The second finger bent.
Inside the cathedral, one cleric forgot his mother.
The third finger.
The face of the first patient he had saved vanished.
The fourth.
Every sin he had hated while hearing confessions became his own.
The fifth finger bent.
He forgot his name.
The Right Arm of Three Thousand Confessors completed its second fist.
Another cathedral seat became empty.
The body remained sitting there.
"Two," Ria recorded.
"Two clerics erased."
Cassian gripped the relic's wrist with his left hand.
Prayer text bit his palm.
When he tried to open the fingers, the right arm pulled the other way.
The muscles of three thousand strangers strained inside one arm.
"Take it off," Marchesa said.
"I can't."
Hassan read the prayers across Cassian's back.
White letters ran from the empty shoulder to the alignment seam at his neck.
"It is not attached, but the loan contract has closed. Remove the arm inside the White Line and you must return every borrowed movement at once."
"How many?"
"Two so far."
Adel asked,
"Returned to whom?"
Hassan looked at the cathedral.
"To the bodies of the two who lost their prayers."
Their erased names would not return.
Only the strength Cassian had received flowed backward.
The bones of the two clerics would bend into the shapes Cassian had moved.
Even removing the arm would ruin people.
Odric waited inside the north gate.
"You will grow accustomed to it."
"Have you worn it?"
"I own my right arm."
"Want me to cut it off?"
Before answering, Odric looked at Cassian's shoes.
He did not raise his brush.
It was not yet time to declare guilt.
Quarantine tents stretched inside the north gate.
Six hundred one refugees entered in a single line.
The final person remained outside.
Bram counted the register three times.
"Six hundred."
Ria said,
"Six hundred one."
"The ledger says six hundred."
"Who is missing?"
The refugees looked at one another.
No one knew.
The White Line had eaten one person's reason first.
The man stood outside, while his family inside forgot why they were waiting for him.
He struck the gate.
"I am from that village too!"
Bram asked,
"Do you have a witness?"
No one raised a hand.
Cassian lifted the relic arm.
The eye in its palm looked at the man.
If the arm cut the gate, a third cleric would be erased.
If it did not, the man remained outside until night.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
"Name," Cassian said.
The man gave it.
Ria wrote it down.
At that moment, a woman inside screamed.
"He is my husband."
Only after seeing the name did she remember why she had been waiting.
Bram opened the small quarantine door.
"Six hundred one."
He corrected his ledger.
The relic arm did not move.
The third person remained.
Cassian spoke to the arm.
"Move without permission and I'll cut you off."
The palm-eye looked up at him.
"That is your only hand capable of cutting," Odric said.
Cassian did not smile.
He forced the right fingers open.
The refugees moved to the cathedral's outer hospital.
There were only two hundred beds.
The rest lay in corridors and stables.
The winter addresses Odric promised had not been issued.
Instead, they hung white paper tags around their necks.
`Subject under cathedral protection.`
Closer to ownership than an address.
Marchesa tore off one tag.
"Read the protection terms."
Hassan found the small print.
"The bearer consents to cathedral treatment and quarantine. Any sinmarks arising during treatment shall be held by the Papal Court."
"For how long?"
"It does not say."
"And if they refuse?"
Odric answered,
"We cannot issue an address."
The refugees could not remove the tags.
To people who had lost their homes, an address was a second life.
Cassian could kill Odric.
Then the man who could issue addresses would disappear too.
He let the old man live.
Because he was useful.
Ria opened the inner hospital door.
The victims' ledger hung from the chain binding her left arm.
Beneath it, she had bound one thin volume.
The first record from Adel's clinic.
From before sin and wounds were bought and sold.
The original from the days when the healer wrote her own name beside the patient's consent.
Adel looked at the ledger.
"Where did you find that?"
"At your funeral."
"My funeral?"
"When the Church killed your name, it burned the clinic's records too."
Ria opened the cover.
"I took the first volume that survived the fire."
The healer field was blank.
The letters had vanished on the day Cassian consumed Adel's name.
But the patients' names and marks of consent remained.
"If we take this inside the cathedral," Ria said,
"we can trace whose sin was treated by whom."
Odric's gaze touched the ledger.
For the first time, courtesy left his face.
"That is Church property."
"It is the victims' record."
"The first treatment ledger is a relic equal in rank to undiluted saintblood."
"That is why you burned it."
Ria wrapped the chain around her right hand as well.
Odric did not try to take it.
The bell in the ceiling rang.
A corpse rose in the hospital morgue.
An old refugee who had frozen to death before reaching the north gate.
He had no eyes.
Two surgical forceps were driven into the sockets.
