Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (32 page)

    
“If it’s another way in here, we damn sure need to know about it, Lupus,” she told me.  She was right.  We hadn’t seen one of the globes for an hour and had no way to communicate with D’gattis.  Only once had he ever come to us, when we had found a central tower that formed a part of the palace wall.  I am sure now that, if he knew where we were at this point, he would have come running.

    
Feet of compacted soil filled the streets above us, but the city had been built with an advanced sewer system that gave us passage.  What had likely been manhole covers and drains up into homes and municipal buildings, like the towers, were our doorways into structures that had born the weight of tons of mud and water – and later men and trees – for hundreds of years.  That anyone could make anything that strong amazed me.  The place should be wreckage.

    
We came up out of the sewer into a huge, open building.  Rats scurried in surprise at our appearance, having lived here undisturbed for however long.  The reek was awful, the floor sticky from their droppings.  The ceiling formed an arch easily two hundred feet in the air, littered with cobwebs and lit by skylights partially overgrown with roots and covered by running water.  The yellow sun shining through what must have been a thick, plate glass cast a rippling light and made flickering shadows for us to see by.

    
The hall stood about one hundred feet in length, half of that wide.  A raised dais held a throne with nothing sitting on it.  Once-proud banners or tapestries were now rags on the floor, beds for rats and worse.  I saw a huge snake slithering along one wall, obviously hunting.  I wondered that the rats stayed in its presence.

    
Genna pointed out to me the rotted, falling remains of what had likely been some sort of bandstand or gallery to either side of the room.  If this were a court, then that is where the courtiers sat.  Our end of the hall stood next to the main entrance: a rotted door fallen off its hinges.

    
“We need to get D’gattis and Ancenon here,” I said, my voice hushed despite myself.  Even in its wreckage, the nobility of the room lived on.  The pillars that lined the hall, dusty and stained by time, still appeared grand, with intricately carved tops and bases. I wondered at the people who had held court here, designed and built this place with their wealth, and run their part of this world.

    
Genna shook her head.  “Not yet,” she said.  “I still smell fresh air.  How do snakes and rats get in here?”

    
“They must tunnel in through the ceiling,” I argued.  “Maybe the stream dug its way through, and the level is down now.”

    
“Maybe,” she conceded.  “Hasn’t rained in a long time, the level could be down.  But running water would mark the floor, and it is pretty dry.  Too much dust, not enough mud for that.”

    
I agreed.  I didn’t know about tracking like Genna.  We crossed the hall, poked through the rotten wood where the bandstand had been, stood on the dais and looked around the chair.  Nothing – even a body would have been a nice change.  Satisfied with this room, we put our noses to the door to decide if fresh air flowed in or out.

    
We both felt the breeze coming into the room.  Moving out, we walked down a long hall with more of the stained marble columns along the exterior.  Windows, broken in to allow mudslides from a thousand years ago, were now just portals for solid earth mounds along the walls.  If the hall hadn’t been so wide it would have been impassable – now it was merely an obstacle course and a maze.

    
Stepping gingerly along the hall, shifting left and right past mounds of earth, we looked through doorways where wooden doors had rotted from their hinges to reveal rooms overrun with earth from broken windows.  We had seen this all through the city.  I couldn’t imagine how the ceilings had held up so long, but many had.  In some places I had stayed behind while Genna wriggled through wrecked arches, dirt and muck.  Murky darkness covered us like a blanket, the light of my sword casting cryptic shadows through which we would walk.  We had enough blue light for us to find whatever we had been looking for and to keep from falling down a flight of stairs or through a hole in the floor if there were any.  Now it revealed more rat trails and droppings, a path that snaked down the hall.

    
At the hall’s end we found another rotted-out doorway.  We had gone too far for my tastes and I felt we should turn back, but Genna had her interest up.  The doorway’s empty maw revealed an even larger anteroom, twenty feet across, circular with arches rising to meet about twenty feet in the air to form a peaked ceiling.  Here roots had cracked the ceiling and created an obvious tunnel down from the surface.

    
Mud had stained the floor.  When it rained this must have turned into a deluge.  The air smelled of the rich earth we had tasted our entire time here.

    
“That didn’t feed the whole city with air,” Genna said, matter-of-factly.  She shook her head.  “Even the rats would need more than that.”

    
I had to agree. Genna’s mind constantly took things apart and put them back together.  I couldn’t help thinking that she would have made a good technician, though this world was centuries away from the first person who would ever hold that title.

    
There were three doors to the room, as well as the one we had come in through.  All were rotted away, brass hinges turned green with verdigris, the passages beyond them dark.  Two, we quickly discovered, were filled with dirt.  Another was a maze of cobwebs that I didn’t look forward to digging through, and the fourth more open, a narrow tunnel with no windows, leading up at about a ten-degree slope.

    
There was no doubt in my mind that fresh air flowed from that direction.  We had been on patrol all day and my muscles felt like bags of sand, but the fresh air exhilarated me.  Like Genna, now I wanted to see where it came from.

    
We traveled up the slope for ten minutes without seeing an adornment on a wall or evidence of anyone passing.  Dust coated the floor and shuffling our feet kicked it up in a storm that rose to our waists.  That floor, once revealed, had been built of a solid, white stone, mortared and dirty.  The center had been worn more than the edges – revealing that the way had been used frequently, but hadn’t been important enough to resurface. 
It was probably a servants’ way to a kitchen or a living space
, I thought.

