The cultist had nothing else to offer. Fear had scrubbed the details of the ritual from his memory by morning. But his abandoned satchel, recovered from the floor of the tunnel, proved more useful.
Isfrid found the ledger tucked beneath a false bottom in the leather flap: a slim, water-stained book of names, dates, and small debts, funded by someone with genuine coin.
"Most of it means nothing," Isfrid said, flipping through the damp pages. "Payments. Dates." He stopped near the back, his thumb holding the corner down. "Faust. Look at this."
Scrawled in the margin in a different hand—hurried, the feather pressing hard enough to tear the grain—was a single word, underlined twice.
Houska.
Beneath it, cramped and jagged: The seal weakens.
Faust turned the page over, found nothing, and spent the next hour hunched over Weyer's stolen journal by candlelight. He ran his finger down decades of marginalia, cross-referencing demonology, geography, and every scrap of lore the old Grandmaster had collected.
Nothing.
Not a province, not a ruin, not a whisper.
Weyer had catalogued entities Faust had never encountered in a century of study, but Houska appeared nowhere.
"It means nothing to me," Faust said, closing the journal. "Bohemian, by the sound of it. But Weyer left very little uncatalogued in his lifetime. The fact that it isn't there is worse than finding it."
"The cultist mentioned a castle in the east," Isfrid said. "Where the old wound never closed."
"He also promised us rewards and voices under the stone, courtesy of fumes and terror." Faust picked up the ledger, turning it over in his hand. A cold weight settled behind his ribs.
"Still. A name is a name. We ask quietly wherever we stop next."
He slipped the book into his pack beside Weyer's notes, keeping silent about one detail.
The dull, rhythmic throbbing that had just started beneath his left eye bandage the moment he'd first read the word aloud.