Page 33 of Holy Wrath
T he gentle patter of rain on glass pulls me from sleep. When I blink my eyes open, gray daylight floods the chapel, tinted gold by the flickering lamp on a nearby pew. I turn over onto my side, wincing in pain at the healing wounds on my back and the stiffness in my joints. I search the chamber for Nyatrix but find only an empty bedroll beside mine.
Snippets of the prior evening swarm my mind, and my face reddens. Suddenly my dress, draped over me like a blanket, is far too hot. I push away the woolen folds—still stained with my dead fiancé’s blood—and sit up.
At that precise moment, with my untidy hair falling around my shoulders in messy waves, the sleeve of my shift slipping from my shoulder, Nyatrix appears in the chapel’s doorway. She pauses there, her dark gaze falling on me. I watch soundlessly as her breath hitches, her lips slightly parted. Something about her expression is vaguely dazed, unfocused, for a moment.
But then her features sharpen and she stalks forward. “Morning,” she offers. “How are you feeling?”
There is an ease in my body, regardless of the stiffness and the wounds, a looseness deep inside of me that I cannot name. “Better,” I say before I can stop myself. “Better than I have felt in a long time.”
A sly, secretive smile curves her beautiful mouth as she draws closer. Her gaze slides to my chest before she tears her eyes away, kneeling by her bedroll. I blush and realize my shift has slipped low on my breasts. Scrambling, I reach for the buttons at my back to pull the fabric higher and tighter.
“No need to make yourself decent on my account,” comes Nyatrix’s voice, soft as silk. I look over to find her crouched, tying up her bedroll, all lethal power beneath dark cloth. “I prefer you indecent, as it were.”
My face burns and I duck my head, finishing the buttons at my back. I say nothing; I have questions that I don’t know how to ask. Feelings that I don’t know how to name. I understand that Nyatrix tried to help me, did me a favor of sorts, and I don’t want to press it any further. I’m sure she has no lasting interest in me—a Host woman lacking any skill with a blade, possessing none of the traits someone like her surely finds worthwhile. I should be thankful for last night, and I am.
The truth is just that I want so much more. Haven’t I always constantly yearned for things I cannot have? Am I not used to the ache?
“Will we reach Liminalia today?” I ask instead, reaching for my cane. I steady it on the stone floor and prepare to haul myself to my feet, but I feel Nyatrix’s hand on my shoulder.
“Do you prefer to do it that way?” she inquires. The scent of asphodels overwhelms me. “Or would you like help?”
“I’m used to sort of rolling myself out of bed,” I admit, looking up at her, my face reddening even further. “So, yes. I suppose help would be good.”
I make suggestions of where Nyatrix can hold me that will hurt the least and support me the most. She follows my instructions seamlessly, somehow intuitively aware of how much or how little pressure to apply, when to exert her own strength or just support me. In a few moments, I’m on my feet and lacing the front of my dress. I shuffle to the pew to put my boots on.
“Yes,” Nyatrix says, breaking the silence as she adjusts her sword belt. “To answer your question. We’ll reach Liminalia today.”
Fear and excitement tumble through my veins, though dread twists in my gut. What if all that awaits me is a necropolis, a place no better than Lumendei? What if I feel that same endless weight on my shoulders—never good enough, never devout enough, never beautiful enough—just from a different source?
I try my best to shake the thoughts away, rising to my feet.
“Ready?” she asks.
I nod, and she extends her hand to me. I hesitate, but then I take it, a thrill racing through me as her long fingers close around my smaller palm.
“There’s a series of tunnels and catacombs we’ll be passing through,” the knight explains, directing me to the mouth of the chapel. We walk up the aisle together, stepping over shards of the nameless Saint to whom this place once belonged. “We’ll remain underground until just outside Liminalia’s gates. Hopefully it’ll be easier for you, but please don’t hesitate to tell me when you need a break.”
I nod and say nothing, following her out of the chapel and into one of the main corridors, biting down on my lip. I wonder if her offer is just a test of my weakness, if she knows I’ve been hiding the pain and pushing forward, like any mammal would, afraid to expose its ineptitude to the rest of the pack.
