“Yurvan was a gentle and foolish young man,” started Varya, toying with a hazel twig, “although he never lacked for cunning. Compared to his siblings, his Artistry was unremarkable, a fragment of the inherited power that overflowed in them. His family expected nothing from him, recognizing Yurvan as the least of them. Despite this, his heart and belly brimmed with desire, while his mind wove the most frenzied fantasies around it. He dreamed of wonderful and terrible deeds – an achievement that would make him worthy in the eyes of his beloved.
“Only she, Yurvan believed, could mend him. She was a creature of fearsome power and presence. Her feats were whispered about throughout the forested lands, her beauty unmatched by any of her sisters. Her coven was known for its Sanguine Arts and prodigious appetite, its lust for life unending. Yurvan longed to impress her. Foolishly, he wished to be her equal one day. But what could a simple man like him offer to a witch of such severity?
“Yurvan committed his limited self to alchemy and the lesser pursuits – that means Sorcery, Yaro – deciding to fashion the perfect gift: a flower, a living thing, that would never deplete and would always keep her sated. Its pistil was a deep ruby, pulsing softly and innocently like a heart.” One of the leaf-buds swelled between Varya’s fingers, its imbricate green scales opening and closing. “It was a mystery, this gift, the culmination of his mad strivings. Despite the dismay and ridicule of his family, Yurvan was unrelenting. His body and ardors – even bits of his marrow, supposedly – flowed into the creative ordeal. Little remained of poor Yurvan once the flower was ready.
“When his fervent work was done and his home quieted, he traveled to the witch, hoping to earn her favor. The coven’s hold was deep within the birchen grove. The weakened man struggled to find her, but she awaited him. He presented the bleeding flower to her, expecting praise, even reciprocity. Her pale palms–”
“Don’t make her sound like a sunk,” Yaro interrupted.
Varya sighed. “Her pale palms were soon slick and scarlet with the essence of Yurvan’s offering. She smiled approvingly, but her amusement disturbed him. The witch spoke kindly of his efforts while her eyes remained cold and curious.
“Before he could reconsider, she ensnared him. He fell to her feet, betrayed and bewildered. His beloved explained: ‘A considerate gift, without a doubt. It is the blood of your own kin that flows through this thing of beauty, is it not? Yet not even they can satiate us. You have given us a single flower, but we require a bountiful garden.’
“Thereafter, Yurvan was made subject to the coven, bound to care for the bud of his own flesh and its festering progeny. It fed and delighted the witches, adorning their domain with its ceaseless crimson streams. The flower spread its leeching roots into the nearby villages and far beyond. He had given too much of himself; his hope was spent and his mind unrecoverable. Reduced and hollowed, he bore the weight of his own creation.
“The little red flowers sprouted from the wandering puppet and stained their lands. The witches started calling him their gardener. His beloved mended him many times. Yurvan endured in her care, blooming and withering dutifully, for she had called his gift beautiful.”
Yaro watched through his binoculars. “What a sap,” he said. “Really was a fool.”
Varya squinted at him. “Why?” she demanded.
“Decades of work. For what? A flower?”
“For love,” answered Varya, throwing the branch at him. “You just don’t understand it, Yarik.”
Yaro lowered the binoculars and gave her the sort of smile that made mockery difficult to resent. He was a handsome Vanaha boy in an ordinary way, strong without being broad, with short dark hair and a nose that had healed cleanly after a break. The old field jacket exaggerated the soldierly impression he cultivated, though his clean face and nineteen years did their best to undo it. “It’s villagey fairytalk, Var. Maybe there was a Yurvan, maybe there wasn’t. Maybe the witch made it herself and a random guy took credit. Doesn’t change anything. It infested Morvin Mir and is making nectar out of their buried. We can get some of it. That’s what I care about. Also, weren’t they related?”
“Who?”
“Yurvan and his witchie darling. Cousins or something like that.”
Varya frowned. “So what?” she demanded. Yaro made a face and shrugged. “It was the fifteenth century when it supposedly happened. Besides, that doesn’t make what he did less beautiful.” She had dressed sensibly for the cold: black cargo trousers over heavy boots, a dark sweater and a striped athletic jacket at odds with the rest of her sunk outfit. Her hair compensated for it, dyed an emphatic jet black around a fawnish, fine Vanahan face, as did the black around her eyes and the chipped varnish on her nails.
“What do you think?” she said. “Ilya.”
