It's the little things that catch her unawares. She has long since grown accustomed to the silence left in Johannes' absence, the dull, dead emptiness where he used to be. She no longer listens for his footfalls on the stone floor of a catacombs gone to the vampires and the nightcrawlers and their servile pets or on a rough outcropping of rock above a suspected den. She no longer hears his voice in her ear as they sit to dinner, low and warm and asking her to pass the mash or the loaf of stale hardtack, nor does she feel him as she sleeps, a heavy, comforting warmth at her back, woolen cassock and warm breath and the drowsy press of his half-hard prick against the swell of her ass. Gone is gone, and in her heart, she knows that he is forever beyond her reach.
But it's an uneasy peace she has made with his loss, and sometimes as she threads her way through the throngs with her head bowed and her rosary twined between her fingers, she sees him in the high jut of passing cheekbones or the curve a shoulder. Sometimes she hears him in a snatch of conversation tossed to the winds, clipped and rough and full of secret mischief and humor black and tart as chicory. She knows it's not him, iknows, and yet she falters all the same, stops and sways and clutches the beads of the rosary so tightly that they rattle in her grip. She looks for him even though she knows she won't find him, scans the crowd until her eyes burn and her head throbs with the effort, and when she finds nothing but a sea of wary, unfamiliar faces, she drops her head and spits her bitter disappointment onto the gritty asphalt and plods on. The sea of indistinct bodies parts before her, fish shying from the shadow of a shark, and she soldiers on, head bowed and palm bruised by the press of the beads, the smarting stigmata of thwarted hope.
It's cheekbones this time, high and sharp, and her fingers spasm convulsively around the beads as she lurches to a stop and spins on her heel to track the flash of movement. A muffled curse at her back, and then a man trudges past. He's wiry and sallow and stooped, with sunken eyes and teeth gone dark with rot. His lips twitch with the impulse to repeat his dour implication, but then his eyes catch sight of the cross etched into the pale, thin flesh of her face, and the oath dies in his scrawny throat.
"Apologies, priest," he mutters, and scuttles away before she can reply.
It wasn't him. You know it wasn't him, she chastises herself even as her eyes scan the crowd in search of a familiar flash. There, near the mouth of a squalid alleyway. Brown hair and a flash of high, regal cheekbones. But the man who bears them is too short and too paunchy and too bowlegged, and the flicker of hope gutters and dies inside her chest like all the others. The taste of greenbark and pitch fills her mouth, and she turns her head and spits a foaming clot onto the pavement.
It wasn't him, she thinks, and resumes her trek.
It never is, and it never will be, says a gentle voice inside her head, the soft patient murmur of her childhood confessor, an Irishman with powdery hands and a shock of white hair to match his cleric's collar. You know that, child.
Yes, she does know that, has known it since Priest and the battered remnants of his cohort had staggered back to the encampment with blood on their clothes and several holes in their already-dwindling ranks. Priest was hard and remote as the moon, but he was neither cruel nor a liar, and so when he had announced that Johannes and two others had fallen to the vampires in the hive at Sola Mira, she had known it for truth. The last of Johannes had been mixed with the blood and the dirt on Priest's face and hands, and it had sloughed off with every desultory, leaden mile they had walked beneath the pitiless sun.
Gone, gone gone, her footsteps had chanted as they had straggled over the sand and grit and parched desert hardpan, and the listless snap of her cassock had echoed it, intimate as breath against her ear. Gone, gone, gone.
She had not wept then. Such displays of emotion were prohibited by The Church, as forbidden to members of the Priesthood as sex and liquor and a life beyond the strangling strictures of the cloth. She had pressed her lips together until sensation had bled from them and taken shallow breaths against the unseen hand that had coiled its crushing fingers around her chest. Chin, another priest who had come to his majority along with her, had tried to offer what comfort he could with a pat on the back and the periodic jostle of his shoulder against hers as they walked, but it had only served to sharpen the yawning absence of a body on the other side of her, and she had coughed and hitched and spit her bitterness to the earth. Then she had fallen to the back of the line and let her eyes burn with tears she could not shed. She had been tempted to slow until they left her behind, but she had still feared death and damnation then, and she had known that Priest and the others would not abide another loss, would drag her back to the city by force if need be, and so she had walked blindly on, guided by the black of Chin's cassock and the snap of it around his slender ankles in the torpid, early-morning breeze.
Nor had she cried when they had returned to a barracks that had been too empty and too quiet, as lifeless as the crypts through which they often crept, stinking of adrenaline and stale sweat and the sweet sage they chewed to clean their teeth. It wasn't until she had gone into the communal sleeping quarters and seen an acolyte stripping the linens from Johannes' cot that the tears had overwhelmed her resolve. She had turned and scissored down the hall to the laundry room, where she'd tucked herself between the ancient washer and the even more prehistoric hand wringer and wept into the grungy folds of her cassock. Stone under her ass and fabric bunched in her fists, and when the hitching cries had threatened to turn into keening walls that carried down the corridor and betrayed her weakness to the others, she had pressed the meat of her palms to her mouth and muffled them with numb, salty flesh. When she had come out sometime later, blinking against the burning scald of lingering tears and tottering on unsteady legs like an invalid, Johannes' cot had still been stark and bare in the somnolence of the hall. Gone, the bed, too, had said, and though the Priest had surely noticed her blotchy face and puffy eyes, he had offered no rebuke. Nor had he offered counsel or comfort. He had merely passed her like a shadow in the night, and though prayers were offered for the souls of the dead, Johannes' name had never been spoken again.
Neither has her own name, come to think on it. To The Church, they are only priests and priestesses, tools to be used and discarded as it sees fit. Names are for those with histories and families, and the Church's chosen are entitled to neither. They live only to serve, and to die at the behest of the bishops and monsignors who live within the shelter of the city walls, protected by thick walls and high parapets and swaddled in luxuries about which the rabble outside can only dream.
There are few who know it, she supposes, and even fewer now that Johannes sleeps beneath the profaned earth of Sola Mira in a bower of sour earth gone black with damp and mold and the unspeakable effluvium of the soulless damned. Her mother and father knew it once upon a time, but she cannot say if they yet live to offer it up in prayers of supplication or send it to the heavens upon a melancholy wish. Her confessor, to whom she was required to lay bare her soul twice a week, and Monsignor Orelas. Monsignor Chamberlain now, who had ascended to the high seat on the council after Orelas' public disgrace. And the members of the training class of which she had been a part. Johannes and Chin and Priest and Khara and Dougal and Harmon. The Church forbad the use of names, but this was a commandment that had been broken freely and often by those who formed small fighting units as a matter of necessity and petty rebellion. A shouted warning to a priest was useless in a room full of nothing but, and grief would brook no anonymity.
Johannes is gone to the undreaming sleep in the dead heart of Sola Mira. The monsignors are indifferent to the sounds that shape her in the minds of others, and Chin, Dougal, and Harmon were lost at New Absalom, martyrs for a cause that had not mourned them. Only Priest and Khara remain, and to them, she is but a good and faithful soldier. Khara's heart belongs to Priest, who will not take it, and the heart of the Priest belongs to a wife that is so much dust and bone beneath the arid earth, and to a daughter of whom he seldom speaks.
