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He, having paused to allow her the use of her phone - it was very odd to watch a cat using a device like that, and he watched with the exact same sort of detached, curious interest that Joy had had in watching her manipulate her signet ring - answered by resuming his leading of her through darker and murkier passages, lit only by the occasional scraps of light from the slits near the ceiling - near the ground, presumably, from outside. The luxurious ornamentation began to give way; the general feeling became something more ancient and primeval, with rough-hewn stone and unadorned walls, as if at some point this had in fact been the first rooms housed on the site, with the keep and the curtain walls built on top of it.

They passed a couple of open, drafty doorways, but he moved past them, evidently intent on some other more useful route, or perhaps only avoiding those areas which seemed to descend into a total darkness, too deep to be reached by the light from above.

Their destination was circled by more of those openings for light, nearly choked by green stuff above: a round chamber, at the center of which was a pillar, bearing an iron ring of the sort one might chain an animal to. It stood above an absolute pile of debris, half-covered in blown-in leaf litter accumulated over a few centuries and so thick with dust that it seemed wrong that even his footfalls left no prints in it.

“If you would be so good,” he said, crouching near it, although he was of course unable to sift through it for her. “It is fortunate for her that the ring was not left here as well, but a great many other things were. Most, I believe, no longer of use to her.”

This seemed to be true: there were the rusted remains of old weapons, old vessels with long-dissolved corks, and little caskets and chests that ranged from simple chunks of wood to ornately-worked metal which were mostly open and emptied, or contained only small items that no longer seemed to have any significance.

“There should be, I hope, a small casket - about the size of a man’s two hands together -” he held up his own, as if to demonstrate “ - and shaped after the head of a hound. I cannot imagine where else it would be, if it is not here, and I have had no means of looking.” This, vaguely troubled.

He added, in case it might be of help to her mapping: “We are now beneath the forest beyond the bailey.” Which explained why the light from above was so green. “And when we pass through the other side, will begin a loop that takes us back to it, and to the door I spoke of.” And then, after a pause, with a polite but unavoidable curiosity: “Your magic - or your science - that makes you a cartographer - is of your own making?”

He did not, as he had to help her, reach instinctively for it before remembering that it was useless to do so. But he nodded. "If you would bring her that," he said, with a trace of grimness, "it may be of use to her before she finds herself willing to extend her work to these underground areas." He did not ask her to open it - and it did appear to be locked, in some way - whether from politeness or from a sense that this was a matter for the Joyeuse Garde's eyes alone, it was difficult to say. Perhaps he only felt that she ought to do at least some work for it, rather than having her every tool handed to her on a silver platter.

It was, maybe, easy to imagine why Joy was shirking the work: Viatrix might not mind the dust, but it was a little more difficult to imagine the indolent and pampered-seeming woman currently soaking up the sun with Encke involved in hard labor in the dirt and the darkness.

(The truth - that it was not a fear of the labor, but a discomfort with the awful solemn mortality of the place crumbling into ash under the eye of a man who'd been dead so long - was something that Joy did not like to even admit to herself, let alone discuss.)

The box, at least, did not seem to be a casket in the sense of containing remains - perhaps, instead, only some archaic bit of vocabulary - but if it had been, it would have suited the general air of the place. Far away from the cicada noise and the running water and the breezes, the place was as funereal as imaginable, the general sense of its being suspended in time somehow only made more notable by the dim sunlight from above, rather than being interrupted by it. He rose, as if to continue leading her. "We move upwards, again. The ceilings will lower - you will find that you may have an idea of our depths by that measure, if it assists you in your work."

And they were, indeed, passing through hallways whose slope, though almost imperceptible, seemed to be bringing the slits in the ceiling nearer to them as they moved. Ornamentation again began to appear, almost intact, and the somewhat grimmer motifs gave way to the scenes of courtly romance again, which the ghost trained his eyes over with absent thoughtlessness as he spoke.

"I believe," he said, after a pause, "that the current keeper of the Garde feels that her effort is better directed towards the preservation of the life she keeps outside of this one, and to the world that that life inhabits, rather than this one. I in no way mean disrespect to your work or the work of your bonded. It is understandable, perhaps, that a person with a great deal of life in her would feel more affinity for a living world than a dead one, and more loyalty to a life that she has made for herself, rather than one that was chosen for her."

There was, in fact, something almost quietly adversarial in this, as if he was assaying a very delicate challenge while being too reluctant to impugn her impressive talents to do it openly.

