Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
Poisoned Saint
The scholastic facet of the Poisoned Saints had been among the things I liked best about my youth.
Pouring over tomes and scrolls both recent and far-flung in the ancient past, dissecting one language from another, translating them both into yet a third, cross-referencing and following ecumenical arguments through the theology of souls that dated back to ten thousand years before my birth and through to the scrappy polemics of our diversified modern time — well, I had happily poured my hours and days into that pursuit, dragged from it only to train my body in the arts of weaponry and battle.
Even now, a Poisoned Saint, galloping from one disaster to the next with barely a hot meal and a breath in between, I can easily be lured away from duty by the call of a promising tome upon a shelf, or a sage whispering about the latest wisdom they are discussing in the halls of the philosophers.
Though I am made to be a seeker of truth and a lover of the novel, and though this terrible wonder we are experiencing is certainly the most fascinatingly awful thing that anyone will be whispering about for decades — if anyone lives to tell the tale of it — I would prefer to employ my gifts of scholarship another way.
I am crafting a demon. Not quite from scratch.
It’s already been fed guilt and murder. My guilt.
My murders. My shameful lusts, and my own blood and spit.
Now, it billows beneath me, forming, strengthening, churning to the strokes of my pen upon the book.
I do not know if I should make it strong and capable to defeat the others already snatching at mine, or if I should make it with a terrible flaw I can twist to destroy it.
I suspect I must do both and I am not pleased with the difficulty of the project.
It would be a fun thought experiment in a high tower beside a crackling fire with a cup of mead and a friend to discuss it.
It is not so delightful when I know I am dabbling in the dark arts, in a deadly sin that may very well have been the origin of all evil on this earth.
I write down an obscure quote from Nasarithin over five hundred years ago in which he expounded on the idea that evil feeds upon the fear of those around it and thus fear ought to be banished or evil will grow, and as the last words settle on the page, the shadow beneath me expands with a motion like a beating heart.
Too effective. I grimace.
“Have we crafted all the demons that ever were?” the Vagabond had asked. And I do not know the answer to that. Perhaps we have. Perhaps from the very beginning, man has penned his own demise. Perhaps he even used the ideas of the theologians to make it easier for him.
Complicating my complicity further is this: I am bound in this harness as I ply my pen, bound and trapped as Victoriana grills Sir Coriand. I cannot aid her. And I feel shame that I was led so easily into this trap. I should be below, helping to unmask the crimes that have been done here.
In my defense, it hadn’t felt like a trap when I climbed into the harness. It had felt like maneuvering — like setting them up to confess and putting me up high where I could watch everyone at once.
Sir Coriand makes no excuse for his actions. All the guilt I’ve been carrying around for years has bent me and yet on his shoulders, it weighs no more than a single flake of snow. He smiles and speaks and he is clearly enchanted by the sound of his own voice.
I have heard the great orators in the capital, but I have not heard anyone quite like Sir Coriand, who twists murders into sorrowful necessities and makes the Vagabond look crass for asking him to answer for them.
I do not know if I am more horrified by him and his ice-cold heart, or by Hefertus, who took one look at this unspeakable choice before us and simply chose it away.
Such an escape is not open to me. And even if it were, I do not think I could leave the Vagabond on her own.
I am annoyed at my friend. I hope to live to tell him so.
I add to my treatise the argument of Saint Flamire, who wrote that every evil was vulnerable to the grace of kindness, that a kind word said could still anger and stop up bitterness.
I see my shadow shiver and glance up again, divided between the battle below and the task of crafting a monster with a fatal flaw.
The Vagabond stares Sir Coriand down like a brave man stares down a charging bull, even though he’s flanked by both golems. I both adore her in that moment and think she bears a tragic likeness to real Saints of the past — the ones torn apart by crowds, sawn in half, and beheaded.
She has their fire in her eyes, their staunch refusal to quit, their intolerable enemies.
It almost hurts to look at her.
I won’t be able to save her if it comes to that.
But I write. As fast and as furiously as I can. And I try to make a monster that can break and yet be broken. I diagram out rules and sketch out plans, and if my handwriting is illegible and my sketches much revised, the arcane power of this place does not seem to care.
