“Be careful,” the revenant warned as I stepped over the threshold. “This place isn’t welcoming toward the Dead.”
FIFTEEN
My senses aren’t going to work well down here,” the revenant went on. “Too much consecrated stone. Move slowly, and I’ll warn you if I notice anything unusual.”
The stair reminded me of the one that led down to the crypt in Naimes, winding deep beneath the earth in a tight spiral. Except this one was clearly even older, the stone pitted like an old bone where it wasn’t worn smooth with the passage of feet. The cobwebby shades that haunted it were slow-moving and almost featureless, barely reacting as I ducked between them.
I descended carefully. A corridor awaited me at the bottom, the low ceiling ribbed in an unfamiliar style. Here and there a statue of a saint stood in a niche, hands clasped in prayer. Age hung in the air as thickly as dust. More shades floated overhead in misty, motionless tangles, as though time itself had congealed them.
“They’re old,” the revenant explained. “Shades have little in the way of conscious minds to begin with, and even that fades in time without human company.”
The thought of the shades’ minds slowly eroding chilled me in a way my surroundings hadn’t. I wondered if it would be a mercy to destroy them. But I couldn’t—I needed their light to see.
I pitched my voice low, gripped by the eerie feeling that speaking too loudly might wake something that was sleeping. “Which way did the priest go?” To my left, there was a shadowed archway; to my right, another stair.
“There.” It drew my gaze to a spatter of fresh blood on the flagstones straight ahead.
It could only belong to one person. I paused to look more closely at our surroundings, but I didn’t see anything that might have injured Leander. I felt the revenant doing the same. Its attention lingered on the statues.
“Take a look at the third statue on the left. Be careful.”
I started forward, grateful I wasn’t wearing boots. My bare feet made it easier to move without a sound. As I neared the statue, the marble saint’s lips seemed to curve in a secretive smile. Its eyelids seemed to lower demurely. Only a trick of the light, I told myself, like Saint Eugenia’s effigy in the crypt of Naimes.
“Stop!” the revenant hissed suddenly, sinking in its claws. “Don’t step on that flagstone.”
I pulled my foot back. It didn’t take me long to work out what the revenant had seen. The center of the corridor had weathered centuries of traffic, but the flagstone I had nearly stepped on looked noticeably less worn than the others.
“A trap. There will be more. The Clerisy built a number of places like this during the War of Martyrs.”
My mouth was dry. The statue continued to regard me with its subtle half smile, as though waiting patiently for me to take another step. “Why?”
“One of my vessels seemed to think they were designed to slow down invading thralls, but I suspect that the Clerisy was just going through an especially sadistic phase in the twelfth century. Keep going, nun. That statue is giving me hives.”
We moved onward. Sometimes I caught glimpses of the hidden traps that the revenant was guiding me around—a gleam of metal tucked between a saint’s clasped hands. The teeth of a spiked portcullis slotted into the ceiling, poised to fall. As we wound our way deeper, it made me pause more often, scrutinizing each crack and irregularity before allowing me forward.
The droplets of blood led us down another spiraling stair, at the foot of which I almost tripped over the body of a nun sprawled across the flagstones. Her eyes were open; her staring, upturned face was contorted into a tortured expression of guilt. Heart hammering, I knelt to check her pulse.
“Still alive, unfortunately. But the priest didn’t hold back with his relic. She won’t wake for another hour or two, at a guess.” Casting its attention down the corridor, it suddenly went alert. “Quickly—hide.”
I squeezed behind a statue the revenant identified as harmless, flattening myself into the shadows. A door stood nearby, huge and grimy with age, heavily banded in iron, with a pair of hooks bracketing it on either side. One held a lantern, and the other was bare. I watched as the door swung open, revealing Leander on the other side.
He paused for a long moment, listening. Then he stepped out, slipping a piece of parchment into his robes. In his other hand, he held the missing lantern. When he turned to hang it back on the hook, it nearly slipped from his grasp.
It took him three tries to hang it. Afterward he slumped against the wall, his face blank with pain. He pressed an unsteady hand to his side. When he drew it away, blood shone red on his fingers. His harsh breathing was the only sound in the corridor.
His hand tightened into a fist. Slowly, he straightened to his full height. He stood for a moment with his eyes closed, almost as though praying. Then he lifted the skirts of his robes and wiped the blood from his fingers. When he set off, only a slight limp betrayed his injury. He stepped over the unconscious sister without looking down.
It struck me as his footsteps receded up the stair that if I had only seen him then, I wouldn’t have been able to guess that he was injured, such was the skill of his acting.
“He’s growing reckless,” the revenant observed.
Attacking a sister was a risky move. The curists had already noticed the change in his behavior. Either his actions were growing desperate, or he was so close to executing his plans that he cared less about discovery. Neither possibility boded well.
I waited a moment longer before I snuck out and took down the other lantern—the one Leander hadn’t touched. Before I entered, I glanced over my shoulder. The corridor lay empty behind me, the half-smiling statues gazing silently into the dark.
All other thoughts fled after I closed the door and raised the lantern. Its light trickled over a dusty confusion of jewels, gold, carved chests, books bound in leather. Some were arranged on shelves, others piled unceremoniously in the corners. An iron chandelier the size of a cartwheel hung overhead, frozen waterfalls of wax cascading from its unlit candles.
“Stop gaping like a peasant,” the revenant said. “This is nothing. You should see the vault in Chantclere; you can get lost in it.”
I lifted the lantern higher. “There’s an entire suit of armor down here.”
“That isn’t just armor. That’s a dreadnought.”
I picked my way over, interested. The armor had been fashioned for a true giant, a man Jean’s size. Though crusted black with tarnish, the intricate engravings on the metal still showed through. The ball of a mace sat on the ground beside it, attached to the chain and hilt of a flail. The ball’s spikes almost reached my knees. Even for someone of near-inhuman strength, I wasn’t sure its weight would be possible to wield in battle. “Was that a type of knight?”
“No one wore it. It’s a construct animated by Old Magic. It walked around on its own with no one inside. Don’t worry, nun,” it said at my reaction. I hadn’t moved a muscle, but my heart had almost stopped. “It’s an antique. It’s been inert for centuries. Do you see that small hole in the center of its breastplate? The key that belongs there is carried by the human who controls it. Doubtless it got lost hundreds of years ago.”