The dark lasted three steps. Then the hall announced itself.
Golden light seeped from the walls in veins that followed the carvings, tracing old symbols across older stonework. The glow was warm without heat, illuminating without revealing. Mood lighting, essentially, though several thousand years ahead of the trend. Incense hung in the air, thick and resinous, while dust of centuries occupied the room with sheer professional commitment.
? Dust is the only substance that improves with neglect. Archaeologists understand this. Housekeepers do not.
Behind them, the portal held open, and Wylan observed the undead guardians still arrayed outside in the grotto, whose enthusiasm matched their body temperature.
Wylan looked around the hall, which was expansive. Thick columns marked regular intervals, each one decorated past the point of good taste and well into the territory of personal conviction.
There was only one exit, like last time. And between them and it, a statue that had no business being that large: jackal-headed, three times their height, gripping a stone sword with the easy confidence of middle management.
Wylan took stock. The chamber was far larger than anything in their father’s Dungeon. The ceiling alone could have housed a cathedral’s ambitions and still had room for regret.
“Is this normal?” he asked Laila. “The size of this place?”
“Honestly, I’ve only been in a few more Dungeons than you have.” She was studying the walls, the columns, the settled weight of the stonework. “But this room reminds me of the de Vaillant Dungeon.”
“I think this might be another stable Dungeon,” Lambert said.
Laila let that sit for a moment. “One in the middle of a city is bad enough. I don’t know how I feel about two.”
The statue’s head moved.
Stone ground against stone, a sound that belonged in quarries, not neck joints. The jackal’s eyes caught the golden light, two points of amber that tracked them with the focused disinterest of a customs official.
The sword came up, casual, administrative, a porter shifting a barrier rope.
“Only the dead lie here. None shall pass into the depths.”
Laila’s hand had found her pigment pouch. “Seraphina.”
“If I were to hazard a guess, this would be the guardian of the tomb.”
“Is there a way past it?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“What do you mean, ‘not to your knowledge’?”
“I told you I’ve never been in here.” Seraphina’s patience had acquired a visible edge, the kind that cuts conversations short and sometimes people. “It is hardly my fault if you weren’t paying attention.”
“So what do we do now?” Lambert said.
“Why don’t you go up to it?” Wylan suggested. “Give it a little kiss, see if that works.”
“This is ridiculous.” Seraphina stepped forward. The guardian’s head tracked her, and its posture shifted in a way that, in a doorman, would have been deference. “Guardian, let us pass. We have business in the Sepulchre.”
The sword lowered.
“You may pass.” A pause. The amber eyes moved past her to the three de Vaillants. “They may not. Only the dead may enter the depths.”
She glanced back at them with an expression as sympathetic as a locked door. “It seems I am expected. You, regrettably, are not.”
Lambert studied the guardian like a man composing a sermon.
“You said ‘None shall pass.’” He straightened his collar. “My name is None. I shall pass.”
Wylan closed his eyes.
The guardian regarded Lambert with what might have been contempt, if contempt were possible in stone. “Your falsehoods have no bearing here.”
The backhand was almost gentle. Administrative, really. Lambert left the ground briefly, crossed a distance he hadn’t volunteered for, and met the far wall with a thud that echoed the length of the chamber. He slid to the floor and sat there for a moment, blinking.
“Lambert?” Laila said.
“I’m fine.”
He was uninjured. He had, however, been swatted like a moth from a lampshade, and the guardian had already returned to its original position, filed under resolved.
Wylan helped him up. “Anything broken?”
“Only my pride.” Lambert dusted off his coat. “And that was in poor condition to begin with.”
“Only the dead,” Wylan said, half to himself. “Right. I could put something together. Slow the heart rate, dampen the vital signs. It wouldn’t hold up to close inspection, but if that thing is checking for a pulse rather than conducting an interview—”
“It would take you hours,” Lambert said. “I have something faster.”
“Since when?”
“I’ve been working on it.” Lambert did not elaborate, which meant the elaboration would be theological, lengthy, and they didn’t have time for it.
Laila had stopped listening. She was watching the guardian with the stillness that, in Laila, preceded bad decisions, and Wylan recognised the look a half-second too late.
She reached into her pigment pouch. Umber and violet bloomed between her fingers, and she worked the colour into the air in quick precise gestures, weaving it toward the guardian in a haze of bruised twilight. The enchantment settled over the stone like a veil.
The guardian turned its head toward her. One hand came up and swept the colour aside, the same dismissive backhand it had used on Lambert, with the same indifference.
The enchantment scattered, reformed, and, finding its original target uncooperative, settled for the nearest alternative.
Seraphina’s eyes rolled back. She folded to the ground, boneless and graceful, unconsciousness merely an inconvenience of posture.
