Many people preferred to inter their family members so that they could come to visit them. Other people, especially the relatives of more famous people, preferred to let fire consume their loved one, rather than allow their bodies to become an attraction, or provide rivals a corpse to spit upon.

Magda had chosen to have the shell that had contained Baraccus’s spirit to be consumed by fire as that was also said by some to purify the spirit of its worldly trappings for its journey to the underworld. Some couldn’t stand the thought of a loved one being reduced to ashes. Magda didn’t see that empty vessel as her loved one. Her loved one was gone to be among the good spirits. The choice being forced upon her, she chose to have his vessel reduced to ash rather than to rot.

The passageway they hurried down widened out, so that the two of them could again walk comfortably side by side. As they descended level after level, past the dead numbering in the thousands, they eventually came to newer sections of the catacombs. The bodies Magda saw wrapped in white shrouds were not yet layered in centuries of dust.

Torches in rusty iron brackets were lit in these newer sections, providing enough light to see without the need of lanterns. Tilly blew out the flame in hers.

“Besides the dead,” Tilly said, “here, too, be places where some of the gifted choose to work.”

Although her guide didn’t mention it, Magda recalled Tilly telling her that some of the gifted down here worked with the dead. Magda didn’t like to contemplate such a concept, and tried hard not to imagine what such work could entail.

Before long, Magda began to hear the whisper of conversation. They soon encountered people coming out of passageways to the sides. Some hurried past in the opposite direction. Most of them were alone, but she also saw groups of four or five people talking in low voices among themselves, absorbed in debate on formulas or the order of prophecy.

Magda finally saw rooms that were something other than burial chambers. They looked like crude work areas cut out of the sandstone. Some were lit by torches, but a number of the rooms were brightly illuminated by glass spheres.

Inside a few darker rooms Magda saw glowing verification webs surrounded by people studying them, pointing out certain elements to others, or casting in additional branches. Some of the webs hummed. The colors of the webs reflected off faces focused on the work.

There were several large libraries, lined with shelves from floor to ceiling, all filled with books. Magda knew from Baraccus that these would be valuable and profoundly dangerous books that needed to be kept away from more public areas. Some such books had been taken away to the Temple of the Winds.