He was silent for a long time. Dying and being unable to die again hit a little close to home, perhaps - as this seemed to be at about the point that he lapsed into a more studied silence - but it was perhaps as well, as they were once again finding themselves in corridors piled with debris, which made it a good thing that Viatrix had opted to stay in cat form. It would take hours, undoubtedly, to make progress here for anything bigger than a cat and more substantial than a ghost, and his silence kept her from needing to interrupt her progress to speak to him.

"If she cares for a dead world," he said at last, "I do not think that it is with any goal beyond her own pleasure. It would be unfair to ask her to aspire to more, if it is to come at so high a price as you mention."

A price he himself had already paid, in a way - dying and unable to die. But things had been different, a thousand years ago, and he had ended up in his current position through something that looked like voluntary choice, if you held it up in the right light. It seemed that Gouvernail - for all his grim references to Joy's ingratitude and laziness, for all her own allusions to his cranky lectures - at least had the grace to recognize the difference between a duty he had chosen and one that had been foisted on his protege against her will.

"But let her have her pleasure, then," he said. "It is not easily come by, and there is no purpose to any war we wage, if not for protecting what can only be had fully in times of peace and plenty. I have never shed blood for the goal of shedding more of it. If she wishes to be queen rather than soldier, I cannot stop her."

His words seemed strangely weighted, as they passed before an intricate mural of revelry: pennants and finery and lovers and their musical instruments and armfuls of flowers seated in the shade of impeccably beautiful trees: idyllic and indolent enjoyments for those without anxiety to cloud them. The link between the Garde's ornamentations of leisure and romance and the Knight's grim and dutiful obligation - the very name of the Joyeuse Garde itself - might possibly seem, in light of this little speech, very clear.

They were somewhat near the surface now, to judge from the height of the ceilings and the nearness of the light coming from them, and arriving at a tall, narrow iron door, barred with an enormously heavy bar - doable for one person, perhaps, but probably a trial - but not locked. Its imposing look was a startling contrast to the tastefully hedonistic decor of the walls around it. The fact that it was barred from this side suggested that perhaps the passageways had once been a sort of exit, or sanctuary, in case of trouble above.

"Do not tell her I said so," he added grimly. "She is already intractable."

"I fear it will be troublesome for you," he said, "but if you would be so kind."

It was, in fact, troublesome - the bar was heavy, but at least not rusted into place - but it gave, finally, only for the hinges themselves to also seem to resist the effort.

It was probably some sort of torture for him to be forced to stand idly and uselessly by, but he did so with an unmoving patience, too kind to lash out at Viatrix, at least, for the sake of his feelings (a luxury he did not always extend to Joy).

The reason for his insistence on this particular door was immediately evident: the way on the other side had been cleared. While the roundabout route they had taken had been tedious and mostly-blocked, the corridors back had been largely empty and, as Viatrix could now see, led to an area already clear and in fact in the heart of the complex, rather than down some dusty and out-of-the-way stairwell.

She emerged, in fact, in what looked almost like a bedroom: somewhere that Joy had put particular effort into, given the decidedly modern addition of department-store bedding and switched-off battery-powered fairy lights. It took a moment to realize - through light filtering from above with more clarity, less choked and more clean - that the bedroom had been assembled in something like a chapel, with the bed itself somewhat blasphemously heaped up on what was unmistakably a kind of altar. Given the lack of other suitable furniture anywhere they'd been, this was perhaps an understandable choice, but it was certainly an odd juxtaposition: nameless saints bending in stone decrepitude over the little chamber with its brightly-tiled floor, a stack of paperbacks arranged by the altar - or bed - and a row of little baskets arrayed on a shelf that had probably once been meant to receive votives of some sort, which seemed to mostly contain the kinds of things you might want if you were camping.

She had told Encke, not Viatrix, that she had spent a little while treating the Garde like a bomb shelter, in the wake of the Hollow. No reason for the bomb shelter not to be comfortable.

Incongruously, a modern wooden carving of seagulls hung on one wall; the room otherwise devoid of modern-day touches besides the bed, the baskets, the lights, and some candles - and a robe hung on the back of a saint's hands - in fact was so ornately carved and ornamented right to the stone that it was hard to tell that the door was there at all, blending into the paneled walls which encircled everything and funneled them towards stairs which appeared to lead back up into the bailey.

"This will make things much simpler for her, when she decides to overcome her -" he paused, apparently having been about to choose an uncharitable word, and chose a different one "- reluctance to take herself underground. It is, as you see, more accessible to her." He was casting an eye about the room that was radiating an expression of unmistakable disapproval, as if the sight of it offended him.