Empress of Dorsa (The Chronicles of Dorsa)

44

Akella could’ve exited the castle by its front gate. She doubted the guards would’ve stopped her. She could’ve left by the sally port built into the northern wall. No one would’ve stopped her leaving that way, either. But she’d never liked being inside walls without having her own way in and out, a way that wouldn’t depend upon whether or not a gate was closed or a door was locked. It was part of the reason why she’d dug the tunnel beneath the palisade wall of their previous camp.

Castle walls, though, were not as easy as hastily constructed wooden walls to burrow beneath. Yet she had to give credit to the Imperial masons and engineers. The entire continent might not have a single decent shipwright amongst them, but their castles and manor homes were certainly more sophisticated than the Adessian ones she’d visited. She knew from her time in the dungeons of Port Lorsin that the palace had a plethora of underground escape routes that wound through the sea caves.

Castle Pellon had to have its underground exits, too. Akella had a hypothesis that, beneath the complex of towers, gates, walls, and residential quarters, there was a network of tunnels that carried things like rainwater, melted snow, and waste away from the building. With the East’s reputation for snowstorms and rainstorms, an absence of such tunnels would surely flood the castle and erode the earth around its foundations.

But she hadn’t known with certainty that the tunnels she was looking for really existed until she saw the Commander and Linna sparring in the eastern courtyard. There beneath their feet, worked in between the flagstones, was an iron grate that had doubtless been placed there to prevent the open courtyard from flooding. The iron grate had to lead downward, and then it had to lead away, taking all that snow that would melt sooner or later away from the castle.

Nevertheless, it took her until the eventide meal to find a grate large enough for a human being to climb down into, and then until sunset to pilfer a screwdriver from the blacksmith’s stall to loosen the screws enough to gain entrance. She had also, well, “borrowed” a lantern, a flask of oil, and a flint and steel kit, because there was no way Akella was going to explore tunnels with an unknown destination in pitch black darkness and risk getting lost and having her lantern go out.

She lost her sense of both time and direction once she began to trace the various arteries, veins, and capillaries beneath Castle Pellon. By the time she found a tunnel that was both large enough to crawl through and long enough that she guessed it was leading her beyond the castle and its grounds, she’d spent what felt like hours underground. She was glad she didn’t get claustrophobic easily, and doubly glad she’d brought the screwdriver along.

The tunnel, which was tall enough at points that she could traverse it at a crouch instead of on hands and knees, seemed as though it might go on forever. If she had to make a guess, she would say she was heading roughly east, and if that was true, this tunnel’s final destination might be as far as the river that lay a quarter mile beyond Pellon’s eastern wall. Other, smaller tunnels – they were more like pipes, really – kept bisecting the main artery, dumping their foul contents into the shallow trickle of water Akella currently splashed through. She would need a long, hot bath after tonight’s adventure, that was for sure.

At last she reached a maintenance shaft. By the time she spotted the milky light of the moon shining down from above and saw the shaft’s iron ladder rungs, Akella no longer cared where the sewage tunnel would end. She was ready to breathe fresh air again. So she climbed upward, pushed the screwdriver through the grate above and awkwardly worked loose the rusty screws, and with a discordant screech of metal, pushed the grate open.

Aboveground again at last. Akella breathed in deeply, letting her nostrils flare and her lungs fill with the sharply cold night air. Pellon carried with it the faint odor that most Imperial cities had – a combination of livestock, unwashed human bodies, and cooking odors. But with Pellon only inhabited by the Imperial Army and a handful of refugees, the city was underpopulated. Even though the city’s aroma was unpleasant to her nose, which far preferred the tang of an ocean breeze and sun-baked sand, it wasn’t nearly as bad as the smell of the tunnel.

Akella set down her lantern near the grate and grabbed a handful of snow from a drift piled up against the side of a roofless building. She scrubbed her hands and fingernails as if the snow was a bar of soap, ignoring the painful needles of cold shooting through her bare skin as her fingers and palms reddened and the snow melted. Then she stuck her boots in the snowdrift, waving each foot around in the hopes that some of the filth clinging to the soles and splattered onto the sides would come off so that she wouldn’t take the smell of the sewer with her wherever she walked.

