The underground approach to the Bone Portcullis was a throat of black dark rock carved directly through the ancient bedrock of Oakhaven.
Ren Vale led the way through the narrow drainage channel, his boots wrapped in thick strips of greased wool to deaden the sound of his footsteps against the wet flat stone slabs. On both hands, he wore heavy lambskin keeper’s gloves, their outer grain soaked with sheep suet and sulfur grease. A crude but necessary heat padding against the consecrated stonework that lined the cathedral foundations.
Even through the thick leather and animal fat, Ren could feel the faint, prickling heat of the stones.
Exclusion Axiom #2: Zero Divine Grace.
The bedrock beneath the Basilica of Dawn had been bathed in holy water, consecrated incense, and sacramental wine for three hundred years. To a faithful believer or an ordinary citizen, the stone was merely cold, damp limestone. To Ren Vale Prime, whose soul had been wildly cut from divine favor. Just then, he burned the holy physician’s future, every mortar seam was an electric wire waiting to scorch his meat. A dull, throbbing ache pulsed behind his breastbone. His throat felt coated in dry sand, and whenever his gloved knuckles brushed a joint in the stonework, a thin thread of acrid smoke rose from the leather.
Behind him came Brother Ren, walking barefoot upon the freezing stones. The monk’s raw, unwhitened burlap habit was freshly patched with hemp thread. His right leg dragged slightly where the absorbed gangrenous ulcer had scarred over. But his face remained calm in the gloom. In his left hand, hanging from a length of tarred rope, he carried his cracked lead purification basin, its dark metal swinging in time with his steps.
Bringing up the rear was Vane Vale. His velvet frock coat was tucked tightly into his wool trousers, a silk handkerchief soaked in lavender vinegar pressed firmly against his nose.
“Four hundred paces through a stuffy sewer channel,” Vane muttered under his breath, his eyes darting toward the slimy ceiling. “The humidity alone is ruining the pile of this velvet. If my tailor could see me now, he would commit ritual suicide with a yardstick. Ren, if this fat deacon sold us a counterfeit schedule, I’m personally returning to that tavern and strangling him with his own rosary.”
“The deacon values his neck more than church loyalty, Vane,” Ren whispered back without turning. “He knows the High court would burn him for the missing wine. Keep your voice down. The sound profile of this pipe amplifies sound upward toward the choir stalls.”
“The sound profile is the least of our liabilities,” Vane grumbled, though he lowered his voice to a bare hiss. “Look at the lime efflorescence on these load-bearing arches. The stonework hasn’t been tuck-pointed since the Second Succession War. The entire cathedral above is resting on rotten mortar and pious wishful thinking. If a heavy siege battery fired a single salvo in the upper city, this ceiling would drop like a stone ledger.”
They crawled through a narrow squeeze where the channel squeezed tight beneath a massive granite footing. Ren slid through on his stomach. He pushed his satchel ahead of him, his teeth grit against the fire in his chest.
The pipe ended at an iron check platform suspended seventy feet above a dark, underground deep gap.
Before them rose the Gate of Skulls.
It was a huge, half-round archway fifteen paces wide, built during the First Epoch. Just then, the Great Sputum Plague had decimated the province. Rather than cutting fresh granite from the surface quarries, the mason-monks of the early church had used the skeletal remains of twenty thousand plague victims as load-bearing aggregate. Thousands of human craniums, yellowed with age and mortared with lime and ground bone-meal, formed the massive arch stones of the arch. Their empty eye sockets stared down into the dark deep pit.
In the center of the arch hung the drop-gate. Three tons of cold-forged black iron, its spikes shaped like elongated femurs, resting flush against an iron threshold set into the bedrock.
Brother Ren stopped at the edge of the iron platform. He tilted his head, his hollow, silver-flecked eyes sweeping across the wall of skulls.
“Brother Michael,” the monk whispered, his voice trembling with an ancient, haunting recognition. “Father Paul. Sister Agnes. I remember their fevers. In my world, I washed their shrouds when the third wave broke the lazaretto doors.”
“They’re two hundred years dead, monk,” Vane said. He stepped onto the platform and eyeing the drop into the deep gap with genuine nervousness. “Don’t start conversational relationships with the stonework. We have a schedule to keep.”
“They’re not dead, Vane,” Brother Ren murmured softly. “Their bone still holds the memory of the salt. A body doesn’t forget the fever that broke it.”
On the overhead frame beside the gate sat the check wicket. A narrow iron door fitted with a heavy brass lock-box and a shallow copper baptismal basin bolted to the door post.
Ren knelt before the lock-box, pulling his carved mammoth bone awl from his belt.
