by Karen Myers
“Smugglers, spies, secret assignations, assassination plots.” Char Dazu ticked off a list. Penrys smiled at the relish in his voice. Sounds like there are popular stories on the topic.
“There’s some truth to all that,” Gen Jongto admitted. “The other tunnels are independent of the ones we’re in. Each is its own system, with its own exits, made for its own reasons. But they do intersect, mostly by accident. To qualify as one of the notju’s section leaders, I had to travel the whole warren of them, so that the maps can be updated.”
“Where will we come out?” Najud asked.
“I have in mind an exit on the south wall, near the eastern edge. Into the Armorers’ cluster of compounds.”
He raised a hand in caution. “That’s if no new obstacles have been erected since the last time I was in the tunnels. It’s going to take many hours, and we’re going to need supplies. I’ll do the shopping—I doubt they’ll notice me if I change my appearance.”
Munraz used his fire kit to burn a rag torn from the bottom of Mrigasba’s under-robe. Gen Jongto unbraided his hair and spread the gray ash liberally throughout it before rebraiding it. He followed this by turning his brown outer robe inside out to expose a clean, tan lining.
When he stood up and walked with the stiffness appropriate to an older man, Penrys agreed with him that he was unlikely to be recognized by anyone he encountered in the streets. The tricky part would be to avoid detection exiting or re-entering the grate.
She went with him as far as the grate to scan the area for people, and especially wizards. It was early in the morning, the dawn light just starting to show. She found nothing nearby, so he climbed the metal rungs attached to the side of the shaft, lifted the grate, and slipped out, lowering it silently back to its place.
She thought he was unlikely to return before mid-morning. If he doesn’t make it back, we’ll just have to retrace our steps to where I met Munraz, and then follow his route out to the eastern cliff.
Char Dazu had offered himself, if Gen Jongto didn’t return and they needed to try again. “I’ve been passing as a someone who is not a lupju all my life.”
She’d told him that Gen Jongto had all her money, and there would be no second ventures. It wasn’t strictly true—she’d held a little back for emergencies. She hadn’t forgotten that she had the remains of a Kigalino face painted on her, and the right clothing, but she doubted she could pass in daylight. She’d need her scarf back, too—the one wrapped around the bundle of sticks.
A trek of hours without water was not appealing, but she wasn’t going to send a young and hunted wizard up to meet his captors. Better the long way than to lose another one.
Four hours later, Penrys was heartily tired of narrow passages.
Gen Jongto had easily managed food but he could only carry so much water without attracting attention. He’d had to buy ale-skins and replace their contents from the fountains provided for the public. He had the most difficulty locating a seller of clothing without spending too much time. In the end, he’d settled for clean rags, thinking of bandages, and a couple of sturdy bags.
They’d attended to the various injuries and replaced the bandages. A little bit of the water had been spared for rags to wipe off faces and hands, before they set off.
Now they were as begrimed and filthy as if they hadn’t seen a bath for weeks.
Some of the tunnels along the route Gen Jongto followed were no larger than they needed to be. “Good thing smugglers made these,” Najud said to Penrys. “Had to make them big enough for men carrying things.”
“Small men,” Vylkar commented sourly, his forehead in constant peril from the ceiling.
Everyone in the party had his own device torch by now, and Penrys’s small belt-pouch of power-stones was half empty. So far there’d been only one roof collapse of unknown extent that had required a detour, but that had cost at least an hour all by itself.
The connections between the tunnel systems were varied. In one case, the intersection was through a hole in the floor. In another, there was a locked framework with bars. Penrys used a power-stone to enhance her skill at moving the internal components of the lock around.
Najud and Munraz kept up a running commentary while she worked, offering to take over with actual lock picks. She ignored them while she concentrated on the delicate work, but was distantly aware of Vylkar taking her own side, describing what she was doing. When it finally turned over, reluctantly, she smiled in satisfaction. “The workings were easy—it’s the rust that was hard. Thought I might need another power-stone to force it.”
“That’s not quite how we would do it,” Mrigasba offered. Char Dazu had his own opinions to volunteer, as well, and it took Gen Jongto’s sober and worn voice to recall them all to the task at hand.
“You can compare technical notes later,” he said. “This takes us into the next to last of the tunnels we want. I’d like to come out in daylight, lupjuwen, if you please.”
This particular tunnel was unappealing—low-ceilinged and dank. It smelled stale, as if no one had been in it for years.
“Can we trust the air?” Penrys asked.
“We may need to sacrifice a stick and light a real torch,” Najud said. “If fire can breathe, so can we.”
Reluctantly, she pulled the longest of the remaining sticks from her bundle, now reduced to just a few small pieces of wood. Instead of tying her abused scarf around them, she spread it out and piled the bits that were left onto it, then tied the corners of the cloth into a parcel.
Munraz cut some strips off a cloth rag and used them to bind the rag around the end of the stick. He reserved some fragments for tinder and used his fire kit to ignite them, and then the torch itself. Moving up behind Gen Jongto, he held the open flame carefully and watched it as it guttered.