While Yaro and Varya argued, Ilya had wandered to the nearest tree. He had discovered a rounded object in the moss and mulch below a tree trunk, too smooth and pale to belong there. He picked it up. An egg, blue-green with a sparse freckling of brown. There seemed to be no crack on it. Ilya investigated the hazel tangle above them. The first buds had begun to loosen, but there was no nest that he could see.
“What is it?” Varya asked.
“Blackbird, I think. Early.” He pressed it lightly between both palms and reached with his Art for whatever life might be hidden inside. He felt nothing certain.
“Are you going to put it back?”
“If only I knew where it belongs.”
“Maybe you can cook it,” said Yaro offhandedly.
Varya watched him search the branches a while longer, then smiled. “Well, what do you think? About the story.”
When no nest appeared, Ilya slipped the egg into his coat pocket. He was the youngest of them, long and narrow where Yaro had already filled out. His tawny hair had grown past the point where it stayed neatly parted, and his brown Vanahan face tapered sharply after the cheekbones. A bottle-green cable-knit sweater showed under his unbuttoned gray coat. “He made it for her,” he said uncertainly. “To gain her love and trust. He even presented it to her knowing that neither was guaranteed to him. To me, that’s beautiful. It’s one of the nicer versions of the story.”
Varya looked at him with quiet approval. “See, Yarik? He’s younger but he gets it.”
Yaro said nothing and kept surveying the land through the binoculars. Their slope flattened to a thicket of hazel, hiding them from the road and graveyard below. Sol had already slumped somewhere behind them and the sky was agloam. Morvin Mir lay quiet under them. At its stream-edged skirt lay the graveyard. It occupied the low hill beyond the last houses. It was much larger than the village seemed to require, spreading around the church. The Vampiric Extirpation Division had sectioned off one part of it with temporary fencing and strips of yellow tape. White lamps were erected among the graves. The VED personnel were packing up, cases being carried to the dark vehicles along the road. Then engines started in rapid succession. The remaining policemen had little left to do except watch the road and keep the nosy villagers away.
“They're clearing out,” said Yaro. He tracked the departing vehicles through the binoculars. “Give them two minutes. Then we move.”
*
They went down the far side of the hill, away from the village, through the hazel, then pivoted along the slope. Yaro had scouted the route before solset and picked the easiest crossing of the stream. It added several hundred meters, but kept them out of sight of the road and the last houses of Morvin Mir. Leaf litter slid beneath their shoes as they descended sideways.
The stream was enlarged by thaw and rain, carrying the smell of black mud and wet leaf mould. It ran brown between banks of pebbled earth. A frog kicked away through the flooded grass. Yaro crossed quickly and helped Varya and Ilya. “Don’t step on them, Ilya,” he whispered. “They might hear it.”
The ground rose again on the other side. The church and rectory appeared intermittently through the branches above them, the black timber and cupola rising above a slumped stone barrier. The fence was old iron at the front, but along the wooded rear boundary it had been bolstered with wire mesh. The stone wall was an older, defunct border. Yaro stopped them with a raised fist. “Down.” He brought up the binoculars.
The nearest police car had gone, but not all the police. One walked slowly along the lower path with a flashlight, stopping now and then to inspect the graves. Another was farther away near the gate. Portable VED lamps still burned at the site of the graveburst, though the specialists themselves appeared to have left.
“Why are they still here?” Varya whispered.
Yaro watched. “Security detail. Veddies probably told them to hold the perimeter.”
They waited. The policeman on the lower path disappeared near the rectory. The other remained near the gate, a cigarette appearing and disappearing as a tiny orange point. “Now,” said Yaro. After a short sprint, he found a section sagging between two concrete posts. He threw the shovel and backpack over, climbed, then held the wire down with his gloved hands.
Varya and Ilya dropped quietly onto the other side.
From the hill they had seen an orderly grid of graves. Now they saw the tangle of tombstones facing different angles and standing at different heights, fitted wherever earlier generations had left space. The newer plots nearer the road were edged in concrete or enclosed by low iron rails. Their stones were polished and square, their fronts carved with twelve-part rings around photographs, names and dates. Plastic flowers and votive cups crowded the bases. The same twelvefold pattern repeated in the ironwork, little circles divided by twelve radial bars. Farther uphill, an older order remained, but only in ruin. Older stelae, with epitaphs effaced, leaned into one another or barely protruded from the flattened sward and early crocuses.
They kept low. Yaro moved quickly from stone to stone whenever the lower path was hidden. Varya followed. Ilya kept glancing toward the church. It was smaller from here than it had seemed across the valley. Rickety, even.
