Lost Covenant: A Widdershins Adventure Read Online Free PDF

were paved far more often than not, in even the meanest neighborhoods, and more frequently with brick than with cobblestone. The architecture was just a bit more ornate, more ostentatious; flared eaves here, an artfully rounded corner there. The clothes had, on average, been just slightly nicer before they'd been ravaged by use and time.
    And then there were those moments, when the clustered buildings and winding streets collaborated with the clouds above and the winter haze below, to part all at once. Then, for a sun-drenched moment, even from the ugliest outskirts of Lourveaux, a passerby could see the center.
    The center of the city. The center of the Church.
    Great arches and bridges of gleaming, white granite. Marble pillars and windows of exquisite glass. Spires and domes and steeples of classical styles, atop which flapped 147 different pennants, each with the unique icon of a god.
    And towering above it all, a single cupola, large enough to have given birth to any handful of the others, gleaming silver despite the overcast. Unengraved and unadorned, save for the repeating motif of the Eternal Eye.
    Beating heart and quickened soul of the Hallowed Pact, focal point of the world's largest religion. The Basilica of the Waking Choir.
    Widdershins couldn't flee swiftly enough.
    The streets, though far from empty, were remarkably uncrowded for early morning—though whether that was unusual for Lourveaux or just another difference between here and Davillon, Shins couldn't have guessed even if she'd cared enough to try. Where the gaps in the traffic of people and horses and carts were wide enough—as they usually were—she slipped through without so much as brushing against anyone. Where they were not, either Olgun reached out to prod someone into a mild stumble or sidestep, clearing a path, or else Shins simply pushed around whoever was in her way with just enough muttered apology not to be entirely rude.
    She made no deliberate effort to avoid the young monk who'd come racing after her, panting breath sending little puffs through the cold air, struggling to get his arm through the sleeve of a heavy coat—but neither had she bothered to slow down for him.
    “Widdershins, please! For the gods’ sakes, would you—”
    “Not the gods, Maurice,” she snapped without turning. “The Church. For the Church's sake. And I've had enough of church people and Church politics in my life! Just leave me out of it!”
    “What have you got against the Church, any uuunnngghk! ”
    Widdershins didn't even remember reacting; reaching; moving. For a single heartbeat that dragged on forever, she wasn't in Lourveaux, wasn't seeing the semibustling roadway before her.
    She was seeing an orphanage, whose caretakers—clergymen and -women, all—had lost the ability to care over hard and thankless years.
    A religious zealot, the demon he'd summoned, and the trail of corpses they'd left behind—including an entire room of her friends and brethren; including William de Laurent; including the man who'd been a second father to her, Alexandre Delacroix.
    A foolish priest who'd meddled with powers he couldn't remotely comprehend, who had drawn the murderous Iruoch to Davillon.
    The bodies…Gods, so many bodies, consumed by that horrible fae creature and the chorus of phantom laughter that surrounded him. Adults, children…
    Julien.
    She saw them all. She heard their screams. She smelled the blood; it choked her, winding through her nostrils and lungs, a serpent bent on poisoning her from the inside.
    Just as swiftly, they were gone. The images, the sounds, the asphyxiating miasma—washed away by a gentle stream, clear, cold, happily burbling.
    A stream named Olgun.
    When her vision cleared, she found her fists wrapped in Maurice's tunic, his back shoved hard against the façade of a building that—when last she remembered seeing the world around her as it actually was—had been a good few yards away.
    From the wild, panicked glaze in the