In that, she supposes they are the same.
We all have secret lives, she thinks as she weaves through the throng. And the people who now beseech us to save them from a threat they thought past know nothing of them, nor would they care if they did. The peasant does not weep for the wall battered by siege engines and arrows and pots of boiling pitch. They pray only that it holds and weep for their own fate when it does not.
She plods and scrapes over the asphalt until she comes to the drab, compact square of the market, a concrete block topped by thatch and tarpaper. She taps her sandaled feet on the stoop as she comes inside, and overhead, a tarnished, silver bell clangs from force of weary habit.
The proprietor looks up at the sound of it. "Priest," he says. "Come for the usual?"
"Yes."
He disappears into the storeroom and reappears a moment later with the requested provisions. He lays them on the counter. "There you are. The fish are rather good, all things considered. I did my best with the rest. I wish I could offer better, but with the way things are..." He shrugs his massive shoulders, and the nylon of his suspenders bites into the thin, cotton fabric of his shirt.
She produces a wicker creel from the folds of her cloak and sets it on the counter, and then she steps up to inspect the fish. They're plump and shiny with silver scales, and their glassy eyes are clear. They don't stink, either. She picks up the stringer and deposits them into the creel. It would be better if they were coated in a layer of salt to preserve them, but she's lucky they're as fine as they are, and so she says nothing.
The vegetables are another matter entirely. The tomatoes are either hard and green or red and overripe, soft as decomposing flesh beneath her fingers. The handful of onions are mottled and sloughing their skins, and the cabbage is wilted and slimy. The carrots are stunted and jaundiced, but they might be salvaged in a stew. She takes the carrots and leaves the rest.
"Sorry," the shopkeeper says. "As I said..." He shrugs again.
A quarter tin of flour crawling with weevils. Half a tin of sugar. A sad handful of coffee.
"As I said..." the shopkeeper repeats at her dour huff, and she resists the impulse to fetch him a blow and perhaps dislodge different words from the back of his throat.
She gathers the tins and tucks them into the creel beside the fish, and then she settles the creel over her arm. "Thank you," she says brusquely, and turns to go.
The shopkeeper clears his throat. "There is the matter of payment," he says diffidently. He sidles from foot to foot and wrings his massive hands.
"That is a matter for Monsignor Chamberlain." She hitches the creel into the crook of her arm.
"Yes," the shopkeeper agrees. "But the good monsignor has not seen fit to answer my repeated inquires, and despite what the Church might say, man cannot live by faith alone." He stops, shocked by his own hubris. "I-I meant no blasphemy," he stammers. His face has gone the color of bleached parchment, and he retreats a step despite the counter between them, as though he expects her to leap it and rain Divine retribution upon him in a flurry of blows.
But she only offers a sardonic smile in grudging admiration of his feeble defiance. "I am but a humble Priestess and cannot move the hearts of those I serve. I will raise this matter with my Priest. Perhaps he can move the Monsignor to action."
"Much gratitude, Priest." He offers a graceless, jerky bob that she supposes is meant to be a bow, obsequious in his relief, and she can see beads of perspiration stippled along his hairline.
"May God bless you, my son." She raises her hand and performs the sign of the cross. It's listless, more muscle memory than meaning, and she's turning from him before her hand falls.
"Thank you, Priest," he calls after her as she pushes through the door, but she hardly hears him. His empty gratitude is as useless as his rotten food.
It's raining when she steps into the street, and she stops to pull the hood of her cassock over her head. Her peripheral vision vanishes, and the smells of dust and warm flesh tickle her nostrils. The rain beats a percussive timpani in her ears, and her breathing is a sussurrating, tidal roar in her ears. Her feet crunch and slap on the gritty asphalt, and she fumbles to conceal the creel beneath the folds of her cloak.
The street floods quickly, and she watches as cigarette butts and scraps of paper drift past on the current. The water, clear when it fell from the Lord's heaven, quickly turns a dingy, soapscum grey as it swirls around her feet and soaks her shoes.
iClinging to the Word of the Church has made us no cleaner, she muses dourly as the rain sluices down a pocked wall and sends streams of black grime into the torrent.
She had heard tales in her youth of a time when the world had not been so lifeless, so besieged by filth and grime and squalor. In the time before the Wars, it had been green and fertile and fecund. There had been rivers bursting with fish and seas teeming with life. The earth had yielded a plentiful bounty, and the fruit of the trees had been lush and plump and sweet as honey and ambrosia on the tongue. The dogs had been friendly then, not snapping, snarling curls with matted fur and weeping eyes and skin stretched taut over jutting bone. Cats had carried more than fever and fleas, and people had kept birds as pets, scraps of color and song kept in gilded cages. The air had smelled sweet and been cool against the skin, and it had not tasted of death and ashes.
She would love to believe such tales, these joyous fever dreams of bygone days, but she has seen no proof of them. On her few forays beyond the city walls, she had seen only miles of dust and sand and the bleached bones of men and beasts. Once, she had found the pitted, rusty handles of an old bicycle and the innards of a radio unspooled across the dry, scouring sand like innards, but there had been no magic in them. They had been only relics of a dead world whose shape she did not understand. The only life on that endless yellow expanse had been the warmth of Johannes' hand on her shoulder as he had pulled her away from the scattering of junk and bid her catch up with the others, who had pulled ahead, their shadows long and thin and tantalizingly cool on the burning sand. Back to the march. Back to the mission.
Always the mission.
The only birds she had ever seen were the sleek, black carrion crows who plucked the eyes from corpses and swallowed them down like sweetmeats with a caw of relish.
Water rills down the back of her cassock and runs into her shoes, and she grimaces at the cold wetness. The barracks come into view, low-slung and grim and smudged with soot. Water runs over the eaves to create a drenching waterfall in front of the scarred wooden door, and she muffles an oath as she dashes underneath it, the creel and its precious cargo clutched to her belly. She spits hair and water from her mouth and brushes the soaking hood from her face. Her teeth chatter as she shifts her grip on the wicker creel, and then she shifts it to her hip and passes her palm over the outmoded bioscanner mounted beside the door. The scanner ponders her offering of supplicatory flesh, and then it releases the tumbler with a cheerful beep.
"You, too," she murmurs, and shoulders her way inside.
The interior is as charmless and cold as the exterior, with concrete floors and unadorned stucco walls from which plaster flakes like snow, but it's warm and alive with the murmur of voices and the scrape and shuffle of feet. She pushes the dripping hood from her face and shakes the water from her hair, and after she closes the door behind her and toes off her sopping shoes, she troops through the empty dining hall and into the order's tiny kitchen.
"Mind your dripping," the cook says by way of greeting, and wags a wooden spoon at her.
Mariel has been the cook here for as long as anyone can remember. Rumor had it that she had fought in the first and second vampire wars and would've fought in the third had not a vampire queen torn off her leg in a failed assault on a hive east of New Absalom. These days, she holds court in the kitchen, a formidable woman with broad shoulders and thin, pinched lips and a shock of silver hair twisted into a ruthless, plaited chignon atop her head. Her hands are coarse and wide and hard from years of hard labor, but they handle knives and weapons with equal and awesome dexterity. Hands that had once cleaved heads from spasming, spurting necks now dispatch hapless vegetables and hunks of gristled meat with grim ferocity and martial efficiency.
