But for now, a simple little job of blocking tunnels, a smart, attractive woman next to me who presented the best kind of challenge. What could go wrong?
It started off all right – it always does. The guards, bored at being left to wander around down here where there wasn’t much chance to bribe anyone and simultaneously grateful they weren’t up by the gates where they could get shot at, had found several tunnels and made a start of blocking them from the castle end. They’d also done a few quick and dirty sorties to figure out where the tunnels led – mostly down by the gates of the castle leading out into the ’Pit, though they’d been overtaken by the growth of the city and led to places that were now inside its walls.
It didn’t take much for Halina and me to block them more thoroughly. Me via rearranging a few bits of rock and wall into interesting shapes and her by levitating a few bits of handy rubble – otherwise known as what was left of some nearby houses – into place. She really was very good. It didn’t hurt too much, and I made sure not to overdo it. We still had the pain lab to visit later on again, and overdoing it would be a bad, bad idea.
While we were doing that Pasha had a look around and managed to find one of the tunnels tentatively marked on Perak’s map. Like all of them, it was cunningly disguised – what made them such a bitch to find, all thanks to our sneaky bastard warlord ancestor.
“It’s a lot bigger than the rest,” Pasha said as he led the way.
He wasn’t joking either. The rest of the tunnels were narrow at the castle end, with slits for arrows, or nowadays guns, to shoot through, and bigger ones for a handy boulder or some hot oil to drop on an unsuspecting enemy. Perfect for defence. Even if they weren’t now blocked up, it would take a handful of men to hold them against a hundred. The problem being, of course, that we’d never expected anyone from inside Mahala – the defected Dench – to use the knowledge of their existence against us, or that we’d need so many men up by the gates at the same time.
The tunnel Pasha had found would take a battalion to hold. The entrance, like most of the others, was hidden in what appeared to be a solid wall, in this case a blank three-storey-tall affair in one of the inner closes nearer the main keep. The mechanism that opened it was hidden inside a hollow brick – even if you knew where a tunnel was, finding the mechanism was like trying to find a fresh breeze in the Stench. When Pasha pulled on the lever for this one, half the wall rolled away on silent… hinges? Rollers? Who knew? Behind it the tunnel yawned off into darkness. No defences here, just wide-open tunnel, which was odd. A frigid wind made the skin on my face tighten and something else – no idea what, but in hindsight perhaps telling the future – made my balls shrivel.
“Much as I don’t like to suggest it, I think we may need to check this one out before we seal it,” Pasha said. “See where it goes. Why it’s different. Maybe it’ll be right for whatever Perak and Lise want to use it for. There’s no one in it, anyway, I can tell you that.”
“Much as I hate to admit it, I think you’re right.” The thought of it didn’t fill me with confidence. I allowed myself one concession to self-preservation. “Perhaps taking a guard or two might be prudent?”
Pasha raised an eyebrow at that, but in the end he conceded it might be wise. A half-dozen guards lounged around the entrance looking bored, and when Pasha asked, four of them looked glad of the chance to do something. The other two waited at the entrance, ready to close the tunnel up, seal it as best they could if everything went tits-up. Not an inspiring thought. Slightly better was the fact that since Trade had started pounding out guns, all the guards had them.
The differences were plain to see inside the tunnel as well as at the entrance. The other tunnels were, shall we say, less crappy-looking than this one. They had dressed stone lining them, at least most of the way, frescos and murals all along the walls, a flat, paved road underfoot. This one had lumpy rock walls that looked half finished and an earth floor that had turned to dust so that little clouds puffed up with every step. Even with the breeze that brought goose bumps up all over, the air felt flat and dead.
“Hey, look.” Halina bent down by one wall, just by the entrance. “I wonder what these do.”
Pasha held his Glow light where she was looking. A series of what looked like lumps of stone poked out from the wall. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it if they hadn’t been so regular, like they were put there.
Halina reached out to tug on one, but I was quicker and grabbed her hand away. “The man who had these built was one sneaky little fucker. For all you know, that could bring down a ten-ton slab of rock on our heads.”