Page 45 of Crucible of Chaos

Strigan was weeping now in abject misery, able to abide the torment of wakefulness no longer. ‘You were alone– please, I’m so tired. Can’t you let me. . . ?’ The wounded monk’s words tailed off into snores.

How was any of this possible? Strigan and his followers had been drinking and drugging themselves into a stupor for days; were they all suffering from similar delusions? He badly wanted to beat Strigan into answering him, but the damned monk’s breathing had fallen into a maddeningly slow and steady rhythm, so unlike his own exhalations, which were becoming ever more agitated. Almost as if Estevar weren’t alo—

‘Who’s there?’ he called out, certain this time that he had heard the breathing of a third person. ‘Brother Agneta?’

No answer came, only that soft, gentle movement of air, almost like a breeze through an open window– but there were no windows in the infirmary.

He cursed himself for having forgotten to search for his rapier, for he was now unarmed and helpless. ‘I warn you,’ he called out to the intruder as he knelt down and began fumbling through the shelves beneath the table in search of something sharp. ‘If it’s my life you seek, others have tried and failed to take it before. Shall I send you to meet them so that you may learn how they fared in the exchange?’

Bluster, he thought, unable to find anything suitable as a weapon.In the end, all I have left is bluster.

‘Don’t be silly, my Cantor,’ the intruder said, her voice an eerie melody against the drumbeat of Estevar’s heart. ‘Won’t you need your Piccolo to help you compose the song of justice that will for ever be sung about Isola Sombra?’

CHAPTER 27

PATIENT SECRETS

‘Caeda?’ Estevar peered into the darkness of the infirmary, no longer merely blinded but smothered beneath its numbing, all-consuming shroud. No answer came from the young woman who’d been both his ally and his deceiver. In fact, he could hear nothing at all in the vast room. So fixated was he on Caeda’s presence– and the many dangers she might represent– that he imagined himself trapped inside a coffin, just as Strigan had when he’d wakened for those brief minutes before drifting back into restless slumber. Estevar was suddenly grateful for the Wolf-King’s proximity, the unsteady breathing proving the monk was still alive. Estevar was equally sure that his own heart was thumping as precariously within his chest, even if he couldn’t hear it right now.

‘Caeda?’ he asked again, and was again met with silence.

She is no spectre, he told himself.You stood next to her, listened to her voice, felt her touch, even held the scent of her hair in your nostrils.

That fragrance came back to him now: fresh, salty, with a hint of brine conjuring images of the sea the morning after a storm. Witnesses claiming to have encountered ghosts spoke of odours lingering from the place where they’d died. Among his own handful of encounters with genuine apparitions, some had evidenced such traits, others not. Like the living, the dead were disturbingly eclectic in their natures.

He was about to call out Caeda’s name again when she spoke at last.

‘Piccolo,’ she said. ‘Call me Piccolo.’

Estevar held on to the sound of that brief command. One of the few consistencies he’d found when conversing with apparitions was a strange narrowness in their inflections, as if the dead could express only a single sentiment. Oh, they might be able to shade it a touch here or there: rage might be tamped down to mere irritation, despair diminished to anxious curiosity, but always the voices betrayed a shallowness in their underlying tonality.

Caeda’s voice was different. Even those four words had carried a jumble of emotions: annoyance at the way Estevar was behaving as if she might present some danger to him, yet also fearful that he no longer saw her as his partner in this investigation. She’d tried to sound smugly mischievous because he couldn’t see her, but something else lurked just under the surface of her words, something he’d never heard in the voice of a ghost.

Shame.

‘What have you done, Caeda?’

‘Nothing!’ she shouted, and he would have sworn he felt her breath against the braided whiskers of his beard. ‘That is. . . there are things about me which I haven’t told you, but Ihaven’tlied to you. I wouldneverlie to you.’

‘A lie of omission is still a lie.’

‘Not if there was no intention to mislead, and I haven’t misled you, Estevar. I swear it.’

A difficult oath to credit, he thought, but she hadn’t finished.

‘Interrogate me,’ she demanded. ‘Ask me anything you want. That terribly clever mind of yours will tell you if I’m lying, won’t it?’

‘It’s not that simp—’

‘Ask me,’ she insisted. ‘If you decide I’m lying, I’ll leave here and you’ll never have to see me again. You’ll miss me, though, and it’ll be your own fault because you should’ve trusted that your piccolo would never lie to her cantor.’

Why is she speaking this way?he wondered.Almost like a child, rather than a woman grown?His hands gripped the edge of the table, wanting to feel the solidity of the wood and reassure himself that he was indeed awake and not under the influence of some raging fever-dream.

‘Ask me anything you wish,’ she’d challenged him. Very well then, that suited him perfectly. Living witnesses were neither entirely trustworthy nor inherently deceptive, and this, he felt sure, was equally true of the dead. So, he would proceed as with any other interrogation.

‘Why did you not bring a lantern with you?’ he asked.

She hesitated, then replied peevishly, ‘Why would you begin with something so trivial? It’s not as if—’

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