The trail led them, three days later, to a half-ruined chapel outside the mining town of Schneeberg.
A miner had reported singing echoing from an old shaft long after the church bells stopped, but his account understated the scale of it.
Faust smelled the sulfur before they reached the heavy oak door—the same acrid tang that had lingered in Baphomet's wake in Paris.
Beside him, Isfrid's aura tightened.
"Something's below us," Isfrid said. "Not in the chapel."
The old shaft entrance had been crudely sealed behind the altar, boards nailed across a hole in the flagstones with a haste that suggested whoever had done it had wanted it closed quickly rather than closed well.
Faust pried them free with bare hands.
"Since when can you do it?"
"Since today."
Low, rhythmic chanting rolled up from the dark.
At the bottom of the narrow mining tunnel, six robed figures knelt around a chalked circle. In the center squatted a small, malformed thing that hissed at the torchlight, clumsy and half-formed.
A summoning in its infancy.
The fight, when it came, was mercifully brief — Isfrid's Frost dropping two cultists before they'd even finished rising, Faust's borrowed [XI — JUSTICE] weighing heavily enough in his coat pocket that his aim, for once, felt less like luck and more like something owed to him — and left them with one cultist alive, weeping, and entirely willing to talk in exchange for his life.
"We were only meant to open the smallest door," the man babbled, blood running from a shallow cut above his eye. "A messenger. That's all it was meant to be. A voice, nothing more, to carry word to the Castle—"
"What castle," Faust said, crouching to his level, all trace of humor gone from his face.
"I don't — I don't know its name. Only that it's in the east. Bohemia, I think. A place where the old wound in the world never properly closed, they said. Where something's been listening under the stone since before the first stone was ever laid." The man's eyes rolled, half with fear and half, Faust suspected, with the lingering fog of whatever half-formed ritual he'd been part of. "They said it would open again soon. They said we'd be rewarded for helping it along."
Faust straightened up. The sulfur stench clung thick to his wool coat.
"Who told you this?"
But the cultist only shook his head, weeping in earnest now, and had, evidently, nothing left worth extracting.
Isfrid, standing over the scattered ritual circle with his sword still drawn, met Faust's eye across the candlelight.
"That's not the first time we've heard something like that," he said quietly. "Is it."
"No," Faust said, and found, for the first time since Weimar, that he genuinely did not want to know what the next thread they pulled might unravel.