Painted devils, p.29
Painted Devils, page 29
Emeric nods. “You’ve been gone two weeks, and there are already violent devotees chasing us all the way to Rammelbeck. I’d say there’s been a change in doctrine.”
“Udo and Jakob.” I grip the table. “Would they…?”
“Every use we’ve found for the seven blood drops requires your brothers to be among the living,” Lady Ambroszia states. “They may not be pleased with the circumstances, but they ought to survive them.”
“But I thought the Scarlet Maiden doesn’t really want my brothers.”
“We don’t know,” Emeric says slowly, “if they’re a diversion or a true alternative. This is where I’m stuck, to be honest. Sacrificing me, using the blood drops—either could grant her power, perhaps enough to take on the hellhound? But she’s a Low God with a growing cult to feed from—she should have that power. And she’s already strong enough to outmuscle your gerblemers, which…” He sees the baffled look on my face. “Your glorbos,” he tries again, but there’s a strange mismatch between what I hear and the movements of his mouth. “Scrimblo and Glup.”
“What are you saying,” I wheeze.
He looks helplessly at Lady Ambroszia, who just offers an awkward shrug. “I’ve no comprehension issues, my boy.”
Emeric pinches the bridge of his nose. “Right. It’s time to talk about this too. Vanja, hold this.” He flicks open his message-mirror and hands it to me. “Your memories are being tampered with when it comes to … your parents.”
I gawk at him. “I think I would notice?”
He gestures. “Look in the mirror and tell me your first memory of Castle Falbirg.”
I see my brow wrinkle in the glass. “Being left there by my mother.”
“How old were you?”
“Four.”
Something—shifts. I blink.
“Four is very young to be taken in as a servant,” he says carefully. “Do you remember anything from when you were five? Or six?”
“I remember…” I shut my eyes, then recall I’m supposed to be watching my reflection and open them again. If I think back, really think … “There were … other children. I remember playing with them in … the yard? Castle Falbirg doesn’t have a yard like…”
But I can see it in my mind: a ring of grass and spongy moss, hemmed in by spicy-smelling yews.
And I can feel a bizarre petal-soft pressure steering my thoughts away, like too many blooms blocking out daylight.
“Your family lived in Kerzenthal.” Emeric’s voice is steady, measured. “How could your mother take you all the way to Sovabin?”
I see her lantern on that cold winter night, a dark forest shrouded in snow—no, I can feel the stones of Castle Falbirg—
“Look in the mirror.”
In the glass, I see a red light flickering deep in my pupils.
Emeric says something, and it’s as if the words are broken to pieces, shaken up in a bag, and emptied into my ears. That red burns even brighter. In the ensuing silence, it starts to fade.
She’s in my head. The Scarlet Maiden is in my head.
“Fix it.” My voice wobbles. Something about this—about my own memories being turned on me—scares me, in a way I’ve never felt fear. “Please—get her out—”
“I’ve been trying,” Emeric admits, running a hand through his hair. “We’ve been looking, but every counterspell, every restoration charm, they’ve all failed. I don’t know if anyone can break it.”
A sick silence falls. I just—have to live with this? Not knowing what memories I can trust?
Someone knocks on the door.
“Come in,” Emeric calls.
The clerk from the front desk pushes it open. “Excuse me, Aspirant Conrad, Miss Vanja. There’s a carriage here from the Imperial Abbey. The High Augur, Abbess Sibylle von Eisz, says you wish to speak with her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
AUGUR'S TEARS
“You wouldn’t happen to know a Henrik Ros, would you?” I ask the friar driving the open carriage as we roll through the gates of the Konstanzian Imperial Abbey. It was already imposing from a distance; up close, it’s even more massive than I thought. The great domed temple of the augurs observes from a hilltop, but it’s shored up by workshops, stables, infirmaries, refectories, long stretches of dormitories, towering scriptoriums, and other buildings I can’t identify but would bet also end in -orium. Everywhere I look, there are friars, nuns, laypeople. All sport heavy silver pendants wrought like single staring eyes.
The friar glances over his shoulder. “Brother Henrik is part of why you’re here. He went missing last night.”
