Disbelief
Isabel shivers. The water turns cold around her, and a lattice of frost spreads out across the side of the metal tub from Geray’s ghostly hands. She draws her knees up to her chest.
“I didn’t do anything,” she says, and she’s almost sure she’s telling the truth. “You were doing unregulated, experimental black magic in an unstable space, and now you’re surprised something went wrong?”
He sneers. His teeth shine white against the black hole of his mouth. “Fix it.”
If nothing else, Isabel is still a Sentinel. She knows how to negotiate with ghosts, though it’s never been this uncomfortably intimate before. Her skin prickles and itches—she hasn’t even finished one bath, and she wants another. “I’m sure there’s a solution,” she says, calm and even through her chattering teeth. “I don’t want you here any more than you do.”
“Don’t patronize me.” Geray lets go of the tub and hovers beside it, his feet a few inches above the floor. He crosses his arms over the hole in his chest.
The air in Brother Risoven’s kitchen warms, but the damage has been done. Isabel’s bath is cold as death. A wet-earth smell hovers around her, pervasive and heavy. If she were to close her eyes, she could believe herself still buried beneath Geray’s house, so she keeps them open. Early sunlight streams through the high, narrow window, falling on the water’s murky surface and the uneven stone tile.
Risoven will be awake soon, and Isabel is taking up most of the space in the kitchen. “You’re a scientist—of a sort—aren’t you?” she says, placating. “We need data. Find the limits of how far you can go in any direction.” Referring to herself and Geray collectively sends another icy shiver through her limbs, but it must be done. He needs to go somewhere, anywhere else, and she needs it to be quiet so she can think.
Geray stalks off, dragging his feet, and passes through the back wall of the kitchen.
Her bath isn’t much cleaner or warmer than an early-spring puddle on a muddy road, but Isabel manages to scrub the worst of the dirt from her skin and rinse it from her hair. She wraps herself in a thin towel and heads up the back stairs to find her spare set of clothing. The steps creak in all their familiar places, and the room is exactly as she left it almost two days ago: her saddlebags open and unpacked, the bedding neatly folded, the wash basin empty. It is as though nothing has changed, the council’s Resurrection Act has never passed, and Ondir’s gate has not vanished from the nether world.
The two events must be connected, Isabel realizes, though it will be some weeks before the university is allowed to commence its collection of cadavers. When it does, and everyone realizes that not even a Sentinel can put the dead back to rest, things can only get worse, in several new ways that she doesn’t want to imagine.
Maybe it’s only me. Maybe they can call another Sentinel from Vernay and everything will go back to normal. She doesn’t believe it. She has no grandiose ideas of her own abilities as compared to those of her peers, but there is no denying the utter %wrongness of what she saw under Geray’s house.
The stairs creak. Brother Risoven is up with the sun.
He might know something. Isabel fastens her skirt and buttons up her blouse. Her Sentinel’s blacks, left beside the tub, will have to be cleaned before she can put them on again. She’s hungry, too, and it gnaws at the edge of her awareness. Exhaustion presses down on her eyes.
One thing at a time.
“Thirty paces,” a thin, cold voice says. Geray appears at the foot of the bed. The edges of his form soften in the brightening daylight, but the dark places on his body–his eyes, his mouth, the hole in his chest–are starker in comparison. “More or less. It’s hard to get an exact measurement without tangible contact with the ground.”
Isabel squeezes her eyes shut. Her head is beginning to ache, from hunger, a lack of sleep, Geray’s presence, or some combination of all three. “And that’s in every direction?”
“Yes. You could have warned me before you went upstairs. The pull was…unpleasant.”
“All right,” Isabel says. “That’s good to know.”
Risoven’s voice comes up through the floorboards. “Sister?” he calls out. “Isabel?”
He must have found the tub and the rest of her clothes. “I’m here,” Isabel answers. To Geray, she says, “I’m going to talk to him. Will you be quiet while I do that?”
“Will he be able to see me?” Geray asks.
“I don’t know.” The constables couldn’t, and they couldn’t hear him either. “Just be patient. I’m going to figure this out.” She says it more for herself than for the ghost.
When she arrives in the kitchen, Risoven has already tipped the metal tub out near the back steps. He’s still strong, despite his age, and he lives alone most of the time, but Isabel feels a pang of guilt. Dust sticks to her bare feet. Her coat and hat look even worse in the daylight; they’re no longer black. A cloud of earth rains down onto the stone floor as she gathers them up.
“You’re back,” Risoven says, fixing her with his magnified eyes. “What happened? I heard about the arrests, and I feared the worst. Are you all right?”
She manages half a smile. “I’m fine. Let me finish cleaning this up.”
“What is all this? You look like you’ve crawled out of a grave.”
Isabel sets her things down beside the back door and picks up the broom from its place beside the door to the chapel. Geray floats in her peripheral vision, a scowl across his gaunt face. “It’s a long story,” she says. “Can we have breakfast first?”
