Page 15 of Crucible of Chaos

Brother Agneta pushed open the gate and took Estevar’s arm. ‘Oh, it gets much worse, Trattari. Trust me on that.’

CHAPTER 11

BLASPHEMY

Wrought-iron gates spanned the entire width of the street. Estevar had imagined the flagstone path as a long, serpentine tongue: now, at last, he and Imperious were about to enter the snake’s mouth. In his fevered mind, the abbey’s six towers were fangs rising up to bite the sky until the rain turned to blood. The question was, he wondered, even in his dazed state, what poison dripped from those fangs down onto the earth below?

‘Enter ye without faith,’ Agneta intoned with mocking solemnity as her key unlocked the gates and she swung them open, ‘and faith will enter ye ere ye depart.’

The old Tristian abjuration was meant to instil reverence and righteous fear in schoolchildren, one utterly at odds with the lovingly held principles of science and exploration taught to Gitabrian boys and girls. But even Estevar’s finely honed mind could not escape the dread that filled him when he saw what awaited them in the abbey’s grand courtyard.

When last he had visited Isola Sombra, the abbot had proudly taken him on a tour along the stone paths that wove through the garden wherein stood six magnificent sculptures of Tristia’s gods, each carved from a single block of marble and shaped into a colossus three times the height of the tallest man. The remains of those statues now lay in rubble; they had crushed flower beds and smashed the wrought-iron benches where the abbey’s theologians had debated religion, philosophy and even obscene literature with scholars who had travelled from lands as far as even Estevar’s distant homeland. Abbot Venia always said he loved this part of the abbey best of all, for here, he claimed, faith was every day tested by cold logic and burning passion, and every day, faith– gentle faith– won. On Estevar’s final evening of that visit, Venia had tried to convince him to take holy orders himself– and he had come perilously close to succeeding.

‘What do you see?’ Agneta asked. The old inquisitor’s voice was quiet, genuinely solemn, for the first time since Estevar had met her.

The two of them stood at the edge of the statuary where a thick, swirling fog that had crept unnoticed upon them had begun to settle over the ground, obscuring what lay beneath the shattered remnants. A trick of the unseasonable weather, he tried to tell himself, although Imperious shied away, braying tremulously when Estevar tried to walk closer.

‘I see futility,’ he replied at last. ‘Callous, ignorant destruction committed by men and women unable to find meaning in their faith after learning of the Blacksmith’s foul deeds. A wound has festered in this abbey, sowing discord between its brethren. I have observed such rifts forming, theological differences festering into factionalism that tears religious communities apart and sets at each other the lay people whose own lives intertwine with those of the so-called faith, for all they never started the disputes and rarely understand the matters.’ He gestured to the ruins, a graveyard not merely of statues but of an ideal that, while he didn’t share it, still made him sad to see it destroyed so utterly. ‘Rather than retreat into contemplation or doubt, one faction of your brethren took sledgehammer and axe to these beautiful representations of divinity and left history with nothing to remember them by.

‘A pretty speech,’ Agneta said, her caustic manner returned. ‘A trifle poetic, but a logical deduction nonetheless.’

Estevar recognised her feigned agreement as just another thorn to scratch him. He closed his eyes; the fever was making it increasingly hard to concentrate. There was something he wasn’t seeing–something in the pattern of destruction in the statuary?

‘Abbot Venia is a deator,’ he said, almost smiling at memory of the short, stocky fellow speaking with utmost humility of his calling. ‘He’s an interpreter of spiritual events.’

Agneta sniffed. ‘A rather mundane understanding of the rarest rank of cleric. Many of my more superstitious brethren would insist that the deator speaks with the voice of the gods themselves– although I’ll admit that’s a difficult claim to disprove.’

‘Indeed,’ Estevar agreed. ‘But unless Abbot Venia has changed much from the person I met years ago, such grandiose assertions are not his way. Perhaps, however, many of your brethren saw the death of the gods as proof that Venia was a charlatan and his teachings a litany of lies.’

Is that why you are hiding in your tower, rather than fencing with me in the duelling circle of ideas as we’ve done so often over the years?he wondered, looking up to the aptly named Abbot’s Tower near the far end of the abbey grounds.Is it fear that keeps you cowering in your chambers while your monks run amok below? Or is it instead. . . shame?

‘You’ve grown quiet, Eminence,’ Agneta observed. ‘Am I to assume you have solved the case?’

‘There is nothing to solve, merely the matter of shaking your abbot from his spiritual somnambulism and—’ Estevar’s eyes grew unfocused; the courtyard undulated before him. For a moment, he thought perhaps an earthquake was adding to the abbey’s misfortunes, but it was only his own unsteady legs causing him to rock back and forth.

‘I’ve kept you at this too long,’ Agneta said without apology. ‘Your wound needs tending, as does that of your noble mule. Yet I must hold you here a moment more.’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘I said before that your explanation of events was entirely logical, but you’ll have noted I did not agree that it was correct. You make the mistake that all Greatcoats do by presuming that people control their own destinies.’

He arched an eyebrow at the diminutive woman. ‘Forgive me, Brother Agneta, but I find it hard to believe that one as cynical as you is about to deliver a sermon on the guiding hand of the divine.’

She ignored his jibe, taking his arm and leading him into the ruins. ‘Look closer at the rubble, Trattari. Let the clues left behind by the instigators of this vandalism awaken that legendary clockwork mind of yours.’

Estevar wasn’t interested in pursuing vandals. What he wanted was a hot meal, a cool glass of water, a warm bed and a vial of alcohol with which to burn away the infection in his wound, followed by a needle and thread to sew it back together. Besides, with this bedevilling mist everywhere, how was he supposed to—?

‘Impossible,’ he said, as some of the fog was swept away by the afternoon breeze, revealing more of the ground beneath the ruins. ‘How can this be?’

Shattered stone spread out from each broken statue like the scorched rays of a sun that had burned itself black. Some was in fist-sized chunks, but most of the remains were shards and splinters. At the centre of every circle of ruin, the ground was charred and covered in ashes.

‘Still imagining hysterical monks wielding sledgehammers and axes?’ Agneta asked.

Estevar didn’t respond, too busy focusing what little attention his fever allowed him on the evidence before him. His initial hypothesis was that oil had been poured over the destroyed sculptures by a mob, who’d then tossed holy texts and scriptures onto the pile and set fire to the whole lot. That, however, failed to take into account for the island’s near-constant winter storms. The winds and rains would surely have washed or blown away any ashes left behind by books and paper, which meant the charring at the centre of each ruin was caused by something hotter and more potent than any bonfire.

‘Explosives?’ he wondered aloud, but then shook his head. ‘No, they would have had to have somehow been placedinsidethe statues to produce this exact pattern of destructions. But how then could six individual explosions be made to occur with such intens—?’

Overhead, the clouds rumbled; the rains would be back soon, and once more Isola Sombra would be assaulted by—

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