But he didn’t seem to believe it.
There was another flurry of sound. Guards had rounded up five more victims. X stood to see.
He knew them all.
The foul-mouthed mummy: They had to carry him up the hill.
The Bombers: They were gesturing frantically in code. The American man was already in tears.
The lonely Knight: He seemed grateful for the guards’ attention. Didn’t he know what was coming?
Finally, the Liar, the one X had struck: Why was he to be punished? He hadn’t helped X at all. And it was the Ukrainian who pushed him forward. Even from a distance, X could see how disgusted his friend was to be a part of this.
“They’ve gathered all of them—every soul I spoke to,” X told Plum. “What will the Countess do to them?”
Plum was too upset to even shrug.
“I apologize for cursing,” he said, “but any goddamn thing she wants.”
Shiloh and the Bride squirmed on the altar. The Countess sat on her bed, languidly putting up her hair. She was prolonging their misery. When she’d finished, she ordered Rex to tighten the laces on her shoes. She seemed to relish having a giant kneel before her. She laughed as he fumbled with the laces. For Shiloh and the Bride—and everyone watching—the delay was excruciating. The servant with the bloody apron stood at the edge of the crowd, waiting to minister to the wounded. She looked fearful. Her eyes were cast down.
At last, the Countess strode to the altar, and plunged her palm down onto Shiloh’s heart.
Every torch on the hill went out. The ceiling exploded with light. It became a screen.
The Bride scrambled to get off the altar. Oedipus and Rex forced her back down. Nearby, the Ukrainian and the other guards tightened in a ring around the next victims.
Shiloh’s sins began to play, loud and bright, in a movie on the ceiling. The Countess arched her back with pleasure.
“His pain feeds her,” said Plum. “His sins. His humiliation. She gorges on it all. If you really have to watch, then watch how she glows as she sucks the evil into herself. I swear it makes her younger.”
Every soul on the hill craned their head back to see Shiloh’s sins. It was like they were gazing at stars. Light and shadow mottled their faces. Shiloh thrashed helplessly, refusing to look. The Countess spread his eyes open with her fingers.
X looked to the ceiling, too. He couldn’t stop himself.
He saw Shiloh and his regiment on a plain in winter. They’d attacked a Cherokee settlement. There was snow on the ground. The trees were shaking. Shiloh forced a native father and his daughter into a wooden roundhouse. He shouted slurs at them, and prodded them with his musket. Once they were inside, he set the house alight. Flames raced onto the roof.
X should have looked away, like Plum had begged him to.
The father and daughter burst from the roundhouse to escape the fire. Shiloh laughed. He raised his musket and shot the father in the face. The girl screamed. She was maybe six or seven. Shiloh lifted his rifle again, and fired. A red stain bloomed on the girl’s chest. A trail of blood ran down her dress like a tear.
Finally, the ceiling went black.
The torches whooshed back to life.
Shiloh and the Bride whimpered on the slab.
The Countess took her knife off her belt. It had a thin, curling blade about five inches long. It looked like something used to peel away an animal’s hide.
All around X and Plum, souls cheered the Countess on. They were greedy to watch someone besides themselves suffer. Some got to their feet. Others shook the giant stalks that held the torches. When the Countess shined the knife on the sleeve of her dress, the cheering intensified, like a rainstorm moving in. Oedipus and Rex looked away. They seemed to have lost their taste for this.
X stood, and drew closer. Shiloh was only being punished because he had talked to him.
Plum heard him leaving, and urged him to come back.
X didn’t listen.
The Countess raised the knife. The hill fell silent. X could hear the torches crackle. The Countess cut through the laces of Shiloh’s boots, pulled them off, and flung them aside. A hunched soul in rags had been watching from the fringes of the crowd. He dashed forward and snatched up the boots. X recognized him. It was Bone, who’d tried to steal Plum’s photograph.
X was close enough now to see that Shiloh wore no socks, and that his feet were horrifically swollen. The boots hadn’t been off in years.
The Countess poked one of Shiloh’s toes with the tip of her knife, testing the flesh. Shiloh wailed, and pleaded for her to stop. His foot shook uncontrollably.
The Countess hissed at Oedipus and Rex: “Hold him fast, else this knife shall play upon THY skin next!”
Again, the torches went out and the ceiling came to life. Again, the souls gazed upward. Everything that happened on the altar played out up there, hundreds of feet tall and wide. Shiloh’s pleading was amplified so much that there was no shutting it out. The Bride writhed beside him. The men waiting to be tortured all wept, even the Knight. The servant woman with the bloody apron never lifted her eyes. Her lips moved soundlessly, apparently in prayer.
The Countess pressed the blade into the sole of Shiloh’s foot, where the skin was most raw. She was about to cut him open when she paused—and looked directly at X.
She was taunting him.
She was saying, This is your doing. This is because of you.
The Countess pressed the blade into the ball of Shiloh’s foot. She did it just hard enough to produce a single bead of blood.
And then she ripped the knife down.
Shiloh’s limbs shot out in every direction, and his back flew up off the altar. He must have been in too much agony to scream. Even if he had screamed, he would have been drowned out by the crowd.
X did not often miss his powers—they were too tangled in his mind with the wretched business of taking souls to the Lowlands—but he craved them now. He hated his weakness. He loathed his damaged, human, near-useless body. Still, he would have to make do with it.
He stepped forward.
He shouted at the Countess.
“It is me you want.”
The cheering stopped. Everyone turned their eyes to him. He could feel it like heat on his neck.
“Is it indeed?” the Countess said mildly.
She slipped the knife into Shiloh’s wound, and peeled back the skin, revealing a bed of blood. Shiloh gave a cry that did not sound human. The Bride was sick over the side of the altar.
“You know very well that it is,” X shouted.
His voice boomed all around. He looked to the ceiling, and saw that now it was he, not Shiloh, projected there.
“Regent forced me on you,” he said, “without explaining who I am or even what I am—and all you could do was whimper because he is so much bolder and grander than you.”
He was desperate to rile the Countess, but her heart seemed to beat slow as a crocodile’s. She held a piece of Shiloh’s skin in her fingers. She slid it into her mouth.
X felt his stomach rise.
“I see you are fascinated by other people’s sins,” he said. “I dare you to have a look at mine. They were too much for Regent. If you want to know why he drove me out—there is your answer.”
The Countess’s knife paused in the air, twitching like it longed to go back to work.
“The Countess ACCEPTS thy challenge,” she said. “She shall force such cries from your throat as shall be remembered forever!”
Excitement spread over the hill. The woman in the apron helped Shiloh and the Bride down from the altar. Shiloh’s face ran with tears. He looked at X, and seemed to ask: Why would you do this for me? He appeared stunned, ashamed.
X turned to look for Plum. He couldn’t pick him out in the low light on the hill. He knew his friend would fear for him.