Chương 16: The Hand in the Galleries

No one touched the wax fragment for several seconds. It rested in Voss's palm like evidence too small for the weight it had suddenly taken on. Black. Crushed. Marked with a ring of ash split by a broken line. Not the seal of the sanctuary. Not that of the Clergy. Not that of the College. The Circle of Ash.

For anyone who could read human politics, that meant one simple thing: the great houses of the eastern marches, the ones who lived facing the demonic continent and always demanded harder, faster, more military decisions, had left a trace in the depths of the sanctuary. Not necessarily absolute proof of guilt. But more than enough to shatter the fiction of a mere accident. Jonah broke the silence first.

"So either someone from the east came down here before us…" He threw Voss a brutal look.

"…or someone really wants us to believe it." Voss closed his fingers around the wax.

"Yes." No immediate defense. No indignation. Just that dry yes, which cleared nothing, but did not run from the fact. Lena was still staring at the seal.

"The Circle of Ash can just come in here like that?" Mira answered before Voss.

"Not officially." Then, lower:"But the houses of the marches have contacts everywhere as soon as something touches demons, borders, or summoned individuals." She glanced at the boot prints.

"And some of them are rich enough to buy eyes inside almost any institution." Zayn, for his part, was watching something else. Not the wax. Not the boots. The others. Lena: 75. Tension high, but stable. Jonah: 80. Anger contained, ready to rise. Mira: 74. Almost icy concentration. Elias: 102. Always that number. Always that obscene way the world had of confirming the density of others while throwing him bloody scraps. Voss opened his hand again and tucked the fragment into an inner pocket of his coat.

"We keep moving." Jonah let out a hollow laugh.

"Of course. Someone sabotages the galleries, a Circle of Ash seal turns up on site, one summoned falls and comes back alone from a lower level… and the conclusion is that we keep moving."

"Yes," said Voss.

"Don't you have any other words?"

"Yes. But those will do." Elias stepped in before Jonah pushed further.

"He's right about one thing. If we go back up now with nothing but this fragment and guesses, everyone will use it however they want." Jonah turned his eyes toward him.

"And you, obviously, prefer clean proof."

"I prefer something that keeps other people from telling the story in our place." The answer landed just cleanly enough. Jonah did not smile, but he did not argue either. Lena turned to Zayn.

"Can you keep going?" A simple question. Too simple. Zayn answered before thinking any further.

"Yes." She held his gaze half a second too long. Because she could see he was lying a little. Because she could also see he was telling enough truth to walk. Mira, meanwhile, was watching something else. Not his fatigue. His reactions. Since his return, he had felt her slide that precise, cutting look toward him several times, the kind that was not yet asking what he was hiding, but was already calculating the shape of what no longer fit. Voss motioned them onward.

"The third node is farther down. If someone worked here before us, that's where we'll see whether the sabotage was opportunistic… or planned with access." So they moved on. This time, the atmosphere truly changed. They were no longer simply in dangerous galleries. They were in a space already touched by human intent. Every corridor, every slab, every sealed door might contain something other than a monster or an old residue. A choice. A hand. An intention.

The passage they followed was straighter than the others, almost administrative in its construction. An old maintenance corridor, probably, with lamp niches, numbered plates half eaten by time, and drainage grooves running along the walls instead of the floor. Every twenty meters or so, a secondary sealing circle had been set into the stone. Most were dead. Two or three still pulsed faintly. Mira stopped in front of one of them.

"Look at this." They all raised their lights. The circle had not been forced. It had been bypassed. A thin grayish line linked two points of the central sigil, forming a parasite bridge over the sacred geometry. Mira traced the stone with her fingers without touching it.

"Someone established a bypass." Lena frowned. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"In normal French?" Jonah exhaled through his nose. A good sign. It meant the tension had not completely eaten him yet. Mira explained more simply:"The seal was supposed to detect unauthorized passage. Instead of breaking it, someone redirected part of its reading into a dead loop." She looked up at them.

"That takes knowledge. And time." Voss nodded.

"So not just some ordinary soldier."

"No," said Mira.

"Someone who understands sanctuary structures. Or someone who was given the right instructions." Elias looked at the stone, then the corridor.

"Is there a risk we're still being guided where someone wants us to go?"

