Chapter 16 The Golden Church #2
It was so like Dark Cathedral to choose a site to conduct their illegal magic right out in the open, where anyone could see it. They’d always been obnoxiously entitled to their beliefs around the ancient ways, no matter how illegal those practices had become over the years.
It was a strategy that had worked well for them, partly because they’d perfected concealment magics centuries ago, when they first began to be hunted by the wider society of Magicals.
Malefic’s father, Caelum’s grandfather, Malefic Nox Anguis I, had supposedly known the architect of this church.
According to an old diary Caelum found, Malefic the First paid that witch a lot of money to build in features no one would ever know in their entirety apart from him, and those with whom he chose to share that information.
For the same reason, Caelum highly doubted that anyone outside of Dark Cathedral knew the catacombs beneath the mosaic floors existed at all.
He would wager a good chunk of his inheritance that no living Magical, apart from his father, knew all of the chambers, antechambers, magical artifacts, secret doorways, and protection spells scattered through the underground maze of tunnels and ritual spaces below that stone foundation.
No one, apart from maybe Caelum himself, due to the connection between them, even knew how to look for the specific markers of his father’s magic.
Not like that had ever really worked to his benefit.
He would have to be extremely careful inside.
As he passed through the second set of stone arches, he felt a flicker of warmth run over his skin.
He sent out a number of different feelers through the wooden double-doors leading into the church.
Feeling nothing, he checked with several other spells before using another series of incantations and hand-gestures to open the locks.
He worried less about this part of the building, but he still needed to be careful. He guessed they had to keep the upper floors of the church free of any real protections, as part of the illusion that nothing inside was worth protecting.
They still might have trip-spells subtle enough to use at night, something to let them know someone was in the building during rituals.
Caelum didn’t feel anything though, as he slipped through the door he’d opened.
He closed it silently behind him, and stood in darkness for a few seconds before venturing deeper into the foyer.
Copper-plated walls surrounded him under high ceilings, and open copper doors stood just ahead, covered in carved depictions of saints.
He passed the holy water font, which had a black marble dragon coiled around the rim, enchanted to blow small wisps of green fire. The first step he took after that, where he entered into the main body of the church, he came to a dead stop.
He tensed without knowing exactly why at first, making himself utterly still. He looked around carefully without moving his feet, using his magic to try and sense anyone near enough that they might have heard him.
He didn’t feel anyone.
He didn’t even feel the wyrmloc now.
His magic touched nothing but empty stone pews. He tilted his head slowly to look up, even though he wasn’t using his eyes. His magic sought out brighter colors or movement in the waves of red-tinted magic rippling up from the tile floor.
One of his questions had been answered already.
They were still using the space.
Someone was using it, at least.
He could feel the heavier vibration of magic under his feet.
It was slow-moving and deep, like a sound at a register only a gryphon or a muscaliet could hear.
More dramatically, the color of the aether had changed.
Instead of the blues, greens, and purples he’d seen outside, in here everything burned with reds, golds, blacks, and sunset orange.
The change happened so quickly, right as he passed the head of the marble dragon, it shocked him.
Now, he forced his breath out slowly and silently.
He’d overreacted.
Whatever this was, it didn’t feel related to his being here.
The change in the aether didn’t feel related to whatever was going on downstairs at all.
It definitely didn’t feel like an alarm had gone off, or that he was in immediate danger.
Odd as it might seem to him, an outsider, this was just how the magic looked inside the church.
It must have something to do with the local prayer rituals, meaning the ones conducted legally and openly, inside the main church.
He resumed walking.
He saw nothing alive, apart from insects, mold, and a lone bat in the higher part of the dome, which occasionally left its perch to snap up mosquitos. Everything else was latent impressions, remnants of Magicals who had been there, but who weren’t there now.
The magic itself felt slightly hotter and more charged, but no where near as dramatically different as it looked.
Someone was still shielding the magic going on below.
Caelum could feel it, but only just, and likely only because his father’s magical signature had sunk into elements of the ritual space, and could be felt even with Malefic absent.
Caelum could feel those things because of who and what he was.
He could see things most Magicals couldn’t.
He doubted very much that the Praecuri would feel anything, even if they were standing right over it, not unless they broke through the chimaeras shielding the lower levels from view.
Which meant all they’d need is to know something might be here.
If they knew to look for it, they’d undoubtedly find it.
A touch of scorn reached his mind at the thought. Did Dark Cathedral really feel so untouchable that they’d risk holding their strongest rituals in the center of town like this? Or was there some other purpose behind doing it this way? Something he was missing?
He glanced around the church, utilizing his black flame primal to try and see any alarm spells that might be woven into the red and gold signature.
He couldn’t feel any.
The only part connected to the rituals below were those same red threads he’d seen outside, in the city square. In here, he could feel and see more of them seeping into cracks in the stone, particularly around the area of the altar.
Honestly, he couldn’t feel any particular intent behind those flows at all.
That part of whatever was going on below remained shielded from view.
He might have been able to get past that shield, but anything too aggressive wouldn’t go unnoticed.
He would rather coax the shield into letting him walk in and out of the space without being seen.
Reconnaissance, he reminded himself. You’re only here to look.
If necessary, he’d call someone else in to deal with it. Forsooth would know who could be trusted, and might even leave Caelum’s name out of it. Even if he didn’t, Caelum would just tell them he knew about the place from his father, which had the advantage of being true.
He made his way slowly down the center aisle of the church.
He’d just about reached the steps leading to the altar, and was just about to send out another set of feelers, when a noise made him freeze.
It was just a squeak.
Caelum stopped walking. He also stopped breathing. He strengthened the shield around his magical aura instinctively.
