The temple's inside didn't match the outside.
The shape from the street had the feel of building—meant, measured, something you could read the intention from in the bones. Inside, that feel flipped. The space was too fat for the walls that wrapped it. Loud in the sharp way of rooms where the proportion had been talked over instead of raised.
The glasses cracked what they could:
Inside size: eats outside by near half again. Gap: not build-wrong. Roof: shifts, running 4 to 11 meters. Floor: first stone, steady keep signs.
The glasses marked it as space-work. Sitting before known arcane work by 300-700 years.
The walls said one size. The inside said another. Both were true.
He slid through the front hall.
The things along the walls were old. Not kept the way the Church kept old things—not set aside for looking at from distance. These were working tools. Pieces that looked like they'd been used, set down, might be used again. Machines if you wanted the word: pieces that sewed body-gear to arcane-thread in shapes the glasses wrote as job: half-getable, first gear: dark, second gear: arcane, third gear: body-touch.
Some had live parts. Cogs and arms and weights in metals the glasses couldn't name, jointed by webs that were half steel and half something else, the something else breathing a thin glow into the air around them. Not light exactly. But sitting where light sat.
He didn't touch them.
He stacked them. Logged them. Moved on.
Some were feelers—tuned to scales he couldn't read but whose point the lay showed: watching, writing, trailing something over long time. Others were hold-cells—cut to keep, not to check—their guts shaped for something that wasn't hard or wet or air in any normal way. One tall thing near the far wall stood maybe three meters and carried the weight of something that had been running without stop a very long time.
The glasses couldn't say what it was doing.
He went deeper.
The second room was smaller. The tools here sat older—the glasses putting them at 800 to 1,200 years of steady burn. They had the feel of things built before the builders full understood what they were raising.
The walls in this room wore the writing from the gate. Floor to roof, thick, no break. Not the lines of the gate but something nearer a page: sheets of stuff in a tongue the glasses locked as full but couldn't turn.
He didn't stop to read.
He opened the deep bag and started.
The way was his own. Grown from the space-gifts he held and the sharp call of this job: most grab in least time with least skin. Isolated Space thrown on a thing made a bubble around it. Space-crush thrown on the bubble shrunk its out-face without shrinking the in-space.
He ate through the second room step by step.
Papers: anything that read as a write-down, anything with the tongue on a carry-face. Things: anything the glasses wrote as job: getable, point: carry-word.
His left hand sat at seventy. The body-wrong from the tunnel fight was easing—his meat climbing back toward its line—but the climb wasn't done. He could feel the gather's crack above him, caught through the space-sense as the sharp print of a fat knot of people drifting with want instead of rite-shape. They were pulling together. They weren't yet dropping.
He had maybe twelve minutes.
The third room was smaller than the first two. It was colder.
Not the deep cold of the under-ground. This was the cold of something that had been very big and was now very still.
The glasses caught it first:
Live stuff: here. Box: off-clear, eats the line. Size: heavy. Shape: part-kept, rough age 200-400 years since life-quit. Name: god-box body-bit.
He pulled the glasses off.
The head sat on a frame raised to carry it. Stone and steel arranged to hold something. The frame looked like a bed and like an apology. The head was near seventy percent whole. The top of the skull had been opened. Not by smash. Not by rot. Something slow and sharp had taken what sat in the highest cup. Someone had known what they were lifting.
Alaric stared at it.
It sat in the room like a fact that didn't belong to the same frame as the walls holding it. The shape ran against the shapes living things made. The proportions weren't right. Not in a way that could be fixed. In a way that said the rightness it ran on was different.
The bits of what might be a face weren't organized for anything Alaric's eyes had learned to read. One eye was open. One was closed. The open one was shut the way things that had died shut. The closed one was closed the way things that had been deliberately closed stayed closed.
He looked away.
Then back.
The stone frame held its shape. The cold came off it steady. The head faced the ceiling. The skull-cup was empty.
Alaric stood still longer than the job's clock let.
He turned back to the room's work. Papers. Things. Gear. The seven pieces near the foot of the bed-frame that the glasses had marked as job: rite-touch, body-string to god-box thing, live-state: leftover.
He looked them over before grabbing.
They were small next to everything else in the room. Two were grown, not made. Their stuff the glasses marked as part-like god-box body-stuff, side bits: human. The line between worker and what sat on the frame had been kept through these. Through things that were part what sat on the frame and part the hands who'd worked for it.
Three were gear. The same sew of body-wheel and dark arcane as the tools in the outer rooms, but shrunk, cut for one hand instead of a crowd.
The last two he couldn't box even with the glasses burning.
He grabbed all seven.
Nine minutes since the gather had cracked. The space-sense showed drift in the ways above. Tied. Dropping.
He shut the bag.
Stepped to the room's mouth.
Looked back once at the frame and what it held. The opened skull. The shut eye. The open eye. The cold that came off both like something steady.
Then he turned and aimed for the way that climbed.
He was forty meters from the gate when he caught someone dropping toward him.
One set of feet. The pace was held—the sharp beat of someone moving at the speed they'd picked was right. The space-sense locked one shape. Human line. A weight that wasn't body-weight but the weight of someone who sat in their own being with real push.
