Wrath of Empire

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.”

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.

“Sir,” the voice echoed in Dynize. “I think I’ve found something.”

Michel exchanged a glance with Tenik and got to his feet, heading across the wide space toward a lantern light off in the distance. He soon found a Dynize soldier standing beside a stone table of some sort, just a few feet from a separate exit that headed in the opposite direction from their planned path. She smiled tightly at him and nodded to the ground.

The dust outside the tunnel entrance had been disturbed recently, enough that Michel couldn’t make out many single footprints, just a trail leading down into the darkness. Inside the tunnel, stashed behind the table the soldier stood beside, were six small barrels of black powder. Michel nudged each of them with his toe. All but one was empty. He knelt beside them, breath held, and turned the barrels upside down.

Burned into the bottom of each barrel was a single rose.

“These are from Blackhat storage,” Michel said, eyeing the path into the darkness. He looked up at Tenik, then the soldier who’d made the discovery. “Ma’am,” Michel said, “you may have just found Landfall’s number-one enemy of the state. Everyone on your feet! There’s been a change of plans!”