All three stopped as a flashlight passed between the bilobed tombstones and monuments. The beam wandered over the row in front of theirs, illuminated a lichenous Saint in weathered sage-green plaster, verdigrised spear raised, then passed. Footsteps and coughs followed. The policeman seemed in no particular hurry. They waited behind the village kenotaph, a broad stone monument to the unrecovered dead, until he moved on. Yaro flicked two fingers forward.
The VED equipment made the graveburst easy to locate. Yellow tape enclosed nine plots. Temporary metal stakes had been driven into the soil around it. The middle one had been opened. The odor was not the thick rot Ilya had expected. A sweet note lingered in the air, like stale rice. The plot was completely excavated and widened; the tombstone was knocked backward in the process. Heavy clods of earth, splinters from the coffin and other debris, as well as dozens of footprints, littered the neighboring plots. A whitish sludge had gathered in one low corner and been partly covered with white sorbent.
Varya leaned over the tombstone. “Radavan Kolitka.” She wiped the damp grit from the inscription. “Nineteen twenty-one to eighty-five. He hasn’t been here long. Saints, I didn’t know gravebursts were this violent. It’s like it detonated.”
“Not a detonation,” said Yaro, inspecting the surrounding damage. “If this were a charge or a shell, you’d get a cleaner displacement and more fragmentation. Slow internal pressure, maybe over weeks, then rupture through the weakest point.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Varya. “We know what did it.”
“Right,” he said and nodded at Ilya. “You’re going in.”
The smell thickened inside, rot admixing with the sweetness. He brushed aside loose earth and examined the cut wall. Most of the roots were ordinary: fibrous, woody, dull. The parasite’s haustorial rootlets were smoother and almost bluish, with vascular interiors. But those were not what he wanted. The overfeeding that led to the graveburst should have bloated the conduit as well. An earthworm worked free of the side he was searching and curled near his wrist. Ilya frowned and recoiled, flicking it away into the dirt.
“I think I have it,” said Ilya, groping the area under the tombstone. He uncovered more of it. The root was dark red-brown, smooth except for faint longitudinal ridges. Clear exudate had beaded at the severed end. He took his compact knife and shaved away a thin section. Fresh sticky droplets welled up immediately. He smelled it, cheek against the dirt. Almost floral, but too faint and mild to resemble perfume. Beneath it was fermenting fruit and the iron tang so familiar to all Sanguimancers.
For a moment, the grave was very quiet.
“Anything?” Yaro asked.
“Yeah,” said Ilya. “I found the one feeding the burst.”
Ilya returned to the rootlet, inhaled and scooped some of the sweet droplets. The sound above changed. The scuff of shoes on grass. He glanced up. Yaro and Varya were gone. Light appeared beyond the lip of the grave. A flashlight. He crouched immediately.
The beam crossed the yellow tape and widened over the disturbed soil. It passed over one of the VED markers, then along the opposite wall. Ilya held dead-still in the grave. Unhurried footsteps approached. The light stayed fixed for several seconds somewhere just beyond the grave, then moved away. After a while, Yaro appeared at the edge.
“Keep going,” he mouthed.
Ilya nodded as Yaro disappeared. He brushed away more earth around the root and pulled at it. The thicker section descended diagonally into the wall, then vanished. It had been taking from the corpse. So he nicked his fingertip with the knife and pressed it to the wounded end. It imbibed him gladly but patiently, as no animal can. Ilya squeezed out more. The root took that too.
His Art was meagre, but he knew his own blood. First there was only the prick in his finger and the warmth teeming around it. Then parts of him were elsewhere. The sensation passed from the wound into the root and away from him. He followed it uphill. A narrow vessel joined another, then broadened. His trace thinned – and in moments he could not distinguish himself clearly from whatever already circulated there.
The dark earth was against his face. The root he held was not a pipe between corpse and flower, nor some blood-hungry beast, nor the fabled Mul-Rasatala, nor Yurvan himself. Subterranean channels crossed, narrowing around individual coffins and widening where several dead contributed to the same flow. Matter passed through all of it; harvested, altered, sent elsewhere and returned. His own trace entered it and became difficult to separate the further it travelled. Some channels felt ancient. Others were new, exploratory runners reaching blindly for recent burials. Not the simple order of roots spreading wherever earth permitted them, but pullulation subdued from within. The plexus abandoned poor paths and strengthened rich ones. It circled rock and masonry effectively, found flesh and redirected nourishment in its direction. As the simple, thoughtless thing drank of him, Ilya could not help but consider it beautiful, even brilliant.
