The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Three

The shape of the tunnel's interior was square with an arched ceiling, possessing an overall height of three meters and a width of five meters, with its upper walls near the ends of the ceiling arch fitted with egg-shaped, snaking sectional conduits that ran the half-kilometer length of the subterranean passage. Light was supplied from lamps behind grime-stained oval lenses inset in the ceiling. Small swarms of feathery-winged moths mobbed together near the ceiling lights, casting strange and erratic shadows that moved across the walls and floor. Aging metal pipes for sanitation and rusted power box housings for electrical power cabling ran along the ceiling topping the vertical walls. The tunnel was dry, with wide swaths of stale, powdery, desiccated dirt clinging stubbornly to the tunnel's interior while swarms of crab-like, hard-shelled beetles scuttled across the cracked surfaces on either side.

A bank of aging photoelectric light sensors set vertically into the walls at the mouth of the tunnel created a crisscrossing latticework web protecting the entrance. Anything or anyone breaking the complex mesh of the light beams would trigger an alarm. Power was supplied to the light sensors courtesy of The City's vast, albeit waning, network of interconnected dry cell batteries, a network used more frequently since the citywide breakdown of maintenance and repair of electrical utilities in the advent of The Long Death.

The tunnel was a dense and flinty avenue that had, over three score orbital solar heliars, been host to covert episodes of brutality that included robbery, kidnapping, torture and assassination. It was a clandestine major artery known to only a select few that led into The City's sullen and gloomy heart.

D'Spayr's plan had been relatively simple. He would infiltrate The City via its underground access, navigating the spokes of the wheel of utility corridors and catacombs towards the secondary center-spool under the Third District of the Altex Prefecture. Niyaddour had, in its heyday, been divided into five Prefectures, each containing two districts, and after Kolag Y'phree had usurped control of the city from its corrupt, post-Emperium criminal masters, the Warlord had relocated the administrative center of power to the Altex Prefecture. The Knight had decided that the quickest and least chaotic way in which to short-circuit the Warlord's control over his forces, scattered as they were throughout The City as a defense against Grimmurmanthe the Arbiter, was to isolate and destroy Y'phree's military command from within. Shut down communications, disrupt supply chains, reroute munitions distribution, orphan the command structure, and then set the unsuspecting troops at each others' throats. If he hit their command center hard enough and fast enough, confused and disassembled their mission control, they wouldn't know what to do and they would doubt the authenticity and veracity of the orders they might receive from upstream. In the matter of a couple hours, D'Spayr could bring down the fortress-city with minimal bloodshed.

And if all that were to fail, he would unleash Emaris Staurqe's superhuman fury against the Warlord's forces.

That was the plan.

And it appeared that from the very start, things just were not going to work out.

There were two dozen armed sentries guarding the hooded, onyx maw of the tunnel leading beneath the perimeter wall into the city. They were rough men, a force of volunteer soldiers pulled from the lower ranks of the tradesman guilds and from the meanest urban districts within the fortress-city. Some were reformed criminals, some yet remained members of the criminal underworld, while others simply liked the opportunity their military service gave them to use their savage weaponry against other men. Regardless, they weren't, for the most part, inexperienced samaritans. They were fighters.

And all of them could see clearly as cats in the dark. That night vision was courtesy of a massive increase in rhodopsin in the photoreceptor cells in their eyes following indiscreet and unwanted experimentation conducted by combined effort of the Emperium's Ministry of Racial Alignment and the Ministry for Technological Development . That experimentation had been horribly inhumane and agonizing, but it had produced a troop of soldiers with the ability to see clearly in very low light... But that same ability forever cost those men the faculty of being able to live in normal daylight without burning out their optical nerves.