The Papal Court's saint came from a dead man.
The Black Feather soldier whose helmet Judith had crushed.
His corpse stood again.
A white bell sounded inside the broken skull.
The spine straightened.
Saintblood vessels grew through gaps in the black armor.
A recovery order covered the place where eyes should have been.
`First treatment ledger.`
`The one who witnessed the contradiction in the record.`
`The recorder who copied the sinmark.`
The Recovery Saint walked toward Ria.
The laughing idol cleared its path.
The Papal monster neither worshipped nor accused.
It offered no interpretation to consume, so even the idol could not hold it.
Cassian's objective was to get Ria and the Master Ledger of Innocence Bonds beyond the recovery line.
Not to save Ria.
That ledger held Cassian's crimes, imperial transactions, and the manipulated Mira ballot.
He could not let someone else destroy it first.
"Put down the ledger," Cassian said.
Behind the bereaved host's shields, Ria hugged it tighter.
"I will not return it to you."
"I wasn't talking to you."
The Recovery Saint opened its mouth.
A small hand lay inside.
It pointed at Ria.
"Set down the record."
Ria looked at Cassian.
"You are saying the same thing."
"That one said please."
The Recovery Saint charged.
* * *
The bereaved host's crossbows fired first.
Thirty bolts struck the saint's chest.
It did not stop.
It did not pull them out.
It twisted its body and broke only those caught on the recovery line.
The shortest path between target and ledger.
Anyone on that line was neither enemy nor civilian.
Only an obstruction.
The first bereaved soldier split from the shoulder.
The second soldier's armor folded inward.
Judith swung her hammer.
The saint's jaw flew away.
It prayed from the floor.
"Recovery is treatment."
Judith crushed its head with a second blow.
The saint fell.
A Church bell rang once in the distance.
The soldier Judith had just lost stood up.
A recovery order covered his face.
"It changed corpses," Ria said.
"Whenever the bell rings, it moves into the nearest body."
Judith's hammer stopped.
This body's chest bore her husband's nameplate.
The soldier had helped Judith found the cathedral bereaved host.
"Break it," Cassian said.
"He's my soldier."
"Which is why you should do it."
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Judith could not raise the hammer.
The Recovery Saint passed through her hesitation.
Its hand pierced her side.
It carried her body like a banner and kept walking toward Ria.
Cassian threw his sword.
It pinned Judith's mourning clothes and the saint's wrist to the wall together.
"You stabbed my clothes too," Judith coughed blood.
"I missed your body."
"Aim for the head next time."
"If you're alive when I kill you."
Cassian severed the hand buried in Judith's side.
He lowered her to the floor.
The Recovery Saint seized Cassian's neck.
The black-crown wound burned beneath white fingers.
The saint read the sins inside him.
Three thousand.
Mira, one thousand forty-three times.
The other names.
Its recovery priority wavered.
Cassian carried more originals in his body than one recorder did.
"Target changed."
The order on its face changed to Cassian's name.
"Recovering Cassian Crow."
"Get in line."
Judith shattered the saint's knee with her hammer.
A blow that helped the enemy who had just saved her.
"That belongs to the Papal Court."
"And you?"
"You belong to me."
Cassian smiled.
Judith did not.
"Don't misunderstand. I'm protecting my right to your neck."
"I saved you for the same reason."
They had not rescued one another.
They had merely refused to surrender the right to kill each other to another faction.
* * *
Each time the Recovery Saint died, it moved into a nearby corpse.
There were too many corpses on the battlefield.
The bereaved host's.
The Black Feathers'.
The empty bodies from the Nameless Court.
Each toll of the Church bell gave the enemy a new body.
Ria turned pages in the ledger.
"Destroy the bell and it stops."
"Where is it?"
"The sealed ward to the north."
"Distance?"
"Half a day on foot."
"Everyone here dies before then."
"If we break the bell, the patients in the sealed ward will worsen."
"Are there more than the people here?"
"I don't know."
Cassian did not abandon a known force for an unknown number.
He chose to create another target.
The Recovery Saint followed contradictions in records.
The contradiction of two Cassians.
The living body and the corpse that had arrived first.
Send the one carrying more records as bait.
Cassian called Toma.
"How many in the vanguard?"
"Eighty-one."
"Take my corpse."
Toma's eyes shone.
"Where shall we bear him?"
"North."
"Our objective?"
"Take the Recovery Saint with you."
Toma understood that they were bait.
The soldiers beside him understood too.
One stepped back.
Pella Brin.
Twenty-nine.
