Free The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett

words they spoke, chanted as they were in high Tharosian, but it seemed to him the sounds that soared up among the arches were somehow beyond words: purer, truer—a language that spoke not to the mind but to the heart. Most of all he had loved the pageantry. He loved the scent of the incense, the vestments of gold and white and scarlet, the candles, and the silver font on the altar. He loved the way the priests moved: slowly, deliberately, as if even the slightest flick of a finger carried meaning.
    When he was sixteen, he told his father he wished to enter the priesthood. That had earned him a laugh and the back of a hand across his mouth. “No son of mine will ever be a priest,” his father said. “I’d sooner break your neck than give you over to those simpering prats. Get that idea out of your head, boy. You’ll follow me to the pits of the Abyss, you will—if I don’t send you there first.”
    He had never asked his father about it again, and in time Eldyn had forgotten about his wish to enter the priesthood. But now, as he stood there in the gathering dusk, the forgotten desires came back to him. Was that why he had come here? He longed to breathe in the incense again, to touch the cool water in the font, to let it wash away the taint upon him.
    Eldyn stepped from the shadows. The young priest appeared startled, but only for a moment; then he smiled, and so beautiful did the expression render him that he seemed a statue himself. Eldyn opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment another figure appeared in the doorway.
    “What are you doing, Brother Dercent?” This one was short and squat, and his voice was coarse. “Are you talking to someone out there? Who is it?”
    Whatever magick had gripped Eldyn was dispelled. What had he been thinking? A peaceful life within the walls of a church was closed to him. Even if the priesthood would accept one as old as he, he had not the funds to pay the required endowment. Besides, who would take care of Sashie? Eldyn shrank back from the fence. The younger priest seemed about to speak, but the newcomer was faster.
    “Has one of them come again from Durrow Street to mock us? You should have called for me at once.” The priest hurried down the steps and pushed past the younger man, the one called Dercent. He shook a fat fist in Eldyn’s direction. “I see you lurking there in the shadows. They cannot conceal you from the light of God. Begone, daemon. By all the saints, I command you. Go back to your houses of sin and trouble us no more!”
    A shame welled up in Eldyn, as it had earlier that day outside the moneylender’s office. Surely the elder priest had mistaken him for someone—something—he was not. All the same, the full force of those words fell upon him, and as if there was power in that invocation, as if he were indeed a wicked thing deserving to be cast out, Eldyn found himself retreating.
    “That’s right,” the elder priest called after him. “You have no power here, fiend. Begone!”
    Folding the shadows around himself, Eldyn turned away from the priests and the angel and slunk into the night.

         

    CHAPTER FOUR
    H ALF A MONTH had gone by since the unexpected visitors appeared at the door of the house on Whitward Street. Though each twilight Ivy looked out the window, she never saw a pair of tall men in dark capes walking up the street, and no one called at their front gate.
    A few times she considered asking her mother about the men. Then she remembered the fearful look she had seen in Mrs. Lockwell’s eyes that night and held her tongue. Nor could she ask Mr. Lockwell. He never answered her questions, and the one time she did mention that some men had come to the door, he grew agitated, snatching books from the shelves in the attic and tearing out their pages, and it took her over an hour to calm him.
    Just after the turn of the month, there came a series of particularly long nights interspersed by brief days. The weather grew