by Scott Hale
“What?”
“Don’t let anyone see you.”
“I know.”
“Don’t listen to anything anyone is saying.”
The Holy Child looked at Avery, and then at the instruments in his hand, which he used to keep track of every nitty gritty detail about those living in Pyra.
“Get out of here,” Avery said, his smile slowly becoming a frown. “Be back before breakfast, or I’ll have the Night Terrors come for you.”
The Holy Child didn’t get adults. They didn’t make any sense. After they brought him back to Penance, they wouldn’t let him out of his guards’ sights. But now, a few months later, Justine often had him running off on his own, completing her “special missions.” Maybe he didn’t know what gullible meant, but he was smart enough to realize “special missions” meant keeping tabs on people the Mother Abbess didn’t really like. As the Holy Child, he could go almost anywhere, and everyone would be nice to him, whether they wanted to or not. It wasn’t a good thing, he eventually realized, but it was a handy thing to have when it came to what Avery called “holy espionage.”
Isla Taggart. Halfway to his hidden place, the Holy Child opened his journal to her aforementioned page. There wasn’t much written there, and none of it was anything of particular use. She was a girl, obviously, and twenty years old. She was the niece of the Exemplar of Innocence, Augustus Enfield, and a hermit. She spent most of her time going back and forth between the library and refectory, and getting, according to Justine, very bad advice from the Demagogue on religion and politics.
The Holy Child went to where the Ascent ran widest, where there were several portraits of previous exemplars, as well as the Mother Abbesses from the past. Justine had been Mother Abbess for the last thirty years, but the thing was, all the other abbesses kind of looked like her, too. The Holy Child was pretty sure it had always been her all along. She worked for god, after all, and everyone loved her, so why find someone different? He didn’t see why she had to hide the fact she could live longer than anyone else, but that was her business. The important thing was that she was his best friend, and he hers. And it made him happy to know she’d be with him forever.
His hidden place was in this gallery. Behind the several bookshelves that lined it, there was a small passage that ran from the Ascent to a small closet on the upper level of the cloister. Inside the place, he kept his disguise—a boring, hooded, servant’s robe, a wig, and some of Mackenzie’s makeup—so that he could put it on, pretend to be a girl, and get around Pyra more or less unnoticed when he needed to, like today. He also had a set of skeleton keys in there, to get into almost any room. That was nice. Cheating, probably, in the grand scheme of holy espionage, but definitely nice.
The Holy Child did his usual rounds to make sure the coast was clear. Like a cat after a rat, he crammed himself behind the bookcases and into the hidden place. There, he put on his robe and wig, and, with a heavy hand, his makeup. He looked like a half-mad doll with all that blush and eyeliner, but most importantly, he didn’t look like himself.
Isla Taggart. Why did Justine want to know more about her? The Holy Child crawled on all fours through his hidden place, turning as it turned through the walls of Pyra. She didn’t seem dangerous like the other people he had investigated. Annoying, yes, but not dangerous. Isla Taggart was the kind of person who had only one hobby in life: outrage. And if you weren’t like her, you were her enemy.
The Holy Child dropped out of the hiding place, from the ceiling and into the abandoned closet. Fresh spider webs and not-so-fresh bugs tried to break his fall, but they ended up grossing him out instead. It was pitch-black, but he had been here so many times before he could find the door easily enough. The closet sat alone in an unfinished, unvisited part of the cloister, so when he unlocked it and stepped out, no one was there to bust him.
“What’s going on?” The Holy Child locked the closet and headed out of this forgotten place. Sunlight shone through the passage ahead, where tens of people were moving in groups, whispering and shouting. He went to the beginning of the passage, peeked through the few boards that were supposed to block it off from the rest of the cloister. There were other doors here, the steel one was especially intriguing, but the skeleton key didn’t work on it or the others, so this was the only way out.
While he waited for a chance to slip through, he tried to figure out what everyone was saying.
“What does this mean for us?”
