“How far?”
“If these tunnels connect to those in the city, then hundreds of kilometers.” He started shining the light here and there. I wished he’d stop; it lit puddles of water in the empty eye sockets, making the faces seem to move. “There have been stories of catacombs under Père Lachaise for years, but I thought they were merely rumors.”
I stared at a nearby skull. It was bodiless, sitting atop a stack of what looked like femurs, and was missing the jawbone. But somehow it still seemed to be grinning. “They look pretty real to me.”
The flashlight picked out a glint of gold, half buried in the mortar keeping a line of bones in place. I scraped at the cement with my finger, and it was so old that pieces of it just flaked off. The golden circle I revealed wouldn’t budge, but I did get a better look at it. It appeared to be formed out of a snake that was chowing down on its own tail. “The ouroboros,” Pritkin said, coming up behind me.
“The what?”
“An ancient symbol for regeneration and eternity.”
“Like a cross?”
“Older.” He shone the light around some more. “The Paris coven must have created their own catacombs, possibly during the Inquisition. Witches and wizards were sometimes disinterred and their bodies mutilated or burnt. This would have been one way of preventing that.”
“You mean this is a mages’ graveyard?”
“Possibly. The limestone pits were dug by the Romans. They were there for centuries before the Parisian authorities decided to make use of them. Perhaps the magical community had the idea first.” From up the ladder came a sudden rain of stone and rubble. It sounded like our pursuers weren’t giving up. “Can you shift us here?” he asked, pointing to a vague squiggle on the map.
My new job had more downsides than I could count, but there were a few perks, too. Well, one, anyway. The power that came with the office of Pythia allowed me to move myself and one or two others around in space and time. It was a damn useful weapon, and so far my only one. But it had its limitations. “I can’t shift unless I know where I’m going.”
“You’ve time-shifted before to places you’ve never been!”
“That’s different.”
There was a sudden avalanche, and a spell crashed into the floor behind us, igniting a storm of violent white light. It hit the skulls, causing them to crack and splinter, then bounced off the opposite wall, slinging stone fragments everywhere like flying daggers. Pritkin shielded me from the worst of the blast, then grabbed my hand and towed me down the corridor.
Since I didn’t go bouncing off any walls, I assumed he could still see something, but to me it was a headlong plunge into nothingness. He’d clicked off the flashlight, I suppose to make it harder for our pursuers to track us, but without it the tunnels were so dark I couldn’t tell whether my eyes were open or closed. “How different?” he demanded.
“The power lets me see other times, past places. Not the present,” I explained, flinching. Afterimages from the blast were making reddish shapes leap in front of my vision, and I kept thinking I was about to plow into something. “If I want to do spatial shifts in the here and now, I have to be able to visualize where I want to go.” And a shaky line on a bad map wasn’t even close to good enough.
The corridor abruptly narrowed, to the point that it was impossible to continue side by side. Pritkin went first, pulling me along at something approaching a run. It was hot, the air was close, and the ground underneath our feet wasn’t anything like level. It was soon obvious why someone would put a treasury here; without clear directions, you could wander around for months and never find anything.
Pritkin stopped, so suddenly that I ran into him. He spread the map out on the wall and handed me the flashlight. I clicked it on and saw a much less organized scene than before: bones had tumbled out of the walls and littered the floor, and in some cases they were mounded up in piles with no effort at arrangement at all. Unlike the ones in the main corridor, these looked like they’d just been thrown around any old way. I’m not usually sentimental about the dead—I meet too many of them—but it still seemed wrong. Friends and enemies, parents and children, all jumbled up, with nothing to give a history, a date of death, even a name.
“It would help if you shone the torch on the map,”
Pritkin commented caustically. I obliged, and the beam lit up his face, too. Its expression wasn’t reassuring. “Are your ghosts here?” he demanded.
“No. They wouldn’t follow us beyond the cemetery limits.” And it felt like we’d left those behind a while ago.
“What about others?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because this map is less than adequate! Some directions would be helpful.”
I shook my head. “These bodies were disturbed. I think they were brought here from their original resting places.”
“Meaning?”
“That their ghosts would have stayed behind.” Not to mention that if it was mages buried here, they wouldn’t have left ghosts anyway. Supernatural creatures just didn’t, as far as I knew.
“But their bones are here.”
“Doesn’t matter. Spirits can haunt a house, even when their bodies aren’t there. It’s all about what was important to them in life, the place where they felt a connection.” I looked around and repressed a shiver. “I don’t think I’d feel real connected to this place, either.”
Pritkin finally settled on a direction and we took off again, sliding through gaps in the rock that, at times, were barely big enough for me. I don’t know how he got through, but based on the muttered comments that drifted back, it wasn’t without the loss of some flesh. Finally we came to a slightly wider corridor, meaning that we still had to go single file but could pick up speed. For a minute, I thought we’d succeeded in losing our pursuers, but as usual, Murphy’s Law caught up with us.