She had joined the Feather Society after guarding the escape route for women exploited by the false Cassian.
"I didn't come here to die."
Toma looked at her.
"We all follow His dead Majesty."
"I came to protect the living."
Pella pointed toward the returnees.
"Escorting them was my assignment."
"His Majesty's corpse is also under our protection."
"I didn't sign that."
Toma looked at Cassian.
"What shall be done with one who refuses an order?"
"She's your subordinate."
Cassian returned the decision to Toma.
Pella glared at him.
"You gave the order."
"Which is why you can refuse it."
"And if I refuse?"
Toma answered.
"We take you."
Four vanguard soldiers seized Pella.
They chained her waist to the corpse's coffin.
"That isn't refusal," Pella said.
"Not from the moment you handed the choice to that man."
She tore the black feather insignia from her chest.
Before Toma could reach her, she put it in her mouth.
The metal broke between her molars.
She spat half of it with blood at Ria's feet.
"Write this."
Ria opened the ledger.
"What?"
"Pella Brin."
She began with her own name.
"I did not volunteer."
Toma shook his head.
"Fear before departure—"
"My words. Not your interpretation."
Pella pulled the chain.
The coffin moved an inch.
Eighty pairs of feet shifted with it.
"I signed to protect the returnees. I never signed to protect Cassian's corpse."
Ria recorded it exactly.
`Pella Brin refused the northern bait order.`
`Toma bound her.`
The pen stopped.
Ria looked at Cassian.
"The last line is yours."
"I did not release her," Cassian said.
Ria wrote it.
Pella did not smile.
"If I die, do not write me as a martyr."
She threw the remaining half of the insignia to Bella.
"If you survive, there are two originals."
One in the ledger.
One with a living witness.
Cassian could have destroyed both.
He did not.
There was no time if the bait was to depart.
The time he saved kept a witness to his crime alive.
Cassian could have cut the chain.
He did not.
One fewer bait risked turning the Recovery Saint around.
"Any order to return alive?" Toma asked.
"No."
Toma smiled.
"Which Majesty gives this order?"
"If you die, choose for yourself."
The Black Feather vanguard lifted the coffin.
Dona refused to let go.
Cassian cut two fingers from her left hand.
"Rental fee."
Dona's tongues picked up and ate the severed fingers.
"And what will you return?"
"Only the coffin."
"Not the man?"
"That is already dead."
Toma shouldered the coffin after hearing it all.
Eighty-one ran north.
Pella was dragged beside the coffin by the chain.
She looked back at the returnees to the end.
The people she had signed to protect avoided her eyes.
Cassian did not.
He stood still so Pella could remember his face to the last.
Inside the coffin, the corpse Cassian shouted a new order.
"Save me."
The vanguard ran faster.
The recovery order on the saint's face trembled.
The living Cassian.
The dead Cassian.
The original indicated by the ledger divided in two.
Toma tied a copy of the Innocence Bond ledger around the corpse's neck.
Ria noticed.
"I did not make that copy."
"Which makes it even more contradictory," Cassian said.
The Recovery Saint turned north.
It followed the eighty-one.
The first scream was not Pella's.
It belonged to the soldier who had bound her.
At the second bell, the dead soldier rose and pushed a comrade beyond the recovery line.
At the third, the corpse Cassian laughed inside the coffin.
Each vanguard soldier who died became new armor for the Recovery Saint.
The force sent north did not diminish.
It became the enemy's bodies.
Pella's curses carried through the fog.
"Cassian Crow!"
One mouth of the laughing idol swallowed the curse.
"She spoke his name."
It vomited it back as praise.
* * *
The laughing idol did not move until the battle ended.
It ate every scene instead.
Cassian saved his enemy.
He abandoned the believers who came to save him.
The idol's mouths made different stories.
"He loved even his enemy."
"He sacrificed his believers."
"He surrendered even his own corpse."
"He protected only his living body."
Praise and condemnation accumulated together.
The idol doubled in height.
Judith bound her side.
"That thing grows whatever you do."
"Then you kill it."
"If I strike, it will eat my hatred."
"You've learned."
Ria watched the northern road.
The Black Feather vanguard's footfalls vanished one by one.
Eighty-one.
Fifty.
Twenty.
At the end, only the sound of the coffin dragging remained.
Then that stopped too.
Much later, someone walked out of the northern fog.
Toma.
His right arm was gone.
He carried a piece of the empty coffin on his back.
Alone.
He reached Cassian and knelt.
"Thank you for choosing me."
"As what?" Cassian asked.
Toma smiled through a blood-soaked face.
"As someone to throw away."