"Yes," Priestess Mariel," she says, and carries the creel to the counter for her inspection.
The old woman stumps over, the leather bracings of her prosthesis creaking as she comes. She stows the wooden spoon in the belt cinched snugly at her waist and throws open the creel like the doors of a conquered stronghold.
"Mm," she says as she peers at the fish and prods it with a blunt, critical finger. "These'll do," she pronounces at last, and plucks them from the basket. She is less impressed with the rest, however. She jabs the wilted vegetables with a moue of disgust. "Barely edible."
"According to the shopkeep, he did his best."
"Of course he did," she sneers, and sets the subpar comestibles aside with a dispirited plop. "Says the same thing every trip, and every trip, his best gets a little worse." She eyes the trio of tins. "I don't suppose those are any better?"
"No. Weevils in the flour and precious little of either sugar or coffee."
Mariel picks up the nearest container and shakes it. "Hmph." She sets it down again. "We pay more and more, only to get less and less. Soon, I'll be down to feeding the acolytes hardtack and leek broth, and those fools will have the gall to howl about weakness and lack of stamina. Even the Scriptures to which the Church so tenaciously clings acknowledge the need for bread. Maybe if they tightened their own belts about their soft, ample middles, the boots on the ground wouldn't be in such sorry shape."
She holds her tongue. The upheaval that had accompanied Monsignor Orelas' public and humiliating ouster had been the topic of conversation among the rank and file for months, and when Monsignor Chamberlain had announced the reformation of the orders, there had been hope that their lot would improve, but those hopes had been short-lived. Chamberlain was sympathetic to their needs, but the previous wars had depleted the Church's coffers, and the High Council squabbled endlessly over the meager remnants. While some, like His Eminence, favored pouring it into training and supplies for the Orders, the majority chose to devote the funds to fortifying the city walls and conducting a propaganda campaign designed to forestall panic and downplay the rising vampire threat massing beyond the walls. Hence, the walls of the city buzzed with useless industry while the orders, already tattered by years of attrition and neglect, were left to fend for themselves and beat back the gathering darkness by dint of blood and pluck and the luck of God's waning favor.
"You could make a stew, perhaps," she suggests.
Mariel swats at her knuckles with the flat of her spoon. "I need no help running my kitchen, young woman," she snaps.
She raises her palms in submission. "My apologies, Priestess Mariel."
She bows her head in mute deference before she gets another smart rap with the spoon and flees to the relative safety of the barracks. They're empty now save for a lone recruit at the end of the long, narrow corridor, sitting cross-legged at the end of his cot with a book across his knees. The Word, like as not; it's the only book permitted by the Church. Her own copy is long gone, disintegrated into dust by the ravages of time and constant perusal, but she can still recite entire pages and sections from memory. Sometimes she mutters them under her breath when she walks or breathes them into the concrete with her forehead pressed to the floor, fingers curled around the beads of her rosary. The roil and oily roll of the words on her tongue are more comforting than the prayers that burn inside her like a simmering fever.
iJohannes and I passed passages to one another through the smoke of the cookfire, she remembers as she heads for her own pallet and the rumpled rucksack puddled at its foot. They were poetry in his mouth, sly and tinged with mischief and smoke and a secret shared. Sometimes he whispered them into my ear when we bedded down for the night beside the sleepy embers. Soft as a sigh against my ear and warm as a caress against my flesh. There was a promise in them whose shape I could not discern, dared not, and an invitation I could not accept.
But you wanted to, whispers a voice inside her head, and the warmth of a phantom hand blooms against the spar of her hip and spreads over the pale, white plain of her belly. And so did he, if the urgent heaviness pressed against the swell of your ass was any indication. Heaven knows how you might have abased and dishonored yourselves if honor and oath had not compelled restraint, if the watchful eyes of the Priest had not been upon you. Hot breath at your nape and pulsing want hidden between your slumbering bodies.
She turns from the memories, mouth dry and eyes stinging. She snatches her rucksack from the floor, digging her fingers into the rough nap of the burlap to banish the scrape of callused fingertips against the smooth, sensitive flesh of her outer thigh, and turns to retrace her steps. Down the end of the corridor, his head bowed to his book, the acolyte notices her not at all.
She is not surprised. She is a ghost here, and no more. She leaves the room as soundlessly as she entered it, rucksack hanging from her hand like a fetter.
The bathrooms are small, shabby rooms that smell of soap and sage and damp towels and cassocks. There are too few for the number of people who must needs use them, and most of the time, there is an impatient bottleneck of swishing robes and fraying tempers waiting for an opportunity for a piss and a shower and three minutes of quiet beneath a sputtering spray of tepid water that smells of earth and sulfur, but the gloomy, claustrophobic hallway is as deserted as the barracks. There have been a spate of desertions in recent weeks, with disillusioned acolytes simply taking their thin bedrolls and leaving their white acolytes cassocks on the ends of their cots, but even so, there should be more activity. She hesitates before the door to the Priests' bathroom and considers returning to the kitchen to ask Priestess Mariel where the others are, but in the end, the prospect of shedding her wet robes and scouring the grit of the city from her goosepimpled skin proves too tempting, and after rapping thrice upon the door to ensure the room's vacancy, she nudges it open and steps inside.
She curses softly as she scrapes her hip on the rounded lip of the basin sink. The towels have fallen from the flimsy metal rack and lay on the floor like the sloughed skin of a scabrous serpent, and the bleary, warped mirror is fogged with condensation. There's a water stain on the ceiling, and the plaster surrounding the calcined showerhead sags leprously, undermined by years of water and steam. The shower curtain has torn from the ring on one end and droops on the rod. Someone-an acolyte-she suspects-has tried to repair the damage with the enthusiastic application of duct tape, but it's already beginning to peel, and she doubts it will last the week. The soap dish inside the distained, fiberglass stall is covered in a thick rime of soapscum, but it's mercifully devoid of soap silvers caked in coarse hairs and reeking of urine and sour sweat.
She sighs and drops her rucksack beside the sink, and then she sheds her wet robes and stuffs them onto the towel rack. She had taken more care once upon a time, had once hung them from the rack with care and smoothed the wrinkles and straightened the hem, but that had been before, when the barracks had been clean and in good repair and bustling with warriors brimming with youth and the might of righteousness. There had been no water stain on the ceiling, then, no crumbling plaster. The cause had been just, and the faces had been familiar. There seems little point to such fastidiousness these days. Now the warriors and the great cause that had united them in blood and sacrifice have flown or fallen, and all that remains are the old warhorses too numb and broken to leave the only path they have ever trod.
So the robe drapes the towel rack in a wet muddle and drips water onto the towels beneath it. The water that emerges from the spigot is the color of old rust and smells like copper shavings. She bathes in silence and brushes her teeth with a wet finger and a sachet of sage, and when she's done, she gets out and dresses in her summer under-robe. The fabric is light and cool around her calves as she combs her hair in front of the bespotted mirror. She should plait it, but that, too, holds little importance these days, and so she leaves it loose and pads from the room in her bare feet, her rucksack in hand.
