The descent took twenty minutes.
Drest's infrastructure maps showed a maintenance shaft in the Ironworks quarter's deepest foundry building — a vertical drop of forty meters to the first sublevel, then three more descending passages that followed the ancient rock formations beneath the city's river clay foundation, cutting deeper than any city maintenance had reason to go.
Someone had been here recently.
Not the Church's assessment team seventeen months ago — more recent than that. The torch brackets in the upper passages showed fresh oil residue. The lower passage walls had markings that Sera photographed in her notebook without comment — geometric, precise, not vandalism.
"Someone has been studying it," she said.
"How recently?" Kael said.
