Shadows, стр. 36
A vast rectangular chamber stretched away for at least one hundred feet. He estimated the walls to either side were at least thirty feet away. Hewn from the living rock, support columns ran in three parallel rows down the room’s length. The room was lit by tall candles in metal holders, and the area stank of tallow. Beyond the light of the candles, deep shadows obscured details. None of that was what stunned him, however.
Every inch of wall space was covered with shelves crammed with binders of paper and parchment, scrolls, stone tablets, pots of various sizes, and dried plant stalks. Thousands and thousands of items spilled onto the floor. Picking up a page near his right foot, Tanavuna felt the rough texture of animal skin and frowned at the characters, diagrams, and illustrations that crowded to all four edges of the smooth side.
Being the hetman’s son, he’d been taught to read, but most of the words were foreign to him. Nevertheless, he could make out enough to know it was about the effects of some medicinal plant. Nearby, stacks of square stone tablets harkened back to an earlier time, with barely legible letters chipped into them, probably by a hammer and chisel.
A sniffle in the distance made him drop into a crouch, the rifle aimed down the center of the room. He saw a faint light some fifty or sixty feet away. Against its glow, he could make out a partial silhouette. As he crept closer and panned the gun in a semi-circle, Tanavuna watched as the light gave increasing detail to the dark outline, ultimately revealing it to be the face of an old woman, her skin bleached nearly white as only long years out of the sun could do. A bony hand held a writing stick, which she dipped in water and scratched upon an ink block before writing on some parchment. She was shrunken, like he’d seen the sun do to mummified corpses, and she hadn’t noticed him yet.
She sat at a table inside a cage with heavy iron bars. A hole in a corner of the floor must have been the privy. The only other furniture was a crude wooden bed with a blanket. Ominously, two identical but empty cages were positioned on either side of it, one of which had a blanket on the floor and its table and chair overturned.
“Hello?” he called out.
The old woman looked up, squinted, and went back to writing.
He came closer. “Who are you, grandmother?”
“What? Who’s there? I don’t recognize the voice.”
“My name is Tanavuna, what is yours?”
“My what?”
“Your name.”
“Oh…my name. I had a name once, yes, you’re right I did. Let me see…Paaku-something.”
Tanavuna stood without realizing it, more shocked than he had been at the sight of the room.
“Paakunami? Is that your name?”
“Hmmm…yes, yes that was it. Paakunami. Good, that’s good, I’m glad to remember that.”
“But…you disappeared thirty-five years ago from a village east of the city. We have all heard the story; all of us in the region. You were thought to have been taken by a predator while out gathering medicines.”
“Was I? Thirty-five years, you say? Well, no matter, I am here now.” Putting her nose an inch from the parchment, she went back to working.
“Was there a young woman here last night?” he asked, voice rising in urgency, “Tall, with black hair and brown eyes?” Now that the shock of finding the room and the old healer was wearing off, his sense of urgency returned, stronger than ever. Tanavuna thought he could smell his wife’s scent.
Paakunami peered at him, annoyed. “What woman?”
“She would have been in there,” he said, pointing to the cage beside her.
“Oh…her. Woke me up with her screaming when Subitorni came for her.”
“When?” In the urgency of the moment, he raised the M14 as a threat, but the hag showed no fear. He doubted she could see it.
“I don’t know; was I supposed to remember that?”
Realizing he’d gotten all he could from the woman, Tanavuna whirled and ran back up the stairs in time to hear a woman’s voice faintly echo down the hallway beyond the staircase leading to the upper chamber.
“Help me!”
It was Kesteluni.
* * * * *
Chapter 16
Yukannak’s footsteps rang through the empty tunnel. At Unaa’s prodding, he tried to force himself to run, but a lifetime of relative ease had not prepared him for so much physical exertion. Nevertheless, the determination that had kept him alive when so many others died served him well now. Unaa had a mad look in his eyes, and Yukannak didn’t doubt the young tribesman would welcome having a reason to kill him. So even when the pain burned in his side like hot metal, he kept moving toward the main tunnel. Once there, they turned south toward the Inner City.
He stumbled as they approached the cross-tunnel leading to the cache set aside for the Harvesters. The aftermath of battle littered the passage. Two men lay dead in each other’s grip, having been shot mid-grapple. Unaa’s face tightened when he recognized a man from his village. He had his thumbs in the eyes of a militiaman wearing yellow and green paint. That man’s corpse still gripped the knife buried in his enemy’s stomach. Bloody drag marks led to bodies piled against the wall where they had been moved out of the way. Men who’d