The read matched a shape Gepetto had handed him before the job. One Church hand worth knowing by name on this ground: Aldric Voss, the most active demigod on the Aurelia–Vhal-Dorim–Eldravar axis, the one Gepetto had flagged as the single piece most likely to become a stone in their shoe. Weight like this, dropping alone toward a place like this, was almost certainly him.
Alaric didn't need it confirmed to act on it.
He stopped.
The gate sat above the dropping shape. The climbing way was the only road. Space-crush could cut new roads, but cutting new roads in a tunnel this thin, with the gather dropping from below and this one dropping from above, would spit a shape with worse bones than the one already there.
He kept climbing.
They hit at a bend in the way. The lamp's light touched the other's spot two breaths before Alaric's body did.
The shape stopped.
He was carrying a long spear at his back in a lay that said it had been carried hotter not long ago. The ring on his hand was the ring of send. And the cut of what he wore—Alaric read it in the first breath, the way he read everything, faster and cleaner than the reading felt from inside—was Church. Sent-hand cloth. High harness.
That was the whole read, and it closed the question before the question finished forming.
Alaric was down here alone. He'd come down alone and met no ally on the way, which meant there was no ally down here to meet. A man dropping toward the lower rooms while Alaric climbed out of them was moving the wrong way to be on his side—toward the thing Alaric had just emptied, not away from it. And the cloth gave the rest: Church harness in a temple the Children of Medusa had kept live for ages meant one of two things. Either a Church hand who'd tracked the order here, or an order's hand wearing the Church to move clean. Alaric didn't need to know which. Both read the same from where he stood. Both wanted the bag. Both were, in the only frame that mattered nine minutes into a climbing clock with a gather dropping behind him, the enemy.
So he didn't answer the question the man was about to ask. He'd already answered it himself, and the answer was: don't stop, don't talk, don't hand a stranger in enemy cloth a single word he could carry back. Go past. Go now.
The man's eyes ran across him with the sharp speed of someone whose weighing of a strange shape in rough ground was a working thing. The Gold Face sat on Alaric. The bag hung on his shoulder. The knife was home. The revolver sat holstered but near.
Three breaths of nothing.
The man looked at the bag. At the hold. At the way Alaric had been heading, which was the way out.
"You walked out of there hauling something," he said. The voice was flat. "And you're bleeding."
Alaric kept his hands where they were and said nothing.
"Tell me who sent you," the man said. "And tell me what's down there. In that order. And do it without moving your hands."
Alaric turned light.
He did not go at the man. He went at the gap—the climbing way past the man's left shoulder, the road out. The space-gift he threw wasn't a strike. It was distance. He took the twelve meters of tunnel between the bend and the higher dark and made them more: the ground swelling, the way putting on length it hadn't held a blink before, a stretch meant to open a lead the man couldn't close before Alaric hit the climb and was gone.
The man moved into the swelling ground at a speed that ate it.
Fast—wrong-fast, the send-box speed of someone whose tie to time had split from the world's, chewing the stretched distance almost as fast as Alaric could grow it. Almost. The ground kept swelling ahead of him and he kept eating it, and the two rates ran close enough that Alaric felt the lead he'd meant to open refuse to open clean.
And that—the refusing—was the confirmation the cloth hadn't given him. Alaric was strong. He knew the shape of his own strength the way he knew the reach of his own arm, and the number of people on this ground who could take a stretched tunnel from him and keep pace inside it was very small. The one who could do it while still gaining—turning Alaric's own lead into a thing that closed instead of opened—was smaller yet. Presumption became fact somewhere in the eaten distance. This was Voss. Nothing lesser moved like this.
So he threw the second thing, not at the man but around him—a rule-wall, a bubble of space cut to run its own shape-rules, the edge of it leaning on the man's reach so that anything past it sat a hair out of touch. Not a cage meant to hold. A cage meant to cost seconds. Seconds were all Alaric wanted.
Voss's counter came slow—Alaric felt it stacking rather than firing, a weight asking the world back toward flat, and knew from the shape of it that it would land, only not fast enough to matter. Alaric was already past. Already climbing. The bought seconds spent on the road out instead of on the fight—and spent, he knew now, against the one Church hand on this whole axis Gepetto had told him to never let close. That the escape worked at all was luck riding on top of timing. Against Voss with the drop on him, it had been closer than Alaric would ever put in a report.
Behind him the rule-bubble cracked. He felt it go. He didn't look back to watch the man stand up in the empty way.
The way above him opened.
Alaric climbed into the light.
The fresh air hit him different than the under-air had. His body registered the shift—the temperature change, the humidity moving. He could feel the Gold Face starting to loosen its grip now that he was out of the tight dark. The bleeding had stopped on its own. His left hand was still at seventy, but it would climb now.
Behind him, the gate to the under-rooms sat closed and dark, and somewhere below it a Church hand he'd never named and never answered was writing down a shape he couldn't box.
Somewhere in the city, Gepetto was waiting for the bag and what it held.
Alaric turned away from the gate.
Started moving toward the edges of the city where the message-riders waited and the roads out started.