His few drops were almost gone now, diluted into a vast pool, but their last recognizable trace drew uphill through two converging branches. Both entered a concentration unlike anything else he had felt – a node, he quickly realized. His blood touched its margin and disappeared into its circulation. Beneath, a hundred buried currents made one wave; under many sepulchral shallows, the dead are one.
The shadow of the boy-soldier crept over the grave. “Well?” he said into the hollow below. “Is it done?”
Ilya startled when he noticed Yaro staring. “Uphill,” he said hazily. “There’s a knot there. The flow mixes with tree sugars, so probably under one of the oaks.”
“The rhizosoma?” asked Yaro. “The root-body?”
“I doubt it,” said Ilya. “But I’ll find it.”
Yaro smiled, lowering his hand for Ilya.
*
Ilya led them toward the church. His first attempt had carried him far enough to know which way it ran. What remained of it had dispersed into a busy confluence somewhere nearer the older plots. He followed the remembered pull between the graves until it brought him to a broad tree growing from the corner of a family enclosure. The tree itself looked healthy, and its lower branches were budding while the others nearby were still bare. Ilya examined the root flare, found a soft place and nicked the bark. He reopened the cut and pressed it to the wound. The blood returned easily. This time there was no hesitation in him and the current was stronger than before. For a moment it spread around the node; then a branch of the flow broke from the tangle and continued uphill. He followed the trace until it weakened and died out.
“This way,” he said.
They crossed the remaining graveyard in stages. Twice Yaro stopped them as a policeman’s flashlight moved along the paved path. Nearer the church they had to lie flat behind a broad slab while the two policemen stopped to talk. Marble, granite and concrete disappeared on the other side. The paths narrowed and finally ceased being paths. Low footstones bearing indistinct names and wooden stakes carrying duodecimal rings were planted among last year’s bramble and fresh nettle shoots. Downhill stood a truncated ossuary, a mouldering building with a sagging roof and corroded iron door. Boscage had swallowed much of the rear boundary.
Ilya slowed. The trace pointed to the closest oak. He stopped beside it and put his hand onto an exposed runner. The absorption was more intense, drawing from him more hungrily and steadily. They crossed to another oak, then a third nearer the rear woods.
Yaro and Varya watched him as he roamed furtively from tree to tree, over the graves and mounds.
“You lost it?” asked Yaro.
“It’s close,” said Varya. “Isn’t it?”
The major runners converged between three cankered oaks. What Ilya had mistaken for another node was only the outer circulation of a larger mass. It was at the rear of the ossuary, in a slightly uneven stretch of land where no discernible tombstones or monuments remained.
“It’s here somewhere.” Ilya sounded strained. “Sorry, I can’t be more precise.”
“That’s fine,” said Varya. She pulled out a small juice carton from her knapsack and held it to him. “Here, it’s blackcurrant. You’ve spent plenty of yourself. It helps.”
Ilya took it with a muttered thanks, smiling briefly. “I think I need to sit down.”
“We haven’t found anything yet,” said Yaro. “Only a place to start digging.” He was already taking off his pack. He unfolded the shovel with a metallic click, locked the blade straight and drove it into the soil.
Ilya had given him a direction, not an exact point. He sat at the foot of one of the oaks with the juice between his hands. Yaro paced out the likely line of the buried flow, marked a short strip from the ossuary toward the woodland, and began cutting across it. He sliced the sward into rough squares and stacked the turf beside the ditch, green side upward, as though he intended to put them back together when they were done. Varya helped first by clearing loose branches and old bramble from the strip he chose, then moved the squares of turf as he cut them. The weather had softened the topsoil, and the shovel entered easily. Below the turf the earth remained colder and firmer. He threw the loosened soil aside in black heaps. The cut lengthened into something resembling a shallow field trench.
Yaro had opened a narrow trench nearly two meters long and no more than thirty centimeters deep when the shovel finally met a thing other than soil or stone. He pressed down, testing it. His grin appeared immediately. “There you are.” He dropped to a crouch and scraped the flat of the blade across it, shaving away the clinging soil.
“Wait,” said Ilya. “Let me.” He dropped beside the ditch and cleared the loose clay. It appeared gnarled and hard where the shovel had polished it.
“The rhizosoma,” said Varya.
“Only the uppermost part. The mass I felt is below it. But this should do.”
