Holy Ground
“There is another ghost in this house.”
Isabel wakes with a start and sees nothing. It’s grown dark, which means she’s slept much longer than she planned, and she’s not entirely sure what day it is now. The translucent form of Arden Geray hovers beside her narrow bed, the sockets of his eyes as dark as the night outside.
For however many blissful, oblivious hours she was asleep, she had forgotten about him. She groans and pushes herself up. “What are you talking about?”
“A spirit,” he says, enunciating carefully as though he is speaking to a child. “It’s just arrived and it’s none too pleased. What are you going to do about it, Sentinel?”
Isabel gets to her feet and crosses the room to the doorway. Lights shine from the chapel downstairs, and the sounds of footsteps and hushed voices make their way up to her.
“They’re bringing in a body for the blue field,” she tells Geray. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“You can’t see it?” he asks.
“Not unless it’s summoned. You, apparently, are the exception.” Isabel sighs. “Risoven will put it to rest. Stay here and don’t bother it.”
Her body is no less heavy than it had been when she went to bed. She could sleep for another year, at least, or maybe just until morning. As long as Geray is stuck with her, things can’t get any worse before then.
The door to the chapel closes, and a horse pulls a rickety carriage away toward the city gate. Isabel says a prayer for the poor soul in the preparation room and drags herself back to bed.
A terrible crash shakes the chapel. Risoven shouts in alarm.
Isabel runs, barefoot, down the darkened staircase, Geray at her heels. Her eyes burn with sudden brightness as she emerges into the hallway.
The altar is all aflame, and it’s as though the sun has left the sky to take up residence in the tiny church. Heat floods from the doorway, carrying with it the smell of smoke.
“Looks like the altar cloth caught,” Geray muses.
Isabel shields her face with one arm and pulls her sleeve down over the other hand. In two steps, she crosses the stone floor to the altar and pulls the burning fabric down. The candles come with it, rolling down the central aisle. She chases them and gathers them up, shaking them until they go out.
The altar cloth smolders, crumbles, and goes dark. A soot stain spreads like spilled ink up the wall behind it, but the fire is gone.
Isabel brushes ash and hardening wax from her hands. “What happened?”
As if in response, a howl tears through the chapel. Frigid wind shakes the pews and threatens the candles placed in the windows.
“That would be the other ghost,” says Geray. “I told you.”
“I heard you.” Isabel takes one candle from the nearest window and blows the others out. There’s no need to risk another fire. “Where’s Brother Risoven?”
Geray gives a languid, ghostly shrug. Isabel wasn’t really asking him. She goes to the other side of the room and puts out the rest of the candles, and the chapel goes dark.
Her feet turn to ice against the flagstones, and she shivers. She knows a haunting when she sees one. But here, in a church of the god of death, such a thing shouldn’t be possible. The blue field is warded and blessed, and the building is consecrated down to the mortar. All of Ondir’s power is brought to bear against exactly this occurrence.
An unearthly moan scrapes out from the preparation room, followed by another cry from Brother Risoven. Isabel shelters her single remaining candle with her other hand and makes her way into the dark hallway.
The door hangs open. Its uppermost hinge is broken. All the lights inside have gone out.
“Risoven?” Isabel calls out.
Something hunched and inhuman moves beside the table. Isabel raises the light.
“Sister! Help me!”
A dead man lies on top of Risoven, pinning him to the floor. With bloody gray fingers, he tears at Risoven’s habit and at his skin, digging broken nails into his flesh even as the decaying finger bones crack and bend backward from the pressure.
Isabel drops the candle. It rolls toward the wall and stays there, dripping wax onto the floor. She grabs the corpse by both shoulders and pulls backward.
It’s inhumanly strong, driven not by the strength of its rapidly deteriorating muscles but by the rage and fear of its ghost. Isabel’s hands close around dirty cloth and death-cold skin, and she drops her weight to the floor, landing hard on her backside.
The corpse doesn’t even notice her. It’s a man’s body, as far as Isabel can tell, only a day or two since death. Putrefaction has set in, turning the skin pallid and bloodless. Its neck is ink-black with bruising—strangulation, maybe, or the gallows. Either would be enough to create an angry ghost, even in the best of circumstances. Its clothes are ragged, its feet bare and filthy. Risoven had started the ritual before it woke. Lines of sigils mark its face and arms.
Risoven covers his face with his hands. Decaying fingers pull at his arms, as though to tear through the flesh and bone. The chapel trembles and howls with unearthly wind.
“Gods, that noise. Shut him up, would you?” Geray says, his earlier diatribes about how Isabel no longer has any divine assistance evidently forgotten.
I’m trying. Isabel gets up. She isn’t strong enough to overpower the superhuman tenacity with which the ghost has imbued his corpse, but even a spirit can’t keep the body from decaying. She places one hand on the table for balance and her right heel just above the corpse’s elbow. The rotting bone collapses under her weight with a sickening crunch, and the right arm falls limp.
It’s enough for Risoven to scramble out from under the dead man. Isabel grabs his hand in both her own and pulls him to his feet. Pushing him out ahead of her, she leaves the preparation room and slams the door.
The body still moves, dragging itself along the floor. The slap of bare feet on flagstones comes nearer. Isabel presses her back against the latch.
