than it should.
‘An ancient fighting style,’ said the count. ‘I was not aware it was even taught any more.’
Oliver dipped down and wiped the blood off his witch-blade onto a corpse’s jacket. A slippery blade is a dangerous blade; the words arrived in his mind as if from his father. Steamswipe galloped for the tunnel that Vauxtion had sketched out for them, Oliver and the count taking the rear as their three companions sprinted in the shielded lee of the steamman’s hull, round shot pinging off his armour.
Someone was shouting at them from above as they reached the shelter of the tunnel mouth, a woman’s voice. It was the assessor; her livid words mangled by the row of kneeling Quatershiftian scouts discharging their rifles. Vauxtion stuck out his hand and Oliver tossed him one of his pistols, the count falling to one knee and turning sideways, gun bucking once. The assessor fell forward lifeless onto the rank of soldiers, spilling one of the troopers into the pit mouth.
‘Remind me to tell Ka’oard to engage a new agent.’
Tunnels split out in front of them in all directions and they pushed past bewildered workers — equalized and human — following the count’s lead. Molly added to the confusion, shouting warnings of raids by the crushers and tunnel collapses, floatquakes and failing Chimecan roof crystals. Tremors ran through the floor of the mine system, lending authenticity to her warnings.
‘An atmospheric capsule,’ said the commodore. ‘The blessed shifties are coming through. If we don’t bring the tunnels down soon we’ll be facing a brigade full of the rascals down here with us.’
Count Vauxtion pulled a spherical detonator cap from his pocket. ‘Be cautious, there will be guards outside the blasting store.’
Oliver frowned. He could not detect any soldiers around the corner. Steamswipe rounded the corner of the tunnel to find a steel door blocking their passage.
‘There is nobody here.’
‘So much the better,’ said the commodore. ‘Let’s set your blessed charge and be away from here before it does its lethal work.’
Steamswipe lifted Lord Wireburn and hosed the locked door with blue fire, melting the barrier with the precision of a Middlesteel watchmaker. Pushing into the blasting chamber’s cavernous interior they halted. It was empty. Four solitary glass-gilded barrels lay piled in the centre, an equalized worker about to load one into a two- wheeled handcart.
‘Where are they?’ shouted the count. ‘Where’s the blasting store?’
‘Compatriot,’ grated the equalized worker, ‘this is the blasting store.’
‘The blow-barrel casks,’ said Vauxtion. ‘This chamber was piled high with blow-barrel casks yesterday evening.’
‘They have been shipped back to mill twelve,’ said the worker, the calculation drums in his chest turning hesitantly as he tried to summon the words. ‘The glass blowers have been out of sap for charge manufacture for days. The mine-works committee said you did not need the barrels in here any more, time for bullets they said.’
Commodore Black kicked the handcart over. ‘Our stars. Our unlucky stars.’
‘Soldiers,’ said Oliver. ‘Coming into the tunnels after us. We cannot afford to be dead-ended in this chamber.’
‘Tell me we can get out of here,’ Molly said to the count.
‘I was not planning to die down here,’ said Count Vauxtion, slipping the detonator sphere back in his pocket. ‘This complex is a termite mound, there’s tunnels all around us and the higher ones connect to the old copper mine above. There are airshafts that come out in Middlemarsh Forest.’
‘With our mortal luck the Third Brigade will have parked their ammunition train over them,’ said the commodore.
They dared the mine passages again, passing equalized gangs blissfully unaware of anything except the hollows in the rock that they were working on and the equipment they were dragging behind them, ignorance which turned to panic when the Commonshare’s skirmishers darted through the corridors in pursuit of the intruders.
Steamswipe overturned three wagons of rubble waiting to be pulled out on a rail. An instant blockade. A tongue of cyan flame licked out from Lord Wireburn, sending the soldiers behind them scattering. Molly ducked her head into a side passage and then tried another opening down the tunnel. ‘One leads up, one leads down.’
Bullets cracked past as Nickleby tried to reload his pistol one-handed. ‘I can hold them here.’
‘With me by your side,’ said Steamswipe, loosing another burst of flame. ‘I could slay the entire army of the Commonshare in these tunnels and I would not think it too much.’
Molly pushed the commodore down the tunnel towards Oliver. ‘I’m not leaving anyone here. We can smash the ladders in the shaft behind us, the shifties don’t know these tunnels any better than us.’
‘He has a point,’ said the count. ‘If a couple of us stay and hold the tunnel-’
Molly heard the glass sphere as it rolled down the corridor towards them, two hues of liquid capped by a clockwork head rotating in towards the crystal. Someone shouted ‘grenade’ and Steamswipe cast himself on top of the crystal explosive, the detonation lashing the steamman warrior into the wall of the tunnel, lifting everyone else off their feet. The burning knight crumpled into the wooden tunnel support, snapping the stay as an avalanche of rock rained down around them.
Oliver got to his feet. Blood was pouring from his head where a rock had glanced off it. Commodore Black rose out of the haze of rock powder. ‘Sweet mercy!’
They had been cut off from the others by the rock fall. There was a small chink of light from the lanterns on the other side of the cave-in — their side had fallen into darkness.
‘We’re here,’ Oliver shouted through the small crevice.
On the other side of the rock fall Nickleby and Count Vauxtion picked themselves up from under the layer of tunnel wreckage and shouted back. Steamswipe’s head and chest were visible; the rest of his body lay trapped under a huge rock. The ceiling had collapsed in front of them too; the barks of the Commonshare skirmishers muffled beyond their pocket of tunnel.
‘Lass!’ shouted the commodore. ‘Molly! Is Molly with you, Silas?’
‘She’s not here.’
Commodore Black stared at the mass of rock. ‘Sweet Circle. Molly, Molly!’
Oliver pulled the submariner away from the rock fall as he frenziedly tried to pull at the rubble and rocks. ‘I can’t sense her under there, commodore. I can feel the Third Brigade passing through in the atmospheric capsules below us, but I can’t sense Molly.’
‘Lad, she might be unconscious under there. Trapped in a pocket of air.’
‘She could be, but better if she isn’t. A company of miners with blasting barrels and drills would take a day to shift this. If she woke under there and she wasn’t dead…’
‘Oh lass, my poor lass.’
Nickleby placed his face near the fissure in the rock fall. ‘We are trapped in here. Steamswipe is pinned down and near deactivate. The tunnel fall at the other end is lighter. We might be able to dig out that way although I suspect we are going to find half the Third Brigade waiting for us.’
‘I doubt they have waived the brigade’s rules on prisoners since I faced them with the remains of the royalist army,’ said the count. ‘Soldiers who accept a surrender are to feed the prisoners out of their own allocation of rations.’
‘There is another way,’ rumbled Lord Wireburn from the tunnel floor.
Count Vauxtion picked up the holy weapon. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I contain within my shell the stuff of anti-life, a grain of a primordial energy superior in explosive force to a forest of blow-barrel trees. I can lower the walls of containment to this power and release my life force in a single burst.’
The commodore climbed up the rock fall to speak through the gap. ‘Silas, you’ll not survive that. Dear Circle you can’t leave old Blacky and the lad down here on our own, scrabbling about in the dark like rats in a trap.’
‘Get away, Jared,’ called Nickleby through the cranny. ‘As far and as fast as you can. We’re going to bring down the roof on the Third Brigade after all.’
‘No Silas,’ wheezed the commodore.
Oliver pulled at the submariner’s jacket. ‘We have to climb as high as possible.’
