‘Complete or correct?’
She flinched at the way his tone snapped like the crack of one of his whips.
‘That I wouldn’t know. But the scholars never brought full lines.’ She reached over him, finger hovering just above the inked marks. ‘Whoever did this writes it well.’ Even on flesh.
‘Well enough to curse us. Not that any of those supposed scholars have been dispatched to confirm it.’ The frustration in his voice was dangerously close to soul-blotting anger.
‘And this all happened in Silgard?’
A cold shiver passed over her scars. His eyes flicked in hesitation, then he nodded.
‘It’s no secret we’ve found bodies.’
This was so much more than bodies. If any word had leaked, it was no wonder the people were afraid, and that the Seal was suffering.
‘You think they’re related? That there’s a demon?’
Her words became hushed. The demons had all been imprisoned after the Severing, and even before, the Shadow-born creatures struggled to raise physical form for long and had to borrow skins to work in a world that still held too much of the divine for their comfort. Those possessed by them could never hide from Asten’s Eye; the testing glass would read their soul and show them for what they were the moment they tried to enter. There couldn’t be one here.
He didn’t answer, only closed his eyes.
‘Finish what you came for and go. Don’t touch anything else, and I’ll pretend I never saw you.’
He went to stack the papers and books together, clumsy with exhaustion, and she raised her hand.
‘I’ll clean up here. You can start fresh tomorrow. Please, rest. I owe you.’ Let him think it was repayment for his kindness in not asking for harsher punishment and for talking to her at all. And it was, in part. ‘I’ve already seen it all, anyway.’
Ilan snorted. ‘You don’t owe me a thing. My honesty was for my own sake, not yours.’
She hadn’t expected any less. ‘That doesn’t mean I’m not grateful.’
He met her gaze then, cool and steady, and rose.
‘Stack everything together and put it over there. Don’t get anything out of order.’
He inclined his head to a corner that held nothing more interesting than construction orders from two decades back. No one would bother anything there.
She held her breath and counted to thirty after the door closed behind him.
A horrified fascination overcame her as she sank into the seat with the stack of papers, ignoring Erzsébet’s biting and pulling at her bootlaces. Four victims. The unholy details burned themselves in her mind as her stomach twisted further with each page of etched brutality. The killings were scattered across the city, the dead with nothing in common but their misfortune and families left to mourn them.
No wonder the Church had been so keen to see Mihály dead. If people were already turning away from the Church under his influence, they would be that much closer to damnation if death came to them before they could make right. His spark of divinitycouldn’t counter this. And if the lack of faith was the reason the Seal was faltering, letting all this out would be its death knell.
In all the horror, there was hope. If she saved the city from something worse than heresy, they’d have to take her back. She could make up for all her wrongs and perhaps show the Church one of theirs as well.
She shuffled through the papers, looking for a blank piece. There was no way around the fact that her investigation would have to start with one small sin.
A piece towards the bottom only had a few scrawled street names, and she pulled it from the pile and began to copy out the names of the victims, and the details as far as she understood. She couldn’t bring herself to replicate the Shadow script, but names would give her a good place to start.
Erzsébet was less pleased, pacing across the table and causing Csilla to scatter blooms of ink where she tried to wave the cat off. When she was finished, she had her names, but there was also a mess, and a little black paw print in signature.
She blew on the paper to dry, eyes on the lightening sky outside. At least she’d be gone before Ilan realised what she’d stolen.
8
Ilan
‘Our Lili was a righteous girl.’
