There was not a soul native to Paris who did not know that beneath the city was a riddle of catacombs and tunnels that led as far as forty miles afield. There were few, indeed, who had not searched out some spot through which they might enter and explore that endless maze, and some few who had of course never returned. The chambers beneath le Monstre's warehouse lair had touched on them; it was perhaps inevitable that he had run to them seventeen years ago when the flame had driven him to madness. It was equally inevitable that I could never have found him in them; their twists and turns were too many, and so the fox need only stay one corner ahead of the hounds to survive.
The fox which now led me beneath the city was fleet of foot and driven by righteous fear of her pursuant, but that, I thought, was not truly what drove her underground. She had the pschent; there had to be some greater plot that I did not yet see that moved her to bring it into the catacombs instead of to der Führer, though I suspected Kiera had no more loyalty toward him than she did for le Monstre. Something else was afoot, and I gave chase with an energy fueled by fury; whatever the purpose of her plot, I did not care for being its mark.
It was in part this blind rage that sent me into the first trap; had I been properly wary, I might have seen the signs of it in the way Kiera leapt nimbly from one stone to another, almost dancing, but in my anger I saw her lithe motions as mockery, proving that she was not afraid of me after all.
I might also have blamed the light: though it was midday above the streets, below them there were only sudden pools of striated daylight where grates above showed promises of the upper world. Between those pools, limestone walls bounced and reflected some of their light, and Kiera, who had always intended to retreat into the catacombs, had a lamp; it made her easier to follow and yet dangerous to lose, for what light she brought was nearly all I had. Without the shining beacon of her lamp, it was at best dusky, hardly showing the pitted walls or the shadowy inhabitants therein. I was grateful for that: I did not need the leering faces of the long dead to add to my disquiet. As it was, the scent of damp and decay brought back far too vivid memories of the day I had discovered my parents bound to the Emotion Extractor chairs.
Oui; it was memory, more than anything, that let the first trap close around me. So embroiled in past emotions was I that I did not think to echo Kiera's dancing steps, only charged forth like the bull in the china shop, and was nothing but purely astonished when the floor itself crumbled beneath my feet.
There was a word for these holes: oubliette, a place where one threw people to forget about them. Most oubliettes, though, were only that: a hole. But some more enterprising soul had thought to litter the floor of this one with four-foot spikes, all sharpened to a razor's edge and of such strong material that it was the falling stones which shattered further upon impact, and not the spikes that dulled or fell.
I leapt, knowing that the breaking stone beneath my feet would never support a jump as lengthy as mine must be. Nor was I wrong: most of what I accomplished was laying myself out so that when I fell it would be my belly that struck the spikes, thus ensuring a long and painful death. But a few pillars remained amongst the shattering floor, those few points upon which Kiera had danced her weight, knowing that they were safe. My fingertips clawed one of those pillars and held me; I swung into it with great force, knocking the wind from my belly. Like a child clinging to its parent—or like Josephine Baker clinging to me so recently I could still taste the scent of her perfume—I wrapped my legs around the pillar's narrow width, and told myself the sounds escaping through my teeth were whines of exertion, not whimpers of terror. After a moment I found that my arms, too, were wrapped around the pillar and hugging it with such strength that it was a wonder it did not fall to pieces in my grasp.
I could not go down—the floor would make a pincushion of me, even if I controlled my descent; a sneeze or a misstep and slip would spell my doom. Nor, it appeared, could I go up—the grip I held on the pillar would not be loosened for love or money, neither of which was in abundance to tempt me into seeing if I was wrong.
It would be an ignominious death, clinging to a pillar until I rotted. With a sigh that I chose not to think of as frightened, I pinched my thighs together one whit more tightly and, thus secured, convinced my arms to scoot up a mere quarter-inch or so. It required several iterations of these minute movements to move my arms high enough that I could then tighten them and in turn loosen my legs, scooting myself up some infinitesimally small distance. By the third or fourth cycle I had grown bolder and also, perhaps, much more aware that Kiera's departure meant the light was gone, and I was beginning to imagine the things that might crawl out of the dark. Whilst I might normally consider myself fearless enough to face all comers, the scent-borne memories of the place reduced some part of my soul to the quivering fear of a child: of the child I had been when I first faced le Monstre. I simply did not wish to be alone in the dark in the catacombs; my nerves were not prepared for that, even if my fellow Centurions might scoff.
It was thus with some haste I finally flung one arm over the pillar's top and dragged myself up to balance precariously upon it, and it was only then that I began to appreciate the true difficulty in which I now found myself.
Kiera's light was gone entirely; only the fact that my eyes had slowly adjusted to the faint glimmers from above allowed me to see at all, and then, not well. Well enough to know—to almost sense—that there were other pillars upon which I might balance, but far too poorly to judge the distances to them so that I might leap free of this predicament. Above me the curved, carved tunnel roof offered no assistance. I could perhaps create some sort of swinging mechanism with the leather gun holsters secured around my torso, but there were no visible hooks from which I could dangle and swing. My choices were to go down to the spine-ridden floor and search blindly for a way up the far wall, or jump.
With a roar intended wholly to drown my own fear, I leapt before I could think on it further: toward the left, and forward, trying to recall in my mind's eye the steps Kiera had taken as she danced through the death trap. My feet hit squarely. Scarcely able to believe my own good fortune, I leapt again, this time surging to the right—and this time I was not so fortunate. My right foot landed hard on a pillar's edge; my left, not at all. My right ankle twisted and so did I, too frightened, too desperate, to even scream. My right arm, flailing as I fell, caught the pillar's flat top; so too did my jaw, which snapped shut hard enough to cause stars in my vision. Before I could stop moving and think, I called on desperate strength and hauled myself upward. The very moment my feet were under me, I crouched, turned to face the way I believed I had been traveling—in the dark, after the fall, I could no longer tell—and with a prayer for wings, jumped.
A coward dies a thousand deaths, they say, and a brave soul, but one. In that leap, I was a coward, imagining every iteration of pain that I might soon face; pierced through the eye, the kidney, the stomach, the lung—all the worst ways to die by piercing came to me, but I could no more alter my course now than I might change the path of the sun in the sky.
I hit solid stone, rolled, and came up against a wall with such force that dust shook from above and coated my gasping face with the detritus of dead men.