My shallow breathing was the only sound I could hear…
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As I wended my way back from the vertiginous alley where I’d found the Roughshod Rose to the city’s better kept avenues, my arse dully aching from Vincent’s enthusiastic embraces, I struggled to dismiss the hetaera’s tale from my mind. Underground tunnels that stretched endlessly across the Empire, submerged right below our very feet. A hidden, shadow empire. It was something out of a fool’s imagining.
She had lied to me. A necessity of any whore’s trade. It must be a story told here at night to frighten small children, I thought as just then I was walking past some shuttered houses where such children surely slept. The night was dark, and a cold wind was blowing in faintly from the east, a tiding of the future that awaited me tomorrow. The streets were even emptier and darker now. Darker. I recalled again the words the Deacon had spoken to us in the chapel, earlier that day: ‘the darkness of the eastern lands’ Some few hours remained until dawn, when my journey into that darkness properly began.
‘Whatever life I have had is ended after this night’, I thought as my feet kicked up the odd bit of crumbled pavement. I wondered if I would ever see this city again. Would I see any city whatsoever, after tomorrow? How long would I be amidst the smells of animal dung and sweating men with parched skin, with nothing to talk of and nothing to see? Would we find them? Would I find Baldwin? Or would we only discover our own doom, out there in the wastes? These thoughts clouded my mind as I gazed at the shabby little houses along the lane I walked as I approached the high street. Entire lives lived inside each one.
Why had she spun that tale for me? She’d gained nothing from it. I had not been asked nor offered any silver beyond the fee I had paid Vincent for his pleasures.Perhaps it, or something very like it had happened, once I thought as I turned right and found myself upon the high street once again. None but I was about at this late hour. Children vanished all the time in the capitol, I knew. Why should it be any different out here in the provinces? Little Jehanne, whose fancy for the depths led to her demise. Why tell me that?
I glanced up and down the great street. Dawn was still a ways off, and some interval of night yet remained to me. I saw a man, bent over almost double from drink, stumbling between houses on the far side of the lane. I walked to the middle of the street, stepping gently to avoid loud footfalls, and turned around in a slow circle. I could see the houses and shops that lined both sides. As I faced south, the great gate I had come into the city from came to view, and of course the walls whose aspect was even grayer now in the night air.
My feet kept turning until I came to face north, where the chapel and its towering campanile stood. When we marched towards it that morning I had been too distracted staring at the locals to take in its scale. It was monstrously large at night, and veiled in shadow like a great smear of spilled ink. How could a building’s aspect change so much so quickly? I had been inside the thing mere hours ago, and it had seemed then like any other provincial church.
I glanced up and down the lane a moment and realized that Abdera did not have naphtha lamps to illuminate its streets as the capital did. It must be the dark of the eastern night that gave the chapel such a grim aspect. The great ebony bulk of it seemed to waver before me, as though it were not a thing of stone but of shadowy flame, writhing and alive. It almost seemed to be facing me specifically. Looking for me. Hailing at me. Waiting on me.
I should go back to the caravan. To sleep. I would need my rest for tomorrow when we set off. I turned once more back to the south, towards the city gates. My tent and my bedroll were right there, just beyond the portcullis and—
“Ueughghf”
I whirled around. The stumbling drunk I had just seen had collapsed down onto the ground. He was vomiting out a great deal of liquid onto the cobblestones under him. I looked back from him and up at the great chapel once more. It seemed to have grown a hundred feet taller, just then, for though I was farther from it, it looked to be coming closer to me. What queer city is this, where walls and buildings grow nearer and further of some strange volition? I thought, recalling the way the city walls had seemed to both loom closer and then recede from sight as I had hunted for the brothel down the dingy side streets I had just left behind.
A door. In the undercroft, the whore had said. That was where she and the girl who’d gotten lost had found it. Stairs that led down to a tunnel. What nonsense. Besides, it was the wee hours of the night. The chapel would be locked, would it not? I felt in my pocket, the small knife I carried with me, which I had used to pick the lock of the Polemarch’s strong box to pay the merchants earlier, was still with me. The main doors to the chapel would be bolted shut, sealed with a chain most likely, as they were in the capital at night. But I was in the outer provinces, perhaps such customs were more relaxed, or different here. I stared up at the stony campanile. I was standing directly in its shadow now. Still some time left to me here, I thought.
My feet began moving forward, though it took me some moments to notice. My legs, seemingly of its own mastery, were guiding me forward down the high street. To the campanielle, and the chapel. Its great black silhouette seemed to quiver more strongly as I began trotting towards it. What nonsense that whore had spun. It would only take a few minutes to discount her story, and then back I would come and be to bed. Abdera was empty tonight, and none save that sickly drunk saw the way I was heading. The eastern wind had stopped blowing, and the air grew calm and heavy as I walked. It was just a story told to frighten small children. I shall prove it.
I made a quick circle around the great chapel as I arrived at it via the same path the caravan had taken that morning. As I first suspected, the main doors were shut and bound by a great lock and chain. Yet this did not slake my curiosity, and as I walked around towards the rear part of the chapel, which I believe is properly called an apse, I espied several small doors, which were bound with no chain I could see.
My feet continued drawing me forth, up to one of these unassuming black portals. As I approached the chapel walls, I felt a heat coming from behind the wooden door that dissipated after a moment, and then returned soon after, then dissipated once again. This happened perhaps ten times before I recognized a kind of rhythm in it. If the chapel were a living thing, this could only be described as its breathing. And the unassuming black door guarded some kind of orifice, which linked the outside world where I lurked to…
But what nonsense I was conjuring! Buildings of stone do not breathe. I faced a plain wooden door, nothing more. I would prove it, as much to dismiss these fatigue-driven fancies as anything. Sodomy always softens my mind, and the hetaera’s liquor might still have had some small hold upon my judgement. Only this could explain my being drawn to a locked old building in the dead of night. I shook my head vigorously to dispel whatever peculiar humors within me had created this stupor, and then I walked up to the door and placed my hand on it and expected it to be barred from within… but instead it simply gave way and pushed inwards before me. It resisted me not at all.
