Those steps were more modern than Kylian had imagined. However old the crypt must be, its access points must have been constructed at the same time as the rest of the cathedral.

The crypt itself was somewhere between a basement and a cave.

At first, it seemed to Kylian that the crypt was lit by torchlight. But a closer inspection revealed artifacts which produced soft, orange lighting, placed at regular intervals along the wall. Kylian wondered if similar artifacts had been used to produce the different types of light in the three chapels above.

Foundations of the old church building could be seen, among the piles and piles of rubble. Astonishingly, it still had an entrance.

“We’re going in?” Kylian asked, with slight alarm. “Is it structurally sound?”

“Don’t be daft, Sir Kylian. The cathedral rests on it,” Ciecout said. He was clearly still peeved about Kylian’s skepticism earlier, and relishing his moment of intellectual superiority. “If this foundation collapsed on us, the cathedral above would collapse as well.”

“Then, I suppose, we’d all be together on our journey to the celestial,” Kylian muttered. He took tentative steps into the old church. “Do you find that a comfort, Father Ciecout?”

Ciecout paused.

“That depends who among my confrere goes where. I can only hope departing from this earth just a few seconds early means I can board a separate carriage,” Ciecout said. “Come now. Few are privileged to see what I’m about to show you.”

Kylian caught the note of excitement in his voice.

The old church was completely hollowed out. It was clear where the pews had been, and the altar as well, by the different elevations. Otherwise, what remained gave no hint as to the structure’s original purpose.

The two of them stepped on the chancel—thought or what purpose, Kylian couldn’t immediately tell.

Ciecout retrieved a key from his vestments that was at least gilded with real gold. Holding it up above the seemingly barren floor, a latch could be heard. Stone swung down hard, the sound of a trap door in the floor opening.

Kylian was duly impressed. These sorts of contraptions were slowly becoming familiar to him, as he had recently been going out of his way to study the works of engineers and artificers. Hence, he could better appreciate the craftsmanship. Saying the trap door had been perfectly flush would be an understatement—to the naked eye, it had simply looked like smooth floor.

Still, even though Kylian was well aware he’d been getting on Ciecout’s nerves, he would be remiss not to point out the priest’s laxness.

“Father, if you’re afraid of conspiracy and sabotage, I would urge you to consider more carefully who you show the cathedral’s secrets to,” Kylian said, gently.

“Sir Kylian, I have known you for your entire knighthood,” the priest grumbled incredulously, as he descended the ladder. “Do you not hear how pedantically your nagging strikes the ear?”

“...You’d be surprised, Father,” Kylian said, deciding not to push any further. He descended after the priest. “I can only hope your faith in others is rewarded.”

Ciecout paid him no mind, as he finished his short descent down the ladder. Kylian, following close behind, shuddered when he realized where he was.

No, rather, what this room was.

It wasn’t simply a crypt. It was an ossarium. There were hundreds of skulls staring at him from all around.

“Varant has seen most trying days,” Ciecout mused, as he examined the skulls, looking for a specific one. “It is a wonder how far the city has come. Aha. West side, third row, fifth skull.”

Sticking his fingers into the left socket of one of the skulls, Kylian could hear some kind of mechanism depress. Then, a section of the skulls swung inward, having been fashioned into a doorway.

Kylian felt a little uncomfortable as he walked through it, wondering if turning the bones of the dead into a door was some kind of sacrilege.

----------------------------------------

After a moment of staring at the fork, the silver lining for Ailn was this: he figured out which way to turn.

He’d been worried he waited too long before pursuing them underground, and that he might lose track of them. But the faint sounds coming from the left path assured him he was still on their trail.

High-pitched and clinking, something was striking rock, and the echo was just barely reaching him—he almost hadn’t noticed at first.

It was a particular stroke of luck, because the right path had a string leading out from an iron stake embedded in the wall. If he’d been forced to guess which way they’d gone, he would’ve followed it.

He kept his footsteps quiet as he got closer to the sounds—there was a lot of digging going on. More than Ailn had expected, and enough that it would cover up the sound of his steps, but he had to be careful here. He didn’t want to get caught and pursued through a narrow, one way tunnel. And if they had ways of communicating with anyone above, his escape route could be blocked entirely.