Clay had compacted around the growth and came away reluctantly. They worked along its sides rather than through it, widening the hole until the buried mass started to show its shape. A broad ridge emerged, then a shallow depression and another prominence below it. Several curving struts branched from a single line at regular intervals and disappeared into the soil. A broad triangular plate lay across part of them. It could have been part of an upper back. The surface was sallow and swollen, resembling a caudex.
Yaro crouched beside them. For a few seconds none of them said anything.
“Those look like ribs,” said Varya.
Yaro laughed once, quietly. “Yeah… Like somebody just curled up and died. But these aren’t bones.”
“Find the spine,” she said. “That’s where I can tap it.”
Once Yaro and Ilya had uncovered the long, segmented taproot, they made room for Varya. She climbed into the dugout and crouched over the exposed mass. Her touch traveled across it slowly. “Yaro, give me your knife and prepare the bottles,” she commanded. “Ilya, bring me a scion. Long enough to work with, healthy bud.”
Both nodded and obeyed. Yaro gave her the knife and prepared the four clean plastic bottles he had brought, squat and translucent. He had also brought a funnel, sealed inside a plastic bag. Ilya wandered around, searching for the right species. Even by night, life spread out sarmentose; over the ossuary stone, it waits to be reborn.
Soon enough, the pale girl had a suitable rose. “Perfect,” she said, “except for the one thorn.”
“Sorry,” said Ilya. “I don’t see it. I’ll get more.”
The other rose cuttings Ilya brought were nearly the length of her forearm, bare except for a few tight reddish buds at the nodes. Varya pared the scions one by one, fitting each into the incision and supporting it with her Art. The first three failed. The fourth was accepted by the rootstock. Her face beamed before either of them saw anything. Then the bud fattened visibly. Its scales loosened, a green point pushed through, and the new growth lengthened between her fingers. Only then did the petals begin to part. The pedicel stiffened, then bowed beneath a new weight.
Yaro stood above Varya now, feet planted on opposite sides of the dugout. “Is it working?” he whispered.
The flower opened only halfway. Its corolla tightened around the swelling pistil. A bead rose slowly from the folds. Soon it was a ruby, dark crimson between the pressed petals, trembling without falling. Varya smiled, standing from her work. Yaro caught her around the waist and lifted her up, kissing her neck and cheek as he held her. She laughed and tried to wiggle away. “You’re brilliant,” he said.
Ilya busied himself with the funnel, but the first drop fell onto his skin before he was ready. He rubbed it between index and thumb, admiring it beyond its Artistic utility. Made of the same stuff that flowed through him but refined beyond comparison. He smelled it, wanted to taste it. Another bead had begun forming at the pistil. “Ilya,” said Yaro. He was watching him, arms still around Varya. “Don't waste it. You’re playing with real money there. Almost a hundred fifty Eisenmarks for a hundred milliliters.”
“Eisenmarks?” jeered Varya. “Since when do you look to the West?”
Yaro eyed her up and down. “And where do you think the sunk look came from? Nagarvan’s sunken districts?”
“Are you calling me a trend-chaser, Lieutenant Yarovan?”
“Of course not, Varvara.” He grinned. “I just know a guy who goes to Eisenstadt once a month. He can get us a better price there, even after his cut. They don’t have the flower growing anywhere near there.”
Varya watched the bottle fill. The red drops were beginning to cover the bottom. “We’ll discuss that later.”
Ilya counted the other bottles. “That’s seven hundred and fifty each, right?”
“If there’s enough to fill them,” said Varya.
“There will be.” His grin was greedy and gleeful. “I’m taking you somewhere good when we get back to Nagarvan.”
“With whose money, I beg?”
“Mine, of course.” He leaned down to kiss the top of her head.
“Couldn’t have done any of this without you, Ilya,” Varya said. “You should come with us.”
The first bottle continued filling, one beautiful drop at a time. It took longer to fill than Yaro had expected. By then there was nothing for any of them to do except watch the graft bleed the rhizosoma. “We need someone to keep watch. A sentry.” Ilya followed his gaze to the church. “You can see the lower path from there,” he said. “And the gate.”
“Why him?” Varya asked.
“Because you have to make sure the tap stays on.”
“You could go as well. Or take turns.”
Yaro smiled. “If someone comes, I pack. You pull the graft. He watches.”
Varya looked at Ilya. “It’s fine,” he said.
Yaro pulled the binocular strap over his head and held them out. “Go uphill. If either of those cops starts coming close, signal us.” Ilya took the binoculars. “Two flashes. One if they turn around.” He took a small flashlight from his jacket and handed that over too. “Hurry.”
