He shouted Tharkay’s name, and called in English as he led the way down the first tunnel; distantly for a little while he heard Forthing and Ferris doing the same, until the rock swallowed their voices. He dragged the softened wax across the rough rock wall, at each division of the passage, choosing always the rightmost way; it left a smudge of pale yellow that showed clearly in the light of the torch one of the soldiers carried by his side. The wind currents brought other noises: he heard shouts and footsteps, echoing queerly along the hallways, and his mouth held the unpleasant taste of bitter smoke.
They looked into storerooms, mostly empty and disused. By any fourth or fifth branching, the tunnel would begin to take on more the character of what the place had once been, Laurence supposed: a mine, the tunnels rough-hewn and pickaxed; when they reached a dead end in one, the torch gleamed on a thin line of silver, the remnant of a vein pursued to its end.
In one chamber, somewhere near the third branching, they found a writing-table, with a handful of scattered letters and pen and ink: but old; the ink dried to a black crumbled clot. Laurence glanced at the topmost sheet, a work broken off mid-stream, and then held it to the soldier nearest him, an officer he thought; the man wore a mark of senior rank. “Can you make anything of it?”
The soldier studied it and said, “This is a letter written to Ran Tian Yuan: I believe he was a chief of the rebels,” in a woman’s clear voice. “He was executed ten years ago.” Laurence with a start looked at her: deep lines about her eyes, her face not very old but leathered from sun and wind, and a peppered scar of burnt-in powder upon her cheek.
The woman took up the papers and held them out to one of the other soldiers, to be bundled up together; she fell in again with Laurence as they went through the tunnels. Laurence glanced back at the other soldiers behind them. Their hair was bound up beneath snug caps, with wrappings bound down beneath their chins, likely for warmth when aloft; in the dim light he could not tell whether they were men or women.
The tunnel died shortly after, and they retreated towards the entry, to take another branch; before they could go down this, footsteps came towards them running. Laurence was appalled to find the soldier thrust him behind her arm as they drew their swords, and another of the soldiers push through the hallway to take her side instead.
The enemy soldiers coming had a look of desperation, drawn blades wet with blood, and pulled up short to see them; then it was a sudden, close struggle in the passageway. Their numbers were even, Laurence thought, but he could not easily tell; the tunnel was too narrow to see clearly, and the soldiers at the front, of both parties, had dropped their torches to free their hands for fighting. He took a blow from a fist to his temple and shook his head to clear it; then thrust back high, his long blade coming over the other’s guard. Then he caught another arm descending, and the woman soldier drove her own blade, a shorter one, into the man’s arm-pit beneath his thick jerkin. She grunted abruptly with pain and fell: one of the enemy had thrust a sword into her thigh. Laurence stepped into the gap. He killed three more, and then a sword took him hot in the meat of his arm; he dropped back and let another step into his place.
Abruptly the enemy soldiers gave over the fight: they made one heaving push, and then withdrew hurrying down the hall. Laurence said, “Let them go.” Twelve lay dead in the corridor, and five of their own party. The waste of it made him sorry, with the battle above already decided. They bound up their hurts as best they could. The woman officer was limping; another soldier, Laurence thought a man, looked dazed: his cap and its bindings were wet through with blood, and a trickle coming down his cheek. Two soldiers stood with him; he swayed between them and did not speak.
Laurence looked down the branching they had been on the point of taking: he wished to get the wounded to safety, but the enemy soldiers had been coming this way. “Come with me, if you please,” Laurence said, to two of the unwounded soldiers, one of them a torch-bearer, “and the rest stay here. We will have a quick look, then return to the entry.”
The passageway smelled of smoke: burning wood, a torch, acrid. His head ached. Blood was wet and sticky upon his arm and on his fingers, and the orange glow of torchlight played from behind his back and over the corridor walls, leaping like a bonfire. There was a strange familiarity to it: the narrow walls in around him. And when he came to a wooden door set in the wall, he put his hand upon it and pushed it open.
There was a room, and a pallet inside it; a small torch burned low in a socket upon the wall. A man lay upon the cot, his face bruised and battered, his hands curled against his chest bloody: and Laurence knew him; knew him and knew himself. He remembered another door opening, in Bristol, three years before, and a voice asking him to come outside his prison, in a Britain under siege.
“Tenzing,” Laurence said, and, as Tharkay opened feverish eyes, went to help him stand.