Chapter 473

There was quite a distance between Reichenau Abbey and the Church of St. George, but whether he had seen the flicker of light or simply been working in one of the nearby buildings, the monk had noticed that someone was there. If it were Narke, he would have made sure the light couldn’t be seen from outside, so perhaps it was the latter.

‘…Huu.’

Apparently, Insight and Precognition couldn’t tell us something like this. Even knowing why, I still found myself wanting an answer. After all, with the sound of someone searching for us echoing through the silence as he changed direction and stepped across the grass, I couldn’t help but wonder, quite sincerely, whether we would actually manage to catch the Papal spy from Terminus Eukairia and make it home safely. We couldn’t afford to get caught this early into our second step toward saving Heike. I could almost feel a little sweat gathering beneath my usually dry gloves.

The moment I thought that, Narke spoke to me through divine power, his face gone pale.

― “Haha… Insight is only half as useful if you don’t look at people’s eyes~ Besides.”

Isn’t that closer to having no Insight at all?

― “Haha.”

Of course, the intuition he had developed from all the big data he had accumulated over time had grown almost like an ability, making up for his low-level Insight to a considerable degree. And I did trust that intuition and his Insight. Narke ran a hand over his mouth and held his breath again.

The footsteps drew a little closer.

The light from the monk’s lantern stretched toward the west, disappeared on our side, then stretched eastward again. He shone the light through the window on the opposite side of the building. A flash of white swept overhead, turning the tree in front of us pale. Narke stared at the tree, now looking like a lump of ash, and sent the words directly into my mind without even moving his lips.

― “I can’t use my abilities all the time. Precognition is especially troublesome.”

― “Precognition aside, you use Insight on me all the time.”

― “Sorry. It’s not on purpose. …For now.”

Rustle—

Damn it. The monk was circling around to the back of the building. If he came around any farther, we would be spotted.

We could slowly make our way toward the front of the building, but the sound of our feet crushing the grass would give us away. And what were we supposed to do, just keep circling around? If we really wanted to move, our only option was to cast a soundproofing spell, but we didn’t know whether that monk was a mage or not. That was exactly why I was hesitant to simply cast concealment like before and walk out in broad daylight—well, figuratively speaking.

Even with concealment, our physical presence would remain the same. If the monk stepped on the spot where we were sitting, we were done for. And if we walked around in this state, we would still leave the same traces on our surroundings. It was nighttime, though. Maybe we could get away with the grass being slightly flattened.

‘Right. So it’s better to use a concealment spell as a second-best option.’

I raised the index finger of the hand resting against the wall, about to rub it lightly against the surface. Just then, Elias suddenly shoved a hand into his pocket and swung his arm far out to the side.

Whoosh—Clatter—Tap—

Three or four stones flew from his hand in quick succession. He spun his body to the right, throwing stones rapidly without stopping. The sounds grew more distant, like a rabbit stepping on a branch and bounding away into the distance. I heard the rustle of fabric as the monk apparently whipped around. He shone his lantern in that direction, then headed toward the woods.

I had no idea how long we could keep him occupied. But Narke let out a deep sigh and dropped into a crouch, then looked at Elias with an odd smile. Elias ruffled Narke’s hair without permission, looking rather pleased with himself.

“This kind of thing is my specialty, you know.”

“Yeah, I can see that~”

“So that’s why you were picking up stones…”

At my words, Elias nodded vigorously. Only then did I remember that he had often picked up stones in the book. I had remembered the fact, but I hadn’t quite internalized the reasoning behind his actions, so I hadn’t thought to apply it in a situation like this. Maybe that was the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

“I’ve got plenty of experience breaking into places without permission. Look, situations like this come up, where you have to sneak into somewhere without anyone noticing, right? In those cases, I go in assuming I’ve already been spotted and think of a way to draw their attention elsewhere. I might set up a spell beforehand, pick up some stones, tie a string somewhere, whatever works.”

“I learned something useful…”

“Remember it. That way, you can break in without me, too.”

“Yeah.”

I answered half-heartedly, but it was genuinely useful information. Narke seemed to like it, too, because he grinned.