“It means everyone will…”
“You know who did it? I know who did it.”
“That’s a sin to suggest so.”
“There’s no proof, though.”
“She’s been lying to us.”
“No, he has.”
“How could god let this happen?”
Are they talking about the monster in the West? The Holy Child slipped through the boards. A light snow blew through, dusting the exterior arcades that ran along the cloister’s winter garden. He pulled his cloak tight. It was always cold in Penance, always snowing, and he always forgot to pack something warmer for his missions. If he missed anything about his time in the South, it was the warmth. To see trees and grass that were every color but white was something he hadn’t even considered until Samuel Turov took him there.
The Holy Child hurried past the gossiping busybodies and took the stairs to the first floor. Justine said not to worry about the monster, he thought, going through the door that would eventually take him to the infirmary. I didn’t tell anyone.
He looked back into the cloister, at the frenzy of robed figures pacing in the snow. The Demagogue was the only other person who knew. Did he tell someone?
Avery said not to listen, so the Holy Child wasn’t going to. His old guards always said he knew too much for a child his age. Maybe that was why he always felt so nervous all the time. Because he knew things he wasn’t supposed to. Even worse were the things he had done. He couldn’t talk of them, either.
There were two infirmaries in Pyra. The first was in the central terminal, the main, open to the public area of the abbey, and the second near the private quarters, on the third floor. Isla Taggart lived alone, in an unfurnished room—unfurnished because she rejected all materialistic things. The room sat beside the third floor infirmary that was for, as the Demagogue had put it, the “important people.” Supposedly, Isla was training to be a doctor, but she actually spent most of her time trying to convert patients to her beliefs.
The Holy Child grinned as he put the people’s gossip out of his mind. He stopped, cracked open his journal, and made a correction to Isla’s page. After “Taggart” he wrote “the Torturer,” because that was what her patients called her after being forced to listen to her for hours on end.
He shut the journal and hurried to the infirmary. It was open, but the staff inside were asleep at their desks. Under the cover of their snores, he slipped in, crouched low, and scampered past. There were only a few patients resting in the infirmary today, but they were out cold.
Mother Abbess Justine had told him there was another hiding place he could use. It sat at the back of the infirmary, in the corner, behind a grate everyone seemed to have forgotten was there. It used to be a vent from the Old World, she told him. Most of the remodeling to Pyra had cut it off from where it used to go, but if he crawled inside it and went right, left, and right again, he would end up in Isla Taggart’s room, under her bed.
Justine had been very specific about when he should carry out his special mission. He had to be in the vent, under her bed, by sunrise. So he padded across the infirmary’s frigid floor, found the grate. Carefully, he gripped the heavy, metal covering and pulled it away. It shrieked shrilly as he worked it out of the wall. Heart pounding, he was almost certain the sound would give him away. But he remembered his page on the doctors of Pyra and their fondness for sedatives.
“Too easy,” he mumbled, sliding into the vent backward. He grabbed the grate and lodged it into place. “All too easy.”
The vent was cramped, uneven. He curled into a ball and turned himself around. Right, left, right. Easy enough. It didn’t look like he could go anywhere else, anyway. Every other direction was caved in or cut off somehow. Right, left, right, he went. He saw light, and also, shadows.
The Holy Child found the grate Justine had told him about and camped out in front of it. He opened his journal to Isla Taggart the Torturer’s page and pressed his pen to the paper. He saw her shadow on the opposite wall. Her legs dropped over the side of the bed. She was awake, but she wasn’t doing anything. Reading, maybe? One of her favorite hobbies was to read about issues from the Old World and use them to invent new problems for this world.
Did she find out about the monster? Did she tell everyone? The Holy Child started writing down a description of Isla’s room. It was a stark, stone, square of a room. There were a lot of dirty clothes everywhere, and a lot of books, too. I bet she did. That’s why Justine wanted me to spy on her. She had several mirrors in her room as well, but they were so caked with dried makeup they reflected very little.
