Chapter 38 Csilla #2
The thing smelled dead. Not in the rotting way of former life, but a nothingness. Clawed hands reached for her face. It wanted, and it wanted, and it wanted.
I didn’t do a miracle for this.
She stretched her hands, only to have them sink into the corruption trying to take shape.
A crisp frostbite pain shot through her, and Csilla screamed with her freed voice, sudden and piercing enough that the demon stepped back with a shocked snarl.
The lightning-white agony leeched into her pores, her lungs, even her teeth, every inch of her trembling.
Something in her was waking with the fierceness of a sleeping creature jolted from its winter cave.
The blue of her veins, the pink under her fingernails, they glowed brighter than they ever had for Mihály, and the hovering creature in front of her reached to grasp.
‘Csilla!’ Before anyone else could move, Ilan had his arms around her waist to pull her back, but she shook her head.
‘It’s alright,’ she whispered. Inside she was painfully alive, her skin thin with the brittleness of a cicada shell waiting to be shed.
She’d felt the crackle of divinity when Mihály had healed her, the sizzle of darkness on the bodies, her own erasure when she’d done her miracle, but this radiance was consuming.
This was a power that had taken the unknowable and turned it into the physical world in an act of reckless yearning.
The darkness began to die on her skin, flaking into dry powder, consumed.
A presence surrounded her, vast and ancient and alive, lodging in her bones to root. The tears that came to her eyes were sharp like splinters of glass.
Sandor gurgled and lay twitching, hand clasped to his throat. Csilla stepped to help him, but her touch didn’t heal. Ilan was still bleeding.
‘Mihály.’
He froze from where he was struggling to his feet as if she’d spoken a word of magic and not merely his name. The whites around his eyes were visible, staring down at her as if she were a thing freshly consecrated.
She was.
The demon whispered a line of twisted creation, cutting through the raw power singing over her skin.
She reached forward. Around her she could feel the pure energy of life, the people with her, the breath of the soil and the small things that crawled through it, the ageless crush of minerals that had led to the rocks that built their walls, the strength of her own bones.
The creature before her was none of that. It was a mistake, a corruption, nothing but endless need to be more than empty, and no means of making it so save stealing the lives of others and dragging them into Shadow with it.
A prick of pity, one fully Csilla and none of the greatness that filled her, lanced the dizziness of power.
This thing, dead and hungry as it was, was equally close to humanity as the pure Brilliance around them.
It had been created by the same hands, even unintentionally. There was a stain of it in every soul.
‘I understand. But you’re nothing meant to live. Here.’ She stretched out her glowing hand to the lumping darkness. ‘It’s alright.’ She gestured to the wound on her cheek in welcome. ‘I’m ready now. Please come in.’
Once again the creature slipped inside. The pure connection to creation echoed in a trillion invocations, stronger than every combined voice of the Union. A darkened haze surrounded her, smoke on her skin, her mind echoing with angry confusion.
All she felt inside was sorrow as it struggled to latch onto her and manipulate her flesh. It was only obeying its nature, and it wasn’t its fault its nature was antithetical to the divine. She brushed a finger over her lips as her mouth filled with tar.
I’m sorry.
She exhaled, and it fell to powder at her feet. One mistake of creation corrected.
When she opened her eyes, Ilan was on his knees before her, eyes alight with reverence.
‘Csilla.’
He breathed her name like a prayer and looked near to kissing her hands. She did have a second miracle to her name now. But not the most important one.
The seal was still dark. She’d extinguished one creature of Shadow, but there would be dozens more, finding hosts, and none of the priests would be able to seal them again, much less banish them.
Csilla knelt in the dirt, willing the magic back. Fierce power rolled inside her, but nothing manifested. Arany’s remaining blood was ordinary loam.
You had me fix one life. They’d used her to bring Madame Varga back, out of everything broken.
Why was that the one thing They fixed? Not ágnes, who could have lived another twenty years doing good in the world.
Not this, the remains of Arany’s rebellion that had ensured people still had a chance to save themselves.
She slammed her hands on the ground, wincing at the helpless smack. She was going to be just a conduit for the divine will.
Everything but that blood in the dirt is a lie. The words echoed and hit home.
There was still something there. Everyone who had taken vows in the Union had lent a drop of Brilliance in their blood, save her. Now it was her turn to do it properly.
If she were to be a conduit, she would be a conduit for them all. If Arany could bleed and weep, so could she. She picked up the dropped knife.
‘Csilla, what are you doing?’ Ilan asked as she slipped off ágnes’s robes. There was no need for them to be stained with the rest of her. She folded them, and held the knife to her breast.
If Asten wanted to stop this, They could. Inside there was only endless quiet. She was being watched, not helped.
Was Tamas right? Do You truly want us to suffer?
But want seemed a distant and far too human concept. There was something alien in the quiet that answered her.
‘Csilla, stop. The Church isn’t worth this. We’ll find another way,’ Ilan said, but Csilla shook her head, everything in her far too old and heavy.
‘This isn’t for the Church.’ This was to give the people hope that a power beyond them still paid attention and cared, and to save them from immediate threat. To give her hope that all of this wouldn’t end in a second Severing, one even more disastrous than the last.
Mihály crouched next to her, his hand closing over hers on the blade. For a second her heart skipped, wondering if he was going to push it in.
‘Don’t,’ he said, eyes filled with a measure of the sweet affection she used to see when he would pretend she was what he wanted. Her fingers loosened on the hilt, and he pried it from her sweating hands.
