Kolea slapped the stone wall with his hand.
‘Well, there isn’t,’ he said. ‘Let’s back it up and go on to the left.’
The squad started to turn.
‘What was that?’ asked Arradin, a little woodwind player.
‘What?’ asked Erish.
‘Didn’t you hear that?’ asked Arradin. ‘Sounded like crying. Sobbing.’
Kolea couldn’t hear anything.
‘Just the alarms again?’ Erish suggested.
Kolea led the way back to the left-hand archway. ‘Close up,’ he said.
He aimed his light beam through. Nothing–
He played it back. He’d seen a damned figure. Someone standing there in the darkness. Gone now, gone before his beam could return to it.
‘Yoncy?’ he called. It had been her, he was sure of it. Just the flash of a pale face in the dark. ‘Close up,’ he said.
There was no one behind him.
‘Erish? Kores? Where the feth have you gone? Erish?’
He heard Erish call back. It sounded distant. The acoustics in the basement were off-putting.
‘Where the feth have you gone?’ Kolea yelled.
‘Where are you, sir?’ Erish called back.
‘I went to the left. You were right behind me!’
‘Where are you, sir?’ Erish called.
‘Feth’s sake!’ Kolea growled. It sounded like Erish was on the other side of the wall. He went back a few steps to the archway.
‘Erish!’
The archway was there. The chamber beyond was small, and stacked with munition boxes and kitbags.
Where the feth were the cots? Kolea snorted in annoyance. How the feth had he done that? He’d gone into a side room by mistake, not the billet they’d just searched.
‘Erish! Follow the sound of my voice!’
‘Where are you, sir?’ Erish called from a distance. It didn’t sound like a voice. It sounded like the echo of a voice, the echo returning slowly from Erish’s previous yell.
Kolea heard a skitter of movement behind him and turned fast. His stablight was quick enough to catch a pale figure darting out of sight.
‘Yoncy!’
He ran after her.
‘Yoncy! It’s me! Yoncy, don’t be scared! It’s just a power-down!’
The hallway ahead of him dead-ended in a solid section of curtain wall.
‘Yoncy?’ he called.
He heard muffled sobbing. He couldn’t tell for the life of him where it was coming from.
Trooper Luhan moved up through the tail-end of the retinue, handing out the little box-lamps.
‘Pass ’em out,’ he said.
They were crowded into the wide stone hallway that led to the stairwell.
‘Why’s everyone stopped?’ Luhan asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said one of the women.
‘They’re jammed up on the steps,’ said an elderly tailor, clutching his workbag to his chest so he could take a lamp from Luhan.
Luhan gave them the rest of the lamps to pass around, and began to push his way up the tightly packed hall.
‘What’s the hold up?’ he asked several times, getting nothing but anxious shrugs in reply. The retinue was a fair size: women, children and support artisans. But they should have been filing out by now, up the long steps to the undercroft’s single exit.
‘We just stopped moving a couple of minutes ago,’ Elodie said to him as he squeezed past.
‘Maybe someone’s had a fall on the steps, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘I mean, in this dark.’
Luhan saw her expression by the glow of the box-lamp he was holding. Captain Daur’s wife was a strong woman. He didn’t like the fear he saw.
‘Let us through,’ said Elodie, pushing forwards. Luhan followed. Elodie had become the spokesperson and leader of the retinue, partly because she was married to Daur, but mainly because she was well-liked and cool-headed. She didn’t crumble easily. Luhan stuck close behind her. The retinue was letting her through with more civility than they might have shown him.
They reached the bottom of the stone staircase. The stairs too were packed with people. The air was very close. Luhan could smell sweat, anxiety and the fouled diapers of some of the babes-in-arms.
‘What’s the hold up?’ Elodie called up.
‘I think the door’s locked,’ Juniper called back.
‘The door? The door to the undercroft?’
‘I dunno,’ the woman replied.
Pushing and apologising, Elodie shoved her way up the steps, Luhan close behind, squirming through the press of bodies.
‘Mach!’ she called up. ‘Mach, what’s the issue?’
High above, in the shadows, she saw the wink of moving stablights.
‘Elodie?’ Bonin’s voice boomed down to her.
‘What’s the problem?’ she shouted. ‘We can’t leave everybody here like this! We’re crushed in! Get it moving!’
‘Keep everybody calm,’ Bonin called back.
Bonin looked at Yerolemew. They were painfully aware of the tight press of bodies on the deep stairs behind them.
‘What do we do?’ the sergeant major asked quietly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Bonin.
‘With respect, Mach, you’re the fething scout.’
‘These are the stairs,’ Bonin growled. ‘The only fething stairs. Unless there’s another flight of stairs I didn’t know anything about.’
‘Just the one flight,’ Yerolemew replied. There was a twitch in his voice, the faintest hint of anxiety breaking through. ‘You know that.’
‘Right,’ replied Bonin in a low whisper. He shone his light at the wall. ‘So where’s the fething door?’
The hallway ahead was flooding. Baskevyl tipped his light-beam down and saw the dirty liquid spilling along the flagstones. It stank. The latrine area had backed up entirely. He wondered if it was still raining. How much more water was going to pour into the palace’s ancient drains and force its way up into the lower levels?
‘Form on me,’ he instructed. All the Ghosts with him had weapons ready, as per his order to secondary. Blenner was hanging back, but he’d drawn his weapon.
‘We’re not going on, are we?’ Blenner asked.
‘Of course we are,’ Baskevyl said. ‘This is the area the crew was working.’
‘Well, they’re not working now,’ said Blenner, stepping back as the water began to reach his boots.
That much was obvious. There was no sound of pumps, no sign of pump tubing. Baskevyl had a scenario in his mind: Taskane’s crew had been working to drain the water, and there had been a short. It had blown the circuit and caused the blackout, and shocked Taskane and his men, who’d been standing in flood water. A maintenance accident, that’s all this was. They had to get in and help. The Munitorum crew could be seriously hurt. Maybe Fazekiel too, if she’d been with them when it happened.
The blood… there had to be some other explanation for that.
He stepped forward. In just a few steps, he had water gushing around his ankles as it back-fed along the hall.
‘Stay sharp!’ he said.
They splashed into the stream. It was getting deeper. Did the tunnel slant down at this point?
‘Sir!’ Osket called out.
The lamp’s beam moved and Baskevyl saw an object floating along in the tide. A work boot. Old and worn, laces broken.
‘That’s Munitorum issue,’ said Osket.
‘Fish it out,’ said Baskevyl.
‘Why?’
‘Don’t bother then,’ Baskevyl snapped, and took a step forward.
He fell, unable to catch himself. He crashed into water at least a foot deep, and thrashed around to get up again. He’d tripped over something.
‘Bask?’ Blenner called.
‘Feth it!’ Baskevyl replied. He groped around, swirling the water, trying to keep his light and his weapon raised out of the way.