She flinched at the way his tone snapped like the crack of one of his whips. “That I wouldn’t know. But the scholars never brought full lines.” She reached over him, finger hovering just above the inked marks. “Whoever did this writes it well.”

“Well enough to curse us. Not that any of those supposed scholars have been dispatched to confirm it.” The frustration in his voice was dangerously close to soul-blotting anger.

“And this all happened in Silgard?” A cold shiver passed over her scars. His eyes flicked in hesitation, then he nodded.

“It’s no secret we’ve found bodies.”

This was so much more than bodies. If any word had leaked, it was no wonder the people were afraid.

“You think they’re related? That there’s a demon?” Her words became hushed. The demons had all been sealed away after the Severing, and even before the Shadow-born creatures struggled to raise physical form for long and had to borrow skins to work in a world that still held too much of the divine for their comfort. Those possessed by them could never hide from Asten’s eye; the testing glass would read their soul and show them for what they were the moment they tried to enter.

He didn’t answer, only closed his eyes. “Finish what you came for and go. Don’t touch anything else, and I’ll pretend I never saw you.” He went to stack the papers and books together, clumsy with exhaustion, and she raised her hand.

“I’ll clean up here. You can start fresh tomorrow. Please, rest. I owe you.” Let him think it was repayment for his kindness in not asking for harsher punishment and for talking to her at all. And it was, in part. “I’ve already seen it all, anyway.”

Ilan snorted. “You don’t owe me a thing. My honesty was for my own sake, not yours.”

She hadn’t expected any less. “That doesn’t mean I’m not grateful.”

He met her gaze then, cool and steady, and rose. “Stack everything together and put it over there. Don't get anything out of order.” He inclined his head to a corner that held nothing more interesting than construction orders from two decades back. No one would bother anything there.

She held her breath and counted to thirty after the door closed behind him.

A horrified fascination overcame her as she sank into the seat with the stack of papers, ignoring Erzsébet’s biting and pulling at her bootlaces. Four victims. The unholy details burned themselves in her mind as her stomach twisted further with each page of etched brutality. The killings were scattered across the city, the dead with nothing in common but their misfortune and families left to mourn them.

No wonder the church had been so keen to see Mihály dead. If people were already listening to heresy, they would be that much closer to damnation if death came to them before they could make right. His spark of divinity couldn’t counter this. And if the lack of faith was the reason the seal was faltering, letting all this out would be its death knell.

In all the horror, there was hope. If she saved the city from something worse than heresy, they’d have to take her back. She could make up for all her wrongs and perhaps show the Church one of theirs as well.

She shuffled through the papers, looking for a blank piece. There was no way around the fact that her investigation would have to start with one small sin.

A piece towards the bottom only had a few scrawled street names, and she pulled it from the pile and began to copy out the names of the victims, and the details as far as she understood. She couldn’t bring herself to replicate the shadow script, but names would give her a good place to start.

Erzsébet was less pleased, pacing across the table and causing Csilla to scatter blooms of ink where she tried to wave the cat off. When she was finished, she had her names, but there was also a mess, and a little black paw print in signature.

She blew on the paper to dry, eyes on the lightening sky outside. At least she’d be out of the church before Ilan realized what she’d stolen.

8

Ilan

“Our Lili was a righteous girl.”

The murdered girl’s father was sweating, though in the early morning air their home was cool enough the butter on the table was still solid and the mother had an extra shawl draped across her shoulders. Ilan made a note, though it meant very little. The citizens of Silgard often squirmed and sweated before him. Gratifying as the fear was, it made getting information slow.

At least he’d gotten a few hours of sleep after leaving Csilla. Few people would trust you if you were yawning during an interrogation.

“Please, Inquisitor,” the mother said, placing a hand on her husband’s back. “We have to prepare her. We’ve readied her place in the....” The woman choked on the last word, eyes unable to meet his. “They won’t even let us see her body, much less sit for her. She was loved. People need to see that.”

