Trouble
Dawn breaks over the city by the time they reach the gates. Berend is usually good at keeping track of time, always waking right before his watch is due to start, but the night seems to have passed by in just a few hours. He doesn’t like it.
Isabel is half a step ahead of him. Though she stops once more at the gate to make sure he’s following, she says nothing. She may have been weeping, silent and stone-faced, but it’s too dark still for Berend to tell.
We are in trouble.
Berend doesn’t want to have to be the reasonable one between the pair of them. His hands still itch as he pictures wrapping them around Arden Geray’s ghostly neck. It feels satisfying in his imagination, even though he’s aware that dead spirits don’t work that way. Failing that, he wants to go straight to the university hospital and shake Lucian Warder awake, his injuries be damned. Isabel is supposed to be preventing him from doing that, at least until she’s explained how best to not get himself killed in the process.
On his own, he’s always been cautious. One doesn’t live as long as he has in his line of work otherwise. It has been seven years since he had a commanding officer, and he’s still ready to let someone else do his thinking for him at the first opportunity.
The watchman at the gate frowns in confusion as they approach, but it soon gives way to a huge, jaw-cracking yawn. He lifts one arm over his head to wave at his comrade on the wall before dropping it to his side. It’s almost time for the watch to change, and this man isn’t going to make things harder on himself by asking questions.
Isabel has gotten away from him in the half-second it took for Berend to acknowledge the watchman. He jogs to catch up, his chest aching in protest. The memory of Lady Breckenridge’s feather mattress taunts him from the back of his mind.
“Where are you going?” he calls after Isabel.
“The Temple of Alcos,” she calls back over her shoulder. “It should be safe for you to wait until…”
She lets the sentence hang in the air, the question of until what? left unanswered. She doesn’t know, and neither does Berend.
Sixteen hells.
“I’m going with you,” he says, willing his exhausted carcass to catch up. It’s too early for the city to be awake, and a gray haze lies over the streets like a woolen blanket. A dozing watchman wakes with a snort and a scramble for his pike at the sound of Berend’s approach.
Isabel turns red-rimmed eyes to him. “This will take a long time. I have to convince Father Pereth that I’m not mad, and then that I haven’t turned heretic, and then maybe he’ll know what to do.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Berend asks.
She shakes her head. It’s a blessing and a curse, Berend muses, that church types always go to their books and their tesselating network of superiors for answers. At best, someone in the vast annals of history has encountered the problem at hand before; at worst, they waste valuable time and are left, like Isabel, with neither guidance nor the auspices to decide for themselves. So she’s going to beg Father Pereth for help, and he’s going to be exactly as not-helpful as he has been so far, and neither she nor Berend will be any better off.
“I’m going with you,” he says again. He has a growing feeling that if Isabel breaks down, so will he. One of them needs to keep their wits about them. He’s going to try to make it both of them, but he won’t get his hopes up.
Isabel sighs so deeply that her shoulders fold in on her chest. “Fine.”
The sun has burned away the fog by the time they reach the Temple District, and the sky is a clear blue, reassuringly ordinary. Berend can’t shake the fear that the next time he looks up, the sky will be filled with eyes. A dozen armed watchmen, with pikes on their shoulders and pistols on their hips, are still posted at the foot of the stairs leading up to the Temple of Ondir. Their companions lining the street are fewer, standing farther apart. Last night must have been quiet. A few discarded pamphlets mingle with fallen leaves in the gutters.
At the crest of the hill, between the grand temples of Alcos and Isra, Isabel stops and grasps Berend’s sleeve with pale, cold fingers. The first knuckle on her forefinger has split, drawing a sharp line of red below the nail. It looks painful. “We’ll go around,” she says, “in through the embalming room. Come on.”
Without another word, she lets go of his arm and crosses the street, placing the pair of huge, yellowing willow trees that mark the steps up to Isra’s doors between her and the watchful eyes of the guards down the hill. Berend wishes he had thought of this the last time he came here. It would have saved him quite a bit of trouble.
He follows her around the temple, to where the mother goddess’s garden has been pruned and covered with mulch for the coming winter—utterly mundane, like nothing Berend has seen in the last few days ever happened, and there’s a guarantee of a winter and a following spring, something that Berend isn’t quite sure about.
It will be fine, he tells himself again, eventually. The world will go on. It always has.
That refrain sets his marching pace as he trails behind Isabel, weaving through marble planters and between grave markers so ancient that the names of the buried are no longer there. A statue of Isra, her arms full of carved grain, smiles down at them, her face smooth and pleasant. She looks a bit like Berend’s memory of his own mother, especially around the mouth.
He tips his hat to her. There’s no reason not to curry any favor he can get right now.
