Chương 15: Under the Goldsmiths

Twenty paces in, the passage doubled back and continued down. The fitted stones had begun to sweat. Then a slow, continuous pressure entered the soles of my boots—not sound exactly, but the weight of water moving through stone—and I understood that we had passed beneath the river. I had never heard about passages below the city, below the river, and I thought it was the kind of story I would have heard if it was commonly known. The dark below the river pulled at me as strongly as it frightened me.

My thoughts raced ahead while my body lagged half a step behind, and with every turn the lantern left a yellow smear across my sight. There was a city's worth of river water moving above our heads. Only a foot from the wall we had opened, and if it rose, that would be it. The lantern flickered, and I gripped its handle hard, knowing we would not be able to see a thing if it went out.

"You are trembling, Vale." Corso's voice was sudden as it broke the silence.

"Slowly, carefully. Breathe." He placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently.

"This place is… It is dark, and far down. What if there is something, someone, down here?"

"We are alone, Vale. Don't be concerned." He paused.

"Did I tell you about Bianca?" For a moment I could not remember whether he had. When I turned towards him, the lantern flame drew a second yellow line through the dark.

"Bianca? I thought her name was Lucia. The merchant's daughter you brought to the Misericordia in spring."

"Lucia was before. Lucia was…" I could hear a sense of loss in his voice as it trailed off.

"We didn't want the same thing."

"What does that mean?"

"I… Vale. Marek. I'm not getting any younger, you know."

"What does that mean?" I exclaimed, darkness and monsters forgotten.

"You are, what, just thirty-something?"

"Thirty-two, this summer."

"So, what does that mean, you did not want the same thing? You seemed happy when I met her. And so did she."

"We were. Then I mentioned Isa being pregnant again, and she got a funny look in her face."

"Ah. She wanted more. Children, and so on, and soon?" Corso was quiet for a moment.

"Not exactly, Vale. I did. I want that. I want to come home, after miserable days at the Misericordia, and find a wife and a son. Or a daughter." It was too dark to see the expression on his face, but I could hear the wistfulness in his voice.

"A small daughter, to walk around the square on my day off. To take to the fountain, and… And anyway. That was it. Lucia forgot me the day after." I was quiet as we continued down. Twice my shoulder brushed the wall before I realised I had begun to drift towards it. Beneath the sweating plaster, fitted blocks appeared at regular intervals—larger than Varenzan masonry, their joints too fine for my fingernail.

"So," I said eventually.

"Bianca?"

"Yes!" he exclaimed, a grin back in his voice.

"She's the sister of a friend of one of Isa's regulars. We went out last week. On Tuesday, I think it was. And we are going to see the new Duomo this weekend."

"Duomo? You mean, that unfinished dome that will fall down any day now? Cevenne's project?"

"Well, Maestro Ferroli is the one doing the building. But yeah."

"Is that a place to take a girl?" I asked, but then the passage suddenly came to an end, opening into a room. The passage ended so abruptly that I took two steps into the chamber before my body understood it had arrived. Corso caught my sleeve. The walls were not Varenzan rubble faced with plaster, but immense fitted blocks laid without visible mortar, each course level after centuries beneath the river. Varenza built in pale limestone and coloured marble.

This stone was brown-grey, severe, and cut with a confidence that made the city above us feel temporary. Three soldier-statues faced the coffin, one against each wall except the entrance. Each carried a rectangular shield and a heavy spear, with a short sword hanging high at the belt. Flecks of pigment remained in the deepest folds, but the figures themselves had faded to dark grey. A squat stone offering table stood before the coffin, bare except for a shallow bowl carved into its surface.

In the middle of the room, a stone coffin stood on a low platform. Its lid had been cut into the shape of a man, cloak clasped at one shoulder, one hand resting on the pommel of a short sword. Time had softened his face but left the square jaw and close-cropped hair. A dark substance remained around the temples and beneath the chin, stained green where bronze had once rested against it. Beside one temple, a fresh pale scar cut through the weathered stone.

Something about the relief made the hairs at the back of my hands stand on end, and that was before I paused, breathed, and took in the full chamber. Funerary chamber, indeed. The room was perhaps twenty feet square, its courses stepping inward above us until the ceiling vanished into darkness. The coffin was at the centre, and the statues along the walls kept vigil. For how long have they kept their vigil?

"Whoa," Corso echoed my feelings.

"This is… This is not Varenzan."

"No," I said, reaching out to feel the coffin. The stone rasped beneath my fingertips, unpolished and dense, the same severe brown-grey as the fitted walls. A thin layer of dust covered everything, and I saw where my hands had left marks on the coffin. Something about this place felt like another, an older world. Something that was here centuries before Varenza and had left its mark. A funeral chamber does not exist alone in the wilderness, which must mean…

"Corso?" I asked.

