Warder
Isabel sits at the small table across from Brother Risoven, her tea growing cold and a piece of bloody-colored fungus lying on a scrap of paper beside it. It’s stained the paper a wet reddish brown, and it’s shriveled a bit, but otherwise it hasn’t changed noticeably from when she pulled it off the side of a shack in the Shell District last night. In the thin early morning light from the high, narrow windows of the chapel’s living quarters, it looks rather like a severed finger, dark and twisted from putrefaction.
It’s a mushroom, but not any that Isabel has seen before. She doesn’t know if it’s one that existed in the world before last night, but she does know that it didn’t grow from the blood on the walls and the roofs by any natural process. It’s a magical side effect, and a rather gentle one, as far as they go. Whoever was working the terrible ritual in the Shell District was lucky they didn’t blow up the whole plaza. There aren’t many ways for a Sentinel’s spells to go wrong—though she certainly found one of them yesterday evening—but blood-magic, flesh-magic, that’s a different matter. It’s the stuff of myth, of frightening stories novices tell one another after the midnight bell when they’re supposed to be asleep. It’s less surprising that there was a strange effect than the fact that it generated any magic at all.
Isabel slides the paper across the table to the old monk, who is happily devouring his eggs. She cooked them, this morning, between watering her horse and sweeping the front steps. Doing chores is expected of her—as a cleric, Brother Risoven technically outranks any Sentinel, unless the undead start battering down his door—but she doesn’t mind. He’s giving her a place to stay for what might be a long time, depending on how long it will take for her to figure out what in the sixteen pits of hell happened to Mikhail Ranseberg’s spirit.
“Do you recognize this?” she asks.
Risoven looks up from his plate and adjusts his lenses. He looks a bit like an owl, with tufts of gray hair around his ears and his eyes hugely magnified above a small, beaky nose.
He blinks a few times before answering. “Can’t say that I do,” he says. “It’s not from our friend downstairs, is it? I remember him being less bruised.”
“No. It’s from where he was found, in the Shell District. Someone had drawn a ritual diagram in his blood, and these mushrooms were growing from it.”
“Interesting.” He reaches out, but thinks better of it and withdraws his hand. “Did you speak with that other fellow, Mr. Horst? I offered our friend a place in the blue field, like I did the others, but Mr. Horst said he wanted to take him to the temple in the city. He’ll need to be moved soon, in any case.”
“He didn’t say anything about it to me.” Isabel folds the paper over the sample. She’ll need to find a jar, something airtight, to keep it from spreading until she can identify it. She doesn’t like the idea of it growing in her clothing, or sprouting between the plots in the blue field.
“Wait. What do you mean, ‘the others’?” she asks.
Brother Risoven sets his fork down. “There were two others in a similar state to our friend, a couple of weeks ago. All torn to pieces. The constables brought them here, and I laid them to rest.”
“You didn’t mention that before,” Isabel says.
Risoven’s owl eyes blink once. “You did not ask.”
Isabel finishes her tea, now the same ambient temperature as the room. “Does Constable Mulhy know?”
“They were in other districts,” says Risoven.
The answer, then, is a likely no. Each of Mondirra’s districts has its own constabulary, and as each one is in itself roughly the size of the small towns Isabel usually frequents, the city usually functions about as well as can be expected. These murders are far from usual, however.
Isabel returns her cup to its saucer. “I’ll try to talk to him today. I’m planning to go to the temple, anyway, and ask about—” She stops. She’s come to the subject she has been avoiding. “About what happened with the gentleman downstairs.”
“Ah, yes. A terrible business,” says Risoven. “I’ve known a number of Sentinels in my time, and I’ve never seen a ritual turn out quite like that.”
Never? She had been hoping he would have some sort of insight. “I think something happened to him,” she offers with a shrug. “To his soul.”
Risoven moves his lenses up his nose with two crooked fingers and stares at her. “What could possibly do such a thing?”
Isabel doesn’t have an answer. She can only hope that someone at Mondirra’s larger temple will.