"Yes," Mira answered immediately. Then:"But now that we know what to look for, we have a chance of seeing it before we walk into it." Zayn stayed silent. He did not need to understand sigils as well as Mira to grasp the most important thing: someone, somewhere, had thought the trap through before them. And that someone had not acted in panic. They had prepared. Fine. That meant the sanctuary—this place of light and control—had already had human cracks in it before he arrived. His presence had not created the evil.

It had only drawn it faster to the surface. The thought should have reassured him a little. It only strengthened another idea: the monsters of this world have titles, seals, and seats in white chambers. The corridor then widened into a small junction room. Four exits. Three sealed doors. Only one open. Too neatly open. Mira raised a hand.

"Wait." Voss stopped immediately. Jonah, at the rear, tightened his grip on his blade.

"What now?" Mira pointed to the floor in front of the open door.

"No dust disturbed on the two doors to the right. Recent passage only on this one." Then, lower: "And the threshold joint was cleaned."

"Cleaned?" Lena asked.

"Someone erased the most obvious traces. Not well enough." Voss stepped forward, crouched, inspected it himself, then gave an approving grunt.

"Yes." Jonah rolled his eyes.

"I really do love galleries. Everyone becomes fascinating in them." Elias studied the open door.

"Do we go through, or do we bypass it?" Mira narrowed her eyes.

"If someone wants to push us somewhere, bypassing it is probably the better answer."

"But what if the third node is beyond that route?" Lena asked.

"Then he wants us to reach it through there on purpose," said Jonah. Voss made the decision.

"We don't take the clean path. We break the left-hand door." Lena's eyes widened slightly.

"Breaking a seal is less risky than following the prepared path?"

"Today, yes." Not reassuring. But logical. The captain and Jonah took position while Mira indicated where to strike to open it without triggering a full rupture alarm. Elias watched the corridor. Lena took a little air back. Zayn, meanwhile, looked at all four directions. Not the structures. The values. Nothing ahead. Nothing to the right. A weak presence far behind the clean door: 3. And to the left… Nothing living immediately detectable. Good. Or bad. Hard to say. The left seal gave way on the second strike.

The door groaned open onto a lower, narrower gallery, drowned in grayish light from ancient filaments fixed to the ceiling. They entered one by one. The progress became almost slow. No more vermin. No more hanging nest. That was worse. The silence gave every small noise too much weight. A drop of water. The scrape of leather. The tiny ring of metal from Lena's staff. Everything seemed to be announcing them to something crouched farther on. After thirty meters, Elias stopped. He did not raise a hand.

He only slowed by half a step. The whole group matched him almost without thinking. Zayn felt immediately what was happening. Not in abstract terms. In bodies. At the beginning, the cohesion of the group had been nothing but chaos held together by good reflexes torn out of their enormous soul strengths. Now something more real was appearing. Still fragile. Still rough. But real. And it revolved around Elias. Because he looked for the others before looking for himself.

Because he adjusted his pace to the group instead of forcing them into his own. Because his skill did not just make him stronger—it made him more relevant every time he fulfilled the role of protector. Zayn clenched his teeth. Unbearable. And it became even more so when he saw that Elias's number did not waver. It held. Dense. Clean. Almost luminous even without light. Zayn jerked his eyes away violently. Mira had already spotted the reason for the stop.

At the end of the corridor, a taller arch opened into a round chamber. The third node. They all understood it at once. Not because a sign pointed it out. Because the place had the gravity of central infrastructure: more runes, more sacred metal, more layers of protection, and that sense that the whole lower network either converged toward this room or died around it. The chamber itself was almost intact. And that was the problem. Too intact. Too clean.

After everything they had just crossed, this perfectly circular rotunda, its floor almost whole, its eight sealing pillars still standing, and at the center that great black-and-silver locking core resting in a dry basin… all of it looked arranged to be seen. Voss raised an arm to slow them even more.

"No one enters the center without a reading." Mira stepped forward first, just to the edge of the arch. Her eyes swept over the pillars, the central core, then the lines carved into the floor.

"Someone passed through here." Jonah exhaled softly.

"At this point, even I'm starting to hope we find a living guy with his name written on his forehead." Mira did not answer. She was already indicating something else. One of the eight sealing lines no longer met the central core properly. It had been detached, then reattached almost perfectly. Almost.

"This is more than sabotage of passage," she said.

