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Perhaps records of the Silver Circle would provide the answers she needed. She stood and reached for the Fount, focussing her thoughts on the Silver Circle, the Amatus Cup, on books, documents, and scrolls, and on various things such records might be called. She waited for the familiar sound of a falling book, but there was nothing. She tried again, and noticed the book on the Chevaliers’ rule twitch on the desk, but nothing else. One final try, more forceful than any of the others, left her feeling dizzy. She sat, wondering what to do next.

  CHAPTER 36

The light from Guillot’s flickering torch was an eerie companion as it jumped around the walls of the cellar, in one moment casting things in a warm orange light and in the next, abandoning them to darkness. He wished he had a magelamp; there had been several in the manor house, but it was unlikely any had survived the fire. With the meagre light he had, it was difficult to tell the size of the space, but it was large, with walls of finely cut stone and a groin-vault ceiling. Care and considerable expense had gone into the construction, making the fact that it had been sealed up all the more intriguing.

He had the fleeting worry that it was to keep something from getting out, but he doubted his family would have continued to live there if something dangerous lay beneath their feet. Even if that had been the case, it would be long dead.

A face appeared out of the darkness and a shriek of fright left Gill’s mouth before he could stop it. The initial flash of panic subsided as he realised what he was looking at, but it took several more moments for his heart to slow. It was, of course, a statue. Composure reclaimed, he stepped closer for a better look. The work was outstanding, and the life-size statue was an equal to any of the monuments he had seen in Mirabay. The features were so lifelike it was as though a living man had been turned into marble. The figure was of a man of a similar age to Guillot—certainly no older than forty. His tight, neat beard was definitely not of the current fashion, and his hair was styled in thick curls.

The stone face’s expression was serene—almost angelic—but as Guillot took in the rest of the statue, he realised this was a monument to a man of war. He wore armour of an unusual style, and a broad-bladed sword with a single cross-guard was strapped to his waist. A museum in Mirabay contained old Imperial-era statues, and this reminded Gill of them. Why would anyone want to shut up such a work in the darkness of a cellar? Indeed, what was a statue like that doing in a place like Villerauvais at all? Guillot’s eyes widened when he spotted something that the inconsistent and flickering light of his torch had not revealed until now—a circle of silver metal on the armour’s marble breastplate.

Waving the torch, Guillot gasped to see another statue standing beyond the first, and another beyond that. Despite the frustrating lack of light, he worked his way along the line of statues, which were arrayed with their backs to the left wall of the room, filling the spaces between the ornate pillars that supported the roof. He counted six before stopping. He had not reached the end of the room, which he still could not even see in the torchlight. Turning, he plunged into the darkness, heading for the wall on the other side, counting paces as he went. At twelve, he found himself staring into the face of another statue—which was flanked by still more. How many were there?

His torch flickered and the flame dwindled. It had eaten away at the wood and he knew soon it would die altogether. He didn’t want to be stuck down there when it did, so after a final look at the statue before him, he made his way back to the entrance.

Guillot’s eyes protested at the daylight when he emerged from the cellar and he shielded them with one hand. In the other, the torch sputtered out in a tendril of black smoke from a meagre glowing ember at its tip. His mind raced, his imagination particularly grabbed by the silver circle on the statue’s breastplate. He had always known a distant ancestor of his was a founding member of the Silver Circle, but the cellar seemed to indicate far more than that. Why would an individual Chevalier keep statues of his comrades in a crypt below his manor house? If there had even been a manor house there when the crypt was built. The masonry below looked old, very old, and far more substantial than the house had been. The older parts of the house had gone back at least a dozen generations. Why would something this large have been built so far from the capital?

He sat on the top step, staring down into the darkness. He went through the possibilities, from as mundane as discovering more about his family heritage, to discovering a great dragon-slaying sword of wonder. He knew the latter was too much to hope for, but the discovery excited him in a way he had not felt in a very long time, and he was glad of the distraction from dwelling on his rash failure and the loss of so many lives.

First, he needed a better light source. He could return to Trelain to fetch a proper lantern, but that would take up too much time. There was no chance of finding anything of use in the village, so he would have to make do with whatever he could find. He could ride to a nearby stand of trees to cut some wood, but it would be green, and the smoke it gave off would fill the cellar until it became a homemade version of the dragon’s cave. He realised he hadn’t checked the kitchen cellar. Something might have survived down there.

Nursing the remaining smouldering fragments from his first torch, he hurried to the stairwell by the lonely fireplace. The stairway’s construction was startlingly similar to that of the secret cellar. He had been down into it countless times, but had never considered it might be much older than the rest of the house. His hope that there would be something useful stemmed from the fact that it was deep below ground—which kept the wine at optimum temperature and slowed the melting of the ice in the cold-room annex. When he was a child, each winter men brought great blocks of ice down from the mountains, packed in insulating straw, and lowered them into the cellar through a hatch somewhere on the grounds, probably long overgrown now.

He had gone only a few steps before the glow of the ember at the end of his stick was the only light he had. However, he knew his way around, so it was enough to let him find what he was looking for. He laughed in satisfaction when he found the brandy rack. There were a couple of bottles remaining, and they were intact, protected from the heat of the fire by the depth at which they were stored. He pulled a large section of planking from an empty rack, tucked a brandy bottle under his arm, and reached daylight just as the glowing ember started to burn his hand.

He dropped the ember, set down his bottle, and made for his horse. Taking a blanket from his saddlebag, he cut two large sections from it. He broke the plank into two thick, baton-length pieces, and wrapped a piece of cloth around one end of each one. Finally, he uncorked the brandy bottle. The smell hit him almost instantly and he hesitated for a moment, but his curiosity at what lay below overwhelmed his fading need for alcohol. He liberally doused the cloth in the brandy until the label on the bottle caught his eye and he grimaced when he saw the date.

At over two hundred years old, the bottle would have been worth at least a hundred crowns in Mirabay, and it seemed like a shameful waste to set it afire. However, needs must, and he was glad that he had not known of the bottle’s existence when Jeanne had cut off his access to wine.

Returning to the remnant of his first torch, Guillot touched one of the new torches to its fading glow. With some gentle blowing, the flame took hold, coating the soaked cloth in a refined blue flame. That done, he returned to the secret cellar—the alcohol-powered flame cast far more light into the darkness than his previous torch, but made for an eerier experience. The first few statues on either side of the chamber were visible, continuing their timeless vigil. Newly revealed were the frescoes painted on the walls behind them.