A row of gray tombs marks the path down the hill to the temple of Ondir, a narrow passage beside a crumbling wall that was once the city’s border. Between them, Berend can see the street and one of the district watchmen. Dry leaves and one errant tract, adorned with the drawing of a skull, scratch at the mausoleum doors and against the foot of the wall. From within the tombs, a faint rattling answers them.
Berend stops, a hand reaching instinctively for his sword. “Sentinel,” he whispers.
Isabel puts her split finger to her lips and shakes her head.
Right. Letting either the guards or whatever’s left in these ancient, dusty graves know he’s here won’t help anything. He shrugs his good cloak over his shoulders, draping it over his weapons. His left thumb finds the hammer of his pistol.
The squat, flat edifice of the temple of Ondir casts a dark shadow on the graveyard path, and Berend shivers as he reaches the bottom of the hill. The dead here are buried in earth, rather than stone, and they are silent.
Mikhail is among them, though the temple stands between Berend and the tiny plot he managed to purchase for the poor bastard. If nothing else, let his body rest, Berend prays, though he’s not sure who might be listening. He’s been through enough.
Berend shouldn’t even be here, skulking behind the temple. He should be getting Lucian Warder to fix Mikhail’s soul. That’s why he got into this mess in the first place. Let the church folk figure out how to find the god of the dead and get him to do his job again.
Well, he’s here now, and he can’t head out to the university hospital without having to answer some uncomfortable questions from the watch, so here he will stay. He catches up to Isabel at the door to the embalming chamber and tries not to think about how she stitched him up in there, not too long ago. He’d like to put as much distance between himself and being treated like a corpse as possible, especially now.
Isabel takes the iron handle and shakes it. “Locked,” she says, a line of confusion and frustration forming between her brows. She stares at the door, as though the idea that it would deny her entry is too much for her to comprehend.
She squeezes her eyes shut, and Berend worries that this last obstacle might be the thing that does them both in, but she takes a breath and knocks three steady, muffled beats on the old wooden door.
Berend glances down to the street. They’re out of line of sight, for now, but the end of a pike rises above the stretch of graveyard where Mikhail is—he hopes—resting. If the watch changes, or the man carrying said pike so much as stretches out his back after a long night, he’ll see them.
No one answers Isabel’s knock. There’s a creak that might be the floorboards from within, and then nothing.
She tries again, a little louder. The sun is high enough that the priests should be at work inside, even if they weren’t gathered in the street last night. The watch can’t have arrested all of them; there’d be a war as bad as the Inquisition, or at least what Berend read about the Inquisition when he was stuck watching over a cart full of rare books while the owner haggled with a collector—who didn’t pay enough to cover Berend’s usual fee, contrary to what the owner had said about the value of the collection. He should have known; the so-called authentic historical text he had been flipping through was sensationalist rubbish from start to finish. There had been a pointed exchange of words after that, and, on Berend’s part, several nights spent in the cheapest flophouse he could find, and a resulting infestation of fleas that had taken a month to excise from his wardrobe.
But more to the point, the Inquisition had happened, and Sentinels like Isabel, who Berend can’t imagine giving orders to anyone, had ruled the continent with iron fist and silver sword, slaughtering at least as many innocent people as they had necromancers. Ondir hadn’t left the world then, ashamed of the atrocities done in his name. Why would he go and do it now?
“Maybe it’s not—” Isabel begins, cutting into Berend’s thoughts. She puts both hands on the door and gives the handle a shove.
The latch gives with a loud crack. Without looking to see if it’s attracted a watchman or several, Berend pushes Isabel through the door and slams it behind them. The hinges turn with tired reluctance, almost as if there were—
A heavy, wrought-iron candle stand lies on the floor at his feet, beside a pair of planks that might have been part of a table. The door had pushed a third board toward the middle of the room. The sharp smell of disinfectant lingers in the air.
“What is this? A barricade?” he asks no one in particular.
The door opposite him, leading into the cathedral, is shut, and the chamber is dim, its windows shuttered and all its lights cold. Berend blinks to clear the reddish marks the bright morning sky left on his vision.
Footsteps approach the door behind him—not many, and not at a run, like he feared, but someone noticed him and Isabel entering the temple. He turns and finds the lock under the handle, and it engages with a satisfying, heavy thump. If the watch dares to force their way in to sanctified ground, they have quite the task before them.
The room is a little brighter and clearer on a second look. Broken glass and torn cloth litters the floor, and the tables have been pushed out of their neat row. Against the farthest table, slumped against one leg, is a body wrapped in a stained white sheet.
It leans forward almost gently, like someone crawling into bed. A pale arm, bruised black in a pattern like an ink splatter, emerges from the sheet.
“Even here,” Isabel mutters. “Maybe Father Pereth will believe me now.”
Zombies! Just one for now. More are coming. Thanks for reading!
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