Perhaps the deacon was indisposed after exerting himself so much with our ceremony that day and had forgotten to lock up properly? There are reasonable explanations for such lapses. Did he, or some other clerical person live on the site, as the clergy tended to in the capitol? I should locate the rectory and inform them of their mistake. Surely Abdera had the occasional thief? I reasoned all of these things to myself as my feet guided me over the threshold, and I carefully shut the great wooden door behind me.
I walked down a narrow hall whose dim illumination came only from the occasional square window allowing in the night, and then I came into a sacristy whose shelves overflowed with candles and heaps of incense. In one corner was a series of wall hooks that held the deacon’s soutines. So this is where the clown keeps his props. I wondered for a moment where the splendid silver femur I had seen at the service earlier was, but pushed the thought away. I was trespassing, in truth. Which I could perhaps find some way to explain, were I caught. Pilfering things in an imperial chapel however, especially this far from home, would end with me locked in a prison cell, at best.
Another door, to my right, led me into a chamber that must have been directly behind the ambulatory, where the deacon had given his sermon from that morning. I noticed a small flight of wooden stairs ahead of me that went downwards. There must be some way to the undercroft from there. I stepped down slowly on the first step, testing it for loud creaks, but none of the wooden slats made a sound from the weight of my passing. At the bottom of these stairs, I found a barren, open space. As my eyes adjusted to the lower light, I could make out in one corner a door, with a weathered old padlock clasped tightly to its bolt, barring any entrance.
Just like she had said. A wave of nausea crept up from my stomach. How could a woman whore who ran a stable of boy whores know that a random door deep in the basement of a church was kept locked? Had she heard of the door from someone who had seen it? For all I knew, the deacon himself had a taste for boys. Could he be one of her clients? She might know of it from him. Or someone else who had seen it? I thought myself into circles like this for a while as I stood before that locked door in the dark, trying to conjure up some way that that woman could have found this place, some fancy which would counter the simplest and most obvious answer: The hetaera had told me the truth.
If this door is real, might also what it guarded be…No. Surely this is just some closet. A place to store gilded trinkets the deacon uses for his ceremonies. All churches have such things. This can all be explained I thought as I tried to pull back on the door handle, slowly, so as not to risk shaking the squarish lock and making noise. But the door was held firmly shut. I bent closer to examine the lock in the meagre light this chamber offered. I saw rust all over its dented surface. It was worn with age; and my fingers left a handprint on it in a thick layer of dust. No one has touched this door in a long while, it seemed.
Unlike the massive, lavish lock I had seen bolting shut the chappel’s front doors, this padlock looked a common one. I turned it over as best I could from the short chain. It took a single key in a single slot, nothing more. The sort of padlock you purchase from a locksmith for a few pieces of silver. You use such a lock to keep something simple safe. To keep it forgotten. There was so much dust on the surface of the lock it had turned the palm of my hand almost black where I had grasped it. What here is in need of forgetting? I wondered.
I pulled out the small, thin knife I used on the Polemarch’s strongbox earlier that day and, carefully to avoid any loud scrapes, I shimmied the tip of it into the padlock’s hole. Gently, I began twisting it around, trying to gauge the location of the several wards which likely held the thing’s core shut.
It proved to be less complicated than the Polemarch’s strongbox, but the space between the wards was greater on the padlock, and my hands were shaking and damp with sweat after what felt like an hour of impossibly minute hand adjustments, as I moved between its metallic dead spaces, listening all the while for the meager sounds of the little iron teeth and the bolt’s tongue falling into place until at last I heard a dull, low clunk and the lock opened and I drew it off and gently removed and folded up the chain and placed it on the ground next to the door.
Then, at last, I pulled back the bolt that held the door shut. I stuffed the lock into a small pouch in my trousers and, slowly, pushed in the basement door, expecting to see nothing but a small closet, full of altar frontals.
Behind the door was a narrow archway. Beyond it, were stone stairs, cracked with impossible age. They led down and disappeared into a black void. Impossible. I pulled out my steel and flint, and lit a large taper that I had snagged from the sacristy above me when I’d first entered the chapel. My small flame barely pushed back the gloom. The dark before me seemed nearly woven into the musty air I now smelled wafting up from the stairs. What is down there?
No living soul knew I was here. The caravan would leave with the new day, with or without me. What perverse curiosity had drawn me hence? Surely I had not come to this place of my own volition…had I? I had no business being here and yet here I was. What was down there, in that stygian dark? It could be a crypt for burying the locals. A cellar for storing the deacon’s wine. An oubliette for prisoners. Or it could lead to tunnels. To the lost bones of the girl Jehanne. I took several steps back into the undercroft, turned around and glanced at the bare walls of the large chamber behind me. My shallow breathing was the only sound I could hear.
I turned back and looked down into a darkness that should have been nothing but a red-headed whore’s imagination.
When I received my commission to join the expedition as quarter master all those months ago, I had shown Veril the parchment, which was apostilled with the Margrave’s own seal, no less. He gave me a hurt, hateful look. “First Baldwin. Now you. How does one family have such a hunger to disappear from the face of the earth?” he’d said. Now there were two paths before me. The wastes out there. Or the craggy stairs which lay before me now. Is vanishing simply my destiny? I wondered. The lit taper I had brought into the undercroft with me was the length of my forearm. It burned through a quarter of its length before I put my foot onto the first step going down into the void, and began my descent.
Alister’s journey continues here.
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