The map in Exie's lap crinkles dolefully as she grips its edges. A flake of paper drifts to the floor between us. Exie hastily releases the relic of a thing. It springs shut along its calcified folds. She pries one corner open to check something, then makes a note on her timeline. It's sitting in the lap of another mark, which she taps with the butt of her pencil. "We need something older. These two could be connected."

"Enlighten me," I say.

Exie starts to spin the map towards me, then glances up the library aisle and decides otherwise. She drops her voice instead. "This was drawn two years after the Sectant Expulsion. I'd bet the House wiped out whatever was here and redrew their maps to exclude it."

"What would a town have to do to get that treatment?"

Even as I say it, though, we lock eyes.

"The witch trials," whispers Exie. She jettisons her notebook and starts shuffling through her open books with an alacrity that would do a gambler proud. I snag the map and open it.

The Sectant Witch Trials. Devil-possession-and-witch trials, really; southern Englemark was fraught with them two hundred years ago, until a particularly virulent set of accusations pierced all the way up the ranks of the local Catholic clergy. Faith in the church was shattered overnight. The infighting that ensued distracted the entire region, paving the way for the pre-Protestant House of Heymair to arrange a widespread crusade against Catholicism. The fiefdom they established was itself captured by the dominant church two decades later, but they left an enduring stamp on the countryside.

I sneak a peek at Exie's timeline. I can discern what I'm pretty sure is the second takeover some ways after the two-hundred-year mark, putting the map's creation far closer to the Sectant Expulsion than the House of Heymair's fall. There's only one issue. We're nowhere near the middle of southern Englemark. This patch of dirt and angelic enterprise was so fringe, it's a miracle it didn't start fraying like cheap cloth long before the fall of the local Catholic church.

Unless it did. Unless whatever happened here was deemed too abominable to acknowledge on House of Heymair maps—which, given their own affinity for scandals, would be a dramatic accusation indeed. It's more likely they deemed the place too barren to farm, and therefore too insignificant to bother laying claim to.

Or the map-maker burned a cake in the oven halfway through finishing and never came back to this map. Either works.

"Des?"

I glance up to find Exie's piercing brown eyes fixed on me like she's trying to take up visual trepanation. "The bible," she says. "What's its printing year?"

I don't remember off the top of my head—never cared to remember, really—so I pull out the bible and hand it to her. She finds the dates immediately, and I watch her face as she makes the same series of discoveries I did when I ran the same inspection. She's got nice eyebrows. Also a cute nose, flared wide and button-tipped, like a kindly grandparent liked to pinch it when she was an infant. With love, of course. Though from what I've seen of her parents, I suppose I shouldn't make assumptions.

Exie's pen-tapping intensifies. She's made several marks on her timeline, and some of them line up. The bible edition she has in hand is a spry sixty years old, but it's a bastard child—the original edition was almost two and a half centuries older. That version predates the Sectant Expulsion by a century, but the reprint matches this school building's founding. Something doesn't line up about that older number. Tradition, Exie said, when I asked her why whoever built this place would mimic Gothic style. We figured then that the seat of whatever denomination worshiped here was in the Gothic era, which the bible has now backed up. That original publication date would match this architecture perfectly.

Clarice jumps as I grab her sleeve and spin her around. "Question," I whisper, so I can at least pretend Exie won't overhear us. "That necklace inscription. Have you found anything else that mentions justice around this place? In the building itself, I mean."

Clarice doesn't even have to think. "Oh, yes. It's all over the stained glass, and the organ is engraved with it. So is the pulpit. It's a really nice pulpit."

"What language is it written in?"

"English." She cocks her head. "Why?"

I release her. "Exie, what's the date on the hymnal?"

"Recent." Exie gives the songbook a look one might offer a particularly viridescent cow patty. "Whoever built this place commissioned it."

Sixty years. "All the individual hymns, too?"

"They're not dated."

"Can you read them?"

"I mean, they don't make sense, but yes?"

"All of them?"

"Don't make sense?"

"No, you're able to read all of them. None of them are in another language?"

"No." Her eyes widen. "Wait—"

"English is the original language of all this, then."

I have at no point underestimated Exie's intellectual acuity. She whips the bible open, confirming what I already know. It's in English, a contemporary relic that still bears the antiquated dialect its ancestors flaunted. I had assumed at first it was a modern translation, but the common language of everything else here disproves that theory.

"That's backwards," mutters Exie. "It's from the Sectant era. Everything was Latin back then. The House was the one that started translating things."

"The church was all Latin back then. This was completely unaffiliated."

"It's a bible."

"And we're sitting in a fake-old cathedral honouring an angel cult. It has to be a cult, Exie. What else would the House of Heymair go through that kind of effort to purge, after it flew under the Church's radar for at least a century? English was the language of the common people."

"Des has a good point," says Clarice with a vacant smile, picking at the spine of a book shelved beside her. "Everything else I see from that era is in Latin. From the Church, that is. This is very unique."