“Good thing we brought Elias along~”

“You can say that again.”

“Now, let’s crack the code.”

Narke grabbed us and led us away, casting a concealment spell as we headed toward the houses. Since there was no one watching, it was fine to use magic for a little while. Between the houses, which stood some distance apart from one another, we found a good spot that wouldn’t be visible from the main road and sat beneath the shade of a tree.

“This time, it’s a simple code. They wrote it in a way that anyone could figure out. As you know, even someone who wasn’t particularly bright would have to be able to decipher it and make their way inside…”

Narke cast a soundproofing spell, then pulled another manuscript from inside his coat and began examining it.

“Lukas. Recall the titulus from the first painting.”

“Sure. Just tell me the number.”

Elias suddenly widened his eyes and leaned his face toward us.

“What are you guys doing? Whoa.”

“What?”

Seeing a student with short-cropped black hair staring at us, I kept getting thrown off. He looked less like Elias and more like some high school student I’d never seen before. Then again, Elias probably felt the same way about us—we had bleached our hair light brown, too. I pushed Elias back when he got close enough to be uncomfortable and answered, “You already figured out what this cipher is.”

“I have a rough idea, but it’s funny how you speak assuming we both know the exact same thing. Leo does that to me, too.”

“…How long did it take Leo to figure out your pattern—never mind. You figured it out too, so let’s put our heads together. Once we have the letters, decode it.”

“Got it!”

“Lukas, forty-fourth letter of the first painting.”

“Forty-fourth?” I gave a dry laugh and began reciting the titulus I had memorized.

“Dæmon proiicitur, Legio cui nomen inhæret. Tum porcos…”

“Stop! S.”

Elias clapped his hands right in front of my face, cutting me off. I startled and my eyes widened before I could help it. Just so I wouldn’t have to watch him do that again, I decided I’d count the letters myself from now on.

“Haha, all right. Then the second painting, eighteenth letter.”

“Hmm… That’s T. We’re already getting the outline.”

“Why aren’t you reciting it, Luka?”

I carefully pushed Elias’s forehead back as he kept bringing his face closer and closer to mine. Narke answered me with a laugh.

“Exactly~ Next, the third painting. Fifth letter.”

“Easy. M.”

“Next… fourth painting, eighteenth letter.”

“U.”

“The fifth mural says zero.”

“That’s because the titulus on that mural is badly damaged.”

“How convenient. Then the sixth painting, first letter.”

“M again.”

“The seventh painting is zero, too. Eighth painting, thirty-first letter.”

“Whoa, this one… Hmm. C.”

“So it’s STMUMC. St is obviously short for Saint, and… why did they leave clues even an idiot could figure out? I guess they wanted the merchants to be able to use it, too.”

Elias sneered. He meant that once you knew it started with St, it was obvious that what followed had to be the name of a church. Apparently, even Elias thought a cipher that was too easy to solve was almost ridiculous. I felt the same way, but the people smuggling manuscripts through Reichenau Monastery couldn’t exactly have used a difficult cipher when their intended recipients were merchants, not scholars. From a monk’s perspective, making the cipher more complicated might have been personally entertaining, but if they wanted to communicate with someone else, they had to make it something the people solving it could actually handle. Thanks to the cipher being made to that level, it seemed like we might be able to find something soon.

‘…No, wait. Does this actually exist? That doesn’t make sense.’

What kind of lunatics would secretly sell manuscripts and paintings just because they were blinded by money? Were they really monks? Maybe money wasn’t their goal at all, and they had been entrusted with some important mission known only to them. But even then, how had they built an underground tunnel?

I still couldn’t be certain that the underground passage even existed. We might simply be taking a cipher that had nothing to do with us and deciding it pointed to a smuggling route. And even if there really was some kind of secret space, it might not be an underwater tunnel at all. It could just be a small room where they secretly handed over illuminated manuscripts and collected payment. Secret rooms built with mechanical devices had existed both in the past and even now, so that seemed far more realistic.

