They weren’t so far from the torture rooms, and as shocked and broken as he was, Mihály would probably volunteer. Csilla stepped between them.
‘You can’t possibly think he’s involved,’ Csilla said, keeping one hand behind her, on Mihály, as he trembled.
Ilan frowned. ‘You saw his experiments. Would it be so large a leap to think he would practice on people?’
‘He wouldn’t.’ He healed people and spent his nights sick himself. A flailing rabbit was one thing, a living person quite another.
‘If I were going to practice on people,’ Mihály said finally, ‘I could do it with far less trouble away from here, and none of my followers would hesitate to leave the city with me. Did you see any bodies at the farm? Am I not trying to figure out the cause of this?’
A twisting ribbon of fear drew tight around Csilla’s stomach. If the killer wanted victims, there was no one closer to Mihály than she was now.
‘Sin outs itself in the end.’ Ilan’s voice had an edge. Csilla was suddenly aware that of the three of them, he was the only one armed.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Mihály countered, waving his hand. ‘The closest we have to a killer here is Csilla, actually, and that was on Church orders.’
She hoped her flat look told him he really wasn’t very funny.
Ilan seemed equally unamused. ‘You’re our only connection.’
‘Me and every person who follows me. They all know each other.’ Mihály’s face was anguished, deep lines on his forehead and around his eyes twisting his beauty. ‘I’m only trying to help people. What good is this divinity otherwise?’
But they’d seen the monstrous way he used his divinity, a blessing delivered with screaming and blood.
Ilan stepped forward, and Mihály grabbed him by the front of his cassock. Where the Izir’s skin brushed his mark, it sparked white.
‘There,’ Mihály growled. ‘You can see I’m innocent.’
Ilan glared, shoving him back hard enough that the Izir almost lost his footing.
‘I can see you’redivine. Nothing about innocent.’
Csilla looked between them, old and new faith warring in the glimmering light.
‘But the marks,’ she said finally. ‘Whoever is doing the killing is also destroying the Seal. Mihály couldn’t do that.’ She turned. ‘Could any of your followers have done this? Are any of them educated, trying to keep you for themselves, perhaps? Or maybe they’re just taking the next step in heresy.’
The leap between the Church being wrong about one thing and a desire to destroy it was large, but some would make it.
‘I doubt it. They aren’t bad people, regardless of what the Church thinks.’
Ilan ignored the pointed look. ‘And you’re sure you can’t read it?’
Mihály sighed and turned back to the papers, eyes sliding from the faces to their mutilation. His expression calmed with the distance of pondering an academic question, and then his eyes widened.
‘This is the order, correct?’ He folded the first drawing with neat creases, then the second, even as Ilan complained behind him, laying them over each other so all that was visible was the charcoal scrawl. ‘I can’t read it, but look.’
Csilla peered around him, unsure what she was looking at in the fanned sheets. Ilan pressed next to her, arms crossed.
‘Look at...’ His voice trailed off and he edged past Mihály to get closer. ‘Wait, are you saying...’
‘It looks like any ritual song, does it not? Even without knowing what it says, there’s cadence. Repetition.’
Now that she was looking at them together, it was undeniable that the eyes danced across the symbols like a poem. Or a prayer.
‘So not a message at all,’ Ilan breathed, fists balling. ‘It’s actual Shadow work.’
Mihály nodded. ‘I don’t think any human, no matter how far they’d sunk, would have found this kind of knowledge. Someone has to have released one.’
There was a tiny measure of relief in knowing it wasn’t the people themselves weakening the Seal, slipping faith or no. ‘But why?’
