CHAPTER 1
I’m waiting for the moon.
All other ground-level windows in the neighborhood are shuttered for the night as I lean out of ours to look. A breeze whisks up the deserted street, carrying the scent of rain and the distant rumble of thunder from the west. The city of Collis covers a large hill rising from the flat plains, but my view of the approaching storm is blocked by angled roofs. If I balance on my hips and crane my neck as far as it will go, the rose window and towers of the Holy Sanctum to the east are just visible through a gap between houses. Even without moonlight, the white facade glows against the ebony blanket of sky, washing out all the stars.
Not high enough yet.
I sigh and lever myself back inside as Magister Thomas comes down the stairs into the workroom behind me. The architect pauses when he sees me, his eyebrows so high they disappear in the chestnut hair peeking out from under his cap. “Catrin?” he says. “I thought you went to bed hours ago.”
“No, Magister.” I remove the angled support and lower the shutter, sliding the bolts into the frame before turning to face my employer’s frown.
“If I didn’t know better,” he observes, “I’d say you’re dressed for climbing.”
After dinner I’d traded my calf-length working skirt for a much shorter one over a man’s breeches and bound and pinned my dark curls into submission. “I am,” I admit. “I wanted to check on a bowed crossbeam I noticed this morning on the southern scaffolds.”
The master architect’s frown deepens, creasing his forehead. “Why didn’t you do it earlier?”
“Well…” I count the reasons on my fingers. “Between showing the Comte de Montcuir around the work site all morning, verifying the alignment of the drainage system, writing up the stone orders for you to sign, and visiting the market in search of fresh rosemary for Mistress la Fontaine, I ran out of time.” I drop my hands and shrug. “Besides, it’s easier to inspect when the scaffolds aren’t crawling with workers.”
“Hmmph.” The architect eyes my belt, which doesn’t hold the small hammer I usually carry. “And no wandering hands to smash. How many this week?” he asks severely.
His ire isn’t directed at me, so I smile. “Only three or four.”
If the apprentices—and some of the older craftsmen—would just keep their hands to themselves, they wouldn’t have to worry about their fingers. I don’t hit hard enough to break bones the first time, and once is usually enough.
“Show me where your concern is, then.” Magister Thomas nods to the scale replica of Collis’s Sanctum which dominates the room. The model is as old as the Sanctum itself, started decades ago.
I walk around to the far end of the table, and the architect joins me from the opposite side. Really, to call this representation a “model” doesn’t do it justice. Every stone, window, and shingle of the structure is perfectly and proportionally rendered, from the two square towers at the western entrance and down its long nave, to the arms extending north and south from the altar at the center—or rather, what will be the center once the holy building is finished. Our expansion project now underway will lengthen the building far beyond its current T shape. The transept wings mark the beginning of the work area, all of which is also portrayed and updated with our progress, including the scaffolding.
“Right here.” I point to a scarlet thread I’ve tied as my own reminder of the location, then back away so he can see. It’s in a support section as complicated as a spider’s web, tucked within the shadow of the high tower at the end of the southern transept.
As Magister Thomas leans closer to look, the parchment nailed to the wall behind him flutters. The light is too dim for me to read the names written on it, but I know them all by heart: fourteen fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons lost in the collapse of scaffolding and wall five years ago. Above the list rests the gold-plated hammer used in setting the markers of the latest construction project as it was blessed by the high altum.
The placement of those two items is significant: The master architect will never look at the symbol of his greatest achievement without also seeing an account of his greatest failure.
To prevent such a thing from ever happening again, the scaffolds must be as safe and reliable as the limestone walls themselves, and the only way to ensure that is to have someone climbing around them regularly, checking for cracks and warps.
That someone is me. It’s a job I take very seriously.
Magister Thomas is still studying the model, measuring distances with his fingers, when the gentle toll of the Sanctum’s bells drifts through the cracks in the shutters. It’s nearly midnight, which is when a full moon peaks, meaning its light will finally be where I need it to be to see by. While I wasn’t trying to hide my plan to go out tonight, now I feel like I need to wait for permission, but with the storm coming I can’t afford to waste time.
“Do you ever wonder why the brethren even bother going to bed before their last devotions?” I ask, mostly to call the magister’s attention to the hour. The holy men who make up the religious order attached to the Sanctum have probably only slept two hours before being wakened for midnight liturgy.
“Seeing as they’re up again at dawn for the next series of chants, I imagine they catch sleep whenever they can,” is his absentminded reply. He tilts his head to look at the indicated beam from several angles. Though the architect is two years past forty—old enough to be my father—two white streaks running back from his temples are the only obvious signs of his age. The one on the left appeared after the accident five years ago, but the other is more than a decade old according to the housekeeper. Given the tragedy associated with the more recent one, I’ve never had the courage to ask what caused the first.
