Medici?
But why would Medici want him to open a tavern?
"Why did your ancestor tell you to open a tavern?"
"I don't know."
He had lapsed back into his vacant state.
Vincent asked several more questions in succession, but Rafter Pound had nothing more to offer.
"Do you think what he called 'his ancestor' has anything to do with the evil spirit we encountered in the underground ruin?"
Bernadette asked: "What makes you say that?"
"Well — Rafter Pound is a Tudor descendant, and the underground ruin beneath Stephen's family's ancestral home was also connected to the Tudor Emperor. And sealed inside that ruin is an evil spirit that was apparently a high-level Beyonder in life. So the pieces fit together."
She thought for a moment. "If it truly is that evil spirit, the first thing it would want is presumably to have someone break its seal and set it free. I can't see how opening a tavern serves that end..." A pause. "Unless Derlin left something important behind in the law firm."
Vincent pulled out a coin and flicked it. "Rafter Pound's behaviour is connected to the evil spirit in the underground ruin."
The coin left his hand, rolled along the floor two or three metres, and stood upright — motionless.
Divination failed.
He set up the ritual quickly and conducted a spirit communication with Rafter Pound to further verify the truthfulness of what he'd said. Everything he'd told them checked out. As for the content of the ancestral "dream instruction" itself, all that Vincent could perceive was pure chaos — no usable information.
"There's nothing more to get out of him. But since the 'ancestor' went to the trouble of arranging this tavern, there must be some purpose behind it — keep having Vivian watch the place?"
"Yes."
Bernadette agreed, then pivoted. "You do realise that what you just did carries a certain risk, don't you?"
"What — the spirit communication?" Vincent paused. "You said gods don't have the attention to monitor every single person who prays to them at any given moment."
"That's not the risk I mean. I'm saying that as a Sequence 7, casually conducting spirit communications involving something at the Angel level could easily invite a backlash."
That reminded him. In the original, Klein had pulled off several reckless spirit communications himself — most of them above the Gray Fog, where they'd been nail-bitingly close to disaster. The most dangerous had been when he'd nearly ended up face-to-face with the True Creator through a spirit communication.
"Why didn't you stop me?" Vincent said.
"I forgot."
"..."
She absolutely did that on purpose. Just trying to frighten me.
Leaving Rafter Pound's lodgings, Vincent used the Faceless ability to take on a perfectly ordinary, forgettable face, then found several street urchins at different locations around the city. He pressed some coins into their hands and sent each of them off to deliver letters — identical letters bearing the message: "King George III of Loen is attempting to advance to Sequence 0. For many years he has been trafficking people to build him a mausoleum... The disappearances of most of Backlund's vagrants are connected to this... The death toll across the years is beyond counting... We implore the Church to seek justice for the innocent victims."
Each letter went to a different church.
Watching the last urchin disappear around a corner, Bernadette offered herself a quiet reassurance: "If George III is truly preparing to ascend to True Godhood, I don't believe the Seven Gods would be indifferent. They may not concern themselves with the lives and deaths of ordinary people, or the rise and fall of dynasties — but they cannot remain indifferent to the birth of a new god."
Vincent, however, knew that George III's bid for the Black Emperor position had actually received the tacit permission of the Seven Gods — they needed a new god to stand against the Apocalypse. But what the Church would make of it, if the letter reached the right hands, was another matter.
If the Church genuinely investigated and found what George III had been doing, the Seven Gods were hardly going to issue a divine decree saying "leave it alone."
After all, tacit permission was not the same as active support.
And frankly, George III was a thoroughly poor choice on any measure. A man of such contemptible character and moral bankruptcy — what strength of will could you reasonably expect from him as a god when the Apocalypse came knocking?
The Church of the Evernight Goddess. Saint Samuel Cathedral.
The Blessed Anthony was resting with his eyes closed in the cathedral's back courtyard when he heard urgent footsteps approaching. He opened his eyes to see the cathedral's bishop coming toward him with an unsettled expression.
"What is it?"
The bishop held out a note with cramped, uneven handwriting. "Your Grace, a street urchin just passed this along to me."
"Oh?"
Anthony took it and scanned it. His expression settled into gravity.
The bishop said quietly, "Archbishop, surely... what's written here can't be anything but fabricated nonsense?"
Anthony set the note down slowly. "We cannot judge the truth of it without investigation. Go and bring Cecimir to me."
"Of course."
Once the bishop had gone, Anthony made his way to a small chamber hung with the Dark Sacred Emblem of the Evernight Goddess. He turned to face it and closed his eyes, allowing the quiet and the stillness of the room to settle around him. Then, in the ancient Hermes tongue, he murmured the Goddess's honorific name:
"Evernight Goddess, higher than the starry sky, enduring beyond eternity — the Crimson Lady, the Hidden Mother, Empress of Calamity and Fear, Lord of Sleep and Silence..."
With the honorific name complete, he switched back to ordinary Loenese, barely above a whisper: "Not long ago, someone delivered an anonymous letter to the cathedral. Its contents are..."
Strictly speaking, an unverified, unsourced anonymous tip was not the sort of thing he should be taking to the Goddess in prayer — but his spirituality was telling him, with quiet insistence, that this matter might be real.
As his voice fell, the note in his cupped hands was swallowed silently by darkness and vanished from sight.
A moment later, a light wind moved through the room, stirring the dust on the floor into a few brief shapes:
"Understood."
Nothing else. No further guidance.
Anthony waited in stillness for a while longer, then made the gesture over his chest. "Praise the Goddess."
He had just risen and begun to move toward the door when a shadow melted out of the darkness at the chamber's entrance — a figure woven from darkness itself, a woman with starlight stitched into her black dress.
"Archbishop Anthony."
The woman inclined her head toward him, and in her dark brown eyes was a fathomless, luminous depth. "Mother says you have something to tell me?"
Anthony paused, then said, "Yes, Your Highness. Just now, I..."
He recounted the tip-off letter. The woman listened in silence from beginning to end, then nodded. "Handle it as you see fit. Don't hold back on my account."
"Understood, Your Highness."
Anthony gave a small bow and withdrew at a brisk pace, leaving the woman still standing beneath the symbol of the Evernight Goddess. She spoke softly into the silence:
"Mother — You've known about this all along, haven't You?"
The only answer was the darkness and the quiet.
To be continued…
Guys, do support me on Patreon LMFAO. This fic costs me money, TwT
Advance 100 Chapters are up on my Patreon!
pat reon.com/AlphaSenatus