“Don’t like the looks of that,” Gen Jongto muttered. “This air should be fresher—the next tunnel beyond connects to the outside. This one didn’t use to be this bad.”
“Should we retreat to a different route?” Char Dazu asked.
“It would cost us at least a couple of hours, and it would come out somewhere not nearly so convenient.” Gen Jongto stroked his face and considered.
Penrys pushed. “If the distance is short, I say we give it a try. Let’s see what it looks like at the other end.”
Munraz kept his grip on the makeshift torch, and held his device torch in the other. “Only one of us should go, so the others can pull him out if they have to. It can’t be you, Gen-chi—you’re the only that knows the tunnels. I’m the youngest and least useful. This is my task.”
Penrys lifted her hand to stop him and then aborted the gesture. He wasn’t a child. Before she could think of what to say, Najud spoke. “Take care, nal-jarghal.”
Munraz gave a jerky nod, and pushed politely past Gen Jongto, into the new tunnel. Penrys monitored him as he went. He stopped after no great distance, but she felt no alarm in him, and he began to move back towards them.
When he reappeared, the torch was still alive and glowing, just bare wood now with the rag burned away. He rejoined them in the adjoining tunnel and wiped his face with his sleeve.
After a few deep breaths, he told them what he’d found. “Someone’s built a wall, right across.”
Gen Jongto scowled. “That’s it, then. We’ll have to go around.”
Penrys ignored him and shared a glance with Vylkar. “What do you think, bilappa? We’ve got plenty of power-stones.”
Before he could reply, Mrigasba asked, “What did you have in mind?”
Soon the three of them, with Char Dazu, were deep in the technical details of just what sort of device would be best.
They had Munraz repeat his description of the wall in as much detail as he could. “It’s not joined to the tunnel at the top or sides,” Mrigasba summarized. “Sounds like drywall construction. Might be pretty easy to bring down.”
“Unless it’s thicker than you think,” Vylkar pointed out.
; Penrys shrugged. “Even if it is, the first device may demolish enough to open up the airway, and then we can deal with what’s left more easily.” She began sorting through the wood fragments she had left and shook her head, then she chose a device torch to sacrifice instead and went to work, sitting on the floor of the tunnel. The others leaned over her holding their device torches and suggested improvements or offered warnings freely, all of which she ignored.
Gen Jongto joined Najud and Munraz who were taking no part in the discussion. “Can they really bring down a stone wall with a bit of wood and a few pebbles?”
Najud half-smiled. “We don’t do this sort of work in sarq-Zannib, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Penrys heard them and looked up. “It’s actually not too difficult, if you’re willing to sacrifice the power-stones. That’s what makes it expensive. An arc of stones in the right shape can focus the force of another stone that’s pushed to destruction. If you can confine it inside a crack, you can get a nice explosion.”
“My wife,” Najud said, “The bringer of lightning.”
She laughed. “Better thank the Rasesni—without a handful of their power-stones, it would be a lot harder.” Behind her, Mrigasba cleared his throat.
More soberly, she told them. “I can’t use them all, either—we might have to try more than once.”
When she was done, she held in her hands a stick that had been originally set up as a device torch. Most of the long handle had been cut off and shoved into her sash for re-use. The far end held an arc of seven stones. The wood inside the arc had been shaved down to make a depression, in the middle of which a larger power-stone was embedded so that the outer arc was focused both across and downward into the singleton.
“It’s tricky,” she said. “You have to get the right geometry for the stones, and then the facets have to be well-cut. This is the best I can do with what I have on me.”
She glanced at Najud. “I’ve never done this before, only read about it. Couldn’t spare the power-stones to give it a try.”
Char Dazu shook his head. “I still don’t see how you’re going to trigger it.”
“That part’s easy,” she told him. “The wall’s not far. I’m going to set it in place, then I’ll power the stones from here.” She tapped her chain.
A thought occurred to her. “Now listen, all of you. The books are full of warnings about what happens. When it attacks the wall, it will displace the air, just the way that a large rock displaces water when it falls into a lake. When the air changes like that, it can hurt you.”
“Knock you down?” Munraz said.
“Not just that. You have air inside your body, too. What the books say is, you have to cover your ears to protect them, and open your mouth to let the air inside match the change in the air outside. And that’s what I want all of us to do.”
She held their eyes long enough to get gestures of consent from all of them.
“All right, then,” she said. “Let’s see what happens.”
As she walked alone down the oppressively dank tunnel, her device torch in one hand and the new device in the other, Penrys chewed on the thoughts she hadn’t shared with the others. This was her best set of power-stones for the purpose, from the ones she had on her. Any second or third attempt would be weaker, or might fail altogether, and she didn’t know if she could face another couple of hours wandering around these tunnels.
She wasn’t really hungry or thirsty yet, just tired and filthy. It was her mental control that bothered her, the fraying at the edges. It was harder and harder to banish the sight of Ijumo’s murder and the roiling anger that was making her muscles twitch. Making the device had required fine movements, and for a while she hadn’t been sure she could do it.