There’s a knock on the front door downstairs. Isabel gets up from the table and goes to answer it, navigating the narrow, creaking wooden steps down.
She opens the door to find Berend Horst, the jaunty angle of his hat at odds with his grim expression. His one visible eye has a dark circle beneath it, but his hair and beard are clean and groomed to a military precision. “I’m here for Mikhail,” he says.
Isabel lets him into the chapel, where he waits as Brother Risoven assembles the pieces of Mikhail’s body into a casket. The casket is placed on a two-wheeled cart, which is hitched to Isabel’s horse.
“You’re not going to need him?” Berend asks. There’s worry in his voice, though he’s trying to hide it. “For more of…what it is you do?” He gestures vaguely at Isabel, the chapel, and Risoven.
“No,” Isabel says. She’ll not make another attempt at contacting his spirit until she finds out what went wrong the first time, and even then, it won’t matter where the body is. The bell will call a soul no matter where they might have roamed.
“Right, then,” says Berend. “Shall we?”
They enter Mondirra’s gate and pass through the edge of the Shell District, avoiding the plaza. It’s still early, and the market at the center of the city is slow to wake. Berend doesn’t try to fill the silence with conversation, for which Isabel is thankful. She has been long accustomed to traveling alone, and she isn’t quite sure what to do with a companion.
The Temple District shines in the sunlight, the roofs of the seven churches washed clean by the rain. The wide, open streets are swept, and manicured shrubs grow from earthen squares fenced in by stone. At the top of the hill at the center sit the temples of Alcos and Isra, facing one another as divine consorts are meant to do, flanked by their children. Ondir’s temple is at the base of the hill, separate from the other six. It’s a squat, rectangular building, its simplicity more pragmatic than elegant when juxtaposed with the high arches and impressive pillars of the others. A graveyard surrounds it on three sides: a field of stone and marble, expansive with age.
Everyone comes to Ondir, in the end. The temple itself is a reminder, from the heavy, stark door to the tesselating skulls emerging from the white marble walls, to the sarcophagi of long-dead paladins in rows, their stone effigies in peaceful repose, swords over their chests.
Isabel asks the novice sweeping the entryway for the cleric in charge of funerals, for Berend, and an audience with the high priest for herself. Berend parts ways with her with a tip of his hat, to head toward the funerary offices. He gives the hollow marble eyes of the skulls a look that’s half unsettled and half challenging. Most people avoid Ondir’s churches, unless there is a funeral to plan and attend.
Silence presses in on all sides as Isabel enters the nave. It’s a comforting quiet, a reminder of a childhood spent polishing gravestones in the much smaller church in Vernay, and learning figures and memorizing verses under the tutelage of grim-faced nuns. Ondir has few hymns, and they are reserved for the holiest of days, or the most dire of catastrophes. Isabel sits at the back and waits.
Perhaps twenty minutes pass. The high priest, dressed in a long, black vestment with sharply pressed pleats, emerges from the offices and comes to sit beside Isabel.
“I had heard there was a Sentinel in the area,” he says. He speaks slowly, deliberately, but there is a faraway quality to his voice. “Welcome, my child. My name is Father Pereth. What can I do for you?”
Isabel gives a respectful nod. “Thank you for seeing me, Father.” With a sigh, she begins, “I have a bit of a dilemma, and I was hoping you could help me.”
Father Pereth nods. He has black hair streaked with silver, and strangely pale eyes. He’s perhaps fifty, young for such a prestigious posting as this one.
“I was called here from Oranne last night,” Isabel continues. “A man had been murdered—his body had been dismembered. Brother Risoven at the chapel on the blue field asked me to call up the man’s spirit, see if he had witnessed his murderer. I performed the ritual just as I have done hundreds of times in the past, but this time…”
“Go on,” the high priest says.
“The man—he appeared, but he was not whole,” says Isabel. “He could not speak. There was a terrible shrieking sound, and flickering lights. I saw parts of a human figure, in the flashes. Try as I might, I could not get him to manifest. It was…unnerving.”
