"Quiet!" Green sternly silenced the monk, who was on the verge of bursting into tears and thanking the Heavenly Father for their protection. Seeing daylight again had relaxed him for only a moment; then his guard had gone up twice as high.
Because of his work, he often traveled all over Dunling and spoke with local preachers who were highly sensitive to the flow of information. As a result, he had seen far more churches, large and small, than most people.
This one clearly wasn't an ordinary church. It used the same stained-glass mosaic technique as the Cathedral of Our Lady, but the interior was small—or rather, quite limited.
That meant it wasn't suited to large gatherings, yet it was highly important. Churches like this were often found on private estates, where they were used for important private ceremonies.
Through the dusty glass, the statue standing in the open space outside the church struck them as strangely familiar.
"That statue—could it be..." Kraft still wasn't sure if things were as he suspected. After all, there was no guarantee that a city this vast didn't contain two nearly identical statues.
They crept over to the window, wiped the dust from a small patch of glass, and peered outside.
Nearby, countless fine, scale-like ripples shimmered gold and red. Across the water, a huge, gloomy building loomed in the distance, its heavy shadow spilling across the surface.
Now they could finally be certain of their location. They had entered through a cemetery in New District, crossed half the city underground, and somehow emerged at Knight Island Church in the middle of the Tem River. The Cathedral of Our Lady in Old District stood directly opposite.
The place where the oldest, darkest secrets were sealed lay no more than half a river's width from