Chapter 37
They flew out of Venice at first light, the lagoon still dark below them and the Adriatic going gold at the horizon.
Dario sat next to Frederica, their knees touching but their game faces on. All the words and softness had stayed in Venice. He had kissed her that morning, long and hard, and they had both shut away everything that wasn't the mission.
The flight to Cologne took just over an hour, and two cars waited for them at the private terminal. By the time the wheels touched down at Cologne Bonn Airport, Rodrigo had already run them through their assignments, and everybody knew their entry point, their target, and extraction window.
Rodrigo's crew would hit the estate's outer security from the north. Kon and Athena had the secondary access point, a section of Roman sewer that ran beneath the city's western ring road and, according to Serapis, connected to the deeper tunnel network below the old Praetorium district.
Silas and Iz would handle communications from the vehicle and coordinate with Tore, who was outside.
Altun would go in with her own approach, and nobody asked too many questions because Altun didn't explain herself to people with fewer centuries of experience.
Julian went as her backup, and they knew that was all Altun needed.
Altun had pressed necklaces into their hands that morning when they had arrived in Cologne. The pendants hung on leather cords and were made of silver, each carved with tiny sigils and an evil eye at their center. She had pricked their fingers and rubbed their blood on them to activate them.
"These will make you harder to see. Not invisible, not if he is looking for you, but they will cost him attention to find you and distract him," she told them, and everyone had put them on without argument.
The Tears of Theotokos, a small icon of a faceless saint, and three others Dario couldn't name were in Serapis and Kon's keeping. They would act as a distributed ward, hiding their magical signatures and physical presence long enough to reach where they were needed before Agrippa sensed them.
Dario didn't need to understand the mechanics of all the items. He knew better than to try to figure out magic. If they said they worked, he believed them. He only needed to keep the Thriae Bee on his person and get it into the chamber to say the phrase Serapis had drilled him on.
Agrippa's estate sat twelve kilometers outside the city in the direction of the old Roman road that had once connected Cologne to Bavay and the coast.
In Roman times, the wealthy had built their villas along the road's western reach, where the land was high enough to be dry and close enough to the city to be useful.
The property itself was registered to a private cultural foundation with an address in Zurich. From the road, it looked like a large, converted farmhouse: stone-built, seventeenth-century, well-maintained without being conspicuous. The kind of building old money bought and forgot about.
The Weiden burial chamber, a second-century tomb belonging to a family of considerable means, still stood not far from the estate's boundary wall, behind a low iron fence and a heritage sign that nobody read.
Beneath it, via a cellar that had been sealed on the official survey but not on Tore's hand-drawn addendum, the Roman sewer network began. That was the way they were getting in.
Now it was dusk, and Dario and Frederica were already slipping through permiters and had found the locked tomb. They had just reached them when Dario's comm crackled in his ear.
"East team, this is your future father-in-law speaking," Tore said, his voice dry and unhurried despite the edge underneath it. "The tomb access has a modern lock on a medieval door frame. Your favorite assassin should be able to open it."
"We are already there, and it's already done, Baba," Frederica said, and pulled out her picks from the lock. Dario hid his smile as he discovered the easy way she picked locks was yet something else about her that turned him on.
"Va bene. Now, at the back of the tomb, there are shelves of bones."
Dario turned on a small flashlight, and they stepped inside. "Okay, I see the shelves."
"See the engraving on the side? Looks like an inverted triangle with a line bisecting it," Tore instructed.
"You mean like the alchemical symbol for earth?" Dario asked.
Frederica smiled at him over her shoulder, and in the low light, he could see how surprised she was.
"What? I read," he said.
"Not just a pretty face, are you?" she teased back.
"I got loads of pretty parts as you well—"
"I'm still here, you two. Find the damn symbol," Tore prompted.
Frederica turned back to the wall and dusted off some cobwebs. "Don't worry. I found it." As soon as she pressed it, the stone shelves groaned and slid back to reveal a doorway of complete darkness.
"Listen closely in case you lose the comms underground.
The sewer you are about to enter branches twice inside the first hundred meters.
Take the left fork at both junctions," Tore instructed.
"The right fork fills with groundwater after forty meters and becomes unpassable.
The third branch, straight ahead at the second junction, was the one I used for the delivery.
It leads up to a loading area inside the estate's east wing. I don't know what's beyond it now."
"And the sanctum?" Dario asked, checking the photo of an old map on his phone.
"Not on any map I ever saw, but the floor of that loading area always sounded wrong underfoot. Too hollow. Whatever is there, it's further down." Tore cleared his throat. "Frederica."
"Baba."
