We left the kitchens and moved horizontally. The locked hallways where I expected to find Emily were on the south end of the base, near the center of the civilian part of the Torchlight District. We went north and up, gaining levels, going away from the buried, secret chambers of the Council’s hidden experiments.
We heard guards patrolling in hallways beneath us, chasing the routes they expected us to take. I wondered how much they knew we knew, if they had planted the seed of the Council’s laboratories in my father’s ear, confident that he would pass that on to me? They had overplayed their hand, then. I knew I couldn’t trust anyone, except maybe Wilson, though I trusted him more to act in Emily’s interests than in mine or his own. I was comfortable with that.
Wilson and I busied ourselves with mischief. We set a fire in the barracks, tripped auto-alarms in the weapon guildhall. We avoided the zep docks. I had them in mind for our escape.
“Are we just having fun?” Wilson asked. We were destroying the escapements in all the frictionlamps we passed, ruining them in a sudden flash of illumination. It was slow work, and taking us no closer to Emily.
“We couldn’t get to her before they closed their noose,” I said. “We can’t get to her now. Too many guards in too small an area. We could try, but that would just be shooting and heroism, and then we’d both be dead.”
“I’m glad you’ve thought this all out.”
“I have. Just listen. So we cause trouble. We fill their halls with smoke, we poke their eyes out.” I shut my eyes and loosened the final bolt on the ‘lamp I was working on. The room went sun-bright, then black. We shuffled to the next room. “Sloane only has so many men. He’ll have to come for us.”
“And then?”
“Then we go for Emily. Evacuating the cadets was a mistake. While they’re searching the Academy, we take the girl.”
“And if she dies in the meantime?”
“They won’t kill her,” I said. “Soon as she dies, they lose us.”
“You’re putting a lot of trust in that,” Wilson said.
“They want me pretty badly, friend. They’ll be careful.”
He snorted, then continued with our campaign of trouble. It wasn’t long before we ran in to our first patrol. Four Badgemen, poking carefully through a wardrobe hall like hunters in a haunted forest. Wilson bellied the first one with his knife, and I shot the rest. After they were dead I stood in the middle of the room and emptied each of their weapons wildly into the walls, to make the ambush look more frantic and horrifying than it had been. We cut away from our goal, and took the next two patrols that came to investigate, then put many chambers and halls between ourselves and the carnage. Not long after, the Academy was bristling with small patrols of very excitable Badgemen, talking loudly to one another and jumping at every sound.
“There, see,” I whispered from my alcove above the grand fireplace in the feeding hall. “Pinch hard enough and the monster stirs. Should just be a matter of finding our girl.”
We clambered down into the darkened hall. I had just reached the ground floor when a voxorator in the wall clapped open and started screaming. Emily.
“They’re killing her,” Wilson gasped. “They’re done waiting, lad.”
I coughed and wiped my mouth. They wouldn’t dare, not until they had me. A lure with no bait is just string. The screams continued, clear and honest.
“Okay, we need… we need to get organized. We can go in together and-”
“Like hell, son. You said they’re waiting.” He unsheathed his knife and buckled another round into his shortrifle. “I’ll make for the front gates, near where we got in. I’ll make noise, like we’re trying to get out. You get Emily, get her out.”
“Make for the zepliner docks. That’s where I’ll be headed, once I have her. You’ll never get out the front door.”
“Probably,” he said, then ran down the hall. I waited until I heard sporadic gunfire. I took the grand spiral to the main level, and started working my way quietly to the locked corridors of the basement.
The Halls were as I remembered them. Some childish part of my brain felt like a schoolboy again, in the halls between classes without permission. It was a ridiculous feeling. The roving patrols had thinned out, now that Wilson was making such a racket above me. My passage was undisturbed.
The locked hallways were still locked, but unguarded. I forced the door. The corridor beyond was dark and quiet. I slipped inside, secured the door behind me, then ventured out with my revolver in my hand.
When I was a cadet, my fellow students and I had spent a good deal of our recreational time discussing these locked spaces. The common mythology was that they were prisons, or held some entombed secret that the Academy could not suffer the light of day. We never saw anyone enter or leave these doors. If it was a laboratory, as my father insisted, then there must be other entrances, entrances that I did not know.
The walls here were stone, not unlike the rest of the Academy. Fewer wall sconces, too. How did the researchers do their work in such dreadful gloom? It wasn’t long before I had to set down my revolver and assemble the tiny hand lamp I brought. Once it spun up, the lamp’s soft amber light was the only illumination in the place.
The air smelled like crushed bugs. It was a familiar scent, but I couldn’t place it. I descended a stairwell, then went through an oak door that opened smoothly on oiled hinges. Beyond the door was a room like a small dome. There were shelves all the way up most of the walls, irregularly spaced and heaped with piles of books, glass tubes, broken equipment and even stranger detritus. There were openings that looked like arched windows near the top of the dome; they seemed to lead to tunnels, or deep shelves, but I could see no good way up there.
The center of the room was clear and the floor was smooth and free of dust. Closer inspection of the walls revealed scattered handholds, too widely spaced and irregularly arranged to let me climb up the walls.
I set my lamp on a shelf and began to search through the junk. It didn’t seem that Emily or Sloane were here. The piles on the shelves were interesting, probably arcane, but not what I was looking for. I took one quick pass through the dome, marveling at the odd handholds, the seemingly inaccessible upper shelves and tunnels.
They weren’t here. But where, then? Wilson and I had been through most of the rest of the Academy, sowing distraction and drawing the guards off. I thought we were drawing them away from this place, but clearly not. We’d been everywhere, except…
The docks. The zepliner docks, at the very top of the Academy, where the old signal flame stood unlit and the airships came and went. Where Wilson had gone, to draw them away. He was headed right at them, right where they were waiting.
I hurried out the door. I thought I caught sight of something, a long pale face, wide eyes the same albino white as the skin, staring down at me from one of the tunnels. A second look revealed nothing, just books, a glass jar and cobwebs. The room was empty, and Wilson was in trouble. I ran up the stairs.
The cavernous hangars of the docks take up the highest level of the Academy, great wooden structures that perch on the ancient stone of that place like an ersatz crown. They form a rough semi-circle around the launching derricks at their center. Rising above the derricks on a gentle dome of rock stands the structure that gives the district its name: The Torchlight.
In the early days of Veridon, a garrison lived on the rock to watch for mountain raiders as they crossed the plains to the east, or river pirates forging their way downriver from the principalities further upstream. They would burn the Torch to warn the soldiers below, so that everyone could make for the fortified parts of the city.
With the gift of flight, our sentry has grown lax. The original iron and stone building was replaced with a circle of hammered brass, a low wall whose lines were reminiscent of fire and smoke. The pyre is no longer kept dry and packed, and the honor guard no longer stands by with dry wicks and flints to sound the alarm. No armies approach Veridon, no raiders ply the Reine.
They were up there, a double handful of Badgemen, plus a couple other figures huddling away from the rain. I could only see them when the storm provided lightning. Sloane was there, and Wilson, tied up and bloody. There was something else, too, squatting where the Torch should be, filling the brass circle with a dark and complicated presence.
I snuck as close as I could. I kept to the hangars. Each building contained a single airship, lashed down for storm-running, the crews nowhere to be seen. The winds beat against the thin wooden walls, and the zeps lurched in their moorings.