“Ah,” Laila said.
“You just knocked out our guide,” Wylan said.
“I am aware of that, Wylan.”
“Our vampire guide. The one who knows the way.”
“I said I am aware.”
Lambert knelt beside Seraphina and, finding no vitals to confirm, shrugged. “I should have known better than to check for a pulse. I guess she’s fine. I didn’t even know vampires could be made to fall asleep.”
He stood. “She’ll keep, I can do this.”
He closed his eyes. His lips moved, and Wylan expected the familiar warmth, the solar cadence he’d heard from his brother a hundred times. Morning prayers, invocations of Invictus, the bright steady heat of a faith that knew exactly where the light came from.
What came was cold.
The words were the same shape, the rhythm still Lambert’s. But the register had shifted, the prayer finding a different octave, and the warmth Wylan associated with his brother’s devotion was gone. In its place, something still and dark and patient.
The veil settled over Laila first. Her skin greyed. The colour drained from her lips and pooled in the hollows beneath her eyes. She looked, between one breath and the next, recently and convincingly dead.
“Invictus preserve me,” she whispered, looking at her own hands.
Lambert moved to Wylan next. The prayer again, that cold cadence. Wylan felt it land like stepping into a cellar, a drop in temperature that started in his chest and radiated outward. His skin tightened. His reflection, had there been one, would have sent him running.
Lambert turned the prayer on himself last. The change, on him, was minimal. Lambert had always maintained a complexion that met death halfway.
? The difference was akin to the subtle distinction between two shades of beige on a paint sample: technically measurable, practically invisible, and of interest only to professionals.
“If it’s any consolation,” Wylan said, “death becomes you.”
Lambert tested the veil by walking toward the guardian. One step, then two. The jackal’s head didn’t move. Its amber eyes tracked nothing. Lambert, to all apparent inspection, was satisfactorily dead. The guardian’s standards, it should be noted, were not high.
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“What about her?” Laila nodded toward Seraphina, still crumpled on the floor in enchanted sleep.
“I suppose we carry her,” Wylan said.
He bent, got his arms under Seraphina’s shoulders, and lifted.
“How does a woman Mother’s size weigh this much?”
“It’s her ego,” Laila said. “Here, let me help.”
Between them, they achieved a carry. Loosely defined. Wylan glanced at Lambert. “I’d use a strength potion, but I’m concerned it might make me look too alive.”
“Have you considered a position in the Church?” Lambert fell in beside them, taking Seraphina’s legs. “Does wonders for the complexion.”
They were three-quarters of the way across the hall when Lambert sneezed.
The sneeze filled the hall. The silence that followed was mortified, which was appropriate, given they were pretending to be dead. The guardian’s head snapped toward the sound, stone grinding against stone. The amber eyes found them, and this time they were not indifferent.
“Move,” Laila said.
Wylan dropped Seraphina’s shoulders, already reaching for the device clipped to his belt. Divina’s grease pit was, by no reasonable standard, a weapon. It was a pressurised canister roughly the size of a wine bottle, decorated with enamel filigree of no mechanical purpose whatsoever, which dispensed an industrial lubricant that Divina had originally formulated for stuck door hinges.
It had other applications.
? Divina’s inventions had a habit of finding their vocation late. The grease pit had been rejected by three door manufacturers before discovering a talent for violence.
He triggered the release valve and swept the canister in a wide arc across the dressed stone. The gel hit the floor and spread with alarming enthusiasm, a slick that caught the golden light. The corridor developed strong opinions about traction.
The guardian’s first stride landed true. Its second did not. Three tonnes of animated stone met a surface with the friction of a political promise, and the result was immediate and deeply satisfying.
Wylan found his footing through familiarity. He’d tested the grease pit in Divina’s workshop, which meant he knew to keep his weight low and his steps short. Laila and Lambert, lacking this advantage, skated, if skating includes falling and swearing.
“Grab her!” Wylan called. Lambert hauled Seraphina up by the arms, sliding backward with the momentum, sandals finding no purchase whatsoever. Laila took the legs, skidded, recovered, took a glancing blow from the guardian’s flailing hand that sent her spinning but kept her upright.
Behind them, the guardian rose with the dignity of a cathedral and the success of a foal on a frozen pond.
The bronze door was close. Wylan hit it first, shoulder down, and it groaned open. Lambert and Laila slid through with Seraphina between them. The guardian found its feet, lunged, and hurled its stone sword.
The blade caught the door as it swung shut. Bronze buckled around stone, the sword wedging into the frame like a furious bolt. The door shuddered, groaned, and held.
Silence. Breathing. Four alive, one asleep.
