Page 60 of Crucible of Chaos

Choosing one of the passages, perhaps drawn by the jagged, angry lettering, Caeda read aloud, ‘Where have gone the days when prayers charged forth like knights to battle? Faithful voices go unheard, as above, so below, and now our curses hold no sway against their schemes and steel.’ She paused, tapping a finger against the cleft in her chin. ‘The abbot bemoans that the gods no longer pay heed to mortal pleas. And this mention of schemes and steel–that could be a reference to the Margrave of Someil plotting to take over the abbey by force.’

‘A logical interpretation,’ Estevar acknowledged.

‘But you don’t agree?’

‘Madness begets madness, and it does so by cloaking itself in rationality. I did not ask you to analyse the words he left behind but to tell me how it makes you feel.’

Her gaze followed the twisting, zigzagging lines. ‘I feel. . . uneasy. I wouldn’t want to be near the person who’d written these words. Look here, how the ink at the end of “unheard” suddenly veers off– and there’s a tiny pit in the stone.’ She turned to look up at Estevar. ‘He broke the tip of his quill, didn’t he?’

‘I believe so. What happened next?’

‘What do you mean?’ Brother Syme demanded, still lurking outside the open door. ‘He went back and finished the sentence. That’s obvious.’

Estevar joined Caeda by the wall. ‘Tell me the part that is less obvious, Piccolo. Interpret from Venia’s actions that of which even he was unaware.’

She stared at the wall a while longer, then turned to look around the room. ‘There’s no desk here, no shelves, not even a box. Even if the abbot had brought spare quills, he would have had to stop to retrieve one from whatever container he was using to keep them off the wet floor. He would have needed to trim it and dip it into the inkpot before returning to finish the sentence.’

‘A few minutes, no more,’ Estevar reminded her.

‘Yes, but even a few minutes should have calmed him down, especially since he’d just broken the previous one by pressing too hard against the stone. Yet here’– she pointed to the following section– ‘as above, so belowis written just as jaggedly as the rest. It’s a wonder he didn’t break a second point.’ Again she looked to Estevar with a questioning gaze. ‘He would have had to have been feral with rage to write like this.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘By listening to your own feelings of disquiet, you have found a footstep in the desert buried after a sandstorm. By opening yourself to the feelings of the suspect, you begin to follow his trail.’

Caeda nodded, but she didn’t smile at his praise as she usually did. Instead, she began to work more quickly, sloshing about the tiny cell as she found other passages scrawled with an equally unsteady hand, yet revealing entirely different emotions.

‘Here,’ she said, kneeling to point at a section low down near the water. ‘Everything’s small here, like the writer is frightened. The angles of the letters are all tilting on a diagonal. And see this dark patch on the wall?’ When she ran her finger along it, the tip came back stained. ‘That’s soot from a candle held too close for a long time. I think he wrote this as he was lying on his sleeping pallet.’

‘What does it say?’

‘They will come now. I have seen to it. There’s a relief in knowing I’ve failed in every way conceivable, like falling into a well so deep you’ll never be able to climb out, yet still there’s reassurance in the solidity of the bottom. Let those who wish to fight over this island do battle with sword and claw until it sinks into the sea. Even then, my own sins will never be washed clean, yet in my thousand damnations, still the vilest of my crimes will go unpunished.’

‘Who are “they” supposed to be?’ Brother Syme asked. ‘The Hounds and the Trumpeters? The margrave’s soldiers? The demons?’

‘It didn’t matter,’ Caeda replied, ‘not to Abbot Venia, anyway.’ Her voice softened, the hatred she rightfully felt for Venia now tinged with pity. ‘He despised himself at the end.’

Estevar took her by the arm and helped her up. ‘Was it the end, though?’

‘What do you mean?’

He gestured at the other walls. ‘We do not know in which order he wrote these passages, therefore, we do not know which came first and which last.’

‘Then what was the point of all this?’ she asked, scowling in irritation. ‘How are we supposed to decide if any of this matters?’

Estevar reached down and dipped his hand in the brackish water, holding it in his palm as if it were a cup of wine. ‘Three ways have we seen the poison affect those who drank it. Paranoia, fear and—’

‘Debauchery,’ Caeda finished for him. ‘You want me to search the walls for erotic poems?’

Estevar let the putrid water slip between his fingers. ‘Feelings, remember? Debauchery is an activity, not an emotion. When we met the Hounds, what fuelled their revels?’

Caeda returned to the walls, running her hands along the scrawled passages as if her fingertips could touch the sentiments fused into the inks. At last, she came to one written in a style different from the others, buried among all the darker testaments. ‘This passage is lighter,’ she murmured, ‘languorous, almost winsome.’

‘Read it,’ Estevar urged her.

‘Every drop of rain from the storm is a blessing that washes away my guilt and drowns my sorrows. What was once lost is found again, for she has returned.’ Caeda glanced around at the other walls. ‘There are no other passages like this one. What does it mean?’

Estevar allowed himself to smile. ‘It means many things, Piccolo, but the one that pleases me is that Venia knew a moment’s happiness before he died. Amid all his suffering, all his doubt, your presence brought him solace before the end.’

Caeda glanced back at the passage. ‘You mean, because I didn’t die when he threw me off the cliff? Malezias told me he’d seen me from the shore and rowed out in his boat to pull me from the sea, but I was already unconscious from days of being deprived of food and water.’ She turned back to Estevar, confusion and anger warring on her face. ‘Why did Malezias even bother? Why do you let me follow you around like a puppy? What does the life of one village girl matter to any—?’

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