She returns it to its place at the end of her pallet and betakes herself to the kitchen again. Mariel has been busy in her brief absence, and the air is thick and sharp with the tantalizing aroma of fish stew.
"It smells delicious," she says as she enters.
"It would smell better if I'd had more flour to spare, but it was either decent broth or a chance at bread, and the bread fills better and keeps longer. Not like the flour was all that fine," she notes bitterly. "More weevils than wheat, truth be told. Least you'll see a measure of extra protein."
The talk of food makes her stomach rumble, so she changes the subject. "The barracks are quiet. Where is everyone?"
Mariel shrugs. "I'm not privy to the Priest's counsel. This saw to that." She stamps her prosthesis on the concrete floor with an indignant crack. "I've heard a fair few whispers, though, and from the number of clandestine meetings between he and Priestess Khara in isolated corners of late, I'd wager there's a mission afoot." She bustles to the pot and lifts the lid to stir the bubbling contents.
"A raid?"
"As I said, I'm not privy to the workings of his mind," she retorts waspishly. "All I know is that he breezed in here in a billow of cassock shortly after you left for the market and ordered everyone to scour the city in search of supplies. I think he would've sent me if he thought he could manage it. I've never known him to do that for a simple raid."
"What else would it be? We don't have the manpower for an assault on a hive. We'd need twice the number, maybe thrice, and not in raw acolytes, either."
"I'm well aware of what we'd need. And so would he be if he had any sense. He's been half-mad ever since that business over in New Absalom with his daughter. Obsessed with tracking down that hybrid vampire he swears he saw." She snorts and opens a cabinet to her left. "That the vampires might be regrouping for a renewed assault on the cities I can buy. They're shrewd creatures for all their godlessness. But the very idea of a vampire who looks like a man and walks in the day." She shakes her head.
The man in the black hat had become the stuff of incredulous legend among the Orders. It had caused an uproar when Priest had returned from his unauthorized foray into the wastes with Priestess Khara at his side and the severed head of a vampire in his fist. The city had buzzed with accounts of how the Priest had marched into a meeting of the High Council and tossed his grisly prize at the feet of a thunderstruck and blustering Monsignor Orelas and accompanied it with a tale of an organized assault upon the city by a seething horde of vampires. The stories had grown wilder in the telling, nurtured by fervid imaginations and liberal consumption of beer and wine, but beneath the layers of fanciful ostentation had been a pithy nugget of truth no less scandalous for its simplicity. The vampires, after long years of lassitude and dwindling numbers, had returned in force and conspired to enter the city hidden in a supply train. That the plan had been thwarted at the last moment by Priest and an ad hoc band of determined cohorts had been mere chance. Or Providence, as the Church had styled it.
The Monsignor had tried to suppress the rising alarm, but the decapitated head lying at his feet had been no mere rumor to be quelled by lofty words and abjurations to faith and trust. Nor could he stop the people from streaming from the cathedral to see the proofs of Priest's claims in the smoke that rose in the distance. A few of the more intrepid witness had claimed to have seen the wreckage of the train itself, a smoldering mangle of charred bodies and twisted metal strewn over the uprooted tracks, but these she calls liars. The Church would never have allowed the people to leave the safety of the walls, not even for such a spectacle as that.
The high clerics had seen, however, or so the story went as it wended its way through the Order grapevine. Monsignor Chamberlain had led the others from the cathedral and bid Priest lead them to the wreckage, and he and Priestess Khara had led them from the city and across the burning sand to see for themselves. There are no official records of what they saw there, gathered around the ruins of a train with the hems of their cassocks flapping at their ankles and dragging in the sand, but when they had returned to the city shortly thereafter, the balance of power within the ranks had shifted. Monsignor Orelas had stepped down as head of the High Council a few days later, and Monsignor Chamberlain had reinstated the Orders before his ass had warmed the seat. The Church's wayward children had been summoned from the far-flung corners of the city and assigned to the various squadrons, and Priest had been appointed liaison to the High Council.
The first intimation of a man in a battered, black had come, not from the Council, or even from Priest, who had been staunchly mum on the topic at first, but from travelers from distant outposts who staggered into the city with wares to ply and tales to sell in exchange for a beer and a spot at crowded bars. They quaffed tinpot gin and shots of bathtub rye, and when the booze had oiled their tongues and washed the dust from their throats, they'd spoken of a man with yellow eyes who wandered the desert in a faded duster. The first reports had named him naught but a solitary traveler who traversed the sands, head bent to the wind and lips sealed against any invitations to conversation. Some said he was badly scarred, wattled, bloodless flesh stretched taut over bone and sinew, but they were overruled by others who claimed he was hale and whole and deceptively fast, long strides eating up the desert hardpan. The more fanciful among them thought him a ghost, while the more pragmatic had supposed him just another farmer driven from his livelihood by the merciless vicissitudes of nature.
Few in the Order had given these romantic notions much thought, knee-deep as they were in the grunt work of reestablishing the daily routines and rituals of life in the barracks, but Priest had grown pinched and remote and taciturn with acolytes and abandoned his administrative duties for long intervals, returning days later with dust on his clothes and new lines etched into his perpetually-pensive face. Hours customarily set aside for meditation and study were spent in grueling training sessions, and there was precious little laughter after. Studying came much later, by the wavering glow of candlelight, and prayers were often interrupted by orders to patrol the grounds or venture into the city for reconnaissance.
The stories they carried to him had been the stuff of mad fantasy. The walker in the desert was no longer a hapless farmer or a wandering spirit. Now he was a vampire, a daywalker whom the sun's rays could not touch. Terrified settlers appeared in the city with tales of slaughtered livestock and dogs screaming in the night, and of children sent on errands from which they never returned. An old washerwoman had hobbled into the city one morning just before dusk, blood in her hair and on her clothes and lingering madness in her eyes. She had clawed at passersby with dirty fingers and beseeched them to deliver her from the demon with golden eyes. An acolyte had ushered her into the barracks for a meeting with Priest, and the novices had clustered around the door to hear her tale as best they might. The only thing to emerge from the room had been Priest, who had emerged with iron in his spine and fire in his eyes and ordered the assembly of a search party. He and Khara had taken a handful of acolytes to scour the desert as far as Mira Sola, but they had returned with nothing but windburn on their faces and sand in the creases of their robes. There had been no demon, no golden-eyed wanderer who rode the wind and breathed death from his mouth. According to the acolytes who had passed the story along with their daily bread, they'd found only the blackened husk of a burnt-out homestead and fragments of crockery and personal bric-a-brac. There weren't even any bodies or dead dogs bested by slavering, scavenging coyotes. Just a tin windmill rattling in the sultry breeze.
Far from satisfying Priest, the discovery had only unsettled him more, and he and Khara had marched their straggling band of dogged acolytes thither and yon, making inquiries of anyone they met. They had only repeated the outlandish accounts of a yellow-eyed drifter who left no footprints in the sand. They had even questioned the remaining residents of New Absalom, the ramshackle dust-and tumbleweed settlement that had still borne the scars of his last journey there. The grim, hollow-cheeked residents had said nothing and waved him on and watched his retreating back as he went. He would have willed them to tramp through the barren hinterlands if Priestess had not insisted they turn back before the acolytes were squandered on a fruitless chase. He had come back more remote and secretive than ever, and even Priestess Khara could scarcely move him to speak. He simply brooded and watched and waited.
