The lower cellar of The Drowned Bell smelled of stale ale, wet dog, unwashed fleece, and treason.
The tavern was built into the foundations of an ancient underwater water gate three levels below the parish square, accessible only by a rope ladder that hung down an abandoned air-flow chimney pipe. Its floor was covered in sawdust that had rotted into brown sponge. Its walls were cried with dark saltpetre blooms. And its patrons were the aristocracy of the underground underworld.
At the long frame stand tables sat grease-merchants who boiled dead carriage horses for lantern fat, saltpetre smugglers who bribed the night watch with copper pence, and corrupt lower deacons who wore dirty woolen cassocks over stitched silk waistcoats. In the corner pit, two scarred roosters with iron gaffs lashed to their spurs fought to the death. They were surrounded by yelling barge-haulers wagering greasy copper half-bits.
Ren Vale sat at a corner frame stand table carved from a waterlogged barge plank, his dark cowl pulled low to hide his ink-stained face and the raw, weeping blisters along his neck.
Across the scarred wood sat Deacon Kaelen.
Kaelen was forty years old, fat as a stalled pig, with red, porky hands and three gold signet rings cutting into his sausage-like fingers. As sub-curator of the Cathedral Storehouses, Kaelen held the master keys to the lower crypts. And operated the most lucrative contraband drain tube in Oakhaven, smuggling consecrated communion wine, ritual animal fat, and raw glass-like dust to High Spire syndicates.
Beside Ren stood Vane Vale.
The Merchant of Guilt had spent the last two hours preparing for this interview. He had borrowed an iron pressing weight from a seamstress in the Wells to smooth the lapels of his velvet frock coat, combed his manicured goatee with a pocket brush. Then he polished the brass beads of his pocket counting frame until they gleamed like fresh gold.
He looked at Deacon Kaelen with the cold, bored disdain of a royal tax collector surveying a defaulting dung-farmer.
“Twelve hogsheads of vintage communion port,” Vane drawled, flicking a single brass bead on his counting frame with a sharp, bone-shaking clack. “Billed to the Basilica’s inventory as spoiled by damp sneaking. Sold last Thursday to the Red Boar trade ring for forty-two sovereigns. Margin: one hundred percent pure theft.”
Deacon Kaelen chuckled, leaning back on his wooden stool and resting his belly against the table. “You have a sharp tongue for a sewer rat, stranger. But numbers don’t carry warrants down here. If I raise my voice, six barge-haulers with lead clubs will break your velvet knees and throw you into the sump.”
Clack.
Vane didn’t even blink. He flicked two more beads upward.
“Item Two,” Vane continued. His voice dropped into that smooth, poisonous register that made men check their pocketbooks. “Four hundredweight of raw glass-like marrow dust, scraped from the straining screens of the Cathedral Cistern. Billed as consecrated ash for holy ash-wednesday spreading. Smuggled through the Bone Portcullis in hollowed animal fat tubs and consigned to Lord Malakor’s factor in Low-Khorat for nine hundred sovereigns.”
Kaelen’s smile twitched. A bead of sweat appeared on his greasy forehead.
“Where... Where did you get those figures?” the deacon whispered, his porky hands tightening on his pewter tankard.
“I didn’t get them from a spy, you pathetic country thief,” Vane said. He leaned forward until his sharp goatee was three inches from Kaelen’s nose. “I have Audit-Sight. I can read the moral and financial decay of your entire terrible operation by looking at the ink-stains on your fingernails and the stretch-marks on your velvet breeches. You have two secret mistresses in the Upper Ward, an outstanding mortgage with the Iron Bank, and seven promissory notes forged under the prior Bishop’s seal.”
Vane tapped his counting frame against the rim of Kaelen’s tankard.
“And worse, Deacon,” Vane whispered, “you diluted the communion wine with ten percent sewer salt water to hide the missing volume. The Archbishop has been serving consecrated bilge water to the High judge’s nephews for three weeks. If that reaches the Void-court Trial, your execution won’t be an office matter. They will skin you in the church courtyard.”
Ren laid a single sheet of cured sheep thick parchment on the frame stand table.
It was a careful transcript Ren had penned an hour ago, cross-referencing Kaelen’s fraudulent inventory slips with the royal tax codes of the Grand Duchy. At the bottom sat the blank, authenticated signed name line of the High Void-court High court.
“Deacon Kaelen,” Ren said, his voice flat as a grave slab. “Under Grand Ducal Law, embezzlement of consecrated church property carries a penalty of unending galley labor. But smuggling raw glass-like ringing dust outside parish boundaries is classified as Class One High Metaphysical Treason.”
Ren tapped the silver metal ring of his mammoth bone awl against the parchment.
“The penalty for High Treason isn’t galley labor,” Ren continued. “It’s the Cleansing Pyre on the cathedral dais. Your fat would fuel the holy lamps for three full days.”