Magister Thomas shakes his head. “I can see how a problem there could have gone unnoticed, but it’s going to be a difficult spot to reach, even for you.”
The scaffold supports are set at unusual angles due to the carved statues that stick out from the walls. Gargoyles are part of the drainage system, which makes them necessary, but working around them is likely the reason a problem has developed. It is high, and I’m not quite sure how I’ll reach it yet, but I’ve been climbing trees and scaling the sides of buildings for nearly all of my seventeen years.
“I’m not worried,” I say.
“You never are.” He stands straight to look at me again. “Maybe I should go along. I can hold the lantern.”
I doubt I’ll need his help—or the light—but a sharp pounding on the door in the kitchen interrupts us. That’s odd. Who would call at this hour, and from the alley rather than the street?
Mistress la Fontaine shortly appears in the doorway to the kitchen. The housekeeper’s gray-white hair is halfway escaped from the bun at the top of her neck after a full day of baking bread and chopping vegetables, and she wears a sour, disapproving expression as she wipes weathered hands on her apron. “There’s someone here to see you, Magister.”
The architect’s jaw tightens as he narrows his gray eyes suspiciously. “Who is it?”
“Perrete Charpentier.”
A daughter of one of the fourteen builders killed in the accident, about my age. Nothing good comes of her visits, but the architect feels responsible for her father’s death, and so he’s tried to make sure she had enough to live on. Lately, however, it’s been obvious she earns plenty—doing exactly what Magister Thomas had wanted to prevent—and sees him only as a source of free money.
“Tell her to come back tomorrow,” he says.
The housekeeper shakes her head. “She says if you don’t talk to her now, she’ll go straight to the high altum.”
It’s easy to picture the stance Perrete took as she made her threat, hand on a hip jutted out, scarlet lips pouting, her face rouged to play up the natural beauty mark on her cheek. No doubt she waited until the midnight bells so she could actually carry out that threat and approach Altum Gervese as he walks back to his palatial home from the Sanctum after prayers.
“I’ll be fine without you, Magister,” I tell him. “I’d already planned on going alone.”
He shakes his head, though I can tell he’s torn. “Maybe we could block off the area first thing in the morning and inspect it then.”
“You know it can’t wait,” I say. “The altum is already frustrated by our recent weather delays. He’ll be angry if we halt work tomorrow.”
Angry is an understatement. He’s been out to replace Magister Thomas for over two years, and his incessant, underhanded campaign from the pulpit is finally turning some people against him. As a result, donations have decreased, slowing our progress and seeming to back up the altum’s claim that it’s time for a new master architect to take charge.
Which was why I spent the entire morning showing the city provost and his sons around the expansion site. Fortunately, the Comte de Montcuir was impressed and promised a hefty contribution. I took him straight to the window maker, who then sketched his face as an inspiration for one of the stained glass pictures he’ll create. Nothing opens a man’s purse wider than public evidence of his generosity.
The master architect considers my argument for several seconds. At last he sighs. “Very well. I’ll speak with her, Mistress, in private. Let her in.”
Relieved, I open the door to the street. “I’ll be back before the rain starts.”
“Catrin,” calls the architect. “You’re forgetting something.”
I stifle a groan as I stop in the doorway. “Magister Thomas, I have never fallen.”
“Until last summer, the bell tower had never been hit by lightning,” he says sternly. The western facade tower, the shortest of the Sanctum’s four by a few feet, had been damaged by the severe strike. “Never only means ‘not yet.’”
With a heavy sigh, I take the coiled safety rope from its hook next to his cloak by the door. I’m about to walk out with it in my hand, but I catch the architect’s glare and pause long enough to knot one end around my waist. “Better?”
His beard shifts with the skeptical tilt of his lips. “Will you use it?”
“Yes, Magister,” I assure him, though it will probably be in the way more than anything.
“Be careful,” he says, waving for me to go. “Mother Agnes would come at me with her bare hands if anything happened to you.”
I grin as I sling the rope over my shoulder. Despite the fact that the prioress of Solis Abbey just celebrated her seventieth birthday, I’m not sure it’s a fight she’d lose.
Perrete sweeps into the workroom then, wearing the simpering, one-sided smile that hides the rotten gap in her teeth. A wave of perfume from her dress wafts over me, and I grimace as I pull the door shut. Last time she was here, it took a whole day of airing to get that lingering scent out of the workroom.
