It did. “You’ve had worse.”
Olem struggled to stand up, and Vlora put her arm beneath his shoulder to get him back to his feet so that they could survey the damage. “The dragoons are pressing,” Olem commented.
“Too many dead clogging the road,” Vlora responded. “They won’t be able to mount another charge at this point. All their cards were in that cuirassier charge.”
“Pit, that scared the shit out of me. Damned good thinking, detonating some powder. Otherwise they might have hit us before we even saw them.”
Vlora didn’t feel as if she’d added much of anything to that fight. They should have seen that possible flanking maneuver and been ready for it. Frankly, she was furious with herself for overlooking it. “Looks like our boys are pretty mauled. We need to grab our wounded and fall back, double time.”
“Agreed.” Olem pushed Vlora away, testing his footing, then headed down the road shouting orders as if he wasn’t still bleeding heavily from his forehead. Vlora grabbed a nearby infantryman, pointing at Olem.
“Find the colonel a surgeon. Make sure he gets stitched up within five minutes,” she ordered.
Vlora spotted Taniel coming down the side of the opposite valley from her, his rifle slung over one shoulder. He stopped beside a dead cuirassier, watching one of the horses panicking in a nearby bush, before finishing his walk toward Vlora. “Those cuirassiers just came out of nowhere,” he commented. “I was so focused on the battle, I didn’t see them until you caused a ruckus with their powder.”
“I barely saw them in time myself, and they were right behind me,” Vlora responded. “I’m lucky one didn’t spot me and put a bullet in my back.” She shook her head, staring bleakly at the carnage one more time. This was supposed to be a way of discouraging the Dynize—clog the road, kill a few hundred of them, draw out their sorcery support, and then flee. Instead, the Dynize had managed to flank them in mere minutes. “Whoever is in command isn’t someone I want to play games with.”
Taniel remained silent.
“Pit,” Vlora said softly. “Now we have wounded to haul.”
“They’ll slow us down less than the capstone.”
“Yes, but we can ditch the capstone if we need to.”
Taniel seemed surprised. “You’d really do that?”
“Burt has the rest of the godstone. The cap won’t do them any damned good. If we need to drop it, we drop it.”
“It might do them some good,” Taniel said hesitantly. “It’s still potent old sorcery.”
“It’s not worth the lives of my men,” Vlora insisted.
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?”