Delayed grief, she thought, or fresh despair at being reunited with his daughter only to leave her again, but then, he had summoned the Priests to counsel and spoken of a yellow-eyed vampire who walked in the sun. The rumors were true, he had informed them with grim solemnity; a daywalker had thwarted the sun's rebuke, and it was he who had nearly brought the city to its knees with a trainful of blind, obedient servants bent to his will. Priestess Mariel, her pegged stump propped on a cushioned footstool had surveyed him in impassive silence for a moment before declaring him either a fool or a liar. Priestess Khara had remained silent.
Then Priest had turned his gaze to her. And you. What do you believe, Priestess? he had asked quietly.
She had studied his face, searching for signs of lunacy or deceit, but she had found only weariness and a restless, chafing anguish.
I do not know, she had confessed. I have never known you to lie, Priest, or to succumb to flights of hysterical fancy, but it seems too fantastical to be believed that vampires have created a human hybrid capable of withstanding the purifying light of the sun. Surely there would have been signs long before now-unexplained disappearances, for instance.
Priestess Khara had spoken at last, Who's to say there haven't been? Not even the Church can account for all the souls who dwell in the city. If a beggar or two were to vanish, they wouldn't be missed.
Surely the Church would have told us about such a dangerous development, she had protested.
The Church has its secrets. Priestess Mariel had shifted in her seat. The fewer who know, the easier they are to keep.
Besides, the Church has grown complacent and indifferent in its peaceful, unchallenged dotage, Priest had noted. It's been years since the cities were threatened, and the infrequent skirmishes outside the walls indicated that the population was in decline. The Church wouldn't know about hybrids because they haven't been looking. I found him by chance, and I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen him for myself.
I saw him, too, Khara had offered at last. Priest has the truth of it.
Priestess Mariel had snorted. You've taken leave of your senses, Priest, she'd declared flatly, and raised her hand to forestall Priestess Khara's indignant defense of his honor. iI believe you encountered something out there, and I've no doubt that the panicky settlers have seen it, too, but it was a man, for all its strangeness. Man ruined this world in his attempt to save it, and what the hordes didn't annihilate, the radiation and biological weapons did. It's a wonder there was anything living at all once the blighted dust settled and the diseased blood seeped into the earth. There's bound to be consequences, genetic aberration. Go swimming in a cesspool long enough, and the sh-filth sticks. The yellow eyes could be the result of radiation poisoning, and who knows what kind of mutants are lurking in the hinterlands?
It wasn't a mutant, Priest had replied, and the stony conviction in it had made the downy hairs at her nape prickle.
How can you be so sure? Priestess Mariel's prosthesis had fallen to the floor with an irascible crack as she'd sat forward, elbows pressed to her knees.
Khara had opened her mouth to reply, but Priest had silenced her with a look. Khara had shot her a miserable, knowing glance and subsided in her seat.
Instead of giving an answer, Priest had reached into his robes and withdrawn a battered, dusty hat singed at the brim and reeking of smoke. He'd tossed it onto the table before him with a flick of his wrist.
It's a hat, she'd supplied, nonplussed, and Khara had shot her another look of inexplicable pity.
What of it? Priestess Mariel had demanded, unimpressed.
He was wearing it, Priest had replied, as though that explained everything. It proves he exists.
Priestess Mariel had snorted contemptuously. Any fool can wear a hat, especially one so plain as that. If that's to be taken as an article of faith, then why don't we just drop all pretense and proclaim the whistlings from my backside as the unknowable word of God? It carries the same weight as what you would have us believe.
You tread near blasphemy, sister, Priest had warned, but there had been no threat behind it.
I speak the truth. She'd sat back and folded her arms across her chest. The leather bindings of her prosthesis had creaked with the movement. iYou fought a familiar, or some fanatic with delusions of immortality. It's no great feat to sharpen teeth, not when you're tempted to eat the rocks under your feet just to fill your belly. There's a threat out there, that much I'll believe, but it's not some new breed of vampire who walks in the sun in defiance of God's law. Vampires are creatures of death and emptiness. What you suggest is a creature whose existence cannot be. If it has eyes and shows no fear of the sun, then it's alive, possessed of a soul. A vampire with a soul would reduce the Church's foundations to dust and throw into question everything it has taught since the first abomination bubbled forth from its subterranean hole. If it has a soul, then it's every bit a child of God as we are, and maybe all the blood that stains our hands should burn like the Mark of Cain against our willful, murderous hearts. If it has a soul, then maybe we're monsters, too.
She'd shaken her greying head and scoured her teeth with her tongue behind pursed lips. No, she'd said. That's the stuff of heresy, and if you've a drop of sense left in your head, you'll never speak of this again, and certainly not to your confessor. It's dangerous lunacy, and if it reaches the wrong ears, you'll be excommunicated. She'd fixed him with a steely gaze, but there had been compassion in her voice when next she'd spoken. It's been a hard ride for you, my lad, harder than most. You've lost much and received neither comfort nor satisfaction from it. It's a heavy burden for anyone to carry, let alone one who's known the taste of life's mercies. Seeing the daughter you gave up for the good of the Church must've been a horrible jolt, especially on the heels of burying your wife and brother. It's a strain too great for anyone, and no one could blame you for going around the bend a few paces.
I know what I saw, Priest had insisted with pettish tenacity.
Priestess Mariel had muttered an oath and stood abruptly, wobbling unsteadily as her mismatched legs fought to establish her center of gravity. Then I suggest you keep the contents of your rather suspect vision to yourself. We've lost far too many as it is. And with that, she'd stumped out without so much as an inclined head.
Sage advice dispensed too late, as it had turned out. Shortly after that surreal conclave, Priest had been called to a late-night audience with Monsignor Chamberlain. The barracks had rippled and buzzed with uneasy speculation in his absence. Priestess Khara had watched the clock with compulsive irascibility, and even Priestess Mariel, who had had scant patience with him since lending reluctant ear to his fanciful recounting of daywalkers and hard-fought battles contested atop speeding, burning trains, had paced to and fro between her kitchen and the dining hall, muttering under her breath and fingering the small, onyx beads of her rosary. Anxious novitiates had peered from the barred and grated windows like fretful marmosets and passed nervous gossip on puffs of stale breath. Others had clustered in the barracks and whispered amongst themselves as they gathered the fabric of their cassocks around their throats. For all their idle chatter, however, none had given voice to the unsettling thought that had hung over the barracks like a pall, feverish and clammy and dreadful to contemplate.
But Priest had not been excommunicated, called into the darkness never to return. He had returned a few hours later, drawn and silent and exhausted. Priestess Khara had rushed to meet him at the door with a cry of relief, and Priestess Mariel had poked her head from her kitchen long enough to offer a blessing for his return. She had said nothing, had only stood in the hall in her bare feet and looked at him with shadowed eyes. Priest had held no cherished place in her heart, and she had felt only a dim, selfish relief that she would not have to adapt to the unfamiliar yoke of another. She had offered him an indifferent bow and shuffled to her pallet, where she'd dozed under the pretext of meditation until the call to morning prayer.