"Yes?"

"Do you think… Do you think there are more rooms like this, down here? Below Varenza?" He paused and looked around the room. When he finally answered, it was in a whisper.

"There must be." Then I stepped up on the foundation slab the coffin was sitting on and looked down. That looks like…

"Corso, give me the satchel." He passed it to me. I unwrapped the cracked mask and lowered it over the stone face cut into the coffin lid. It was a perfect fit: across the brow, nose and jaw the mask slid into place and it was immediately obvious that this was where it had come from. The mask's cracked side even met the scar in the stone. As I held it there, the pull that had led us beneath the river vanished.

"They cracked it taking it off," Corso said. I nodded, but my mind was preoccupied. Or, it is fairer to say, there were thoughts up there that were struggling through the fog that my mind had become. Idly, I spoke my thoughts out loud.

"Why did they only take the mask?"

"Simple, Vale," Corso replied. I looked at him, and he made a wide gesture with his hand.

"What else down here could you carry up?" He was right. Everything else in the room was stone. Heavy stones. There was no simple way to carry out statues or coffin. Does that mean, these monuments are worth some three hundred florins? Or… Corso walked around the coffin, studying the narrow seam beneath the lid. Then he walked up to it, and, gripping the lid with both hands, he straightened his back and lifted with his legs. The lid did not move so much as a fraction of an inch.

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

"The coffin," I said, understanding.

"The coffin," Corso confirmed.

"But this lid weighs more than both of us." What if… I thought.

"Eight Might," I said, handing Corso the lantern and putting my satchel down after placing the mask back inside it. Then I took up position at the end of the lid opposite Corso, grabbed the edge of the lid and tightened every muscle in my abdomen—and lifted. Muscles that had never been exercised, but strengthened by my Class, groaned in protest as I put everything that I had into the motion. I held my breath until I grew so dizzy I almost fell backwards. The lid stayed where it was.

"That's why they only took the mask," Corso said.

"What if we both lift, and at the same time?" We tried that, again without result. By then, my strength was waning quickly. The night had been long, as had the night before, and my head swam with nausea. I heard Corso pacing around the room, sometimes pushing and sometimes trying to lift. He was muttering to himself the whole time, and at one point I heard him ask himself, "Perhaps if I use the iron bar?" I sat quietly watching him try to wedge the bar under the lid.

He tried pushing, but nothing he did had an effect. But watching him with the iron bar in one hand reminded me of something I had once heard. Very rarely, the Signoria will call an Assembly. They prefer to make their decisions in secret, away from the eyes and impulses of crowds, but on this occasion they had invited all city-employed citizens to a meeting. This, we call an Assembly, and it is a forum to discuss and ask questions, and according to the Signoria, to give them advice.

They will say something like, the collective wisdom of the crowd guides their action, and then they will wheel and deal and decide whatever brings them in more florins. But I am digressing. This Assembly was called to discuss the location, the architectural plans, and the building progress, for the new Duomo. The Cevenne family was providing the funding and the land, hoping the magnificent structure would strengthen their political position.

They had recruited Maestro Ferroli to head up the Duomo's team of architects, and it was this very Maestro who received the question: "The size of these stones, Maestro. That will sit on the columns and hold up this dome. They are enormous, and there is no way to lift them up there!" He had answered, "Give me a stone to brace against and a bar long enough, and I will move the sun." I looked at Corso's iron bar. It was not of any great length, but then, we were not intending to move the sun.

Then I looked at the table sitting towards one end of the room.

"Corso," I exclaimed.

"Help me move this." I moved over to the stone table. Not asking any questions, he joined me, and together we dragged and pushed. Stone ground against stone, and our breaths came short, but finally we had its edge close beneath the corner of the coffin, where a corner of the lid was projecting out.

"There," I said.

"Now, give me the bar." I held out my hand, and understanding was dawning in his eyes as he handed me the solid metal instrument. I set the rod across the table, pressing it up under the lid so that most of the bar still extended towards me. Taking a deep breath, I delayed no further, and I pushed down at the farthest end of the rod. The bar flexed, and it flexed more than I was expecting. For a moment I feared it would break before anything more happened, but then I heard it.

The faint rumble of heavy stone scratching across another surface, and the corner of the lid rose a fraction. Corso stared at the widening gap before looking at me.

"Let it down, Vale, I will be right back." I did as he asked. Corso ran from the room. I sat down on the floor to wait and woke a moment later as he returned, his arms full of bricks.

"Again," he said, and I pushed myself to my feet. Then I repeated the action from before, and as the lid slowly rose, Corso manoeuvred a brick into the gap. Then we placed another brick under the bar, and lifted again so we could place a second brick under the lid. And so we continued, brick by brick. Once the wedges had lifted the lid clear of its rim, we dragged the offering table alongside the coffin.