“Are you serious?” I demand. “I thought he was the nice one! First Erwin gets himself held hostage for three days, now Henrik runs off? What is with this family?”
“We don’t think he ran off,” the driver says tensely. “His room was locked from the inside. Mother Superior can tell you more; I’m not an augur.”
Thankfully we don’t have long to wait before we’re hustled to Abbess Sibylle, the Mother Superior herself. She’s waiting at the end of a long walkway that stretches from a temple, her deep gold face in high contrast to the starched white headdress that covers her head and falls behind her shoulders, nearly all the way to the ground. Against the sky’s blanket of flat clouds, her nacreous dove-gray vestments gleam like mother-of-pearl, nearly as bright as the ceremonial halo-like headdress of wrought silver eyes affixed to the back of her head. Another heavy silver eye hangs from a chain around her neck, and strings of clear glass prayer beads dangle from her crossed wrists.
“I’ll just, er, be in here.” Lady Ambroszia climbs into my satchel as the carriage slows to a halt, pulling a kerchief over herself.
“There’s no need for that,” Abbess Sibylle calls as Emeric helps me out of the carriage. “I have no quarrel with the dead.” She bows her head. “Greetings in the blessed works of the Low Gods and in the eyes of Truth, Brother Conrad. Greetings to you as well, God Daughter. And to you, Lady Ambroszia.”
Emeric bows, and I duck a curtsy. Lady Ambroszia pokes her head out. “Considering my … involvement with Nibs—Nibelungus von Wälft, I did not expect so gracious a welcome from House Eisz.”
The corner of the abbess’s mouth twitches. “All abbesses here are inducted into House Eisz only upon election. And even if I were descended from the first imperial abbess, I would not care particularly about her ex-husband’s affairs.” Before I can decipher if that was a backhanded snub, she fixes her soft slate-gray eyes on me. “I do not believe we have time to waste. Your brother is missing, and your feral god grows stronger by the hour. Please come with me to the martyrium.”
She turns and sets off down the walkway at a startlingly brisk pace for a woman in heavy robes, headed to the temple. I half jog to catch up. “Your—Your Reverence, could you please elaborate on ‘martyrium’? It’s not still actively producing martyrs, is it?”
Abbess Sibylle regards me with a half-lidded stare before saying, with an absolute deficit of inflection, “That’s the first time anyone’s made that joke.”
“A martyrium is a shrine built over the tomb of a martyr,” Emeric clarifies. “I believe this abbey’s is Saint Konstanzia, the first augur?”
“That is correct, Brother Conrad. She guides our visions.” Abbess Sibylle’s jaw tightens. “Which is why mine, as of late, have been so troubling. You, God Daughter, have taken Augur’s Tears before, correct?”
Augur’s Tears are collected directly from the eyes of the Low God Truth and taken in small doses to see the world as they do. The first and last time I took the Tears, Adalbrecht von Reigenbach was trying to poison me. To call the experience “troubling” would be like locking someone in a closet with an angry wolverine and calling it “a bonding exercise.”
“I did,” I answer. “I spent an hour tasting seasons and staring at tapestries until I fell off a waterfall.”
Abbess Sibylle only sounds faintly judgmental when she says, “You experienced the vastness of Truth. An … untrained mind can see only fragments at a time, like single facets of a snowflake in a blizzard. Augury acts as a lens through which to focus those fragments into a clear vision.” She trades the judgment for consideration. “Truth also sends me warnings of threats rising in the region. If the threat is significant and complex, though, Truth will share it in pieces. For example, shortly before Winterfast, I had a vision of the margrave of Bóern riding dead horses through Alt-Aschel, as the night sky burned with blue eyes instead of stars. In another, he strangled the empress with an iron crown.”
“I mean, he was planning a nachtmären-fueled coup, so those pretty much sum it up,” I say.
We reach the great doors of the temple; they’re bracketed by stern-faced nuns, who haul them open in a cacophony of hinges. “Indeed,” the abbess says a bit testily. “And that was no small threat. So you may comprehend my alarm over the past week as visions came to me in mere scattered fragments, even with Saint Konstanzia’s help. I saw a mountain dyed red, a bleeding tomb, a flood of thorns eating Rammelbeck whole—dozens of pieces. And with every one, I saw you two. Sometimes Brother Conrad; sometimes you, God Daughter; sometimes both.”