Far from being defrocked and excommunicated, Monsignor Chamberlain had reaffirmed his status as head priest of the unit, and though the yellow-eyed daywalker was never explicitly mentioned within earshot of the curious novitiates, Priest had been given open and standing orders to pursue any and all threats to the Church and its faithful as he saw fit. Priestess Mariel had rolled her eyes and declared this development a sign of the Church's unchecked descent into impotence and sad irrelevance, but Priestess Khara had unquestioningly and resolutely cast her lot with him and bustled to and fro throughout the city as she carried out his every order, no matter how foolhardy, draconian, or bizarre.
And she? She obeyed. It was, after all, the lot for which she had been destined from the cradle, and she could do naught else.
It's the hat she's thinking of when she speaks, black and battered and reeking of smoke. "But what of Priestess Khara? She says she saw the daywalker, too."
Priestess Mariel gives an indelicate snort. "Loyalty can be a greater poison than drink. She'd swear the sun rose from the center of the earth if he said it was so." Her eyes glitter with unspoken knowledge. "Do you not find that so, sister?" she asks shrewdly.
She thinks of Johannes, of his warmth at her back, and of the spicy smell of him in her nostrils, cardamom and iron and earth and sweat. She turns her head and swallows around the lump that has risen in her throat. "Yes," she confesses to the wall. It's rasping and strengthless, and she clears her throat. "Yes."
The room is silent except for the solid ithock of honed steel on thick butcher block and the burbling bubble of the stewpot, which has reached a full boil and is throwing up a billow of fragrant steam.
"Go on and set the table now." The gentleness in the command scalds and scours, and only the discipline of long years keeps her eyes dry and her shoulders straight as she moves to obey.
She's still setting the table when the door opens to admit the hiss of steady rain and the shuffle and scrape of feet. The scattered acolytes have begun to return from their various errands, and they carry with them the fruits of their labors. One carries a bundle of makeshift crosses wrought from bits of scrap metal and naive faith. Another boasts a bundle of weapons tucked beneath one arm. Still a third holds a sack that clatters as he swings it from his sopping shoulder. Beads, perhaps, or bottles of water collected from the running gutters. Some for blessing, no doubt. They'll boil and bottle the rest.
"Priestess," says the one with the sack, an eager gangle of a boy, no more than seventeen. His eyes are young and soft inside his face, and his skin is yet unblemished by the trials and privations of war.
"Apostle," she replies. She cannot remember his name.
"It's been a while since Priest has asked for so much water. Do you think this means a raid?" he asks, eager and guileless, a kitten leaping at the dancing shadow of a butterfly.
"It is not for me to dispense Priest's wisdom for him, apostle." She sets a plate on the table, followed by a fork with a crooked tine.
"Of course not, Priestess," he says, chastened. "Forgive my impertinence."
"Ten Hail Marys and an Our Father," she murmurs absently, and sets another plate.
"Yes, Priestess. Thank you for your mercy." He bows his head and bobs his knees in an awkward curtsy and scuttles off to deliver his payload to its intended recipient. She reaches for another plate and dimly wonders what he will look like when the vampire's flashing claws and gnashing teeth prove faster than his youthful zeal. If he's lucky, death will come swiftly, in a single ruthless strike. If he isn't, it will be dealt slowly, meted out in a measure of grim and joyless years as loss and hardship and bitter experience slough the years from his face and leach the vitality from his bones.
Let us speak the truth, mutters a darkly-pragmatic voice inside her head that is as deep and implacable as grinding stones. He is as dead as the abominations he longs to fight. His life was ended the moment the church stretched its shadow across his door. Everything human in him was stamped out beneath its cold, inflexible heel. He is just a vessel now, a tool to be used as the Church sees fit, and when he is of no more use to it-when he can no longer fight for the burden of his wounds or the last vampire has fallen at the end of a holy blade-it will cast him aside and leave him to die with nothing but its meaningless gratitude for comfort. Zeal holds no warmth when you're sleeping in corners and lapping water from the very same gutters from whence you once thought to collect God's favor because the Church can spare neither solace nor coin for its obsolete. motherless children.
Another plate finds the table, and she wonders when she last felt anything at all. The answer seethes and shifts within her bones, light as breath and insistent as sand, and she grits her teeth and turns from it and recites the Lord's prayer until the sensation fades.
Hope is a powerful force, indeed, my child, comes the low, soothing voice of her confessor. But even it cannot raise the dead.
Though her lips remain silent, her heart utters an oath that would see her to the fires of eternal damnation.
The scrape of the door and the patter of the rain. The flap of wet wool and the scuffle of feet. More acolytes, come home from the hunt. She turns to watch them as they stamp and flap like grackles shaking the rain from their feathers. The women squeeze the water from their plaits, and the young men shake the rain from their boots and scrub the droplets from their hair. Those who see her nod in wordless deference. Those who don't troop toward the barracks to shed their wet robes. The last to enter are Priest and Priestess Khara, his faithful shadow. She stops to stamp the dirt from her feet, but Priest weaves around her and makes directly for the dining hall.
"Priestess," he says brusquely. Water beads in his close-cropped blond hair and drips from his temples in lazy, meandering rivulets. His rosary dangles from one hand, and the small cross hangs at the end of the long strand and twirls in a slow, dreamy circle.
"Priest." The syllable scrapes the back of her teeth like a pebble. "The acolytes have been busy today. It's inspired excitement in some."
He draws closer, and heat radiates from him like heat from a stone. He smells of rainwater and damp wool. He leans forward until their foreheads are but a hairsbreadth apart, and his breath against the bridge of her nose is oddly intimate when he speaks. "There will be a council after vespers tonight."
So there is to be a raid. She nods once. "Should I make preparations?"
"Put to mind which of the acolytes under your charge have shown the greatest promise."
She blinks in surprise. "But why?"
"Just do it." There is such steel in the command that she's an acolyte again, flat-footed and cowed. This close, she can see the age in his eyes and the care in his face. He is too thin and too pale and too sharp at the angles and edges. Even as a young man, as yet unblooded by the cruelties and vagaries of war, there had been little of laughter and gaiety in him. Now even those faint traces have been expunged; now there is only melancholy and the cold fire of remorseless purpose.
"As you wish, Priest." She steps back and bows her head.
The only acknowledgment she receives is a narrowing of his eyes and a thinning of his lips, and then he spins from her in a whirl of robes and marches toward the kitchens. A fighter no more, Priestess Mariel is yet a sister of vast experience and incalculable wisdom, and none has a keener eye for judging talent and its potential for development and eventual success. It was she who had judged her squadron fit for battle, who had given the nod that had pitched them headlong into war without end that had claimed them all one by one until only this pitiful remnant remained. She hasn't wielded a blade in twenty years, and yet, she will be at the council tonight, seated at his left hand and charged as his conscience.
And who will she send to die this time? asks the cold voice inside her head, the voice of the mountains, and of tombs dark and deep and unattended by God's light. Whose bones will she damn to an eternity in the godless dark?
To that she can find no answer, and so she turns from it and sets another plate on the table.
