The cathedral bells announced Adel's death.
Adel listened beside Cassian.
The black war banner of the north still waved in the shadow beneath his feet.
Marchesa Bell had found him.
Cassian did not go north.
There was still one death he should have finished before today arrived.
The first bell.
`The excommunicated saint Adel Venati is dead.`
The second.
`Her killer is Cassian Crow.`
The third.
`Her remains shall be recovered.`
Adel pressed two fingers to her wrist.
Her pulse beat.
"You are alive," Cassian said.
"Thank you for confirming it."
"The Church seems to disagree."
They stood in a clinic in the eastern capital.
It was the last clinic Adel had been unable to abandon after her excommunication. Outside its windows, patients cut off from bread rations waited in line. They had collapsed after the Red Table's winter grain burned.
Adel had treated nineteen people through the night.
The seventeenth woman from the square sat on the nineteenth bed.
She was not ill.
Her engagement ring was gone from her finger, and the guild crest had been torn from her coat. She had lost her home and her work on the same day. The clinic was merely where she had spent the night.
She covered her face when Cassian passed.
"Do not say my name again."
"I already did."
"That is why I am here."
Cassian did not argue.
He had received no treatment.
His right arm was still bent backward. The broken fingers of his aged left hand had swollen black. Each breath drove the ribs broken against the Red Table across his lung.
The cathedral bell rang a fourth time.
A white seal appeared on the clinic door.
`The residual body of the deceased shall be seized.`
Adel read it.
"And who is this residual body?"
The answer came from beyond the door.
"You."
Recovery knights in white armor smashed through the door.
There were six.
They did not look at Adel.
They looked at Adel's body.
They carried iron hooks and white cloth used to transport corpses.
"The death of Adel Venati has been entered into the record," the lead knight said.
"What moves is residue."
"If I speak my own name?"
"A heresy in which a corpse imitates the dead."
"If I treat a patient?"
"Theft of a dead saint's miracle."
"If I resist?"
"You will be burned for desecrating a corpse."
Adel looked at Cassian.
"The Church always offers such generous choices."
"Three of them."
The knight threw an iron hook.
Cassian raised his right arm.
Still bent backward at the elbow, the arm caught it. Metal scraped bone. The rejuvenated hand closed too quickly and seized the chain.
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His left hand missed the scabbard.
The sword fell to the floor.
A second knight drove another hook between Cassian's ribs.
"You are still broken," Adel said.
"I was busy."
"I can fix it if you give permission."
"Later."
Cassian pulled the hook deeper.
The knight came closer.
Cassian shattered his nose with his forehead.
Blood flooded the white armor. Cassian's young right hand wound the chain around the second knight's throat. His aged left hand could not lift the sword. Cassian kicked up the hilt with the top of his foot and caught it in his teeth.
The blade passed behind the third knight's knee.
The armor remained.
Only the leg walked forward.
The knight fell.
Adel caught the first knight by the throat from behind.
"May I touch you?"
The knight with the broken nose did not answer.
"If you do not answer, I will not treat you."
She let go.
Cassian asked, "You will let him die?"
"He shook his head."
"So he can still move."
The remaining three knights rushed Adel.
Their swords did not cut people. They were recovery blades that carved only the record of the dead from a living body.
The first blade cut Adel's name.
`Adel Venati` vanished from the license on the clinic wall.
The second cut her profession.
The patients in the beds forgot who had treated them.
The third tried to cut away her face.
With the sword in his teeth, Cassian caught all three recovery blades at once.
Blood ran between his teeth.
He twisted his body.
The broken ribs fractured again inside him.
The paths of all three blades bent downward.
Adel stepped into the opening.
She pressed her fingers to the gaps in their armor.
One pulse.
Two.
Three.
All three right arms went numb at once.
"That was diagnosis, not treatment," Adel said.
Cassian did not cut the throats of the fallen knights.
Instead, he tore down the white seal.
A death certificate had been fastened behind it.
`Time of death: midnight last night.`
`Place of death: sin-transfer appraisal chamber.`
`Deceased body: throat and lungs.`
`Victim: Adel Venati.`
`Killer: Cassian Crow.`
Adel read the paper.
"That voice."
The throat and lungs that had hung beneath the drain in the appraisal chamber.
A proxy body born from the wounds Adel had transferred into herself throughout her life, imitating the shape of murder.
Cassian had not saved that body.
Nor had he killed it.
He had taken only its death tag.
The tag grew hot inside his coat.
The appointed night had already passed.
The murder had been carried out somewhere Cassian had never been.
Only the killer's name belonged to him.
