Tycho stood in the south watch tower between Wren and the young soldier who had been ringing the alarm bell a few hours ago. He could see the airships clearly now, including the long gondolas clinging to their bellies and even the shadowy figures of the crews moving about inside. Now that they were closer, the airships looked to be moving faster and he could see them shifting slightly in formation, sometimes closer, sometimes farther apart. They nosed gently to the left and right as the wind moved around them.
“I can’t tell if they’re heading straight for us, or if they’re pointing toward the ships in the Strait,” he said to no one in particular. “They’re angled into the wind.”
“Does it really matter?” Wren asked. “You said your guns can’t shoot that high.”
“They can’t.”
“Then why are we out here? Just to wait and see what those skyships do?”
Tycho felt a sudden storm of anger and frustration in his chest and he almost snapped at her, Because I have to do something!
Instead he said, “What else can I do? I have to defend my people.”
Wren shrugged, jangling the silver bracelets on her wrists. “If you can’t fight your enemies, you hide from them. So hide.”
“Hide?” Tycho clenched his spyglass. “I can’t run away and hide in the middle of a war. There are thousands of people out there and they’re all counting on us to defend them. We have to be here. We have to do something about this.”
“Or, you could get your people to safety.” Wren poked her head out the window and looked up through her blue glasses. “Those skyships are huge and slow. You know exactly where they are, and they just drop the bombs straight down, right? So all you have to do is not be under them. Easy.”
“So what? Am I supposed to just evacuate all the houses in the path… of the…” Tycho blinked. “Of course, that’s exactly what we should be doing. You’re beautiful! Captain!” The major spun around and shouted down the stairs to the bottom of the tower. “Captain! I want your entire company assembled in the First Courtyard in five minutes. New orders! I want every building within a quarter league of the water to be evacuated. Empty every house. Tell the people to leave all their belongings, it’s just for a day or two. Get them back as far as possible.”
“Sir?”
“Go door to door, now! Move it! Move out! Go!” Tycho paused at the top of the stair, then looked back at Wren. “We need to get the Duchess to safety, too.”
“Sure. But where should we take her?”
Tycho hesitated.
We shouldn’t take her too far from the palace. If we end up spread out all over the city, we won’t be able to coordinate our forces.
He smiled.
“I think I know a place.”
Tycho and Wren rode their little pony back across the park from the wall to the palace, dashing through the columns of soldiers jogging up the shallow hill side to muster in the First Courtyard.
Back in the Chamber of Petitions, the atmosphere was strangely calm and quiet as the servants went about their chores and the clerks shuffled their papers, and the politicians argued quietly in the corners.
Tycho found Lady Nerissa in her office with the gravely pale and sleepy-eyed Salvator and several other senior officers. “Your Grace, we have to evacuate the palace.”
The Duchess’s face betrayed her worry and fear. “Vlad’s plan failed? The airships are still coming this way?”
“It’s impossible to be sure, but we can’t wait until the last minute to find out. I’ve already sent our men into the city to evacuate the homes near the waterfront, but we need to get you to safety as well. The palace will be their first target.”
“Not the most gallant recourse, but probably the most prudent,” Salvator said begrudgingly.
The Duchess nodded. “Very well. We’ll move to the Cathedral of Saint Sophia. Not even the Turks would dare to destroy that house of God.”
“I’m sorry, Your Grace, but we can’t take that chance.”
The woman’s face hardened with resolve. “Major, I won’t simply run away to some country estate and wait for it to be safe enough for me to resume my duties. I have a war to fight.”
“I know, and I agree,” Tycho said. “Which is why I want to move you to another palace nearby.”
“What other palace nearby?” The Duchess’s look of confusion blossomed into realization. “Major, that’s an excellent idea.”
The next half hour was a maelstrom of clerks and papers and maids and orders as the palace staff were all sent away and the entire bureaucratic machinery of Constantia was bundled up into satchels and cases and bags and trunks and simply carried out through the front gates of the Palace of Constantine.
