‘Research.’ Ilan tilted a prone squirrel upright. Its black eyes shone as if it were about to break the spell that held it and scamper away. ‘And what have you learned from all thisresearch?’
A distance clouded Mihály’s eyes. ‘Not enough. I can touch their souls, keep or even draw them back here momentarily. I can give them a new... container as it were, but they don’t have enough fire to stay.’ His voice bit on the last word.
Ilan hummed a prayer as he moved down the line of unfortunate creatures. ‘What in Asten’s holy name made you want to mess around with souls?’
His eyes went to Csilla on the word as she crouched, gathering up the mess and speaking softly to animals long past hearing her. No wonder she’d been taken in by him. The difference between immortal saints and the forgotten Faithful was oftena measure of divinely sanctioned violence: Wise Angyalka, hanging with bulging eyes, Ladislaj the bounty, feeding his village in the starving season with strips of his own regenerating flesh. To someone so desperate, this massacre would look holy.
Mihály smiled, a grim contrast to the wretched surroundings.
‘Surely you wouldn’t want me to turn away a gift? Knowledge is a virtue, and how do we get more of it if we don’t experiment once in a while? Miracles are proof of the transformative nature of the divine. I’m doing nothing more.’
Knowledge. A fine summation of chewed-on birds and crusted feathers and tufts of matted fur.
‘You’re divine, but you’re no god. Knowledge without obedience is heresy.’
Csilla seemed to have glossed over the details with his promise of miracles, but the tiny broken bodies should have made her afraid. Being raised in the Church had given her too much trust in the appearance of the holiness, without a soul to understand it. If she’d never experienced the ecstasy, she couldn’t understand the horror.
But Ilan knew that she had lived her own kind of horror, one that had led her to kneel in old sawdust on a barn floor with a lap full of dry dead things.
‘It’s a very old kind of power,’ Mihály continued. ‘From before the Severing.’
‘People weren’t moving souls before the Severing,’ Ilan countered.
Angels and demons had lived among humans and added their magic to their territories, swayed them one way or the other, but the basics of souls never changed. Everyone had two aspects, Brilliance and Shadow, and the side you nurtured during life determined your eternity. You couldn’t touch them or redirect them. That power belonged to Asten alone.
‘People weren’t. Angels were. Sometimes a soul could be held for a day or two. Sometimes it could be brought back; Lajol did his best for Graced Rozalia. But in this corrupted world, it needs something to cling to. Something fresh, almost like life.’ Mihály pushed the hanging rabbit lightly, and it danced on its rope, a grim and slow waltz.
‘Blood.’ Ilan knew how easily the body gave it up.
Mihály nodded. ‘Still warm. Enough to give it a physical tether while Csilla accepts it. And the killer has spilled enough to forfeit theirs.’
The image of Csilla, chestnut ringlets matted and pale skin smeared crimson, was unholy intoxication. In the dusty light coming through the wood cracks, she was splattered in golden sunlight that could all too easily be running red.
‘That’s madness. Not a miracle. And Graced Rozalia herself remained a corpse, no matter how perfect.’ How could this man be one Asten Themself had marked as holy?
‘If your faith is that weak,’ Mihály’s voice held needles, ‘then I’ll show you.’
Ilan’s lip curled. Faith didn’t mean believing every heresy that crossed an Izir’s mind or giving witness to it. But the part of him that had been a child shaken by stories of miracles, who’d lived his life in pursuit of that unknowable perfection, still craved.
‘Please do.’
Mihály stretched and cracked his knuckles. ‘There’s a cat around here somewhere, if she hasn’t died...’
‘No!’ Csilla jumped upright, gathered feathers and wood-stiff mice falling around her feet. ‘I fed her. You’re not killing her.’
Her protests were comical and brave.
Mihály put a hand on her head, a mocking benediction. ‘One meal wouldn’t have made much difference to the poor thing. It was kind of you, but not helpful.’
‘Well the cat isn’t here,’ Ilan said as Csilla’s lip trembled, ‘but there are a fair number of rabbits in the woods.’
The snow was half-gone after the brighter past few days, so much so that it was impossible to tell tracks from melt holes, but there would be plenty of game out to nibble on the green poking through. Twigs snapped and leaves rustled as small things had jumped away from their approach. The forest was alive and waking.
Mihály scratched his beard. ‘True enough, but I’m not very good at hunting unless the thing is already half-dead.’
No surprise, as he wasn’t even good at being quiet. Ilan made a quick inventory of what was strewn about. The mess of stained cloth looked the most promising, and he picked up enough to construct a sling.
‘Luckily, I am.’
