Page 29 of Crucible of Chaos

Strigan cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘What makes you think we moved it?’

‘Piccolo?’

Caeda leaped up from the bed and began to pace around the room like one of those bombastic investigators in the old plays so often staged in the Duchy of Pertine–Between Two Midnight Murdersand the like. ‘When the knights stormed across the causeway eight days ago, they declared that the abbot’s corpse had been defiled and decapitated, his flesh covered in mystical symbols.’ Without turning from her examination of an ivory wall sconce, she swung one hand negligently towards Strigan. ‘Symbols like those adorning your own body.’

The Sorcerer Sovereign chuckled at her, making a show of playing with himself beneath the water. Estevar badly wanted to remonstrate with the foul lecher, but held his temper in check. Imperious, however, whether sensing his rider’s disapproval or simply from his own instinctive dislike of wolves, wandered over from the comfort of the hearth to raise one leg and send a bucketload of urine streaming against the side of the tub. When he was done, he craned his neck over the rim and chewed on a rose petal.

‘Damned beast!’ Strigan swore, but stopped splashing about when the mule raised his muzzle to show his teeth.

‘You admit to finding the body nine days ago,’ Caeda snarled, as if urinating mules were a standard part of any Greatcoat’s interrogation technique. ‘No doubt you sought to take advantage of his death to intimidate the other factions. You and the Trumpeters have both been vying to see who can terrify the Bone-Rattlers into joining your side. You cut off Abbot Venia’s head and tattooed his body in a pathetic display of power, hoping to scare the other monks into submission. That would have taken time, though, a day at least for all those sigils. Then you had to wait for the opportunity to sneak him back out to the statuary for one of the other factions to discover, knowing they, in turn, would throw the body into the ocean rather than leave it there as a testimony to your viciousness.’

Good, Estevar thought.She intuits the language and by-play of posturing between the factions, even if she is a trifle too keen to show off her intellect. She should not have attributed the beheading and tattooing to the Hounds without evidence.

‘You make me sound like a very dangerous man,’ Strigan said, smiling.

‘How did you remove the head?’ Estevar asked.

‘Hmm?’

‘The abbot’s head. Did you cut it off with a slice of your rapier, or use your bare hands?’

Caeda stared at him questioningly, wondering, no doubt, why he would suggest that a beheading could have been accomplished with so unwieldy an instrument as a slender rapier blade or–even more preposterously–that a man’s head could be removed without any blade at all.

Strigan took the bait, giving them a feral grin as he lifted his hands out of the water. ‘These were all I required to separate Venia’s fool head from his shoulders.’ The grin widened as he bared his own teeth. ‘Are you still so certain you could take me with your “Cressi Manoeuvre”, Greatcoat?’

‘You’re lyin—’ Caeda began, but Estevar cut her off. The thrust needed to be delivered with precision, driven deep enough to make him anxious, but not so far as to make him stop talking.

‘You are a petty showman.’ Estevar began his own pacing, but around the brass tub, forcing Strigan to swivel his head to keep an eye on him. ‘You call yourself the “Sorcerer Sovereign”, yet you appear to know little of the mystical traditions of this nation. You claim every outrageous crime we lay at your feet, even those you could not have committed yourself– which is why, when my associate tested you a moment ago by suggesting you beheaded and tattooed Venia’s corpse, you went along, hoping to make yourself appear even more frightening to us.’

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Caeda stiffen, then resume her own perambulation of the chamber, nonchalantly studying the room’s décor.

‘Oh,fine.’ Strigan leaned one elbow on the rim and rested his head against his fist. ‘Yes, yes, we found the body,’ he confessed. ‘Yes, the head was already removed. Obviously, whoever drew the symbols on Venia did so to implicate me in his murder.’ He perked up now, and tracing one of the sigils on his chest, said, ‘But these aren’t just for show, you know? Unlike those scurrying Bone-Rattlers who await the return of the old gods, or the Yellow Bitch and her Trumpeters who somehow think they can coax new ones to arise,weunderstand the true nature of faith. My Wolves have been studying religious fervour, how it can be transmuted into magical potential. That’s why we imprinted these runes on ourselves; there’s as much power in rituals of desecration as consecration, you know, especially in a place invested with the country’s spiritual belief. Our experiments in harnessing that essence are close to bearing fruit.’

Caeda snorted, which annoyed Estevar; why did she insist on revealing as much about her own thoughts as she discerned from the subject of their interrogation? But he would not undermine her before Strigan.

‘My colleague happens to be an expert in Tristian occult lore. There is a language to symbols, to ritual, and you are far from achieving your aims, Strigan.’

The monk leaped up, splashing water over the side, the phallus of which he was unduly proud dangling for all to see. He stared at Caeda with an altogether different form of desire than before. ‘You could help us then– both of you! Join us!’

‘We are otherwise employed,’ Estevar said, taking a plush scarlet towel with gold trim from a wicker basket and tossing it at the naked man.

Strigan snatched it neatly out of the air. Estevar would have been happier if his reflexes were not so sharp. He stepped out, dripping water and rose petals and the physical evidence of his excitement. ‘I’m not suggesting you become part of the order, of course,’ he said, doing a haphazard job of drying, ‘but you’ll have to side with one of the factions sooner or later. This state of siege can’t continue much longer, each of us occupying part of the abbey, arming ourselves for the inevitable war to come. Those yellow morons are bloodthirsty lunatics, you know– chanting and muttering and flagellating themselves in hopes of winning the attention of some new deity they’ve conjured up.’

‘Yes, how silly they are, these superstitious monks,’ Estevar observed drily.

‘At leastwe’reapproaching the matter scientifically,’ Strigan insisted. He finally wrapped the scarlet towel around his waist. ‘What do you think’s going to happen if the Trumpeters gain control of Isola Sombra and then decide one of their new gods favours human sacrifice? You think it’s a coincidence that they named themselves for a poisonous flower? How about when Mother Leogado commands her “troops” to rile up the people of the March of Someil against their margrave? He’s weak, you know, Someil is. Those knights of his–sauntering up here with their swords and axes like they owned the place–were so ill-disciplined that the first thing they did when they came to the abbey was start drinking our holy wine.’

‘Axes?’ Estevar asked. That was the second time Strigan had mentioned an unusual choice of weapon. ‘What sort of axes?’

‘The regular kind,’ he replied, and with a shrug, ‘What of it?’

The regular kind, Estevar repeated to himself. Strigan was a swordsman, but not a soldier. What he saw as ‘the regular kind’ of axe would likely be the sort meant for chopping wood, not a throwing or mêlée weapon.

‘So you poisoned the wine they drank?’ Caeda pounced before Estevar could signal to her to keep silent on the subject.

‘Ha!’ Strigan exclaimed, delighted, as if he’d just scored a touch in a fencing match. ‘Shows what you know. We had nothing to do with the wine. Probably Venia’s old followers slipped herbs into the knights’ cups. They’re like that, the Bone-Rattlers: sly and sneaking. We didn’t find the knights until hours later in the statuary, drugged out of their minds.’ He smirked at his own cleverness. ‘So we marked them up, too, mounted them up on their horses in a stupor and sent them packing back to their margrave as a warning.’

All this the young man had said with a kind of dazed merriment–almost as if he were making up events as he went along, yet was instantly convinced by his own fabrications.

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