My shadow is growing.
I write of how sin amplifies itself by curling the spirit in on itself round and round, like a tree stunted by growing within a dwelling.
I write that, and the demon billows wide.
I write of how anger, when fed, feeds on the one who is angry, and I feel the crack form in the center that I can leverage later.
I glance up and see Owalan move from the corner of my eye.
I shout my warning and clench my jaw as his sword splits the air an inch from Victoriana’s face.
My heart is in my throat as she twists to the side.
I thrash against the straps holding me in unconscious reaction, but I can no more leap to her aid than I can fly.
Her demon dog leaps from the shadows. He grabs Owalan by the shoulder, bearing him down to the earth.
A spike of fear shoots through me. Too many buckles hold me in place. And I will not be able to help as long as I am tied into this harness. My fingers fumble with the buckle on my forearm, blunt against the smooth leather.
“If you want to help her, you’d best write,” Sir Sorken calls out. “You won’t be getting down until you’re done. That’s how this works, my lad.”
His shadow demon shambles over to mine and strikes it with a powerful overhand blow to the shoulder.
I bite my lip, put pen to paper, and scratch until my hand cramps, forcing speed and power into the lines of the shadow I craft.
I write of compression and the art of water pumps in the aqueduct systems, and as I write, my shadow tightens and strengthens.
It grabs a strand of Sorken’s demon, dragging it a little over the line where our shadows meet before that scrap of shadow shreds away and the demons burst into fragments.
I curse as my shadow falls to shreds and then slowly starts to build beneath me again.
Sorken’s is in the same state. I should be throwing all my efforts into my fight against him, but I’m distracted by the sight of Owalan and Victoriana spinning through the space where our two demons were only moments before.
Their blades clash, steel on steel, as they whirl.
Victoriana lands a double-handed strike on Owalan’s shoulder, but the other paladin still has his armor — I never did ask what happened to the Vagabond’s, and curse me for that.
I was so fascinated by how I could feel her warmth through the cloth of her clothing that I forgot entirely that there ought to be steel cladding over it.
With a flick of a pen, I add heat to my demon, writing of how the sear of a guilty conscience is like to a fire that can never be fully quenched, beginning to build him again from scratch.
Beneath me, dancing around my black, filthy shadow, Victoriana ducks under a blow from Cleft, her groan audible as she spins out of the defensive duck and brings her sword up just in time to turn Owalan’s blow.
My guts tighten.
She’s forgotten Suture.
I cry out a warning as he lunges in from behind her, grasping with bone fingers.
At the last moment, the dog leaps, catching Suture’s forearm between its canine teeth.
The golem tries to shake the dog off, bones rattling, bits of cloth tearing off.
Brindle’s sleek body shakes with him, teeth rattling but refusing to quit, just like his mistress.
It’s with the dry-stick snap of a breaking bone that he finally flies through the air, half the golem’s forearm and hand still locked in his jaw, to land hard on the edge of the sand rim.
I can’t afford to watch to see if he can recover.
I write about the tenacity of evil, how a single root left behind can grow again as if it were never razed in the first place.
My shadow pops back to strength as if it were never ripped apart — and only just in time.
Sir Sorken’s demon leaps toward Victoriana, snatching at her foot.
She goes down in a heap, a pained gasp breaking her silence.
I drive my demon forward, using its bulk to push Sorken’s back. It thrusts with the power I’ve scribed into it. And if I did not feel guilty before, it is coming back now. I am creating a monster. I am good at it.
Sir Owalan sails back into the fight, swinging his blade at Victoriana. She rolls and pops up to her feet, where her dog stands, still shaking the broken golem arm in his jaws, spittle flying everywhere.
“Don’t think I’m done questioning you, Sir Coriand,” she says, pointing the tip of her blade at him for a heartbeat before turning back to Owalan just in time to slide his strike away. Her eyes flash and her cheeks are flushed with the fight. I force my gaze away and back to what I pen.
“You’re a terribly dogged thing, Beggar,” Sir Coriand says, annoyed. “I heartily wish Sir Kodelai had succeeded with your demise.”
“And why should I not be? We who are poor have only honor and truth left.”