Then he placed it against his own neck. ‘If a divine sacrifice must be made, let it be my legacy.’ His eyes were bright now, traces of the medicinal haze faded. He was beautifully, terribly awake.
‘No!’ Csilla reached for him again. Mihály’s sins were born from love and grief; he didn’t deserve death for them. ‘No.’
Her voice could barely rise above a whisper, and she forced a smile, though the stretch of her cheek was agony. ‘You can still leave. Go somewhere far away, and do good. This must be what I was born for.’
She’d always quietly hoped her strange life would have purpose. If this was the purpose, she would accept it.
He shook his head, calm and resigned. ‘You have to let others burn sometimes. You’re too important to die. You can’t help anyone if you’re throwing yourself on every blade offered to you. And you’re not the kind of girl to take an easy out.’
He was using the same smooth voice he did to persuade her of other things, so calm and soothing it seemed the most natural thing in the world. She still hadn’t developed perfect immunity to it. She shifted to look at Ilan, standing above them as if in looming benediction.
‘Ilan, tell him not to do this,’ she said, as if that would do any good. But Ilan only shook his head, his lips moving in a silent no. She swallowed a growing lump in her throat and turned back to Mihály. ‘And what if it doesn’t work? You’ve told me all along you’re no real angel.’
‘Divinity freely sacrificed will always be a powerful thing.’ He reached out to cup her cheek, where their touch glowed and her open scrapes knit back together. ‘This started with me. Let me end it.’
Ilan held out his hand to Mihály. ‘Give me the knife. If you shake while you do it you’ll make it worse on yourself.’
Mihály lifted his chin, pressing the knife more firmly against the skin. But not enough to cut, yet. He was trembling, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
It had to be done. But she couldn’t let him do it to himself.
Csilla put her hand over the handle again, shifting his fingers from it.
‘No. If someone is going to die for me, I’ll be the one to do it.
Because he’s right.’ She was nauseous and her heart might fail itself, but she had to.
Ilan’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t protest.
And still the power in her didn’t speak, didn’t stir.
Wouldn’t save him.
Mihály shifted, laying back to place his head in her lap, the position of a trusting lover, and closed his eyes. ‘Make it quick for me, dearest.’
She looked to Ilan, to the painted eyes of the saints, waiting for an intercession that in the deepest parts of her heart she knew wouldn’t come.
He offered his hand again, but she shook her head.
She slid a palm across Mihály’s cheek so the last touch he knew would be soft.
She cupped his chin, and tilted his head, blinking back her tears so no drops would fall and cause him to flinch.
Then she drew the knife, as hard and fast as she could.
Ilan and Csilla flinched at the sudden shock of light pouring forward, brighter than anything Mihály had ever conjured.
Asten, she prayed, hands wet and shining. I know You can hear me now. Whatever power I have, whatever love you had for him, let it work for this. Don’t let this be in vain.
The answer was an impossible swirl of breeze against her skin. The smoke-stained saints on the wall seemed to brighten, a new lustre in the dusted gold and ochre.
Mihály gurgled from the wound as he shifted and slumped against the dark ground. She was too slow to catch his head as he fell off her lap. From the cut poured lines of gold, the echo of the blessings in the courtyard, flowing into rivulets in the stone.
And the Seal began to awaken.
A shimmer blossomed above the body and she put her hand out, letting it come to rest on the open altar of her palm.
It was dazzling, strange and spider-silk ether.
In this state his soul was stardust. She let out a breath, the pain and hope equally terrible.
It felt like Mihály’s gentlest moments and softest words, a soul-deep beauty even his pain didn’t tarnish.
‘Csilla?’ Ilan was behind her again.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she breathed. This holiness was what all the light and glass and shine of the cathedral had been trying to capture.
It was the poorest imitation, the wavering reflection of the moon on brackish water and not the resplendence of a night sky.
This was the purest stuff of creation, a reminder that once they had all been infinite.
‘What is?’
If she’d thought she was alone before, it was nothing compared to this. No one else would understand what it was to see the stuff of souls. Her face softened. Except, perhaps, Mihály, his body already stiffening before her.
The little bit of spun ether fluttered like a broken-winged moth. She pushed it towards the flickering Brilliance.
If You must take him, make it glorious.
From the Seal came a golden host of wings and radiance, long-fingered hands reaching to claim him with a hum like wind on water.
The light illuminating her faded as the presence and his soul dispersed into hundreds of starry motes.
The lines of it, so faint and delicate, glowed sunlit gold with the infusion of spirit.
They filled the room from end to end. Inlaid between were points like tiny flickering sparks.
All the souls of the Union, under her feet. Everyone connected and protected again.
Csilla pressed her fingertips to her lips, tears threatening to spill over her lashes.
Mihály had managed to do something lasting and good after all. But even he’d left her in the end.
She collapsed, forehead against the ground, adding its dirt to the mess of her face. The people would have their faith and hope, and the Church would have its laws and power.
But the blankness of Mihály’s face, the gaping wound in his throat, made it hollow. Ilan caught her as she rose and stumbled forward.
He ran his hand through her tangled hair and let his fingers linger on the back of her neck. He touched her cheek, the healed flesh that was the last of Mihály’s power.
‘You’re hurt.’
It was a silly thing to focus on now. ‘So are you.’
She should go. Something insistent and old pushed through her power-drenched limbs, but instead she sank down by Mihály’s body, tilting his head to rest against her leg, stroking his hair as he bled out for the world.
She once promised him she would stay, and that was a mercy she could offer to the last.