Csilla

The seal had been a living thing, feeding on the holiness of the Union. Now it was starved.

Dark, light, then speckled like mica in a stone. Bright flecks turned black as seconds dragged into minutes. Perhaps the Incarnate hadn’t been wrong in giving up the location. There didn’t seem to be anything left here worth guarding.

Csilla’s fingers itched to touch it, an impossible urge to heal the damage. She stretched out her scarred hand and something rippled in the magic. It was faint, a twist of flickering white undulating in the pale glow.

Mercy breeds good. That’s what she’d always believed. And now she was in the belly of the church, watching the holiest place in the world die.

But she could try to save it. She didn’t know how, but if she were meant to be an instrument, let her be wielded here.

First Mihály. His body was stark in the dirt, lips parted in a stiff gasp. He had given her the precise dosage to wear off within an hour of the hanging. It wouldn’t work if his neck was already damaged beyond healing; repairing crushed cartilage took more than mercy skill. And she knew well enough that medicine was like a miracle- it could save, but it couldn’t always be counted on. As Sandor lit rushlights to illuminate the tomb-like chamber, the red and raw abrasions on his neck only looked more gruesome.

She knelt next to Mihály, placing a hand on his chest, her palm rising with a shallow breath. A small knot of tension uncoiled. She met Ilan’s eyes, and he nodded.

Now to try.

Csilla shifted her attention to the cold dirt, spreading her fingers and pushing them down. It wasn’t just Arany here. There were centuries of the lives of the faithful on this spot, drops of their brilliance and pledge reaching for the hope of return. Spectral fingers by the thousands reached to twine with hers as old copper stung her nose. People across the Union had put part of themselves into this web. They would stand with her now.

Everything but that blood in the dirt is a lie.

Something caught within her, like a finger snagging a hole in cloth, unraveling everything stitched tight, and she gasped with a pinching pain. This wasn’t the brilliance Mihály had described. There was so much more here than simplistic joy, and her mouth filled with a film of metal, and dirt, and sharp salt. The blocks of creation: not nourishing but foundational.

But nothing she felt was transferring to the seal. She swallowed the choking flavor, pushing harder, tears pricking her eyes. She reached for Mihály’s cramped hand, a silver glow connecting them, ignored by the earth.

The air was thick with the stink of dying embers. They were failing.

Sandor kicked Ilan from behind as the other man whirled to strike, knocking him to his knees with a heavy thud that sounded enough like cracking bone to strike her heart.

Csilla jumped, pulling away from Mihály with a cry. “Ilan!”

Ilan brought his knife up in a wide, artless arc, slicing the man’s outer coat, but not more. There was no way to get a good strike from the angle, and the larger man stepped heavy on Ilan’s hand with a sickening crunch. Ilan hissed, pinned.

“What are you doing?” Csilla choked out through the pain of helpless shock.

Sandor cocked his head, darkness bubbling over his lips. It slipped around his face in a slide of oily caress and slithered back up his nose with a sickening slurp.

The demon had had to go somewhere. And with the church’s magic broken, there had been no way to see the home it had found.

They couldn’t fight, she realized as a smoky film leaked from his pores, rising like steam. This wasn’t a room of weapons, only struggling holiness.

“I told you to stay out of this, didn’t I?” Sandor spat at Ilan, whose face went feral in response, white teeth showing despite the boot digging into thin finger bones. “Or you could have at least gone out alone when I told you to and had a softer death next to the fool who gave me these robes.” He kicked Ilan in the chest with a cleaver-on-bone crack.

Understanding chilled Csilla. The man who was supposed to have been here was the body they’d found in the woods. Sandor wasn’t just a poor member of the church; he was no member at all.

“You were working with Tamas then?” She tried to stall. If Mihály would wake, at least he would be a weapon. “You’d rather lose your humanity than trust the church? You served with them.”

When Sandor grinned, he had an extra row of teeth, sharp and pushing against his lips. “Which only convinced me further. You’d be surprised how many of the Servants have come to see the truth. How many soldiers resent their sanctified conscription. How many know the only righteous path is the broken one.”

The next sound that came out of his mouth was inhuman and corrupt, and at it Mihály stiffened, then began to stir. It was a second resurrection. In the quiet of her shock, grief for Ágnes claimed another moment.

She’d be proud that Csilla was still down here fighting. The seeds of faith and goodness that she’d planted in rocky soil had bloomed into weedy strength.