The train of porters and soldiers and clerks shuffled down the road behind the Cathedral of Saint Sophia led by Lady Nerissa, Salvator, Tycho, and Wren. When they reached the gated entrance on their right, they turned into the estate and crossed the flat lawn of brown grass.
“What is this place? Have I been here before?” Wren asked. “I thought we were going to another palace.”
“We are, and you have, although you were probably blindfolded at the time,” Tycho said. “I’m sorry about that.”
“You mean… we’re going back to the prison?”
“We call it the Sunken Palace now. It’s centuries old, and no one’s certain what it was really for or why it sank, but it’s down there. It’s partly flooded as well, and it’s used as a cistern. And a prison.” Tycho opened the door of the small mausoleum in the center of the field and let the ladies enter ahead of him, and then he followed them down the stairs into the darkness with the stampede of men and papers following behind him.
Down below, the air was stale and cold and Tycho saw Wren’s breath swirling around her pale lips. He led the way through the makeshift office at the bottom of the stair and headed down the narrow corridor to the first vast chamber. The walkway skirted the edge of the room some ten or twelve feet above the floor, and the level of the water reached nearly to the walkway, so that the rippling surface of the reservoir lapped and splashed gently at their feet. The light of the torches danced on the water, and dripping sounds echoed over and over into the distant shadows.
Tycho hurried on past two more cisterns that had been grand ball rooms or dining halls for the long-dead lords of Constantia. The major kept his eyes on the walkway.
Perhaps Constantine himself danced in these halls. Princes and emperors from half the world might have walked here, talking of war and love and religion and politics. Writing history with every gesture and word. And now it’s all one big well full of cold water for people who barely remember that Constantine ever really lived. What a joke.
Beyond the cisterns stood the hall of small locked rooms guarded by the pale-faced soldiers, who leapt to salute the major as he led the Duchess and her entourage past the cells ever deeper into the ancient palace.
Finally they came to another large room, one not flooded but still pocked with broken tiles and wide shallow puddles from the water that dripped from overhead. The moldy remains of the ceiling were supported by two rows of thick Hellan columns, which may have been solid marble, or merely granite, beneath the layers of moss and fungus and filth on them. A dozen other doors led out of the room in every direction, but Tycho paused just inside the entrance and said, “We should be safe here.”
“Where is here?” Wren asked.
“We’re fifty feet underground, near the edge of the empty field.”
“Very good,” said the Duchess. “With nothing on the surface, there’s no reason for the airships to bomb this area. Good thinking, major.”
Tycho nodded. He was too tired and too worried to feel any pride in the compliment.
Salvator hobbled out into the room and sighed loudly. “Well, if we must, we must.”
For the next ten minutes, Tycho watched the Duchess direct the clerks and porters and other servants carrying in the machinery of government, hauling chests and desks and tables and an endless supply of paper into the dingy, dark hall. Torches were set and lit, furniture was arranged, and within half an hour the center of the ancient hall resembled a large office ringed in fire light, already bustling with the mundane business of reconciling numbers and reports and issuing new orders. Couriers began jogging out the door, heading for the surface to deliver their new papers to the officers outside.
Toward the center of the room was a round table with a square map laid on it with the corners drooping over the edges. Wooden figures of soldiers, marines, horses, archers, and ships were scattered over the map to show the last known positions of every defender in the city. They were scattered very thinly.
“You see, this would have been an ideal moment for two forward thinking gentlemen to be on a ship sailing away across the placid Sea of Marmara toward the Ionian coast,” Salvator said from his chair. “Have you ever been to Palermo? It’s quite picturesque in the winter. And when spring comes, those two gentlemen might take a leisurely journey up to Rome to seduce foolish young women and kill arrogant young priests. For money, of course.”
“How are your stitches?” Tycho asked, his eyes never leaving the map.
“Holding, for the moment. Your common Hellan surgeon is no match for even the lowliest Italian tailor, but I suspect I’m going to survive.”
