Sanctum

IN THE MATERIAL REALM

*

I’d never spent this long filling out paperwork in my life.

Not even during my six months trying to convince the Paprika markets I wasn’t some vagrant looking to pinch their coin purses.

The intake hall of the cathedral was all soaring stone and coloured glass.

Sunlight falling through it in long amber bars that should have felt peaceful, and would have,

I imagine, on any other day.

Instead I sat hunched over a low desk, a quill cramping my fingers, answering the same questions a different clerk had already asked me twice.

“Name of the afflicted.”

“Job Henry, I told the last two men that already.”

The clerk, a thin, balding sort of man with ink stains on both his sleeves didn’t look up from his ledger.

“And his relation to yourself?”

“Family.”

I said it before I’d even thought it through.

But I didn’t take it back.

It was true enough.

“Protection Corp officer, Paprika precinct.”

I set his badge down on the desk between us.

The metal dull under all that stained glass light.

“Currently on approved leave, not that it should matter. He’s dying. Or he’s already dead. I don’t actually know which, and neither did the last two men I told that to.”

The clerk finally looked up.

Something in my face must have shown him I’d reached the very end of my patience, because he set his quill down with something almost like sympathy.

“I understand your distress, madam, truly. But the Reclamation Rite is not granted lightly/ It requires the sanction of a superior clergyman, and given the unusual nature of your companion’s condition, I suspect this will need to go higher than that.”

“Unusual how?”

He hesitated.

“The soldiers who brought him in from the courtyard mentioned his… well… aura. When they checked for signs of life.”

I felt my stomach drop somewhere near my boots.

Of course they’d have checked.

Of course somebody would have noticed.

Dio, who’d been sitting silent beside me this whole while with his knees drawn up, finally spoke.

“It’s green. His Karma’s green. Is that bad?”

The clerk didn’t answer that either.

That told me plenty much on its own.

-

We waited the better part of an hour on a stone bench outside a door marked with a sigil I didn’t recognise.

A spear crossed behind a sun.

It was the same one I’d seen on the banners flying over the city.

Job hadn’t been moved from the carriage yet.

Every time I thought about that, about him lying out there alone while I sat here answering questions about his name…

I had to stop myself from getting up and marching back to check on him for the fourth time.

A man in polished plate stepped into the corridor before I could give in to it.

Not clergy.

That much was obvious from the cut of his armour and the crest stamped into his breastplate, that same spear and sun again.

He carried his own weapon loosely in one hand, and as he walked he ran his thumb along the haft in slow, absent strokes.

The way you’d stroke a dog you trusted not to bite.

“You’re the ones who arrived with the Bethar seal.”

“We are.”

I stood, mostly so I wouldn’t have to look up at him.

“Mara Hopkins. This is Dio.”

“Ser Aldric, of the Holy Jurisdiction’s second garrison.”

He looked past me, down the corridor toward where they’d taken Job.

Something flickered across his face I couldn’t quite name.

Not concern, that much was clear enough.

Something closer to curiosity.

“An officer of the crown, dying in Heran, under the sponsorship of a Gorge house, A major house no less, currently rebuilding from its own scandal. You understand why this draws attention.”

“He’s not dying because of anything Bethar did. He nearly died saving that province from being overrun.”

“I don’t doubt it.” He said mildly.

He turned the spear over in his hand.

“I only mean to say, the Holy Jurisdiction governs this city alongside the Church, and anything of this scale that happens within our borders is, by custom, our business as much as it is theirs.”

“With respect, Ser, he’s not a political incident. He’s a person.”

Something in Aldric’s expression cooled.

Just slightly.

For one uneasy moment I thought I’d said something wrong, though I couldn’t for the life of me work out what.

Then he simply inclined his head.

“Of course. Forgive me. I only came to see the man everyone’s suddenly talking about.”

He glanced once more toward the far door, and I noticed, the way I used to notice a mark’s hand drifting toward a blade back in our vigilante days, that his own weapon drifted closer to his chest while he spoke.

Cradled almost.

The way you’d hold something that might overhear you and take offence.

He left without another word.

I didn’t like the way he’d said the word ours.

