More footsteps. Mkoll stuck the blade in his belt and stepped out into the long hallway. Two more packsons were running towards him from one direction, three more from the other. They were shouting. They had weapons. Mkoll raised the pistol and fired, cutting the approaching pair off their feet with four neat snap-shots. Then he turned smartly, and fired on the trio. He dropped one and clipped the second. The third hurled himself into the cover of a doorway. The second tried to rise, and Mkoll plugged him in the side of the head with a single bolt. The man flopped back down.
From the adjoining chambers, Mkoll could hear raised voices and the frantic ringing of handbells. The whole building was scrambling to respond.
He stepped back into the room. The scribe he’d dropped with the pistol butt was stirring and moaning. Mkoll put a shot through his head. He shoved the bodies of the packson scribes out of the way, and closed the door. There was no lock, and merely the overpainted marks where a bolt had once been screwed in place.
He looked around and made a rapid assessment. Then he dragged the bodies of the two dead scribes and piled them against the foot of the door in an awkward heap. They would hardly keep the door shut, but they’d slow down any attempts to shove it open. There was no time to check the bodies for anything useful like spare clips or keys.
He crossed to the desk, bent down, and opened the ledger, brushing splinters of decanter glass off the pages. He found the page that had surprised him, the page of enkil vahakan, and tore it out. He folded it and stuffed it in his pocket. His hands were leaving bloody finger marks on everything.
He swayed slightly, and steadied himself against the desk. There was a dull, throbbing ache behind his right eye. The scalp wound was still bleeding freely. Shaking his head, he gritted his teeth and shoved the heavy desk against the end shelves.
Olort was still twitching, staring at him with wide eyes, his bloody mouth opening and closing dumbly.
‘Vahooth voi sehn,’ Mkoll said. I bless you.
He shot Olort between the eyes.
There were more footsteps outside, raised voices, thumps at the door, an attempt to shoulder-barge the door open. The door opened a crack, but the weight of the bodies slammed it shut again. The thumping resumed. Another fierce shoulder-barge.
Mkoll clambered up on the desk, and climbed the shelves to the high windows. There was no clasp or opening, but the sea air had rotted the ancient windows in their frames long since. He pushed out a pane of glass and heard it fall and shatter somewhere far below.
Then he hauled himself up and out through the gap. Cold air met him, and a strong sea breeze. He clung to the sill. The wall dropped away sheer directly below him, but there was an adjoining tiled roof three metres down to his left.
He jumped.
Behind him, the first las-rounds tore through the door.
Baskevyl was handing out stablights from a packing crate.
‘One each. Check the charge, grab a weapon, and start searching.’
‘What are we looking for, sir?’ asked Leyr, taking the stablight offered and testing it.
‘Commissar Fazekiel, for a start,’ replied Baskevyl. ‘She was the one who called this amber status. Right, Meryn?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Aside from her… I don’t know,’ said Baskevyl.
‘Is this an attack?’ asked Neskon. ‘I mean, has the undercroft been penetrated, or–’
‘We don’t know anything,’ said Kolea. ‘This is probably just faults in the circuit. Spread out like Bask says and take the undercroft by sections. There will be stragglers, so round them up and send them along to the exit staircase.’
The darkness felt close, as if there was no room to move or breathe. The stink of the cellar level was getting worse, but Baskevyl thought this was probably just his imagination. That, or the air-circ pumps and vents had shut down too. And the scratching in their ears was persistent. That, more than anything, made Bask feel like this was more than a technical problem.
The chamber itself possessed the eerie qualities of a bad dream. It was so lightless, it was hard to tell who you were standing next to, even though it was packed tight. As stablights flashed on, the moving beams came at haphazard angles, like bars of pale blue glare that showed frosty details but nothing of the whole. The alarms kept stuttering and squeaking in short, fitful bursts, little shrill gasps of sound that came and went, truncated. Neskon had strapped on his flamer unit, and had used the ignition burner to light tapers. He was now passing these, one by one, to Banda and Leclan so they could light the wicks of little tin box-lamps. The box-lamps issued only a dull glow, but it was more diffuse than the hard beams of the stablights.
‘Pass them out,’ said Leclan. ‘Maybe take a bundle of them up to the stairs. The retinue haven’t got many lamps.’
‘Do that, Luhan,’ ordered Baskevyl.
‘On it, sir,’ replied Trooper Luhan.
‘I could take them along,’ suggested Blenner.
‘Luhan’s doing it,’ replied Baskevyl, passing a stablight to Blenner.
‘Well, maybe I should at least check on the progress,’ said Blenner. ‘There’s a lot of women and children, in the dark, trying to find their way out–’
‘Yerolemew and Bonin are running the evac,’ replied Baskevyl. ‘They’ve got it covered. Help with the section search.’
‘All right,’ sighed Blenner. ‘Of course.’
‘Has anyone seen Dalin?’ Kolea called out. ‘Or Yoncy?’
His voice was sudden and loud. Everybody, even Baskevyl as he called the shots, had been talking low, as though louder voices might somehow offend the choking darkness that had engulfed them.
‘We’ll find them, Gol,’ said Baskevyl. ‘Come on, shift your arses and get to it!’
Shoggy Domor hadn’t waited for a stablight. He’d simply flipped his bulky augmetic optics to night vision and set off.
Now he was beginning to regret responding to Baskevyl’s instruction so eagerly. He could hear an agitated murmur of voices several chambers behind him as the retinue hurried to evacuate and find their way to the undercroft steps. The alarm system kept piping in sudden, unnerving squelches of sharp sound.
His heart was racing. It was unnerving. Domor could feel an unpleasant rasping in his ears, as if someone was wiggling a pin against his eardrum. He wished he’d waited for some company. He wished he’d picked up a weapon. All he had was his straight silver.
He wondered why he felt he needed a weapon. Was it just the non-specific amber status that had been issued? Out on the line, that usually meant bad shit was coming, but this wasn’t the line. Domor didn’t scare easily, and this was surely just a power-out. But the darkness was oppressive. It didn’t feel like the simple absence of light. It felt like a thing in its own right, as if darkness had poured into the undercroft and filled it like black water.
‘Taskane?’ he called. ‘Overseer Taskane?’
The blackness seemed to eat his voice.
‘Commissar Fazekiel?’
Domor moved forward, seeing the world as a cold, green relief map. He moved with one hand on the wall, feeling his way even though his augmetics gave him the best sight of anyone down on the undercroft level.
‘Taskane? Overseer?’
Domor jumped as the alarms sounded again. This time it was a dying shriek that ended in a long, warbling throb of defective speakers. It tailed off into nothing, but while it lasted, for five or six seconds, it sounded less like a broken, misfiring alarm system and more like a baby crying.