Page 10 of Crucible of Chaos

Malezias’ instructions, uttered with scorn and malice, returned to him once more.

‘Ring the bell in the old way’– what was older and more fundamental than a pilgrim begging for aid?

Estevar looked through the iron bars to the cobbled street beyond. Two hundred brethren had lived in the abbey when last he’d set foot on Isola Sombra, and nearly four times as many lay people made their homes outside its high walls, some growing crops or working for the monks; some merely beggars, waiting outside for the end-of-day scraps. Surely they couldn’t all be gone? But where were the errand-runners, the merchants with their well-laden wagons, the sellers of dubious religious icons, the children playing in the streets?

‘Could this entire island have been deserted without anyone noticing?’ he asked aloud,one hand stroking Imperious’ muzzle as the dazed mule’s head lolled back and forth. ‘What petty theological dispute would induce so many to abandon such a prosperous abbey?’

A simple if troubling explanation was that those bearing witness to his plight didn’t consider a half-drowned wretch and an injured mule worthy of their friendship, and cared not one jot for their need for succour.

‘I do not see you,’ he said between teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. He gazed at the watchtower with its silent, uncaring sentry. ‘I do not see you, but I know you are there, and by the oath I took as a Greatcoat to deliver justice to every corner of this country, Iwillmake you open this gate.’

Grimly, he picked up the rope and wrapped it around his hand once again. There was one bell chant taught to every King’s Magistrate whose circuit included a fortified religious settlement: a message only a Greatcoat was permitted to use. Estevar sounded it now with ferocious precision.

First, the clang, strong and loud, repeated once more with equal force to signify an outsider come to call. But after these came two short hums separated by a brief silence, followed by a third clang and then, finally, a hum he kept resonating until at last the bell stopped swaying and the sound died away. It was a simple enough code for a magistrate to memorise, and a summons that always unnerved those dwelling within who understood its meaning:The trial is about to begin.

He let go of the rope, then looked back up at the watchtower. The light now shone from the top window. His hand trembling from his exertions, Estevar reached around to the back of his belt and wrapped his fumbling fingers around the hilt of his dagger.

‘Let us see what greeting we receive now,’ he murmured to himself.

CHAPTER 8

THE PORTER

Despite his feverish condition, Estevar had been ready to fight to the death whichever mad monk or demonic apparition descended to the gate where he and Imperious waited.

His fearsome adversary proved to be a diminutive woman of advanced years whose grey-stubbled scalp barely came up to his chest. She was garbed in the three-layered robes of a sectati, a monk who saw to the mundane needs of a religious community. Over the traditional ankle-length grey wool tunic was a thicker, sleeveless one in black with worn honey-oak buttons down the front. The short cape of her faded blue chaperon hood was decorated with six faded pewter coins, one for each of Tristia’s gods, dangling from silver chains no longer than a fingernail.

‘Forgive me, Eminence,’ she said with a cheerfulness that belied any genuine contrition. She descended the stairs in leather-soled sandals with more confidence and nimbleness than her scrawny frame and obvious age suggested. She gave a forlorn sigh as she halted on the other side of the locked gate. ‘I was deep in the bowels of the abbey checking the storm drains these past hours. Just as I was climbing back up the ladder, contemplating a nice pot of tea, I heard the bell.’

Estevar presumed it was his use of the judicial summoning code which had revealed him as a magistrate, since his barefoot, shabby state–to say nothing of the loss of his beloved greatcoat–did nothing to evoke his rank. ‘You were not in the watchtower?’ he asked.

‘The watchtower?’ The old sectati glanced up towards the abbey. ‘Did you see someone? Did they appear to—?’ She shook her head, a lopsided smile on her thin lips as she turned back to Estevar. ‘Forgive me, Eminence, my mind is still down in the storm drains.’ Both lenses of her spectacles had cracks near the bottom edges, giving her milky grey eyes a slightly confounded look as she peered at him through the iron bars. ‘And here you are, from all appearances having held back the ocean herself with naught but those big, strong arms of yours!’ She produced a set of keys from an inside pocket of her outermost robe and set about unlocking the huge gate for him.

