Their argument was cut off by the arrival of one of Vlora’s scouts. It was a young woman, dusty and glassy-eyed from a hard ride, her horse worked into a lather. The woman didn’t bother to salute before barking out her report: “Ma’am, we’ve just caught sight of another Dynize army.”
Vlora’s head snapped up. “Where?”
“To our southeast. Two brigades, coming on quick. They’re going to cut off our escape the moment we get out of the foothills.”
Chapter 61
Thousands of Dynize soldiers flooded every known entrance to the catacombs in the Landfall Plateau at four o’clock in the morning. It was an impressive display, carried out with a precision that Michel found almost startling. Hundreds of copies of the catacomb maps were made in the course of just a couple of days, each one sectioned into squares drawn in different-colored ink and assigned to a company of soldiers. The companies were divided into platoons, each one of which was equipped with lanterns, pole-arms, pistols, swords, and a box of colored string that an infantryman would unravel as they searched the tunnels to mark that they’d passed through.
Michel watched as a platoon in their turquoise uniforms and steel breastplates hammered the lock off the iron-bar door in the basement of an old church not far from the capitol building and rushed down through the church’s cellar of ossuaries and into the darkness below.
Michel held a lantern and a pistol, and he watched the last of the soldiers disappear with growing trepidation. He wasn’t entirely certain which he feared more: cornering je Tura in some cave where a load of soldiers would die trying to bring him down or not finding je Tura at all.
“Claustrophobic?” Tenik asked.
“Not particularly,” Michel answered, “but I am not made to go into a place without an easy exit, and instinct is a hard thing to overcome.”
“If all these maps are right, we’ll do just fine.” Tenik was carrying a whole satchel full of those maps over one shoulder – all the originals that Michel had found in the Millinery. Not all of them had been copied – just the three with the most minute detail – and Michel wanted the rest on hand in case they needed to figure something out while they were deep underground.
“I am admittedly nervous about mass-produced maps done on the spur of the moment.”
Tenik leaned toward him. “I can’t disagree. But we pulled in all the regimental cartographers to get this done. They weren’t amateurs.”
“I sure to pit hope not. How did you manage to organize this whole thing so fast?” Michel glanced back up the stairs into the back of the church that they now stood beneath. He could hear voices up there: people shouting commands or asking for updates. The church was a sort of command center, and Michel and Tenik and the two platoons accompanying them were a “mobile” version of that command center sent to search the area directly beneath the capitol building.
A new squad of soldiers rushed down the stairs into the basement, squeezing in between Tenik and Michel and following their comrades into the darkness.
“Seriously, I’m damned impressed.”
Tenik waited until the soldiers had all disappeared before answering in a low voice. “We got all this organized because most of these men know someone who’s died to je Tura’s bombs over the last month. Revenge is a powerful motivator.”
They were joined by another squad, this one gathering around Michel and Tenik in the narrow space in the church basement. Michel glanced from face to face, noting the eagerness and hoping that none of them turned out to be claustrophobic. He took the satchel of maps from Tenik and looped it over his shoulder, then plucked one of them out, unrolled it, and turned it over on itself until he could hold it easily draped over one arm.
“All right,” he said, “you’ve all been briefed by Tenik here, so I’ll make this short: The capitol building sits directly over a series of chambers that probably date back to the old Dynize Empire. We’re going to sweep those chambers, looking for hidden alcoves and nooks where a single man might hide.” He swept his finger over a route he’d planned out in pencil, then asked Tenik to hold his lantern closer. “Be on the lookout for any indication that someone had been living down here: bedding, tools, gunpowder, even footprints in the dust. If the walls begin to close in on you, tell one of us and then trace the string back up to the surface. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” a dozen voices responded.
“Good.”
Michel set aside the map and searched his valise for another – one of the older, more detailed maps that they didn’t have copies of. He spread it across his lap and traced their route out one more time, making sure that they weren’t going to miss anything by depending on the newer maps. The tunnels lined up with their plans admirably, and he was just about to roll the map back up when something caught his eye. It was a label on one of the dozens of chambers that they’d be searching, each of them marked by the cartographer with a single word in a language Michel wasn’t familiar with.
It was labeled MARA.
The sight of the word made Michel’s heart jump. “Let’s go,” he told the soldiers.
“Is something wrong?” Tenik asked quietly as the soldiers headed down into the darkness.
“This word here,” Michel pointed. “What language is that?”
“Same language as the rest of those rooms, I’m guessing. Must be old Dynize.”
“Do you know what it means?”
“Haven’t a clue. Yaret might know.”
The discovery troubled Michel as they followed their escort into the tunnels. He tried to shake it off, and had gone less than two hundred yards when he decided that perhaps he should rethink the answer to that Are you claustrophobic? question that he’d been asked a few minutes before. The tunnel they followed sloped gently downward, the rock slick with moisture and lichen, the light of Michel’s lantern playing across the uneven shadows. It was so narrow that he could touch both sides and the ceiling without reaching.
Michel had always thought of the catacombs beneath Landfall as something akin to a sewage system – in that everyone knew they were there, but no one really liked to talk about them. Some people were afraid of tunnel collapses, others that they were haunted. Most agreed that it was best not to disturb the rest of the ancient dead.
They followed a zigzag pattern through a series of cross-halls and small rooms filled with ossuaries, full-blown tombs, and even bones packed into alcoves so tightly that not one of them could be dislodged. He reined in the soldiers every few minutes, moving slowly and consulting his maps by lantern light even though he had memorized their route. When it came to someplace as disorienting as the catacombs, he didn’t want to make a mistake.
Their journey consisted of long stretches of moody silence, the soldiers tense and irritable, punctuated by the distant echoes of other searchers. After some time their squad vanguard finally called a stop, and Michel and Tenik were called up to examine an immensely heavy iron grate blocking their path. Michel pressed his face to the grate and noted the way the light from his lantern disappeared into the darkness beyond without revealing any walls.
“I’ve heard stories that the Kez sealed up a lot of these tunnels decades before I was born,” he said. “We’ve reached the first chamber. Get to blasting.”
One of the soldiers kicked at the grate. “It’s solid, sir. If the room is still closed up, can’t we count out the chances of them being enemy bases?”
“These chambers have more than one entrance,” Tenik said. “We’re going to do a proper job of this.”