Geray steps out through the door beside her. “Determined bastard, isn’t he? Criminals always are.”
Isabel ignores him. “Are you all right?” she asks Risoven.
The old monk bleeds from lacerations on his face and arms. One side of his thick lenses shows a crack through the center. “Ondir preserve us,” he wails. “This is holy ground!”
“I know,” Isabel says.
“All my life I’ve been a servant of the gods. Seventy-one years. I’ve tended the blue field for thirty of them.”
The body slams into the door. Isabel gasps as the frame lurches into her back.
“It’s not your fault,” she says. “We need to barricade this door. Can you help me?”
Risoven nods. He takes a heavy iron key from the ring at his belt and turns the lock, his elbow digging into Isabel’s side. It won’t hold forever on its own, but it buys enough time for the two of them to move a pair of pews from the chapel and prop them up against the door to the preparation room.
The hallway has turned as cold as a winter storm. Isabel’s toes and the ends of her fingers turn blue, and her breath clouds the air. She wraps her arms around herself and tries to rub feeling back into her hands. Behind the barricade, the corpse barrels into the door, over and over again, but the lock holds.
“This is holy ground,” Risoven says again. He sounds near tears. “Master of the gate, watch over us.”
Isabel bites her tongue to keep her teeth from chattering. “This is what I was trying to tell you,” she says. “The gate is gone. Something is terribly wrong.”
“Then Ondir has abandoned us.”
The words leave Risoven’s mouth in a cloud and dissipate, unanswered, into the frigid air.
Isabel wants to argue. Ondir has ever been as faithful as death, as inevitable as the grave. Even in the days of legend, when the gods squabbled with each other for dominance and granted their gifts according to fickle favoritism, Ondir was even-handed and steadfast. When the plague of undeath threatened the entire continent, he gave his Inquisition the abilities they needed to overcome it and preserve the world for the living. The Inquisition may have been an evil thing, but they were effective—Isabel has spent her life hearing this constant, careful verbal balancing act—because Ondir cared not for their virtues, only for their capability. One has only to ask, the scriptures say, and to perform the rites, and the dead will stay dead.
But she saw the vision under Arden Geray’s house. She even performed the ritual to send Geray on, and he’s still here, his dead face contorted in what might be concern. It’s hard to tell.
She won’t ask Risoven what to do. Strictly speaking, according to church hierarchy, he outranks her, but this exact situation is the exception to the rule. The dead are about, so the Sentinel is the one in charge. Panic swells in her throat; she swallows it down.
“We have to quiet this ghost before we both freeze to death,” she tells Risoven. “I don’t have any of my things. Do you have a bell?”
Risoven nods, and he shuffles off toward the chapel.
“It’s not going to work,” Geray says.
“I know. But it got you to stop, so it’s worth a try.” Isabel blows warm air onto her fingers. It doesn’t help much. “Do you have a better idea?”
Geray steps out of view and into the adjoining wall, his feet hovering a few inches above the floor. “Death isn’t my purview, really. Besides, this one won’t be nearly as well-mannered as I, let me assure you.”
“Not your purview?” Isabel echoes, incredulous. “You murdered people and hacked them apart.”
The door and the barricade shake again. A moan, somewhere between agony and winter wind, fills the narrow hall.
“He’s still at it, isn’t he?” Geray says, reappearing beside the door.
“I told you not to bother him,” Isabel says.
For now, the barricade will hold. She forces her frozen feet to move and goes into the chapel. Here, the chill abates only slightly, and the smell of burning textile lingers. Isabel finds a box of matches under the altar and lights a single candle. The flame gutters, and a ring of smoke and ash gathers around it. She shelters it with one hand.
The stairs creak as Risoven comes down, carrying a small iron hand bell and two folded blankets. He wraps one around his own shoulders and gives the other to Isabel along with the bell.
She has bell and candle, and she doesn’t need the book. Years of rote memorization are finally paying off. She takes them to the altar—Ondir may have abandoned her, as well as his entire church, but maybe not, and surrounding herself with holy things will help. Kneeling down, she tucks her feet under a fold of the blanket.
“Who was this man?” she asks Risoven. “Can you tell me anything?”
Risoven kneels beside her. “His name was Reder Angrove. Hanged for poaching outside of Oranne. His brother, Gauwert, couldn’t afford a plot, but he didn’t want the university to take the body for their—” he shudders— “experiments.”
Word travels fast. The law isn’t even in effect yet. “Thank you,” says Isabel. “You don’t need to stay here. You should clean up those wounds. I don’t want you catching corpse fever.”
“I’ll be all right, Sister. I’ll stay.” He falls silent. His fingers, poking out of the end of his sleeve, turn his glossy black prayer beads. Habits are hard to break, all the more so for church folk.
Geray crouches down beside the remains of the altar cloth, his knees to his chest and his toes dragging on the floor. He’s uncharacteristically quiet and morose.
Isabel sets the candle in front of her and takes the bell in one hand. Please, let this work, she prays to whomever might be listening.
“In the name of Isra, mother of creation,” she begins, “and of Alcos, king and father, and of Ondir, lord of the gates: I call the name of Reder Angrove—”
The rapid pounding of a fist on the chapel door interrupts her.
“Shell District constabulary!” a loud voice announces. “Open the door!”
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