Page 59 of Crucible of Chaos

THE LAST TESTAMENT

The cell was barely eight feet long and only half as wide. The floor was lower than the tunnel outside, forcing Estevar to wade knee-deep even as he stooped like an old man to keep his head from hitting the rough-hewn rock of the low ceiling.

A sleeping pallet barely wide enough for Caeda–never mind someone of Venia’s girth– floated atop the murky water alongside sodden pages which upon examination, proved to be from the missing religious treatises. Estevar reached down to snatch up several sheets he recognised, ripped from theSacrificia Purgadis. Folding them carefully, he slid the wet bundle into one of the lined pockets meant to protect legal documents. Only three copies of that banned text had remained in Tristia. Now there were two.

A familiar fury rose inside him. Every blotch of smudged ink was another desecration that would have broken the heart of the scholarly, inquisitive cleric who’d been drawn to knowledge almost as deeply as faith.

Now, it appeared, the only words Venia had cared to preserve were his own– for scrawled all over the walls was a manic, haphazard last testament and unwitting confession of a man lost to his own madness. Words, phrases, even whole sentences were often at odd angles, sometimes even overlapping. The same word kept appearing, written over and over, until the excess ink had dripped down the wall like a bloody arrow pointing to the water.

There were drawings, too, of creatures wondrous and foul. Some frolicked together, some fornicated, but most were tearing each other apart with monstrous teeth, horns and twisted claws. Estevar produced a small notebook and a slender, leather-wrapped charcoal stylus from a breast pocket and began copying the designs as best he could on the still-damp pages. Two figures stood out among Venia’s bizarre bestiary: a man and woman, covered in sigils similar but not identical to the ones Strigan and his followers had inked into their flesh.

‘Estevar?’ Caeda said quietly. She rarely used his name.

He turned to see her pointing to the wall nearest the door, where five words, larger and more precisely written than the rest, had surely been meant to be the last thing Estevar would see before leaving the room.

Judge me without mercy, Eminence.

‘What does it mean?’ Caeda asked.

A simple question– the obvious one, in fact. And yet it revealed an innocence that might well destroy her when the time came that Estevar could no longer allow their game of intrepid detectives to continue.

But not now, not yet, he swore silently.I will not steal one minute of life from you, Piccolo, not until the very end.

He answered her question truthfully, which would serve them both far better than if he’d done so honestly.

‘We are witness to a battlefield, Piccolo.’ He turned, gesturing to the scrawls covering the walls. ‘A war between madness and reason waged within the mind of one man. A war, I fear, over which we can have little doubt about which side won.’

‘It’s all nonsense,’ Brother Syme insisted angrily. ‘I’ve examined every line written on these walls, searched for scriptural quotations, word patterns, even anagrams. It’s nothing but gibberish.’

‘Gibberish,’ Estevar repeated to himself. The novice had employed that word like an advocate demanding absolution for his client, though he was wrong; he merely lacked the mental discipline to navigate the long, twisted path Venia’s broken mind had blazed during his final hours.

Estevar reached out to trace one of the scrawls with his fingertips.You left your footprints for us to follow, didn’t you, my friend?

‘Tell me, Piccolo,’ he said, turning to Caeda, ‘what do you see inside this room?’

She was standing closer to him than usual, as if she, too, feared something swimming beneath the torpid waters of the cramped chamber. ‘I see madness. Incoherent babble and ugly images, strung together without purpose, without. . .’ She looked up at him. ‘Without music, my Cantor.’

‘See?’ Brother Syme pounced on Caeda’s confusion. ‘Evenshesees it’s all nonsense.’ He backed out of the chamber as if nervous that at any moment something in the water might snap at his heels. ‘I’ve done what you asked, shown you things no one should ever have seen. Now, will you please leave so that I can lock this room and throw the damned key into the ocean?’

Estevar waded towards the door, only to stop suddenly. Staring down at the muddy water, he asked, ‘Tell me, Brother, do eels often get past the gratings in the storm drains?’

Syme practically jumped out of his robes and very nearly bashed his head against the low ceiling. ‘Why would you ask that? Did you see one? Where is it?’

Estevar bent at the waist, making a show of trying to peer through the murk. ‘I thought I saw—There!’ he shouted, his finger following the path of something moving under the dark water towards them.

‘Saints protect me!’ Brother Syme cried.

As the panicking novice kicked at imaginary eels, Estevar reached into one of the pockets of his greatcoat before discreetly passing his hand over the lock on their side of the door.

‘That’s not an eel!’ Syme declared angrily, still kicking at the water. ‘Nothing but a crooked stick floating under the surface.’

‘Ah, what a relief!’ Estevar said, placing a hand on his own chest as if on the verge of fainting. Turning back to Caeda, he went on as if nothing had happened, ‘And you, Piccolo, what do you feel?’

‘What do Ifeel?’

He gestured at the incoherent scribbles all over the walls. ‘When reason fails to reveal the clues, logic dictates we must turn to our emotions. Let us listen closely to where our feelings guide us.’

Caeda took the lantern and sloshed through the water until her nose was a hand’s breadth from one of the walls. The writing covering every inch of stone would have required days to transcribe, never mind interpret. And as much again of Venia’s scribblings were already below the water line.

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