Black Blood II: A Hundred Vigils

The Mother House

In my Order, they teach us that a Candle Maiden gets used up like a candle, and that is her honor. It took me six years to realize that phrase was not a metaphor. My name is Ísel Marañón. I silence the dead for a living, and for the past two weeks I have been traveling with the man I swore to kill. We are bound by a Yoke: an old tie we made in a ravine to close a rift and save a village. Since then, what he feels, I feel; we cannot be more than two leagues apart without it hurting us inside; and our power passes through skin. His name is Corvián. He is of black blood, the lineage my Order has spent three hundred years burning in public squares. And until two weeks ago, I believed he had killed my teacher. We are heading north for two reasons. The first is that the rift was not natural: someone opened it and left their seal carved into it, and the seal was my own Order's. The second is that, when we closed it, I heard through the door the Yoke leaves open the voice of Beltrana Sáez, my teacher, dead for four years, telling me she is not dead. The nineteen rifts opened with the seal of the candle and the ash form a circle. At the center of that circle lies one thing only: the Mother House of Vellón. I was raised there. I entered at nine and left at seventeen. It is a gray stone building the size of a village, with a hundred side chapels and a cloister where I learned to kneel beside the dead without trembling. And in the eight years I lived inside, I never went up to the third floor of the north wing, because the old sisters go up to the third floor of the north wing when they have nothing left to give, and they don't come back down, and they call it the Rest. We entered Thursday night through the coal chute, and as soon as I set foot in the hallway, I knew something was wrong. In the Mother House, there had always been a hum. As a child, I blamed it on the river, or on the beams. With the Yoke in place, I heard it for what it truly was, and it wasn't the river. It was that distant-fair sound that the dead make on the other side, except here it wasn't distant. Here it was beneath us. Thousands of voices under my feet, in the walls, in the foundations, all speaking at once. My knee gave out, and Corvián caught me by the waist and pulled me against him. "Skin," he said through clenched teeth. "Now." I slipped my hands under his shirt and wrapped my arms around his bare back, and the noise dropped abruptly to something bearable. That's what the Yoke does: while we touch, the door closes halfway.

"Welcome home," he murmured against my hair, and through the bond I could tell he wasn't saying it to mock me. He was saying it because he was scared and didn't know how else to say it. The third floor of the north wing has a hundred and four cells. In ninety-one of them, there was a woman. They are alive. That is the first thing I need to say, and the thing that dropped me to the floor: they are alive, sitting on a cot, in clean habits, hands folded in their laps. And there is nothing left inside. A Candle Maiden's memory is worn away to make room for the deaths she swallows. I have lost my sense of smell, my mother's voice, and the house where I was born. These women have lost everything. They have no name, no language, no face of their own: even their expressions are gone. They stare ahead. They are fed. And twice a day, through a stone channel that runs through the wall of each cell, another death reaches them. Because that is what lies beneath the Mother House. We went down through the cloister well and saw it: an enormous vaulted chamber, and in that chamber, laid out in rows of a hundred, the dead. Thousands. Fresh, old, children, elders, brought from all over the kingdom in canvas-covered carts. They don't burn them. They store them. And through a system of channels, funnels, and stone mouths, their deaths rise to the third floor and are distributed among ninety-one women who have been swallowing for decades. "It's a factory," said Corvián, and I felt his nausea in my own mouth. "A factory for what?" We found it in the workshop at the back. Vats of boiling tallow, brass molds, and shelves holding thousands of yellow wax candles, bundled in dozens and labeled. Rest candles. Everyone in the kingdom knows them. They are bought at any parish for the price of a chicken, lit beside a body, and the body does not rise. I have lit hundreds. My whole life, I was told they carry a prayer inside. They carry women inside. They are made from the fat of the dead stored below and charged with what a spent Candle Maiden swallows above. Each candle is one night of life from a nameless woman locked away on the third floor. I stood there for a long time, unable to breathe, gripping the edge of a vat. "Ísel." Corvián turned my face with both hands, forcing me to look at him. "This isn't your fault." "I entered at nine."

"Exactly," he said. "That's why they take you at nine."

