“We slotted all the cups in the clock while you were being tended,” he said in a low voice, and the intensity of his eyes made my skin crawl. “The hands began to move.”
“It tells time?” I asked, stupidly, my eyes locked on his wrist.
“In a way,” he whispered. “I was checking on it just now, and it’s changed from where it was at sunset.”
“Clocks do that,” I said steadily.
“It’s counting down, I think. And we’ve used up one-sixth of the time.”
“What happens when we run out?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, but I followed his gaze up to the ceiling where the demon slept.
“Do you think the monks here left because the Rim moved?” he asked me. “Or did they leave because of something else?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” I said slowly.
“Funny. It’s all I can seem to think about.”
If he was trying to scare me out of my mind, he was doing an excellent job. I almost thought I felt my own shadow flinch.
And then he was gone, and as the dawn swelled and light pierced the room through the carving in long, sharp beams, I saw drips of scarlet blood trailing after him.
And Then There was Darkness…
Chapter Twenty-Four
Poisoned Saint
Healing one man from a mortal chest wound and then a woman from a compound fracture is more exhausting than they tell you. There’s a reason we’re meant to build up our piety before we arrive at battles and plague towns. A reason we’re trained rigorously in dedication. That I was already almost drained before my arrival here is doing me no favors. But my heart thrumming every time I see the Vagabond Paladin, and the careful work I must do to deny myself so much as a single touch of her had been helping … until last night when, despite myself, I slipped. Even so, I sleep until well into the morning.
When I wake, everyone is drinking tea without me.
My eyes find the Vagabond immediately. She’s taken time to clean her face and fix her braid; her arm is draped over her dog’s body. His rib cage moves enough that I know he is breathing, though his lungs hitch badly. There’s tightness right through her posture, and there should be. We are in a hell.
Not the hell, obviously, but there are hells and then there are hells.
The problem with hell is that it makes demons. Creates them the way we were so sure that this place could make Saints.
What I don’t see, to my relief, is pain in how Victoriana sits. It pleases me even more when her eyes snag on mine. My heart kicks in my chest like a fresh-caught fish.
“It’s a code,” Sir Coriand insists, opening his hands to the others.
They’re in a rough circle — all but Hefertus, who snores raggedly beside me. The Vagabond must have spelled him off when she woke. I’m still not fully myself. I don’t like that. I need to be battle-ready and instead, there is weakness in my limbs and fogginess in my mind and this strange lightheaded softness infusing everything.
Last night keeps invading my thoughts — both the good and the bad of it. I must shove it away roughly. I am a knight of the God, not a boy with his first beard. I dare not moon after a woman when there is work before me.
But I feel her beside me, still. I feel the thrill of waking with my hands against the warmth of her clothing and my nose against the softness of her cheek and I do not want to forget that one precious, forbidden moment that was mine. It is the only moment I may ever have like it.
One of the golems lurches in from the side — the hideous one made of rags and bones. Its rags are stuck to it as if they had been dipped in bone glue and stuck on, but then the sea air had its way and the edges of the rags peel and pick up dust and gravel wherever they touch the earth. Some have stripped almost entirely off, hanging shaggily around it and exposing sticky bones beneath — some human, some beast, all bleached or boiled nearly white. I swallow roughly at the sight of it. The exposed bones are not too different from the look of Victoriana’s exposed radius last night.
The creature shoves a mug into my hands and I meet its glowing eyes. Is it a soul in hell inside this terrible constructed body of rags and bones? And what would it have of me if it could speak? Would it plead for death to free it — or would it want life poured into its empty spaces?
I take the mug in trembling hands and mouth a blessing over it.
“Once we crack the code, we can turn the room again and open the next space,” Sir Coriand says. “And with the clock ticking down, this must be our priority. No more sleeping. No more eating.”
Sir Owalan looks up from a light gruel he’s eating — likely given to him by the Engineers, as they’re the only ones with supplies. He looks thinner and more hollow-eyed than ever, as if he is a candle being burned down. He takes one more defiant mouthful and something flickers in his shadow. It seems to build somehow, as if it is darkening, growing.