From the street, I can see enough sky ahead of the approaching storm clouds to assure me I’ll have time for my inspection, but I still have to hurry. I turn and trot uphill toward the Sanctum, the wind at my back.
CHAPTER 2
The problem is shockingly easy to see by moonlight. Something about the way the shadows play across the lines and angles of the supports nestled against the new stone structure. It’s almost as if the darkness coaxed the flaw into revealing itself when it thought no one would be looking—which is nonsense.
Observing it from the ground isn’t enough, though. I have to inspect it up close if I’m to justify stopping work tomorrow.
There’s nothing nearby to support my weight other than a stone gargoyle extending three feet from the Sanctum wall. The doglike creature is designed to spew channeled rainwater from its mouth, away from the building. Like most sculptures, it’s supposed to look fierce, but the circular opening between this one’s teeth makes it appear comically surprised. Wind whistling across the mouth creates a shrieking sound, like a housewife who’s spotted a mouse, adding to the effect. With the scaffolds built around it, I have to balance across the statue’s back and stretch out to reach the warped pole. My fingers immediately find a split in the wood which is invisible from every vantage above and below.
Falling Skies, it’s huge. It’s a miracle it hasn’t failed already. By day, the scaffolds above are crawling with dozens of workers. Had they collapsed, few would have survived the six-story fall onto the stones in various stages of cutting and shaping below.
I angle myself to feel along the length of the crack. The gap is almost as wide as my forearm—too large to simply reinforce with lashing—and the tiny, fresh splinters I encounter mean it’s expanding rapidly. As much trouble as this will cause, I’m relieved to have such a clear answer: The entire scaffold here will have to come down and be reassembled.
Two days of construction, lost. One more reason for the high altum to complain.
A sharp sliver of wood jabs my middle finger, and I reflexively yank my hand back. Blood wells from under the nail as I bring it to my mouth. The coppery taste hits my tongue with startling intensity, but it’s not bleeding that badly. After a few seconds, I raise the wound up to the moonlight to look for any remaining fragments of the splinter. Fortunately, there are none.
My arm, still extended to hold the beam, begins to tremble from bearing so much weight alone. Before I can reach back with the other, a strong gust of wind causes the gargoyle’s whistling to pitch higher and louder, and the shrill screaming sound sends a jolt of lightning down my spine and out to my limbs. All the muscles in my body contract, and my already precarious grip on the pole slips.
Suddenly I’m plunging headfirst toward the stones below, tumbling and twisting as sky and scaffold and Sanctum and moon streak across my vision. An arc of blood splashes the wall in front of me, and in that instant, I think—I know—I’m going to die.
I never thought it would end like this.
My vision fades on the edges, and I arch my back and grab at my throat in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding. The other hand claws at the wall with equal futility until an impact across my stomach rips me open.
Pain is the only thing left in my world. All I can do is wait for the last of my consciousness to drain away.
Until it doesn’t.
My surroundings slowly come back into focus. It takes several seconds for me to understand I’m not lying dead on the ground but dangling about thirty feet above it, the safety line agonizingly tight around my waist. Dazed, I look up to the gargoyle where the rope angles back to the place I’d attached it to the scaffolding on the other side—rather reluctantly, I might add. The whistling sound continues as though it had never changed. Did that horrible shriek come from the statue’s mouth? It had sounded … human. Like someone terrified or about to die, or both. If I wasn’t absolutely positive the noise came before I fell, I would’ve thought it was me who screamed.
There’s no blood on the wall next to me, either, and as I raise my shaking hands into the moonlight, they, too, are clean.
But I’d seen the blood. I’d felt it.
I was going to die. I’m not entirely sure I didn’t.
Someone who was dead wouldn’t hurt this much, however. Grunting, I wriggle into a position where I can brace my feet against the stone wall. My leather boots are specially made for climbing, and the ascent is fairly easy, even with trembling hands and bruises forming across my middle. The hardest part is heaving myself over the gargoyle so I can stand and jump back to the woven-reed platform.
I collapse against the smooth limestone of the Sanctum as soon as I’m safe, promising myself never to complain about using a safety line again. As I work the length into a loose coil, I notice my fingertips and nails aren’t ravaged from clawing at the wall. Other than the clotted splinter wound, which has expanded into a perfectly round bruise, they’re undamaged. Shaking my head, I untie the line from my sore waist and gaze out over the homes and shops which ring the paved area around the Sanctum. Most of my view is blocked by rooftops three and four stories tall. All is quiet but for the scream still echoing in my brain.
Copyright © 2022 by Erin Beaty