The next time she sees Priest, it is in the long, thin hours after midnight, and the acolytes are all in bed. It is only the priests now, clustered around one end of the table in the dining hall. He sits in the simple, wooden chair, fingers curled around the armrests. Priestess Khara sits at his right, and to his left, Priestess Mariel sits with her ungainly wooden leg jutting to the side at an unnatural, excruciating angle that makes her eyes water to look at it. She sits to Mariel's left, her own legs tucked far beneath the chair and her feet close together.
"We leave on a hunt tomorrow," Priest announces without preamble, and even Khara is surprised. Her face betrays nothing, but her brown eyes shift to study his profile from beneath oildrop eyelashes.
"So soon?" Mariel says into the bewildered silence that greets this pronouncement. "Found the the Antichrist in those death-blasted hills, have you?"
Priest does not laugh. "We pursue the daywalker. There have been reports of daylight attacks between Sola Mira and New Absalom. Livestock at first, but the last few have been on traveling merchants and remote settlers. The most recent was an old woman and her two young grandchildren."
"There were witnesses?" Khara leans forward in her chair, and her glossy black plait falls over her shoulder and the swell of her breast like an undulating serpent.
Priest purses his lips. "Those who discovered the bodies reported that their throats had been torn out and that they were drained of blood, both signs of a vampire attack."
"In broad daylight," Priestess Mariel points out. "Which is impossible."
"And yet, it is so."
"So say you," she counters. "It's far more likely to be the work of mutants, brigands, or some wretched combination of the two. Evil doings, yes, but not the business of our kind."
"It is not," Priest insists doggedly. His fingers have tightened around the armrests, and a vein pulses at his temple. "It's the work of the daywalker, and I mean to take him before he inflicts more damage."
"You insufferable mule of a man," she hisses, and slaps the arm of her own chair with a resounding crack, flesh kissed by the punishing knout. "I tire of your games and your reckless fantasies. How can you be so sure that this precious phantasm of yours exists? Tell me, brother, and swiftly, with more than a dusty hat to prop your claims, because I am too old and have lost too much to sacrifice all that I have left to the pursuit of imaginary monsters." Her normally placid grey eyes are ablaze with righteous fury, and the silver of her hair is pale moonglow in the dim, uncertain flicker of the light from the sconces mounted along the walls at haphazard intervals.
"Because I know," he says simply. He folds his hands beneath his chin and continues. "Because I've seen him. I've fought him, have felt his flesh beneath my hands. I have felt his bones within my grasp. I have seen his malice and heard his blasphemy, and I will brook no more of either. Because I saw him through the smoke and flame as he rose to the heavens with my daughter in his arms." His voice rises with every word until it is a song of bombast and blood, a homily delivered from the mouths of avenging angels.
But Priestess Mariel is not one to be cowed by sound and fury, not after a lifetime of blood and steel upon the lifeless, pitiless sands beyond the city walls. She laughs, a bitter caw of contempt. "That is your proof? Then by your own admission, this hunt is nothing but a wild goose chase. You said yourself that you blew him to his judgment atop that train. Now you would have me believe that he survived the blast? There's not a vampire on this misbegotten earth that can withstand the purification of flames. To suggest otherwise is blasphemy. If you aren't a madman or a heretic, then you're a fool bent on chasing ghosts."
"I thought him destroyed. Now I am not so certain. There have been too many whispers, too many rumors-"
"Too much longing in your heart." Disbelieving and beseeching. "You are desperate for purpose, for a reason to keep fighting. You would fight shadows if you could make an enemy of them. Enough, brother. Enough. Fight the monsters that remain and make your peace with whatever comes after. But don't ask us to follow you into perdition for the sake of company."
"I have seen him, too." Khara smooths the fabric of her cassock over her knees.
"And that would carry more weight, sister, if I knew whether you saw him with the eyes of your heart or the ones in your head."
Khara drops her gaze and shifts in her chair.
For a moment, no one speaks. Then, Priestess Mariel murmurs, "I mean no rebuke, sister, nor would I impart shame when there is no need of it. Loyalty is a blessing, and the world would be poorer for its absence, but it bends will and distorts the truth when it burns too hot."
"The truth is the truth, and I know what I saw," Khara replies staunchly, and casts a furtive, sidelong glance at Priest.
Priestess Mariel only smiles. "In that we are agreed, sister. Which is why I refuse to let this go any further. There is no daywalker, Priest. I will not countenance this hunt."
"I don't need your approval, Priestess, merely your obedience. The Monsignor himself has ordered this hunt."
She gapes at him. "The Monsignor?" she repeats incredulously. "You've infected him with this madness?"
"He has given me full authority in this matter."
Priestess Mariel shakes her head. "No," she says flatly. "I refuse to believe he sanctioned this. If he did, it's because you've told him some faint shade of the truth." She heaves herself out of her chair and starts for the door.
"The meeting isn't over, sister," Priest calls.
"It is for me. I'll have no part in this. I didn't train and feed these children of God just to see them used as fodder in some quixotic quest. I'm going to the Monsignor. Pray God he'll still see reason."
"He has seen it, which is why he has given me his grace. And if forced to choose between a priest who has seen battle against the enemy and carried proof of a tale thought wild in his hands and one who who has spent the last twenty years in a kitchen, boiling fish and scouring pots and bestowing blessings upon the dishwater, who will he believe?"
"Priest!" Khara exclaims, shocked at such uncharacteristic harshness.
Whatever happened on that train changed him, she thinks as she watches the exchange in silence. And not for the better.
Grief always leaves its awful mark, child, says the lilting voice of her confessor, and she reaches into her robes with absent fingers and pulls out her rosary. She watches, unblinking, and lets the beads drip through her fingers like blood.
Priest has the grace to look abashed. "Sister, I-" he begins, but the old priestess cuts him off.
"Sometimes I think we lost more than one good man at Sola Mira. Now I know," she says coldly, and then she whirls on her heel, plait slicing the leaden air like the flaying tongue of a lash, and departs. The sharp rap of her wooden leg on the concrete floor echoes in the strained silence, the weary ticking of a dying clock, and then she's gone.
No one speaks until the sound fades. "Do you share her misgivings, Priestess?" he asks listlessly.
She shrugs and smooths the end of her golden plait. "It is only for me to obey. I am but a tool of the Lord, to be used as you see fit." And I pay my debts. For an instant, the memory of wool and warm flesh tingles in her fingertips, and she curls her fingers into fists to blot it out.
A nigh-imperceptible nod, and his fingers relax on his armrests. "Gratitude, sister. Faith would be even more appreciated, but in this case, I'll take what I can get." He settles in his chair and stretches his long, white fingers until they tremble and the knuckles crack. "As I said, we leave in the morning."
"Why so soon? We scarcely have the provisions for the necessary kit. One of the acolytes brought some holy water, but if this creature is as fearsome as you say, I doubt it will be of much use. Even the juvenile vampires have gotten good at avoiding it these days, and aim in combat is iffy at best. I can help the acolytes make more crosses tonight, assuming we have the materials, but you've said yourself that they have little effect."
"They don't," he agrees, and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "But they'll serve against the lessers and provide some comfort to the acolytes."
She blinks. "The acolytes," she repeats, and utters a humorless bark of laughter as comprehension dawns. "You can't possibly mean to bring acolytes on this hunt. They're half-trained. At best. And their training is but a shadow of what ours was, of what they need to survive. For God's sake, most of them are still children. A few of the girls haven't had their first cycle yet."
