She doesn't have anything she can spare to throw back at him, not even shoes, so she'll have to settle for shouting.

She wants to get into a shouting match with the Cuno? Cuno will oblige with gusto.

Backing up for a running start is not necessary. Whooping with pure unadulterated joy is supererogatory. Pulling hard on the ropes to get yourself spinning in the air, even if you have flight training and the erratic aerial movement won't give you vertigo, crosses the line into being gently discouraged. Nevertheless, Gwen is having as much fun as it's possible to have while jumping off a cliff. It's rare that she gets the chance to use up a Levitate outside of an emergency, and if that means letting her partner get away with dawdling, well, she could technically be doing something important down there.

Gwen manages to pack in almost a whole minute of antigravity shenanigans before the sound of the nearby screaming argument grows loud enough to remind her that she has other responsibilities. Feeling put out yet again, she descends to offer the detective a rope.

The moment it started it was already over. There is no way to best Cuno in a pointless shouting match. He is simply the best there is. The high-volume torrent of profane drivel he is capable of producing is simultaneously too inane for any sensible person to take seriously and too mean-spirited to be a casual attempt at inflicting ego damage. Insulting comparisons to sedentary wildlife, Evil gods, the undead, and women of little virtue figure prominently. For years he has honed the craft of producing blue clouds, and today he is among the virtuosos of the art. All others engage with him to their own detriment.

You need to be louder than him. That's the only surefire way to win this argument.

She's trying! She is acutely aware that her off-the-cuff cracks don't hold a candle to the scorching cascade of hate pouring out of this kid's mouth, and is compensating by trying to drown him out. Trouble is, he's got the pipes to match her own, and now she can barely hear herself think.

Not to interrupt this scintillating tête-à-tête, but climbing a static rope is significantly easier and does not necessitate going past the angry one.

Yeah, this conversation is going nowhere. She accepts the rope and finishes the climb, which is almost effortless now that she has a straight shot upwards. It's a little awkward to start with, since there are no knots in the rope and the hemp fibers slide easily in her still-wet hands, but since it's only anchored at the top there's nothing stopping her from wrapping it around her fists as she goes along. The kid – Cuno, assuming his verbal tic is illeism – calls her a hag and a banshee and several other disgraceful things before he takes her refusal to reply as the signal to give up, and then it's just her and the repetitive slog of putting one hand after the other.

The rope lets her bypass the damaged part of the church, too smooth to find purchase on but conveniently there to brace against, and then she's able to haul herself onto the unbroken pediment. It's wide and slopes gently, which means she can get the rest of the way up without having to exert herself.

The writing on the surface of the church peters out here, of noticeably lower quality than the earliest sections. If she cares to read it, some of the final lines of text on the Church of Humanity:

— missing since yesterday's sermon, though at the time he would not say one way or another if it was true. It was the visiting Abydikos Eugen who announced to all that his morning prayers went unanswered, and this the Archbanker confirmed at once. The darkness has yet to —

— finally arrived from Primarch Seib. His missive was accompanied by Select Leo Novac, whose presence is most welcome regardless of the circumstances surrounding the church these past few weeks. The unquiet dead have risen from the sea, and Escadar has struggled without —

— deny that Aroden is dead. His priests and saints have no account of the matter, nor do any clerics who speak for Absalom, save for that His death was not foretold in the prophecies of Glory. Ownership of the Church of Humanity passes now to His —

The prose is terse and the artifice is sloppy. Would you expect anything less from an epitaph written on the roof of a condemned building?

Those were dark times – metaphorically and literally. Don't think too harshly of them, they were doing their best.

She can empathize with the struggle. Stopping multiple times on the way up was clearly an indulgence, one that her forearms are already paying for. You can't do the heavy lifting with your legs when you're climbing a static rope.

The last few feet are mercifully easy. She hauls herself over the lip onto the roof of the church, panting and swearing under her breath. The crest is wide enough to support a copse but narrow enough to see clear through to the other side, where the river feeding the valley disappears into an endless deciduous forest. There are mountains in the distant north, and what looks like a lake or an estuary to the west. From this vantage point it's hard to even tell that they're on an island.

And, Gwen was right: there is a skylight. In the middle of a round supporting dais is a fat glass oculus, ten feet in diameter and bulging slightly in the middle. It's absolutely filthy, covered in grime and rotten acorns and ferns growing in the soil caked into the cracks, and there's no obvious way to open it from this side.

The glass is two inches thick. It's not designed to come out, and it won't pry loose for anything shy of a crowbar.

The crowbar is a modern tool. What you need is ancient, reliable, and easily obtained: a sufficiently large rock. Get looking.

So she goes hunting for a big rock, venturing down the very gradual slope on the other side towards the forest. At this elevation there are plenty of small stones but nothing that looks like it would do much more than chip the glass even if thrown from a sling – which would still serve as a backup plan, maybe, except she doesn't have a sling and Gwen probably doesn't either. She spends a minute or two walking in a circle, kicking through piles of pebbles and dry brush in case there's anything promising hidden underneath, but finds nothing.

On the way back she will unavoidably notice the person silently observing her from the branches of a tree growing in the copse, mostly because the leaves provide excellent camouflage but only from one side.

Doesn't register as a threat – too small, too unarmed – which means she's a potential source of information.

"Hey! Do you know where I can find a rock around here, something yea big or bigger? I'm trying to break the church's skylight."

This endears her to Cunoesse immediately – it's rare that Cunoesse meets anyone who shares her love of vandalism – but it does not inspire her to helpfulness.

"You! You were playing the shouting game with Cuno just now!"

What a shrill voice. It's like she's acting out the part of an insipid princess in a pageant.

"The what game?"

"You pick a word, you shout it, they shout it louder, you shout it even louder than that…" She rolls her fingers in an 'ad nauseam' sort of way.

You're not going to get a better justification for hollering "fuck" at the top of your lungs so many times, my liege.

"And I won," she says proudly. "But as fun as it was, I need to get into the church so I can finish investigating the guy buried under the door."

"You're a pig? Didn't know they had women pigs," Cunoesse says suspiciously.

"… why wouldn't there be any?"

"Human women are all spinsters and whores," she explains, with the certainty of a mathematician delivering a lemma. "All the pigs are punters and all the punters are men. Doesn't work out, see?"