Chương 14: A Midnight Visit

"There has to be a way down," Corso said. We were tracing the northern abutment, and I was trailing one hand along the stone, feeling the texture of it and wondering if this was all a waste of time. We had reached the point where the bridge met the land, and the skill kept pulling downward, towards somewhere below the midpoint of the river. My head was getting heavier by the moment, and I stopped to lean on the stone.

"The entrance could be anywhere," I said, and I heard the tiredness in my voice. I sighed.

"Sorry, Corso, this night was a waste. The skill just… wants us down there." I gestured to the river. He walked up to me and slapped my shoulder.

"Vale, wake up! We are here now. Who's ever heard of treasure hunters giving up as soon as they meet resistance? If the location was obvious, we wouldn't be here. It would have been found, and long ago!"

"I guess," I said.

"But truly, Corso. What's your plan? Borrow a boat and then swim down?"

"Do I have to do all the thinking here?" he asked.

"Intellect twenty, right?" he added, and walked towards the bridge, his eyes scanning. On the way over he had told me he worked on many of the smaller dockyards that line the edge of the river, and now he grabbed my arm and led me towards a narrow lane behind the northern row of shops.

"Here," he said.

"Just where I remember them. Goldsmiths' stairs." He pointed down a set of very steep and narrow stairs, precisely cut stones all the way down.

"For the gold barges, and the gems. They come in here, and they carry the gold straight up into the workshops. When they come in, this place is teeming with guardsmen, but it's a narrow stair and a small area to watch."

"Would those lead below the bridge?"

"No. Just down to the river below." He kept walking.

"But the old ones. When they rebuilt the abutment, my master said, they filled in the old barge stairs. He said you can still see the top of them." We followed the goldsmiths' stairs down, and found a small landing cantilevered over the river. To me it looked like a dead end, but soon Corso pointed over the side of the landing.

"There!" he exclaimed, and I joined him. And there, hidden part-way below the landing, a second set of stairs, even steeper and narrower, was carved into the abutment foundations. Perhaps twelve feet down, and then they ended abruptly at a stone slab no more than a couple of feet square.

"That would be below water when it floods," I said.

"At spring high water. Not in Novembre." The pull in my hand agreed with the place. West and below, through the wall at the back of the landing. RELIC LINK DETECTED Relationship SITE Target Type Funerary chamber Bearing Below Estimated Salvage 80–300 florins"How do we get down there?" I asked Corso, because now I was also excited. This felt right. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. He grabbed my arm again, pulling me back up the goldsmiths' stairs.

"We need some equipment, Relic Hunter Vale."

The bakehouse was a half-hour walk away, and I was dead on my feet when we arrived. A faint smell of yeast and bread came through the door that Corso knocked on. Soon, his sister answered the door. Obviously Corso's sister, she was a large woman, greeting us with an apron already covered with flour. She took one look at us, and stated, "No."

"Isa, I haven't even asked yet!"

"Corso," she sighed.

"You stayed out all of last night, came back smelling of wine and messed up my timing. Three burnt loaves. And here you are again, for the second day in a row?" She turned to look at me.

"And you, Marek. You're the last man I'd think to pull Corso into shit like this, and here you do it again." Her look told of her disappointment, and I felt the need to defend myself.

"Monna Isabetta," I began.

"Please, I apologise, but—" She abruptly turned her back and waved us after her into the house.

"Don't just stand there. Come in. Men!" She sighed, too dramatically I thought, before adding, "And close the door and wipe your feet!" We followed her into the house's main room, which was both her bakery and her living room. The large central wooden table was covered in a thick layer of white flour, and a great mound of dough sat there. Isabetta went over and began to knead.

"So, what is this about? Out with it. I want you gone. To bed or back out, but I need to work."

"The rope from the yard hook. A lantern. And the iron bar from the woodpile," Corso said. She stopped her work, arms covered in flour and dough, and turned to look at Corso. Her mouth pressed into a flat line.

"What in… What are you up to, brother?" And before he had a chance to respond, she turned to me.

"Marek, are you bringing trouble to him, or is he bringing trouble to you?"

"Monna Isabetta," I tried again.

"I apologise for the interruption, perhaps it is better if we just leave, and—""Never mind that," she interrupted me.

"Corso, go fetch those things, but I want them back." Corso left the room to collect our treasure hunting equipment, leaving me with his sister. Her breath was still short, and I could see from the set of her shoulders that she was very much not happy.

"Monna," I said.

"Let me leave you to your work. I will go outside and wait for Corso."

"Idiot," was her response, as she turned to a cupboard and fetched something. She put that something in a bag, which she handed me.

"Eat. You will bring back trouble, I know it, but you need your strength to watch over Corso. And right now you don't look strong enough to watch over anyone."

"I—" I began, but she slapped me over the head with enough force to make my head ring like a bell.

"That was not a suggestion," she said, just as Corso came back into the room.

"Now leave, both of you." As soon as we were out the door, my stomach growled. Apparently it had betrayed me and allied with Monna Isabetta, and now it forced me to follow her orders. I opened the bag and found a loaf of bread and some cheese, which was not bad at all, and I shared it with Corso as we walked back to the bridge. It helped less than I hoped, and the world had developed a habit of arriving a half-breath late: I would turn my head and the wall would follow, politely, a moment after.

Corso caught my elbow twice on the lane down to the landing and said nothing about it, which was its own comment.

Back down on the landing, Corso found an iron mooring post and fastened the rope he had brought. He passed the rope through its ring and flung it down along the old abutment stairs. Holding it for balance, we took turns to manoeuvre down to the small stone slab at its end. We stood there, too close for decency, and looked around. Only a foot away and down from where we stood, the river coursed past. And in the abutment wall…

"There," I whispered, holding up the lantern. Someone had bricked up an opening in the older stone. The river had left a dark stain across the lower courses, but the joints between them were unbroken. Corso scraped one with the point of the iron rod. A pale crust came away; beneath it, the mortar was dark and hard.

"River mortar," he said.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning whoever closed this knew what the spring water would do. This is a seal." The pull in my hand tightened, and a sensation that I would grow very familiar with over the months and years to come gripped my chest. Excitement grew, and I just knew we were getting closer. Corso drove the iron rod into a joint near the top where the newer bricks met the old abutment. The outer mortar fractured readily enough, but the material behind it clung to the bricks and came away in hard black pieces.

It took both of us working the bar before the first brick shifted. Corso set two of the sounder fragments aside, rather than letting them fall into the river. After that we widened the breach one brick at a time. It was not a quick job. Whoever had closed the passage had expected the river to press against it, and the lower we worked, the thicker the wall became. When we finally broke through the inner face, cool, dry air touched my cheek.

Corso pushed the final brick fragments out of the way, then bent to look into the darkness beyond. I held out the lantern. It revealed a clear passage sloping gently downwards. The ground was the same hard-packed ground you find in the few non-paved alleys in Varenza, but someone had gone to the trouble of holding the dirt walls back with stone. We went in.