Chapter Eighteen
To her, he wasn’t a creature.
Seraphina’s appetite was gone. Every time the Voice of God rang out over the city, she felt the food she’d ingested want to lurch back up her esophagus.
“Cast off your doubts. Miracles abound for those who believe with fervent hearts. Come near and wonder. Honor the bones of the saints, and they will keep evil at bay, they will keep the war from our gates.”
She heard Rune groan beside her. He bent forward, hands clutching his head. Seraphina could imagine him clawing at his own scalp, because she wanted to do the same. But she’d experienced this before and knew how it worked.
“It will pass,” she said. “Let it move through you, and it won’t hurt as much.”
Rune shook his head. He tried to say something, but only a whimper came out.
Seraphina got up and pulled at his cloak, urging him to get to his feet.
“I know you want to curl up, but it won’t help. It’s better when your body is upright and stretched. Come on, let’s see for ourselves.”
“I don’t want to see.”
She let out a breath and counted to five.
Her insides seemed to readjust, though her heart was clenched tight and beating in her throat, and there was a sharp pain in her side.
The Voice of God didn’t say another word.
For now. But it would, and Seraphina needed Rune to be on his feet when it happened.
“Up,” she said, an edge to her voice.
He shook his head harder, his hands now covering his eyes.
Seraphina cursed under her breath, hating herself for what she was about to do. She took her walking stick from where she’d left it against a tombstone and smacked Rune in the shoulder.
“Up. Now.”
He let out a startled moan, and Seraphina felt tremendously guilty, but she smacked him again, and finally, he picked himself off the ground and stood next to her.
“I’m sorry, but it’s better this way. Trust me–”
“Bear witness to the power displayed before you. Let Heaven hear your prayers.”
Rune staggered backwards but didn’t fall back to his knees. Seraphina held her ground.
“See?” she asked.
“It is better.”
“Let’s move. Shake your body a bit.”
She demonstrated by shaking her arms and torso, then rolling her shoulders back and shaking her head, her long, blond hair falling to her waist.
“He’ll stop soon. Hopefully before people start vomiting all over each other.”
Rune followed her example. Seraphina heard his bones pop as he shook his body and stretched.
When the Voice of God spoke again, it barely affected them.
“Are you ready to go and see now?”
“All right.”
There was reluctance in his voice, but Seraphina could tell he was also curious.
She started toward the gate of the churchyard, and he followed.
Soon, they were walking down the empty streets back toward the Church of Our Lady, where every single soul in Ingolstadt was gathered in a mass of mesmerized people.
The crowd was so large and packed that Seraphina didn’t even attempt to penetrate it.
She and Rune stopped at the edge of it, and Seraphina focused on her own breathing and on the way her body vibrated and her skin tingled.
The feeling that she was being watched didn’t return, but she was braced for it.
“There are more people on the church steps,” Rune said. “There’s a man in a blue and silver robe. More people in blue and silver around him, and a few in white and gold.”
Seraphina was impressed by how well he could see from that distance.
“Anyone in green and bronze?” she asked.
“Yes, two people.”
“How about iron gray and black?”
“No, I don’t see anyone dressed like that.”
She smiled to herself, but it was bitter.
Two years ago, she’d been the last Sarumite to stand on the steps of the Church of Our Lady on All Hollows’ Eve wearing robes in iron gray and black, looking like a harbinger of doom next to Matteo’s white and gold.
Only her blond hair had redeemed her in the eyes of the onlookers.
“Of course, Headmaster Wolff knows better than to show up with pragmatists at his side,” she said. “I’m surprised he brought the two naturalists with him.”
“That’s the headmaster of Kr?henstein Academy?” Rune asked, and Seraphina could imagine his blue eyes growing wide.
“Yes. He’s a doctrinist, so he wears the celestial blue and silver of House Rome. The people in white and gold are purists. Those are the colors of House Syracuse. And the people in forest green and bronze are naturalists, wearing the colors of House Cordoba.”
“And iron gray and black?”
“The colors of House Hamburg. Pragmatists.”
“You are one,” he noted.
“Am I still? I don’t know.” She shrugged, but it hurt to say it. “If I’m not up there with them, am I a Sarumite? If I haven’t renounced my ideas as a pragmatist, am I still part of the Order and the resistance?”
