“Just a moment,” Yazata said into the mouthpiece before hanging it up and once more turning the window to a one-way mirror.
“Was that enough information for you to decide on a plan of attack, Aristedes?” she asked, an undercurrent of annoyance in her voice. He couldn’t blame her. He was withholding information from an Inquisitor. That was to be expected from civilians and even witnesses, but not from coworkers, even less so from apostles, and absolutely not from pilgrim banisher apostles. Casus fully understood where she was coming from, because he hated it too, but he couldn’t reconcile his own sense of right with betraying Lady Blackhand’s trust.
Casus got up, walking to the table that took up a third of the room’s floor space. It was a “Strategic Planning Unit SPR-4735-C”. It was an enormous and highly advanced piece of machinery, combining a massive memory bank called a Memory Obelisk, countless memslate slots, a cognition engine the size of a small building, and a combination of projector lenses and a geomantic mapping module. The module was a mass of thaumetically treated “clay” that could work as an erasable writing surface, form a 3D map, and perform several other fancy functions that rarely if ever got used. Unsurprisingly these things were rare due to their impracticality compared to simpler and more modular solutions.
He exerted quite a bit of strength pressing one of the large buttons on the side, a loud CLACK betraying the fact it set a great clockwork mechanism into motion. The SPU whirred to life, the scribe-automata underfoot coming alive and literally reading off of the Memory Obelisk as the boot sequence.
“I need to ask a few more questions. Patch him through and keep it open, just let him see,” he said. Yazata did as asked, and stepped to the side, walking around the room’s perimeter to reach Casus’ side without breaking his sightline with Seer.
“I’ll ask this simply: Do you know of any means of entry into the mansion that wouldn’t be on official maps or blueprints?” Casus questioned. “Secret entrances or passages through the mansion, illegal tunnels for trafficking contraband…”
“...or people,” Seer finished, his reluctant tone betraying the fact he did know. He sighed, leaning forward in his chair, grasping his head. He ran his hands over his visor, then emitted a noise of annoyance as his vision was overtaken by smudges. While cleaning the outer shell with his shirt, he began talking again.
“When Semzar ‘invited’ me to that mansion, I was led through one of those tunnels. The ones that nobody but its builders and their victims know about. It was connected to the mansion’s underground supply line. I can point out where it was on a map, it was this underpass somewhere near… I think it was somewhere near Jafarnejad Gardens, with the big tree.”
“That’s nearly ten kilometers by air from the mansion…” Casus thought aloud, operating the PSU. The lenses set around its outer edge came alive, projecting a map of that section of the city. With the adjustment of a slider, he turned it so that Seer could see it from a bird's eye view. Immediately, he pointed out the spot.
“There. Some stones on the left side look out of place. Not sure how it opens; I couldn’t see. Probably a combination illusion and deterrence field.”
“You let us deal with that. How much did you see inside the tunnel?”
“I already told you. The tunnel goes on for a while, twisting left and right, loads of sealed off side passages from the looks of the walls. Some of ‘em are just locked doors, and some of ‘em are see-through, like the rusty barred ones off of old elevators. Saw some nasty shit behind those, but it all looked to have been abandoned for a while. As for the subterrain, it looked like a private tram line or something, way too nice to not be on maps.”
Casus shifted the map. Both the projection and the clay model shifted, showing a sprawling, vein-like tangle of tunnels and vents.
“Looks like it connects the mansion to several other buildings, they even come under the same deed as the mansion. A butchershop, a grocer, library, anything you would need without having to interact with the ‘common rabble’...” Casus thought aloud as he inspected the map.
“One more thing about the tramline - it was flooded. Wasn’t much, about two, three finger-widths of old rainwater. Won’t stop you, but they’ll hear you coming.”
Casus nodded: “Very well, you’ve been helpful.”
He glanced at Yazata, and without him needing to say a word, she once more separated them from Seer. With that, Casus got to work, operating the giant machine with gusto. It wasn’t the most practical, it didn’t conform to more common standards of design, learning it had been a nightmare, but Casus couldn’t help but love the PSU. It was as much a holy relic of the Inner Wheel as it was a machine, possessing a sense of the sublime not found in its mass-production counterparts. In a few minutes, he had a plan of attack worked out - not because he could think that quickly, but because he had considered this possibility before. Audunpoint’s subterrain layer wasn’t quite as vast as those of capital cities, but there were so many ancient and forgotten passages from the city’s time as a Jas’raban metropolis that there was no chance in hell to keep track of them all.
The subterrain was on the clay layer, while the surface level was projected above.
“You want me to lead a contingent of ‘Red Hood’ semi-autonomous graft-beasts and mount an encirclement assault on the mansion? Truly?” Yazata questioned for the third time.
Nodding, Casus reaffirmed his intent: ”I will join up with Lady Blackhand to infiltrate through the subterrain while the security force is distracted, eliminate Semzar and his officers, and we mop up the rest from within and without.”
Sighing, the witch-inquisitor agreed: “Very well.”
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