Scribe IV didn’t experience any of the dizziness or nausea that Quin St. John seemed to when he was pulled through space, snapped from one location to the other by Angel. It was disorienting though, to be one moment in the tower and the next outside the Bastion’s walls, standing near the ruins of the labyrinth. It left a faint ringing in his ears. Angel, however, looked delighted.
Xyr appearance had changed again, skin like basalt rock, cracked with veins of lava. When xe turned to grin at Scribe IV, xyr eyes were gold. Tiny flames danced among the strands of xyr hair. Xe wore an oversized beige trench coat, and xyr feet were bare despite the rough surface underfoot.
They stepped into the labyrinth together. Scribe IV recalled the last time the gardens and the labyrinth had been used for their original purpose, the rising chant as lines of novices and initiates, monks and nuns and priests wound their way through the twisting paths, censers and flickering beeswax candles in hand, the weight of ritual in the air. Once upon a time, they had elevated saints and made gods in this labyrinth. They had bound demons here, too, devoured their flesh and called it holy.
Two of the three moons had set while he and Angel were speaking in his tower. As on Heaven’s Ark, traditional cycles of day and night didn’t fully apply; the Bastion rarely saw actual sunlight. Not to mention that Scribe IV himself had no need of sleep. He hoped that Dominic had managed to rest at least, and Quin as well.
With the moons settling, the sky lightened, something approaching dawn, with the faintest blush of pale green behind a layer of clouds. Even abandoned, there was still a wild kind of beauty to the place. Porous stones rose like worn teeth, the ways between them winding arcane symbols over the landscape. Salt-eaten and wind-scoured, he could still see some of the original designs etched and painted on the stone.
Lichen grew on the rocks; other patches were spattered white with bird shit. Here and there, tiny star-shaped flowers with white and yellow petals pushed up through the stone.
Scribe IV stopped at the edge of what had once been the Chalice, in the deepest part of the labyrinth. Now it looked like a half-collapsed pit chewed into the stone. The clever system of pipes that had once fed it water from the sea had long been left to crumble, leaving it empty and dry.
Wind sighed over the stone, the pocks in the surface deep enough in some places to make a mournful sound – air across a dozen open mouths. The flames of Angel’s hair shivered. Scribe IV turned, surveying the stone around them, looking for anything out of place.
“I contemplated the priesthood once,” Scribe IV said.
He wasn’t sure what made him say it, only that he’d been turning Angel’s questions over in his mind. Why did you come here? Why did you stay? If you weren’t this, what would you be?
“What stopped you?” Angel asked.
“The age-old debate over the nature and existence of the soul.” It sounded strange, saying it aloud. Even admitting there was a controversy – or heresy, some would say – felt like giving it weight. Acknowledgment wasn’t the same as belief, wasn’t the same as aligning himself with one doctrine or another, but still. The fact that he couldn’t dismiss the arguments that his mere existence was blasphemous, the fact that he’d ultimately chosen not to enter the priesthood, sometimes made him feel like a traitor to his own kind.
“Do you know that when the Scribe models were first introduced there was a call to destroy us? At worst, we were demonic – at best, an advanced form of mimeograph machine. How could we fail to taint the prayers of the faithful with our hands? We could copy them with great precision, translate and archive them flawlessly, tirelessly, but could we understand the nature of a prayer? How could a being without a soul be even a small part of the vast machinery of the church that stands between common humanity and Heaven, without bringing the whole of said machinery crashing down?”
“Humans are absurd,” Angel said, an unshakable pronouncement of truth, which drew a startled sound from Scribe IV that might almost be categorized as a laugh.
“Yes, I suppose they are.” He shook his head. “But still, even with the ratification by the Council of Erebus – and even though I would have been far from the first constructed being to take the sacred vows – I decided I didn’t want to live with that doubt.”
“Yours, or other people’s?” Angel asked.
He opened his mouth to respond, but the words went unsaid, forgotten. Scribe IV bent to look at the white droplets spattering the rocks at his feet – beads of candlewax, not bird shit.
He crouched, and Angel crouched beside him, touching a finger to one of the drops.
“Look.” A note of excitement crept into Angel’s voice as xe pointed. “The dirt here is disturbed, like it’s been swept around deliberately to hide footprints. Maybe someone camped here and left in a hurry. They could have left something else behind.”
Xe stood, winding xyr way toward the other side of the labyrinth, and Scribe IV followed.
“If someone did camp here, they could have used the tunnels under the Bastion to get inside,” Scribe IV said. It was only open ground between the labyrinth and Bastion otherwise, all visible from multiple points, including his own tower. “Part of the system connects to the pipes that used to feed the Chalice. Even if that is the case though, they probably would have needed help from inside. Sections of the tunnels are collapsed and to the best of my knowledge, there’s no official map showing which are safe.”
“Who among the staff would know the tunnels well?” Angel asked.
“Dominic,” Scribe IV answered. “Agnetta too – she’s the Chambermaid. And the Chatelaine.” Scribe IV paused, feeling a flicker of guilt. “She claims not to like going down there. The Head Butler, as well.”
“Would any of those people have a specific motive, a way they would be directly threatened or impacted by the conclave?” Angel asked.
“I… don’t know.”
He tried to think beyond his own biases, tried to recall what he knew of his staff beyond their work at the Bastion. Marius had a brother in the clergy; that might provide a motive of sorts. Dominic had said Johanna didn’t like the Pope, but did he know that for a fact, or was it conjecture? Dominic liked to gather gossip, anything to relieve the boredom of days at the Bastion where nothing ever changed. He might have overheard something in the days leading up to the conclave.
