“A clue?” Fritzi says. “We’re looking for earth?”
“Let’s see if there are more.”
We split up, each of us going to a different pillar. I find another chalky line under the wordsub,which meansunder.Fritzi motions for me to come to her, and she points out a third word underlined:mortuos.The dead.
“Earth, under, dead,” I whisper to her. “We need to find the dead who are under the earth.”
Her eyes grow round. The clues all point to one place.
The crypt.
Fritzi looks around the small church, scanning for steps that will take us down to a crypt. I grab her hand. No one would know this route unless they were deeply entrenched in the Church, someone who studied the maps and knew the passages. Someone like me. Or Johann.
I take her through a back door, into the courtyard connecting Our Lady to the archbishop’s cathedral. A priest I don’t recognize has his head bowed in the cloister, but a light rain has kept the courtyard otherwise clear. I pull Fritzi down another passage and to a dark stone staircase and the filigree door at the base, quickly entering. There’s no light here beyond the guttering candles. The scent of petrichor and damp rises up to greet us.
“Could this be a trap?” Fritzi asks, her voice a trembling whisper.
I step deeper into the crypt. I know, only because I have studied the tunnels and maps, that there is a passage from here to the Roman aqueducts, but it collapsed long ago, a century before now. The only entrance to and exit from this part of the crypt is by the stairs Fritzi and I just descended. If hexenjägers stormed the crypt, we’d be trapped.
I’m just about to grab Fritzi and run to the stairs when I hear footsteps—not from the door, but from deeper in the crypt, in the dark shadows.
“You’re here,” a voice says. One dying candle flickers at the speaker’s breath.
Johann straightens, looking from me to Fritzi and back again.
In the space of a few short months, the boy has aged a decade. Pale scruffy hairs scratch at his chin, the barest markings of a man that seem reluctant to catch up with the boy’s age. His face is gaunt, his skin sallow. Johann squints up at us, and I think he must doubt we are real.
“I’m back,” I say.God, forgive me for leaving. For not finishing what I began.
Johann swallows, the lump in his throat rising and falling against the thin corded muscles. “We must pray it’s not too late.”
“What’s been going on?” Fritzi asks, stepping closer. Johan motions for us to follow him deeper into the crypt. I grab a candle, the wax soft and cheap, denting under my grip, and go with him.
“Dieter’s mad,” Johann says. “But he somehow…he has sway over people. The archbishop is like a…”
“A puppet?” Fritzi guesses.
Johann nods. “He speaks, and it is his voice, but he says things that he would never say, does things he would never do. He rarely leaves his office, but the decrees he’s given… Dieter holds all the power now.”
I curse. I had thought Dieter powerless when we overtook him at Christmas, but he’s been drawing on Fritzi as a magical source and using that to manipulate those around him. And there are other sorts of power than magic, like the power of control over a diocese.
“I’ve been in hiding for more than a month now,” Johan continues. This is an ancient part of the crypt, deeper than I’ve ever been before. Rocks are scattered, and Fritzi and I have to go slower, picking our way around them so we don’t fall.
This hiding place is brilliant, I have to give him credit. Not only is it unlikely that anyone would look for a rebel within the church complex itself, but the crypt here is rarely used. Unless the archbishop himself died, no one would come down here. The cathedral’s crypt is reserved for the most illustrious members of the church; the regular parishioners who die—at least the ones not burned—rot in an ossuary before being packed into graves. They’re not given their own chamber beneath the holy floors. Pilgrims to the cathedral worship at the altar, kissing the reliquaries, those elaborate gilded boxes that hold holy relics. The archbishop sits on his throne, and the priest’s robes brush the smooth floor above, all without knowing that the one human living in the shadowed crypt beneath their feet plots to free the city of their tyranny.
The only problem is…
“How do you leave the crypt unnoticed?” I ask.
“Dieter has been focused on the tunnels,” Johann says. “But he hasn’t found this one.”
Johann sweeps his arm aside, and I gasp. The old tunnel, the one that had caved in, has been cleared. The rocks piled up around the tombs are debris from the excavation.
“You did this?” I ask, looking into the depths of the tunnel. A thin pile of stones separates this from the main aqueduct; no one in the aqueducts would think the tunnel was open.
“I’ve had help.” Johann turns to me. “It wasn’t just you, you know. Lots of people hated the regime of terror. Lots of people have been fighting back, even in little ways.”
“And you have united them.” I swallow down the emotion welling in my eyes. I should have done what Johann has done. I should have trusted others, formed a rebellion, not a heist. I should have unified the people.