    
The flow of air remained constant – with more of the loamy earth smell from before.  We traveled into gloom made slightly better by the sword’s light.  I desperately wanted to hold Genna’s hand but felt silly for thinking so.  I gripped my sword tighter instead.  Finally we arrived at an arch with steel double doors at the end of the hallway.  The doors remained intact, though rusted at the hinges.  Air moaned lightly through gaps made as the doors were pulled away over time from their moorings.

    
“Can you open it?” Genna asked.

    
“Can you lift it if it falls over on me?” I asked in return.  It stood fifteen feet high and who knew how thick?  Thick rivets held bands in place at three levels and huge, heavy rings were set in the left and right face.  No less than ten feet across – I’d never survive if it fell on me.

    
“If we had a beam, we could lean it against one door and try to open the other,” Genna said.

    
“Yeah,” I agreed, somewhat sarcastically, “we should have brought one.”  She hit me and I was reminded of Elle in Volkhydro.  My armor rang hollow down the hall.

    
“Big milk canister,” she cursed me.  “I don’t see you coming up with any brilliant idea.”

    
“Mine is to go back and get the rest, of us,” I said.  “This isn’t a two man job.  No one is coming through that door behind us.”

    
Genna shook her head.  “We don’t know that until you pull on that ring.”

    
I eyed the door skeptically.  I could see myself pulling it from the wall pretty easily.  The hinges had probably come away from the mortar, leaving it freestanding with its weight keeping it in place.  I said as much to Genna.

    
“So you are a mason as well, Lupus?” she said.

    
“Actually, yes,” I told her.  I had done a little.  “Enough to know that door isn’t sound.  We are going
back
.”

    
She bristled and I knew I had played my hand too soon.  I could have argued safety and gotten her to come back, but a woman who does what Genna does lives by the strength of her convictions.  Like any good marine, she could follow orders but she didn’t necessarily
like
it.

    
Naturally, she gave the door ring a good tug to spite me.

    
The door wailed like a banshee as the hinges gave.  Sure enough, the whole thing toppled over.  If she hadn’t been dressed in her leathers and had the reflexes of a cat, she would have been squashed underneath it.  The door was a good six inches thick.  It must have been balanced on a knife’s edge for her to move it at all.

    
I jumped back reflexively, and had less far to go, or it would have gotten me.  I wore my armor lightly but it was still heavy plate and it hindered my movements.  Genna leaped past me to escape, barely missing me.  The door smashed the floor and cracked the flagstones, making a noise like a bomb exploding in the close spaces.

    
“Do the words, `stupid bitch’ have any significance to you?” I snarled at her.  Either she’d been made deaf or left too stunned to understand me.  My ears were ringing and I could barely hear myself.  She just looked at the open maw of the doorway, tears in her eyes and her mouth open.  She had nearly killed us both and she knew it.  People like her take that pretty seriously.

    
I stepped gingerly on the door and looked at the ceiling, waiting for it to cave in.  I was glad that it didn’t.  The air flowed pretty steadily now.  I held my sword out to light the darkness beyond so thick a door.  I didn’t think we’d found the servants’ quarters or a kitchen any more.

    
When my sword broke the plain of the door, I heard a staccato series of pings and looked down in time to see little darts raining from my breastplate.  If I had been a foot shorter, I would have taken them in the face.  More careful now, I looked down and saw a deep hole at the edge of the doorway, on the inside of the room.  I could barely see the bottom in the gloom, but lowering my sword revealed rusted spikes reaching up maliciously toward me.  It had been built wider than I could jump, though there must be a way.  The spiked pit reached out a good five feet to the left and right of the door.  I doubted that anyone in armor could make that leap.

    
Raising my sword, I could see about thirty feet into a room filled with bricks.  Piled neatly, they were covered with dirt and mud.  A crack in the ceiling like the one before, again disguised by tree roots, had filled the room with runoff for centuries.  That runoff had come from the ceiling, down to the ruined, stone floor, to the pit and out through another sewer system or some such thing that acted like a drain for the pit.  In the process, the room had been half-filled with dirt from above.  It would take some digging to get it out.

    
The digging would be worth it.  In my blue light, the neatly piled bricks, even covered with mud, managed to shine an evil green.  By my reckoning, that meant yellow, and that meant gold.

    
I smiled to myself.  Wealth to buy a nation, it seemed.  Wealth to do anything one wanted.  With this sort of backing, I could do anything War wanted me to do – and have money left over for a vacation afterwards.

    
I looked for Genna – silent for so long in the face of this.  Ah, Genna – did you know all along?  Did you suspect when you found the throne room that the treasury would be nearby?  Perhaps D’gattis had informed you we were getting close.  That would be like him, to tell you and not me.

    
But I would never know.  Genna stood about five feet, three inches tall.  The darts that had bounced from my armor had taken her in the face.  I never thought to look to her – I might have been able to save her, who knows?  The poison had lasted an impossible eleven hundred years, and dropped her like a rock.  She was so tiny that my damaged hearing hadn’t even heard her fall over the sound of the darts on my armor.  She lay as if asleep at my feet.  I knelt beside her and removed all of the darts, just in case this was some magic. Nothing changed.  I felt between her familiar breasts, and at her wrist and neck, and held my ear to the mouth I had kissed over and over.