“Well,” Wylan said. “That worked.”
“‘Worked’ is generous,” Lambert said from the floor.
The ceiling was the first thing Lambert saw, and for a moment it was the only thing.
It rose into a dome that had no business existing this far underground, its entire surface worked in mosaic, gold and lapis and deep celestial blue, depicting the night sky with a precision Lambert found unsettling. Not a representation of stars. A portrait of them, each constellation rendered by someone who had met them personally.
Laila looked up, and the strategist who had navigated a vampire’s contract, a guardian’s riddle, and a floor with no traction fell apart completely.
“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, that’s beautiful.”
“Laila.”
“Mm.”
“We need to wake Seraphina.”
“Yes,” Laila said, still looking up. She did not, Lambert noticed, make any move to do so.
Lambert left her to it. Or rather, left her to the constellations.
The room was circular. Fourteen statues stood at even intervals around the perimeter, each twice life-size, each carved by the same careful hand. At the centre, four plinths stood in a tight arc. One bore a bronze figure that caught the golden light from the walls. The other three were empty. Lambert circled the perimeter first, and the recognition came in pieces.
He knew these figures; he had grown up with them.
Dreven stood with hands open, palms up, the posture of meditation Lambert had seen in a hundred monastery carvings. St Dreven the Monk, patron of discipline, focus, and the mastery of self. Lambert had prayed to him every morning for six years at the seminary. He knew this figure the way he knew his own handwriting.
Something was wrong with it.
He stood in front of Dreven, trying to find the error.
“You’re frowning,” Wylan said, appearing at his elbow.
“Something about this isn’t right.”
Wylan studied the statue with an appraising eye, working out how it was made. “The craftsmanship is extraordinary. Whoever carved these knew what they were doing.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Lambert gestured at the figure. “This is St Dreven. I’ve seen him depicted a thousand times. The posture is correct, the open hands, the robes. But something about the way he’s shown here is...”
He trailed off, and Wylan waited.
“The halo,” Lambert said.
“What about it?”
“In Church iconography, the saints’ halos are depicted as reflected light. It comes from above, from the Pendulum, and falls on them. The saint receives. That’s the whole point: they’re mortal, their radiance is borrowed.”
Wylan looked at the carving above Dreven’s head. “This one isn’t coming from above.”
“No.”
“It’s radiating outward. From him.”
Lambert moved to the next statue. Celestia, the Cleric, with her open hands and scales. And the same wrongness: a solar radiance that emanated from her own hands.
“It’s the same,” he said quietly.
“Same with all of them, I think.” Wylan had moved ahead, scanning the perimeter. “The ranger. The Sorcerer. The one lurking in the back that I’m fairly sure is the Rogue. They’ve all got intrinsic light sources.”
Lambert stood in the centre of the room and turned slowly, taking them all in. Fourteen figures, one for each calling. Every halo self-generated, every figure rendered as something that carried its own authority.
“Lambert?” Wylan was watching him. “You’ve gone quiet.”
“I’m thinking.”
“About?”
“I’m not sure yet.” He turned away from the perimeter statues. “Let’s look at the centre.”
The bronze figure on the central plinth was Invictus. There was no mistaking him: the armoured form, the raised sword, the solar crown. This was the god Lambert had served his entire adult life, rendered in metal with a craftsman’s reverence. The golden light from the walls caught the bronze and held it, so that Invictus alone in the room appeared to glow.
The three empty plinths beside it were worn smooth by the weight of whatever had once stood on them.
“Over here,” Wylan called. He had found them against the far wall, half-hidden behind one of the perimeter statues. Three figures, gathered together. They left an impression of things tidied away instead of put on display.
Lambert knelt beside them. The first was stone, so weathered that erosion had taken everything. No features, no inscription. A figure that had once been someone, reduced by time to a shape and a suggestion.
The second was marble. White, hulking, carved with craggy features and broad hands. One hand held a sunflower, rendered with a delicacy at odds with the figure’s bulk. Lambert brushed grime from the base and found letters cut deep into the stone.
Hyperion.
He sat back on his heels. Three days ago, Theodora had placed a book on a table that smelled of hookah residue and told them the history the Church did not teach. The pastoral god, radiant and generative. The god who held the sun before Invictus took it.
“This is Hyperion,” he said.
“From Theodora’s book?” Wylan crouched beside him.
“The same.”
Lambert looked from the marble figure to the bronze Invictus on its plinth, and then back to the weathered stone figure with no name and no face. Three figures and three plinths. A succession.
Gods who held the sun. One after another. Each replaced by the next.
He looked up. The perimeter statues watched him from their positions around the room, and the halos that had troubled him five minutes ago suddenly made sense.
