Page 16 of Crucible of Chaos

‘Lightning,’ Estevar murmured just as the first crack of distant thunder reached his ears, almost as if it were whispering agreement with his inescapable conclusion. ‘Six statues, each struck from the sky by a bolt of lightning that shattered it and sent the ruins radiating away from a central point, charring the remains black.’

He turned where he stood, his gaze sweeping over the rest of the abbey grounds: the cloister, the chapter house, all the other buildings and towers, even the curtain wall. There was not a single sign of similar damage anywhere else.

‘The gods died,’ Agneta said, then repeated her earlier admonition, ‘but that is not the same thing as saying they are dead.’ She placed her hands on Estevar’s arms and turned him back towards the ruins of the courtyard. ‘When my brethren woke after the first winter storm seventeen days ago to discover the portrayals of their gods obliterated this way, they were forced to ask the inevitable question.’

Seventeen days ago.Had it been this that had induced the abbot to send copies of his letter for Estevar off with every travelling Bardatti his unnamed ‘trusted emissary’ could find?

Oh, Venia, you silly fool. What manner of faith led you to expect a Greatcoat could arbitrate the riots that envelop an abbey when it appears the skies themselves wage war upon your beliefs?

‘You understand now?’ Agneta asked, suddenly eager as her fingers squeezed Estevar’s arms painfully. ‘You see the futility– the danger–of a secular magistrate seeking to impose his will upon the monks of this abbey at a time like this? Flee this madhouse, Trattari. I will provide you with clothes and food and medical supplies so that you can return to the shore with your mule and await the lowering of the tide when the causeway will be passable again. Leave the sickness afflicting my brethren to one who understands both its cause and its cure!’

Estevar Borros had never been so tempted to abandon a case. Brother Agneta was right: this was no business of his. Whatever intellectual fascination he might have with the improbabilities of six bolts of lightning so perfectly striking six statues– perhaps they had been reinforced with iron rods and their towering height was the cause?–still, that was a poor reason to insinuate himself into a situation which he could not in good conscience hope to ameliorate.

‘Where is Abbot Venia?’ he asked, once again gazing up towards the tower at the far side of the abbey grounds. ‘Was it the destruction of the statues that led him to hide up there all this time?’

When she failed to answer, he looked at her, guessing from the tightness of her features that she was formulating a response that would divert him from something she was hiding from him. She saw his stare, and appeared to respect him enough that she cast off whatever attempt at deception she’d been concocting.

‘No, Eminence, it was not the statues that sent him into hiding inside his tower. He had already sent his missive summoning you before this happened. The destruction of the statues is what caused him to descend from his tower for the last time.’

‘What? Then where is he? Why has Venia not come to meet me?’

Agneta dropped the mule’s reins and walked across the ruins to a mound Estevar had not noticed before. The low pile of upturned dirt was a mundane sight compared to the rest of the destruction.

‘What– or who– lies beneath that soil?’ he asked warily.

‘Come,’ she said, gesturing for him to join her. ‘It’s almost time.’

Leaving Imperious outside the statuary, they stepped across the field of charred stone shards.

‘Time for what?’ Estevar asked.

She pointed to the dark earth at their feet. The mound was roughly the length of a man, not a tall one, but of comparable girth to Estevar.

‘We keep burying him,’ she said, her voice oddly sorrowful, ‘but he refuses to lie where he should. Perhaps it is because he still hears his name called so often, in grief or in disdain.’

‘Brother Agneta, what is this madness that overtakes you? If Venia has been killed, then—’

‘Ah, there, you see?’ she asked, jabbing a forefinger at the mound. ‘It’s as if we keep summoning him.’

Estevar was about to urge her away from the grave when he thought he saw the ground shifting as if thousands of earthworms were burrowing their way out of it. He would have assumed it was simply his fever overtaking him again, but now Brother Agneta was murmuring something, almost chanting.

‘Venia,’ she said quietly. ‘Venia, Venia, Venia.’

The dirt shifted again, and Estevar reached to the back of his belt for his dagger. He’d investigated cases involving the so-called ‘living dead’ before. Tristia’s flora was rich in plants that caused unusual effects in the human body, including several which could make a person appear dead, only to waken in a stupor hours or even days later.

More of the soil fell away, revealing the first glimpses of pale yellowish skin.

‘Impossible,’ Estevar whispered, for no concoction he had ever encountered could induce a cadaver whose head had been severed from its body to move itself out of the earth.

‘Impossible, indeed,’ Agneta agreed, also staring down at the prone corpse of Abbot Venia, his naked flesh inscribed with the same foul sigils drawn in the sketch placed in Estevar’s hands by Sir Daven Colraig on behalf of the Margrave of Someil. ‘And yet, no matter how many times his remains are reburied, still he returns to remind us that some crimes refuse to remain unpunished.’

‘Who did this?’ Estevar demanded. ‘Who beheaded Abbot Venia and desecrated his corpse in this fashion?’

Agneta chuckled, a deeply disturbing sound given what lay at their feet. ‘I show you statues blasted by lightning and a beheaded cadaver that won’t stay buried, and yet you seek an answer to the most prosaic question imaginable?’

Estevar felt a fire rising in his belly raging hotter than his fever. ‘You mocked me earlier for being a Greatcoat: a magistrate whose jurisdiction you Cogneri deem trivial because we deal only with secular matters.’ He knelt down and began examining the pale corpse in earnest. ‘Well, here lies the victim of a murder. The means, whether mundane or magical, are far less important to me than the identity of the murderer. And that, Inquisitor, lies squarely in my jurisdiction.’

‘He was a deeply spiritual man,’ Agneta said, as if she hadn’t heard him at all. Her voice was filled with an evident fondness for the dead abbot. ‘But in matters of canon law, he was guided by his reason as much as his faith. Given the circumstances, he too would no doubt deem you the logical choice to investigate his murder and bring the guilty to justice.’

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