appointment.
The Incarnate himself had named Ilan head of Silgard’s Order of Justice, the High Inquisitor and steel hand that scoured away sin.
No lesser power could undo that charge, and the only higher power was no longer speaking to Their creation.
Ilan straightened his cassock, touched the sharp silver four-point mark pinned to his collar. He would take evening prayers in his own chambers. And he would pray for the same thing he’d prayed for nightly for all these long weeks, as blood polluted consecrated stone.
Let me be Your justice, swift and holy.
He would show them all that he was Asten’s chosen servant, brought here to purify with leather and steel. And he would show this monster, who had driven his city into froth-mouthed fear, what it meant to face the wrath of the divine.