The Lupa Nox leads me through more of the broken archetype of my home. We move through passageways and tunnels that I don’t believe exist in my Lumendei—or perhaps I just tell myself that, because the thought of a spiderweb such as this running beneath my feet for almost thirty anni fills me with a terror I have no room for.
“I’ve been thinking...” she says as we walk through a massive catacomb. Stone tombs covered in dust seem to stretch for an unfathomable distance. The ceiling is tall and vaulted, painted black and decorated with gold medallions. “What if the Lumendei you knew was an illusion? Powered by this sword?”
I frown, distracted by the quiet tombs. In my home, we don’t bury our dead. Instead, they’re offered up at the altar of the First Son and then given to the flame. There’s just not enough room for consecrated ground. Even the remaining cemeteries in the Lower Wards are covered with ramshackle housing, filled to the brim with young infantry and their families.
“I don’t feel any Mysterium from it,” I say automatically, and then immediately clamp my jaw shut. I’ve told no one about my sense for Blessings, how I can feel the thrum even though the Saints have not chosen me. I scoff at myself. No, not the Saints—the First Son.
“Me neither,” Nyatrix says. I look over at her in shock, but she’s already examining me, sly as a fox. “You, too, then? You can feel it, the vibration?”
We reach the end of the tomb. I say nothing as she helps me up a short flight of stairs in a tight tunnel of ancient stone. When we reach a corridor, wide and blank, its farthest reaches shadowed in black, I glance over at Nyatrix. She is harder to deny in the lamplight. Her ears knife through her hair, and her jaw is sharp in a way that makes me weak.
I let out an audible sigh and then blush. “Yes, I can feel it,” I manage eventually. “I can’t work Mysterium, though.”
“What about the violets and Renault’s fingers?” Nyatrix asks. “I didn’t feel Mysterium when you healed his hand, but it had to be, right?”
“I don’t know,” I murmur, the honest truth. “There is so much I don’t understand.” I pause, my head feeling as though it’s been stuffed with cotton, and lean against the stone wall. My hip aches, and the wounds on my back sting bitterly.
Nyatrix halts and turns to face me in one easy movement, the lamp swinging in her hand. “Are you all right?” she inquires, peering at me in the gloom.
“My hip,” I explain, closing my eyes, unable to witness her disgust or rebuke. “The dead weight of my leg causes my hip a lot of pain. And my wounds are beginning to sting again. Nothing like before, but it’s just a bit much.”
It’s all far too much. I watched Renault die—someone whom, regardless of his betrayal, I’ve held dear for most of my adult life. I can work a power that isn’t Mysterium and that I pray isn’t goetia, either. And then, of course, there’s the trouble of how everything I’ve ever believed has been torn from me in one fell swoop.
Nyatrix hums, and for a wild, strange moment, despite my turmoil, I wonder what it would be like to have my mouth against hers and taste that sweet vibration, feel the friction of her lips in my entire body. I swallow and shove the thought away, opening my eyes to find her close in the torchlight, holding the lamp near my face as if to examine me.
“I have more salve,” she offers. “Could you hold the lamp? Or is there a ledge?”
I feel around behind me, my fingertips meeting sand and dust, then an alcove. I direct her to it, and then she’s rummaging through the small pouch hanging from her belt.
“Turn around, if you would, little dove,” the Lupa Nox instructs, her mouth a sinful curve, her voice pitched in that husky register that makes every drop of blood in my body pound ferociously.
I let out a sharp exhale that’s intensified by the empty stone hallways before turning and offering up my back. With one hand, I sweep my hair off my neck and then loosen the ties of my dress. This caretaking is practiced now, and I relax into it—her deadly hands undoing my shift, her breath ghosting the nape of my neck, her fingertips massaging salve into my wounds.
It is impossible not to think of last night, the way she brought me pleasure untold. How can one creature be so intimate with both death and desire?
The object of my contemplation finishes dressing my wounds and begins to button up my shift. When she’s done, I turn to face her, retying the front of my dress.
Nyatrix’s fingertips brush my jaw. I look up, my heartbeat rabbit-quick, to find her gazing at me with something I do not understand in her eyes.
“Now that I’ve seen you,” she whispers, tilting her head, “it’s much easier to believe a goddess walks this cursed soil again.”