Pereth’s icy eyes fix on her, unblinking. “Do you mean to tell me that the soul was…damaged, in some way?”
“It certainly appears that way,” Isabel admits. “I’ve seen worse states that a body could be in, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Such a thing should be impossible, my child.”
Isabel looks down at her hands, folded in her lap. “I know.”
“This is…most disturbing,” Father Pereth says. His brows draw together in a contemplative frown. “Who else knows about this?”
“Brother Risoven, in the chapel, and Constable Mulhy. He was the one who found the body,” says Isabel. “And the other man—Berend Horst. He is here arranging the funeral.”
Pereth glances back toward the offices. “I must ask your discretion in discussing this with anyone else,” he says. “Faith in the soul’s journey to the embrace of Ondir is…crucial. Any shaking of that faith could have dire consequences, especially if people fail to take proper care of the dead. You are a Sentinel—you know this.”
Isabel does. She has seen the consequences of improper interment and cremation—the fields of walking corpses bent on mindless destruction, hauntings that bring villages to their knees; even a gathering of vampires, once, when she was an apprentice. Trust in the church and its rituals ensures that there aren’t more undead than there are people like Isabel to deal with them. She doesn’t want to imagine what would happen if the masses ceased to believe that Ondir receives their souls at the end of their journeys. One misadventure would not end the faith, but if there are more?
“I understand,” she says.
“I will contemplate what you have told me,” Father Pereth promises. “Where are you staying, my child?”
“In the chapel on the blue field.”
He nods again, and rises in one fluid motion. “I will contact you should I discover anything. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”
Isabel stands as well. “Of course, Father.”
Father Pereth glides away, back toward his office. Isabel is alone once more.
She’s no closer to an answer than she was last night. The soul can’t be divided, but how else can she explain what she saw?
She’ll go to the university library, she decides after a long moment. At the very least, she can try to identify the sigils painted on the walls in the Shell District, or the fungal sample she is acutely aware of carrying in her pocket. She takes it out, on the steps outside the church, and sees that it hasn’t started emitting spores or more bloody fluid, so that is something of a relief.
Berend is nowhere to be seen. It’s not a long walk to the university, if Isabel remembers correctly. If he needs her, she’ll be back here in a few hours. She doesn’t want to interrupt his business, anyway.
She can see the dome of the observatory as soon as she leaves the Temple District. Once, centuries ago, the university taught divination and magical ritual based on the position of the stars, but now it produces far more useful and reliable navigational charts. It’s the older, more improbable things that Isabel is after.
“Sentinel!”
She stops at the top of the stairs to the great library, before the heavy wooden door and the four columns of blue-veined marble that stand at either side of it, and turns around. A man of early middle age, wearing a vest and shirtsleeves, with a sheaf of papers tucked under one arm,
bounds up the stairs two at a time behind her.
“What a wonderful coincidence to find you here!” the man exclaims between gasps for breath. “I’d heard there was a Sentinel in Mondirra, and I was so afraid I would miss you.”
Word travels fast. Isabel had thought wouldn’t be such an unusual sight in a city with such a large Ondiran temple.
Before she can say anything, the man holds out a sweaty hand and continues, breathlessly, “Where are my manners? Lucian Warder, at your service. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”
She hasn’t. She shakes his hand, grimacing inwardly at its dampness, her outward smile politely blank.
“Lucian Warder? Of the Elisian Warders? Inventor of the Warder device?” His thin, parchment-colored brows arch upward as he searches her face for a hint of recognition. “Well. I’m a researcher here at the university. My family and I have been working on a device to banish restless spirits—rather like you do, I imagine, but until now I haven’t had a chance to speak to a Sentinel. Would you have the time to answer a few questions for me? Understanding how your order goes about this work would provide great insight, I’m sure.”
