‘It’s the latest corpse, Inquisitor. We’re sending it out tonight.’ His voice cut off as his teeth worried at his lower lip. ‘No one wants to give her rites. They say she shouldn’t have them.’
Of course. The congregational priests whose prime virtue was Obedience joined the Faith to cocoon themselves away from sin, not confront it, and it showed in the distance they put between themselves and his work even as they praised it. A thousand hymns and confessional comforts didn’t do a darkened soul the good of one well-timed strike. And now that discomfort at reality was leaving a dead girl disrespected.
‘Fine.’
If he couldn’t yet give her justice, peace was the least he could offer. He followed the boy out and into colder and deeper parts of the cathedral, the stone halls narrowing to squeezed passages and a low slanting roof. It was a blessed thing the killer had decided to take up his sport in an icy season, but the hold still stank with the lingering sour of rotting bodies; the wine merchant the week before, and now this girl. The novice passed him a hand cloth doused in altar oils, but the sandalwood wasn’t strong enough to keep the stench at bay, and Ilan’s head throbbed.
‘Has she at least been given a deliverance writ?’ he asked as he approached the corpse.
The murdered girl – Kovács Lili – had lost any charm she had in life. Ilan slid her eyelids shut to cover the last bit of her empty stare and smoothed her pale blonde braids over the jagged rat bites on her ears. She was from the north; his mother used to plait his hair much the same. She could have been one of his sisters if he didn’t look too closely. Or even Ilan himself, before he’d realised he was no one’s daughter.
The boy stared at the body, face twisted in discomfort.
‘Well?’
He finally bowed, and Ilan let the hesitation in it slide. ‘No, Inquisitor.’
‘We respect those delivered, no matter how they got here. You haven’t even kept the vermin away.’ He picked up the corpse’s arm, turning to look at the palm where shallow cuts festered. She’d made a brave attempt to defend herself. ‘Bring me paper.’
He inspected the blackened wounds with pursed lips as the boy scurried off, then traced his fingers along the carved flesh under her collarbones, turned into a macabre decoration of dribbled blood dried to black garnet and citrine-yellow pus. The script of this killing was in the language of the ether, the message a corrupted and Shadow-touched one he couldn’t read, no matter how many times he traced the words peeled in her skin.
The bodies had begun appearing after the shortest days of winter. People still murdered even in Silgard; holy walls couldn’t stop rash impulses and elements of jealousy or rage. This, however, was something new.
The Church had ruled the first death a singular event; unsettling, but within the realm of reason. The second, not two weeks later, raised eyebrows and pulled together late-hour meetings. The third, and the Church closed ranks, citing potential panic if word got out that someone was killing citizens and marking them as unholy.
Now they were on four, perhaps five, and he was no closer to finding out who was responsible.
Prelate Abe and his council had suggested sabotage from the broken territories or perhaps the Apostate cults springing up in the wake of war using dark imagery to terrorise. Madness was always a suspect, as was vendetta, though the killer had a wide reach, and there was no clear link between the victims save the manner of their deaths. The families all denied their loved oneshad enemies or dark interests; death made a saint of everyone. There were never any witnesses.
The novitiate trotted back and passed over a crisp sheet of paper, the pale surface starkly bright in the flickering shadows of the room. It wasn’t the vellum used for holy manuscripts or even the parchment of the Incarnate’s letters and missives, but it was fine enough for something that would be ashes by the morning.
Ilan wrote the girl’s name in a careful hand and inscribed an intercessory prayer beneath. If there were a particular saint or angel she wanted to lead her, there was no way of asking now, and any fresh blood that would have sealed the request had been emptied into the river to flavour the carp. He touched her cool forehead and penned in the name of Sainted Vasya. This girl was also a child of Saika, and their home territory’s most beloved saint should be willing to lead her soul across, far as they were from her.
He folded the paper and placed it on Lili’s chest, her arms too stiff to be bent to hold it. A memory flashed; another body with arms folded, and leather cuffs, and snow-heavy pine branches scratching at the windows as they prepared the body to burn. It was said to be a blessing for anyone to die in Silgard, in the sight of the spires of the grand cathedral and heart of the Church, but he’d wager she would have rather been delivered while looking at peaks and ice. For a too-brief moment, a sharp memory of the forest scent of Saika, wild and evergreen and seven years behind him, chased out the scent of death.
‘Send a message to the Servants of the Road that we’re done with the body and put her out,’ he said. ‘I’ll let her parents know when I speak to them.’
He turned and left the disquiet of the cell-turned-morgue, but childish whispers chased him.
‘—lost Asten’s favour.’
Ilan turned, the snap of his boot heel on the stone enough to silence, but not to erase what he’d just heard. The two novices skulking behind Ilan bent together under his gaze. Likely shirking their 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 grey 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 blessed glass and forced it against the boy’s skin, where it clouded with the grey 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 whatI’msaying! 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 boy’s fear.