"If they just wanted to emulate the Gothic era, they'd have written in Latin."

"They translated things before anyone else did, then."

"They must have been recruiting among common people."

"It's very thick."

I give Clarice a blank look. She nods towards the bible Exie has now set aside. "It's thicker than most bibles I find. And the paper doesn't look heavy. Not heavy enough to explain the thickness, at least."

More for me to read when I already know I'm going to struggle. Exie reaches for the bible again, but I beat her to it. She shoots me a look as I stuff the thing back down the gullet of my satchel.

"That's my job," I say, and stick my tongue out at her for good measure. We have a bet, and I'm petty enough to fall back on it. It's half an excuse. I mostly just don't want Exie ascertaining that I haven't started reading yet.

Exie rolls her eyes. "Have it your way. I only need Clarice here anyway."

My pettiness withers like crops in a frost. Exie turns that fake smile—I want it to be faker than it is—on Clarice instead, and offers the hymnal like an olive branch. She was nowhere near this cordial ten minutes ago.

"I need another set of eyes on that," she says. "We want to know anything familiar you find in it. Particularly around angels."

Clarice accepts the hymnal and spends a moment too long tracing the gold-foil inlay of the angel on its cover. She eschews the urge with difficulty, and finally opens the book. Me and Exie sit poised on the edges of our metaphorical seats. Clarice is a fast reader. She skims the first page, flips to the second and skims that, too. A slight frown creases her forehead.

"There's a lot about judgment," she says, ten or fifteen pages in. "That's all over this building, too, and the language is styled like I see on very old things. It's very hyperbolic. Like the Book of Revelation, but also not? There are a lot of angels judging humanity."

Revelation paints an apocalypse of Godly making, where the righteous are deemed worthy of ascending into heaven, while the unholy masses are trampled beneath a series of blights as horrific as they are devastating. Angels carry out many of those. I would know—Revelation houses at least half my favorite bible stories.

"Oh!" says Clarice. "These are names. Words styled like this are always names."

I lurch to her side. Exie grabs a pen and paper.

"Samyaza," says Clarice, and my blood runs cold. "Azazel."

"Satanail," I say, and both their gazes fly to me.

"What—" begins Exie, but the names return to me in a rush, from corners of my memory I didn't know had sequestered them in.

"Samael, Azza, and Uzza," I finish. "Right?"

"Yes," says Clarice. "They're the ones from the paintings."

I'm the first on my feet, the others close behind me. Someone grabs my sleeve and drags me back. It's Exie.

"Don't draw attention," she hisses.

And so we walk, and I focus all my willpower on walking, while everything in me screams to buck the rules and run to the school's chapel anyway. We reach it a million years later. The names are the same. Clarice plops down in a pew and scrutinizes the hymnal with a renewed forehead-crevice. I sidle up beside her, one eye on the cruelly smiling angel as he starts to judge my sins. His painting's backdrop suddenly makes a lot more sense.

"Is there another name?" I murmur to Clarice.

"Not written out. They keep mentioning this, though." She taps the middle of the page. "MSTM. They treat it like a name. And some churches do that. Write a holy name without vowels."

"They don't pronounce it, either."

Clarice nods absently. She's deep into the hymnal now. Exie scribbles in her notebook over by the paintings, about as subtle as a herd of water buffalo. At least she finds something this time. The paintings, as I found the first time I visited them, were commissioned the same year this cathedral was built. That means everything here except the bible's original edition and this style of Gothic architecture lines up.

"It keeps mentioning MSTM," says Clarice.

"You think it's a person?"

"Yes. Someone holy. Like a god, but not a god, because there's only one God, and she's also mentioned. More like..."

"An angel?"

Clarice frowns at me. I point to the nameless angel painting.

"Oh," says Clarice. "Maybe. It doesn't really say either way. And I don't know any extra-holy angels with a name like MSTM. Does the bible mention anything about it?"

"I'm working on it," I lie. Exie has finished her sweep of the paintings and is making notes on the nameless one's apocalyptic backdrop. "We should get back to the library before anyone finds what we were working on."

Clarice retrieves Exie, and we return to the library together. Nobody's touched our stuff. Almost nobody's here at all; one upshot of a school for delinquents is a marked lack of enthusiasm for voluntary studying. If we raise suspicions with our presence here, at least I can pin the blame on Exie.

There's not much else in the hymnal. Clarice finishes and confirms she can't make off with it for its shiny cover decor. She's begun to pluck at other books around us, too, so it's probably best that she takes her leave. I'm not keen on risking biblical interrogation by hanging out with Exie alone, so I also depart. I have other homework I should be doing, so naturally I head in the opposite direction, towards my secret hideout. For better or for worse, I am interested in this bible. And this time, I actually want to try reading it. 

Like this chapter if you're happy to see these three working together!

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