The ground ploughs into Thomas and empties his lungs of all their air.

WITCHFINDER GENERAL

Julius leads us to a sewer entrance not ten minutes’ walk from the flat. It’s an unmarked stone slab covering a manhole in the corner of a dirty yard. The slab must weigh forty pounds but Julius, broken-limbed, listing, labours it aside without asking for help. Underneath, a shaft leads straight down, its circumference roughly equal to my girth. An iron ladder is screwed into the brick. I am winded from the pace Julius has set, crablike, scuttling sideways down the streets, and gesture for him to wait. He does but spurns repose; paces the alley from wall to wall. Watching him — his jerky movements, the way he twists his neck too far around the anchor of his trunk; remembering that this was once my student, a boy placed in my care — makes me sick to my fat stomach. My man, Boswell, appears immune to such queasiness. He kept both lamp and gun trained on our guide as we followed him and now descends the shaft first, so as to cover Julius from the bottom while he climbs. Myself, I carry my Colt stuck in its holster on my belt. The thought of drawing it fills me with dread.

The shaft is perhaps fifteen feet deep. At its bottom lie the sewers. For the past few days, I have been sending men down here. Spies. Ever since I learned that Ashton was Aschenstedt; that Parliament, in its infinite wisdom, had given a terrorist the mandate to clean up the former capital. I imagined the sewers to be an orderly thing: a system of tunnels, with waste running down their centre. What they reported was a web, a maze. Old tunnels and new, lying at different depths in the earth, cross-connected by vertical shafts and silo-like chambers. Neighbourhood cesspools five storeys deep, tapped and drained by Aschenstedt’s men. Steam-powered drills; sluices and locks; water pumps the size of grain silos sitting in purpose-built chambers; exhaust pipes leading to air vents above. It would take a team of engineers a month to make sense of it all. My lads are many things, but engineers they are not.