“Does she speak Messaii?” queried the priest, to which the bishop glanced, his beetley eyes suggesting that it was time.
“I do,” said the singer. “Everyone in Eemah speaks the Messah tongue. We—”
The gruff knight stepped forward and cut her words short, forcing the wind from her lips with a fist to the belly. Jezebel doubled over, and Adnihilo’s voice rose, and the knight put him down as well—a clout to the ear and a boot on his back to keep him docile.
“Quiet! Saint Paul wasn’t speaking to you, half-bred whore. And you,” he continued, digging his heel into Adnihilo’s hide, “move a hand and I’ll have it off.” The knight reached for the sword at his hip, but the priest reached him first and grasped him by the wrist.
“Sir Holland.”
The knight fell silent, and a chill settled in the air as the high-priest, the arch-bishop, the great saint of holy Messai stared bedeviling into the small, dark eyes of the Temple Guardsman. Sir Holland’s face grew heavy with humiliation, weighing towards the floor as he spake, “Forgive me, Saint Paul. Your Holiness, I let this witch get to my temper.”
“Leave us. Go and ensure the preparations are underway. I’ll be inspecting them myself shortly. I expect the baptismal fonts to be full by my arrival.”
The knight took his foot from the half-blood and knelt, then stood again and vacated the chamber, muttering obscenities as he passed the bishop and glaring at the enameled knight as he vanished into the corridor. The sounds of his boots echoed angrily from afar.
The saint sighed. He looked more tired than annoyed, weary from the weight of his thick, broad shoulders, large even for a laborer half his age. He turned to the bishop, the slightest cave shaping his back. “At last, that ass is gone. I should have listened to you all those years ago. Holland was a mistake. Hell, I’d trade any of those useless fools for your Gildmane. Three captives by himself—my guards would have butchered them. Then what would I have to show for the Purge?” He paused and examined the singer more closely. “And what is it that I have, exactly? You were saying, Ba’al?”
The clergyman’s neck contorted on his shoulders, popping and snapping, relaxing his jaw and his lips and his tongue. “The Witch of Babylon, that’s what you’re looking at. Tricked old David into letting her enter his flock pretending to be an Impii convert. She would have turned the whole assembly against God had we not come down on her. She’s confessed as much to me already, though I’m sure you’d like to hear it for yourself.” He waited for the saint to look away, winked at the singer, then at the enameled knight.
This was it, the moment of life or death decided by strangers in a strange land. Adnihilo’s life dangled in her hands. She had already dropped Adam’s, and she would not see him suffer again like on the ship. The horrors of that cabin and the demon within—grinning, perverse and jaundiced—haunted her still. Not again, she thought. She would play her part and seduce these men just as she had intended for the idiot jailor. Men are all the same, willing to believe the stupidest things. She was thinking of Cain and how he sacrificed himself for nothing. Not nothing. For me, for Adnihilo. He’s still breathing. I can give him this one son. It was that which Jezebel carried in her heart as she gazed long into her inquisitor’s eyes—dark, hard, and incredulous.
“It’s true,” she admitted. “I am the most desired singer in all of Eemah. Men bow their heads at the mention of my name, and it is me they come to see during the sacrifices. And it’s true that I fooled your Messah pastor. I stole into his parish by enticing his son, and I even brought my lover with me. He might have killed David that night if your soldiers hadn’t come.”
Saint Paul didn’t blink. “Yes, so you have confessed. Yet I see no penitence in you. Only regret and anger.”
“And why should I repent? We both know my soul is damned.”
Ba’al stepped in. “Yes,” he said, “but what about the pastor’s son? And the half-breed? Why don’t you tell His Holiness the rest—how you possessed them, made them do your bidding.”
Jezebel glanced left to right at the rock-faced saint, the quiet knight, and the demon-clergyman, trying with all her might to recall that evening spent bowed before the witch during her initiation. The Final Moontide, Bianca had called it. At once, the witch’s words flooded her consciousness with images of Cain, bloody and erect. Her breath quickened and deepened, her heart leaping in her chest as she said, “You want to know about the old tongue? About the songs sung since a time long gone? It’s true. The words work like magic; our singing moves the muscles of men, and they fight and die in our honour. They die as offerings to the gods of the Old One.”
The saint balked at that. “Devils, you mean. Dull. You pagans are all the same, servants to false idols. Why the pastor had not rooted you out is beyond me. And that the Impii would return to worshipping such rot after Lucius’s mercy.”
“What’s hard to believe?” Jezebel interjected, her voice rising with an angry tide. “Our gods have real power. Their promises come true. But what prayer has your Lord ever answered? How many orphaned little girls hear nothing but silence when they ask him for answers? How many wives does he leave widowed and destitute?”
“Real power, you say?” Paul chuckled toward Ba’al with curious eyes.
The bishop smiled and lied through his teeth, “It’s true,
