Slowly, his tiny friends poked their heads out of their dusty hiding places, and Ivanova was shocked to see that some looked as young as a four or five-year-old human. Al Vernon, Na'Toth, and Garibaldi filed slowly into the tomb, and they gaped at the unexpected enclave of children.
"You can't stay here," Ivanova warned them. "There are bad people chasing us. If they knew you helped us, they would be angry."
Pa'Ko bounded to his feet and frowned like a serious adult. "Too many bad people live here. Maybe you could take us where you live!"
The children nodded in agreement, as if it couldn't be much worse than this. Ivanova took a deep breath, feeling both her charitable and motherly tendencies starting to rise up. She would love to help these children, but right now there was a good chance that none of them would get back to B5 alive.
"Don't you have parents?" she asked, knowing she probably didn't want to hear the answer.
Pa'Ko shrugged. "They kept beating me, so I ran away. Since then, I've heard they're dead."
Ivanova looked around the musty chamber. Counting the entrance they had used, there were three passageways leading out of the tomb, and G'Kar looked in each of them, prodding the darkness with his candle.
"This might be a good place to lose our pursuers," he said. "They can guess, but they won't know for sure which way we've gone. We can't go back the way we came, so we'll take one of these passageways, and the children can take the other one."
"Do any of these tunnels lead to Hekba City?" Ivanova asked the children. "Or the outerwalk?"
Before they could answer, there was a crashing sound from the passage behind them, and everyone in the room dropped into a wary crouch.
"There's no more time for chitchat," whispered Garibaldi. "Which way?"
Like a little general mustering his troops, Pa'Ko dragged the children out of their hiding places and motioned toward the right-hand passageway. He handed the first one a candle and snapped his fingers, and the tykes padded into the darkness of the catacombs. It wrenched Ivanova's heart to see them run off so alone and unprotected. But they had survived this long, she reasoned, and they would probably survive having a Blood Oath played out on their doorstep.
When the last child was dispatched, Pa'Ko motioned the adults down the left-hand tunnel, and he led the way, with G'Kar, Na'Toth, and Al Vernon right behind him. Garibaldi and Ivanova went to grab the remaining two candles, which not only gave them light but left the tomb in utter darkness. As they jogged into the passageway in pursuit of their comrades, Ivanova could swear she heard voices directly behind them. Or maybe it was the dead laughing at them.
She was so intent upon putting distance between her band and their dogged pursuers that she could barely breathe. After a while, she realized there was no sound in the catacombs except for their footsteps pounding through the dust, and she paused to take stock. All around her in this underground necropolis, there was a sense of agelessness, of time standing still. Even the children hadn't seemed real, just small Narns who hadn't learned to stand still, like their elders hanging on the wall.
She turned and confronted a line of corpses who stared at her with empty eye sockets; their drawn, sardonic faces seemed to laugh at the futility of it all. Sooner or later, she would join them, they assured her.
Ivanova had a very troubling thought. They had put their lives in the hands of a street urchin—what if they couldn't trust him? What did they know about Pa'Ko? Nothing, came the disconcerting reply. But they knew perfectly well what Mi'Ra represented—she was the Angel of Death in this city of the dead.
The commander brushed up against Garibaldi and protected the candle in her grasp. She realized that the group had stopped ahead of her, and she squeezed between Garibaldi and a pyramid of heavy-lidded Narn skulls to see what was happening. There was a fork in the catacombs, and Pa'Ko pointed down the left-hand passage. "There is a shrine halfway down, and if you look up, you will see a ladder to the surface. You'll come out at a bigger shrine near Street Jasgon. If you want to return to the surface, you can climb out there."
Al Vernon snapped his fingers. "Jasgon is the main drag down here, isn't it?"
"Yes," answered Pa'Ko. "Travel south upon it, and you will reach the outerwalk."
G'Kar shook his head. "That entrance is too well known. They might be waiting there."
"Listen," said the boy. "If you have to come back into the catacombs, you can look for me in the tomb where you found me. I have a hiding place there."
For some reason, that honest answer relieved Ivanova's fears about Pa'Ko. The boy was just trying to help them, but his expectations of doing so were not all that great. That seemed to be implicit in the way he was always trying to ditch them. He knew they were probably as dead as the denizens of this place, and he didn't want to be around when it happened.
"Thank you," said G'Kar with a nod to the boy. "A proper reward will have to come later."
"Critical!" said the boy brightly. He pointed to the unusual candle holder. "May I take the skull? It's a great-uncle of mine, I think."
"Yes," said G'Kar with a smile, handing the grimy skull to the boy. Pa'Ko promptly whirled around and made a sharp turn to the right, disappearing down the other fork.
In the still of the catacombs, they all paused to listen, and they heard voices. They were faint and ghostly as they reverberated through the narrow tunnels, but nobody thought they were ghosts. The group headed down the left-hand fork without further discussion. Ivanova scanned one wall with her candle while Garibaldi scanned the other wall with his wavering light. G'Kar and Na'Toth guarded their rear, while Al Vernon ran nervously ahead of them.
It was Al who spotted the shrine first. "Over here!" he called.
Ivanova reached Al's location first, and she shined her flickering light on the simple altar. It consisted of a crumbling pedestal only a few centimeters high, upon which sat a highly stylized female form fashioned from what looked like terracotta. The statuette had been carelessly trodden upon, and her arms and most of her legs were broken off—but she still had a regal appearance. Her spots and bald head identified her as Narn, but she had an unearthly expression and was fleshier than most Narns.
"D'Bok, our harvest goddess," said G'Kar, stepping up behind her. "It's an old-fashioned belief, as the Martyrs have supplanted the old gods in importance. But she belongs here—these catacombs date from her time."
G'Kar peered upward about a meter to the left, and Ivanova followed his gaze with the candle. Sure enough there was a shaft, spacious compared to the one inside the old well, and a good rope ladder hung down the middle of it. There was also sunlight at the top, blessed sunlight. Assassins or no assassins, Ivanova was really glad to be getting out of the catacombs, with their musty smells, terrifying darkness, and oppressive corpses. If she had to die, she would rather have blinding daylight in her eyes and fresh oxygen in her lungs. To die down here among centuries of Narn dead—it made death seem commonplace, inevitable.
She shook off these unpleasant thoughts and looked at G'Kar. "Are we going up?"
"You don't want to die down here, do you?"
"No."
G'Kar pulled out his PPG and insisted, "Let me go first. If they get me, maybe they'll leave the rest of you alone, although I doubt it. I'm very sorry to have gotten you into this unfortunate mess."
"Then get us out of it," said Ivanova, tempering her order with a pained smile.
G'Kar nodded somberly. "That is my first order of business. Then I'll deal with Mi'Ra." He lifted his boot on to the first rung and hauled himself out of the darkness.
CHAPTER 16