Corso guided the stone while I pushed, and the lid shifted sideways a finger's breadth at a time, until half the lid rested on the table and a dark opening gaped beneath it. We approached the now-open coffin together, slowly, and looked down. We were both familiar enough with corpses that I expected he saw much the same as I did. A man once; now his flesh was gone and only bone remained. Brown bone lay on the stone bed exactly as it would if the man had decayed around it.

He was on his back with his hands folded on his chest, and I noted that Varenzan corpses were buried with their arms straight along the sides of the body. Furrows cut across two lower ribs on his left side, evidence of a sharp blade, and each arm had at least two healed fractures. The cloth had vanished long ago, but a green bronze clasp could be seen below the clavicle, and a broad buckle had fallen into the bowl of his pelvis. Extending down from where his hands were folded, there was a short sword.

He had been buried, holding that sword. Three rings still encircled fingers, two of them corroded green, but one with the patina of gold. This ring was also flat at the top, and I could see a relief carved into the metal. Some kind of signet ring? I wondered, before I noticed the eyes.

"Two coins," Corso said, having noticed the same.

"And silver." I nodded. In Varenza, we place a copper in their mouth. I leaned over the opening. The upper arm bones were thick, the right heavier than the left. There was wear at the shoulder and along the spine of a man who had spent years carrying weight, but not a labourer's wear. His knees showed less use than his hips. Riding, perhaps. The teeth were good and the bones dense. Male, beyond forty, perhaps beyond fifty. My best guess now was that the two marks in his ribs showed the cause of death.

I had examined bodies dug from old parish grounds, bones exposed when cellars broke into forgotten crypts, fresh corpses and some dead for years. I had learned to read age from the desiccation and decay of the flesh, from smell and touch. I could read the rigidity and flexibility of joints, and even age from the colour of the bones. This man was the oldest dead person I had ever seen or handled.

I knew the date of the first ledger on the shelf in the Regesta, and he had been dead long before its first page was filled. Perhaps even before the river followed its present course.

"He was important," Corso said.

"Huh?" I said. At some point during my examination, I might even have fallen asleep for a moment, and Corso's voice broke through several layers of fatigue. I stopped examining the bones and took in the burial as a whole.

"Oh, yes." A sword. A funerary chamber, guarded by statues.

"So, what do we do now?" he asked next, and this time I did not follow.

"What do you mean?"

"Dawn is nearing. We knocked through a wall, and my guess is people are going to come investigate within an hour of day's light. What do we do about this?" He gestured, then paused.

"Well, we have two choices."

"Yes," I answered, having reached the same conclusion.

"We either leave this down here, or we bring it with us."

"And…" he said, drawing it out.

"That is not really a choice."

"You are right." I shook my head.

"I don't know why, Corso, but I don't like it."

"Oh," he answered.

"That is obvious, Vale." His eyes took in the room, and he got a pensive look on his face. I looked at him, waiting for him to complete his thoughts.

"This is a grave," he said simply, and I nodded. Our eyes met, and without much enthusiasm we made the decision. Corso found the satchel and put the belt buckle, the two bronze rings and the clasp from the dead man's shoulder inside. He slid the gold signet onto his smallest finger.

"Look, Vale. It fits." I blinked at his hand.

"So it does." He reached towards one silver eye-coin, hesitated, then left both where they lay. I understood. I then reached down and picked up the sword. And that is when a current of energy shot through my body. One moment, it saturated me, reaching in waves down into the core at my centre, and then just as quickly, it was gone. FIND COMPLETED Relic recovered Officer's Gladius Class RELIC HUNTER — Level 2 Attribute point available. I read it twice, and swayed on my feet.

"Vale?" Corso asked, some worry in his voice.

"Level two."

"What does that even mean?" he asked.

"I received an attribute point. Whatever that is." He grunted and paused, then looked back at me.

"Let's think about that later. We need to hurry up." We left the lid where it was. On the climb back up, my feet missed one of the steps and the sword struck the wall with a noise that stopped both our hearts. That was when we realised we had intended to carry a bare blade out in the open, through the night streets of Varenza. We looked at each other, and a hysterical laugh escaped Corso as he took off his tunic and wrapped it around the blade before carrying the bundle beneath one arm.

Outside, the river air felt warm. Grey had begun to gather above the eastern roofs, and somewhere upriver a cart rolled on stone.

"Next time," Corso said, coiling the rope, "we bring the mule."

"And the advocate." We went back through the waking city with a sword, a belt buckle, a clasp and three rings that had not been worn since before the city of Varenza even existed, and we hurried to reach the Misericordia before first bell.