Chapter 92 - The Earth Opens

Under normal circumstances, the history of imperial infrastructure was an enigmatic affair. Professor Halvorsen, a man whose voice resembled the slow grinding of millstones, was droning on about the engineering marvels of the early capital's aqueducts and, as a tangential footnote, the "largely mythical" network of catacombs and reinforcement chambers that supposedly predated the city itself. "Superstition and structural necessity often blur in the popular mind," he intoned, pointing a bony finger at a diagram of sedimentary layers.