If that turned out to be the case, Narke and Elias would be terribly disappointed, but I supposed it was all right for them to be disappointed this time. I’d take them somewhere afterward, feed them something good, and cheer them up. By my standards, something had to go wrong enough to leave the two of them thoroughly disappointed.

‘No, wait… Then we’d have to sneak across the border by swimming.’

This was a situation where I had to pray that the secret passage really existed. I was practically praying to medieval people who weren’t even my ancestors. Whatever. I let out a long sigh as I looked up at the sky and sank into thought.

‘Then we need to find a church called MUMC.’

Considering the level of the cipher, MUMC was probably just a set of initials. If so, figuring out which church it referred to would be child’s play for someone from this area. Of course, as an outsider, I had no idea where MUMC was. But if I thought back to what Narke had said earlier, the answer would probably come soon enough.

‘He said the Reichenau Monastery is here.’

And there was also the Church of St. Mary and St. Mark. He said there were churches of St. Paul and St. Peter as well. As far as I knew, there weren’t any other major sites.

Of those, it wasn’t hard to figure out which one MUMC was referring to. St. Maria und Markus—that gave us STMUM. But could the C also be an abbreviation for Markus? The use of C would suggest Latin. Yet German before Martin Luther was practically as different from modern German as pre-Shakespearean English was from modern English, and Martin Luther didn’t even exist when these murals were painted. Besides, we’d just confirmed that the tituli on the murals were written in Latin. If the church’s nameplate was also written in Latin, then C was possible…

“No.”

I slowly opened my eyes as I said it. Narke and Elias had been standing close by, exchanging glances as they watched me. The moment I opened my eyes, they both jumped and backed away. Feeling a little awkward, I muttered, “Having fun watching me?”

“Hahaha~”

“What could C be? C isn’t an abbreviation for Markus.”

Reichenau Abbey was the island’s most prominent landmark, with people coming and going even now, just as they had in the past. The Church of St. Mary and St. Mark right beside it was the same. It made no sense to use an entire building as a smuggling site. So C had to be some room or specific location inside the Church of St. Mary and St. Mark—the place where the exchange took place.

“C in the Church of St. Mary and St. Mark. What’s the last one? Considering the level of the person decoding it, they wouldn’t have made it too difficult.”

“Room 3~?”

“Could be. Or the third floor. Or the third basement level. But what church has something like that? We need more possible answers. All right… tell me what place you got on the last Latin exam you took.”

Even at my sudden demand, Narke answered calmly.

“Hmm, 1st.”

“I knew you’d say that. You’re a cardinal, so I suppose you’d be good at Latin.”

“I got 50th!”

“Impressive… Fine, I’ll count you as first place, too. First place in your own special way.”

Elias probably knew all the answers and deliberately wrote them down wrong. At least, that’s how he’d always seemed to me, though I had no idea whether he’d done the same on last year’s Latin exam. Whether he really knew everything and wrote the opposite answers or not, the guy was actually pretty good at it. I carefully leaned my back against the tree, keeping an eye out for anyone else passing by, and muttered, “All right. I got every question wrong and came in 3rd, so I’m out. You two figure it out.”

“Haha, if you got everything wrong, you wouldn’t come in 3rd. Why are you backing out~? You know the words, don’t you?”

“Just do it yourselves.”

“Luka must be sulking because we were watching him.”

As if. I let out an incredulous laugh at that.

“Yeah, exactly. So you two do it…”

“Something that starts with C, huh~? What could it be? Choir, column, crypt, clerestory, bell tower…”

“Crypt sounds the most likely. It’s underground, after all.”

Narke and Elias really did start discussing it between themselves. I listened to them for a while, then got to my feet when Narke began to stand. Even after casting a soundproofing spell, Narke whispered, “The problem now is that we have to head into the monastery, where the monks are concentrated. The Church of St. Mary and St. Mark is right next to the monastery, so we have to be extremely careful.”

“So we have to go through what happened earlier all over again…”

“Yeah.”

Narke answered with determination. Elias started picking up stones again. But judging by how he wasn’t gathering nearly as many as before, he seemed to think there were limits to how much he could distract people with rocks. Somehow, that only made me more nervous.

