Page 41 of Crucible of Chaos

‘Just because a Cogneri must occasionally act with decisive force to ensure the spiritual laws of this country remain intact, that does not mean I approve of monks being turned into soldiers under the boot heel of a despot.’

Estevar wouldn’t have judged the woman he’d met in the Vigilance Tower to be a tyrant, would-be or otherwise. Right or wrong, her belief that Isola Sombra was under threat of invasion by the Margrave of Someil and his knights would have appeared genuine– even sensible–were it not for the events of an hour ago and the far more unsettling conquerors who’d clearly set their sights on this abbey.

‘Why are you laughing?’ Agneta demanded from the darkness ahead.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Gallows humour is an unavoidable pastime for a magistrate.’

Now he heard her chuckling in the darkness ahead. ‘Something we have in common, then. Come, it’s this way.’

He followed the sound of her voice and at the next corner, saw a sliver of light leaking out beneath a door a few paces away to their left. Agneta took a key from inside her robes, opened the lock and ushered him into a massive room. Beyond a dozen beds arranged in two rows were three large wooden tables, each the length of a man. The shelves beneath each one were filled with wax-stoppered bottles, rolls of linen bandages and surgical instruments.The inquisitor might not approve of the soldierly mentality of Mother Leogado’s Trumpeters, thought Estevar,but this abbey could very easily serve as a military fortress.

‘Bring him here,’ Agneta ordered, removing the brass oil lantern by the door to hang it from a hook attached to a six-foot-tall wooden pole mounted to the corner of one of the three tables.

The moment he’d laid down the shivering, unconscious monk, Estevar slumped against the table himself. It was all he could do to keep from collapsing to the floor.

‘There’s a chair behind you,’ Agneta informed him as she set about collecting several bottles and metal instruments from one of the shelves beneath the table. ‘If you pass out on the floor, that’s where you’ll stay, for I’ll not torment my own back trying to lift you.’

Too weary to trade barbs with the irascible inquisitor, Estevar stumbled to the chair, flopped down clumsily into it and had to readjust himself to keep one of the arms from pressing against his ribs. Almost immediately, he had to fight to keep his eyes from closing, a fight he was keen not to lose.

‘It wasn’t my intention to kill you,’ Agneta said matter-of-factly, pouring what looked like silvery milk over Strigan’s chest and wiping away the diluted blood to reveal the damage caused by the demon’s claws.

Those symbols, Estevar thought, seeing the intricate sigils clearly for the first time.I must make a record of them.He reached for the stylus and notebook he kept handy in his top pocket for capturing such details, only to feel the sweat-soaked wool of his borrowed shirt.Focus, you fool, he warned himself.Your coat lies drowned at the bottom of the sea, and your own situation is not much better.

Wanting to hide his exhaustion as best he could, he forced himself to his feet and began searching the shelves around the room for writing implements.

‘Had I wanted you dead,’ Agneta went on chattily, ‘you would already be in the ground.’

For once, fortune favoured him. He found some scraps of paper sitting beside a pot of ink and a small basket of ready-sharpened quills. Now armed, he decided not to allow Agneta’s verbal apologia to continue unchallenged.

‘You struck my wound with your fist,’ he reminded her, ‘split open my stitches and left me to bleed out next to Abbot Venia’s corpse.’

The nonchalance of the inquisitor’s shrug was maddening. ‘Those stitches needed to come out one way or another,’ she said, holding up as if evidence a glass bottle filled with a thick amber liquid before pouring liberal quantities over Strigan’s wounds. ‘I would have returned with another pair of hands to help carry you, had you not disappeared before I got there.’

‘Hmm?’ Estevar asked, unable to suppress a yarn. One of the beds nearby was calling to him. He would have resisted, but its position opposite the table where Strigan was lying would make an excellent vantage point from which to make a study of the sigils carved into the monk’s skin.

‘I said, you were too damned fat for me to carry myself, and it turned out, you had other allies lurking inside the abbey already, so my ministrations weren’t needed after all.’

Casting an eye over the canvas of Strigan’s flesh, Estevar was struck by the meticulous precision with which the demons had followed the inked lines of the tattoos. When he’d seen those same markings on the drawing delivered by Sir Daven, the convoluted sequence had struck him as nonsense, just an unrelated hodgepodge of pseudo-esoteric symbolism. Why, then, did some of the runes look so familiar?

So much for your vaunted memory, he chided himself.A decade spent studying every occult text in Tristia and you can’t recall where these symbols appear?

‘Remarkable,’ Agneta said, her awestruck voice jolting Estevar from his ruminations. She was bent over Strigan, peering through a magnifying-glass.

‘What do you see?’ Estevar asked, trying and failing to rise to his feet and join her. His body had apparently determined that his conscious mind could no longer be trusted to make decisions for it.

‘The incisions,’ Agneta replied, moving her glass to another of the wounds. ‘They’re so precise– so perfect– they would put a master sculptor to shame. Had the tips of the creatures’ nails not been so sharp, the skin would be in ribbons, but see here, the way the flesh holds together. The scars left behind will look almost beautiful, in a way.’

‘Beautiful?’

She shot him a scathing glance, as if he’d tried to catch her in a lie. ‘Evil things can still be beautiful, even transcendent.’ Absently, she traced the air above one of the wounds. ‘This one reminds me of the old illuminated manuscripts in theCanon Dei.’

‘No!’ Estevar said, suddenly on his feet as the excitement brought on by Agneta’s tiny mistake banished his weariness. He quickly set a piece of paper on his abandoned bed, balanced the pot of ink precariously next to it and picked up one of the quills.

‘What’s got you flapping about like a chicken?’

‘Not theCanon Dei,’ Estevar replied, dipping the quill, ‘for that text comprises theacceptedwritings of earlier Tristian theologians.’

‘Accepted?’ she repeated. From the tone of her voice, she had evidently found some cause for insult in his use of the term.

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