“You dedicated your life to the study of relics, so I think you’ll always be part of the Order.”
Seraphina bit the inside of her lower lip.
“Thank you for saying that,” she whispered.
“He’s holding out his hands,” Rune explained what he was seeing. “Like he’s making an offering.”
“What’s he holding?”
“I don’t know. It’s too small.”
“Every day, you fear that the Blasphemer’s army will march to our walls and tear down our gates.
Yet, they cannot take cities smaller than ours only a day away from Ingolstadt.
Trust that sacred relics are keeping them away, keeping them weak and disorganized.
Have faith! Mark this day as a promise to you and your children: the Blasphemer will not prevail! ”
A collective groan shuddered through the crowd. Seraphina sensed a few people in front of her doubling over, clutching at their stomachs. Someone to her right fell to their knees and heaved.
She reached behind her and grabbed hold of Rune’s cloak. She tugged at it until Rune leaned over her shoulder, and she could turn her head toward him and whisper.
“He’s holding the relic. The one we call The Voice of God.”
“Oooh...” That was all he could manage at the revelation.
Seraphina chuckled.
“It’s a parlor trick. And a cheap one at that.
But I have to admit it was smart of him to choose this particular bone to display today.
People are easily impressed by amplified sound because they don’t understand what they’re hearing.
When a voice becomes loud enough to shake the ground and rattle your organs, the mind wants to believe it’s divine.
And Headmaster Wolff is especially good at using it. He can speak without moving his lips.”
“Is that possible?”
“With practice, yes. Just another gimmick. It was recorded, you know. In the greatest book of all.” She said it with mild sarcasm.
“The Old Testament describes it in Exodus, chapters nineteen and twenty, when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The Israelites heard thunder and trumpet blasts, and a voice so terrible they begged Moses to be their intermediary because they couldn’t bear to hear God speak directly.
Then in the Gospel of John, chapter twelve, verses twenty-eight and twenty-nine, a voice spoke from the heavens, and the crowd couldn’t agree on what they’d heard.
Some said it thundered. Others said an angel had spoken.
None of it was divine intervention. It was the amplification relic.
It projects sound in such a way that it seems to come from everywhere at once, and the vibrations cut through flesh and make people sick with terror and wonder. ”
“That is fascinating.”
“It’s a hyoid bone,” Seraphina continued.
“It’s a small, horseshoe-shaped bone that sits at the front of the throat, just below the jaw.
It’s the only bone in the human body that doesn’t connect to any other bone, and it supports the larynx and the tongue when a person speaks.
The saint is unknown. The relic is so ancient that it’s impossible to determine when it appeared or from whose body it came.
It was lost for centuries, then reemerged a few decades ago.
The academy acquired it, and the curators catalogued it as a greater relic because of the dramatic effect it produces.
But in my opinion, it’s no more than a lesser relic.
I hope that one day, we’ll become evolved enough to see it for what it is and reclassify it. ”
With that, she turned on her heel, as if she were disgusted.
It was sad to see the academy put on a show of smoke and mirrors for the crowd.
The people were worried about the war that raged – like the headmaster had said – only a day away from Ingolstadt.
Something nagged at her, though. Because there was one thing he’d said through the Voice of God that was true.
Cities smaller and less fortified than Ingolstadt held and were still holding fast, refusing to fall.
Ingolstadt sent reinforcements whenever they were needed, and daily, wounded poured through the gates and into the city’s hospitals.
From the south, Ingolstadt was surrounded, but the front line hadn’t moved closer than a day away – two days at most – since last winter.
Something was amiss. Gladly, to their advantage. Now she was out of the loop, but she’d been on the inside two years ago, and sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t missed things then. Obvious things. Or if she simply hadn’t been told.
“Everyone is here,” she told Rune as they walked. “Which means no one is where we need to be.”
They wound through empty alleys. It was dark out; Seraphina could tell by the ashy smell of the night air.
She found the tailor’s stop by memory and signaled for Rune to break the lock.
For him, it was nothing, and within less than a minute, they were inside among bolts of fabric and clothes hanging in neat rows.