The Winter Parlor

And this is where I have to tell you about the winter parlor, even though it's hard. We needed to wait for the guard change, and we couldn't go more than a quarter hour without touching, because the noise from below would seep in and shatter you. We slipped into a closed-off parlor, the fireplace dead, and sat on the floor facing each other, legs crossed, hands clasped, foreheads together—the posture we had learned to endure it. And we had been like this for two weeks. Two weeks of sleeping an arm's length apart, of brushing against each other while riding, of feeling what the other felt without being able to lie or hide—which is the most brutal thing that can happen to two people who started out wanting to kill each other. "I know what you're thinking," I said, because I did. I could feel it rising through the bond like heat through iron. "And I know what you are," he replied, his voice very low. "You've been thinking it for four days." "Five." He laughed, and his laugh reached me from the inside, and that was when my composure ran out. I kissed him. I want that clear, because he never tells it right: I kissed him, and I bit him, and he bit me back with a desperation that came to me doubled—his and mine at once. And that is the trap of the Yoke: you don't just feel what you do. You feel what you do to him. When I ran my hands over his bare back, I felt his skin under my fingers and at the same time my fingers on his skin. When I kissed his neck, I knew exactly how it traveled down his spine. There is no way to hide, no way to pretend, not a single thought you can keep to yourself, and everything one of us felt came back multiplied. We tore each other's clothes off on the floor of a frozen parlor, in the building where I was raised to have nothing of my own, and I opened myself completely for the first time in my life. And with all my skin against all his skin, the Yoke opened fully. The noise from below vanished. The thousands of dead in the basement fell silent all at once, as if someone had closed a door on the other side of the world, and in that silence there was nothing left but the two of us, trembling, his mouth on my throat and my hands in his hair, and a power racing between our bodies that was neither his nor mine, making the parlor's windows rattle. It lasted hours. And at some point, with my face buried in his shoulder, I whispered against his ear the only ugly and true thing I had inside: "I still want to kill you." And he, without stopping, his voice wrecked, answered: "I know. Keep wanting it. But not tonight." We burned the Mother House of Vellón at dawn. We brought the ninety-one women down from the third floor, one by one, down the north wing stairs, and none of them asked where they were going—and that was the worst part. Eleven died on the way, just like that, the way a candle goes out when it has no wick left.

We set fire to the workshop, the vats, and the shelves, and with the flames rising through the cloister well, I went down one last time to the dead chamber, and there I did what I had been training for six years to do and had never done on this scale. Corvián held me from behind, both hands spread open on my stomach, and commanded. And I swallowed. Three thousand four hundred and eleven deaths in eleven minutes. It was like drinking a river. I came out bleeding from my nose and ears, and this time I have lost everything I learned at the Mother House: all eight years. I can't pray. I don't know the prayers I recited a thousand times. I don't remember the faces of any of the girls I grew up with. Corvián carried me out through the coal chute, and the ninety women followed us down the path in silence, in a line, with the building burning behind them. And then we found the book. I had been carrying it. I had grabbed it from the prebendary's office without looking, on instinct: a black-bound ledger with the candle and ash embossed on it. It is the record of openings. Nineteen rifts. With their dates, their locations, their death tolls, and their authorizations. Sela del Hondo, where we met, has eighty-seven dead noted in the right-hand column in the same careful handwriting used to record a purchase of grain. And all nineteen bear the same signature at the bottom. It is not a name. It is a title, written in the old tongue: the First. "Who is the First?" asked Corvián. "The founder of my Order," I said. "The first Candle Maiden. She's been dead for three hundred years. Since the Shift." He stared at the fire for a long time. "In my language," he said at last, "we call her by another name. We call her the Mother of All the Dead. And we don't pray to her: we fear her." We left at daybreak, with the ninety women on their way to the valley monastery, where real nuns would take charge of them. I was at the rear, checking the line, and my count was off by one. I went back. Corvián shouted at me not to go back, but I went anyway, because the north wing hadn't collapsed yet and because I had counted ninety-one and only ninety were on the road. She was in cell one hundred and four, the last one in the hallway, the only one with a lock on the inside. It wasn't a cell. It was a room with rugs, with books, with a fire lit and a kettle on, and in the armchair, her back to the door, sat a woman in the habit of the elder sisters, wearing red gloves. The red gloves I had been mourning for four years. Beltrana Sáez turned her head, looked at me over her shoulder with those eyes that had taught me everything I know, and smiled at me the way she used to smile when I was a child and I did a closure right. And behind me, in the doorway, I heard Corvián draw his blade.

"You're late, little one," said my teacher. "And I have missed you terribly. Sit down—we need to talk about your mother."