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“These”—Lyall gestured around—“are the Empyrea’s Celestines. The best and bravest of the Tribunal’s ranks, saved to be reborn on this day, to attend their queen as she begins her human reign.”
“Their queen? You mean Arceneaux?”
“Arceneaux has earned the great honor of becoming the Empyrea’s human vessel. And these Celestines . . . they will be her servants.” From each pocket, he pulled several clear stones, and he held them between each of his fingers. Luneocite. Soul stones, Simon had once called them. “Some of them have waited a very long time for this moment. Their reward for lives spent doing Her work with honor.”
He turned to lift the plaster stag’s head from the body standing closest to him. Beneath it, old Mrs. Lister’s decaying visage appeared, her shriveled lips pulled away from black-rimmed teeth in a perpetual snarl. Lyall frowned and settled the mask back over her head. “Some of the bodies we had to use are a little worse for wear. We’re working on it.”
I palmed my knife in my right hand, moving carefully in hopes that Lyall wouldn’t notice, but his gaze snapped to me. “I wouldn’t do that,” Lyall said. “They’ll smell it.”
“And then what happens?” I asked. “Are these not the Tribunal’s best and bravest? Do they not obey your command?”
“There are still . . . flaws . . . in the process,” he said. “There’s a certain amount of .
. . degradation . . . that occurs to a spirit when it is not free or housed within the body to which it was born. Most of these spirits have been locked away in these stones for decades—even centuries. It may take a few more cycles of experimentation to bring them back to their full awareness.” His eyes flashed. “But trust me when I tell you, right now you do not want them to smell blood.”
“That puts me in a very difficult position,” I said, pursing my lips, “as, at the moment, blood is the best weapon I have.” I raised my small knife, no longer attempting to conceal it. “You’re something of a scientist, aren’t you, Lyall? Conducting your little experiments, never able to satiate your curiosity.” At my feet, the Tribunal flag still smoldered. I edged closer to it. “But now you’ve piqued my interest in your studies too. You say they can smell blood? I’d like to see it for myself.” I wrapped my hand around the blade and gave it a yank, wincing as the skin parted and the blood and magic began to freely flow between my fingers.
The effect was enormous and immediate. The villagers began to snap and slaver in their animal masks, some running toward me, others skittering across the ground on all fours. Their masks cracked as they crashed into one another in their struggle to reach me, chunks of plaster teeth and painted fur raining down into my hair and eyes as I ducked and rolled beneath the frenzied onslaught. As the masks began to break and fall away, I recognized their occupants. One was named Rowena, the wife of a sheep herder. Another was Niall, a man I knew from the Quiet Canary, a boisterous drunk who used to sing songs on the tables. I cringed when I sliced her neck, nearly retched when I drove my knife into his eye. They’re not them, I told myself. They’re not them.
“Burn!” I said, calling the fire up from the Tribunal flag and sending it in a column toward the stag that was Mrs. Lister and the rabbit that was revealed to be Elisa Greythorne, Fredrick’s wife. I stifled a sob as she was engulfed in the flames, barely able to catch my breath before fending off a snarling scullery maid from Greythorne’s kitchen with a strike of my knife’s pommel to her temple. “Shatter,” I demanded as an empty-eyed bear tried to claw my arm. All the bones in his body became shard-like splinters, and he gave a last yelp as he slopped to the ground, the bear’s head rolling from the malformed face of Father Brandt. Then Father Harkness began to lumber over to me, his face half obscured in the disintegrating mask of a horse. I put my bleeding hands on his chest as he tried to dig at my eyes. “Rend,” I said, and his chest opened down the center, his insides spooling out onto the ground.
“Find peace,” I said, sobbing, to both of them. “I’m sorry. Find peace.”
Gilbert Mercer was wearing the face of a ram; I turned his blood to acid and tried not to think of the sombersweet wine we’d shared even as his eyes boiled away in their sockets.
The jackal came at me next; I didn’t have to see under the mask to know the name of the man to whom those knobby, callused hands belonged.
“Hicks!” I cried as I felt the flames leave my fingertips. “Forgive me. Forgive me.”
Lyall was watching implacably, as if he were making mental notes. This was all an experiment to him. All of it.
With a cry of rage, I dove for him. My fury made me strong. I caught him around the waist, pulled him down into the dirt, and rolled with him through the rushes beside the mill and into the shallows at the side of the river.
Lyall pushed me off and rose, dripping wet, looking at me with new calculations going on behind his eyes. “Interesting,” he said. “I’ll have to gauge a subject’s response to nonfamilial bonds when deciding which bodies will make the most suitable hosts for which spirits.”
“You’re dead,” I ground out through my teeth. I stood up in the shallow water, facing him and the river.
“Look behind you,” he said smugly.
I could hear the groans, the dragging footsteps on the shore, but I wasn’t afraid.
“Look behind you,” I replied, then raised my hand to command the mill’s precariously hanging water wheel. “Autem!”
The wheel lifted with a screech of its old, breaking irons.
“Descendit!” I said, slamming my hand down. The blood from my newest cut sang free in response. Lyall screamed as the wheel plunged down and came to rest on his back. Blood ran from his nose and mouth into an eddying pool around him as he tried to keep his head up out of the river.
“No,” he said, scared for the first time as the blood-hungry monsters of his own making stumbled toward the riverside after the nearer prey. “No!”
“I’ll give your regards to Arceneaux,” I said, “on her special day.”
You can’t kill what’s already dead, Rosetta had said. You have to exorcise it.
Breathing hard, I gathered my strength and my magic, and cried, “Et abierunt!”
Be gone.
One by one, the dead began to collapse, the black clouds of their infesting souls dispersing into the air just as the last gasp of daylight disappeared behind the horizon.
