My gasp sounded loud in my ears, almost as loud as the nearly hysterical laughter of the demon.
Your ally! The one person you could count on here on the ground and he — what? He disappears so he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty? That’s amazing. I’ll drink whatever he’s drinking.
I could feel the blood draining from my face, sinking so quickly that my head felt light and nausea washed over me.
I glanced at Sir Owalan and saw the murder in his eyes, and then to Sir Coriand to see the black humor in his.
“Well, that’s one problem solved,” he said easily.
There was a strangled sound from the harness where the High Saint was, but I didn’t bother looking up. He was as trapped in that rig as Adalbrand was. If he was horrified, then he’d have to wait to act, just like the Poisoned Saint. For now, there was only me and my enemies.
“What will you do, Penitent?” Sir Coriand asked grimly. “Now that you know you are building a Cup of Tears? Now that you know that the ultimate serving of the God will require ultimate sacrifice?”
“That’s not how it is at all,” I protested, but Sir Coriand moved to the side, starting to stalk around me, and I had to keep turning to stay facing him.
From behind me, I heard Sir Owalan’s answer. His voice was torn and ragged, but laced through with sincerity.
“My duty is to serve the God. No sacrifice is too great. No pain too overwhelming. If all is demanded of me, then all will be given, even the lives of those around me.”
Sir Coriand nodded to Sir Owalan, somewhere behind my shoulder. It was the nod of one soldier to another. Acknowledgment. Kinship. Blessing.
Saints and Angels.
“Watch out!” Adalbrand shouted.
Brindle barked sharply behind me and I twisted, just in time to see a blade plunge by where my head had been a moment ago. And then a brindled body blurred past and bore Sir Owalan down to the sand, a growl rumbling up from a doggy throat.
Chapter Thirty-One
Poisoned Saint
The scholastic facet of the Poisoned Saints had been among the things I liked best about my youth. Pouring over tomes and scrolls both recent and far-flung in the ancient past, dissecting one language from another, translating them both into yet a third, cross-referencing and following ecumenical arguments through the theology of souls that dated back to ten thousand years before my birth and through to the scrappy polemics of our diversified modern time — well, I had happily poured my hours and days into that pursuit, dragged from it only to train my body in the arts of weaponry and battle.
Even now, a Poisoned Saint, galloping from one disaster to the next with barely a hot meal and a breath in between, I can easily be lured away from duty by the call of a promising tome upon a shelf, or a sage whispering about the latest wisdom they are discussing in the halls of the philosophers.
Though I am made to be a seeker of truth and a lover of the novel, and though this terrible wonder we are experiencing is certainly the most fascinatingly awful thing that anyone will be whispering about for decades — if anyone lives to tell the tale of it — I would prefer to employ my gifts of scholarship another way.
I am crafting a demon. Not quite from scratch. It’s already been fed guilt and murder. My guilt. My murders. My shameful lusts, and my own blood and spit. Now, it billows beneath me, forming, strengthening, churning to the strokes of my pen upon the book. I do not know if I should make it strong and capable to defeat the others already snatching at mine, or if I should make it with a terrible flaw I can twist to destroy it.
I suspect I must do both and I am not pleased with the difficulty of the project. It would be a fun thought experiment in a high tower beside a crackling fire with a cup of mead and a friend to discuss it. It is not so delightful when I know I am dabbling in the dark arts, in a deadly sin that may very well have been the origin of all evil on this earth.
I write down an obscure quote from Nasarithin over five hundred years ago in which he expounded on the idea that evil feeds upon the fear of those around it and thus fear ought to be banished or evil will grow, and as the last words settle on the page, the shadow beneath me expands with a motion like a beating heart.
Too effective. I grimace.
“Have we crafted all the demons that ever were?” the Vagabond had asked. And I do not know the answer to that. Perhaps we have. Perhaps from the very beginning, man has penned his own demise. Perhaps he even used the ideas of the theologians to make it easier for him.
Complicating my complicity further is this: I am bound in this harness as I ply my pen, bound and trapped as Victoriana grills Sir Coriand. I cannot aid her. And I feel shame that I was led so easily into this trap. I should be below, helping to unmask the crimes that have been done here.
In my defense, it hadn’t felt like a trap when I climbed into the harness. It had felt like maneuvering — like setting them up to confess and putting me up high where I could watch everyone at once.
Sir Coriand makes no excuse for his actions. All the guilt I’ve been carrying around for years has bent me and yet on his shoulders, it weighs no more than a single flake of snow. He smiles and speaks and he is clearly enchanted by the sound of his own voice.
I have heard the great orators in the capital, but I have not heard anyone quite like Sir Coriand, who twists murders into sorrowful necessities and makes the Vagabond look crass for asking him to answer for them.
I do not know if I am more horrified by him and his ice-cold heart, or by Hefertus, who took one look at this unspeakable choice before us and simply chose it away. Such an escape is not open to me. And even if it were, I do not think I could leave the Vagabond on her own. I am annoyed at my friend. I hope to live to tell him so.
I add to my treatise the argument of Saint Flamire, who wrote that every evil was vulnerable to the grace of kindness, that a kind word said could still anger and stop up bitterness. I see my shadow shiver and glance up again, divided between the battle below and the task of crafting a monster with a fatal flaw.
