“Could you?” His eyes swept her as if he could possibly see something the scholar priests had missed.
“Of course not!” The words were hot with the shame that still squeezed her chest at the memory.
“Useless, then.” He leaned back in the chair, Erzsébet jumping to the floor at the sudden shift.
It wasn’t like she was ever anything else. “Is it real?” The words fluttered as they left her lips. Real, as in not a copy made by someone who had studied the imperfect remains from before the Severing. Real, as in written in the hand of a demon itself.
Ilan didn’t answer but instead raised a hand to beckon her closer, pushing the papers slightly to the side. There were three other bodies. “Saints preserve,” Csilla whispered, brushing her mark as a ward though the paper couldn’t hurt her.
“Does it look familiar at all? From what they showed you before.”
It was a simple question, but still unfamiliar enough to throw her, and she stalled. Every line he’d drawn was once part of a breathing person.
He looked back, a pale eyebrow arched. “I don’t remember taking your tongue.”
Csilla forced herself to step to his shoulder and look. “They’re...different. All complete, for one thing.” The examples of shadow invocations she’d been brought had all been broken, lost to time, or even for those not, a syllable here or there purposefully left blank or reversed to avoid any accidental workings.
“Complete or correct?”
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.
