SALVAGE SAINT

On the morning she was supposed to become a god, Abbess Seraphine Vale ate a bowl of barley porridge, scolded a novice for sloppy footwork, and found a mouse in the reliquary.

“Leave it,” she told Brother Tomas, who had come at the mouse with a broom and an expression of holy outrage. “It has been living on the Founder’s toe bone for a month. The Founder would have approved. He was also very small and mostly bone.”

“Mother Abbess, it’s a relic.”

“It’s a toe.” She set her bowl on the windowsill. “And if I fail today, you will have more interesting problems than a mouse.”

That shut him up, which had been the point. Tomas was a hundred and forty years old and her senior disciple and he would be abbot by nightfall if she did not come back down the mountain. She watched the broom go slack in his big scarred hands, and she turned to the window before he could see her face.

Mount Hesper wore its first snow. Below the abbey walls the pines went down in dark ranks to the cloud line, and the air was thick with the Quiet, as it had always been. A child born in Hesperwell learned to hold it in the well beneath her heart before she learned her letters, and by the time she was grown, if she had the gift and the patience, she could tether a sword to her will and send it across a valley like a thought. Seraphine had been doing it for two hundred and ninety-one years. She had been Grandmaster of the Order of the Quiet Blade for one hundred and six. There was nothing left in the Quiet for her to learn, and so there was only one thing left to do with it.

“The Crossing Stone is ready,” Tomas said behind her. “Sister Liesl swept it. Twice. She’s crying about it.”

“Sister Liesl cries about bread.”

“She’s crying harder than about bread.”

Seraphine picked up her sword, a plain single-edged blade in a scabbard of black ash. Its name was Vesper. It was older than the abbey. The moment her fingers closed on the hilt it spoke into the back of her mind in the dry, faintly bored voice it had used on her since she was nineteen.

You’re dawdling.

I am saying goodbye.

You said goodbye yesterday. And the day before. You have been saying goodbye for a month. At this rate you will ascend from old age.

She slid Vesper into her belt and did not dignify that.

They were all waiting in the yard. Forty-one Blades, nineteen Edges, six Keens, and a crowd of novices so young their gray habits dragged on the frost. She had specifically told them not to come. She looked at the red noses and the terrible careful hope on every face, and thought that if she had been a better teacher she would have taught them to obey her.

“This is not a funeral,” she said.

Nobody laughed. A novice in the front row, a round-faced girl named Pim who had arrived last spring with lice and a stolen knife, raised her hand.

“Mother Abbess. What happens if you win?”

“The Crossing is not won. It is completed.”

“What happens if you complete it?”

Seraphine looked at the child for a long moment. It was the question nobody asked out loud. Eleven grandmasters had attempted the Crossing in the recorded history of the Order. Four had walked back down the mountain changed, glowing faintly for the rest of their lives. Seven had not walked back down at all.

“Then I will know something none of you know,” Seraphine said. “And I will come back and be insufferable about it.”

That got the laugh. She walked out through the gate with her disciples’ laughter behind her, because she had learned a long time ago that it was easier to leave people when they were laughing.

The Crossing Stone was a slab of black granite a thousand feet above the abbey, worn smooth in the middle by eleven sets of knees. The wind cut through her habit like it had a grudge. She knelt. She laid Vesper across her thighs. She closed her eyes and breathed in, and the Quiet came.

It came as a tide, pouring down out of the sky and up out of the mountain until the well beneath her heart was full and then past full, and she let it keep coming. That was the whole secret of the Crossing, as far as anyone knew. You stopped holding the edges. You let the Quiet have you, and you trusted it to give something back.

She opened.

It was the most frightening thing she had ever done, and she had once fought a mountain troll with a spoon. The edges of her dissolved. She felt the mountain under her knees, not as stone but as a slow patient mind, and the river in the valley talking to itself about rain. She felt the abbey. She felt Tomas and Liesl and Pim, and the whole bright net of them, every disciple she had ever taught, every tether she had ever bound, and for one astonishing instant she understood that the Crossing was not a door out of the world at all. It was a door further in.

And then somebody kicked it.

“Beautiful,” said a voice behind her. “Truly. I have waited forty years to see you do something that stupid.”

She turned her head, slowly, like a woman surfacing from deep water, and saw Cassius Dray standing at the edge of the saddle with the wind snapping his crimson cloak and a sword of red-gold fire burning in his hand.

The Hierarch of the Burning Crown had always been handsome in the way of a man who knew it, but forty years of envy had worn grooves down his face like rain down a statue. His Order took the Quiet and burned it hot, and had lost three wars to the Quiet Blade because a fire that burns hot also burns out.

“You’re too late to watch,” Seraphine said. Her voice sounded doubled, as if the mountain spoke too. “Go home, Cassius.”

“Oh, I didn’t come to watch.” He lifted the burning sword. “Your well is wide open, and everything in it is spilling into the air for anyone to catch. I came to catch it.”

He means it, Vesper said. He’s going to cut into the Crossing and drink it.

It will kill him.

It will kill you first.

He came across the stone at a run. She was half out of her body and could not close her well in time, and so she did the only thing left. She drew Vesper and met him.

Steel met fire in a blast that took the snow off the ridge for half a mile. She was faster than him, she had always been faster, but the whole Quiet of the world was roaring through her like a flood through a broken dam, and every strike came out too big. The fourth one missed him and split the ridge. The sixth caught his burning blade and shattered it, and he laughed with blood in his teeth and plunged his bare hand into the torrent of light pouring off her and pulled.

She screamed. She had not screamed in two hundred years.

And the sky went out.

It went out, as if someone had pinched the wick of the sun, and in the sudden black the snow began to rise off the mountain in slow silver flakes. Far below, the abbey bell started ringing on its own. Seraphine looked up.

The storm was coming down out of nothing. It was black, blacker than the empty sky, and shot through with veins of cold silver light, and it made no sound at all except that inside the silence there were voices. Thousands of voices. Millions. They sounded like wind in a field of dry grain, and they were all saying the same word.

Ripe.

Every book in the abbey library said the same thing about the storm of annihilation. It came once in ten thousand years, and no one who saw it lived to describe it.

Cassius let go of her and stared up at it, afraid.

Seraphine did not waste the moment. She reached down the thousand feet of rock and snow to the abbey, found the bright net of her disciples, and threw every scrap of Quiet she had left around them like a cloak. It was the last thing she did as herself.

Then the storm touched the ridge, and it swallowed the Crossing Stone, and Cassius Dray, and Abbess Seraphine Vale, and the voices closed over her head like black water.

The first thing she knew was that she was cold, and the second was that she was being dug up.

The digging was loud. Something was scraping away at the dark above her face with a sound like a shovel on gravel, but sharper, a shriek of metal on metal, and between the scrapes there was a voice. It was a boy’s voice, broken and not finished breaking, and it was saying the same thing over and over.

“Come on, Mags. Come on. Come on, Mags, come on.”

She tried to tell it to stop. Her mouth did not work. Something heavy and flat lay across her chest, and her lungs were full of a smell she had no word for, like rotten eggs and hot iron and the underside of a forge, and there was a taste in her mouth of old pennies.

The scraping stopped. Light came in. It was yellow and dirty and it hurt, and it came through a gap in what she slowly understood to be a sheet of dented metal as long as a coffin, and in the gap there appeared a face.

It was an enormous face. It belon