Ilan cleared his throat. “Her ashes can’t be interred inside the city, I’m afraid.” They didn’t need to see the obscene wounds on what they doubtless remembered as perfect skin or spread the secret of what those wounds actually were. None of the victims families had been allowed to see what the killer had made of their loved ones. “She’s already been put out for the Servants of the Road.” The traveling priests swept up everything too far from the provincial church seats to warrant congregational involvement or theologically messy deaths with bodies no city would claim. They would burn her without ceremony, but they would treat her with respect.

The father’s fists clenched, his wife’s face now the bloodless white of a scar. Ilan held up a hand. “I sent her with a writ. Vasya will see her soul to brilliance if she’s earned it.” He could at least give them that comfort.

“We can’t even send her back to Saika?” The mother’s accent slipped through in her anguish, tugging an irksome note of sympathy in him. He knew as well as they did how long that road was. No one would be willing to carry a desecrated corpse through the eastern wilds and the endless mud that would come with the spring thaw or even hold ashes that long. “Somewhere family could visit her remains, even if she can’t be here...”

“I’m sure her soul is at peace with the eternal,” he said. He hoped it was true. The one blessing in all this was that even the defiled spirits seemed to be passing on, no matter what the Izir was preaching about souls and ghosts. “The body is only a vessel, after all. And she’s already gone.” That was why he’d waited to speak with them. Any questioning that spent the whole time debating where to put the body would be a waste of everyone’s time.

The mother murmured a prayer, a balm for grief, but the words were slow in her mouth. The father’s eyes were still wary.

Ilan leaned forward, pressure with nowhere for them to run. “I need to know if you saw anything suspicious in the days before her death. Was she meeting anyone new? Mention being followed, or seeing anything strange?”

The woman gave a little shake of her head, the man rubbing at his knuckles.

Ilan narrowed his eyes. “Think carefully.”

The two sat silent, breath heavy. That was fine. He’d set the temperature to one he was well used to, he could sit here as long as it took for them to boil and crack.

The father leaned forward first.

“She—“

“Karlos.“ His wife grabbed his sleeve.

Ilan raised an eyebrow. “If there’s something I should know, say it. She’s dead. There’s nothing that can stain her now. All we can do is try to give her justice.”

The mother’s hand dropped back to her lap. Her husband continued.

“Lili had come to resent going to service.” He spoke slowly and with struggle, as if the words were being fished from his throat. “She was going to see the Izir. I worried for her soul, whether she’d even be allowed to stay in the city.”

The Izir. Just one more wretched thing in the middle of an already wretched business. “Why was she visiting him?” It didn’t reflect well on her, worse on them for letting her stray. “Was she ill? Or perhaps...other interests?” She would hardly have been the first to lust after the angel.

The man’s eyebrows drew together. “It began after that first man was found dead. She couldn’t sleep for worry and nightmares, she was always a sensitive girl.” Now his words were tripping over themselves in eagerness to be done talking. “She said his prayers and tonics helped, stopped her from pacing all night at least. But I don’t think she believed his heresies—she was just desperate. She’d even talked about joining the church, so it doesn’t make sense. She couldn’t have believed him.” The man’s voice rose with every anguished word.

“What sort of nightmares?” Ilan asked. They’d been careful not to let word of the marks on the bodies slip to the public. Acolytes, however, were young and gossip-prone.

The parents shook their heads. “She never said, not specifically.”

He made a note anyway. “If she was scared of going out at night, what was she doing by the river? A lover, perhaps?” The fetid riverside would be a strange choice for a romantic encounter, but perhaps a fisher or trader had caught her eye. A lovestruck girl might have thought it a chance to sin in the open without being caught, and family often elected to be naive when children grew up.

The couple’s eyes met, but the mother spoke first. “No one that we know of. We didn’t even hear her go out.”

His lips thinned. More intangible testimony instead of evidence. “Perhaps you should have also urged her more strongly to be cautious.” Ilan reached beneath his vestment cloak. “A memento to burn, if you like.”

He placed one of the girl’s blonde braids on the table, where it lay curled and frayed like a strip of pelt, and averted his gaze as the woman broke into gasping sobs.

The father stared down at the twined hair, skin as ashen as the salt white in his beard.