We quietly cast concealment and ran. Whenever a monk appeared, we stood still where we were and made sure not to stir the air. We prayed they wouldn’t come near us, and once, when we were in danger of being spotted, Elias threw stones in the opposite direction to draw their attention away. We slipped away while they were distracted and started running again.

After about thirty minutes of this, we regrouped in front of the monastery, its windows faintly lit. Elias carefully pulled a wire from his clutch again and approached the entrance of the Church of St. Mary and St. Mark. This time, all we had to do was remove the piece of wood wedged through the door handle, which meant even the slightest movement could be more noticeable.

‘Man… this is nerve-racking.’

The entrance to the Church of St. Mary and St. Mark faced the monastery directly. In other words, someone inside the monastery could see us from there.

Just then, Elias patted us on the shoulders and ran past the monastery toward the southern end of the island. I looked at Narke with a What the hell is he doing? expression, but apparently Narke had no idea either.

Screeech—— Chirp-chirp-chirp…

From somewhere in the distance came the sound of a bird.

‘What was that?’

It sounded remarkably like a bird, but knowing the situation we were in, we could make a pretty good guess that the sound had come from Elias. The absurdity of it was enough to make me laugh.

I quickly pulled out the wooden block and opened the door, shoving Narke inside. Elias came running over shortly after. I immediately shut the church door behind him so no one would see us and hurried farther inside. Then I asked Narke, “Where are crypts usually located?”

“Under the apse? I’m not sure. It depends on the church.”

We couldn’t even turn on a light, so darkness had settled over the church. We had to find a way down to the crypt from here.

“This church was burned down once and rebuilt afterward. We can only hope the fire didn’t spread to the underground passage.”

“They might have blocked the passage when they rebuilt it.”

“That’s possible. But it was rebuilt in the 11th century, so there’s still hope.”

Narke approached the apse. He carefully ran his hand along the pillars and examined the floor and walls, but apparently found no obvious door, because he eventually came back toward the altar where we were.

“I’ll check the back.”

“Go ahead.”

While Narke searched for an entrance leading underground, I kept my senses sharp, watching the monastery outside. Even after quite some time, Narke apparently hadn’t found any stairs, as he continued searching one place after another. Eventually, he came back near the altar.

“There is a door leading underground over there, but I don’t like it. No matter how I think about it, this spot in front of the altar feels the most promising. I wonder why~”

“…Feels the most promising?”

Who knows. I certainly didn’t. Still, this spot was definitely a C as well. I was standing right in front of the altar and the nave—in other words, between the two. And this was where the choir would have stood in the Middle Ages.

I began slowly stamping my feet, putting some force into each step as I searched for something to back up Narke’s intuition.

Tap, tap…

Each step produced a rather dull sound. By the twentieth step, I was starting to worry that the vibrations alone might alert the monastery and bring someone charging in here.

Thump—

I stopped dead at the spot where a different sound had echoed. For a moment, my eyes met Narke’s and Elias’s. Their round eyes gleamed in the darkness. Elias hurriedly shoved the altar aside and pulled back the carpet. A piece of wood with a shallow groove cut into it covered the floor. Elias drew his wand and lifted it up.

The place where the choir stood, and the underground crypt. Two Cs.

“…….”

Cold air surged up from the pitch-black stone chamber, dark as a manhole. Elias shone his wand down into it, then carefully climbed down the iron ladder. I followed close behind. Narke came down last, using mana to put the altar and even the carpet back where they had been. He looked around in amazement.

“This isn’t the crypt that was originally used. The actual crypt is next door, and this…”

“They made this place separately. I see.”

Why was this even here? I could understand having a room, but if we actually found a passage here, I was going to lose my mind. And sure enough, the moment I had that thought, Elias spotted an elaborate stone door at the end of the corridor—it looked like it used more advanced technology than I would have expected. Beyond it was a long passage that seemed to stretch on without end.

“…….”