She leads us in. The exterior of the martyrium was austerity defined, its towering walls grudgingly allowing only a modest clerestory of narrow windows to break the stone monotony. Inside, it’s made a few reluctant concessions to architectural splendor: Simple adornments on the limestone columns ringing the nave. A suggestion of a flourish on the sparsely populated stone pews’ armrests. A divot of sorts depresses the floor in the room’s center, where it shifts to black glass.
But the real glory is above, in the domed ceiling. A spectacular honeycomb of rainbow stained glass is further multiplied by mirrors spinning on wires and spraying color everywhere, turning the subdued stone of the martyrium into a canvas for infinite hues.
“I would have sent for you anyway, when we learned Brother Henrik was missing,” the abbess continues, “but Truth had advised me to wait for their signal as well. They said it would be of no use until you could understand what you saw.”
Emeric brightens. “When I filled Vanja in on the case.”
“Oh,” I say, barely keeping a lid on the sheer vindication boiling from my every pore. “I should let Proctor Kirkling know how wrong she was.”
“Please don’t,” Emeric sighs.
“I should let her know five times,” I say, beatific, “every minute of every hour of every day until she dies.”
Abbess Sibylle motions to the handful of people in the pews, who begin clearing out. “I’m certain that will make her hate you less,” she says in that flat voice again, the one that makes it impossible to tell for certain if I’m being roasted.
“How do you know so much about me?” I ask incredulously. She just points to the eye pendant. I add a defeated “Never mind.”
“Now, the problem at hand,” the abbess says. “The scale of this threat is too enormous for Truth to show it to me all at once—it would be like pouring a barrel of wine straight into a pitcher. But between the three of us, if we each focus on different elements, we may see as close to the whole picture as possible.” She sees Emeric open his mouth and holds up a hand. “Bringing in more augurs won’t change anything, as this is my vision, not theirs. You two, however, are very much a part of it.”
“Never mind,” he says appreciatively.
Abbess Sibylle just points to her pendant again in explanation. Then she adds, “And yes, before you ask: This should help God Daughter Vanja’s particular … situation as well.”
“Why do people keep calling me that?” I ask. “First Saint Willehalm, now you. I think I would know if you were my godparent.”
“I wouldn’t bet the farm on that,” Ambroszia mumbles from my satchel.
The abbess snaps three clear beads off the string at her wrist and hands one each to Emeric and me. I’d thought they were glass, but now I see flickers of gold leaf moving in a slow spiral within: Augur’s Tears. “On my signal, we will take these. I will meditate upon Brother Henrik’s disappearance and how it connects to this calamity. God Daughter, I suggest you focus on what you have lost to this Scarlet Maiden.”
Emeric rolls the bead across his palm. “And I’ll try to see what she’s really after.”
“Am I supposed to swallow it or bite down?” I ask. “Or does it pop? The last time I did this, it was just murder juice.”
“It will dissolve,” Abbess Sibylle says, with a patience usually reserved for small children and orange cats. “Lady Ambroszia, you will be more comfortable in the pews.”
“On it.” I set my satchel on a pew to make it easier for her.
When I turn back, the abbess is pointing to where I should stand on the dark glass disc; Emeric is already posted up, facing away from us both. “You’ll want to look at the wall,” she advises. “At least, once you take the Tears. It’s seldom best to see someone in the full light of Truth.”
“Don’t I know it,” I say under my breath, taking my place. Adalbrecht von Reigenbach appeared to me as a horse-headed monstrosity right before I was sucked into his debatably tragic backstory. I’d rather not roll those dice again.
But there’s nothing to worry about until the Tears kick in. I pinch the bead between my finger and thumb, still nervous. “Ready?” calls the abbess from where she stands at the peak of the perfect triangle we form. At an assent from both Emeric and me, she lifts her arms and face to the ceiling.
