”—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.
The city truly wasn't that confusing, much as pilgrims complained that the districts bled together and the door fronts didn't always face the expected direction. It was simply much like the divine itself: difficult to parse when in the thick of it and best understood through long study and the occasional overview from on high. She'd had almost twenty years, and plenty of time hanging out cathedral windows, to take in the whole.
Her calculations were almost correct. It was only the wobble of a loose heel that slowed her. Shoes donated for charity had already walked a fair number of miles.
Csilla pulled the iron of the back gate closed with a sigh, adding 'mend a boot' to her list of tasks.
"Csilla. I've been waiting."
The quiet voice drew Csilla up short and dispersed the mental calculation. Elder Ágnes, her face shadowed by the peak of her red hood covering the frost-rime white of her hair. The head of the mercy order must have been waiting for her arrival, and watching in feast day colors. Csilla bit her lip. Had she missed something?
"I'm sorry, Elder. There was just so much to do. I'm late for dinner, aren't I?" Whoever she'd inconvenienced would no doubt be cross, and the resulting next interaction even more awkward, and she'd rather just quietly do all the work herself.
Ágnes put a hand on her shoulder, urging her through the low door. "There's something else for you to do."
"Hm?" Csilla let herself be led back to where she slept, a windowless side room of the cloisters crammed with three small beds for visiting penitents to share. They came and went. She never left.
A set of gray robes lay on the bed, the sleeves and hems embroidered with a dance of red poppies and lined in matching scarlet. The uniform of the church's mercy priests, the inverted match of Ágnes' colors.
"Who died?" She jumped to take the bundle before the older woman could reach for them. If there were empty clothes, it was because a body had left them. Ágnes was sick enough without handling the things of the dead. Illness had a tendency to creep, and the mercy priests were more often than not tending their own.
