“I went to see the Izir.” Elmere’s voice slipped into reverence.
Csilla turned so quickly she bumped the pot, spilled water sizzling to faint mist in the flame. “Oh?”
Izir were rare, descendants of the angels who walked the world of salt and blood before the Severing and those humans they had loved. There had been one in town for weeks, not that the endless work of tending the sick gave her leave to gawk. He certainty didn’t come by the church; blooded divinity had no need of intercession.
Elmere nodded, gesturing to his pocked skin. “He heals, child.”
The lesions weren’t healed, but if Elmere was feeling better, that was a true blessing. “How?” A hundred litanies crawled through her throat. Where there were blessings, there should be praise.
The old man’s laugh was a bark. “Through Asten eternal. Virtues and vices, didn’t the church teach you anything?” She bit the inside of her cheek at his teasing as he continued. “He heals with a touch, and he has the most marvelous voice. Makes one think of how Silgard must have been in glory.”
There had been a time when the streets glowed with the divinity of the those who walked on them, every footstep a benediction. Saints and angels had made this city on a river the locus of the faith, nestled safely in the center of the territories of the Immaculate Union, and built walls of stone inlaid with prayers to last until the material world fell to dust.
But that was when their god still found the world worthy of notice. Now when the walls cracked they were repaired with nothing more than earthly mortar, and the only things that watched from on high were vigilant pigeons.
“One day we’ll be gloried again,” she said, words tripping off her tongue as easily as song. “Once every soul is brilliant.” It was the Church’s most important charge. Asten may have left, but perfect obedience would lure Them back and wash the world clean, would allow the angels to return and bring a second golden age. It was only the fact that humans were a corrupted creation in the first place that made obedience so hard.
“He might get you a miracle too, you know.” Elmere’s voice was soft, but the words chafed as she bowed her head for a prayer to blessed Arany, whose sacrifice had kept humanity’s hope alive long centuries ago. It was kind of him to say, but there was no miracle for something like her. Not even in a city built on one.
2
Ilan
There was little pleasure in burning a man when it produced such dismal results. The high inquisitor scowled at the pinkened strips along the shaking merchant’s forearm, skin that would soon shrivel to blisters. “I’ve already told you everything,” the man gasped. “The cheating I’ll give you, but I didn’t have anything to do with that girl’s murder. Mercy. Please.”
Ilan’s lips thinned at the impotent plea. He set the iron rod back in the fire, gaze lingering on the steady orange smolder that gave the windowless room a smoke-tinged glow of golden holiness. He’d been sure of this lead. Multiple witnesses had testified they’d seen the man prowling the dank riverbank in the mornings, right where the latest death had been. The man himself had confessed to sabotaging his neighbor’s eel traps so readily Ilan had been sure it was a ruse.
But he really was just that easily cowed, a cheat wanting to be the only option for serving eel pies when the city opened its doors to celebrate the Incarnate’s return from the war front. Failure scored him as surely as the marks he’d left on the crook, and Ilan let his hand linger on the metal until the heat stalked back up it, ready to scald.
“Hold out your hand.”
The merchant uncurled his tense fingers, wincing as if expecting to have them broken.
Ilan fished a piece of consecrated glass from his pocket and placed it on the man’s sweat-slick palm, murmuring a cleansing invocation.
The misshapen piece, broken off an older miracle and worn smooth by years of sinners’ touches, glowed with soft light as it read the man’s soul. The taint of guilty Shadow present before Ilan’s care had been brushed away by the confession like the soil covering a buried gem. A small satisfaction eased the knot in Ilan’s stomach. He’d set one part of the city right tonight.
He untied the ropes binding the man’s forearms to the table and gestured to the burns. “Find a mercy priest to tend that before it blackens.” With luck it would scar, a daily reminder of what Asten thought of swindlers, and save him work in the long run.
The man half-sank before he stood, his run out of the purification room more of a stumble. He was replaced in the doorway by a long-faced acolyte, one wax burn-reddened hand curled on the door frame.
