The door opened onto mud, torchlight, and the low groan of a siege engine being winched into position.
Jonah’s boots sank the second he stepped through. The soft-looking man was already three steps ahead, now wearing a leather apron and carrying a lantern and a heavy ring of keys. Same unhurried walk.
“Watch the ditch,” the man said.
Jonah watched the ditch. It had bodies in it. He decided the universe had a sense of humor and it was not on his side.
“What is this place?”
“Keep of Aldwyn. Sixty-first day of the siege, give or take.” The man glanced at Jonah’s clothes. “Stay close and try not to look like you just fell out of the future.”
A horn sounded above them, low and mournful. The whole courtyard flinched as one.
“That’s the all-clear for the short pause,” the man said. “Catapults stop for about twelve minutes while they reload. Then they start again. Kitchens first — most of the non-combatants are still in there. We move them while we can.”
They cut across the muddy yard. Men shouted. Somewhere a damaged section of wall collapsed with a roar. As they passed a group of exhausted soldiers, one of them looked up and actually smiled in relief.
“Gary. Thank the saints. We thought you’d gone under with the north tower.”
“Not yet,” Gary said, already moving past. “Cellars. Spread the word.”
Jonah noticed, with the specific outrage reserved for very stupid details in the middle of a crisis, that Gary was eating a sandwich. Where he’d gotten it, or when, was not information Jonah had access to. Gary took another unhurried bite and kept moving.
The kitchens were packed — cooks, servants, children, the walking wounded. The air smelled of smoke, boiled cabbage, and too many people who hadn’t slept.
Gary didn’t waste time.
“Listen up!” His voice cut through the room. “Bombardment resumes in minutes. Cellar stair, now. If you can walk, help someone who can’t. Leave the pots. Leave everything. Move.”
A few people stared. One older woman actually brightened.
“It’s Gary,” she said to the person next to her, as if that settled the matter.
They moved — but not cleanly. A man tried to drag a whole sack of flour until Gary simply took it out of his hands and pointed him at the stair. A child refused to leave without a wooden spoon; Jonah grabbed both child and spoon and kept them moving. Two women argued about which way the stair was until Gary physically turned them around.
“Left side clear!” Gary called. “Keep moving. You — help him up. Don’t stop on the stairs.”
Jonah posted himself at the doorway, steering the stubborn ones. A catapult stone hit the outer wall hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling. The pause was ending early.
“Faster!” Gary barked.
They got the majority down before the real volley arrived. Timber cracked. A section of the kitchen ceiling folded inward. Gary hauled a woman clear of a falling beam and shoved her toward the stair.
“Down! Everyone still up here — down!”
Jonah scrambled over rubble and pushed the last straggler. Another stone hit. The floor under the kitchen began to give.
Gary was the last one down. He looked back once through the dust, then followed.
Below, the cellar was crowded and loud with coughing, but it was holding. Most of the people they had pushed down were still on their feet.
Gary was already moving through them, one arm out like a gate. “Wine tunnel, back wall, past the racks — it comes up outside the wall line. Go now. Don’t wait on the stragglers, just go.” People went. It wasn’t tidy — the flour-sack man got wedged in the tunnel mouth for one bad second before Jonah hauled him through by the collar — but they went, coughing and cursing and moving, disappearing one after another into the dark.
The keep above them decided it was finished before the last few made it clear. The ceiling of the cellar split. Stone and timber came down over the tunnel mouth, sealing it — but the sound on the other side kept moving away instead of stopping. Footsteps, not screaming. Jonah grabbed the last person still in the open — the boy with the wooden spoon — and shoved him at the closing gap in time to see him vanish into the tunnel dark a half-second before the floor gave way entirely.
Jonah fell through torchlight and smoke and the smell of grain dust.
He hit solid ground alone.
Rain. Neon. The alley. Doors.
Gary was already waiting, apron and keys gone, looking only mildly put out.
“Most of them made it,” Gary said. “The tunnel held long enough. Next one.”
He held the open door.
Jonah followed. He was starting to hate doors. He was also starting to understand that whatever this was, Gary was still the only person who knew the way through it — and that the people in these places seemed strangely glad to see him.