Frai Lorenzi startled. “No, no. He stopped once he realized he wouldn’t be punished anymore. All this fierce, outrageous talent, and he doesn’t care a fig. He wanted punishment, and he’s found other ways to earn it.” The librarian smoothed the pages against his knee. “He hardly speaks to me anymore. I hoped, when you smiled at him, that maybe you saw through him. That you might befriend him. You’re leaving, though.”
“Indeed,” said Tess, studying his face.
“Good,” said Frai Lorenzi curtly, rerolling the parchments. “Let me just reiterate: that key opens any lock here. All of them. You should have no trouble.”
He wasn’t very subtle. Tess took up the key and mimed unlocking the air. “All of them. Even the cellar hole.”
Frai Lorenzi rose and paused with one hand on the door, his face full of grief and hope. “Thank you,” he said softly. “He’s the son I never had. I don’t know what else to do.”
He left. Tess put on her boots, gathered her things, and sneaked down the dormitory hallway, through the vaulted kitchens, and into the cellar. She found no “hole,” only casks and crates and a dark stairway to the subcellars. She went deeper, through more storage rooms, and was ready to give up when she spied it behind a hogshead of ale, a depression in the floor covered by an iron grille. As her pool of lamplight neared, dirty fingers poked up through the bars like tentative shoots in springtime.
“Frai Lorenzi?” said a heartbroken voice.
“He sent me to release you,” Tess said, kneeling by the hole and fitting her key to the padlock. Hinges shrieked as she swung back the grille. Moldi’s eyes reflected lamplight like a frightened animal’s. His chin was gritty with day-old beard.
“Give me your hand,” said Tess, reaching toward him.
“Give it? I don’t have a spare, like some people,” said Moldi, making no move to get up. In fact, he flattened himself so Tess couldn’t reach him.
“I’m not coming out,” he said. “You needn’t bother.”
Tess lowered herself onto her stomach, arms folded at the edge of the hole, fascinated. His petulance wasn’t aimed at her, and there was probably nothing she could do to fix it, and still this drew her like a moth to flame. “Are you angry that Lorenzi didn’t come for you?” she said, trying to guess. “He thought you wouldn’t speak to him.”
“I probably wouldn’t have, at that,” said Moldi grudgingly. “I’m an incorrigible ingrate.”
“Bitter as gall,” said Tess. She recognized it, even if she couldn’t see the root cause. “Is it because you lost your arm?”
“Lost it?” he cried. “Never. Does Goreddi have the expression ‘I’d give my right arm’? I gave mine to get out of subduing the Archipelagos. Threw myself under a horse.”
Tess grimaced, imagining the desperation it would take to do such a thing.
Or the courage.
“It was a foolish trade; I’d assumed I could go home,” said Frai Moldi, growing quieter. “I hadn’t appreciated that I was merely a coin in my baronet father’s keeping. Betting me on warfare brought a poor return, but I had to be spent somewhere. I had no say in the matter. He reinvested me here and sent my younger brother to be a soldier in my place.”
“You’re worried your brother will be hurt,” suggested Tess, still groping for the answer.
“I hope he’ll be hurt,” said Moldi, deep in his hole. “He likes killing things, and he’s good at it. Mark my words: if the Archipelagos catch fire, it will be Robin?t who did it, and his pathetic brother Moldi who’s ultimately responsible. We should have been a feeble soldier and a terrible priest; that was our destiny as the second and third sons of a baronet, and no harm done except to my soul.” His voice broke. “Now the world is afflicted with an incapable monk and an arguably excellent axe-lieutenant, which is much, much worse.”
“You’re not merely a monk,” said Tess, trying to sound encouraging. “You’re a historian. If there is trouble in the Archipelagos, as you say, maybe someday your insights into your brother will let you write the definitive—”
Moldi’s shoe hit Tess stingingly in the ear, and then it ricocheted back down the hole and got him in the face. “Damn it,” he said, rubbing his cheek. “No, I’m not a historian. I’m trapped, as surely as I was before, but without any spare limbs to gnaw off.
“Frai Lorenzi says that if I study, the threads of truth will come together into a numinous, shining tapestry—or some cack. But you know what history looks like to me? My weeping mother and splenetic father; my sweet-natured elder brother, a Daanite, obliged to flog his serfs and produce an heir; my sisters married to wastrels just to join their lands with ours; and a little devil who’s traded his homilies for a poleaxe, thanks to my selfishness.
“Here’s the truth, Brother Jacomo: history is a hole, and at the bottom is a smelly drain, a damp floor, and a debauched monk who can’t see his way out of darkness.”
It took Tess a moment to find her voice; the word selfishness echoed inside her, bringing back memories and regrets. Old bitterness was never completely gone. “I’ve lived in that hole,” she said quietly. “I promise you, that’s not all there is. The world is different than you think.”
Moldi made a rude noise through his lips.
“However,” said Tess, pushing off the floor and brushing grime from her jerkin, “I can’t make you come out. Frai Lorenzi hopes you’ll leave; I just want you to have the choice.”
His voice grew small: “Leave…the monastery? Where would I go?”
“You could come with me,” said Tess, not sure if she meant it. Frai Moldi would make a dismal traveling companion, but maybe that was better than no companion. Pathka’s quest was finished; she’d barely admitted to herself what that meant. “I have some business to attend to in the cavern,” she said, “and then I’m off to Segosh.”
“That cack-hole!” he cried, his scorn returned in force.
“Is it worse than the one you’re in?” said Tess.
The silence seemed to deepen as Frai Moldi considered. “Good point,” he said at last, sitting up. “Segosh is certainly worse. I’m surely meant to keep rolling downhill.”
He staggered to his feet. Tess hesitated and then said, “Can you climb out?”
“What do you think?” said Moldi, reaching for her help.
He brushed cellar-hole detritus off his cassock and then led her by quiet passages to the gardens; they stopped at the well so Moldi could get a drink and dump a bucket over his head—most welcome, because he smelled terrible. The orchard door was closest, so they departed that way and locked it behind them. Tess waded through waving grass toward the shrine, Moldi at her heels. She left the key on the altar for Frai Lorenzi while Moldi studied the pagan inscription above the doorway down, shaking his head.
“I’ve got to go down again before we leave,” said Tess.
Moldi wrinkled his nose. “Down…with the giant serpent. On purpose.”
She’d discounted his terror in the library. “If you’re frightened, you can wait here, but Frai Lorenzi will come fetch his key eventually, and I don’t know how long I’ll be below. I’ve walked a long way….” Across lifetimes, she felt. “I have to see the serpent, after all I’ve gone through to get here. And I have a friend down there whom I can’t leave without saying goodbye.”
Moldi stared at his shoes while she spoke; when he raised his chin, there was an unaccustomed gleam in his eyes. “All right, then. Let’s see this monster. Why the devil not?”
They descended. Halfway down, the biggest tremor yet made the stairs churn and rock like the ocean. They flung themselves flat and clung to the steps for dear life. Tess prayed to St. Prue (as seemed prudent) not to be buried alive in this stairwell.
The shaking ceased, and Tess clambered to her feet, but Frai Moldi couldn’t seem to stand; he trembled as if the quake continued in his very bones. His fear hadn’t all been an act. Tess grasped his hand, pulled him to his feet, and kept hold of him the rest of the way down.
So it was that Tess, hand in hand with a monk, entered the great chamber and saw.
* * *
The world was different than either of them had thought.
* * *