Why before sunrise, though? He noted the single portrait on the wall, sitting higher on it than the icon of Penance. It was of her, and only her, and though he thought she was pretty in person, in the portrait, she had been made ugly.
As the Holy Child lifted his eyes from the journal, he noticed a second shadow beside Isla’s on the wall. It was coming out of hers. He heard the bed creak, saw it sag a little, as though someone had just sat on it. But no one had entered the room since he got here.
“I have to be quick,” a woman who wasn’t Isla said. She sounded scared, thirsty.
And then Isla did speak, but in a whisper. “How did you…?”
“Will you help me now?”
“Yes, of course. Have you told anyone else? If you have, I won’t.”
The woman sighed. Whoever she was, she sounded fed-up with Isla’s selfishness. “What does it matter?”
“Because we have to do this right, or no one will believe you.”
The bed shifted again. Two legs dropped over the edge, beside Isla’s. They were bare; dark green bruises ran up the backs of them.
Isla continued. “You have to show me how you do it.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Part of the deal, Audra.”
Audra? The Holy Child started writing frantically on the page, the sound of his pen’s scratching growing louder and louder.
“This was a mistake.” The women pulled up her legs. Her shadow started to draw closer to Isla’s.
“No! Where are you going?” Isla dropped from the bed, her feet falling into a pile of expensive, crumpled undergarments. “We have to do this right. I can’t just come out and say it.”
“I’m Audra of Eldrus!” Audra shouted. “Your city has been keeping me prisoner for years! You don’t think that won’t get anyone’s attention?”
The Holy Child’s eyes went wide as Audra’s shadow disappeared into Isla’s. Audra? From Eldrus? He started backing away, down the vent. That doesn’t make sense. The royal family of Eldrus… they’re all supposed to be dead.
CHAPTER II
The Holy Child had to run as fast as he could to get back into bed before it was time to do his daily duties. As he tore through Pyra, ditched his disguise in the hiding place, and snuck through the Ascent, he found himself slowing down as he thought about this woman who claimed to be Audra. Obviously, that was what Justine had wanted him to record. So did she know a surviving member of the royal family of Eldrus was staying here? Or was it just a lucky guess?
The Holy Child turned the corner, clipped Avery as he did so, burst into his room, and threw the covers over his head. Ten seconds later, Avery and a sniffling Mackenzie came to collect him.
“Still have a little blush on your cheeks,” Mackenzie said. She took out her handkerchief and cleaned him up. “Learn anything juicy today?”
The Holy Child got out of bed and let Avery dress him in his sacred robe. He nodded and, barely paying attention to them, said, “Oh, yeah. Definitely.”
The Holy Child had several tasks he had to complete every single day. They began with breakfast, where he, Justine, the six exemplars, and almost everyone else in Pyra sat down and ate together in the gathering hall. But before they could eat, they had to listen to him share any news he had received from god during the night. Most of the time, he just made something up on the spot—god wasn’t exactly a chatterbox—but here and there, Justine would pull him aside and tell him what to talk about.
Given the chaos in the cloister today, it was no surprise to the Holy Child that, after his guards left the room, Mother Abbess Justine entered, a look of concern etched upon her usually warm and inviting face. She wore a long, hooded, light blue dress that shimmered when she walked, and white gloves that looked as pure as the snow outside. He didn’t know as much about Justine as he would have liked, but he did know that she often dressed opposite to how she felt that day. According to her, it reminded her to “try harder.”
“I want to hear about Isla Taggart, I do,” she said, noticing how antsy he looked on his bed. “But god has spoken, and had a lot to say.” Her pale skin became flushed. She started to pace back and forth. “It’s about the monster in the West.”
The Holy Child nodded. “Someone spilled the beans?”
“It takes a long time for news to reach Penance when it’s not coming from god directly.” She stopped, combed her fingers through her long, brown hair. “That’s a good thing. We don’t need gossip and lies out here, in our cold wilderness. The monster was in the West, but not anymore.”