Najud had his own injuries dragging him down, but he knew there was something seriously wrong—his little pats of comfort in passing had been unexpected but welcome. She couldn’t talk about it with him yet, not while they were all trapped here. It wasn’t fair to put another burden on him like that.
She shook her head impatiently. I’ll think about it all later.
There it was, looming out of the dark into the light of her device torch—a rough drywall. You could attack it with a pick. If we had a pick.
Well, this will be a very expensive pick, then, won’t it?
Her mouth quirked for a moment, and she sought a piece of chinking along the lowest part that she could remove. She found one thicker than her hand and wiggled it out. When she stuck her hand in the resulting gap, it seemed deeper than the flat stone she’d pulled out. Perfect.
Carefully, she pushed the device inside, and then replaced the chink as deeply as she could without displacing the device.
It was hard to breathe, she discovered—she’d stayed too long. She turned and pushed her way through the inert air toward the distant light of the device torches, not sure if she was going to make it, gasping.
One step, and another. You can do this. One more step.
Suddenly she felt support on one side, hastening her along. Najud’s grip. When she got to the metal frame, hands reached down and pulled her out.
“Breathe!” Najud’s face loomed over her. “Big breaths.”
She obeyed, and gradually she felt more alert and noticed the worried expressions. “Sorry. Nasty down there.”
With Najud’s help, she stood up and leaned on him. “It’s in place. We need to move away before I trigger it.”
When they settled down again, several yards further down the upper tunnel, she looked at them all in the light of the device torches. “Remember, cover your ears and open your mouths. And watch your heads—it might bring down loose rock elsewhere, too. Hard to say how powerful it will be.”
She hung her head and concentrated on the distant power-stones. The power she poured from her chain into the focal stone pushed out to the arc of stones surrounding it and was reflected back, and she kept pumping power into the loop, reinforcing it until…
With a low thud she could feel in her bones, the air became solid for a moment and knocked her sideways. An impenetrable haze of dust surrounded the device torches, and then it was cleared away in a draft of freshening air.
“You did it!” Munraz cried, and Vylkar murmured, “Well done.”
Gen Jongto just shook his head, then he picked up his device torch and headed back to the intersection. They all followed him into the lower tunnel, the draft of air in their faces. When they got to the wall, they found most of the central section in rubble, the rocks spilled out all over the floor.
Munraz scrambled up the slope of loose rock and stuck his head and torch out the other side. “We made it all the way through,” he said, when he tumbled back. “We’ll still have to clear some of these rocks out of the way to get by.”
He suited action to words by thrusting his device torch at Najud and lifting a rock to heave it to one side. A work party quickly developed for the able-bodied. Najud protested being assigned to torch duty like Mrigasba, but was overruled by the others. “Bad enough you probably opened those wounds again pulling me out of the tunnel,” Penrys told him. “We need light on both sides, so make yourself useful.”
She kissed his cheek surreptitiously when he glowered at her, and went back to hauling rocks aside.
It was tedious, dirty work, and even with rags wrapped around their hands no one escaped scratches and abrasions.
Char Dazu asked Gen Jongto, “Who would have built this wall, and why?”
“No way to know. It’s recent, no more than eight years old—that much I’m sure of from my own experience. When I get back and look at the updated maps, I may be able to pin that down more exactly if anyone’s gone this way more recently.”
Mrigasba held the torches up on his side and said, “This is prepared stone, from outside, not rubble from the tunnel walls somewhere. Quarried stone. Some of it’s even shaped and cut.”
Gen Jongto paused a moment to wipe his face. “Leftover building material, most li
kely. That’d be the easiest thing to lay your hands on. Doesn’t take much to build a wall.”
Then he looked down at his rag-wrapped hands and the rocks remaining to be shifted. “Well, I suppose that’s easier said when you’re planning the project than when you’re actually moving the material.”
Penrys said, “The wall looked finished from this side. The gaps were chinked. Built from this side?”
Mrigasba asked, “All the way up?”
“Well, I was looking at the lower courses.”
“Look at the edges,” he said, directing her attention to the still intact portion alongside the tunnel walls.
She finally saw what he meant—the chinking stopped about halfway up. “You think they finished the lower part completely, then pulled themselves out and closed it behind them?”
“We’ll know when we see the other side. If the chinking goes all the way to the top, then that’s how it was made.”
She nodded, and bent over another stone.
They managed to carve a passage out by disassembly without creating more than one additional partial collapse, and two of the power-stones were recovered from the rubble—one intact, and the other shattered. Penrys pocketed them both, surprised that any had been found at all.
Gen Jongto scrambled through first, with his device torch, and called softly for the others to join them. Penrys noticed Munraz hanging back conscientiously to take the rear guard position and refrained from smiling. Who’s going to sneak up on us from behind? Still, it was good to know that Najud or Mrigasba couldn’t fall behind with Munraz on watch.
When she reached the other side, she lifted her torch to inspect what was left of the wall and found Gen Jongto doing the same. “Mrigasba was right,” he told her. “Built from this side, in the narrowest part of the tunnel. I wonder why?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter right now, I suppose.” He glanced at the five foreigners and laughed. “If your embassies could see you now.”