WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(63)

The stairwell door was ajar but unattended. There was a light fixture at the mid-flight landing, but it hadn't worked any of the times Daniel had used the stairs to see Woetjans.

His half-boots rang in the stairwell, but the sound would be lost in the noisy excitement echoing from the masonry cavern below. He didn't have the slippers with small tassels on the toes that were the proper footgear with this uniform. Even if someone noticed, the Kostroman navy wasn't a stickler for detail.

Somebody fired a shoulder-stocked impeller within the basement. The whack! of the heavy slug hitting a pillar was followed instantly by pebbles slapping against the walls and floor in all directions. People laughed hysterically.

Even a single round would blast a divot the size of a man's head in this brick. If the idiots weren't careful, they could cut through a pillar. A collapsing ceiling would spoil this party for good and all.

Daniel grinned. The chaotic violence made it less likely that he'd be arrested by the authorities, but there was a pretty good chance some drunk would blow his head off as surely as they'd decapitated the fountain in Palace Square. Well, he'd wanted an adventurous life.

The stairwell's basement-level door was closed. Daniel passed by it and continued down. Ceiling-level windows let enough light into the basement to make the space usable if not comfortable for clerical activities. The line of electric fixtures running down the middle of the central vault was enough to keep somebody down there by night from running into a pillar, but no more than that.

The subbasement had no windows and fewer lights, at least until Woetjans moved her contingent into it. The Kostromans used the space only for storage, the powerplant, and a quartet of huge pumps. The last were intended to lift ground water into a sewer and keep the palace from sinking into the bog from which the land had been reclaimed, but according to Woetjans only one of the pumps still worked.

There was no light at all in the subbasement. Daniel paused to put on his goggles and switch them to thermal imaging. He hadn't wanted to wear an item as out of place with a Kostroman uniform as a brass brassiere, but he had to be able to see.

The pillars on which the entire palace rested were ghostly outlines that belied their massive construction. The archways were filled with broken furniture and machinery, old carpet and wall hangings carried down here to rot in billows of mold, and boxed documents. The junk had been stacked any which way, and decay had caused even that rudimentary organization to sprawl in chaos.

Infrared gave the inch-deep pools of groundwater a bright, even sheen because they were a degree or two cooler than the irregular pavement on which they lay. The only difference between storing material here and dumping it in the harbor was that the subbasement was a shorter distance to carry things.

There should have been some light on the vault ceilings. Daniel walked toward the bay which the Cinnabar detail had converted to living quarters. It was marginally higher than most of the region and therefore dry, though the frequent plink of condensate falling into pools of seepage reminded Daniel that "dry" was a relative concept.

The pillars were quatrefoil rather than round in cross-section. A man waited in the niche between two lobes, watching Daniel. His body heat made him stand out against the brick like a floodlight. Though the human form was clear, thermal imaging blurred the face into oval sexlessness.

"You there!" Daniel said. "Identify yourself!"

"Goddam good to see you, Master Daniel," Hogg said. "I was about ready to turn into a mushroom or a fish, waiting for you."

He switched on a tiny deep-yellow light he wore as a thumb ring. It was intended for reading maps at night, but in the present darkness it made an adequate area light. "Now let's get out of here, shall we, sir?"

Daniel gratefully removed his goggles as Hogg led the way back to the inside staircase. "How did you know I'd come here?" he said. He didn't bother asking about Woetjans's detail since they were obviously safe without his help.

"Well, I figured you'd have better sense than to go to the apartment," Hogg said. He moved soundlessly through the clutter like the old poacher he was. "There wasn't any place I could hide and catch you if you did anyway. There's a squad at both ends of the street waiting for you. Best bet was you'd come here to find Woetjans. If you didn't, well, we'd deal with that."

Hogg stopped at the foot of the narrow staircase. "Sir," he said, "I should've known about it sooner. When I learned what was going down, you were long gone with that ponce Candace and the girls. If something had happened . . ."

The pudgy little man shook his head. "I don't remember praying since I was in diapers. Maybe there's a God after all."