"Someone worked on the node itself." Voss entered the room as well. Very slowly. The captain moved around the center not like a mage, but like a soldier who knew some rooms were designed to kill cautious people just as easily as idiots. Lena murmured:"What exactly does a locking node do?" Maelor was not there to explain. So, for once, Jonah answered with his dry bad humor.

"Basically? It keeps certain kinds of crap from moving between levels." Voss added, without irony:"The sanctuary galleries are a containment system. The nodes are the major locks. If they're altered, residual pockets circulate, secondary seals drain out, and the levels stop being compartmentalized." Lena went pale.

"So someone could trigger several incidents at once."

"Yes," said Mira. Then, after a second:"Or artificially create the right route for something." The word something hung in the air. Zayn, meanwhile, was watching something else. Still no visible living presence. But just behind the central core, partly hidden by one of the pillars, he spotted a broken tablet lying on the floor. Not ancient like the rest. Recent. The kind of object a scribe, ritualist, or liaison agent would use to carry a short order, a transit authorization, or a line of transmission.

"There," he said. The group turned toward him almost too fast. Bad move. Too abrupt. Zayn regretted speaking that way at once. But Elias was the only one who reacted properly. He simply followed the direction Zayn had indicated.

"I see it." Voss approached, circled the core, crouched, then picked up the broken tablet. It had been deliberately snapped in two. Not to destroy it completely. To make its reading incomplete. The captain turned it toward the light. A crushed wax seal still clung to the upper corner. Black. The same black. The same fractured ring of ash. The Circle of Ash. But beside it, below, almost erased by the impact… another mark appeared. A small stylized silver arch. The College of Arches.

The silence that followed had a different quality. Sharper. Because this time the trail no longer pointed only east. Someone inside the sanctuary, or someone with access to its internal authorizations, had crossed hands with an authority of the marches. The conspiracy stopped being a vague theory. It took administrative shape. An order. An access. A collusion. Jonah was the first to say it.

"Okay. So there really is a human hand in the galleries." Mira corrected him without taking her eyes off the tablet.

"At least one." Lena looked at Voss.

"You can't call this simple zeal from the eastern houses anymore." The captain did not answer right away. Then, in a lower voice than before:"No." Elias stepped closer to the central core.

"What were they trying to do here?" Mira knelt near the locking lines. Her fingers traced, without touching, the nearly invisible diversions between two pillars.

"This isn't crude sabotage."

"Thanks," said Jonah. She ignored him.

"Someone didn't want to destroy the third node. They wanted to… reconfigure it." Lena frowned.

"Why?" Mira looked up at them.

"So certain pockets would open in certain places and not in others. To create a controlled circulation of danger." Jonah understood first.

"So the galleries didn't just go wrong. Someone built a testing ground." Yes. This time, they all felt it. Not a mission that had become dangerous. A mission already shaped to produce certain results. Zayn felt the back of his neck go cold. Not because he was shocked by the world's malice. He already knew better than that. Because he was beginning to understand something more precise: someone had probably wanted to see how the group would react… and above all, how he would react.

The thought went through him with almost physical force. Mira, at the center of the chamber, suddenly broke off her reading.

"Wait." She turned her head toward the right, toward a secondary pillar partly in shadow.

"Something's missing." Voss moved closer.

"What?" She pointed to the base of the pillar. Where a secondary control plate should have been, there was only a cleanly torn absence. Not broken. Removed. And along the edge of that missing space, a small smear of dark red still dried. Not old. Not monster blood. Human blood. Elias saw it immediately.

"Recent." Voss nodded, already more tense.

"Very recent." Jonah slowly lifted his head toward the corridors leading out of the round chamber.

"So whoever did this might not be far." The word had no time to settle. Because at that exact moment, Zayn finally saw something else appear at the edge of his perception. Beyond the right-hand pillar. Behind the secondary wall. Very faint, but real. A living presence. Human. And not small. Zayn froze inside. Twenty-eight. Not a monster. Not a hero. A trained adult. Maybe a soldier. Maybe an agent. Hidden. Very close. He said nothing. Not yet.

Because at the same moment, another thought—fast and ugly—passed through his mind: If you speak too quickly, Mira will see again that you know things you shouldn't. So for the space of one breath, he stayed silent. Only one. And that single second was already going to cost something.