They hadn’t seen a single cat, fortunately. Cats knew to get out at the first hint of trouble. Csilla would have been pleased.
He didn’t need to think about her right now.
His fingertips caught a small indention, shallow for fingertips to grip. To the eye it didn’t look any different than the pattern of weathering across the rest of the wall.
The door retracted and slid scant inches into the section of stone behind it, wide enough for him to squeeze into if he pressed himself flat and put his back to the wall. The dog stuck his nose in expectantly, squirming around Ilan’s legs.
‘Back.’
He didn’t have a candle on him, but far down was pale wavering yellow, tiny flames in a cavernous dark. The angle suggested stairs, and the dark meant being unable to see if any were broken or missing altogether, perhaps intentionally. The Church protected what belonged to it, but if their arsonist was one of them, they might know enough to use one of these secret pockets of stone.
‘Stay.’
He held a hand out to the dog, who didn’t seem to understand and whined at the chiding tone, then whined louder when Ilan shoved the door back to no more than a crack with a little black nose pushed into it. He wouldn’t risk more than his own neck. Besides, if he died down there the dog could show where his own corpse had ended up.
With a hand on the wall, he moved towards the tiny glow, enveloped by stale air and incense.
Incense would be a strange addition to a room for plotting treason unless one was trying to cover up the scent of something dangerous or rotten. With every step closer the light intensified until he came to the source: a smaller room, painted in gold, with two half-used-up candles on either side of a bed of tattered white silk.
In that bed, a corpse in shambles. Bones burst from darkened and leathery skin, a caved-in mouth gave her the look of choking on her own teeth. Bits of still-bright blonde hair clung to amottled skull and twisted around a crown of square-cut jewels, and a cramped hand clutched the dusty brown stalks of what were no doubt once flowers.
Graced Rozalia.
He had never doubted her miracle or the power of Lajol to deliver what he had felt was just, but had always privately thought the tale of her entombment was fanciful. And yet here was a tomb.
Rozalia was said to be proof of the perfection past the ether, the saint who came back unmarred and lived a hundred years never ageing a day more. When she finally passed, she continued to exist as beautifully as she had in life, only put into hiding when worshipers couldn’t resist taking bits of her hair and dress and, in one case, several toes and part of her ear. The saint that helped Mihály feel like there was some truth to the idea that he could have his lover back.
He lifted the edge of the whisper of old fabric hanging across her legs. Her toes were gone, and the old wound was blackening with mottled gangrene.
Another miracle collapsed. Rozalia decaying, Arany dry. They really had been abandoned.
He’d given it his best effort, kept what he still regarded as a perfect balance of virtues, given the Church everything, and it hadn’t been enough. Even being right hadn’t been enough. They were all as inconsequential to the divine as Csilla now.
Ilan sank beside the body’s altar and rested his head against the faded and dusty rose silk of her draping shroud, torn between curses and wild laughter. His entire life and purpose had come to nothing but mangled bodies and failure, and he was still thinking about Csilla, still stinging that she’d clung to the Izir. The hurt was embarrassing, even if the only witness was a rotting saint.
A loud bark echoed down the steps and then the air shivered with a growl. Ilan ran upstairs without care for the broken steps, cursing every time he missed one, cursing louder as his shoulders ached to pull the stone enough to slip back out.
It was a strange relief to see Mihály there, and not some further horror.
‘Ilan.’
Mihály’s deep voice echoed in the dim and filtered light, a soft note to it. Awe.
The Izir had never seemed awed by anything but himself. Certainly not a burned Church whose holiness had been stripped. More certainly not Ilan.
He tried to call up a sharp tone, but his nose was still full of the stink of incense and decay, the fight in him torn away like the peeling flesh left by Rozalia’s venerated toes. There was little else the Izir could do to hurt or save the Church now.
‘What do you want?’
‘It’s not what I want. It’s Csilla.’
‘She’s here?’ The want to see her hit like an unexpected breeze on a burning day. He tamped it down. ‘For Ágnes?’
‘Yes, but...’ He gestured, the gesture loose and helpless. ‘Come to the sanctuary. She wants to see you.’
‘She’s sick of you, then?’
The Izir snorted. ‘Come and see, and I think even you will be out of snide commentary.’