"She's right," Khara says. "I'm not sure half of them would last against an average vampire, let alone one impervious to holy water and crosses. It would be a massacre."
"I know. You're right. But there is no choice."
"Why not?" she presses him. "Why not bide our time, build our resources and our manpower? If we wait, some of the acolytes might make it to priesthood. Our numbers would be stronger, and by then, Monsignor Chamberlain will have established his authority and been able to provide better supplies."
"Training acolytes takes years, and public opinion is fickle. The same people who now cry for our help because they've glimpsed the severed head of a vampire and who treat us with fearful reverence will be doubting and heaping scorn upon our heads when a month goes by with no ripple in their peaceful little existence. Our situation is more likely to be worse a year from now than better, and if Orelas can get backing and make a run at reclaiming his seat, we could well find ourselves disbanded again, if not excommunicated outright and branded as heretics."
"That's a bit paranoid, don't you think?"
"Maybe, but maybe it's not, and what then? We'll be scattered and powerless, while he's free to roam and kill and replenish his forces under our noses."
"He," she prods relentlessly. "He, he, he. You speak as though you were an intimate familiar. Who is he that you are so eager to shed his blood? If I didn't know better, I'd say this was personal."
His eye twitches. "Isn't it enough that he is an affront to God's intended order?" He scratches his elbow with rough, close-bitten nails. "Our current situation is hardly ideal, and any casualties we suffer will be regrettable, but we don't have the luxury of time."
"Luxury!" she shrieks. "It's a luxury now not to hurl the lives entrusted to our care to a meaningless death? This thing killed three priests with scant effort and even less hesitation, and you would challenge him with ill-prepared children?" She shakes her head and tugs furiously on the end of her braid. "That isn't bravery or noble self-sacrifice, brother, that's hubris."
"Madness?" he offers drily, but there is no humor in it, only a grating bleakness.
"That's the kindest word for it," she retorts.
He straightens, and though his eyes are full of sorrow, there is no tenderness in his voice, only the pitiless inflexibility of the Church. "I understand your objections, sister, and the man in me shares them. If I could, I would turn from this path, but I am a priest, the hand of God on this earth, and I am bound to do His will. As I must obey, so must you. Will you obey?"
"Yes," she answers dully, and her shoulders slump. "But I would have it known that there is no honor in this. It's so much screaming into the wind for the pitiful consolation defiance brings before the end."
"Noted," he says, and she's surprised at the gentleness of it. "Now, which of the acolytes do you think have the best chance of survival?"
"Truthfully?" she croaks, and rubs at her stinging eyes with cool fingertips. "None. As to which might at least find a dignified death beneath the enemy's heel, there's Mills. Sanchez is impressive with the blades when his focus is right, but that's no guarantee. He hasn't yet mastered the desires of the flesh. Fontana has mastered her body, but her pride often overrides her reason. Johnston. Maybe Dunn." She shrugs again. "They're the best of the lot, but as I said, that's not saying much. The rest wouldn't last thirty seconds. They're just children, Priest. Children! If you send them in pursuit of this demon, you might as well call them sacrifices to an insatiable God and be done with it."
Have I become Mariel so swiftly, then? Evaluating children like chattel and deciding which of them are perfect enough to die in the service of an absent and indifferent Lord?
"Have you further need of me, Priest?" she asks wearily. "If not, I must make ready for our departure."
"Rest well, sister. We leave for Sola Mira in the morning."
She freezes, hands clawed around the armrests and ass hovering deliriously above the seat like a capsizing dirigible. "Sola Mira," she manages, and she tightens her calves to keep from collapsing back into her recently-vacated seat. Her lungs have gone heavy, and the air they draw is too thick. Her ears hum and sing with the notes of a distant Aeolian harp.
"The most recent sightings put him just south of there," Priest replies from the vast expanse of a bottomless well.
"Mm," she grunts as though that explains anything. She wills herself upright and forces herself to meet their gazes. She's too cold. Her hands are freezing, and her stomach flutters and cramps beneath the fabric of her cassock.
"Are you all right?" Priestess Khara asks, and advances on her with hand outstretched. She's joined Priest in the vastness of the well.
She flinches from the well-intended contact. "I'm well, Priestess. Thank you," she answers with ludicrous formality.
Oh, I've committed a dreadful sin, she thinks with woozy giddiness. I've uttered a lie before the face of God.
She wheels on treacherous feet and flees their solicitous scrutiny before her wobbling knees can expose her deceit. Pride keeps her gait steady until she gains the concealing solidity of the corridor wall that leads to the barracks, and then she staggers and lurches for a few steps before the strength ebbs from them altogether and she sags against the rough, buttressing plaster.
Sola Mira. The high, rocky outcrop of the hive rises in her mind's eye against a flat, red sky the color of rust and suppurating infection. Nothing lives in its sandy soil. Nothing flourishes there but death and sorrow. The wind howls and raises sand yellow as pus, and in the depths of the hive's corrupted shadows, bones bleach to white beneath the skitter and patter of small, inhuman feet.
Life goes on, child, and so must you, her confessor urges. Longing will not raise the dead. One foot in front of the other, that's the only way it can be.
She pushes away from the wall and is confused at the muffled clack from her hand. Her rosary dangles from her fingers, and her palm prickles and smarts where the beads have dug into the flesh. She sways as she threads the glittering black beads through trembling fingers, and when she's sure she won't simply fold to the floor with the first ginger step, she shuffles towards the barracks and the neat double row of billets arranged on the floor.
One foot, she tells herself. One foot at a time. The rosary beads rattle and clack in time to her footsteps, and she breathes slowly and deeply in time with her heartbeat. Eventually, grace returns to her stumbling, fumbling limbs, and she nimbly picks her way through the sleeping bodies until she reaches her pallet.
She sinks to the floor, legs crossed and spine straight and rosary threaded through her folded hands. The cross rests against her palm, light and cool, but she draws no comfort from its familiarity, or from the soft, sussurrating sounds of sleep from the acolytes who slumber around her. The knowledge of what waits for her on the edge of tomorrow has awakened old grief and stirred painful memories. She should meditate, should pray for God's mercy and guidance, but when she closes her eyes there is only empty blackness and the aching awareness of absence, of the bump and scrape of a shoulder no longer there.
It isn't until she draws a deep breath and thinks of cardamom and sweat and sun-warmed earth that the cramp in her stomach uncoils. Cardamom in her nostrils, sweet and sharp and safe, and her muscles go slack with relief. Cardamom, and peace comes at last. Cardamom, and the unceasing tumult in her head and heart stills, the raging tempest of a boiling sea replaced by the glassy, shimmering stillness of a pond in summer, with green grass beneath her bare feet and golden sunlight on her shoulders. No terror now, no endless yearning and an ache that never eases no matter how fervently she prays for surcease and serenity. Just an indistinct figure on the opposite shore with hand outstretched, beckoning her to him. She smiles and answers the summons, heart rising in her chest as her feet glide across the cool, silver water. She reaches for the proffered hand and lets it pull her to the shore, but as she surrenders to the persistent tug of meditation's current, it isn't God who holds her hand.