Frai Moldi was up all night, soothing his shocked brethren and aiming them in useful directions. He gently pointed out to a group of wailing librarians that the refectory still stood; they stopped crying and got the injured indoors. Moldi had learned to bandage a wound and wrap a sprain as a soldier but couldn’t manage either one-handed; he calmly instructed a novice, who taught others. Pater Livian had hit his head and seemed confused; Moldi brought him to the dazed priors, who snapped out of it and organized a sort of nest for him at the head of the room.
Soon every surviving monk was either caring for the injured, being cared for, or salvaging what supplies and furnishings could be safely reached. Tess had joined the bandagers, and by dawn they were out of wounds to tend, to her relief. Her ribs ached terribly. She caught some sleep under one of the refectory tables, and when she woke she went looking for Moldi again, to see what else was needed.
She found him at the periphery of a meeting of senior monks, sitting alert as a collie; he’d herded them together and was ensuring they didn’t wander. When he saw her, he quietly slipped away and led her out to the remains of the orchard.
“Did your friend survive?” he asked. “I presume it was he who shoved us up the stairs.”
Tess looked away; she’d been avoiding thinking about Pathka’s fate. “It was. And I don’t know.”
“Go down and look for him,” said Frai Moldi, watching her steadily. “And then you should travel on to Segosh, if you ever mean to go.”
“You still need help here,” Tess began, but the little monk held up his hand.
“You’ve helped, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart,” he said. “But you never meant to join our order, and if you’re going to leave, it would be easier on me if you left now.”
Tess swayed on her feet, buffeted by a sudden surge of love. Her mind raced through futile scenarios, trying to devise a way to stay, but it was impossible. She didn’t belong here. She couldn’t have joined this order even if she felt called to it.
Anyway, it wasn’t that flavor of love. She could leave and carry it with her. Time would not put a dent in it, nor distance snuff it out.
She threw her arms around him, hurting all over. She could hear the smile in his voice as he said, “Give Segosh my apologies, but I have my own cack-hole to attend to here.”
Tess gave him one last look. Frai Moldi seemed more tired than despairing now; his decisive nose was finally coming into its own. She turned to go before she lost the will to do so.
* * *
With great trepidation, she returned to Santi Prudia’s shrine. Frai Lorenzi’s key lay on the floor among rubble. The spiral stair looked surprisingly intact, so she picked her way down.
Pathka had been right behind them when the cavern collapsed. She saw it over and over in her mind. But had he been crushed, or had he dodged and wriggled free?
She was afraid to find out.
The bottom of the stairs was clogged with debris, but she squeezed through a cranny near the ceiling, her ribs screaming agony. The other side, the cavern that was now a pit, was bright and airy, with noonday sun shining down; loose pages fluttered, caught by a breeze. She climbed mountains of books and rocks, which slid, shifted, crumbled underfoot.
“Pathkaaaaa!” Tess cried. There was no answer but her echo.
The bowl of Anathuthia’s nest had filled with fallen debris; the serpent herself was half-submerged, coated in dust and stone. Her glow was barely discernible, but she still radiated warmth. Tess, numb with exhaustion and worry, felt herself drawn forward across the wreckage, over one last heap of ruined books. The serpent—the coils that weren’t buried, anyway—loomed like a living wall, aquiver with breath and expectation. A glowing stream of blood trickled from a high-up wound, almost dried now.
Tess approached, mesmerized, and pressed her palm to the serpent’s side, into the rivulet of sticky blood. Blue fire ran up her arm. Literal or figurative, she couldn’t tell. Tess screamed, but the pain was already gone, only a flickering afterimage now, a gentler warmth suffusing her body. Her ribs stopped aching, her mind stopped aching, and she was filled with unexpected reassurance: I am Pathka.
She yanked her hand away. She’d heard the voice in her head. Impossible.
Anathuthia glowed in front of her, inscrutably.
I am Pathka? He wasn’t dead—she felt certain—but he might have been…subsumed? Absorbed or eaten? The voice had been so reassuring that she couldn’t fear for him.
This was what he’d wanted. The end of the singular-utl, whatever that meant. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that no matter how she’d tried to define his journey—quest, ritual, pilgrimage, religion—Pathka had always slipped the traces and eluded her. He had truly been on a path she couldn’t follow or understand.
It was all right. It had to be.
“Take care of him,” she told the serpent, as if her admonishment could carry any weight. One might as reasonably command a mountain.
Tess wiped her hand on the pages of a ruined book and then picked her way—less gingerly than before—back to the stairs.
She’d almost reached the stairs when a torn page blew against her ankle and clung there. She picked it up and saw, beside an account of ancient warfare, a scribbled drawing of a monk playing what could only be called arse-bagpipes. Tess laughed and cried, both at once, and then she stuck the drawing in her pack and walked on.
The monastery had collapsed so suddenly that Tess had had no time to dwell upon her own experience of Anathuthia. She wanted nothing more than to recapture that feeling—the comfort and joy of nothingness. She stared at the sky while she walked; it was not quite the same shade of blue that lingered behind her eyelids. Thinking about Anathuthia was like almost remembering a perfect snatch of song that had made the world stand still.
It was right on the tip of her tongue. It flitted around her like a swift.
She wanted to talk about it, to tell the peasants in the fields and the nobles in their palashos—the cows in the pastures, the very birds in the air—that everything was nothing. It was a delightful thought because it meant (to Tess) that one was free to choose, or decline to choose, without shame or coercion.
For someone who was nothing, anything was possible. The pressure was off.
“What would you say if I told you we’re all very, very small?” Tess asked an aged farmer as she helped him pack his barn with straw against the coming cold weather.
“Are we,” said the old man, eyeing her suspiciously.
“Did you ever see something so beautiful, so awe-inspiring, that it made you look at the world through different eyes?” said Tess. “Well, it happened to me recently.”
“Did it.” The farmer scratched his rough red chin.
“There’s a giant serpent underground,” said Tess, launching into the story, but it was like pushing a boulder uphill; his silence made the slope steeper. The story felt dead in her mouth.
She didn’t hear what he whispered to his wife when they’d finished work. The old woman gave Tess a whole loaf and a warm blanket and said gently, “St. Loola’s runs a hospice down in the village. Take care of yourself, m’dear.”
Thus ended Tess’s short career in herpevangelism. If nobody believed her about the serpent, she wasn’t going to enlighten anybody by babbling on about transcendent nothingness.