*
The ground rose sharply before the ossuary. Ilya crouched by the corner of the church. From there he could see surprisingly far downhill. Both policemen were near the gate, smoking. Neither seemed inclined to come any closer. After a while they started in the direction of the graveburst site. No danger there. He trained the binoculars on the thin copse below the ossuary. He could not see Yaro or Varya anywhere else. Ilya moved a few steps sideways and tried again. Nothing. He considered going back down and telling them that the police were staying near the gate.
There was no reason to pursue the thought surfacing in his green, maculated mind. He was alone on the watch, and could easily have dozed off, or at least rested.
No reason to do it again.
Ilya checked the path once more through the binoculars then put them aside. A strange, appetitive mood had already overtaken him. He was flushed, ashamed.
No reason. Again.
He went to the nearest oak; one they had skipped following the trail. He uncovered a promising root facing the church and reopened the cut on his index finger. It accepted him immediately. His blood dispersed and he made no effort to follow its course this time.
Within moments he could no longer tell where he ended and the others began. They all met and merged somewhere underground, drawn to the same wellspring. Hiving, brought together, manifold and serried – neither visages, nor vessels, nor wills remain. One inevitable flow for the pricked and buried, life and death, both tributaries of the vernal vein. A composite circulation, gathering and refining until all those separate streams became a single, sublime substance: the raktic nectar of the vampiric flower. The sheer pleasure of it surprised him. It teemed and abounded yet made room for him.
When he finally pulled away, he had to lean on the trunk. His pulse seemed to continue underground for several seconds after the link had been severed. He chuckled once under his breath, dizzy. He finished the carton of blackcurrant juice from his pocket as he rested below the tree. He wiped sweat from his brow and shrugged his coat down off his shoulders.
A blackbird sang from the bare canopy above him. Ilya looked up at the sharp, repeated call. After a moment, he remembered the egg in his pocket. He drew it out and turned it between his fingers. It had warmed inside his coat. Although he was exhausted, he tried to probe it again. It answered through the thin turquoise shell. He could make out the beginning of a web of vessels spreading across the yolk, not yet properly a bird but no longer merely a possibility. Its nascent life fluttered weakly in response to his Art.
Ilya’s face tightened and his eyes watered unexpectedly. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his other arm. He looked up into the branches, searching more earnestly this time. Still no nest. The blackbird had moved farther away and continued calling from another tree. “Sorry.” There was nowhere to put it back. Ilya crouched beside the tree. He found and widened a hollow between roots. He lowered the egg into it gently. Only a faint greenish speck remained. “You belong here now.” He drew the earth over it and pressed the leaves into place.
He turned to go and the church was right there, beside him the whole time. Only now did he see it properly. The sill beams were black with damp, their grain raised and split. Several had been repaired with shorter boards of visibly newer wood. The low foundation was stone, unevenly mortared and mossed. The steep roof overhung the walls, patched with sheets of metal where the old covering had failed. The narrow belfry rose to a sharp point.
Ilya circled it.
The building was hardly larger than one of the houses in Morvin Mir, the rectory adjacent even smaller. Ilya looked through one of the windows and quickly jerked back. For an instant he had thought it was in the middle of mass. He waited, embarrassed though nobody had seen him, then returned to the glass. There were no people inside, only flowers. They occupied the nave in such quantity that the darkness had given them the semblance of a congregation. Roses rested in jars and metal pitchers along the walls, hothouse blooms far too lush for the season. Bundles had been laid before the iconostasis. Others filled the ends of benches, crowded the window ledges and gathered around the stands before the icons. Pale blooms caught what remained of the evening through the opposite windows; darker ones disappeared almost completely into the interior.
There must have been hundreds. Ilya stared captive.
Then he remembered the date. Of course, the spring equinox – The Feast of Saint Marcelin. There had been a service that day. People from Morvin Mir and the surrounding villages would have brought offerings with them. Roses especially. Marcelin was impossible to imagine without them. He moved to the next window. Narrow benches occupied either side of the nave. A battered wooden lectern stood before them, still draped in the green of the feast. The floor appeared to be bare boards.
Ilya glanced downhill. The policemen were at the gate. Yaro and Varya were out of sight. He turned off his flashlight. Mud had dried in overlapping footprints across the boards at the entrance. Ilya touched the door handle, expecting it to be locked. The latch withdrew with a dry click.