There is my mother, thought Constance with a shiver of mingled horror and sadness, and even a little fear, as she spotted one of the nearest Ancestors. She recognized the blue dress, the golden rings woven through the perfectly preserved dark hair. She stepped closer. From the middle distance, her mother was familiar—sleeping, perhaps, on her bed of stone. And in spite of everything, Constance felt an irrational thrill of hope. But as she neared the body, details revealed themselves. The face was sunken and pale, the lips slightly parted, and the eyes—replaced with glittering dark sapphires—stared up at her coldly, as if in disapproval, reflecting the purple glow on the bulb of the cane. Nevertheless, Constance lowered herself closer to the face so similar to her own, close enough to touch, close enough to smell the decay, the herbal, oily tang of whatever they used to stave off the rot. They had packed her mouth with cotton, she realized, noticing the material protruding ever so slightly between the thinning lips. She clenched her fists, turning aside from the body.

Focus.

Constance shut her eyes and tried to sense whether any magic lay in the cavern around her. As usual in Duke’s Forest, despite her best efforts, she felt nothing but a residual bass note, the thrum of an old and growing spell: the storm cloud. She slipped the mask from its secret pocket in her cloak and fastened it onto her face. Carefully, she turned the wheel to bring the spell-scape into focus. The shimmering storm spell surrounded her in phantom streaks of blue light, like frozen lightning, despite the fact that the cloud itself had not reached underground. She adjusted the wheel further, but beyond the slightest gray shimmer above the bodies of the Ancestors, there was nothing.

She wound a path through the sarcophagi to the first tunnel leading off the main chamber. This passage too was filled with corpses, set on ledges carved out of the stone wall. The inscriptions were much humbler. Servants who had lived and worked in the castle were interred here along with their families, doomed to serve their masters in death as in life. Constance sent her senses down the tunnel, searching from beneath the mask, but to her frustration there was nothing hidden in these graves.