The faint squeak turned to a creak, then actual movement.
A hatch door lifted off the floor and swung open, right in the middle of the elaborate mosaic on the floor in front of the altar. Caelum stared in disbelief as a head poked out of the round door, barely two yards from where he stood.
Long, midnight blue and black hair flowed down over narrow shoulders, which were partly bared by her midnight blue dress.
Even through the distortion of his magic, Caelum recognized her at once.
Something in her features and magic was unmistakeable.
If anything, the view through his black crystal seemed to show a more accurate picture of who she really was.
Through his magic, she looked skeletally thin.
Her hair, normally thick and vibrant under expensive potions, spells and charms, looked dull and thin.
Her skin appeared nearly translucent, and glowed a dead-looking, greenish-white hue.
Her eyes, normally a pale blue, shone nearly black.
He saw the dark, close-set eyes narrow in that ghostly face, then move around in a slow circle.
They slid past him as if he wasn’t there, but he couldn’t help clenching himself into a magical fist, anyway.
He stopped breathing, stopped his heart, froze his magical aura.
He disappeared, silencing and stilling every part of himself out of existence.
He caught her hand movement even as a low murmur of a spell reached his ears.
He moved his own hand in a quick counter-spell as her magic spiraled out from the graceful flow of her greenish-white hand.
It rippled out fast enough to make him panic, causing sparks to fly up as it impacted insects, what might have been mice behind the walls, the bat he’d seen enjoying itself in the dome earlier, the wyrmloc who’d returned to the outer walls––
His own spell bent the trajectory of hers around his shield.
Luckily, she was still staring up at the dome when it reached him. The warping of the path of her magic would have been subtle, but she might have seen it.
He could feel himself sweating inside the overcoat and jacket.
He gripped the dragon cane hard enough that it hurt his hand.
His collar stuck to the back of his neck, his hands felt clammy.
The shield made that claustrophobic feeling worse, but he pulled it even tighter, still while scarcely breathing.
He had to let his heart and lungs go just enough to keep from passing out, but the rest of him remained frozen in place.
Once the deflection spell dissipated, he brought his magical aura back to utter stillness.
Such deflections would only work one-on-one against what she’d used.
Hers sought out life, living auras, and it was too strong for a blanket protection from him––a temporary one, at least. Only a semi-permanent shield chimaera would work for that, one grounded to rock, to stone, to packed earth, or some other dense physical matter.
Shields around a Magical’s body didn’t work that way.
Not even for him.
If she got suspicious, she could do something a lot more drastic, something that would force him to drop his invisibility, or at least the shield obscuring his magic, in order to counteract whatever she sent.
Both things took a fair bit of his focus to maintain continuously, even apart from what he needed just to see his surroundings.
He only stood about six feet away from her.
The nearness alone put him at risk. All she would have to do is––
Her head began to recede back down through the floor. Her greenish-white, skeletal arm reached up, and her long fingers gripped a cold, metal ring. She brought the hatch lid down with her and disappeared back into the floor.
Caelum let out a relieved breath, still scarcely audible, but louder than he would have dared with that hatch door open. He took a few seconds to just stand there, to let his heart beat normally and his lungs to catch their regular rhythms.
He tried to decide what to do.
Had she felt him? Had he trigged an alarm after all?
It seemed likely, given her sudden appearance, and the spell she’d used to determine if anyone had entered the church.
But, he wondered, if so, why would they only send one Magical, even if it was Sirena?
And why wouldn’t she have tried more drastic spells, given everything going on in the world, and Malefic being locked in the Pyramid Gaol east of here?
Why wouldn’t she have done more to ensure it wasn’t… well, him?
Or anyone hostile, really?
He shivered at the lingering wisps of the witch’s presence, feeling a cold pit forming in his gut.
It annoyed him that he’d never quite gotten past his fear of the dark sorceress.
He knew it was at least partly irrational, but Sirena’s odd fixation with him, which started when he was something like eleven or twelve years old, never really ended as he got older.
Really, it only seemed to get worse, until he avoided any gathering of his father’s where she might appear, at least when he was allowed to avoid them.
The barest touch of her magic left him off-balance and disturbed for days, and she didn’t usually content herself with a bare touch.
Fuck.
Maybe he should abandon this.
He needed to know what the hell they were up to, but was this stupid?
His jaw hardened as he fought to think. If Dark Cathedral planned to try and free his father, or even found some way to neutralize the block on his magic, he needed to know about it, before his father found some way to reestablish the active link between them.
Was there another way down there?
He approached the hatch warily, using his magic in bare touches to determine the nature of the chimaera below-ground.
He was even more surprised when he didn’t find much of one around the hatch itself.
Like the door to the church, the magic he sensed didn’t contain defensive spells.
It didn’t even seem to contain an alarm.
He knew there were advantages to keeping shields and chimaeras intensely localized.
The Praecuri were much more likely to grow suspicious if a massive shielding chimaera covered an entire church, or even the entire floor beneath a church.
That would be particularly true if no basement floor existed on any of the church’s architectural plans.
Still, the lack of protection on the door itself unnerved him.
There must be something?
His extended his magic further.
That time, he found it.
The steps of the ladder were coated in gold.
The gold had magic woven into the metal, and he sensed a dense, cold vibration in that magic. It was tied to several magical signatures he recognized.
It would alert those Magicals if anyone unfriendly tried to use the ladder.
Somehow, finding that calmed his previous panic.
His jaw hardened as he made up his mind.
He glanced around, tightened the invisibility spell and the chimaera around his form.
Then, taking a deep breath, he phased right through the floor.