Page 74 of Property of Prophet

Flint stares at him. “I’m simplifying.”

“Badly,” quips Rooster.

“Still waiting for you to tell me I’m wrong.” Flint exhales through his nose. “Six is the created thing falling short of its maker. Six sevens is completion counterfeited. A whole made entirely from failure.”

Vex’s mouth twists into a grimace. “That sounds like something broken, wrong... like Calix.”

“It is Calix,” Prophet says.

“He built his whole church to a recipe,” Rooster says quietly.

“He built his church to a body count,” I answer.

Prophet has gone very still at the end of the table. Weeks of nursing put a particular quality into his stillness, and this is not it. This is the older kind, the kind he brought back with his memory.

“The people out there believe he loves them,” he says.

“They believe he will open Heaven for them.” Flint closes the book with care. “The texts suggest he promises each of them a place at his side, afterward. Grieving parents, the dying, the betrayed. He tells each of them their sacrifice buys a door.”

Lily’s pen stops. “And instead he’s going to kill them.”

Flint doesn’t soften it. “Yes.”

“All forty-two?”

“If the rite succeeds.”

Her jaw tightens. “Then we make sure it doesn’t.”

“It buys him a patch job,” I say. “Forty-two doors for forty-two cracks, with your grace poured in as the flood. He is caulking himself with human lives.”

Lily looks up from her notebook. “Do they know? What the deterioration is doing to them?”

“Some suspect,” Flint says. “The texts describe late-stage Devoted in other centuries. The failing ones grow more fervent, not less. Their bodies become proof of devotion.”

“Sunk cost,” she says, mostly to herself. “The more it takes from them, the truer it has to be.”

She writes another line. The pen is steady. I have stood in rooms with generals, princes, and one memorable pope, and not many of them took news this dark with hands this level.

Blade shifts forward, his forearms on the table. “Timeline.”

The question comes to me, not Flint, and it should. Lore lives in books. Rot lives on the wind, and the wind is mine.

“He cannot wait.” No point softening it, so I don’t. “The rot on his people has doubled in strength since they arrived. Two nights ago, I could only smell the failing ones when the wind cooperated. Last night, I smelled all forty-two from a mile out, and under them, I smelled him.” The memory alone makes my lip want to lift off my teeth. “Cracked stone and burned honey. A thing coming apart at the seams and sweating through the gaps. Every day he waits, the vessel splits wider, and the fix costs more. He knows his own arithmetic better than we do.”

“How long?” Blade asks.

“A day... two at the outside.” Around the table, nobody flinches, which is its own kind of answer. “He moves tomorrow night or the night after. If he had the luxury of a week, he would spend it starving us out, and he isn’t. Desperate things keep honest schedules.”

“Then we finish the plan today,” Blade says. “We sleep in shifts.”

He turns to Flint, and they bend over the map. For a while, the cabin fills with the low, working hum of men who have done this before. Positions, sightlines, and distances are measured in wingbeats and wolf strides.

Lily’s pen keeps moving.

The woodpile needs splitting, whether the world ends or not. So, when the first round of planning breaks, I take the axe and go out into the blue morning cold. I am not surprised when Prophet follows me.

He stacks while I split.