An old man came running in through the doors shouting for Aunt Lily. Something was wrong. Her granddaughter had lost consciousness; her face was turning purple.
"How is that possible?" Lily said. "She was fine all day. She was fine — "
She ran to Gerard in a panic and told him everything, and told him that she had given the child the holy water, exactly as instructed.
Shawn assumed she was lying, because that is how he sees people. She was not lying. She had done everything for that child that a person could do.
Aunt Lily got down on her knees and prayed — not to any god, but to the old man standing in front of her — to help her granddaughter, and promised that she would pay more water.
"The gods are not your personal nannies," Gerard said. "If the holy water has not worked, there is only one explanation for it. Lily is not pious enough."
It is one of the oldest tricks the false priests have. When the miracle cure fails, the shame goes onto the person who asked for it.
"Drop the excuses," he told her. And then, raising his voice for the whole hall: "Tomorrow, at noon, I will perform a true miracle, and every one of you will witness it."
One of the men pressed a folded cloth into Shawn's hands. From today, he said, Shawn was a member of the pure water congregation. Since he had donated so generously, the gentlemen were prepared to let bygones be bygones — though Shawn should always remember the gravity of his sins.
What idiots, Shawn thought, bowing over the rag.
They had no idea that he had already fixed trackers to those water bottles.
He followed the signal that night and found the room. Water and food, stacked from the floor to the ceiling. And, exactly as expected, no purification of any kind anywhere in it. The holy water was ordinary water and the whole thing was a swindle.
Nobody heard him come in, so he stayed behind the shelving and listened.
A man was in there being cruel for no particular reason, scolding a woman for having played the part of the healed girl badly.
"Using it takes too much of my stamina," she said.
The old man was not interested. He called her work useless trash, and then he shamed her the way he always shamed her, by reminding her that it was he who had pulled her out of hell in the first place.
Which meant, of course, that she was the awakened one here. Not him.
And at that, Shawn had another idea.
That night, when the whole building was asleep, a little girl lay awake in pain. Two bottles of water came in through the doorway and rolled across the floor to her.
Such kindness was extremely unusual for him.
Morning came. Gerard sat himself down in the middle of the courtyard, under the full weight of the sun, and began his trick.
"So long as the divine is kept in your hearts, the scorching heat of the sun cannot harm the messenger of the gods in the slightest."
The people, who did not yet know that awakened ones existed at all, believed it completely.
Except that the old man did not do anything. He sat, and he sweated, and nothing happened.
Shawn, watching, considered that he might not know the exact nature of her ability. But suppose one assumed that its working could be torn apart by space itself?
Across the yard, the girl understood that somebody was stopping her.
"I can't reach him from here," she said.
"Whatever it takes," the old man hissed, "this miracle happens."
The heat was unbearable. In her state she would not have lasted three minutes standing out there, and he knew it, and he went on telling her to come closer.
And then a message reached her. It is not entirely clear how it reached her, but it did.
Shawn intended to kill the old man and take the territory. She had one chance to come over to his side.
The girl made her choice. She turned around and walked away from Gerard, and left him sitting there.
"Where has she gone?" the old man shouted. "Where — "
Then she put her arms around Shawn.
"My ability is forced heat dissipation," she said, close to his ear. "It sharply accelerates the transfer of the body's internal heat to its surface."
He had time to understand that this was a very useful thing to have.
"But the power has another use. When the heat is pulled out of the head and the heart at once, the blood supply to the brain drops away."
The courtyard tilted. Shawn's head began to spin.
Once, before any of this, a kitten had been dying of the heat in her hands, and Jinny had gone on holding it, and holding it, long after there was any point — and the kitten had lifted its head and been well.
Then a man had thrown open the window and shouted at her to come here right now. He had worked himself to the bone raising her, he shouted, and she would bring him water, and he did not care how she got it.
And at that moment the doors had opened and Gerard had come in with his pawns behind him.
They killed her father in front of her.
Gerard said that he had seen the cat come back to life in her arms. That this was a gift from the gods. That if she came with him, together they could save hundreds of souls.
Under the appearance of virtue he had promised to help her, and promised that she would save people. In reality he used her ability and deceived everyone who came through his doors.
And for some reason, even now, she was still on his side.
Shawn came back to himself much too quickly for a man whose brain had just been emptied of blood. She had very nearly finished him and it bought Gerard about four seconds.
Shawn cut the old man down at the feet, and Gerard went into the dust of his own courtyard screaming.