The sounds were coming from a few hundred meters away, and as Ailn approached, the path sloped upward while the tunnel’s height increased, allowing him to walk normally again. It was clear the tunnel was beginning its ascent to the surface.

Ailn could see it: the narrow path led into a chamber just ahead—a wider area, with more narrow paths splitting off.

All the digging sounds were coming from the narrow paths. There were about eight of them, but they were too shadowed for Ailn to see. Still, he was close enough to tell: there were a lot of workers here. It sounded like there were at least twenty… no, thirty pickaxes all striking rock.

“This is a… pretty big operation,” Ailn muttered to himself. He could make out a main dumping zone for heaps of rubble even from here.

Covered by the clanging sounds of the pickaxes, he advanced quickly, running up as close as he could to the main chamber and settling into a dark spot.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Now that he was close, he could tell for sure: this was some sort of staging chamber. The narrow tunnels splintering off even had their own spoil heaps.

Every minute or so, one of the eight or so tunnels would produce an exhausted, beaten-down worker; carting off rubble into the heap right outside their tunnel, they’d moan in frustration and get right back to work.

Picking a moment when the staging chamber was empty, Ailn darted in, crouching low among the heaps of rubble in the dumping zone.

Just after he’d managed to slink into the the rubble’s shadows, a worker came out of one of the tunnels pushing a wheelbarrow, accompanied by one of the loan sharks who’d attacked Ailn.

It was the small one. And he was yammering away to a worker with dead eyes.

“Ayeee, my good man! Your performance indicators are right through the tower.” the small man grinned. “Group D’s all on the rise ‘cause of you. Think there’s a promotion in the works for me, eh? That tall one Carlin brought in’s been pissin’ me off lately. Listen now—you keep this up, then the moment I’m promoted I’ll see to it you have yourself a day off every week.”

Then he leaned in to whisper. “I could even get you out of this crap. What do you say? Want me to run it up the flagpole? You ever think of joinin’ me in management?” The small man started to cackle. “Once I’m lieutenant of this operation, I’ll give you a whole team!”

The miserable worker barely had the energy to even look at his foreman. But the small man interpreted this as agreement.

“This is why Group D’s ahead. All us are bought in. All you lot are hard workers, and unlike that dimwit Carlin, I keep my feet on the ground. You know, greasing all the wheelbarrows—that was my idea. The proper term for that? That’s a game changer,” the small man blathered on and on. “Everyone else was so focused on just breakin’ rock faster, they didn’t do a deep dive on our real issues.”

Well, he was right. The wheelbarrow didn’t sound squeaky.

They started heading back into their tunnel.

“Geoff’s a real asshole, but he knows who’s got brains, and who’s just got brawn. Carlin’s a nobody. He’s two bit. He doesn’t disrupt. He doesn’t innovate. That’s why he’s a thug and not a merchant,” the small man—who had also attacked Ailn—rambled. “He doesn’t know how to scale.”

Geoff? Where had Ailn heard that name recently?

The small man never stopped throwing out buzzwords, as they disappeared into the tunnel, and Ailn heard a familiar voice come shouting out of another.

“You fiend!” Ceric’s voice echoed. “We were friends! Argh!”

“Not once have I given you any reason to believe that!” A voice Ailn recognized responded to Ceric.

Wait… was that the merchant from yesterday?

----------------------------------------

Renea waited quietly in the carriage while Reynard asked around the Golden Apple. If she walked in as Renea eum-Creid the Saintess, it would be needless trouble. The castle still hadn’t settled on how to explain to the denizens of the duchy that she wasn’t a true Saintess.

At any rate, she didn’t feel comfortable entering a tavern past evening. Soon enough, though, Reynard had returned.

“I asked if Ceric’s been sittin’ with a cloaked fellow, and the tavern owner told me they left for the outside walls just today,” Reynard said. “But one of the smiths in the tavern said they saw Ceric being carried by some known loan sharks, headed to the industrial quarter.”

“What?” Renea paled. “Were the loan sharks carrying anyone else?”

“Not as far as anyone saw,” Reynard shook his head.

“But if Ailn was with him earlier today, then where is he now?” Renea wondered.