It was near dusk by the time the far door finally opened, and the man who stepped through it looked nothing like I’d expected.

No ceremonial robes.

No gilded staff.

Just plain grey vestments and a face carved from the same stone as the walls around him,

Unreadable.

Unhurried.

Old in a way that had nothing to do with his years.

“Canon Merrow.”

He didn’t offer a hand.

“I’m told there’s a boy in my cathedral whose Karma has no name.”

“His name is Job.”

I stood, and I made myself meet his eyes, though something about them made that harder than it should have been.

“And I don’t much care what colour his Karma is. I need to know if you can save him.”

“That depends entirely on what colour his Karma is.”

Merrow said it without a trance of cruelty.

Which somehow made it worse.

“Doctrine is precise about the paths of Just and Demon for a reason, madam. A thing that fits neither is not automatically a miracle. It could as easily be a corruption we’ve simply never had cause to name before.”

“He’s not corrupted. He’s the best man I’ve ever known.”

“I don’t doubt that you believe that.”

He studied me for a long moment, then glanced past me toward DIo, who’d gone very still under that gaze.

“The Reclamation Rite has not been performed on this scale in a generation and never on a soul carrying an aura outside our recorded scripture. I will need to bring this before the greater council. Until then, he will be kept in the north cloister, watched, and warmed, and no harm will come to him. That is the most I can promise tonight.”

It wasn’t enough

But it also wasn’t nothing.

By then I’d learnt the difference well enough to take what I was given.

“Thank you.”

I said it through my teeth, because some part of me still resented how calmly he was discussing whether or not to let Job stay dead.

Merrow only nodded, turned, and walked back through the door.

*

IN THE SPIRITUAL REALM

*

“Again.”

I lunged.

Or did whatever the version of lunging was that didn’t involve legs and the spear Grandma had shaped for me out of that endless white passed clean though the shifting shape she’d conjured to stand in for an opponent.

It dissolved back into the tide the moment I struck it, the way everything here seemed to.

And I was left standing, or floating, or whatever it was I did now, feeling exactly as foolish as I had the first fifty times.

“You’re still swinging.”

Grandma didn’t sound disappointed, exactly.

She never had.

But there was an edge under her patience that told me I was trying hers all the same.

“The claymore rewarded you for committing to a blow with everything you had. The spear punishes it. Distance is the whole art of it Job. You do not close a gap. You make the gap close itself, on your own terms, at the exact moment your enemy least expects to lose it.”

“It doesn’t feel like anything, out here. There’s no weight to push against, no ground to plant my feet on. I don’t know how you expect me to learn balance in a place that has none.”

“Then stop looking for what isn’t here, and start listening for what is. This realm is not empty space, Job. It is Karma in its rawest form, unshaped, unclaimed. Everything you feel as absence is only your mind still expecting a body it no longer has. Let that expectation go, and you will find there is more here to stand on than you ever had in the world of the living.”

I tried again.

This time I didn’t reach for the memory of the ground beneath my boots.

Only for the substance of her presence a few feet away, the faint pull of it.

The spear moved differently in my grip when I did.

Lighter,

Turer,

Though I still couldn’t have said whether I was holding it or it was holding me.

“Better.” Grandma allowed herself the smallest smile. “Once more, and mind your-”

She stopped mid-sentence.

I felt it too.

A beat behind her.

The way you feel a draught before you notice the door’s been left open.

Somewhere at the very edge of that white expanse, further than I could properly see, something had shifted.

Not moved exactly.

Looked.

As though the tide itself had turned its attention toward us for the length of a single breath, then withdrawn it again.

“Grandma? Did you feel-”

“I felt nothing.”

She said it too quickly.

Her grip on her own spear had tightened by a fraction.

I doubt she meant for me to notice.

“Your senses are still raw here, that’s all. It happens. Again, from the top stance.”

I wanted to press her on it.

The same way I’d wanted to press her, once, on why her smile had faltered the morning we left for the camp.

But something told me this wasn’t the moment.

So, same as I had that morning, I let it go, and raised my spear, and struck at the shape she wove for me out of the endless, listening white.