The scream tore through the darkness like a physical thing, a ragged edge of sound that cut off abruptly and left behind a silence more terrible than the noise had been. Helena was already moving, scrambling down the ladder into the trench, her boots slipping on the wet rungs. Behind her, she heard Lena shouting something, heard Iris's footsteps on the earth above, heard the distant slam of a door from the Aethelgard compound. But all of it was secondary to the single, obliterating fact: Marcus was in the crypt, and Marcus was no longer screaming.
The work lights had died completely. The trench was a chasm of blackness, the kind of dark that seemed to absorb not just light but sound and thought and hope. Helena's torch was in her tent. She had no weapon, no plan, no sense of what she was descending into. She only knew that she could not stand at the edge and listen.
Her feet found the bottom of the trench. The air here was cold and wrong, carrying a smell she had not noticed before—not the dry mineral scent of ancient stone, but something organic and recent, like turned earth and copper. She moved forward with her hands outstretched, feeling for the entrance to the crypt, and her fingers brushed against rough-hewn stone.
"Marcus?"
No answer. She stepped through the entrance and into the crypt.
The darkness inside was absolute. She stood in it, breathing hard, listening for any sound that might tell her where Marcus was, where the danger was, whether she was alone. For a long moment, there was nothing. Then, very faintly, she heard breathing—shallow and rapid, coming from somewhere to her left.
"Marcus, if you can hear me, stay where you are. I'm going to find a light."
The breathing hitched. A voice, barely recognisable as Marcus's, said: "He's here."
"Who's here?"
"Henricus. He's been here the whole time. He's been—" A gasp, a sound of movement, the scrape of fabric against stone. "Don't let him touch you. Don't let the song touch you."
Something moved in the darkness to Helena's right. Not Marcus. Something larger, slower, accompanied by a whisper of cloth that might have been robes or might have been the wind through the crypt's narrow entrance. She turned toward it, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her throat, and then a light blazed behind her and the darkness fled.
Iris stood in the entrance, holding a high-powered torch, its beam cutting through the crypt like a blade. In its light, Helena saw Marcus first—crumpled against the far wall, his face white and streaming with sweat, his hands clutching the manuscript as though it were the only solid thing left in the world. And then she saw the other figure.
It stood against the opposite wall, motionless, its robes the colour of old bone. For one impossible moment, Helena thought it was a statue, a carving, a trick of the light. Then it raised its head, and she saw the face beneath the cowl.
It was not a face. It was a mask—a smooth, featureless oval of polished wood, painted with a single symbol in dark red pigment: the neume for the opening note of the manuscript's first chant. The same note that had been drawn on the vellum page left on the spoil heap. The same note that had been placed in Tom Balfour's mouth.
"Don't move," Helena said, her voice steadier than she felt. "Iris, call the police."
The masked figure did not move. It stood perfectly still, its hands folded inside its sleeves, its posture one of patient, almost liturgical attention. Then it spoke, and the voice that emerged was low and calm and utterly without emotion.
"The manuscript belongs to the Trust. It has always belonged to the Trust. You will return it now."
"The manuscript belongs to the Valdorian people," Marcus rasped from his corner. "It's evidence of a crime. A thousand-year-old crime. And I know who you are. I know who sent you."
The figure turned its masked face toward him. "You know nothing, Professor Fell. You have spent thirty years studying the wrong composer. Do not presume to understand the work of a single night."
"Then explain it to me." Helena stepped sideways, placing herself between the figure and Marcus. "Explain why eleven monks were murdered. Explain why my great-grandfather buried the evidence. Explain why Tom Balfour is dead. If you want the manuscript, you're going to have to give me a reason not to burn it right now."
The figure was silent for a long moment. From the entrance, Iris moved the torch beam slightly, and Helena saw the crypt in its full, terrible detail: the circle of skeletons, their skulls still twisted, their empty eye sockets catching the light. The empty reliquary on its plinth. The walls covered in a faint patina of salt and age. And the masked figure, standing among the dead as though it belonged to them.
"The Trust was created to protect something," the figure said finally. "Not to exploit it. Heinrich Voss understood that the Cantus Mortis was too dangerous to be released into the world. He understood that some knowledge must be buried. The copyright was a convenient fiction—a way to control access to the manuscript without revealing what it truly contained."
"A convenient fiction that made your family millions," Iris said. Her voice was cold and steady, the torch beam unwavering. "The Morrow Trust isn't a guardian. It's a profiteer. You've been charging licensing fees for a century on a work you claim is too dangerous to share. That's not protection. That's extortion."
