Chapter IX #3
Finally, he pushed open a set of enormous carved double doors at the end of a long stone corridor, ushering me into a cavernous room.
Dread swallowed me deep into its throat.
I hadn’t been in a church of any kind since I left the nuns, not even for Dacia, and here Death had brought me to a chapel.
It was dusty with disuse, but a somber Christ hung on a crucifix overlooking a massive stone altar, and that same kind of oppressive silence that collected under every church bower lingered.
It even smelled, somehow, like the nunnery chapel, hints of tallow and terror.
I swallowed and tried to hide my discomfort.
“You have one task today,” Lord Death announced as he strode up the altar steps and sat in a mahogany chair clearly dragged from somewhere in the chateau and placed behind the stone slab.
“Use your power again. In any way you see fit. No time limits. No consequences. Nothing good or bad should befall you. I want to better assess your capabilities.”
“Anything?” I asked.
“Anything at all.”
Of all the requests, this was the most complicated, the thing I feared most. I still wasn’t sure how I’d managed to pull the little violet from the ether, let alone do it again. I took a deep breath and tipped my head to the stone arches, trying to avoid looking at any of the crucifixes.
“Begin,” he said with a wave of his gloved hand.
I nodded, as if I hadn’t already. My mind kept racing, unable to settle or focus. It felt like the time I had a patron who had asked me to piss on him and I hadn’t known what to say—it wasn’t that I was opposed, he was paying handsomely, it was just that I didn’t think I could really do it.
“Do you have a pitcher I can break?” I asked. If there was one type of magic I was good at, it was smashing Josef’s clay pitchers under my hands.
“A talent for destruction is not magic,” he said, eyebrow arched in faint contempt.
Despite the chill, sweat beaded on my temple.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees like an emperor waiting for the games to begin. “You have much more in you than a capacity for destruction,” he said.
The altar loomed in front of him and I eyed it nervously. “Isn’t this a blasphemy here?” A house of God was a holy space, a place of sanctification. Part of my shame in childhood was not being able to control my power when I most understood I needed to.
Death followed my gaze over his shoulder, to the cross on the wall. “You mean because this is a chapel? No. Magic is not a contempt. The church is just as much a space for spells and alchemy as any other. What is the transmutation of bread into the body of Christ after all, except magic?”
“The Eucharist is magic?” I asked uneasily. Despite the years that had passed, I felt the familiar cold sweat of childhood that the Mother Superior would overhear. I feared her more than God.
“It is a rite of transmutation,” he repeated. “The bread into the body. The cup into the blood. So, yes.”
Perhaps it was like Hildegard’s visions and my own—the same, except that one was blessed and one was …
cursed. But I still did not understand what made it so—only my birth?
“The nuns taught that I am the natural foe of the church. As a woman, I mean. It is only through degradation and ascetism that we can be made a useful vessel for God.”
“Those things are required for a sorceress as well.”
It thrilled me to hear him say that word—sorceress—but also dismayed me to hear becoming so would require embracing what I’d run from at the convent. “Why? Why must I deny and degrade myself to become a sorceress?”
“In the realm of gods, one must understand the proper context of self in relation to what lies beyond. If you cannot deny yourself, you can never know yourself, and if you never know yourself, you know nothing else.”
“I know myself.”
“You know only what you do not want to be,” he said, with a dismissive wave.
“So to become either a nun or a sorceress, I would have to walk the same path as I did in the convent? What determines the difference between the two?” I wanted to learn to live, not learn to carry more suffering.
“Religion is a means to an end. Magic is an end in itself.”
He spoke to me like no man had before—as if I understood these higher levels of thought. I was confused and uncertain, but I did not want to betray that when it felt as if he’d said something quite profound.
He pursed his lips thoughtfully and after a moment he asked, “Where do you think your magic comes from, Salomé?”
Hearing my name like that, so softly uttered in this silent space, was startlingly intimate.
I swallowed against the jolt of my heart.
“I don’t know. It’s something that just …
happens sometimes.” Other than my trick of finding eggs (which, arguably, were already there to find), any other use of my power had only been accidental, as if it were only a matter of fumbling in the dark and finding unseen doorways.
Sometimes at just the right time. But then sometimes not even if I banged on the door until my fists bled.
“As I thought. Your task is to find the path to its origin,” he said. “Focus.”
The wind was a wolf howling in the eaves, and I paced the edges of the chapel trying to conjure up the one part of myself I’d most carefully buried.
My gaze found Death—the slash of black against the whitened chapel stones, his proud, red mouth, the long, carefully gloved fingers.
All that, and even he had been lured, just like the monster that had taken Rochelle.
Whatever magic this wretched body of a prostitute contained must be powerful indeed.
If only I could find it. My eyes narrowed. “Why does Death know about magic?”
“I was a magician before I was …” He hesitated, his mouth twisting just slightly, as if the next words were impossible to speak.
“Were you a good magician?”
“Do you mean was I skilled or was I moral?”
I felt like he could see the pieces of me I could not. I had meant moral, but I did not realize until he said it. “Both?” I asked in reply, not wanting to admit my true question.
“I am skilled. And I exist outside of morality. All sorcerers must.” He flicked some unseen dust off his leg. “Is our conversation helping you do something?”
“I’m trying. It is difficult,” I said reflexively.
“Try harder,” Lord Death said.
I can’t, I wanted to say in frustration. I felt empty and carved out. I wanted to be taught how to no longer struggle. But I could not voice any of this, lest he be disappointed in my petulance, my mortality, and my wretchedness. So I simply stood there in increasing agony.
The wind wailed in the stone vaults.
“I’m not sure how to … when I used it before, it was always an accident.”
He shook his head. “Magic is always intentional.”
“I only know of accidents … or luck.” I regretted the words the moment they left my mouth. Was I a fool, to admit to him this was all a mistake?
“Turn around,” he commanded.
I stood without moving for a moment too long and the elegant line of his body stiffened in threat.
“Yes, my lord,” I said and turned.
“I will help you. You must listen to me very closely. Think of using your power—in this moment. Think of what you most want.”
He kept speaking, slipping into a language unknown to me.
What I most wanted. I closed my eyes and listened to the deep resonance of his voice.
His words, even though I did not understand.
I did not seem to be able to think of anything at all, only that unknown deep within and how it had stolen everything I loved.
As he spoke, it seemed the air shifted around me.
Not as a wind, but as a sort of rearrangement of the firmament.
Magic. It pulsed, closing in on me. I opened my eyes, still facing the back of the empty chapel with my heart racing.
Someone was walking through the doors.
Rochelle.