Friends
Berend marches Isabel out of Father Pereth’s office. His grip on her arm is immovable as a rusted iron hinge. Isabel struggles, twisting her elbow and pulling against him, but it’s no use. Fear restricts her vision to the end of the hall, where the dome allows in a few thin beams of sunlight. She expects the chapel will be filled with constables, but she might still be able to get away, to disappear into the back corridors and out into the graveyard—if she could only get herself free of Berend.
She trusted him. She’d thought he cared enough about the state of the world, about protecting the people of Mondirra, that he would help her. He saw the same terrible vision in the nether that she did. She’d even thought he supported her against the high priest’s accusations, until he’d smiled and acquiesced and grabbed her by the elbow.
“I’m not going to the temple of Isra,” she snarls through her teeth. She doesn’t want to hurt him, but if she has to, she’ll drive the heel of her boot straight into the soft leather instep of his. It’ll have to be quick, and then she’ll have to run. He’s still injured. That will slow him down.
Instead, Berend lets go. He holds both hands out, spreading his fingers to show they’re empty. “I know.”
Isabel’s heart still hammers in her ears, a thudding rhythm that makes her teeth ache. There’s a weight on her chest, and her breath comes fast and shallow. She swallows, forcing herself to slow down.
“Listen, I’m sorry, but this place isn’t safe,” Berend says in a loud, hurried whisper. “We have to get out of here.”
He’s not dragging her to an indeterminate confinement with the green-robed sisters. Of course he isn’t. Fear has made her uncharitable. Another few steps, and she’d have kicked her only ally wherever it might hurt the most and lost his support.
Though her mind understands it, her body refuses to take it in. Her limbs are numb and cold, though they ache with the desire to move, to carry her anywhere but here. She wants to scream. She wants to hide, silent and motionless, underneath the nearest, shadowiest table. She’s ten years old, afraid of the stern-faced nuns; she’s ancient and her bones hurt from her skull down to her feet.
“I don’t—” she begins, but it comes out strangled and voiceless. She tries again. “I don’t know where else to go.”
Berend adjusts his hat and looks, narrow-eyed, down the hall. Stern voices, muffled by distance and architecture, drift in from the sanctum. “We have to find some place to lie low for a while,” he says. “After that, we should check in on Warder.”
“You said he was at the university hospital,” Isabel says.
“That’s right.”
She shakes her head, as though it will clear the fog of panic and help her think. It doesn’t work. “He’s safe there. There’s nothing we can do to help. We’ll just draw attention to him.”
“It’s his device that’s responsible for all this.” Berend’s voice is flat in the narrow corridor. It’s a small grace, but they’ll have to move. Either the constables will seek Pereth out, or he’ll come out himself to see what all the noise is about.
“We don’t know that.” There is so much they don’t know, and all the people who would have any information are either many miles away or refusing to listen. A Sentinel isn’t a scholar, and Isabel isn’t even a Sentinel anymore. The lapel of her coat carries the faint outline of her missing silver brooch, like a ghost, where it protected the wool from fading.
As if she needed the reminder, Arden Geray stalks into view, emerging from the left-hand wall. “It might interest you to know that the district constables have left the building,” he says. “It might interest you further to learn that they are standing at every door. No one is to enter or leave.”
Berend can’t hear or see him, so he speaks over the end of Geray’s last sentence. “I think we do know, at this point. We know it destroyed Mikhail and Bessa Kyne, something that you said was impossible, just like whatever is happening with Ondir. It can’t be a coincidence.”
Geray smirks. “So now the sellsword thinks he’s a theologian? I don’t know what you see in him, Sentinel.”
Isabel holds up a hand. She can barely think fast enough to process one person talking to her, much less two. “The constables are guarding the doors. We need a plan.”
“What?” Berend’s eyes go wide. “How do you know that?”
Isabel sighs. “Because the ghost who’s following me around can walk through the temple walls.”
Berend glances from side to side, and his fingers curl, but he doesn’t go so far as to reach for his weapons. “He’s here, isn’t he?”
The smug grin on Geray’s ghostly face makes Isabel want to hit him. He folds his arms over the bullet hole in his chest and stalks over to Berend, taking up a place directly beside him, not quite close enough to touch. It seems he’s still a little shy of the man who killed him. Good.
“Yes,” Isabel says. “I don’t know how to get rid of him. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
Berend clenches his teeth, and the muscles on either side of his jaw flex up and down. “Fine. All right. We’ll deal with him later. Is the watch still inside?”
Geray shakes his head.
“No, they’re all out,” says Isabel.
“Then we’ll go back into the church. You’re praying one more time for contrition before you go to Isra’s temple, and I’m keeping an eye on you. The high priest can’t argue with that. It’ll give us time.”
Isabel nods, swallows, and wills her pulse to slow down. She puts a hand on Berend’s arm. He’s solid and warm, and the smell of the autumn fields clings to his clothing. The mud on both their boots has dried, and it falls off in dusty pieces onto the hallowed floor of the temple, where it will stay until a postulant has enough time to sweep the halls between dealing with the watch and protesting the council’s decision.
