Of the Livonians and the ragmen, there was no sign.
“Where…?” Cnán hissed at Finn, who only shrugged in return. She moved a few feet farther along the wall, choosing a different gap to spy through. She squinted, shifting her body from side to side in an effort to see more of the courtyard. But it made no difference. The monastery was deserted.
“Where did they go?” she wondered aloud. It was possible they were inside one of the buildings, but she couldn’t fathom an explanation as to why. The gate had been opened readily enough, which meant they had been invited inside and were not—as Feronantus had mistakenly said—chasing the ragged hide workers. But what was so important in these buildings that they ran away from us? she wondered.
Finn tapped her on the shoulder and pointed at the top of the wall. He mimed climbing and held out his hands for her to use as a brace. “Oh no,” she shook her head, “I’m not touching that wall.”
“Would you prefer the front gate?” he asked.
“I would prefer not—”
A clank of metal against stone interrupted her, and they both returned their attention to the monastery.
Two Livonians had suddenly appeared and were standing next to the well house. One had put his shield down, leaning it against the wall. It was the sound of the metal rim scraping against the stone that had alerted them. The Livonians were sullen and angry—not with each other, she realized, but rather with an order they had been given.
“The two who fainted,” Finn whispered. “Guard duty.”
“Guarding what?”
As if in response to her question, the well house door creaked open to disgorge one of the raggedy monks. The Livonians kept their distance, and the monk jabbered animatedly at them in Ruthenian, stopping only when one of the knights put his hand on his sword hilt. Cackling like a diseased crow—and looking not unlike one as well—the rag-covered man scampered away, ducking into the nearest building.
Cnán eyed the well house. The hut was tiny, and while it might hold all three of the men and the well, she couldn’t imagine the Livonians tolerating the presence of the foul monk for longer than a heartbeat.
With the monk gone, the Livonians had no one to torment, and their attentiveness gave way to lethargy and boredom. The shieldless one began to cast about, his attention on the nearby ground. Looking for a place to sit down, Cnán thought, and she couldn’t blame his reticence.
“Caves,” Finn said.
“What?”
“Caves,” he repeated. “Under this hill.” He grabbed her shoulder, pulling her away from the wall. “We must tell Feronantus.”
“I was surprised when Illarion showed no interest in coming down here,” Roger muttered to Raphael. “Now I wish I had thought a little harder about what it signified.”
He was a voice from the darkness. During the first part of the expedition—a descent into cellars, subcellars, and crypts of the priory—Vera had lit their way with a torch. The depredations of the Mongols had left fine oils in short supply, and so this consisted of a rag on a stick, soaked in rendered animal fat that was available for purposes of illumination only because it had gone rancid. This had stunk even before she had ignited it and had produced a spreading plume of thick, greasy smoke that they could have followed with their noses even had they not been able to see its fitful yellow light.
After a series of descents into ever deeper, moister, and darker parts of the substructure, they had reached a place where the ceiling had become so low and the ventilation so poor that Vera had been obliged to douse the torch—though not before using it to ignite a pair of crude candles, consisting of the pith of some plant soaked in tallow. By the light of these they crawled through a low opening and thus entered into something that was clearly a natural cave. Chisel marks on the wall proved that it had been widened, and mortared ashlars provided level footing, at least for the first few dozen paces.
Roger’s comment was probably a reference to the way the place smelled. It was not well ventilated. Certain notes in the aroma made it obvious that these caves must communicate somewhere with all the gutters of Kiev. That, in and of itself, was hardly unusual. One could not go anywhere near a human habitation without smelling what ran in its gutters. The musty spoor of an uncontrolled rodent population was mixed with it. Too, though, Raphael’s nose was detecting an unmistakable smell of dead flesh. Not the unbearable, nausea-inducing ripeness of something that had died recently, but rather the product of a slow decay that had been going on for a long time.
“It is remarkable,” Raphael said, “that cities can be so very different in their buildings, their peoples, and their customs—but the catacombs are always the same.”
Vera and Percival were several paces ahead of them; the Shield-Maiden knew the way and moved nimbly through the passages, which were becoming rougher and more twisted the deeper they penetrated into the heart of the hill. Percival was carrying their candle and casting a long shadow on the floor in his wake, which Raphael tried to fill in with the feeble light of his own candle. But he was dazzled by the flame directly before his face. The floor was becoming more uneven—the masons had not ventured into this part of the catacombs to lay down pavers. Roger edged in front so that the candle flame would not be shining into his eyes, and Raphael held the candle high to shine the light over Roger’s shoulder, to let him find the way and warn him of any hazards.
Raphael’s attention wandered. He took note of several niches that had been chiseled into the walls. Some of these were occupied by corpses wrapped up in shrouds. Others were vacant except for jumbled blankets and ragged, dirty furs.
Roger noticed the same thing and turned back, his face incredulous. “People sleep down here?”
Raphael made an effort not to laugh. Vera would hear it and be offended. “Perhaps during the worst days of the Mongol siege,” he suggested. “But I cannot believe that the good sisters would make a habit of it.”
The passage forked from time to time, and whenever it did, Vera led them into what she deemed the correct path, while making some comment to Percival about what exhibits they might have found if they had chosen to go the other way. In most cases, these were holy wonders and relics of various descriptions, but it seemed that some tunnels led off in the direction of churches and monasteries elsewhere in the city.
“Every godly building in this town,” he muttered to Roger, “is, it seems, connected by this subterranean network.”
“Good thing for them the Mongols never found that out,” Roger remarked.
Raphael shuddered. “I doubt they would venture into a place such as this one. No victory would be worth it.”
“Which leads to the question…” Roger began, then stifled himself.
“What the hell are we doing here? Going on a quest, of course.”
Raphael got the sense that they were approaching some crisis, for the passage had become quite difficult to negotiate, being nothing more than a series of air pockets of varying sizes and shapes, joined by openings that had to be crawled through or climbed up to, with only a few chisel strokes in the slick stone to serve as footholds. Vera had to stop and think for a disturbingly long time at some of the turning points. But then, noting a concentration of scorch marks left by the torches and tapers of pilgrims who had gone before, she finally led them around the curve of a boulder and through a crevice that was invisible until almost the moment they passed through it. They entered into a flat-floored chamber large enough for the four of them to stand comfortably and look about.