My body pitches toward her of its own accord. She doesn’t hesitate: one of her arms wraps around my waist, pressing our hips, our bellies, our breasts together. Her hand opens, fingers splayed across the small of my back. I tilt my chin up, some instinct I didn’t know I had, as she traces the line of my jaw, fingertips trailing down my throat. I shiver and, oh-so-tentatively, raise my hand to her collarbone, just peeking out from her blouse.
When I touch her skin, Nyatrix slips one of her muscular thighs between mine. That keening place between my legs awakens all at once, throbbing with sharp-toothed insistence.
“If Vitalia has indeed returned,” she murmurs, fingertips sweeping across my chest, “surely She looks just like you.”
I flinch at the name of one of the Creatrixes, a string of syllables we were taught never to utter, lest we draw the attention of the dark goddesses. My breathing grows rapid as Nyatrix bows her head over me in the same way I might inside a confessional. Words dance on the tip of my tongue, but I do not say them. I cannot encompass what I feel, cannot wrestle together a sentence that manages to even come close.
A scattering of sounds at the far end of the corridor—the direction from which we came—draws our attention. Nyatrix disentangles herself from me in an instant, all predator as her hand goes for the hilt of her sword. I hold still, wondering if I should extinguish the lantern.
A hiss of some kind, trilling at the end with excitement, echoes down the corridor. Fear replaces the fire in my veins, all ice-cold instead of molten heat.
“Hexen,” Nyatrix whispers. “But how, this far into the ruins?”
Her head snaps to me, and for a moment I’m terrified.
“Your gown ,” she says. “The blood.”
Horror floods me, shame wrapping its familiar hands around my neck. I stutter out nonsense as Nyatrix, for some reason, kneels at my feet. “I’m so sorry,” I whimper, tightening my hands into fists, awaiting her rejection. “Nyatrix, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
She looks up at me, pulling a knife from her belt and throwing it into the darkness without taking her eyes from mine. In the dead silence, I can hear the thunk as the blade finds flesh, followed by a screech. “Of course you didn’t,” she says, gathering up my skirts in her hands. “I should’ve known. It’s my fault, if it’s anyone’s at all. Sorry about your dress.”
With that, she produces another knife and tears a jagged cut into my skirts. For a long moment, I don’t understand, until I see by the dancing lamplight that she’s removing the parts of the fabric with Renault’s bloodstains. She balls it up and launches to her full height, lobbing the wool down the hall. A chorus of shrieks follows, sending chills down my spine.
“Okay,” she says, turning back to me. “I’m going to carry you. Don’t see much of a choice.”
Wide-eyed, I nod my permission, clutching my cane close to my chest. And then I’m yet again in the arms of the Lupa Nox, fleeing farther and farther into the unknown dark.
N ight has long since descended when we emerge into open air. I’m half-asleep, still tucked against Nyatrix’s chest, and barely notice the difference. But then the wind whips at my hair and I stir, opening my eyes.
“Almost there,” she murmurs, her gait changing from the smooth strides she took on the relatively even floor of the tunnels to the jagged walk as she battles sandy footing.
I look around, but only a sliver of moonlight peeks through the heavy clouds, and Nyatrix appears to have left the lantern behind in the ruined citadel’s tunnels and tombs.
“I didn’t realize Liminalia and Old Lumendei were so close,” I say, surprised, my eyes roving the dark velvet of night, unable to make out much.
“They’re not,” she replies, letting out a low grunt as she scales a particularly steep hill. The Godwinds are still present here, but they’re much less ferocious, no Nocturnes whispering in my ear with the voice of my mother. “When Old Lumendei was ravaged, we searched for survivors and mapped most of what remained. Since then, we’ve been using it as a shelter in the Sundered Lands and have dug out tunnels to make passage easier.”
I nod absentmindedly, nervously glancing about for more Hexen. But Nyatrix moves confidently through the dimness, like she’s cut from the same fabric as the night itself. I cling to her and hope she will bear me through to the morning.
We trudge across the sands, which grow firmer and rockier with each step. Soon, I see a gleam in the distance—like moonlight on water. As we approach, ramparts of dark stone materialize out of the night. Banners hang down the sides, I think, though all I can make out is the silver embroidery: the Sepulchyre emblem of four skulls piled, one on top of the other, with a spear driven through the bones. I can’t help myself; I shudder.