"Your mother is going to have people to be angry at when you find her. Try and get out of her way before she starts shooting."
Frederica barked out a harsh laugh. "I know. Don't worry. I'm going to give her a gun and stand behind her."
"Good. Bring her home, gioia mia. Make sure Dario doesn't get shot."
"I'll try, but he is such a big target."
Tore laughed and disconnected from the comms line with a final, "Buona fortuna."
The darkness below smelled of wet earth, and the faint mineral sourness of water that had been sitting too long.
"Ladies first," Dario said, shining the torch inside.
"Chicken," Fredercia snickered, before pulling out a gun, turning on the light clipped to her vest, and starting down the stairs.
Dario checked the pendant and small bag with the bee were safe on his necklace before he tucked both inside his collar and followed Frederica into the dark.
The Roman sewer tunnels were exactly as Tore described, but they also ran deeper and farther than any public survey acknowledged.
Tufa blocks, large and neatly fitted, had the occasional missing mortar joint that left a gap big enough to fit a fist. The ceiling curved two and a half meters overhead. The floor was uneven and damp, the passage just wide enough for one person at a time, with their shoulders turned.
Frederica moved through it carefully, keeping the light on her vest dimmed and using the faint luminescence from the entry shafts overhead. They were maintenance access points spaced every twenty meters, each letting in a thin column of failing sky to navigate by.
Dario followed Frederica's footsteps, her breathing, and kept his mouth shut in case their voices carried. Frederica's first stop was at the left fork. She listened for eleven seconds, then moved on without a word.
The second was at the second junction. There were voices. Men, somewhere in the right-hand passage, not moving toward them. They held position until the voices receded, and Dario used the time to check the chain at his collar again and keep his breathing slow.
The third time she stopped, it was because of what was on the floor. A body lay face down in the narrow passage, hands at its sides.
Dario crouched and pressed two fingers to the neck. The skin was cold, but something felt wrong. It had no residual warmth, nor post-mortem rigidity.
They both understood what Serapis had warned them about. Agrippa didn't waste resources. The disciples who had given too much too early didn't leave, exactly. They remained in service as gūl.
Dario hissed and moved back as the dead man shuddered and got back to its feet.
Frederica pulled a short sword from the sheath on her back and cut off its head before it made a sound, three seconds of efficient violence that Dario made grateful she was on his side.
She wiped her sword on the corpses and kept moving.
"You're amazing," he whispered.
"There will be more. Get your knife out," she replied.
They found two living guards next, alert and armed, operating on a patrol. Frederica moved without hesitation or theatrics. No wasted motion, no word spoken. She took both guards down before they knew she was there, and Dario caught them and lowered them to the ground so they wouldn't make a sound.
Dario handled another gūl on the loading area stairs. The creature came around a corner, and Dario cut its head off before it sensed them. He made sure it stayed down and stepped over it to join Frederica in the loading bay.
"They might be moving, but they aren't really clever," Dario whispered.
Frederica was standing in the center of the poorly lit bay, her boot on the floor, testing the hollow sound beneath.
"This is what Tore was talking about," she said, tapping the floor again.
"Let's see what it is."
The flagstones on the floor were Roman, but the one Frederica was standing on was made of painted wood to match the floor around it.
Dario crouched down, felt around the edges before sliding his knife under the edge, and levered it. Something clicked, and a small panel sprang back to reveal a metal ring.
Dario pulled, and the thick wood lifted on a counterweight set somewhere deep inside, and the door moved smoothly and silently, revealing a staircase.
It was Medieval, not Roman, cut from the same tufa but with the narrower proportions of Gothic construction, the arched ceiling dropping lower with each step.
The walls on either side were covered in symbols, layer on layer, carved into the stone and overlaid with metalwork fixed directly into the rock.
"They are binding symbols," Frederica said, shining her light on them.
Altun's pendant was warm against Dario's chest in a way it hadn't been before.
That can't be good, he thought, but he trusted the sorceress.
They moved carefully down the stairs, and whatever magic was on the walls didn't hinder them. At the bottom was a passage that they followed for forty meters before it turned.
Dario paused, holding onto Frederica. "You hear that?" he whispered.
It was a low, sustained resonance that had no identifiable source, the kind of vibration that lived behind the teeth and at the base of the skull. It rose and fell in a pattern that was not quite rhythmic, not quite musical.
Frederica's hand closed briefly around his wrist, two beats of pressure that he read as 'it's ahead, be ready.' He nodded, and she let go and moved forward.
The door at the end of the passage had been left open because whoever had built this place hadn't expected the uninitiated to get that far. Frederica pushed it open, and the sound of the chant echoed all around them. Dario gripped his knife and stepped inside.