The Lower Wardens

A handful of House Vandahl servants sworn to a duty the house will not admit exists: keeping the sealed lower halls of the Sered catacombs shut, and keeping what the house buried down there out of anyone else's hands.

Three-quarters of Castle Sered stands closed, and House Vandahl would rather you believed it was disrepair than ask why. The truth is a family secret with a small staff. The Lower Wardens are house-born servants — never family, always trusted — who carry the keys nobody names, mortar the doors that work themselves loose, and turn back anyone who comes sniffing after the lower crypts. The house buried generations of its dead down there with grave-goods, and a failing house cannot afford for the wrong people to learn what those niches are worth: caskets of old coin, temple-bronze and burial relics that would fetch a fortune from a salvage broker or a tomb-robber. So the Wardens guard it. They are paid in silence and the promise their own names will be kept off the lower niches and the work kept quiet. They are owed back-wages the house keeps deferring, and most of them have stopped believing the promise — which is exactly why the house watches them as closely as it watches the doors.