Chapter Ten
The compulsion throbbed behind her lids, an ache that intensified with every beat of her heart.
“I’m a surgeon, not a butcher,” Idris said.
“I would never mutilate a body if there’s no reason for it.
Seraphina, I thought you were different.
They call me a ghoul because they think I dissect for pleasure.
It’s always for science, always to learn more so I can save lives.
The vessel is sacred, and even when I cut and remove parts, I praise its sanctity and pray for forgiveness. ”
“What if I told you we’d be giving his eyes to someone who doesn’t have any?”
Idris sucked in a breath, then promptly regretted it and pressed his sleeve to his nose and mouth.
“Tell me first. Everything. And I’ll consider what you’re asking.”
“Not here. We can’t linger.”
Idris averted his gaze, looked at the walls, at the ceiling, at the Virgin painting on the mantel, anywhere to avoid her pleading eyes and the gore at their feet.
“You’ve known me for fifteen years, you said so yourself.”
He shook his head.
“No more lies, I promise. No more secrets.”
Her own words were more sickening than the scene before them. She meant it to the extent that she could. She would tell him all he wanted to know, except the one thing that would lead to her death and his downfall.
His dark eyes snapped back to her, and he held her gaze for one long, heavy moment.
Without a word, he opened his satchel and took out his kit, only half unrolled it, enough to get the tools that he needed, then made his way toward the grotesque pile in the middle of the room, stepping carefully and stretching to reach the boy’s face.
It was frozen in terror. His bright green eyes were the only thing that still made him look human, and Idris started removing them with precise cuts while murmuring a prayer under his breath.
Seraphina didn’t understand it. She didn’t know Arabic.
It only took ten minutes. They walked out of the cottage, checked their surroundings, and moved fast up the hill, keeping low.
Bramble was waiting where they’d left him.
He nickered affectionately, his ears twitching, and Seraphina rubbed his head and hugged him, relieved to see he was all right. The cart was intact, too.
Idris filled a bucket with snow and placed the bundle that contained the boy’s eyes on top.
It was all efficient and mechanical, as if he’d decided not to dwell or agonize over a thing already done.
He helped Seraphina into the cart, his hand steady on her lower back, settled on the driver’s plank and steered Bramble out of the copse of birches.
Only when the village was behind them did he say a single word:
“Speak.”
Seraphina was grateful for the time he’d given her to organize her thoughts.
She started with the beginning and told him about Matteo’s mission from Headmaster Wolff to travel to Tuscany to bring his family’s apex relic, the journey back, the attack, his death, and her eyes being carved out of her skull.
She didn’t give him details, not even suggested the four men had raped her, but she knew he understood from the visible tension in his shoulders.
It wasn’t something that needed to be said.
It was a known fact that when men at war got their hands on a woman, they treated her body like loot.
She told him about the convent of Saint Vivia, the sisters who nursed her back to health, about Briar who became her friend and guardian.
She’d learned to navigate the world blind, do almost everything she could do before.
And more. Fight. She told him about the nuns’ raids to collect relics for their vault, and how a name heard in a tavern – Major Eisengrau – ignited a fire inside her, and from that moment on, she knew there was no other purpose to her life except to get revenge on the men who’d ruined her.
Ingolstadt followed, Hartmann, and the prison. Rune.
Their journey south, the stop in Langenbach where they cured a plague, the things they learned in the western tower of Schloss Ewigheim.
“Matteo’s hands,” she said. “My eyes.”
Idris was too struck to speak.
“He tore them out of his sockets and gave them back to me. And I ran. I left him there, bleeding, terrified, alone… I left him there in pain, remorse, hating himself. When I came back to my senses, it was too late. He was gone.”
“The eyes are for him.”
“Yes.”
“Seraphina.” Idris turned to look at her. “You know what he is.”
“I do.”
“The creature who ripped those people apart…”
“They’re not the same,” she said. “That revenant was a Sentinel. Rune is a Construct. They were built for different reasons.”
Idris was silent, processing her words.
She climbed onto the plank next to him and placed her hand on his arm, feeling his muscles flex and release. He wasn’t disgusted with her, only uncertain. There was still time.
“Did you work on Project Prometheus?” she asked.
“No. I know about it, but I stayed away from it, kept my head low and downplayed my skill and knowledge. Most of my colleagues from House Cordoba were and are still involved with it. From all years, not just ours, surgeons and scientists in their own right. Bright people. Knowing who is working for the High Harvester, I fear that the resistance has no chance of winning this war.”
Seraphina bit her tongue. The urge to reveal Matteo’s secret was strong, the words ready to fly past her lips.
She tasted blood and swallowed hard. The compulsion throbbed behind her lids, an ache that intensified with every beat of her heart.
She moved back into the cart, rummaged for a cup, and poured herself beer from the half empty cask.
Yes, she’d drunk half of it while stuck in the barn, but in her defense, it was a small cask, she’d been in agony for most of that time, and Idris had used it in her food, too.
“Stop the cart,” she said.
Her head was killing her, she wanted to lie down and sleep for ten hours, but that wasn’t possible, so what was left was for her to stop letting her problems drown her and get on with the solutions.
Idris pulled at the reins and looked at her expectantly. It was as if he knew she was going to say something bad, something crazy and punishable by a trip to hell, because he was braced for it.
“We should get that Sentinel.”
His thick, black eyebrows shot up, and his lips curled into a disbelieving smile.
“What?”
Seraphina knocked back the last of her beer.
“We should kidnap him.”
“Seraphina, did you see what I saw? Were you there, or did your soul leave your body? I wouldn’t blame you for it.
God knows I often pray for the ability to separate from myself so I don’t have to experience every single dreadful moment of his life.
