Page 50 of Crucible of Chaos

Caeda was quiet at first, but soon he heard her head nestling onto the pillow and the soft sound of blankets being pulled over her. With a contented sigh, she said, ‘I’m very comfortable.’

‘Oh? On such a cold, hard cot, in this cramped stone cell?’

She snorted. ‘This “cramped stone cell” is a palace compared to where most people live. And this “cold, hard cot” is a lot softer and warmer than a pile of reeds on the floor. I have my privacy, which isa luxury few commoners ever experience. There are thick stone walls around me to keep me safe. My belly is full, my skin is dry. My bones don’t ache because even if tending crops or making wine is arduous, it’s never back-breaking. There’s an infirmary, so if I get sick, I’ll get decent care. My mind is alive with the subjects of my studies and conversations with my fellow monks, my spirit lifted by the hours I’m allowed to devote to contemplate the gods and worship as I please.’

‘And tomorrow?’ Estevar asked.

‘Tomorrow. . .’ She sounded sleepy now. Her eyes closed and she tugged the blankets up to her chin. ‘Tomorrow I get to do it all again. No scrounging for my next meal, no pleading with some merchant or lord not to cut my wages or beat me for no reason. I am. . . at peace.’

‘Good,’ Estevar said. ‘Very good.’

‘Can I rest a while?’

‘Alas, my dear, you cannot. In fact, you can’t sleep at all. You’re tossing and turning because this very morning, you and your fellow monks discovered the six statues of your gods struck by lightning. What do you make of that?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Piccolo, I did not bring you here to nap! I have just informed you of a terrible discovery. A crisis of faith. The gods are dead, their monuments lie in ruins! Tell me, why have you not fled this place already?’

‘What? Give up this sheltered existence because a few old sculptures happened to get hit by lightning during a storm? Of course I’m not leaving.’

‘Ah, so instead you lie beneath your blanket, seething with resentment towards your fellow monks, convinced they’re worshipping the wrong gods, so now you must decide which faction to join in opposition to the others?’

‘No, I’m enjoying my lovely cot.Trying to, anyway.’

‘Why? Are you not furious that—?’

‘I’m a monk, not some would-be soldier or zealot!’ Her fingernails clacked against the stone wall. ‘I chosethislife because it freed me from violence and deprivation.’ Throwing off her blanket and sitting up on the cot, she turned to him. ‘Are we done with this, Estevar? Because it feels like a terrible waste of time, given the island’s about to be invaded by some petty aristocrat’s troops or overrun with demons– unless, of course, the monks massacre each other first and save them both the trouble.’

‘One final question.’

She groaned. ‘You really take the fun out of investigating brutal beheadings and demonic onslaughts, you know that?’

‘Just one more.’

‘Oh, fine. Go on.’

‘You have told me that the existence of a monk in this abbey is, if not idyllic, then certainly more comfortable than what they might expect in the world beyond these walls. Furthermore, you consider the lightning-struck statues, though troubling, to be insufficient cause to flee Isola Sombra, or to justify the fracturing of the brethren.’

‘So?’

‘So, my young monk, answer me this: why are you planning to run away in the morning?’

‘I’m not! That’s what I keep telling you!’

Estevar stepped back into the room with her, gestured to the empty writing desk and the bare shelves. ‘But youdidrun away, Piccolo. You and half your brethren. Those who remained either banded together like soldiers awaiting an attack or lost themselves in revels as if death was already certain. If the statues weren’t sufficient cause for panic, then why are you leaving?’

‘Because. . .’

Estevar placed his hands in front of the lantern on the desk, shaping his hands so that the shadows cast on the wall grew more menacing.

‘Because I was already scared!’ Caeda exclaimed, leaping up from the bed. ‘The troubles among the brethren didn’tstartwith the ruined statues– something was already wrong with the abbey, and the monks sensed it. The destroyed statuary was thelaststraw, not the first!’ She began pacing around the tiny cell. ‘Some of the monks fled the island. Some joined Mother Leogado and walled themselves up in the Vigilance Tower, paranoid about the margrave launching an invasion. Others, like Strigan and his idiot followers, debauched themselves with endless drunken revels.’ She rubbed at her wrists, as if at old wounds. ‘Is that why Abbot Venia tied me down in the infirmary and inscribed those awful, awful markings all over me and threw me from the clifftop? Because he and the other monks had already gone mad?’

Estevar seldom ascribed madness as an explanation for a crime. Most of those condemned as ‘lunatics’ or ‘deviants’ tended to be ordinary men and women cursed not with a defect of the mind but simply of failing to fit in with the ways of their neighbours. That, added to the effects of injury, near-drowning and subsequent fever, were all the excuses he could find for having so utterly failed to recognise that the behaviour he’d witnessed here could not be dismissed as eccentric, or even erratic. Neither theological panic nor the threat of invasion could account for the chaos unfolding on Isola Sombra. The monks had quite simply–and precisely as Caeda had suggested– gone mad.

The question now waswhatorwhohad driven them to that madness?

‘Come,’ he said, taking the lantern from the desk and handing it to Caeda. ‘We have learned everything this empty cell can teach us.’

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