The iron grate at the head of the under-road drain gave way with a muffled, greasy click.
Ren-the-Cinder eased the heavy rusted bars open two inches. His bloodshot grey eyes peeked through the gap into the underground darkness of the castle cellar.
“Two guards,” Cinder whispered over his shoulder, his breath smelling of stale trail biscuits. “Black plate. Glass visors. Armed with six-foot steam-actuated axe-spears. They’re standing by the main distributor coil twenty paces east. No dogs.”
Ren Vale pushed past the Coward, his boots making zero sound. He stepped onto the dry, flagstoned floor of the lower cloisters.
The chamber was huge.
It was an ancient underground crypt forty paces wide and a hundred paces long, its vaulted ceiling supported by twelve thick columns of dressed black dark rock. But the crypt had been stripped of its old family tombs. In place of stone sarcophagi, rows upon rows of low iron hospital cots stretched across the floor. Over two hundred cots, arranged in neat, military files.
In each cot lay a child.
They were borderland boys and girls between the ages of six and fourteen, dressed in coarse linen hospital smocks. Across the forehead of each child was strapped a band of polished copper mesh, connected by padded wires to a massive brass bus-bar that ran down the center of the aisle like a gold-trimmed spine.
