Chapter 3 #2
‘I remember when they found you,’ Abe said, and she tilted her head at the fresh wistfulness in his tone.
Ordinarily it would please her, but at the moment it was a torture worse than anything the inquisitor could produce.
Every second of uncertainty was a misery.
‘At Arany’s feet, in the snow. A baby who no one quite knew what to make of. ’
Csilla shivered, as if the frost on her skin had lingered.
She’d heard the story so many times it was practically a memory.
A baby near-dead from cold at the statue’s base, scalp weeping blood through crusting scabs and speckled with Arany’s miraculous gold.
A baby who left her baptism water cold and clear, whose touch never sparked the smallest reaction in anything from a consecrated threshold to a relic.
No one had ever heard of anything like her, not evil, not good.
‘And I thank you for your mercy in taking me in, Prelate.’
They could have done a hundred things with her – sent her to a farming family in need of extra hands, sent her to the ever-burning garden in the great northern forest of Wesp, said to be where creation broke and brought forth Shadow.
They could have simply given her a large dose of tonic and rocked her over the veil with lullabies.
But they let her live. Every thudding beat in her chest was a reminder that no matter how confusing her existence was, mercy had won.
The thousand flat eyes of the angels watched them from the stuccoed wall, flaking old paint like paper tears.
Their golds and whites had dulled to a dead, smoky brown, expressions lost to time; had she not long ago memorised the eight-pointed star of their compass of virtues, she wouldn’t have even been able to tell Arany from Lajol.
The Prelate beckoned her further into the chamber, light lost with each step.
Beckoned her to the Seal.
It was nothing like she’d pictured. It was said to sparkle like the endless dazzle of winter stars over Silgard. It was said to glow like the eyes of the angels, ever watchful over the humanity they loved.
What lay on the ground was a dim, foggy etching with charcoal flecks darkening what light still shone.
She squinted, her eyes adjusting to see the lines that had been carved down in this deepest floor, the compass of angels and a circle embracing the whole.
Little touches of light, each no bigger than a mote of dust, resembled the glowing sparks thrown off a tended hearth.
It was beautiful, but it wasn’t what she’d had described to her, and not what the texts and prayers spoke of.
The books told of how Arany created the Seal on her deathbed, linking each of the territories of the Union to Silgard with her own blood and divinity.
There should have been millions of lights, one for each soul in the Union, incandescent and gathered at the point of their home.
But parts of the Seal had only the barest scattering of glow.
Tarnished gold flickered across the darkened points like the frantic heart of a dying bird.
Her mouth went dry. She’d studied too long, done too much mercy work, not to recognise wasting when she saw it. And though it wasn’t logical, as she watched the twisting sparks struggle to light what was shadowed, only to fade again, all she could think was: pain.
Abe moved behind her, fingers curling into her shoulders. ‘The Church has found a use for you, Csilla. If you still wish to serve.’
‘Has it always looked like that?’
The question was rude, she should stay silent and obedient, but perhaps she was wrong. Maybe this was what it was meant to look like, and it was only childish imagination that had made it more than it was in her mind.
The Prelate sighed, a sound that echoed from deep in his chest.
‘No, child. No.’
She barely heard with the horror before her. If the Seal was dying, the power of the Church was, too.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ This couldn’t be everything.
The Prelate ignored her, hands still caged around her. ‘Do you know the Izir who has graced our city of late? Nemes Mihály?’
She nodded, head ringing with the echo of Elmere’s delighted ramblings about the healer.
‘Do you want me to bring him here?’ She did not mention her own silent, stumbling prayers to the Izir. Perhaps they thought he could heal whatever this was.
Abe cleared his throat, the words caught and gargling.
‘Izir Mihály has been preaching heresy.’
‘What?’
The words were so incongruous they were nonsense.
The Izir were closer to Asten than anyone, with one divine ancestor who had never been touched by the corruption that came with the creation of humanity.
The world may have lost the presence of the angels, but even the Severing couldn’t steal the sacred blood of their children left behind or stop those children from having their own.
Even diluted as it was, the power of their angelic forebearers still manifested once or twice in a generation, as remarkable and unpredictable as a falling star.
‘He’s been drawing worshipers from the Church.
’ Abe’s voice thrummed with the fire of a sermon.
‘Claiming to see the dead, saying there are paths to grace before judgement, a time when the fate of souls is malleable. It’s just the kind of thing that appeals to the weak, false comfort that if they die in Shadow, it’s not the end.
’ He gestured to the flickering Seal. ‘We need the people’s faith, now more than ever.
He’s brought doubt to our doorstep, and it’s showing in service attendance.
Anyone who trusts their soul to him . . . ’
Would spend their eternity wrapped in nothing but hunger and self-flagellating misery, forever apart from the divine. Knowledge was one of the four virtues, but only if what was learned was true.
‘I’d be happy to speak to him . . .’
It was a strange mission. Csilla swallowed a bleak laugh at the idea that she could convince anyone of anything. Her skirts were stained from years of kneeling outside during services. No one listened to her about what to serve for breakfast, much less theology.
‘We’ve already tried.’ Abe’s voiced wavered with something she didn’t understand.
Csilla tensed. ‘But then, what—’
The priest reached into a pocket of his robes and pulled out a necklace. A bird skull on a chain, the beak replaced by one made of silver filigree. The bleached bone and polished metal were awful and lovely in one, the hollows of the eyes almost alive with the flickering shadows.