Toma entered through the clinic's rear door.
He wore gray funerary cloth over his Black Feather Society apron.
"We found the body."
"Where?"
"Beneath the cathedral cemetery. It was taken to the first copycat execution ground."
"Why?"
"They are using it in a rite that praises Cassian for killing a saint."
Adel asked, "Why must I die for them to praise Cassian?"
Toma was silent for a moment.
"Because the story that he killed even a saint out of love sells best."
Adel did not smile.
"Lead the way."
Beneath the cemetery were more drains than coffins.
It was a funerary waterway that washed away the blood, holy water, and confessions of the clergy into a tributary of the River of Absolution.
Toma led them only as far as the first iron door.
"Someone inside knows my face."
"A former comrade?"
"I still think of them that way."
"Then come inside."
Toma's face stiffened.
"Why?"
"Betrayal is complete only when you show your face."
Ria was already waiting before the iron door.
The victims' ledger was chained to her wrist.
"I examined the proxy body," she said.
Adel asked, "Is it still breathing?"
"One person's worth at a time."
A small chapel lay beyond the iron door.
A throat and lungs rested upon the altar.
Red tubes were weaving wounds into flesh. A white mask modeled after Adel's face covered the throat.
The mask's mouth opened.
"Cassian Crow killed me."
It was Adel's voice.
One hundred believers knelt and repeated the same sentence.
"Cassian Crow killed the saint."
Each repetition made the real Adel's body more transparent.
Her fingertips first.
Her lips.
The edges of her irises.
Ria read the proxy body's death record.
"Two bodies are fighting over one name."
Cassian asked, "What if we save that one?"
"The Church record erases the real Adel as residue."
"And if we kill it?"
"Three records agree that you killed Adel: the proxy body, the believers' testimony, and the death tag."
"I dislike both," Adel said.
"There is another choice."
Cassian took the death tag from his coat.
Adel caught his wrist.
"Explain first."
"I remove your name from that body."
"Does it return to me?"
"No."
"Where does it go?"
Cassian pointed to the alignment seam on his throat.
"Into my sin."
Adel's grip tightened.
"The result?"
"Your body lives."
"My name?"
"Dies."
"The clinic?"
"It becomes a dead woman's property."
"My vows and records of consent?"
"Become a will."
"And I can never treat anyone as Adel Venati again."
"Yes."
Cassian waited.
This time, it was her name.
He needed her answer.
Adel listened to her voice upon the altar.
`Cassian Crow killed me.`
She released his wrist.
"I give you permission to touch my body."
"Your name?"
"I do not give permission."
Cassian tore the death tag.
Adel's face went rigid.
"I just—"
"I heard you."
"And you still—"
"You permitted the body."
Cassian pushed the torn tag into the open alignment seam on his throat.
Adel's name entered his blood.
The proxy body upon the altar screamed.
The same scream left the real Adel's mouth.
Cassian caught the name connecting the two.
Black letters stretched like tendons.
He tore them from Adel's body.
He left the flesh.
He left the pulse.
He took only the name.
The proxy body's lungs expelled their last breath.
Cassian swallowed it.
The sensation of killing Adel completed itself in his throat.
The believers' chant stopped.
The real Adel became solid again.
She vanished completely from the Church register.
The clinic license became ash.
The healer field went blank in the records of Adel's patients.
She was alive.
Adel Venati was dead.
Cassian had saved the body as promised.
He had killed the name without permission.
Adel slapped him.
His young right hand moved by reflex to catch her wrist.
Cassian pinned his own right arm beneath his left foot.
He kept it from moving.
Adel struck him again.
This time, the alignment seam on his throat burst.
"Give me back my name."
"I cannot."
"You mean you will not?"
"I already ate it."
Adel did not raise her hand a third time.
Instead, she pressed it to Cassian's ribs.
"Do you consent to treatment?"
"Now?"
"I do not want to see how long the body that killed my name can endure."
"I consent."
Adel set one broken rib.
The pain did not lessen.
She did not move it into her own body.
She turned the bone only far enough to keep it from piercing his lung.
"The rest?" Cassian asked.
"Ask the dead saint."
The chapel floor opened.
A funerary waterway hidden beneath the proxy body appeared. It split three ways.
The North Gate sewer.
Western Printer's Road.
Deeper beneath the cathedral cemetery.
Paths to the three copycat execution grounds.
The hundred believers rose.
They did not look at Cassian.
They looked at Adel.
A body dead in society's record.
A living ghost who had lost the saint's voice.
Someone commanded from the deepest underground.
"The saint is dead."
The hundred raised black feathers.
"Bring us her ghost."