This room is older than the Church.
The thought arrived quietly, and everything it touched rearranged itself. The Exemplars with their self-generated radiance. The solar figures gathered in a pile. A bronze Invictus standing on a plinth that had held others before him.
The saints were never saints. They were here first.
“Lambert.” Wylan’s voice was careful. “You’ve gone very pale. More than the veil, I mean.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.”
“No,” Lambert agreed. “But I will be. There’s a third statue.”
Laila had finally stopped looking at the ceiling. She was circling the displaced statues, and Lambert watched her crouch beside the third figure, the terracotta one, turning it with careful hands.
“Wylan, have you got anything that shifts grime? There’s something under here.”
Wylan produced a vial from his bracer without hesitation, the preparedness of a walking pharmacy. “Solvent. Gentle. Won’t damage the surface.”
Laila worked it into the base with her fingertips. Letters emerged from beneath the grime.
Amaterra.
“I don’t know that name,” Lambert said.
“Nor I.” Laila worked upward, clearing grime from the carved robes, the sun motifs, the shoulders. Her touch was careful, an enchanter’s hands accustomed to delicate work. She reached the face.
Her hands stopped.
When she spoke, her voice was level by force.
“I have seen this face twice. Once at my son’s Emberlight, and another time at my granddaughter’s.”
The floor shifted beneath him, though nothing in the room had moved.
“You’re certain?”
“This is Aeloria,” Laila said.
Lambert looked at Laila. Laila looked at the terracotta face of a god she had met twice and never recognised.
He crossed the room and put his hands on her shoulders. Gently, the way one steadies something fragile.
“Laila. I know I’m not the only one here grappling with having my beliefs shattered like cheap glassware, but for the sake of everything right now, we need to bench these revelations and come back to them later.” He glanced back at the perimeter statues, the self-radiant halos, the bronze Invictus on his plinth with three empty spaces beside him. “The middle of the dungeon is not the place for one crisis of faith, let alone two.”
Laila inhaled. Held it. Let it go.
“Right.” Her voice recovered before the rest of her did. “So we’ve solved the puzzle. Four solar incarnations, four plinths, chronological order. We just need to put them in place.”
“They’re stone,” Wylan said. “And heavy. Even between the three of us, I don’t think we could lift one.”
Lambert looked at Seraphina, still asleep on the floor where they’d set her down.
“I’m going to recommend we wake her up,” Wylan said.
“I’m kind of all right with her taking an extended nap,” Laila said.
“Sure. But these things weigh more than we do.” He glanced at the statues. “And even if I use a strength potion, I’d probably need some help.”
Laila looked at Seraphina, weighing pragmatism against preference. Pragmatism won, as it usually did.
She knelt and pulled the enchantment loose. It came apart easily, threads of umber and violet dissolving into nothing. The spell had never been meant for Seraphina in the first place, and it let go without complaint.
Seraphina’s eyes opened. For a moment something old and predatory looked out of them. Then the intelligence settled back in, and she sat up, carefully neutral, determining how much trouble she was in.
“Why do you all look like the walking dead?”
“Ah,” Lambert said. “Yes.” He closed his eyes, murmured something brief, and the death-veil lifted from all three of them at once. Colour returned to skin. Laila checked her own hands, confirming they were hers.
“It’s been a very interesting few minutes,” Laila said.
Seraphina surveyed the room: the statues, the plinths, the displaced solar incarnations. Her expression gave nothing away.
“We need your strength,” Wylan said. “Four statues, four plinths, chronological order. Oldest to newest.”
Seraphina lifted the first statue, the nameless stone god, and placed it on the leftmost plinth like setting down a tea service. The second, Amaterra in terracotta. Wylan took a strength potion and helped guide the marble Hyperion into position, steadying while Seraphina bore the weight. Invictus in bronze was already on his plinth.
The last statue clicked into place like a lock finding its key. The plinths rotated inward with self-satisfied precision. A rumble ran through the floor, and the stone circle at the centre of the room opened downward, revealing a staircase descending into dark.
Lambert looked at Seraphina.
“This is a Sepulchre. A city of the dead. Why is the first chamber we’ve entered dedicated to solar theology?”
Seraphina studied the staircase. She had not expected it to be there, either. “An excellent question.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” Seraphina agreed. “It isn’t.”
“We were hoping you’d be a guide,” Laila said. Her voice was pleasant. Dangerously so. “And so far, you haven’t been much help.”
“I said I’d be your guide. I never claimed to know the way.”
“So you’re as lost in the dark as we are.”
Seraphina’s smile was genuine, if not warm.
“No, dear daughter. I am never lost in the dark.”
She descended first. After a moment, they followed.