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.

”—lost Asten’s favor.”

Ilan turned, the snap of his boot heel on the stone enough to silence, but not enough to erase what he’d just heard as the acolyte bent together with another who'd been skulking. Likely the other who'd been shirking his duty.

“Did you have something to add?”

One of the boys was shaking his head, and the other put his back to the wall as if he could blend his oak brown robes into the gray stone.

That was the one who had spoken. Ilan grabbed his wrist, and though they were nearly the same height the boy folded in on himself as if to protect his viscera, his already pale face a shade close to Lili’s.

“No, Inquisitor.“

Ilan’s reflection looked back at him in the gleam of widened, frightened eyes. He pulled out the glass and forced it against the boy’s skin, where it clouded with the gray stain of lies. “Would you like to answer again?”

The boy jerked like a hooked pike, and his thrashing was equally futile. “It’s not what I’m saying! But you must have heard that the seal is...It’s weak.”

Of course it was weak: the city was too troubled for it to be otherwise. Ilan nodded at the glass, darkening by the second with the acolyte’s fear. “Our blessing remains.” There hadn’t been so much as a stutter in the glass, or any of the powers of the church. “We can’t make any judgement beyond that.”

If the boy were wise, he would drop the matter.

He was still too much of a child to be wise.

“But it’s been almost two months and so many people are dead, and the congregational priests are saying there’s going to be a replacement, and if Asten really has called you—“

The force of Ilan’s hand took the end of the sentence. Blood bloomed from a dry crack in the boy’s lips, parted in shock from the smack.

Ilan made a loose gesture of blessing over the wound and dropped his wrist. Congregants called him the Holy Wolf for his viciousness, but creation itself had been an act of gloried violence. It was only right that a certain amount of violence was required to keep it pure.

“Apologies, Inquisitor,” the boy mumbled, tongue darting over the seeping red.

“Watch what rumors you listen to. All our souls are at risk— be thankful I just corrected yours.”

The boy bowed, and Ilan nodded.

There was silence as he left, but the disquiet in Ilan’s mind echoed louder than any words.

A replacement. Unlikely. The Prelate would have warned him if things were truly that bad.

Ilan straightened his cassock, touched the sharp silver four-point mark pinned to his collar. He would take evening prayers in his own chambers. And he would pray for the same thing he’d prayed for nightly for all these long weeks, as blood polluted consecrated stone.

Let me be Your justice, swift and holy.

He would show them all that he was Asten’s chosen servant, brought here to purify with leather and steel.

And he would show this monster, who had driven his city into froth-mouthed fear, what it meant to face the wrath of the divine.

3

Csilla

Csilla walked with small, sure steps, steps that paused as she bowed her head to every wisp of holiness on the streets. Eyes of Asten were carved on doors, illegible intercessions to saints baked into bricks along with the maker's fingerprints, infusing even the shadows with a certain holy air.

The fierce form of the angel Virag was pressed into an alcove, a fat black cat curled beside it. The silver-plate statue was clean of bird droppings, and she nodded approvingly at the resting feline as it opened a slit-pupiled eye.

"You're doing wonderful work for the faith, cousin," she told the cat, who yawned wide enough to show fang then shut its eye again. Well. Maybe he couldn't appreciate the praise, but it was worth giving all the same.

Bells echoed across high roofs, tolling the hour, and Csilla sucked in a breath. She'd meant to be back an hour ago, but extra minutes here or there, helping take down laundry or soothing a colicky baby, did tend to add up. She pulled her empty satchel to her chest and ran, dashing through a side street that would let her out near one of the bridges mostly used by merchants. Then if she cut through one of the open courtyards of the guild district, avoided the main thoroughfare and its horse-drawn cabs, and slipped through a back entrance, she could technically be on the grounds in time to help make dinner.