Isabel lets Berend lead her to the end of the hall and out under the dome. It’s quiet, and the sanctum is all but empty. A cluster of black-robed priests stands just inside the main entrance, peering through the narrow windows on either side of the doors and exchanging worried looks. A young man with slicked-back dark hair and a nose like a hawk’s beak leaves their number and heads toward Father Pereth’s office, brushing past Berend and Isabel without looking at their faces.
Isabel thinks she can hear the animated corpse in the morgue scratching its nails off on the stone tiles. It’s impossible, of course—the temple was specifically designed so that sound was amplified inside the dome and dampened in the chambers where the dead and mourning might interact—but the persistent scraping remains, nonetheless. It is only when she takes her place beside Berend in the back row that she realizes it’s the sound of a barricade being dragged into place outside.
“The church won’t stand for this,” she says to no one in particular. Her words ring hollow. The church wouldn’t stand for the arrest of half the priests in the temple, and one of their Sentinels, but that had happened anyway. They wouldn’t stand for the Resurrection Act, either. The council hadn’t cared much.
It might not matter, in any case. Fewer and fewer corpses will lie still long enough to be taken to the university, much less dissected and examined in an operating theater full of unprepared students. It’s not a reassuring thought. Isabel bends her head and presses her palms against her brow. The desire for a bath and a warm bed, and the chance to forget the mess she’s in for a few hours, washes over her like a rising tide. She fights to keep her head above it, to stay focused on the task at hand.
“We might have to be here a while,” Berend says.
Isabel looks up, following his gaze to the entrance, where the sharp-faced priest has brought Father Pereth to speak with the occupying captain. There will be no trip to the temple of Isra at the moment, even if Isabel had agreed to go.
She’ll just have to wait, to keep her head down until one of these doors opens. It’s not like Pereth wants to keep her here. The only question is where she’s going to go.
Only one other layperson occupies a seat here. He sits a few rows ahead, facing forward, dressed in an expensive-looking brocaded doublet and a starched white shirt. His black hair shines in the slanting sunlight. He looks wealthy, and therefore important, and he’ll have several choice words for the priests once he realizes he’s stuck here, Isabel is sure. For now, though, his shoulders rest easily against the back of the pew, and his head leans back. Not many are so relaxed in the temple of Ondir. Death isn’t only a grim reminder for the living; it often comes with a lot of work on a quick schedule.
“We could go to the Fox and Dove, maybe,” Berend is saying, in a hurried murmur that might sound like prayer from a good distance. “Lady Breckenridge might put us up, but I don’t want to lead any trouble to her door. I wish there was a way to get word to Lucian Warder, but odds are he isn’t awake yet.”
Isabel places her hat in her lap and gives it a quarter turn, and then another, with the full knowledge that she’s just fidgeting and isn’t helping anything. “I think we should leave Warder where he is. At least for now.”
Berend shakes his head once, a sharp no. “He’s the one who’s been fooling around with ghosts. He’s the only one who knows how the device works.” He looks up, searching for someone he can’t see. “Unless your ghostly friend has any ideas.”
Geray settles into the row ahead of them, one final piece of evidence that the holy wards around this place are no longer functioning. He gives Isabel a languid shrug.
“He’s useless, and he’s not my friend,” says Isabel.
“And when were you going to tell me he was still around?” Berend asks.
There’s that fear again—that she’s losing her one ally in all of Mondirra, and perhaps, if the church at Vernay follows a path anything like this one’s, in all the world. “I’m sorry,” she says. It comes out in a high-pitched whisper, like a kettle not quite boiling. “I hoped I’d be rid of him before long. Before it became a problem.”
“But you couldn’t, because you can’t send ghosts away anymore.” Berend sighs, and his chest deflates, curling his shoulders inward. He rubs at his brow with one hand. “That man is a butcher of innocent people.”
“I know,” says Isabel.
“He killed Mikhail. He killed a lot of others we don’t even know about. If there’s evil in this world, real, intentional evil, then it has his face.”
Geray’s hollow eyes widen in surprise and something that might be perverse delight. “Do go on, mercenary,” he says. “I’ll expect a recitation of your own sins, after. You can start with how you shot me in the chest.”
Isabel shifts in her seat until Geray is outside of her peripheral vision. “Something happened when his spell went off. He’s bound to me. He can’t go too far without pain.”
“Pain for you, or pain for him?” Berend asks. “Or both?”
“For him.”
Berend laughs, a quick puff of air from his nose. “Good.”
The other living man in the room turns around, putting an arm around the back of his seat. He’s young, in his early twenties, with the olive skin and angular face of a certain sector of the nobility. A younger Isabel might have briefly noticed his good looks. Now, she sees his sharp smile, and how it does nothing to warm his cold, dark eyes. She breaks eye contact and bends her head, feigning prayer.
“We need to leave,” Berend says.
Isabel doesn’t look up. “We can’t. Not until the priests get the watch to leave.”
“We don’t have that long.” Berend’s fingers close around her wrist, gentle but insistent.
“Why not?”
“Because that’s Hybrook Belisia,” Berend says, “and he’s here to kill me.”
Thanks for reading! If you’ve gotten this far, you’ll be happy to know that I just finished writing Chapter Twenty-Four, and Part Two will be done shortly. I’ll use the rest of the month to start Part Three. As always, I appreciate you and welcome your feedback.
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