They went deeper, and the dungeon changed around them as they walked.
The black stone gave way to something older, the walls slick and dark and carved with long rows of faces, mouths open in a silent chant that matched the murmur in the air.
The passage sloped down and down, and the ore-light thinned, until they moved through a near-dark lit only by their own armors, eleven soft glows of amber and crimson and gold and shadow drifting through the deep.
The murmur grew. It pressed on them from the walls, from the floor, a low layered chorus of the dead, until it was less a sound than a weight on the shoulders.
And then the passage opened, and the fourth Cardinal waited.
The chamber was a drowned cathedral.
Black water lay still and mirror-flat across the floor, ankle-deep, and from it rose broken pillars that vanished up into a dark no light touched.