Tycho said nothing. He stood by the map, his arms folded, his foot tapping, as he waited for the runners to start bringing fresh reports so the map could be updated and he could offer the Duchess some new idea, some new tactic that might help save Constantia from the airships. But as he stood waiting, his mind was a blank. His eyes traveled up to the young woman in black, to her long red hair cascading around her shoulders in wild tumbling locks, her tall red ears poking up in front of the black scarf that was slipping back over her head, and to her pale white hands with the jangling silver bracelets.
“Is everything all right?” he asked her. “Can I get you anything?” He frowned as he glanced around the makeshift office in the dank cavern.
That was stupid. What the hell can I get her? A handful of dirty water?
“I’m fine.” She flashed a brief, tired smile and came over to stand beside him and look at the map of the city. “Just restless. I don’t like standing still, waiting for something to happen to me. I spent a long time with my first teacher, Gudrun, in this one little village, just listening to old stories and learning about herbs. And toward the end, I couldn’t even leave the tower for more than an hour or two. It wasn’t safe. But then when I did leave the tower, it was nothing but running and fighting and arguing and more running. Even after I left Ysland with Omar, it’s been nothing but moving and moving. We sailed across the Sea of Ice in a ship made of steel, and rode through frozen forests on huge shaggy horses, and then crossed the glaciers on sleds pulled by dogs.”
“It sounds like it was hard. And cold.”
“It was, but it was wonderful. I saw new places, met strange people. I talked to ghosts hundreds of years old and visited tiny villages in the mountains that can barely survive, but somehow do, generation after generation.” Wren stared up at the shadowy ceiling as she spoke in soft, reverent tones. “And then we reached Vlachia and saw the walking corpses, and fought them, and escaped here, and the war, and Yaga…”
“Not a moment to rest?”
“Not a one.” She glanced at him. “I guess I’m starting to like it that way. I don’t like just standing still like this, especially in the dark. Waiting in the dark. It brings back bad memories.”
“I’m sorry. It’s only for a day or two,” he said. “But at least we’ll be safe from the bombs.”
“Right, the bombs.” She nodded absently. “If they ever drop any bombs.”
He sighed. “If. When.”
Wren looked sharply to her right. “Did you hear that?”
Tycho turned to peer into the deep shadows at the far end of the hall. He heard people murmuring and papers shuffling and pens scratching, and faintly, he heard water dripping. “What was it?”
Wren’s ears twitched, jerking left and right in tiny increments. “It was like footsteps. Tapping, but irregular, not like the dripping. And scraping, like boots.”
Tycho frowned a bit deeper as he started walking through the office space and out beyond the perimeter of torches across the wet tiles toward the dark corners and sealed doors. He heard nothing. Still, he drew his white-handled Mazigh revolver and pointed it at the shadows and stood very still, listening.
Wren followed a moment later and stood behind him. “I hear it. Scratching.”
“It could be rats in the walls,” he said quietly.
“Maybe.”
One of the sealed doors in front of them banged against its hinges and the deep wooden thump echoed across the room. A dozen clerks looked up from their papers.
Tycho pointed his gun at the door and took a few more steps forward. “That wasn’t a rat.”
“What else could be down here?” she asked. “Are there other parts of this palace used for other things? Could other people be down here for shelter too?”
“Maybe,” he said.
But probably not.
Tycho waved to two of the soldiers to follow him and they crossed the room through cold puddles and over crackling, uneven tiles to the door that had banged. It was a double door hung in a thick frame of carved pillars crowned with stone leaves and flowers.
“Hello?” he called.
The doors banged, and banged again. Something heavy was striking the wood panels, and the doors shook on their hinges, rattling against the old iron locks that held them together. They banged a third time and the left door cracked apart a bit, splintering just enough to reveal a sliver of darkness on the far side.
And from that darkness a pale blue hand clawed into the light.
“Guards! Get over here!” Tycho grabbed Wren’s hand and pointed his gun at the door.
I have six bullets. I can kill six of them, at most. Six, and then we’re all dead.
He squeezed Wren’s hand and grimaced.
Palermo is sounding very nice right about now.