“I should thank you.” The thing that was Sandor screeched. “You finished our work well and broke all the remaining protections, took the church’s sight. I’m not as blessed as Mihály. No one could see past his shine.”

Her knees trembled. “What?”

“It’s a dangerous thing to play with souls,” Sandor whispered, cold like a new moon winter night. “They’re tricky things, finding the cracks and pieces to cling to, letting themselves be sealed in awkward places. And angel blood is a lovely conduit when all they want is to touch the divine.” He looked at Mihály, whose eyes were laced with inky threads. “I can feel how much it wanted to stay in you. Any mere human would be a poor substitute.”

He grabbed Ilan by the hair and pulled him back, knife point resting on his forehead. For a moment Csilla was back in the room with Madame Varga, her own hand carving darkness. “We thought breaking the city would be enough, but you made a good point, little saint. We have to pollute this room so thoroughly no one will feel the divine again.” Ilan jerked, then winced as the blade skimmed his skin.

Mihály groaned and shifted, eyes fluttering.

“Tamas said it’s for our own good,” Csilla said. If she could speak, she could stall. Every second was a beat of hope, even as no miracle came. “That we need to face demons without our armor before Asten is willing to return. We have to prove we’re worthy of perfection.”

“We aren’t the only ones who think so.” Sandor rolled his head, as if his neck suddenly had an excess of vertebrae. “And we aren’t the first to try it.”

“Stay back, Csilla,” Ilan said, and at the words the knife slipped, slicing through his brow nearly to his eye. The cuts were starting to take shape, smoke curling from split skin.

Sandor turned slightly. “Should I deal with her first?”

He leaped with inhuman speed that should have been impossible for his size and then his skin was branding hers, and beneath that, the dark corruption. He moved to scratch over the healing scabs of her face and she shuddered. Blood streaked down the peeled skin of her cheek in a sticky, crimson tear. There was darkness, probing the opening in the flesh, asking the question again. This time she knew better than to answer.

Sandor tilted his head and wrapped his free hand around her throat. She pulled away and gagged, then doubled over at the sickening woosh and thud of a fist in her stomach. The snap of her small ribs made her gasp.

Ilan was shouting something, but she couldn’t hear through the blood-pounding nausea. Sandor grabbed her wrist and jerked her back upright. The seal flared brighter for a moment in reaction, long enough for Csilla to half-form a prayer, a habit she was sure now she wouldn’t live long enough to break.

Sandor’s grin—the grin of whatever had him—widened, with large teeth and an outstretched tongue. The demon leeched from his skin, reaching for Csilla.

Behind him Ilan approached, eyes blood-smeared yet wild, alight with pain and anticipation. He had his own knife. It came down between Sandor’s shoulder blades with a crack, resistance as metal hit muscle and back ribs, a twist and push as he aimed for a lung. Sandor fell forward as Ilan stabbed again, quick and lethal. Merciful. If there was no longer a willing host, the demon would struggle.

A buzzing rose in the air, released by the pain of the host, twisting and darting between her and Mihály, seeking familiar skin.

Mihály was still weak. She stepped between as the cloud began to solidify, hovering and writhing. She outstretched a hand, and it buzzed over her skin like a tight swarm of gnats with wings made of cutting glass. “Leave him.”

The shadow clumped more tightly. The air around her stung with needlepoints, and she could see the outline of some other creature, face masked by small, dark wings with trembling, oil-clumped feathers, and triplet eyes resting in the hollows of its collarbones. Pieces of a broken creation desperate to feel whole.

Darkness unfurled, and a hard pressure sucked at her lips as she went dizzy. To the side Ilan wavered on his feet, and her own vision was dim. She wanted to scream for him to run, but her mouth was choked with tarry magic biting at her gums and tongue. It would take any opening it could find.

The thing smelled dead. Not in the rotting way of former life, but a nothingness. Clawed hands reached for her face.

I didn’t do a miracle for this. She stretched her hands, only to have them sink into the corruption trying to take shape.

A crisp frostbite pain shot through her, and Csilla screamed with her freed voice, sudden and piercing enough that the demon stepped back with a shocked snarl. The lightning-white agony leeched into her pores, her lungs, even her teeth, every inch of her trembling. Something in her was waking with the fierceness of a sleeping creature jolted from its winter cave.

The blue of her veins, the pink under her fingernails, they glowed brighter than they ever had for Mihály, and the hovering creature in front of her reached to grasp.