It struck Scribe IV again that he’d asked the wrong questions of the boy, that he shouldn’t have been the one to question him at all. He didn’t want to believe any of the Bastion staff could be capable of murder, even those he didn’t care for, who didn’t care for him. But desperation could drive people to do terrible things. And faith could, as well.
“What’s that?” Angel pointed, pulling Scribe IV away from his grim thought. “That looks like something that could have been left behind, maybe.”
Scribe IV looked to see something half-flattened that had been wedged into a gap in the stone. Hidden, dropped or accidentally kicked into place. He bent to pry it out, holding it up in the weird green light for Angel to see.
A metallic cylinder, not much longer than the space between the heel of his palm and the tip of his middle finger, cracked, perhaps where a careless boot had stepped on it.
Or where someone had tried to destroy evidence and, in their haste, done a poor job.
A faint tracery of numbers and letters remained visible upon its shattered side. “It looks like a container,” Scribe IV said. “And this looks like a serial number, or at least part of one.”
“It could be a clue.” Enthusiasm had returned to Angel’s voice, but Scribe IV couldn’t shake a feeling of dread.
“Or it could be from the supplies delivered for the conclave,” he said.
“What would it be doing near the labyrinth, then?” Angel asked. “Call it another hunch, but it seems out of place. If we can trace the serial number, maybe we can confirm what used to be in the container, and where it came from.”
Xe grinned, spirit undampened. The wind picked up as they stepped around the last curve of the labyrinth and out onto the open cliffside again. It made Angel’s hair crackle, whipping flames briefly into a streaming banner.
A figure stood between them and the path back to the Bastion. A figure that startled, before drawing herself up. Scribe IV recognized the silhouette – the Mother Superior. From her reaction, she hadn’t come looking for them specifically. Searching for clues of her own then, or – the grim thought struck him – come to inspect the Chalice, to prepare it for a Drowning.
With a quick motion of his fingers, Scribe IV wedged the broken tube between the metallic bones of his forearm, dropping his sleeve to cover it and hoping she was too far away to see. He tried not to stand in a way that conveyed tension as the Sister approached.
“You are aware there is a curfew in effect?” the Mother Superior said.
“Yes.” Scribe IV shifted closer to Angel. Xe had promised to protect him, but that didn’t stop the fear clinging to his skin, sure as the salt-laden breeze. “I lost track of time. Apologies, Sister.”
A blatant lie. His construction made it impossible to do something so human as to lose track of time, as he was certain the Mother Superior was well aware. The shape of her jaw was such that the Mother Superior couldn’t press her lips into a thin line, nor hum her disapproval, but he felt it radiating from her nonetheless.
Scribe IV imagined another waterspout, called from the waves. He could almost hear the sound his bones would make, torn apart, the hidden cylinder revealed. He didn’t have lungs, couldn’t technically Drown, but he didn’t doubt the Sisters’ capacity for ingenuity in their cruelty.
The Mother Superior’s gaze was fixed on him. Scribe IV held himself still. The singularity of her focus was unsettling, but the longer it went on, the more certain Scribe IV became that she wasn’t waiting for him to crack. She was trying not to see Angel.
It was easy to ignore certain realities of divinity, to put forth your own interpretations of right and wrong, when your own god had been sleeping for countless years. It was much harder to ignore those realities when an angel was staring you right in the face.
Scribe IV met the Sister’s eyes with somewhat less trepidation than he had a moment before.
“Is there anything else I might do for you, Sister? Were you in need of something, to be out here in the rising weather?”
The Mother Superior glared at him, or tried, but she couldn’t quite hide her discomfort.
“You are aware that the Bastion is under the Sisterhood’s full control, and that anyone failing to report even the most seemingly insignificant detail would, by their act of omission, be considered an accessory to the crime?” she said.
Her gaze, imperious and steady, didn’t have the effect she intended. Not anymore. Scribe IV found himself amused. He could see even more clearly now how uncomfortable the Sister was. Angel made her nervous, and her threat fell flat.
“I am aware, Sister.” He kept his tone neutral. “And I apologize for our violation of your curfew, but as neither of us are human and neither of us sleep, I thought it might be permissible to pass the time by showing my guest the grounds.”
Scribe IV saw the Mother Superior flinch as he drew her attention to Angel’s presence.
Beside him, Angel stretched. It was the only word Scribe IV could think to describe what he felt. Xe didn’t move physically, but Angel expanded, as though part of xem now existed in the rocky ground on which they stood, in the air around them, perhaps even in the sea below the cliffs.
And if he could feel it, surely the Mother Superior could feel it too.
“Don’t worry,” Angel said, placing xemself directly in the Mother Superior’s eyeline. “I’ll see us both back inside safely.”
The sweet innocence with which xe said it was belied by the tension Scribe IV felt where xyr hand rested on his shoulder. A subtle vibration, the effort of holding xemself back. The Mother Superior blanched. Her religious practice might not include angels, but she understood what angels were, what they could do. Her belief was not required. Angels were, and had always been, terrible things.
Angel’s fingers curled subtly, whisking xemself and Scribe IV back inside the Bastion, letting their presence linger just long enough to see fear written clearly on the Mother Superior’s face. It was immensely satisfying.