Isabel can only stare. The thought of a mechanical object—or even a layperson—doing the work of a Sentinel is preposterous. It has taken her years of training and study, to the exclusion of the finer arts a lady might be expected to practice, to be able to do what she does. Warder says he is a researcher, but there is no chance that he has the requisite background in magic, theology, and cosmology to so much as call up a ghost, and it would be impossible for her to impart that knowledge to him over the course of an afternoon.
“I’m sorry,” Isabel says. “I don’t think I can help you.”
Warder looks surprised, but it’s soon replaced by an amiable smile. “Ah. Well, then. I apologize for taking up your time. If you reconsider, please, you may contact me at any time.”
She takes the offered card, hand-lettered with Warder’s name and the address of a university office, and places it in the same pocket as the mushroom sample. She does not intend to ever look at it again.
Warder takes his leave, and Isabel enters the library.
An hour among the dusty tomes of the university’s special collection only confirms what she already knows: it is impossible to damage or subdivide a soul by any method, practicable or theoretical. A soul may be moved around, losing its way on its crossing to the world beyond, or sold in a bargain with a demon, if one believes the old stories, but it is always whole.
A demon. She remembers the many-branched sigil painted on the wall in the Shell district. Her memory is good, and she’s certain she could recognize it if she saw it again.
She’s in luck: the library still maintains a copy of the Luminous Codex, and judging by its weight, the manuscript is mostly complete. It’s mustier than the other tomes she’s looked at today—it must have gotten wet at some point in its long history, likely when it was being smuggled over one border or another, out of sight of the Church. The lettering was once red, the illuminated capitals and garish illustrations lavishly colored, but now everything is a uniform, faded brown.
Isabel’s fingers hover over the lines of text, not touching the paper’s surface. The librarian, an elderly gentleman in an old-fashioned scholarly robe, is watching her for any mistreatment of the collection, however slight.
There it is—the sigil she recognizes is under the thumb of her left hand, at the edge of a full-page diagram of a summoning circle. Essash-poleth, lord of pestilence, reads the heading.
The diagram is the only illustration under this entry; the scribe must not have felt up to the challenge of drawing this particular demon. It’s described as an amorphous mass of teeth and eyes, ever-shifting and maddening to behold. Unusually for the Codex, the text cautions against any attempt to summon it. There is nothing the Summoner can offer that will appease the Corruption, it reads, nor prevent the Plague from spreading. This Demon desires only utter Destruction upon all the World.
She sits back in the hard wooden chair. The room is already cold, its thick stone walls keeping out the afternoon’s heat, but a chill falls over her and she shivers.
Isabel is an agent of the Church of the Seven. She believes, as everyone but the most skeptical does, that demons exist. She also knows that summoning spells like this one have never been attested to work in any sort of reliable source—the Codex itself, everyone knows, is a fanciful work of fiction, a product of the superstitions of the past.
Someone—someone who had access to this library’s special collection, no less—had tried to perform this ritual. One would have to have studied this text extensively in order to create such a faithful reproduction of the diagram. That would mean someone from this or another university, one of its patron families, or the Church, or someone who had a privileged person to vouch for them. And if one had examined the Codex, they would have read all the warnings against performing the ritual.
The demon had not been summoned. Isabel was almost certain the spell had not worked as intended, though not as sure as she had been this morning. Some magic had been called forth, however: enough to create an enormous colony of unidentified fungi where none had been before.
She shuts the book and carries it to the librarian’s desk. He looks up from his quill, peering at her through wire-framed lenses.
“I’d like to know who else had access to this book,” Isabel says.
The librarian takes the volume from her and returns it to its shelf before answering her request. His steps are short and shuffling, his back bent, but the weight of the text seems not to trouble him.
When he comes back, he leafs through a stack of papers before handing her a sheet. Isabel’s signature is at the bottom of a column of names, along with the date.
Not many have sought out the Luminous Codex in recent history. The column is rather short. Professor Jauffre Arnaut. Symund Alswich. Sir Amos Courbeg. More recently, Arden Geray.
And just above Isabel’s name, Lucian Warder.
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