"That doesn't look like what we're looking for."
After a long stretch of time, like water wearing down the edges of bricks, someone in the group spoke up. The sound of rushing water swallowed his voice as it echoed through the space.
Before setting out, everyone had seen the rubbings. They showed hexagons no wider than a palm, several clustered together and pressed flat between the pages of an old book, their surfaces covered in strange patterns of uncertain age.
Only the most sensitive and suspicious among them would have connected them to an undiscovered heresy or activities inside the Medical School.
Green was that kind of person. Sometimes, he had an astonishing intuition, able to pick out the crucial detail from a bewildering mass of information, like a heron spearing a fish that blended into the ripples and shimmering scales on the water.
As it turned out, most of the time, this wasn't the delusional reasoning of some paranoid, obsessive person desperate for a promotion. It was a God-given gift.
It was thanks to this that a man with no connections had carved out a place for himself in an important Church institution.
The friars were willing to follow his orders. Even sailors knew to board the ship that caught the most fish. If they put in a little physical labor, they could usually count on a share of the spoils.
Following the usual pattern, they might find a set of heretical symbols hidden underground, then use them to locate a gathering place.
What they found far exceeded their expectations. No one could have imagined that beneath Dunling lay a space comparable to a church nave, with numerous tunnels leading here and pouring their waters into a roaring, thunderous Hexagonal Deep Well.
Following the heron's lead through murky shallows