Beside the keyhole, inscribed upon a plate of beaten bronze, ran the liturgical running charter of the gate:
The Bone Portcullis. Gearwork: Sanguine Crushing pressure Lock. Requirement: Tithe of Consecrated Blood (Minimum 3 Ounces). Penalty: Secret Tampering Triggers Golem Deployment.
“A blood-tithe lock,” Vane murmured. He leaned over Ren’s shoulder, his gold-trimmed pocket counting frame clicking once in the gloom. “The high-pressure pistons are sealed with dry sheep-bladder diaphragms. The gearwork needs body fluid to lubricate the valves and complete the current-carrying circuit. A standard ministerial barrier.”
“Deacon Kaelen said the new students usually bleed a sick leper to satisfy the ward,” Ren said, his silver-tipped awl hovering over the keyhole. “They bring one down in chains every morning.”
“We don’t bleed lepers,” Brother Ren’s soft voice broke in.
The monk stepped onto the iron overhead frame, knelt beside the copper basin, and reached inside his habit. Without a heartbeat of pause, he drew his iron paring knife across the meat of his left palm, slicing a two-inch furrow through the calloused skin.
Dark, sluggish blood welled from the cut, thick with the purple-black residues of absorbed sickness. It dripped into the copper basin with a rhythmic, hollow patter.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The copper basin hissed. The dark blood flowed into the drain hole, filling the inside high-pressure pipes. Inside the lock-box, heavy iron tumblers began to clunk into posture, the ancient gears grinding against hundreds of years of dried settled mud.
“Ren,” Brother Ren murmured, his forehead resting against the iron door post, his breath steady and calm. “The tumbler is free. Turn the iron before the blood congeals.”
Ren didn’t waste a heartbeat. He pushed in Deacon Kaelen’s notched iron key into the ward. He gripped the shaft with his greased lambskin gloves.
CLACK-WHIRRR.
The internal balance weights dropped with a dull, underground boom that echoed through the iron platform. The check wicket swung inward on greased pivots. He showed a narrow, vaulted hall paved with polished black slate that sloped gently upward into the catacombs.
Ren grabbed Brother Ren’s arm, hauling the monk to his feet. He pulled a clean strip of linen from his satchel and wrapped it tight around the monk’s bleeding hand.
“Move,” Ren said. “The high-pressure drop will register on the water-gauges in the guardhouse within three minutes.”
They slipped through the wicket. They pulled the heavy iron door shut behind them until the latch caught with a soft, final click.
The air on the other side of the gate was dry, freezing, and heavy with the scent of dried myrrh, old paper, and beeswax. They stood in the silent heart of the underground ossuary. On either side of the black slate hall, miles of arched alcoves pulled back into the darkness, each shelf stacked six feet high with neatly arranged, yellowed bones—the old family dead of Val-Khorat, sleeping in the shadow of the cathedral’s stolen light.
Vane smoothed the lapels of his velvet coat, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. “Welcome to the treasury of the dead, gentlemen. Let’s go see how much the church has mortgaged their souls for.”
They paused at the foot of an ancient granite stair where a broken stone fountain cried stone salt water into a lead catchment basin. Overhead, the vaulted ceiling was carved with weeping cherubs whose stone eyes were stained brown with iron slow leak.
“Notice the mortar joints,” Ren whispered. He held his animal fat stub close to the granite blocks. “The lower four courses use river sand and wet lime plaster from the First Epoch. But twelve feet up, the mortar changes to crushed bone-meal and volcanic cement. The church didn’t build this hall as an entrance. They built it as an escape tunnel during the Siege of the Seven Barons. If the city fell, the bishop could withdraw into the catacombs with the treasury and flood the lower channels behind him.”
Vane tapped his cane against the lead basin, his ear cocked toward the darkness. “A classic asset-escape artery. Every despot constructs one while preaching steadfast courage from the balcony. And the sound above us? That rhythmic, heavy thudding?”
“The high-pressure pumps of the Great Baptistery,” Ren replied. He wiped sulfur moisture from his leather apron. “Every evening at the eighth hour, they draw ten thousand gallons of water from the Blackwater aqueduct to fill the ritual baptismal pools. That means the drainage channels we just crossed are currently flushing with fifty tons of high-pressure overflow. We can’t turn back, Vane. The only way out of this foundation is forward through the ossuary.”
Brother Ren stepped to the edge of the stair, his scarred hands folded within his burlap sleeves. “The forward path is the only one that carries mercy, Ren. When a soul turns back out of fear, it carries the weight of the unopened door for the rest of its days.”
Vane grimaced, adjusting his silk cravat with a sharp jerk. “Spare me the holy philosophy, monk. I’m not turning back because my boots cost forty sovereigns and I refuse to drown in baptismal runoff. Lead on, keeper.”