But then I feel guilty, because I was meant to live it all, and I choose to believe there must be a greater purpose to it. ”
“No. I mean, yes. But I can do it.”
She took out the vomer bone and showed it to him.
Idris stared at the new relic, his hand reached out to touch it, but he changed his mind at the last moment and pinched the bridge of his nose instead.
“Another one,” he said. “The atlas vertebra is in the medicine chest. Should I put this one with it?”
Seraphina’s eyes widened. “In the medicine chest? What’s wrong with you? I thought you kept it in your satchel.”
“Not seeing in the dark doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I don’t wear relics on my person. Aside from lattices, I’d rather not have much to do with bones.”
“We could lose the medicine chest! The whole cart with all that’s in it! That was so irresponsible of you, Idris. I told you that bone has no toll.”
“And what about this one? What does it do?”
“Well.”
She sat next to him, her palm open so they could both look at it. It was so small, it was hard to think it did much at all.
“I don’t know what saint it came from, but it is an apex relic I found implanted in a… questionable place. Don’t worry, its keeper was long gone when I removed it.”
Idris shot her a look. “Are you trying to tell me in a lot of words that you desecrated a grave?”
“Rune helped. I knew there was a relic, why leave it buried? It would’ve gotten lost, for decades, or forever. And a bone like this, in the right hands, can do good.”
He didn’t seem convinced. In fact, the more she talked, the less receptive he was.
“All right, it’s a thrall relic,” she said, letting out a sound between a groan and a sigh.
Idris jumped out of the cart, his hands going to his head, his eyes not leaving her as he started pacing.
“I discovered what it does by accident. It works like this.” She averted her gaze, just in case it might misfire.
“I make eye contact, address the person as ‘you’, and that gets their attention. I say the order, and they just do it. Whatever it is. Of course, I would never…” She looked back at him and saw that he seemed fine, not in her thrall even a little bit.
If nothing else, it was the opposite. “It was useful for getting in and out of Schloss Ewigheim without being questioned.”
“Captain Mayer,” Idris said. “Found dead. Did you–”
“He was one of the four. He deserved it, and the only thing I regret is that I did it fast. I should’ve drawn it out.”
He processed this for a minute.
“Wait. You were shouting ‘you, you’.” He went pale when it dawned on him. “You could’ve saved them. All of them. And I stopped you.”
Seraphina joined him in the snow. She dropped the relic in her pocket and took his hands in hers.
“You couldn’t have known, and I didn’t have time to tell you.”
“You should’ve fought me harder.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now. It was a bad strategy anyway. It would’ve exposed me. Us.”
“But all those people… They didn’t have to die.”
She smiled. “So, you agree with me. A relic like this can do a lot of good. In the right hands.”
“What about its toll? And don’t tell me this one doesn’t have one either, because you’d be lying again.”
“No more lies. It has a toll, and it’s unpleasant but manageable.”
He cocked an eyebrow, waiting for her to continue.
“Dreams. Every time I sleep, it shows me the people who were manipulated by it in the past. Mostly, it’s about how the relic was used before I got it.”
“The dreams you told me about. They torture you.”
She shrugged. “It’s a small price to pay.”
“Is it?”
“We can use it to control the Sentinel. We can find the company in charge of him, where they’re stationed, and all I need is to get close enough so I can make eye contact and he can hear me.”
“And what would be the point of that?”
“One less Sentinel for the High Harvester to deploy into battle. That’s the first and most important.
Second, the ledger Rune and I found at the castle contains lists of all the organs used to create the revenants, and Mayer said Matteo’s body was used almost in its entirety.
Rune has the ledger, I’m sure. He wouldn’t leave it behind.
It’s the one thing that tells him the story of how he was made, that offers him a glimpse into his identity.
I intend to read that ledger from cover to cover, then hunt down every Construct still alive, and every murdering Sentinel, and retrieve what belonged to Matteo.
I will give him a proper burial even if it takes me years. Decades.”
“Seraphina,” Idris sighed. He pulled her into a hug. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”
“No,” she said, her voice muffled against his chest.
She clung to his shoulders and bit her tongue again. Every time a conversation skirted close to what she’d read in Matteo’s journal, nagging whispers rose at the back of her mind.
“What about Matteo’s hands?” he asked.
“Rune will keep them, of course. He’s not like the others, I swear it. You’ll see when you meet him.”
“I believe you.”
“Also, I was thinking…” She disentangled herself from him and tapped her chin. “Wouldn’t you like to dissect one of them?”
He furrowed his brows in warning.
“The revenants are the Harvester’s greatest weapons. Wouldn’t learning how they function – how they’re even possible! – help the Sarumite Order and the resistance win the war? I remember you saying something similar.”
“Using my own words against me.”
“They’re not–”
“Human? Their bodies aren’t sacred?”
Seraphina rolled her lips, waiting for him to fight this inner battle and come to the only conclusion that made sense.
“You’re right, they’re blasphemous,” he said. “Revenants are abominations.”
“With one exception.”
He didn’t contradict her, though she sensed he wanted to. He’d come around, Seraphina would make sure of it. No one who spent five minutes in Rune’s presence could see him as a monster.
“So, we… turn back?” she asked.
“If you’re sure. You’re the one with the relic, and you’re the one who has to suffer the consequences of using it.”
“I’m sure. This is the right thing to do.”
They turned the cart around. Seraphina could laugh at the absurdity of what they were doing.
From trying to avoid the heat of the war, now they were looking to walk right into it.
But having a Sentinel… Owning a Sentinel she could command however she saw fit – that could turn the tide.
What Matteo had done with the Bastion Weaves inside the city walls was defensive.
She herself was the kind to go on the offensive.