Tess always felt, later on, that words could not begin to touch that moment.
Not that she didn’t try, but explaining was like trying to carry a river in a teacup. Or worse, that the experience was like a paper-thin, perfect sheet of ice upon a pond, and every word of explanation a heavy footfall, obliterating what it meant to elucidate. The serpent truly was thmepitlkikiu, the death of language.
The only approach was through analogy, but Tess didn’t know many good ones.
Far to the north, on the continent of Iboia, was a chasm, a gash in the face of the world so deep and wide that one could not see the bottom, or even the opposite rim on a hazy day. Its edge, where the rock was crumbly and weak, posed a real hazard of falling in and tumbling more than a mile downward, bumping and cursing. Yet people stood at the edge, gaping foolishly, because they didn’t believe it. The chasm was too big to understand.
Tess, alas, didn’t have access to this metaphor.
At the end of St. Jannoula’s War, when St. Pandowdy bestirred himself from the swamp and circled Lavondaville, shedding dirt and rocks and trees and shining with the light of Heaven itself, people fell on their knees, prostrated themselves, and wept for joy and terror. His presence was so sublime that a human mind could not comprehend it.
Tess, in the tunnels when St. Pandowdy rose, couldn’t make this comparison, either.
The closest she could get were the stars. Kenneth had once explained that while it looked like the sky arched above and the earth sat solidly below, up and down were mere conventions. “We’re clinging to a sphere, after all,” he’d said. “From some angles, up is toward the earth and down toward the sky, and everything—people, horses, cathedrals, dreams—is suspended over the ceaseless void, barely hanging on.”
Tess had looked at the stars differently after that, lying with her back pressed desperately to the earth, and felt the thrill and terror that gravity might capriciously drop her into the sky and she would fall forever.
Anathuthia recalled in Tess that terror and exhilaration. The whole chamber ached with vibrant life as her luminescent blood pulsed beneath milky, translucent scales. Her massive loops and coils arced impossibly, like stone arches made of noonday sky, burning a hole in night. Tess had to squint because the light was too much. Everything about Anathuthia was too much.
And Tess was vanishingly small.
Everything disappeared. Will. Dozerius. Mama.
All your failures and hopes, your suffering and striving, the great coils seemed to say, are inconsequential, compared with this. They are nothing.
You are nothing.
It was a relief to be nothing; it felt deep and beautiful and true.
Tess wept.
Beside her, Moldi wept for reasons of his own. Maybe for the same reason. Tess didn’t let go of his hand. They could not feel time passing.
All was nothing. It was exactly as it should be.
* * *
Moldi broke the reverie after what might have been hours. “Light requires the high relief of darkness,” he said, and although Tess’s thoughts had been going in other directions, she understood him. “Seeds sprout in darkness. Children are conceived, and the sun reborn. Death returns us to it. Darkness is not…it’s not wrong.”
He was weeping again. Tess could think of nothing to do but hold him close, his head against her shoulder. He clung to her fiercely until his breathing calmed. “You are not wrong,” Tess whispered into his hair. Impulsively she kissed the top of his head.
Experiencing nothingness had left her feeling unexpectedly full.
Moldi sat up, wiping his wet face with the end of his sleeve. The blue light gave him a ghostly aspect. “I hope you won’t be too disappointed, Brother Jacomo, but…I need to go back. I—” His voice broke again, but he steadied himself. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve heard the call.”
“Your vocation?” whispered Tess, happy for him.
He shrugged self-deprecatingly and quirked the first smile Tess had seen on him, a small, ironic, unpracticed thing. “That’s a rather grand word for finally noticing what’s been right in front of you. But Santi Prudia’s Sign was painted in mile-high letters. ‘O ignoramus,’ it said, ‘your life is not a tragedy. It’s history, and it’s yours.’?” He flashed Tess an apologetic look. “It made terrible yet reassuring sense in the moment. Words aren’t—”
“I know,” said Tess. “I had a moment of my own.”
“Would you tell me about it?” asked Frai Moldi shyly.
Before Tess could answer, though, Anathuthia moved. She rubbed against the ceiling, and loose rock rolled down her shining body, boulders like grains of sand. A chunk the size of a farmhouse crashed and split with a sound like the world’s end. Across the dark ceiling a darker crack appeared, like black lightning, growing and forking as it spread.
Tess and Moldi held on to each other and gaped, forgetting they had lives to fear for, until a shape came hurtling out of the shadows and shoved them toward the stairs.
“Go!” cried Pathka. “Get out! It’s falling!”
Only Tess understood the words. She grabbed Moldi’s arm and hauled him toward the spiral stair. The ground bucked so hard they could barely keep their feet. They climbed endlessly while stone crumbled around them. Their lantern was dashed on the rocks, but they kept moving through darkness until they burst out into another fine autumnal evening.
Only the stars stood still.
The plain undulated. Apples fell in the wobbling orchard. The bell tower flapped, clanging, as if seized by an invisible hand, and then the library of Santi Prudia seemed to melt as Anathuthia’s chamber collapsed beneath it. A cloud of dust rolled out of the chasm.
Frai Moldi paused, swaying on his feet. “Sweet Heavenly home,” he murmured. “So many times I prayed this place would disappear, Jacomo. But not like this.”
Tess followed him into the dust cloud, coughing and choking, calling Pathka’s name when she had enough breath. The little quigutl didn’t answer.
When she caught up, Moldi was already directing his brethren hither and thither, organizing stunned monks into gangs to move roof beams and free their trapped brothers. He was the lone pole of calm in a blizzard of panic, touching his brothers’ wet, grime-streaked cheeks and whispering in their ears.
Only when he looked into the chasm did she see him falter. At first she thought it was the shock of seeing Anathuthia again, not as the sign revealing his vocation but as the monster that had destroyed his home—and surely he struggled with this terrible paradox. However, Tess followed his gaze and saw that the surface of the serpent, its glow discernible in the deepening twilight, was littered with stones, broken shelving, thousands of books, and the wrecked bodies of everyone who’d been in the library.
The head archivist, recognizable by his iron hair and lanky limbs, lay splayed within view. Frai Moldi sank to his knees. Tess was at his side in an instant.
She didn’t know what to say, so she sat with him in silence. He sighed heavily and ran his hand over his face.
“Are you all right?” she finally whispered.
“Absolutely not.” His mouth quivered. “But I’m used to it, Jacomo. They’re not. I think I can show them the path out. I understand now that it’s not a question of faith or hope; it exists, and we can find it. It’s going to take some time, though.”
He took a last, lingering look at Frai Lorenzi’s broken body and pressed his hand to his heart, as if he could keep it whole by squeezing.
Then he stood shakily, holding Tess’s arm, and walked back to where he was needed.
* * *