“Yes?” Ilan didn’t bother to temper the sharpness in his voice. It was late, and the driving energy that came with his calling was fading. Chasing whispers and paranoid suspicions was long and haggard work, even before the physical acts. Bodies in pain, souls desperate for escape, were also closest to the divine, their confessions the most likely to save. But getting them there was exhausting and left tired grit behind his eyes.
The boy averted his eyes from the whips and ropes that dragged the misguided back onto the path, focusing instead on the floor. “It’s the latest corpse, Inquisitor. We’re sending it out tonight.” His voice cut off as his teeth worried at his lower lip. “No one wants to give her rites. They say she shouldn’t have them.”
Of course they didn’t. The congregational priests joined the faith to cocoon themselves away from sin, not confront it. A thousand hymns and confessional comforts didn’t do a darkened soul the good of one well-timed strike.
“Fine.”
If he couldn’t yet give her justice, peace was the least he could offer. He followed the boy out and into colder and deeper parts of the cathedral, the stone halls narrowing to squeezing passages and the hall roof slanting low. It was a blessed thing the killer had decided to take up his sport in an icy season, but the hold stank with the lingering sour of rotting bodies; the wine merchant the week before, and now this girl. The novice passed him a hand cloth doused in altar oils, but the sandalwood wasn’t strong enough to keep the stench at bay, and Ilan’s head throbbed.
“Has she at least been given a deliverance writ?” he asked as he approached the corpse. The murdered girl—Kovács Lili—had lost any charm she had in life, and the two acolytes assigned to tend her body had clearly not had washing a mutilated corpse in mind when they joined the church. Ilan slid her eyelids shut to cover the last bit of her empty stare and smoothed her pale blonde braids over the jagged rat bites on her ears. She was from the north; his mother used to plait his hair much the same. She could have been one of his sisters if he didn’t look too closely. Or him, before he’d realized he was no one’s daughter.
The boy continued to stare, face twisted in discomfort.
“Well?”
He finally bowed, and Ilan let the hesitation in it slide. “No, Inquisitor.”
“We respect those delivered, no matter how they got here. You haven’t even kept the vermin away.” He picked up the corpse’s arm, turning to look at the palm where shallow cuts festered. She’d made a brave attempt to defend herself. “Bring me paper.”
He inspected the blackened wound with pursed lips as the boys scurried off, then traced his fingers along the carved flesh under her collarbones, turned into macabre decoration of dribbled blood dried to black garnet and citrine-yellow pus. The script of this killing was in the language of the ether, the message a corrupted and Shadow-touched one he couldn’t read, no matter how many times he traced the words peeled in her skin.
The church had ruled the first death a singular event; unsettling, but within the realm of reason. The second, not two weeks later, raised eyebrows and pulled together late hour meetings. The third, and the church closed ranks, citing potential panic if word got out that someone was killing citizens and marking them as unholy.
Now they were on four, and he was no closer to finding out who was responsible.
Prelate Abe and his council had suggested sabotage from the broken territories or perhaps the cults springing up in the wake of war using dark imagery to terrorize. Madness was always a suspect, as was vendetta, though the killer had a wide reach, and there was no clear link between the victims save the manner of their deaths. The families all denied their loved ones had enemies or dark interests; death made a saint of everyone. There were never any witnesses.
Ilan wrote the girl’s name in a careful hand and inscribed an intercessory prayer beneath. If there were a particular saint or angel she wanted to lead her, there was no way of asking now, and any fresh blood that would have sealed the request had been emptied into the river to flavor the carp. He touched her cool forehead and penned in the name of Szente Vasya. This girl was also a child of Saika, and their home territory’s saint should be willing to lead her soul across, far as they were from her.
He folded the paper and placed it on Lili’s chest, her arms too stiff to be bent to hold it. A memory flashed; another body with arms folded, and leather cuffs, and snow-heavy pine branches scratching at the windows as they prepared the body to burn. It was a blessing to die in sight of the spires of the grand cathedral, but he’d wager she would have rather been delivered while looking at peaks and ice. For a too-brief moment the sharp memory of forest scent, wild and green and seven years behind him, chased out the scent of death.
“Send a message to the Servants that we’re done with the body and put her out,” he said. “I’ll let her parents know when I speak to them.”
He turned and left the disquiet of the cell-turned-morgue, but childish whispers chased him.
