Brother Thomas's back disappeared around the corner and Raziel stood there holding a dirty rag, not moving.
His mind had already gone somewhere else.
The orphanage in the past life, Raziel was already a priest. The smell of it, dust and cold wood and bread that was always a little stale.
Thomas had been older then, and he'd been standing in that dirt yard watching the kids run while Raziel watched him.
"You are very quiet," Thomas had told him.
"I spent two years closing dead people's eyes at the hospice," Raziel had said. "This much life in one place is disorienting."
Thomas had laughed. The kind that came from the chest.
"The Church trusts you with these children. That means something."
"The Church trusts people with things until they stop being useful," Raziel had said. "I'll try to be useful for as long as possible."
Thomas had laughed again, because he thought it was a joke.
It wasn't a joke.
CRASH.
Lucian had dropped his bucket.
Raziel blinked. St. Celeste. Window duty. Right.
He gripped the wet rag and stared at the blue System notification still floating at the edge of his vision and dismissed it with a blink.
"Did you fall asleep standing up?" Lucian whispered, keeping his face neutral for Oriel's benefit.
"He keeps looking at us. If you go catatonic he's going to run straight to Marius."
"I'm fine," Raziel said. "Thinking."
"About?"
"How much I hate windows."
Lucian looked at him. "That's not what that face was."
"That's exactly what that face was."
He went back to scrubbing. Lucian, who was irritating but not stupid, dropped it.
They worked until the light went flat and grey.
Oriel packed up early and left with the specific energy of someone who believed they had won something.
Raziel watched him go.
'He tattled,' he thought. 'Or he's about to.'
Forty minutes later, the acolyte showed up.
Older, grim face, the small silver badge of Marius's personal staff pinned at his collar.
He stopped in the corridor and looked at both of them like they were a task he hadn't asked for.
"Raziel. Lucian. Father Marius requires your presence."
Lucian went pale and dropped the mop. It hit the tiles loud enough to echo down the hall.
"Now? But we haven't finished the… do you think it was Oriel? I'll kill him, I'll actually —"
"Don't say a word," Raziel said without moving his lips, smiling pleasantly at the acolyte. "Not one."
The walk to Marius's office was long. That was fine. Raziel used the time.
'Options: Oriel reported the hallway incident only, which is manageable. Oriel reported the crypt rumors, which is less manageable. Or someone else entirely has been talking, which means a completely different problem.'
He ranked the scenarios by damage level and prepared an answer set for each.
He was ready for Marius.
He was not ready for what was in the room with Marius.
Marius was behind his desk, but the executioner from this morning was gone.
What sat there instead was a man sweating through his collar, rubbing his hands against his thighs under the desk where he thought no one would notice.
Standing at the window was the reason.
Tall. Black robe with silver embroidery. The kind of silver that caught the last of the evening light and held it too long.
An Inquisitor.
Raziel's brain, without consulting the rest of him, ran a quick calculation.
'An Inquisitor does not travel to a novice academy for curfew violations. So the crypt report reached the capital faster than expected. This is either very bad or catastrophically bad.'
He hadn't decided which yet.
"Come in, sit down," Marius said, pointing to the chairs. His voice had about thirty percent of its normal authority left in it.
The Inquisitor turned from the window.
His eyes went to Raziel first. Not Lucian. That told Raziel something.
"So these are the famous troublemakers," the man said quietly. "The reports make more sense now."
Lucian swallowed. Audibly. In the silence of that office it sounded like a dropped chair.
Raziel stepped forward, lowered his head, folded his hands. Every inch of him said: small, young, harmless, devout.
"Reports, Excellency?" Genuine confusion. He'd practiced this exact expression. "We attended the Royal Monastery as part of the guided tour. There was a scheduling misunderstanding. That's all."
The Inquisitor smiled.
It was not a good smile.
"A misunderstanding," he repeated. He started walking. Not toward them. Around them, slow, like he was checking the shape of something from different angles. "My sources describe dark energies in the crypt. Broken seals. Magic that no novice should be capable of casting."
He stopped directly in front of Raziel.
Close enough that Raziel could smell him. Incense, iron, old parchment. The smell of an office that dealt in confessions.
"And you, boy, were in the center of it."
'He is not asking,' Raziel noted. 'He already has a version. He's seeing if mine matches.'
Next to him, Lucian had stopped breathing in any useful way.
Raziel looked the Inquisitor in the eyes.
"I don't know what you're talking about, Excellency. I'm a novice. I can barely light a candle in class, let alone break seals in a royal crypt."
The Inquisitor let out a short laugh. Not dismissive. Evaluating.
"Don't do that," he said pleasantly. "I've been doing this for nineteen years. The 'confused innocent' posture fools exactly no one after the first decade." He turned sharply to Lucian.
"What about you? Your friend seems to have a very impressive memory gap. Help him fill it in."
Lucian looked at Raziel.
The look said: WHAT DO I DO.
Raziel's look said, as clearly as he could manage without speaking: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
"I, we " Lucian started.
"It was my fault," Raziel said.
The Inquisitor's eyes snapped back to him.
"I wanted to see the heroes' tombs. The ones from the second Invasion. We weren't supposed to, I knew that, but I convinced Lucian and we went down. We got scared by the dark and ran out. That's the whole thing, Excellency. A stupid decision and nothing else."
He put a small, genuine-looking shame into the last three words.
The Inquisitor looked at him for a long time.
Raziel felt the [Acting] skill doing its job, keeping his pulse down, keeping his hands still, keeping the performance locked in place.
The man was good. He was looking for the crack.
He was going through everything Raziel had said and measuring it against what he already knew.
'He's not finding it,' Raziel thought. 'But he knows there's something to find. He just doesn't know what shape it is yet.'
The Inquisitor tilted his head slightly.
"A boy who wants to see the heroes' tombs," he said.
"That I believe. What I don't believe is that a boy who sneaks into a royal crypt out of historical curiosity ends up at the center of a dark energy discharge, a broken necromantic seal, and multiple eyewitness accounts of holy fire."
He paused. "That's not curiosity. That's a biography."
Marius made a sound from the desk. Not words.
Just the noise of a man watching something happen that he knew he couldn't stop.
"If you won't talk here," the Inquisitor said, still pleasant, still smiling, "your tongues will work fine in the interrogation rooms. I have yet to meet the story that doesn't improve under the right conditions."
Marius choked. "Please, Excellency, they're children, surely—"
"They're suspects," the Inquisitor said. He signaled to the door.
Two guards appeared from the hallway. They had been outside the whole time. Of course they had.
"Take them. We'll get to the truth tonight. However long that takes."
The guards came forward.
Raziel walked without being pulled.
'One conversation down, one to go,' he thought. 'The next room is going to be worse.'
He was already building the second story.