“Why isn’t the church doing more?” he asked, voice grave and flat. “We’ve been terrorized for weeks, and the Prelate hasn’t said a blasted thing.”

Ilan tilted his head. “Excuse me?”

The fear was gone from the man’s eyes, replaced by a cavernous anger as he half-rose, fingertips pressing into the table. “You relish punishing those who sin, but what are you doing to prevent these crimes from happening in the first place? If prayer was going to work the city would be free already. Say what you want about the Izir, but at least he’s on the streets and not hiding in the cathedral. He’s offering what comfort he can.”

“Karlos!” The man’s wife pressed her palms on the table and bowed her head until it nearly touched the surface.

It had been a long time since Ilan had seen quite that much deference.

Then again, these people were from Saika. They may have seen him in uniforms far more decorated than the one he now wore.

“And what would you have me do?” Ilan’s lip curled. “I have the census of everyone in the city. Would you like me to call them in, one by one, and pull out their fingernails until I get a confession?” They’d already tested the population against the glass, found all manner of minor blasphemies and a few horrors, but nothing close to this level of sin.

“If that’s what it takes.” The man’s chin was set. Grief had snatched the color from his world, rendered it black and white, illuminated only with flashes of pain. He’d seen it in the church, among those who thought taking vows after tragedy would bring some meaning to their loss. He’d seen it in his own home, with two siblings delivered before he’d turned fifteen and his mother reduced to a ghost herself for years.

But there was a reason justice and knowledge were equal among the virtues. Ilan himself had considered putting more pressure on the interrogations, and just as quickly dismissed it. He wasn’t going to scar a city of the devout in the hope some rumor of smoke turned out to be fire. The Izir was making enough people question the church as it was; any more and it would spill over into outright anger at the faith.

He’d been raised on politics and stories of what happened when the hungry turned hateful against those guiding them. In the dark years between the Severing and the Union, the territories had been in constant fear-stoked uprising, and trust had only slowly been rebuilt in the three hundred years since they’d come to a sort of order. Managing a population for their own good was delicate work.

But this man didn’t need to know that. Ilan let teeth show with his smile. “Then why don’t I start with you?” Let the man look his call to violence in the mirror. By the way his lip curled, he found the reflection sickening.

“My daughter is dead. You can’t think I killed her.” He was standing upright now, backing up to put a cowardly step of space between himself and the inquisitor.

“You would be surprised. But I don’t think these murders are a family matter.”

The older man leaned back and stared at the ceiling, retreating into the shroud of impotent anger, and his wife saw Ilan out with a bowed head and breathy prayers to their shared saint.

When he shut the door, he paused to place his hand on it and say a prayer of solace, one he’d learned from his own mother in the endless nights of deep winter. These people would need strength.

Murders happened in Silgard, but never in such isolation. There was always a thread- jealousy, or anger, or greed, and he wasn’t lying when he said it was kin killing kin more often than not. The only connection here was spilled blood, the writing on the bodies, and the way the killer never surfaced.

Thoughts he had tried to suppress leaked to the surface like smoke finding hairsbreadth cracks in a sealed door.

Ilan would have bet his own soul that there could never be a demon in Silgard. The city was warded, the people striving for good, and creatures of Shadow required invitation.

But this was the city of miracles, and not everything miraculous was good.

“Prelate, a word.”

The man stood before the glowing gold-wrought eye at the front of the sanctuary hall, but he shifted to let Ilan take a spot at his side. This close the fire inside was warming, then scalding, turning the gilt molten.

“A helpful one, I hope.”

Ilan wouldn’t go that far. “A concerned one. I spoke with the parents of the latest victim. There was nothing overly suspicious in the girl’s life.” Not that he had expected them to say anything else.

The Prelate’s soft sigh stirred the ash on the air. “Unlucky, then. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Very strange for the place and time to have been by the river at night, don’t you think? Almost like there was some influence. Have you considered...” It felt blasphemous to be the first to suggest it, but he couldn’t do otherwise. “Have you considered that this truly is Shadow work? A broken seal, Sotir, something...” Something that hadn’t been seen since the Severing.