“Lukas is gonna faint~”

I stood there blankly, rubbing the back of my neck in disbelief. This actually existed? A passage leading out to the mainland? No matter how much we had deciphered the cipher ourselves to get this far, this was still impossible to believe. But whether I believed it or not, the passage was real. Even the door looked like it had been replaced relatively recently.

‘This is insane.’

“Yaaay~ Wooooo~!”

Elias cast a soundproofing spell and ran down the unlit corridor, shouting at the top of his lungs. Before I even had time to collect myself, Narke pulled me farther inside. He carefully shut the stone door behind us, gathered light at the tip of his wand, and began walking slowly.

“Now I understand why they built the passage here. If they had built it at St. Georg’s Church, it would have been the first place anyone coming over from Konstanz would reach. They wouldn’t have had time to close the passage~”

“Right… So they must have built and hidden the passage in the building right next to the monastery, the heart of this island. But why is it so damp?”

Elias, walking ahead of us, happily answered my question.

“Hey, isn’t there a lake right beyond the plaster here~? Of course it’s gonna be damp.”

“I don’t think this is normal.”

I muttered with a frown. It was far too damp. Had it been left unused for so long that it hadn’t been properly maintained? No, could we really say it hadn’t been used until recently? They had replaced the door, after all. The carpet lifted easily instead of being stuck to the floor, as though it had been removed and cleaned from time to time, and there wasn’t much dust underneath it either. There hadn’t been any buildup of cobwebs or dust on the way down here, either.

Narke knocked lightly on the wall a few times. After hearing the clear echo, he nodded.

“Doesn’t seem like the lake itself is right behind it. There’s a thin hollow space first, and then the lake. Why would they build the passage like this?”

“Maybe so they could duck into the hollow if the passage was ever discovered? Or maybe to escape there if water started leaking in.”

“Hmm… That makes sense.”

Well, I’d only thrown the idea out there. I reached out and touched the wall. Whether they were meant to provide access to the hollow or serve some other purpose, several bricks had been left out of the passage walls at regular intervals.

We walked like that for about thirty minutes. We talked about what Leo might be doing, what Julia and Ulrike might be up to—we eventually concluded they were probably asleep—what had happened to the curriculum for the Theravada Buddhism club, and whether everyone’s newly dyed hair suited them or not. I’d curled my hair into slightly wavy locks, so that came up too. Elias said I was doing an overly stereotypical impression of an Italian, while Narke just burst out laughing.

Then, a cold breeze blew in from behind us.

Fwoooosh—

The eerie sound of wind came from somewhere behind us. Elias glanced back before draping an arm over my shoulder.

“Luka, I’m cold.”

“What do you want me to do about it… Want my robe?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

While we were having that pointless conversation, Narke turned around too.

It wasn’t because of us. He had stopped dead in his tracks, despite having said earlier that he had a good feeling about this place, and was staring behind us with a worried look on his face. A sense of foreboding rose in me, and Elias and I looked toward whatever he was staring at. Then we turned back to Narke. His eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open. I heard Elias let out a sharp gasp.

“Gasp.”

Slosh—…

“…….”

I slowly lowered the light gathered at the tip of my wand. Unlike before, the floor was turning black with water. The sound of rushing water was growing louder. Which meant…

“What the hell…!”

Lake water was flooding into the passage!

Rumble—

The water, rushing toward us in a pool ankle-deep, surged up in a curve against the distant wall before crashing down. It churned and swept toward us. Narke grabbed my wrist with a pale face, ready to run. Elias stared at the black water pouring in from both sides of the passage we’d just crossed, his face completely blank as he rattled off in a panic.

“We really are going to get drowned! That pig mural was warning us not to go in! It was telling us we’d get drowned!”

What is this, Egypt?¹ There was no time for that. I didn’t have time to worry about my legs, which still hadn’t fully recovered, either. Elias faltered when he saw the wave rushing toward us in the distance, its maw wide open. I grabbed him hard by the collar of his shirt and sprinted at full speed, yelling at the top of my lungs.

“Run! All the way to the Swiss border!”

Translator Note

1. A reference to the biblical story of the Exodus, in which Pharaoh’s army pursues the Israelites into the Red Sea and is drowned when the waters return. ↩︎