Abe snapped off the beak, revealing a stoppered vial nestled inside.
It was far smaller and slimmer than the medicine bottles she took her patients, and whatever in it was clear, not the brown syrup that soothed coughs.
He put it in Csilla’s hand and closed her fingers around it, the glass still warm from his body heat.
‘Perhaps in your reading you’ve come across Scorn’s Friend. You always were a studious little thing.’
She was, and she knew the piece of death in her palm. Poison.
Her head dizzied, her face dampening with sweat despite the cellar cold.
‘But I’m a servant of the Church.’
Mercy workers saved, protected. She clutched at the vial, metal digging into the flesh of her fingers. She’d been right to be shocked at her acceptance. It was a dream, and this was the second when the beautiful turned grotesque and the shock of the impossible shoved you back into waking.
There was no waking. Only strokes of fire and Shadow, the corroded magic, and the Prelate’s unwavering gaze.
‘You’re not, though, are you? You wear our robes, speak our words, pray to our god.’ His voice wasn’t unkind, merely flat with truth. ‘But you lack a soul. And that’s why you’re the only one who can do this. It’s no sin for you. There’s nothing of you to blacken.’
‘But murder . . .’
No one stole the right of death from Asten. Even the worst crimes were punished by abandonment on the winter ice or in the forest ravines of the north, not execution. It may have led to death all the same, but it wasn’t murder.
People die, she reminded herself, though her vision blurred. It was a mercy worker’s job to know that, even more than carefully memorised prayers and the ratio of herbs to blessed water. It was a truth pressed into their hands every day as they folded endless bandages and soothed fevered skin.
Abe reached for her trembling arm. ‘All you’ll be doing is delivering him back to the arms of the divine and saving the city from apostasy. It’s not murder, it’s mercy. For all of Silgard. The Incarnate himself has signed the order. It will be secret, but it will not be unholy.’
If the Incarnate signed the order, why do you still think it’s a sin? How could the Prelate stand in this place of light and ask something so dark? She shook her head, not trusting her voice, and the new fabric scratched around her throat.
Abe’s grip tightened. ‘If you won’t do it, you can leave.
You’ll never pass a holiness test, child.
Silgard has no place for you, and we’ve given you shelter long past what is owed by the tenants to care for orphans.
An adult’s duty is to take a role and contribute to order. If you won’t serve, you’re no use.’
Her mouth twisted in open shock. What was treating the city’s ill, washing its dead, and giving a lap to its children if not being of use? It didn’t matter if she wore the brown lining of a novice or the glowing white of a prelate or the hand-me-downs of no one at all, her work was good.
‘I don’t want to . . .’
‘Asten doesn’t ask what you want to do for Them, but what you will do for Them and for our eventual perfection.’
Csilla turned her gaze to the saints and martyrs watching the exchange. If she could pray for their strength and be answered, maybe this wouldn’t feel so much like drowning.
‘I don’t understand . . .’
‘Submission isn’t meant to be light work. You don’t need to understand to serve.’
He was right. It was selfish, presumptuous, for her to argue. She wasn’t anything, and she was being offered a way to do good.
Even if it was no kind of good she would have ever elected to do.
‘Alright.’ She barely recognised the voice that came out of her, choked and small. ‘I’ll do it.’
If this really would protect the souls of the city, she had no choice.
Abe’s smile, ordinarily so kind, curled her stomach. He beckoned her forward.
If she’d had a family, they would have bathed her in water infused with rosemary and mint and given her an equal dose of affection, sent her to her vows with a crown of poppies and her dowry in hand to offer at Asten’s Eye.
Instead she shivered, unadorned and empty.
Together they knelt before the tattered magic of the great Seal.
She spread her fingers on the earth, taking a deep breath and taking heart with it.
This was what every servant of the Church did, and she was fortunate to be able to do it over the remains of Arany herself.
In other territories they made do with facsimiles and floors stained with wine and varnish to look like the martyred angel’s resting place.
They claimed the blood of the Faithful would always find its like, connecting the country in a web of consecration.
It was a pretty idea, even if it sounded more idealistic than true.
Abe’s chant caressed her to her bones. The sound grew as it echoed against the damp walls, as if the centuries of the worshippers were speaking through the paint in welcome.
On the far side of the wall were portraits of the noose-necked last saint Angyalka and the star-crowned first Incarnate Imre; stand-ins for the kin she would never know. They would have to be enough.
‘Csilla.’
She opened her eyes again and offered her palm. He took her smooth fingers in his weathered ones.
‘Do you swear to serve in perfect and perpetual Obedience, to accept the Church as judge and Justice of this world, to full-heartedly seek knowledge of the divine and Their creation, and provide unfailing Mercy?’
‘Yes,’ she answered before he’d even finished. Before she had any more time to think about the terrible nature of her calling.
Abe brought the knife to her skin, drawing a thin line of red to well on the surface. Then he squeezed, letting a drop fall to the gritty earth. The Seal remained still, dashing a final, quiet hope. Her soulless blood didn’t carry any spirit, couldn’t do anything to strengthen the Faith.
The Prelate rubbed his thumb through the dirt, her blood, and whatever echoes of Arany’s holiness remained. She closed her eyes as he smeared a warm line down her forehead.
Bled and marked for the Church.
Called to service, just like she’d always wanted.