"Profit was never the purpose." The figure's voice did not rise, but something in it shifted—a tightening, a pressure. "The Trust exists to ensure that the Cantus Mortis is never performed. Never recorded. Never disseminated. The licensing fees fund the apparatus of suppression. The lawyers, the non-disclosure orders, the excised catalogue entries. All of it serves a single purpose: to keep the song silent."
"And the murders?" Helena demanded. "Tom Balfour? Do the murders serve that purpose too?"
The figure was silent for a long time. When it spoke again, its voice was quieter, almost regretful. "I did not kill the student. I did not leave the vellum page. Someone else is moving against the Trust. Someone who wants the song to be heard."
"Who?"
"I do not know. But they have been inside the Trust for decades. They know our methods. They know our secrets. And they have been waiting, as we have been waiting, for the excavation to reach the crypt." The figure turned its masked face toward Helena. "You were meant to find the manuscript, Dr. Voss. Your family's role in the Trust ensured that. But you were not meant to find it now. Not yet. The timing is wrong. The discovery has been accelerated. And I believe the person who accelerated it is the same person who killed your student."
The beam of Iris's torch flickered, just for an instant. Helena saw the masked figure tense, and then the light steadied. From somewhere above, she heard the sound of an engine—Nash's car, she hoped, or the police, or anyone who could turn this nightmare into something she could understand.
"The page on the spoil heap," Helena said. "The page in Tom's mouth. You said you didn't leave them. But they were written in the same ink, the same hand, as the manuscript. Someone has access to the original materials."
"Yes." The figure inclined its head, a gesture that was almost a nod. "Someone inside the Trust. Someone who knows the Cantus Mortis. Someone who has been waiting for the right moment to expose everything. The vellum pages were not threats, Dr. Voss. They were invitations. They were meant to lead you here, to this moment, to the truth."
"And the sound? The frequency I heard?"
"The Cantus Mortis is not a metaphor. The monks who composed it were experimenting with resonance—with the physical effects of sound on the human body. They discovered frequencies that could induce fear, paralysis, even death. The song they created was a weapon. Godric killed them because he wanted to control it. Heinrich Voss buried the evidence because he was afraid of it. And someone is now trying to unbury it, piece by piece, death by death."
The sound of the engine grew louder. Headlights swept across the trench entrance above, and Helena heard doors opening, voices shouting. The masked figure straightened, its posture shifting from patience to alertness.
"We are out of time. The manuscript must remain hidden. If the police take it, if it enters the public record, the Trust will not be able to prevent its dissemination. And the person who killed your student will have won."
"I'm not giving you the manuscript," Marcus said, his voice stronger now. "I've read enough of it to know what it is. And I've read enough to know that the Trust's version of history is as fraudulent as Godric's authorship. You didn't suppress the Cantus Mortis to protect the world. You suppressed it because it proves that the copyright was built on murder."
The masked figure turned toward him, and for the first time, Helena saw something that might have been anger in the set of its shoulders. "You have read a few pages, Professor. You do not know what the complete work contains. You do not know what it can do. And you do not know what you are risking by refusing to surrender it."
"Then tell me." Marcus struggled to his feet, the manuscript clutched to his chest. "Tell me what it contains. Tell me what it can do. Convince me."
The figure was silent. The footsteps above grew louder, and Helena heard Nash's voice calling her name. The moment stretched, elastic and unbearable, and then the masked figure did something unexpected. It laughed. A low, dry sound, utterly without humour.
"You are so certain that the truth will set you free. But some truths are cages, not keys. The Cantus Mortis is not a weapon in the way you imagine. It does not kill the body. It kills the memory. It erases. It unmakes. The monks who composed it were trying to create a song that could make a man forget his own name. They succeeded beyond their expectations. And Godric killed them not to steal the song, but to stop them from using it."
The figure stepped backward, into the shadows at the edge of the crypt. "The person who killed your student is not trying to expose the Trust's fraud. They are trying to complete the monks' work. They are trying to sing the song in full. And if they succeed, everything you are—everything you remember—will be gone."
Nash's voice was directly above them now. The masked figure reached up and, in a single swift motion, extinguished Iris's torch with a gloved hand. The darkness rushed back in, absolute and suffocating.
"Tell Dr. Voss," the voice said from the blackness, "that the Morrow Trust did not create the debt. It inherited it. And the debt is older than any of us. Older than the priory. Older than the song. It was written into the bones of this place long before the first stone was laid."
When the police descended into the crypt, lights blazing, the masked figure was gone. There was no other exit, no hidden passage, no way out that the archaeology team had discovered. But the figure was gone, and the only trace it left was a single scrap of vellum on the plinth where the reliquary had sat. On it, in fresh crimson ink, were three words: Mox incipiet cantus. Soon the song will begin.
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