It seemed to work, at least a little. Her boots were a little cleaner, the snowbank a little dirtier. But her bare hands were freezing now and already felt painfully chapped. She probably should have thought of that before she used snow to wash them clean. What did she know about snow? It was only the third time she’d been around it. The first time had been when a winter storm stranded her and her crew in a hidden cove off the Empire’s western coast years ago. The second time had been about three weeks ago, when the mountain men raided the Empress’s camp. She was still a cold-weather novice. Next time she skulked around stealing supplies from unsuspecting soldiers, she’d have to find herself a pair of those wool-lined leather gloves that she kept seeing.

Fortunately, her overcoat had pockets. As she walked away from the iron grate and towards the mouth of the alley she was in, she took turns putting one hand in a pocket while the other held a lantern.

Well, she’d found a way out of Castle Pellon that didn’t require her to go through one of its two main gates or its sally port. That had been the first half of her task. It was good to know she had an alternative route out of the castle. Hopefully she’d never have to use it. And she certainly didn’t plan to take Megs this way. The amount of filth she’d just crawled through was a little much, even for a seasoned smuggler like herself.

Now for the second half of her task – finding a way to get Megs out of Pellon unseen.

The alleyway opened onto an empty city street. The street wasn’t much broader than the alleyway she’d come from; the stone buildings on either side of it were so close together that Akella could imagine leaping from the rooftop of one to a rooftop on the other side of the street without too much effort.

Except for the fact that there were no rooftops.

Like the building she’d come out next to when she pushed through the iron grate, the roofs here had all been burned away. Black soot streaked their tops, and here and there she saw the burnt fragments of wooden beams that must have supported the missing roofs peeking out from the snow.

Akella wondered if the mountain men had burned Pellon, or if, in their haste to escape the invaders, the Pellonites themselves knocked over a lantern or two and started the fire that swallowed their city. She remembered the raid on the camp from a few weeks ago, remembered the fire-tipped arrows the tribesmen had shot, and decided it had probably been a combination of both. The way these buildings were crammed together, close enough that one roof probably touched its neighbors on either side, she imagined that the fire would’ve spread quickly, jumping from one building to the next until the entire city was a flaming torch in the night. The tops of the buildings were all peaked, and with gaping holes where their roofs should be, they looked to Akella like a nest of baby birds, craning their triangular mouths upward, waiting to be fed.

In her mind’s eye, she saw the street’s inhabitants fleeing, stuffing what few possessions they could grab into a sack or a trunk, scooping up their children, and running for their lives as the homes and shops surrounding them transformed into a hellish inferno.

Where did those people go? How many of them had survived the night the tribesmen took Pellon?

Akella shook her head and sighed. She might not have much love for the Empire, but that didn’t mean she took any pleasure in seeing the city that had once been the beating heart of the East become a burnt-out ruin. Nor did she take any pleasure thinking of innocent civilians hacked apart by warriors artificially strengthened by shadows or whatever potion they were hopped up on during battle. Akella might not have much love for the Empress, but she respected a woman who would leave the luxuries of Port Lorsin’s palace and travel to this frigid wasteland to see her people liberated.

She glanced around, trying to get some sense of where she was, but the buildings on either side of the street were too high for her to see the castle, which was the only landmark in Pellon that would help her get her bearings.

A slapping noise behind her made Akella jump, but when she spun around, one hand going to the hilt of the long knife hidden beneath her overcoat, she saw it was only the tattered remnant of an awning hanging askew above a splintered doorway. It had been composed of cheery white and red stripes once; now it was a dirty rag flapping in the breeze, its edges singed black.

Time to get going. She headed up the street, which curved gently uphill. Maybe once she got higher, she’d be able to see the castle. From there, she’d be able to find what she was looking for.