“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.”
Michel retreated a few hundred yards back up the tunnel while the squad sapper worked. He listened to echoes coming down to them from a side passage, and once even saw the bobbing of a lantern. He wondered if je Tura was down here somewhere, having caught wind of the manhunt and desperately trying to avoid the searchers.
He caught Tenik’s eye. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Oh?” Tenik asked.
“We’ve been down here for over an hour and we’ve only seen one single other squad.”
“So?”
“So there are four thousand soldiers searching these tunnels. I get the feeling the catacombs are bigger than we considered.”
“Not much we can do about it now.”
Michel thought about some of the maps in his satchel—the ones there’d been no time to copy. Many of them were half-finished, sometimes contradicting the more complete maps and other times hinting at the idea that there were tunnels that went far deeper, down below the base of the plateau. He wrestled with a fear that they’d just drive je Tura down into the farthest reaches without a prayer of catching him.
There was a distant boom, and Michel and Tenik headed back to their squad to find the path ahead of them cleared—the heavy grate blasted along the edges and pushed off to one side of the tunnel. Michel ducked through the remains and into the first of the chambers, raising his lantern to get a good look.
Tenik gave a low whistle. “These aren’t chambers, Michel. These are damned temples.”
He didn’t seem far off. The rooms were much larger than the map indicated, with vaulted, cavernous ceilings and a width that was large enough to accommodate most theaters. The floors were covered in dust, the walls slick. At second glance, Michel realized that it may very well be a theater or conference room of some kind, as apparent seating had been carved into about two-thirds of the room in a half-moon shape.
There was no evidence that anyone had been in here for a long time. Michel studied the floor, looking for footprints in the dust, mildly disappointed that he didn’t find any beyond those of the soldiers who’d just entered with him. He crossed clear to the other side, where he found, per his map, a narrow tunnel leading to the next chamber.
“Chamber clear,” one of the soldiers reported.
“Then we keep moving,” Michel responded.
Michel and his squad searched chamber after chamber for hours. They moved methodically, following a path he’d laid out on his map so that they could search crisscrossing chambers without the risk of someone getting behind them. They found a dozen paths leading back to the general maze of the catacombs, most of which were still sealed off. Occasionally they came across one that had rusted through or been blasted in decades ago by looters.
It was almost noon when Michel checked his pocket watch and called for a halt in one of the larger chambers they’d attended. This one appeared to be some sort of communal living space, complete with old notches at regular intervals along the walls where torches might have been lit a thousand years ago.
Michel was exhausted and more than a little emotionally frayed. Even without any real excitement, he found the inky darkness battering to his nerves. The uncertainty was taking its toll, and every time they entered a new chamber, he wondered if they would trigger some ancient trap or encounter a collapsed tunnel or lose a man to madness in the claustrophobic area. Add onto all of that his exhaustion—they’d searched all through the night, for ten hours straight—and he felt ready to collapse.
“Do we have a depth?” Tenik asked him quietly. Michel could see the same exhaustion in Tenik’s eyes, and took a moment to pull out his maps, looking carefully at the chambers. Decades ago a thoughtful cartographer had given a depth for each chamber, but many of the numbers were worn off, and Michel had no idea how accurate the legible ones actually were.
“Eighty feet below street level,” Michel responded.
Tenik ran a hand through his hair. “Damn. It feels like we’re so much deeper. I can throw a rock eighty feet.”
Michel echoed the sentiment. To be so close to the city—probably just fifty or sixty feet below the basement floor of the capitol building—and yet be so removed from the world made him feel a little crazy. He looked around at each of the soldiers, wondering who would snap first, and curious if anyone from any of the other search parties had snapped already. He let his eyes fall to the box of string held by a soldier, forcing himself to remember that if he began to get twitchy, he could just follow that string right back to the surface.
It was just fine. No chance of being trapped down here.
“Do you think someone else has caught him already?” a soldier asked.
“If they have,” Michel said, “they’re supposed to send someone down our string to find us and let us know. But that could take two hours on its own.” He cleared his throat and checked his watch. “We’ve got about an hour left until we’re meant to head out. We’re only about”—he unrolled his map and traced their path—“eight hundred yards from an exit.” He pointed at the closest doorway into the next chamber. “We’ll head in that direction. Don’t worry, fellas, we’ll be back in the sunlight before too long.”
There were a few “yes, sirs,” but most of them sullenly stared at their feet. Michel wasn’t sure whether they were as frayed as he was from the oppressive rock or if they were tired and angry at not having found je Tura. He opened his mouth, trying to think of something to say to cheer them up, when a voice came to him from across the chamber.