Abe stared into the flame, not even acknowledging the possibility with his gaze. “Arany still bleeds and weeps. There is no proof this is anything more than a human killer with a taste for the macabre. The bodies smell like bodies. The wounds don’t smoke.”

Because whatever made them is gone. “The seal...”

“The seal is fading because the peoples’ faith is weak. If they trust the church to protect them all will be well.”

It would be easier to believe that.

Abe turned and his hand found Ilan’s shoulder, fingers pressing to prevent Ilan’s instinctive flinch.

“You’re wise to consider all ideas, Ilan, but a lack of focus will lead to failure. If it were truly a work of Shadow, the Incarnate would have returned already.” The older man’s lips pressed into a cutting line. “As it is, he has been delayed.”

“Again?” They’d been sure he’d arrive before the spring. Pilgrims and merchants had already started appearing in the city, hoping to participate in the celebration of his homecoming, or at least capitalize on it.

“Again. But he is sending us help.”

“We don’t need help, we need him.“ The Incarnate was the one person the divine still deigned to speak with.

The Prelate sighed. “We will be obedient and grateful for what we are sent. And you will drop that train of thought. I wouldn’t be surprised if spiritual dissent is part of what our killer is after with these mock-Shadow deaths. We have to be united, and strong.”

Ilan murmured respect. He would be obedient; it was a tenet. But there was nothing in scripture that said he had to be grateful, and he was hardly going to stop thinking.

He waited until he was out of sight to pinch the bridge of his nose and try to stave off a headache. He would add a few notes to Lili’s file, then check who the junior inquisitors had rounded up. And look at the old records and their descriptions of older magic again.

It was blasphemous to think it, but all creation was a selfish act in a way, and the very act had birthed dark demiurge with god-sprinkled humanity. The Severing had cut the world off from the extremes of the ether, but the remnants still stained. The Izir and his sham of brilliance. The demons that the Servants of the Road kept sleeping in their tarry prisons. They weren’t so far from Silgard, and the wards the church trusted in were old and maintained by the faith that even Abe admitted was weakening.

The floor outside the library was dotted with little smears of black cat prints. A sinking feeling overtook him as he opened the door.

Everything looked neat enough, and the stack was where he told Csilla to put it, but as he approached his work it was clear that it was a facade. There were fingerprints and ink dots and one very suspicious paw print, and as he shuffled through the papers, one was missing.

His brows drew together. The paper was replaceable, the information less so. She was probably going to take it to the stupid Izir who was the only one who seemed to want her, the person in Silgard least likely to keep their mouth shut. She was going to spook the killer, no matter what it was, even further into the dark.

9

Csilla

The day was rudely bright. Snow had melted into puddles in the street too large to avoid, dampening her hem. She hiked her skirts up, trying to keep her dress out of the slush, suddenly conscious of the value of the fabric. Her clothes had rarely been nice and never new, but if she stained or tore something beyond repair it would be dear to replace now.

There were seven districts in Silgard, with the cathedral at its heart, once divided to provide a seat to every angel and the representatives of their respective territories. Now the lines bled and the grand governing houses only sheltered the secular nobility when they saw fit to make pilgrimage. With the Incarnate returning, some were no doubt preparing for just that, and there’d be no chance of hiding in an empty outbuilding to save her coins.

First, to find Mihály. Maybe he could even convince one of his followers to give her a place to stay. They seemed willing enough to do anything for him.

She picked up speed, brushing past women on their way to and from shopping at the streetside market stalls, nearly stepping into the road as a carriage clipped past. She couldn’t move back fast enough to avoid being splattered with gray water and barely got her arms up in time to defend against flecks of gravel that shot out from beneath the horses’ hooves. The driver never slowed, yelling an insult to her mother as he passed.

Well, the insult was a black mark on him and nothing to her. Csilla had no idea who her mother was. She shook her skirts off as best she could and picked up her pace again. The alley looked more open in the bright light— all the easier to see that the ladder on the side of the house was gone.