Kaelen turned the color of skimmed lard. He looked toward the tavern door. But the two rough barge-haulers who normally guarded him were busy cheering on a dying rooster in the pit, fully clueless to the financial execution taking place in the corner.
“What do you want?” Kaelen whimpered, wiping sweat from his fat neck with a stained linen sleeve. “Gold? I have thirty sovereigns hidden in the grain cellar—”
“Keep your filthy coppers,” Vane snapped, waving his hand with dramatic disgust. “I’m cursed to lifelong insolvency by my idiot junior partner. Your gold would turn to lead in my coat before sunrise.”
“We want passage,” Ren said, leaning in. “Tonight.”
Kaelen blinked, his eyes darting between them. “Passage? To where?”
“The Bone Portcullis,” Ren said. “The underground gate beneath the cathedral foundations that leads into the lower catacomb ossuary.”
“Are you insane?” Kaelen choked, his voice cracking into a high-pitched squeak. “The ossuary is under unending Inquest lockdown! Inquisitor Malachai has twenty Justiciar new students posted at the Gate of Skulls! If you step into those crypts, the clockwork guardians will grind your bones into mortar!”
“That’s our concern,” Ren replied. “Your concern is opening the gate from the outer drainage channel and providing the patrol schedules for the third watch.”
“And the master key to the Scroll hall of Sins,” Vane added. He tapped his counting frame sharply. “Don’t omit the writing hall key, Deacon. I know you keep an extra cast-brass copy in your tobacco pouch to steal blank indulgence forms when the head scroll-keeper is asleep.”
Kaelen’s jaw dropped. He stared at Vane with superstitious dread, as though looking upon a demon summoned from the deep ledgers of hell.
With trembling fingers, the fat deacon reached into the greasy pocket of his cassock. He pulled out a heavy ring of three cast-iron keys and a folded sheet of scrap parchment detailing the guard rotations for the cathedral’s underground outer edge.
“The small key with the notched ward,” Kaelen whispered, shoving them across the table as though they were burning coals. “That opens the check wicket beside the Bone Portcullis. It bypasses the main high-pressure lock. But I warn you, scribe... Whatever you think is down there, it’s worse.”
“We already know what’s down there, Deacon,” Ren said. He swept the keys and the schedule into his satchel.
“No, you don’t,” Kaelen said, his voice dropping to a scared rasp. “You think Malachai is just building an arcane battery. But three nights ago, they brought down the Great Frame. A five-story iron monstrance forged from blackened boiler plate, shaped like an open ribs. They’re mounting it directly beneath the radiant dome for the Midnight Mass of Dawn.”
Kaelen leaned over the table, his breath sour with beer.
“They have thirty-two glass-like patients already wired into the copper pipe hubs,” the deacon whispered. “And Malachai announced at vespers that the crowning core—the central singing heart—will be installed before the final bell tomorrow night. He’s offering a five-thousand-sovereign bounty for the girl with the smoky quartz arm who survived the train crash.”
Ren stood up from the table.
His carved mammoth bone awl slid smoothly into his lambskin belt. In his breast pocket, the Speculum of Forfeited Paths felt cold as a block of river ice against his ribs.
“Then we have twenty-four hours,” Ren said. “Vane. Let’s go wake the saint.”
Deacon Kaelen swallowed hard. His porky fingers grabbed his pewter tankard as though it were the last spar of a wrecked ship. “There’s one more thing you must understand, keeper. The Bone Portcullis doesn’t open with iron keys alone. It’s bound by a Blood-Tithe clause. Every time the gate is raised, the gearwork demands an offering of body life-force. The new students usually bleed a sick leper into the lock’s copper basin to satisfy the ward.”
Vane sneered, his pocket counting frame clicking with contempt. “A high-pressure lock energized by living flow rate. A primitive hack invented by third-rate thaumaturges to avoid paying proper upkeep guilds. Ren’s ivory awl can pick that thick parchment lock in forty seconds without spilling a thimble of blood.”
“And if the lock alarms?” Kaelen whispered, glancing nervously toward the tavern door. “The clockwork guardians on the other side don’t sleep. They’re eight-foot reliquary golems forged from blackened boiler iron, energized by the embalmed hearts of First Epoch martyrs. They don’t have eyes. They track the sound of human heartbeats. If your pulse rises above ninety beats a minute, they crush your ribs like an eggshell.”
Ren stood up from the table, his cowl casting deep shadows across his face. “My brother doesn’t fear heartbeats, Deacon. And his ribs have already learned how to mend around iron.”
Ren gestured to Vane. The two of them slipped past the shouting barge-haulers, climbed the dripping rope ladder into the abandoned air-flow chimney, and emerged once more into the cold, sulfur-misted halls of the Leper Wells.
Behind them, Deacon Kaelen sat alone at the wooden table. He stared at the empty tankard and the forged indictment. His fat hands shook so wildly that his three gold signet rings clicked together like tiny funeral bells.