I have been in a kind of purgatory since that first plunge from Lumendei’s balconies, but I feel it intently now. There is little but the heat of the Lupa Nox, the rise and fall of her breath, the soft whisper of the fading Godwinds, and the slowly approaching city of doom. The clouds above us part and, all at once, I see the Sepulchyre’s city gate.
Its metal is like tarnished silver, blackened with age, a sweep of spires and spikes. The design is unearthly, chaotic, and somehow incredibly beautiful. The gate is held aloft by two massive pillars. Made, of course, of bone.
Bones upon bones upon bones, all gleaming mad and ravenous in the moonlight. To worship the Creatrixes is to worship death. Perhaps I am more like the Liminalians than I realize, clinging to the muscular shoulders of a creature who seems born to usher death into the world, to deliver that final, glorious blow.
“The Ossuary Gate is a bit much, in my opinion,” Nyatrix says, a complete contradiction to my thoughts. I dare to raise my head from her chest and look up at her expression. Her nose is wrinkled, the turn of her mouth wry. “It’s not the bones of your people, if you’re thinking that. It’s Sepulchyre folk. By giving their remains to the city gates when they die, they believe they’re strengthening the protective Blessings placed by our priestesses.”
“What do you believe?” I ask, my words nearly torn away by the Godwinds.
She glances down at me for a moment, and then her gaze returns to the difficult, rocky terrain she’s navigating. “I don’t know,” is all she offers me, her tone contemplative and a little sad.
The truth hits me then, the turmoil of my own heart rolled over to show its soft underbelly to the world.
“Nor,” I admit for the first time aloud, “do I.” And there it is: Ophelia Foundling of Lumendei, a blasphemer. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.
Nyatrix says nothing, but her hand tightens on my arm, fingers curling in as if to provide a comforting squeeze. Little the Lupa Nox does with her body provides me any comfort—instead it reignites that fire smoldering deep in my belly.
“I’m taking us straight to my rooms,” she tells me, swerving to the left, away from the gates and toward the towering rampart walls. I can see now that the base, too, is made of bones. I set my jaw. “We’ll explain ourselves in the morning. I have a friend whom I trust to look at your wounds, if you’ll permit it.”
I hesitate, my throat constricting. I have little idea how Sepulchyre city-folk will react to finding a Host woman in their midst, a Saintess medallion still strung about her neck. And it’s not even as though Nyatrix has brought back some brave, strong warrior of rare beauty, capable of dealing death with a single blow, burning bright with the Mysteries. She’s returned home with a fractured piece of a woman, capable of little and weak in every sense of the word.
“That is all right,” I concede, my voice small. I feel her take a deep breath, her chest moving against my shoulder, and wonder if she’s going to say something else. I wonder if I’m going to say something—going to ask the questions on the tip of my tongue.
But we continue in silence, making our way to the base of Liminalia’s walls. Up close, rocky soil and short, parched shrubbery line the ramparts, a low earthen slope forming an embankment into which the thousands and thousands of bones are set. They’re hardly the gleaming shields of silver I saw from afar, gilded by the moonlight. Instead, the bones are cracked, bloodstained, yellowed with age, weathered by the elements.
“Can you stand for a moment?” Nyatrix asks me.
I nod, and she sets me down, making sure I have a good grip on my cane. Then she turns to the wall and runs her fingers down the bones. One skull she pushes in, ever so slightly, and a femur bone gets twisted to the left. A tibia is pulled out by a hair’s breadth, and finally, she lays her hand flat against a second skull.
Mysterium thrums, and then a door opens, revealing a patch of warm, yellowed light in the grayscale world.
Nyatrix turns to me, eyes narrowed. “Probably should’ve blindfolded you,” she remarks in a casual, amicable way that makes my chest swell with the thought we might, at the very least, have some kind of budding friendship. How I yearn for it; I feel the loss of Carina like a dull ache in my temples, my chest, my hands.
“Probably,” I murmur with a shrug.
Her beautiful mouth curves into a smile and I am lost. I would dedicate my bones in her honor, leave my body to strengthen her walls, fall upon her sword to keep her safe.
The Lupa Nox extends her hand to me, and I take it. Together, we walk into the seat of the Sepulchyre and every single thing I have been taught to fear.