“Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”
Ammit laughed and clapped me on the back so hard I almost dropped the lantern, which would have left us in what the old-timey horror novels liked to call “the living dark.”
I started walking. They followed. The hammering on the door faded, then was left behind. Kellin’s night soldiers would have a hell of a hard job breaking it down, too, because it opened outward and because, inside their auras, there really wasn’t much to them… as we now knew.
God bless Percival, whose note hadn’t been timid, as I had first thought. It had been an invitation: the door may be locked. As in, behind you.
“Who wants to live forever?” Iota roared, and a flat echo came back from the tiles.
“I do,” Jaya piped up… and you may not believe it, but we laughed.
All of us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX The Tunnel and the Station. Scratching. The Trolley House. Red Molly. The Welcoming Party. A Mother’s Grief.
1
I think the tunnel was a little over a mile and a half long from the Officials’ Room to where we finally emerged, but at the time, with only a single lantern to lead us, it seemed to go on forever. It tended always upward, broken every now and again by short flights of stairs—six in one, eight in another, four in a third. Then it took a square turn to the right and there were more steps, this time a longer flight. By then Murf could no longer support Freed, so Ammit was carrying him. When I made it to the top, I paused to get my wind back and Ammit caught up to me. Not breathing hard at all either, curse him.
“Freed says he knows where this comes out,” Ammit said. “Tell him.”
Freed looked up at me. In the pale glow of the lantern, his face was a horror of lumps, bruises, and cuts. Those he might recover from, but the leg wound was infected. I could smell it.
“I sometimes came with the officials in the old days,” Freed said. “The judges and boundarymen. To doctor the cuts and breaks and broken heads, you understand. It wasn’t like the Fair One, murder for the sake of murder, but [a word I couldn’t translate] was plenty rough.”
The rest of our merry band was bunched below us on the stairs. We couldn’t afford to stop, but we needed （I needed） to know what was ahead, so I cranked my fist at the doc, telling him to go on but to make it fast.
“We didn’t use the tunnel to come to the Field of the Monarchs, but we often used it when we left. Always, if Empis lost because of calls that enraged the crowd.”
“Kill the ump,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Never mind. Where does it come out?”
“The Trolley House, of course.” Freed managed a feeble smile. “Because, you must understand, when Empis lost a match, it was wise to leave the city as soon as possible.”
“How close is this Trolley House to the main gate?”
Freed said what I wanted to hear and feared I would not. “Quite close.”
“Let’s go,” I said. I almost added hump, hump, but didn’t. That was the language of our captors, and I wanted none of their belittling talk. We’d done for seven of them. No matter how it went at the end of the tunnel, there was that.
“Who still has buckets with water in them?” I called back.
Six did, but none were full. I asked them to come up behind me. We’d use what we had, then do what we could.
2
We came to another flight of steps and Ammit, out of breath at last by the time we got to the top of them, shifted Freed to Iota. Freed said, “Leave me. I’m just dead weight.”
“Save your breath to cool your porridge,” Eye growled. It might have been porridge—as in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears; it might have been soup.
The corridor now tended up more steeply, like the one leading to the field. I hoped we’d reach the end soon, because the reservoir of fuel in the lantern was almost gone and the light was dimming. Then, on our right, I began to hear a scratching and scrabbling beyond the tile wall. Quite close. I remembered my doomed run for the outer gate, tripping over the gravestones, and the hackles on my neck rose.
“What’s that?” Quilly asked. “It sounds like…”
He didn’t finish, but we all knew what it sounded like: fingers. Fingers in the earth, clawing toward the sound of our passage.
“I don’t know what it is,” I said. Which was probably a lie.
Eris said, “When his mind is not at rest—Elden, I mean—the dead grow restless. So I’ve heard. It might only be a story to scare children. Even if it’s true, I don’t… I don’t think they can get in here.”