Before it could re-form, I lunged forward and threw myself in front of Sophia’s niche, already swinging my censer in a well-practiced pattern. Only the most powerful spirits could pass through a barrier of incense smoke. To reach Sophia, it would have to fight me first.
I knew what it was now. A common Second Order spirit called a gaunt, the corrupted soul of someone who had died of starvation. Though known for their speed, gaunts were fragile. A single well-placed blow could destroy them.
I raised my dagger. Gray Sisters wielded misericordes: long, thin blades designed precisely for such a strike. “Sophia, are you hurt?”
She sniffed loudly, then said, “I don’t think so.”
“Good. Do you see my dagger? If anything happens to me, promise me you’ll take it. I hope you won’t have to, but you need to promise. Sophia?”
She hadn’t responded. The gaunt reappeared near the bend in the tunnel and flickered closer, zigzagging an erratic path toward us.
“I promise,” she whispered.
She understood the danger of possession. If a spirit managed to gain control of a person’s body, it could break through barriers designed to repel its kind, even walk among the living undetected for a time. Luckily for most people, only the Sighted were vulnerable to possession. Otherwise Loraille would have been overrun by the Dead long ago.
Another flicker. I sliced my dagger through the air just as the gaunt materialized in front of me, its bony hands grasping. The consecrated blade etched a line of golden fire across its shroud. My breath stopped as the fabric dissolved into vapor, laying bare the unharmed sinew beneath. I had only caught its sleeve.
Its hand closed around my wrist. Splinters of cold shot up the nerves of my arm, wrenching a cry from my throat. I struggled to free myself, but it held my wrist fast, captured in the space between us. Past its clawlike nails, its face swam into focus: drawing closer, the huge jaws parting as though breathing in my pain, sampling the taste. Any moment now my numb fingers would no longer be able to grip the dagger’s hilt.
Deliberately, I dropped it. Sophia screamed. As the gaunt’s attention caught on the glint of falling steel, I grabbed my censer in my bad hand and drove it upward into the spirit’s chest.
It looked at me in surprise. Then it coughed up a trickle of smoke. I thrust the censer higher, barely feeling the metal’s heat. The gaunt shrieked, an eerie, echoing sound that sent a shock wave of cold through the tunnel, stirring the brittle bones in their niches. It arched its spine and clawed at its chest, its form blurring in every direction, violently shredding apart, until it suddenly exploded into wisps of glowing fog.
Sophia’s uneven breathing was the only sound as the tunnel darkened. I knew I should say something to reassure her, but I could barely move for the pain in my frozen wrist. It was coming alive again in waves of pins and needles, and there were already lines of bruised-looking purple where the gaunt had touched me and blighted my skin.
“Artemisia?” Her voice scratched like a mouse behind a wall.
“I’m fine,” I said. I hoped that was true in case I needed to fight again, but I doubted I would. A single gaunt might escape Mother Katherine’s notice, but she wouldn’t fail to sense the presence of more. I turned to Sophia and let her climb down into my arms. “Can you stand up?”
“I’m not a baby,” she protested, brave now that the danger had passed. But as I poured her onto the ground, she abruptly seized my robes, jolting a stab of pain from my wrist. “Look!”
Light seeped into the tunnel ahead, throwing a crooked shadow across the wall. It was accompanied by the sound of hoarse, indistinct muttering. Relief flooded me. I knew of only one person who would be wandering down here talking to herself.
“Don’t worry. It isn’t another spirit. It’s just Sister Julienne.”
Sophia clutched me tighter. “That’s worse,” she whispered.
As Sister Julienne shuffled into view, still muttering, her face hidden by draggled waist-length hair lit white by the lantern, I had to admit that Sophia had a point.
Julienne was the convent’s holy woman. She dwelled as a hermit in the chapel’s crypt, watching over the holy relic of Saint Eugenia. Her unwashed robes reeked so pungently of sheep’s tallow that my eyes began to water at her approach.
Sophia stared, eyes wide as saucers; then she knelt and scooped up my dagger, silently pressing it into my hand.
Sister Julienne didn’t seem to notice. We might as well have been invisible. She shuffled past us, close enough that her hem trailed over our shoes, up to the niche that Sophia had just vacated. I strained to make out what she was mumbling as she poked the disturbed bones back into order.
“Heard it down here for years, moaning and wailing… finally quiet now… Sister Rosemary, wasn’t it? Yes, yes. A hard year, a terrible famine, so many dead…”
My skin prickled. I didn’t know of anyone named Sister Rosemary. But I suspected that if I checked the convent’s oldest records, I would find her.
Sophia tugged on my robes. She whispered in my ear, without taking her eyes from Sister Julienne, “Is it true she eats novices?”
“Ha!” Sister Julienne exclaimed, wheeling on us. Sophia started. “Is that what they’re saying about me now? Good! Nothing better than a nice, tasty novice. Well, come along, girls, come along.” She turned and began to shuffle back the way she had come, the lantern swinging in her wrinkled hand.
“Where is she taking us?” Sophia demanded, following reluctantly. She still hadn’t let go of my robes.
“We must be going through the crypt. It’s the safest way back to the chapel.”
Truthfully, this was only a guess, but as Sister Julienne took us through a series of doors fitted into the roughly hewn tunnels, it seemed increasingly likely. I was sure of it when we reached the final door, a heavy black monstrosity of consecrated iron. The lantern’s light leaped over its banded surface as Julienne opened it and ushered us inside.
The air eddied with ribbons of incense smoke, so thick that my eyes stung and Sophia coughed into her sleeve. We had entered a stone chamber, pillared and vaulted. Robed statues stood in the archways between the columns, their hooded faces shadowed despite the candles that guttered at their feet in puddles of dripping wax. Sophia peered around suspiciously, as though searching for a cauldron hidden in one of the corners, or maybe the gnawed bones of past novices scattered across the floor. But the flagstones were bare except for the holy symbols carved here and there, their shapes worn nearly invisible with age.
Sister Julienne let us gawk for a moment, then impatiently beckoned us onward. “Touch the shrine now, for Saint Eugenia’s blessing. Be quick about it.”
The shrine dominated the middle of the crypt: a white marble platform with a life-sized effigy of Saint Eugenia lying atop the lid of the sarcophagus, her beautiful stone face serene in death. The candles arranged around her body cast a shifting glow over her features, lending her a faint enigmatic smile. She had died a martyr at fourteen years of age after sacrificing herself to bind a Fifth Order spirit to her bones. The spirit was said to have been so powerful that it burned her entire body to ash except for a single joint of her finger, a relic that now rested inside the sarcophagus in unseen splendor. It wasn’t like the minor relic in Sister Lucinde’s ring, useful for lighting the occasional candle. It was a high relic, wielded only in times of desperate need.