“Are you going to lie to him, as well?” Geray whispers. “A priest of Ondir?”
Risoven can’t hear him. It’s only me, then, Isabel realizes with an inward sigh. Wonderful.
Breakfast is milky porridge, but it’s a feast fit for a king compared to what Isabel was given in the tower, and she hadn’t eaten anything since being released. Risoven waits until she’s finished one bowl and half of another before he speaks.
“I haven’t seen you since the night before last. Did you find him? The murderer?”
“I did,” Isabel says. She can’t help but glance at Geray, glowering in the corner of the room. He smirks. She hates him, now, where she didn’t before she knew his face and his name, when he was more of a terrible occurrence than a person. What use was it to hate a fire in one’s home, or a flood in one’s village?
Now, however, he is an individual, and one who won’t–can’t–leave her alone. She hates him.
“What happened?” Risoven asks.
Isabel pulls her gaze back to the table with deliberate effort. “He’s dead.” She takes a breath and rubs at her brows with one hand. There’s still a thin layer of dirt clinging to her face. “His ritual misfired and the house collapsed.”
Risoven nods. “I suppose that explains the dirt. You’re not injured?”
“No.” With her bodily needs more or less met, Isabel feels her lack of sleep catching up to her. Her limbs are made of lead, and the climb upstairs might as well be a mountain.
“I’m relieved. And that the man responsible for those deaths can no longer harm anyone,” Risoven says. “May his judgment be swift and fair to his deeds.”
Isabel’s eyes find Geray again. His smirk is truly insufferable. She supposes he was what one might call handsome, in life. It likely helped divert suspicion as he began his murders.
“I’m not worried about my judgment,” he says. “I’d be more worried about yours, if I were you, Sentinel.”
He doesn’t quite believe it. For Isabel, the dead have always been easier to read than the living. He can sneer and smile all he wants, but he is a ghost, made of thought and memory and emotion. He can’t hide anything from her.
“When did you get in?” Risoven asks, startling her.
She shuts her eyes. The food has helped her headache, but it’s still there, like a worm tunneling through her skull. “This morning,” she says.
“You should rest,” says Risoven. “I’ll take care of the dishes.” He stands up, gathering bowls and spoons into a stack that leans precariously to his left.
Isabel drags herself to her feet. “Wait. There was something I wanted to ask you.” Without waiting for him to acknowledge her, she continues, “When the spell went off, it tore through the veil for a moment. Ondir’s gate—I wanted to put the ghosts to rest, and when I did, the gate wasn’t there. I couldn’t see it anywhere.”
Risoven cocks his head to one side, adding to his owl-like appearance. “Are you certain?”
She can only nod. She’s too exhausted to speak.
“I see.” He sets the dishes down on the corner of the table, and the uppermost bowl tilts, scraping against the one below it. “My dear, I think you should rest. You were inside a collapsing building with unknown magic effects happening all around you. I’m not surprised things looked…a little strange.”
“I know what I saw,” Isabel says with a shake of her head. How could she forget? She sees it every time she closes her eyes—the churning void, the field of stars, the empty expanse. She wonders if she’ll ever stop seeing it.
Risoven smiles, paternal and infuriating. “Get some rest, sister. The murderer is dead, and the danger has passed.”
How she wishes that were true.
Isabel doesn’t have the strength to argue with him. Each step is a task in itself as she climbs the stairs to her borrowed room.
Geray follows. “I’m hurt you didn’t introduce me,” he says. “Who taught you your manners?”
“It would cost you nothing to be quiet.”
She shuts the door behind her, but Geray walks through it. “What are you going to do now?” he demands.
“I haven’t slept in two days,” Isabel answers, sinking down onto the straw-stuffed mattress, “so I’m going to do that. We can go to the Temple District later, see if anyone there can help you move on.”
The black hollows of his eyes compress into a frown. “I’m so glad you’re going to tell someone the truth, at last. What am I supposed to do until then?”
“I don’t know. Just don’t disturb Brother Risoven, and leave the blue field alone. And for the love of the Seven, don’t talk to me.”
“And what if I do?”
Isabel covers her face with both hands, dragging her palms from her brow to her chin. “Then I’ll banish you somewhere else, and whatever tether ties you to me will either break or hurt you, I don’t care which. Or I’ll have someone dig up Warder’s device, and we’ll see what it does to you, how does that sound?”
“You wouldn’t dare,” he growls, but he retreats into the back corner of the room and hovers there, his ghostly glow dimming until he’s only a shadow. He’s muttering to himself, probably cursing Isabel and her entire order, but she can’t make out the words and can’t bring herself to care.
He’s right about one thing. She wouldn’t use the device, not even on him; not until and unless she ever finds out what it does. Let Warder live long enough to tell me, she prays.
And let Berend be all right, is her last thought before she falls asleep.
We’ll check in with Berend next chapter. If you want to read it a week before everyone else, consider signing up for Patreon! As always, thank you for reading. I’m happy you’re here.
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