There’s a chime and the whisper of glass slicing through air. The colors drenching the temple begin to shift, the mirrors and panes above us wheeling into a deliberate dance. Shafts of light spear down, vanish, cross, and merge. The glass beneath my feet pulses.
Suddenly the light is catching on invisible prisms, like we’re at the heart of an incorporeal diamond, gathering and splintering in wild patterns. I look back at Abbess Sibylle. Her ornamental halo has transfigured, the silver eyes now burning molten white and slowly spinning behind her head. Her eyes, too, are blazing prismatic white, every color in the universe.
“Now,” she orders, and tips her bead between her lips.
I brace myself and follow suit, then remember I’m supposed to face the wall. I slip one last glance at Emeric as the Augur’s Tears touch my tongue. My mouth burns with salt and copper, my eyes watering—
And then, abruptly, he is etched against the shadows like a saint. A wave of terrible adoration drowns me, the heart, the truth of how I feel for him, and I cannot tear my eyes away. The red handprint burns before him, but it is not of him, not the way the lines of his prefect marks are. They’ve grown to a massive incandescent ring, tethering him to the stars in infinite threads. One constellation weaves into focus, its lights drawing into sharp focus: the Lantern.
The lantern. My mother’s lantern. That’s what I’m searching for, the memories I’ve somehow lost. I force my gaze away—
But the lantern is still there, hanging before me now, a sputtering flame in the dark.
Focus.
Silently, I ask Truth, What is it I’ve lost?
The lantern shrinks—or the world does, I cannot say. I see Castle Falbirg beyond the weak flame. Then the castle dissolves like smoke, leaving darkness behind. No—not just darkness—
Towering evergreens draped in snow. The lantern clutched in my mother’s left hand. My mitten gripped in her right.
And before us, resplendent against the night, are my godmothers, Death and Fortune.
It all floods back in, all at once: Our cottage. Our life together. Our family.
Our separation when I was thirteen and they claimed me as a servant.
Our reconciliation when I was seventeen and they claimed me as a daughter.
In the Library of the Divine, it was Death holding back the poltergeist. In Rammelbeck, it was Fortune’s work I saw in every golden gleam of luck. They’ve been with me this entire time.
The Scarlet Maiden took them from me, my mothers, she took them—
The crossroads go dark, but Death and Fortune still stand before me. Their mouths move. I can’t make out even a single word.
Tears sting my eyes. “I can’t hear you,” I say unsteadily. “Can you hear me?”
My godmothers look at each other. Then they reach for me and fold me into their embrace. For a beautiful moment, I smell the yews, the cottage, I feel their arms around me, and that is enough.
Then we are rising.
I lift my head. The world shrinks below, the dome of the martyrium a flashing rainbow jewel, Welkenrode and Rammelbeck unfolding like Jakob’s map. Crimson threads like those I saw stitched to Emeric spill from me; I touch one that runs far to the south and see Ragne’s ever-shifting face. Another leads down into the martyrium and, when I brush it, conjures Udo amid a cluster of five red stars. A thread of shadows binds me to Death; a thread of mingled gold, bone, copper, and coal leads to Fortune.
My godmothers draw me over the hills to the southeast, following another strange thread, this one knotted in thorns. It isn’t difficult to guess whose that is. Forests, villages—they fly by in the blink of an eye, the roads growing more and more crowded the closer we get to Boderad’s Gorge—
And then we’re before the stave church in Hagendorn’s town square.
Leni stands atop a wooden scaffold beside the Scarlet Maiden’s statue. Red still drips from the tip of the statue’s spindle, as well as from the hole in her palm; smoke rises from the iron crown of roses. Leni, too, holds a crude brass spindle aloft like a scepter, and a red diamond is painted on the palm of her other hand. More red diamonds are painted over her cheeks, like the ones I used to daub on, but she’s added a headdress to the outfit. A polished brass disc with cutouts like burning roses now sits behind her head like a sunrise, like a farce of the abbess’s halo.
She’s addressing a crowd that stands below. I lived in Hagendorn two months, I’ve been gone two weeks, and I barely recognize a single person in the throng. The cult is growing out of control.