Conscious of the dagger loosened in its sheath at the back of his belt, Estevar found himself disarmed by her amiable, business-like chattering. ‘You’d begun to say something about the sentry in the watchtower?’ he prodded, but the sectati didn’t take the bait.

‘Oh, now, isn’t this a handsome fellow?’ she said brightly, ignoring the shrieking squeal as she pushed open the gate; Imperious took great exception to the hideous racket, nearly bowling Estevar back down the stone stairs to the rocky shore below.

She stroked the mule’s cheek cautiously before gently folding back the edge of the bandage across his face. ‘A nasty scrape,’ she said, casting Estevar a disapproving glance. ‘This calls for cleaning and stitching, not clumsily wrapping a few lengths of linen around it as if you expect the gods to heal it for you.’

An odd jibe for a holy woman, he thought, noticing a pair of little bone dice dangling beneath her chaperon cowl from a thin leather cord. While there had once been a Saint Gan-who-laughs-with-dice, Estevar had rarely encountered any of his devotees in an abbey. He decided to probe the sectati’s religious allegiance further.

‘I spoke a seven-fold prayer to Amoria,’ he said with almost theatrical piety as he spun a lie so obvious any child could see through it. ‘We were bound north for Pertine when my mule Pedar here panicked. I’d been such a fool, taking him up on deck, but he does so hate to be kept down below for days on end. The thunder drove him a little mad and he leaped over the railing and into the water.’ Estevar stroked Imperious’ mane. ‘By the time I got to him, the two of us had washed up on the shore. He stumbled and fell, wounding himself against the rocks. I prayed as we came up the path, and promised to sacrifice a month’s wages to Amoria should she grant Pedar a swift recovery.’

The sectati pulled her cowl up against the rain that was starting up again, then took hold of the mule’s reins and urged him through the gate and up the rough-hewn steps. ‘A month’s wages is a generous opening bid,’ she observed drily. ‘I wonder, did the Goddess of Love accept immediately, or might she be contemplating a counter-offer? For she has clearly done nothing to help your mule, Eminence.’

Her tone was jovial, devoid of apparent malice: a fine impression of a doddering, elderly monk playfully spouting sacrilege to a pious stranger on a drizzly winter’s day.

Estevar was not deceived.

When last he’d come to Isola Sombra, the streets had been bustling with life, with stoop-backed scholars from all across Tristia come to consult the abbey’s legendary library of archaic religious tomes and nervous schoolchildren from the mainland sent to learn their letters from stern-voiced monks, not to mention all manner of travellers come to gawk at this holy site so they could return home and claim to have walked upon the soil from which the gods first arose. The tiny shops lining the main road used to display their wares beneath brightly coloured awnings, and everywhere men and women–even the monks–proudly wore the tiny purple roses for which the island was famous pinned to the necklines of their coats or robes.

Today was very different. Though not yet noon, the shops were closed. Many of the awnings had been torn down and broken bits of pottery and shards of wood were strewn around the place. There was no commerce taking place, no humming village life– and there was not a single rose to be seen. No one save Estevar, Imperious and their enigmatic guide walked the streets.

When he made mention of these changes, she was utterly unperturbed. ‘Subdued, you say?’ she asked as if she couldn’t perceive the gloom all around them. ‘Did you come in winter, when all but the hardiest of souls make for the mainland? Did you, perchance, arrive during a once-in-a-century storm season, no less?’

‘No, it was autumn, yet still—’

The sectati spun on her heel to face him. All traces of her charming smiles and disarming chatter vanished. ‘Let us not play games with each other, Trattari. We have greeted each other as liars do, with lazy tales meant to test weak minds. That is well, for we have no reason to trust one another and these are not trusting times.’ Wrinkled with age and murky with cataracts, still her eyes pierced like iron nails as they locked with his. ‘You didn’t chance upon Isola Sombra by accident. No captain in his right mind sails these reefs during winter, and never during a storm. Nor would I call the leaky rowboat that dredged you up from the water a ship.’

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