long corridor were bones arranged in patterns all the way to the low ceiling. Water had seeped in from somewhere, and a lot of the skulls were crying green tears and growing fuzzy green beards. It didn't make them look less creepy.
"The catacombs," Pritkin said, before I could ask.
"The what?"
"The Parisians started using old limestone quarries as underground cemeteries a few hundred years ago." He took the flashlight and pointed it at the map, frowning. "I didn't think they extended out this far."
"How far?"
"If these tunnels connect to those in the city, then hundreds of kilometers." He started shining the light here and there. I wished he'd stop; it lit puddles of water in the empty eye sockets, making the faces seem to move. "There have been stories of catacombs under Père Lachaise for years, but I thought they were merely rumors."
I stared at a nearby skull. It was bodiless, sitting atop a stack of what looked like femurs, and was missing the jawbone. But somehow it still seemed to be grinning. "They look pretty real to me."
The flashlight picked out a glint of gold, half buried in the mortar keeping a line of bones in place. I scraped at the cement with my finger, and it was so old that pieces of it just flaked off. The golden circle I revealed wouldn't budge, but I did get a better look at it. It appeared to be formed out of a snake that was chowing down on its own tail. "The ouroboros," Pritkin said, coming up behind me.
"The what?"
"An ancient symbol for regeneration and eternity."
"Like a cross?"
"Older." He shone the light around some more. "The Paris coven must have created their own catacombs, possibly during the Inquisition. Witches and wizards were sometimes disinterred and their bodies mutilated or burnt. This would have been one way of preventing that."
"You mean this is a mages' graveyard?"
"Possibly. The limestone pits were dug by the Romans. They were there for centuries before the Parisian authorities decided to make use of them. Perhaps the magical community had the idea first." From up the ladder came a sudden rain of stone and rubble. It sounded like our pursuers weren't giving up. "Can you shift us here?" he asked, pointing to a vague squiggle on the map.
My new job had more downsides than I could count, but there were a few perks, too. Well, one, anyway. The power that came with the office of Pythia allowed me to move myself and one or two others around in space and time. It was a damn useful weapon, and so far my only one. But it had its limitations. "I can't shift unless I know where I'm going."
"You've time-shifted before to places you've never been!"
"That's different."
There was a sudden avalanche, and a spell crashed into the floor behind us, igniting a storm of violent white light. It hit the skulls, causing them to crack and splinter, then bounced off the opposite wall, slinging stone fragments everywhere like flying daggers. Pritkin shielded me from the worst of the blast, then grabbed my hand and towed me down the corridor.
Since I didn't go bouncing off any walls, I assumed he could still see something, but to me it was a headlong plunge into nothingness. He'd clicked off the flashlight, I suppose to make it harder for our pursuers to track us, but without it the tunnels were so dark I couldn't tell whether my eyes were open or closed. "How different?" he demanded.
"The power lets me see other times, past places. Not the present," I explained, flinching. Afterimages from the blast were making reddish shapes leap in front of my vision, and I kept thinking I was about to plow into something. "If I want to do spatial shifts in the here and now, I have to be able to visualize where I want to go." And a shaky line on a bad map wasn't even close to good enough.
The corridor abruptly narrowed, to the point that it was impossible to continue side by side. Pritkin went first, pulling me along at something approaching a run. It was hot, the air was close, and the ground underneath our feet wasn't anything like level. It was soon obvious why someone would put a treasury here; without clear directions, you could wander around for months and never find anything.
Pritkin stopped, so suddenly that I ran into him. He spread the map out on the wall and handed me the flashlight. I clicked it