Her hands started to tremble. The best case scenario was that Ailn had parted ways with Ceric before he’d met trouble, and found his way back to the castle already.

The worst case was that he was lying in a ditch somewhere.

Despite the awful cold, Renea could feel herself starting to sweat. She was dizzy and had to brace herself against the door of the carriage.

“Lady Renea?” Reynard looked at her with concern.

“Let’s… swing the carriage over to the industrial quarter,” Renea said. “If—if we don’t see him, there’s nothing we can do tonight but hope he’s back at the castle.”

----------------------------------------

After passing beneath the grim archway of skulls, the knight and priest entered a tunnel of more conventional material: stone. Upon exiting, Kylian’s eyes widened. They had stepped into the kind of wide open space he least expected.

“A mausoleum?” he murmured. “I assumed you were going to show me the cathedral’s reliquary.”

“The reliquary is above ground, immediately adjacent to the bishop’s office,” Ciecout said, the skin around his nose wrinkling in disapproval. “The bishop enters it thrice a day to fondly gaze upon the relics of greatest value. If the man were ever caught praying, he would no doubt be caressing diamond beads strung with gold.”

It seemed that whatever treasure this mausoleum held, Ciecout was unique among his confreres in valuing it.

The mausoleum was significantly dimmer than the rest of the crypt. Kylian hadn’t thought the crypt particularly well-lit, but now that he moved into a chamber where his eyes had to actively adjust to the dark, he realized he hadn’t fully appreciated the light artifacts’ utility.

Especially when he recognized what was lighting the mausoleum: an actual torch.

Just one torch, actually. And that torch had an incredibly bizarre pedestal.

A sarcophagus. Standing upright, the vertical sarcophagus faced them. Carved from dark stone and depicting a woman's features, one aspect of the sarcophagus particularly stood out—the golden eyes.

Though he was no expert, Kylian felt fairly certain those eyes were made of real gold.

There was one more use of gold, this one seemingly pointless: a chain of gold, reaching out from the torch. The chain crept above their heads, till it reached a sort of cup inlaid to the wall, a few feet above the mausoleum’s entrance.

“Whose…?” Kylian didn’t even know where to start with his questions. “Surely not Celesti—”

“Of course not,” Ciecout shook his head. “This tomb is for Noué Areygni. So, the story goes, when she painted ‘The Saintess and the Wolf,’ her request was to be interred beneath the church, in a specially constructed mausoleum.” He gestured all around him. “The artist worked on her own tomb.”

Following Ciecout’s gesture, Kylian now noticed the other extravagance in the chamber. What he’d thought were drawings upon the wall—already lavish by itself—were actually carvings, all around.

Except for one place, strangely. The wall to the right of the sarcophagus was some strange form of art, where the figures seemed to lack any sort of perspective. It was as if they lived in the world they were drawn upon.

It wouldn’t be so strange, except that the wall to the left of the sarcophagus had the deepest carvings within the chamber. The contrast between the two was all the more apparent because of the torch’s flickering light.

The bas-relief on the left, in its nearly three dimensional inlay, almost looked like men and women petrified, anguished by the light flickering across their faces.

The mural to the right, meanwhile, seemed to be given life by the moving shadows, almost as if the characters could start to dance upon the wall.

Written beneath the torch was a single phrase: ‘As above, so below.’

“I suppose Noué requested this specific lighting?” Kylian mused. “Is it not tedious to constantly refill the oil?”

“Even centuries ago, there were rather ingenious artifacts, Sir Kylian,” Ciecout said. “The oil in that torch need only be refilled every half a year. Would you believe I’m the only priest who enjoys the task?”

“No,” Kylian sighed. “That doesn’t surprise me at all. Rather, tell me why we’re here. I can’t imagine thieves wish to abscond with the bas-relief and the murals.”

“Of course not,” Ciecout said. “There’s a far more important piece.”

The priest paused, almost as if he were surprised by the next words he would say. “A piece that I would consider nearly as priceless as Noué Areygni’s portrait of Lady Celestia.”

“...Another one of her paintings, I suppose?” Kylian asked, confused.

The priest shook his head. “Not a painting by her. A painting of her.”