Csilla trailed them to the barn, hands twisting in her skirts and pursed lips that spoke to questions. Her nerves needled his curiosity. “With all you’re willing to say in the city,” he said to Mihály, “I can’t wait to see what you think you need to hide from us.”
Mihály merely pushed the weathered door and let dusted light slant over the carnage.
Whatever his opinion of the Izir, Ilan hadn’t imagined so much scattered fur and rot in his homestead. Dead animals, some dry and withered, some still bloated, littered the ground, and a rabbit hung by its hind leg from a rafter, half-torn by yanking jaws that left the drying meat in dank strips. The whole thing stank of curdled blood.
So this rancid display was what the angel did when no one held him accountable. Ilan slid his gaze to Csilla, her lips pressed thin, but no surprise in her eyes. She already knew about this. He never would have expected her to already be so sunken into heresy already. Nothing in this macabre scene was mercy.
“Shit. Something got in.” Mihály lit a lantern and swung it in an arc of cast orange, but there was no scurrying in the shadows.
Ilan picked the ripped head of a fox from the ground, lifting its black lip with a thumb to examine the frozen fangs. If the Izir had been a hunter, he could respect it. But these weren’t food, and weren’t trophies. They were corpses, laid out without the care even animals deserved. “What is this?”
“This is...” The Izir paused, mouth working for the word. “Research.”
“Research.” Ilan tilted a prone squirrel upright. Its black eyes shone as if it were about to break the spell that held it and scamper away. “And what have you learned from all this?”
A distance clouded Mihály’s eyes. “Not enough. I can touch their souls, keep or even draw them back here momentarily, but they don’t have enough fire to stay.” His voice bit on the last word.
Ilan hummed a prayer as he moved down the line of unfortunate creatures. “What in Asten’s holy name made you believe you needed to work with souls?”
His eyes went to Csilla on the word as she crouched, gathering up the mess and speaking softly to animals long past hearing her. No wonder she’d been taken in by him. The difference between immortal saints and the forgotten faithful was often a measure of divinely sanctioned violence: Wise Angyalka, hanging with bulging eyes, Ladislaj the bounty, feeding his village in the starving season with strips of his own regenerating flesh. To someone so desperate, this massacre would look holy.
Mihály smiled, a grim contrast to the wretched surroundings. “Surely you wouldn’t want me to turn away a gift? Knowledge is a virtue, and how do we get more of it if we don’t experiment once in a while? Miracles are proof of the transformative nature of the divine. I’m doing nothing more.”
Knowledge. A fine summation of chewed-on birds and crusted feathers and tufts of matted fur. “You’re divine, but you’re no god. Knowledge without obedience is heresy.” Csilla seemed to have glossed over the details with his promise of miracles, but the tiny broken bodies should have made her afraid. Being raised in the church had given her too much trust in the appearance of the holiness, without a soul to understand it. If she’d never experienced the ecstasy, she couldn’t understand the horror.
Though she had lived her own kind of horror, one that had led her to kneel in old sawdust on a barn floor with a lap full of dry dead things.
“It’s a very old kind of power,” Mihály continued. “From before the Severing.”
“People weren’t moving souls before the Severing,” Ilan countered. Angels and demons had lived among humans and added their magic to their territories, swayed them one way or the other, but the basics of souls never changed. Everyone had two aspects, brilliance and shadow, and the side you nurtured during life determined your eternity. You couldn’t touch them or redirect them. That power belonged to Asten alone.
“People weren’t. Angels were. Sometimes a soul could be held for a day or two. Sometimes it could be brought back. But in this corrupted world, it needs something to cling to. Something fresh, almost like life.” Mihály pushed the hanging rabbit lightly, and it danced on its rope, a grim and slow waltz.
“Blood.” Ilan knew how easily the body gave it up.
Mihály nodded. “Still warm. Enough to give it a physical tether while Csilla accepts it. And the killer has spilled enough to forfeit theirs.”
The image of Csilla, chestnut ringlets matted and pale skin smeared crimson, was unholy intoxication. In the dusty light coming through the wood cracks, she was splattered in golden sunlight that could all too easily be running red. “That’s madness. Not a miracle.” How could this man be one Asten Themself had marked as holy?
“If your faith is that weak,” Mihály’s voice held needles, “then I’ll show you.”
Ilan’s lip curled. Faith didn’t mean believing every heresy that crossed an Izir’s mind, or giving witness to it. But the part of him that had been a child shaken by stories of miracles, who’d lived his life in pursuit of that unknowable perfection, still craved. “Please do.”
Mihály stretched and cracked his knuckles. “There’s a cat around here somewhere, if she hasn’t died...”
“No!” Csilla jumped upright, gathered feathers and wood-stiff mice falling around her feet. “I fed her. You’re not killing her.”
Her protests were comical and brave.
Mihály put a hand on her head, a mocking benediction. “One meal wouldn’t have made much difference to the poor thing. It was kind of you, but not helpful.”
“Well the cat isn’t here,” Ilan said as Csilla’s lip trembled, “but there are a fair number of rabbits in the woods.” The snow was half-gone after the brighter past days, to where it was impossible to tell tracks from melt holes, but there would be plenty of game out to nibble on the green poking through. Twigs snapped and leaves rustled as small things had jumped away from their approach. The forest was alive and waking.
Mihály scratched his beard. “True enough, but I’m not very good at hunting unless the thing is already half-dead.”
No surprise, as he wasn’t even good at being quiet. Ilan made a quick inventory of what was strewn about. The mess of stained cloth looked the most promising, and he picked up enough to construct a sling. “Luckily, I am.”
Good, but out of practice. His first shot scattered dirt and roots, and the second struck too true, the rabbit dead before it could try to run. He took a few practice swings and said a prayer to guide his aim as scrubby leaves shook. Rabbit or grouse or vole— hopefully it was something he could leave alive enough to see what the Izir would do with it.
The heft of the rock and the rhythm were a rare nostalgia. His mother had taught him when he was old enough to crave the excitement of a hunt, too young to be trusted with a bow, and for years he and his littlest sister had taken the place of their hounds as the champions of the gardens. The cooks and furrier had always indulged them by making their catch useful.
He stretched out his legs, a twinge in his lower back. Crouching for hours hadn’t felt this bad when he was eleven.
The next launch hit true. The rock cracked the creature’s back and it cried out with a stomach-churning bleat, its front legs grasping for useless purchase as it realized it couldn’t run. He picked it up by its scruff, still screaming, and carried it inside where Mihály had turned his examination table into an altar, laying his own coat down and putting a small dish on it. Csilla gasped and reached out for it, but he elbowed her away. He’d offered up his own hands for this stain.
“Took you long enough,” Mihály said, propping a hand on the table. Ilan squeezed the slingshot. The Izir’s skin would look quite nice with a few round bruises.
The creature had turned trembling and glassy-eyed in shock. Ilan set it on the table, and Mihály looked between the pair of them. “Who wants to give me blood?”
“You do it,” Ilan said before Csilla could volunteer. Her palms were together, fingertips against her lips.
“Hurry up,” she said, voice stiff. “Don’t let him suffer.”
Mihály made a quick slice on the pad of his finger, hissing and cursing all the while. He squeezed out three fat beads of red onto the clay surface.
Then he cut the rabbit's throat. Fresh blood pooled on his jacket, but he held his hand cupped, around something Ilan couldn’t see. “Come close,” Mihály whispered, his voice urgent and deep. He placed his hand over the dish, then let it fall back to his side.
