Page 13 of Crucible of Chaos

‘My turn to give the ultimatums,’ Agneta said. ‘You have ten seconds. Nine, seven, five—’

‘You appear to be skipping a few numbers,’ Estevar observed. Now that the lines of attack had changed, he was going to need to find a way to knock down the old Cogneriaftershe’d shot Sister Parietta butbeforeJaffen loosed his arrow.

‘I never was good at maths,’ Agneta replied. ‘Where were we? Oh, right: four, two, o—’

‘We’ll go,’ said Sister Parietta, lowering her sword but keeping it in front of her just in case, ‘you dried-up old—’

‘Oh, Saint Arcanciel-who-watches-all-pass, here it comes,’ Agneta muttered.

Parietta was undeterred. ‘The pact will not endure much longer. The time of choosing comes, and once the choice is made, the purification of Isola Sombra will begin.Haeraticum purgadis anteva deato!’

Haeraticum purgadis anteva deato, Estevar repeated to himself.Before come the gods, the heretics will have been purged.Something about that antiquated phrasing put an itch in the back of his skull. Such axioms were usually rendered in the simple future tense in Tristian, not the future sublime.So why is that particular phrasing both unknown to me and yet somehow. . . familiar?

For her part, and for the first time, Brother Agneta sounded genuinely affronted. ‘I was aCogneri, girl. An inquisitor! You think I haven’t purged more than my share of heretics already? Now get out of here beforemygod, lazy hag that she is, informs me that she’s sick and tired of all this posturing and forces my finger to squeeze on the trigger of this thrice-blessed weapon of mine so that by her will I shoot you in the head and put you out of everyone else’s misery.’

Slowly, the two yellow-and-black robed monks stepped away, walking backwards up the street so that Jaffen could keep his arrow trained on Agneta. Estevar wondered if the young man would try to shoot her once he was far enough away that his bow was a more accurate weapon than her pistol, but the old woman had already shifted behind him to use his bulk as a shield while keeping her wheellock aimed at the departing Trumpeters. Only when they were gone did she at last face Estevar.

‘How tiresome life has become,’ she said, her right arm sagging, the pistol dangling from her hand. ‘Though you are no holy man, Trattari, I make this confession to you: I will not bemoan my own passing from this melodramatic existence one bit.’

‘Would you really have pulled the trigger?’ he asked. ‘Shot a stranger, a man of the law who has done you no wrong?’

‘Of course, I would,’ she replied, then raised the weapon to his face and, without warning or apology, squeezed the trigger.

Estevar heard the whir of the winding spring as it expanded, saw the sparks from the striker wheel spinning against the pyrite, but neither flame nor lead ball emerged from the muzzle.

Agneta stared at the weapon a moment. ‘Wouldn’t you know it? These things cost more than a cottage and they still don’t work for shit when you let the powder get wet.’

Though he was sure she’d been fully aware the weapon wouldn’t fire, still Estevar felt the familiar outrage rise up in him at being used this way. The challenge he so badly wanted to issue came to his lips as easily as his own name, but he was too tired, too weak from his wounds and too worried about poor Imperious, who was once again leaning heavily against him. Besides, he’d lost one duel already, thanks to his own poor judgement. Neither his pride nor his body could sustain another.

The elderly inquisitor watched him as carefully as he’d been watching her. ‘Good,’ she said, apparently approving of the resignation no doubt visible in the slumping of his shoulders, and she slid the pistol back into whatever holster she had hidden in her robes. ‘Now then, Magistrate Borros, knowing Greatcoats as I do, I suspect that by now you believe you have some sense of what hellish discord afflicts Isola Sombra.’

‘I believe I do. Some of it, at any rate.’

‘And no doubt that idealistic fool Abbot Venia summoned you here in the hope that you could arbitrate the dispute and bring loving peace back to this troubled yet still hallowed ground?’

Estevar didn’t much like the disdain with which those on this island spoke of the abbot. He’d never much liked the man’s religious zealotry himself, but nonetheless, it pricked at Estevar’s conscience to another’s dignity being so casually stripped away. ‘The abbot perhaps had more faith in the desire of his gods that their worshippers not suffer needlessly than you do, Inquisitor.’

‘Excellent!’ Agneta took the mule’s reins and resumed their journey up the long, spiralling street towards the abbey. ‘Then let us test each other’s knowledge of those gods, you and I, and when we are done, I will show why the situation at Isola Sombra is so much worse than you imagine.’

CHAPTER 10

THE MAD AND THE MIGHTY

‘The gods are dead,’ Estevar pronounced breathlessly, he and Imperious both struggling to keep up with Brother Agneta, who was setting a merciless pace. It wasn’t such a long way to the abbey, Estevar recalled, no more than three-quarters of a mile, but the incline was steep and the streets so slippery with rain and overflowing gutters that Imperious was having trouble finding purchase on the flagstones. The mule was also having trouble focusing on the way ahead, taken by surprise by every new thing that appeared– an empty shop, a dilapidated cottage, broken wooden struts of a barrel or a pile of bricks. Imperious shied away from everything, even the seagulls landing on broken awnings to squawk down at them causing him to recoil in shock.

Estevar quietly reassured the trembling animal every few steps, ‘Not long now—’ although all too aware that he’d been making that same unfulfilled promise ever since the waves had first dragged them out into the ocean. He wasn’t doing much better himself. His breathing was shallow and interspersed with increasingly long fits of coughing. His bare feet were so numb that he couldn’t even feel the pain of the cuts, scrapes and bruises accumulated since abandoning his boots to the choppy seas. That privilege was left to the wound in his side, no longer merely aching but instead burning as if even now the pitiless old inquisitor were holding a white-hot brand to his flesh.

‘The godsdied,’ Agneta corrected him.

‘Hmm?’ It was becoming harder to hold onto a single chain of thoughts long enough to make sense of them. When he swiped at the clammy slickness on his forehead, his palm came away with more sweat than rainwater.

If only he hadn’t lost his greatcoat! There was a tiny jar of the black salve in the fifth pocket on the left side, nearly empty thanks to that gods-be-damned duel, and what little was left stank worse than any dung heap. Yet he longed for the soothing coolness of that foul paste, for it could have stayed the infection long enough for him to rid himself of this nagging inquisitor and find the abbey’s infirmary.

‘Focus, Trattari,’ Agneta chided him without slackening her pace one jot. The Cogneri, church inquisitors granted jurisdiction over religious crimes, leaving the Greatcoats to investigate and render verdicts on secular ones, had never been known for their soft hearts. ‘I asked you what you believed you knew about the discord afflicting Isola Sombra, and you began with, “The gods are dead.” This is imprecise. The godsdied, which is not the same thing at all.’

Had she bothered to notice how pale Estevar knew he must be, how hard he was struggling to keep from collapse, perhaps she might have allowed him a moment’s rest? Instead, she reached up a thin, wrinkled hand to snap her fingers in front of his face. ‘Quickly now, or we will lose the chance to probe that vaunted intellect of which Abbot Venia spoke so admiringly before you pass out and are no use to me at all. Begin again. What nefarious plague threatens Isola Sombra?’

The remains of a fallen bell tower split the street in front of them. He took the left path, Agneta led Imperious up the right. ‘T-two. . .’ He had to pause to stop himself stammering. ‘Two years ago, the gods died– in Domaris, a few hundred miles northeast of here. Not far from where I’ve just been, in fact, and close to where Imperious’ forebears were first—’

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