The Holy Child stood up. He felt his heart quicken. “Where is it?” His shoulders tightened, in preparation for the bad things about to come.
She waved her hand for him to sit, and he sat. She took a seat beside him. “In Gallows.”
Up close, she always looked sickly to him, her skin moist and almost translucent. Up close, she smelled strange, too. She did smell good, most of the time, but behind the perfume, there was always a pungent odor, like burning wood.
“Gallows? That’s all the way across the continent.”
“The monster made it there is no time.” She took his hand and squeezed it. She did this a lot, to borrow his courage. “It’s dead now.”
His eyes went wide and he exclaimed, “That’s great!”
Justine shook her head, a bit of her hair brushing his arm. “No, because now people think the monster is our fault.”
The Holy Child raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
She closed her eyes and nodded. “Because they think we made it.”
“What?” His hand started to shake. She squeezed it harder, giving him some of her strength. “What? Did we?”
“No,” she said. “No, Eldrus did. That’s what we’re going to tell everyone today.”
“But did they?” He searched her face for signs of a lie, but as always, she was unreadable.
Sounding sterner, she said, “That’s what we’re going to tell everyone today.”
Breakfast always began with a prayer, but the Holy Child was afraid to give it today, because he knew he would sound afraid. He sat at the front of the gathering hall, at the small table he shared with Mother Abbess Justine. To their left and right, two longer tables ran, where three of the six exemplars occupied each. He didn’t mind talking to them. It was the rest of Pyra—the priests, nuns, staff, students, and various visitors—now seated before him that made him scared. There had to be at least one hundred people here today. How could he say something that would make all of them feel at ease?
“You’ll do fine,” Justine whispered, leaning into him. “You always do.”
The Holy Child nodded, swallowed hard, and came to his feet. As soon as he did, the rest of Pyra went silent and fixed their eyes on him. After all, he was as close as they could get to god. The respect they had for him wasn’t necessarily earned, but understood.
“To the almighty lor
d who watches over us, we give our thanks and praise. For this day and those days to come, lend us your guidance and your love, so that we may serve you faithfully and honor through action your teachings. To those who do not yet know of your love or have refused it, be merciful, for in time, they shall know it and accept it wholly. We are your servants, and by the bones of your blessings, we shall bring to life the parts of the Earth that have withered without your grace. Through hell, we find heaven. And through heaven, we find you. So let us suffer and make better those who have suffered, so that we may be strong enough to sit at your side. To the almighty lord who watches over us, we give our thanks and praise. We shall honor you at every moment of every hour of this joyous day. Amen.”
As those gathered said “Amen,” the Holy Child took a drink of water. Prayer always managed to parch his throat. Looking out across the gathering hall, he saw everyone was on the edge of their seats, waiting for him to address what Justine had called the ‘Red Worm.” He started guzzling the water, his thoughts turning to escape. Between the age of five and his current age of eleven, he had spoken to most of these same people every day during this time. He wasn’t good at math, but he didn’t need to be to know that should’ve been enough time to be prepared for this moment when he, not Justine, finally gave the people his first bit of bad news.
Will they hate me? He looked at the exemplars, both tables, and set down his cup. Will they turn on me? A monster had killed all of Geharra, some Night Terror village of Alluvia, and ravaged most of Gallows, on behalf of King Edgar of Eldrus, yet here he was, worrying about himself. He felt like Isla Taggart; that is, selfish and sick.
“Forgive me,” he began. His leg started to shake. Justine touched his knee and it calmed. “God has spoken to me. It is dark news I bring to you today. But by the light of the lord’s words, we will lift this darkness and see the truth for what it is.”
The Holy Child’s confidence began to return. Like always, once he started speaking, he became eloquent and fearless. People would often compliment him on his speeches, but he couldn’t accept their praises. When he spoke as well as he did, it was because god was inside him, guiding him. Benefit, he assumed, of being the lord’s chosen speaker.