A saintblood pouch gagged his mouth.
An execution knight's armor was stitched into the flesh of his back.
It was a Recovery Saint.
It did not attack the nearest person.
Not the grieving family.
Not the patients in their beds.
It passed Adel too.
It looked only at Ria's ledger.
"Recover the original."
The voice came from inside the saintblood pouch.
The Recovery Saint walked.
It cleared beds from the line between itself and its target.
Patients lay in them.
It cleared them anyway.
A bed struck the wall.
The patient's arm broke between the rails.
The saint did not look.
It was not trying to kill people.
Only the straight line to the ledger remained.
Ria backed away.
The chain on her left arm drew taut.
The Recovery Saint caught the ledger's cover.
The crushed bones of Ria's left arm shifted again.
She screamed.
Cassian raised the relic arm.
The prayer-text fingers formed a fist first.
The third complete movement.
One cleric inside the cathedral forgot his sin.
Cassian's fist crushed the Recovery Saint's face.
The surgical forceps drove into the sockets.
They came out through the back of its skull.
The saint did not fall.
It did not release the ledger.
Cassian moved the arm a second time.
The palm-eye opened.
The fourth complete movement.
One cleric forgot that he had declared an innocent defendant guilty.
The sinmark did not return to the victim.
It found an empty place and entered Cassian's arm.
A white line cut through the Recovery Saint's wrist.
The severed hand remained gripping the ledger.
Ria pulled the chain.
Hand and ledger returned together.
"Four," she said, swallowing her breath.
"Four people erased."
Saintblood erupted from the saint's severed wrist.
It flowed toward the nearest corpse.
A second body in the morgue opened its eyes.
The Recovery Saint's armor peeled from the first body and attached itself to the second.
The bell rang again.
The broken face remained on the floor.
Only the mission moved to a new body.
"Recover the original."
The second saint charged Ria.
Marchesa blocked its path.
With half her armor scales gone, even an ordinary blade drew blood.
The saint's hand punched through her side.
Marchesa trapped the arm inside her body.
"Now."
Cassian seized the saint's throat with the relic arm.
The fifth complete movement.
One cleric forgot burying his own child.
That grief entered Cassian's fingers.
He felt himself closing the coffin of someone he did not know.
His fingers tightened.
The Recovery Saint's neck collapsed.
Marchesa twisted the arm buried in her body.
She tore it free at the shoulder.
The saint's second body fell.
The bell rang.
A third corpse rose.
This time, it was a woman who had died holding a refugee's young daughter.
Adel stood before the body.
"Get out of her body."
The Recovery Saint did not listen.
It walked toward Ria's ledger.
Adel raised a treatment knife.
Without damaging the dead body further, she cut only the armor seams.
The first.
The second.
The saint shoved Adel.
She struck the wall.
She did not drop the knife.
"She never gave you permission to use her body."
Adel cut the third seam.
The armor fell from the corpse.
The Recovery Saint's mission crawled across the floor.
Without even a human shape, it moved toward the ledger.
Cassian stepped on it.
The relic arm prepared its sixth movement.
Ria shouted,
"Don't use it!"
Cassian lowered the arm.
He pinned the mission with his left foot.
He held it without sword or right arm.
The white mass stretched beneath his boot toward Ria.
Thoma threw an ink bottle.
Black ink splashed across ledger and floor.
The scent of treatment and contradictory records spread in dozens of directions.
The Recovery Saint's mission divided.
It could not find the original.
Even when the bell rang, it could not choose a body to enter.
The white mass stopped in the ink.
"The transaction price," Thoma said, pressing the hole in his throat.
"I'll collect later."
Cassian answered,
"Charge me dearly."
Ria sat on the floor.
Blood ran inside the chain around her left arm.
The ledger remained.
Five clerics did not.
Odric's expression did not change when he heard the number.
"Five out of three thousand."
Ria looked at him.
"People are not fractions."
"Cities are."
"That is why you gathered three thousand."
Odric did not answer.
White light shone from the empty healer field in the first treatment ledger.
The Recovery Saint's touch revealed letters that had been invisible.
Each patient's name had a cathedral seat number.
One.
Forty-seven.
Nine hundred twenty-three.
Two thousand nine hundred ninety-nine.
All three thousand seats were connected.
The last page had no patient's name.
The healer field was also empty.
Only one mark of consent remained.
Beside it was a seat number.
`Center seat.`
Adel reached out.
The ledger did not recognize her hand as the healer's.
She was a saint who had lost her name.
One empty chair moved at the center of the cathedral.
A dead name appeared on its back.
`Adel Venati.`
The sins of three thousand waited for the dead saint to take her seat.