Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [45]
He found himself, at last, in an eight-sided chamber that he guessed must lie beneath the very centre of Severn Hill. The ceiling was a casual marvel, a piece of mechanical elegance that he realized must only ever be seen by the condemned and their judges. From a mosaic setting of geometric patterns set out in thumbnail-sized blue and green tiles depended a veritable orrery of lamps, circling one another in complex, perfect patterns to the gentle ticking of its clockwork. From a professional point of view it was admirable, but it peopled the scene below it with disturbing, circling shadows, and the blue-green of the ceiling reflected a gloomy, undersea radiance on to everything there.
There was a high dais to one side of the room, a long table set out upon it which was scattered with scrolls and papers, and at least one map that looked – from the brief glimpse Angved caught of it – to be a chart of the Lowlands. Angved himself was not destined for that table, of course. There were three rows of benches on the far side of the room, and they dumped him on one without a word and left him there, abruptly forgotten and abandoned.
Surreptitiously, he peered at the high table, trying to work out what was going on. There were a half-dozen men there, conferring in hushed voices but with a fair amount of animation, showing that, whatever was at stake, they had a great deal invested in it. Another man sat back, listening but not contributing, and displaying an indefinable air of wrongness. Not one of us, Angved realized, although he was not sure if he himself still counted as one of the Corps. The seated man was Rekef, though: he’d bet his life on it. An observer from the secret service – Outlander probably – brought to the secret heart of the Engineers’ little dominion. What is going on here?
The arguing men were four Wasps and two Beetles. After his eyes had adapted to the light, Angved could place at least half of them, and from that he guessed they must all be very senior engineers indeed. In the centre of the knot was Colonel Lien, his gaunt face looking as bitter as ever with the knowledge that his inferior rank was all the authority the Engineering Corps could muster. They had never been granted a generalship, and the others would all be mere majors.
Abruptly there was movement from behind Angved, with more hard and unsympathetic-looking guards arriving, and for a moment the engineer thought that he would just be hauled away again, his brief glimpse of this place just a mistake, punctuation on his road to some worse fate. The newcomers were delivering, however, rather than picking up, and someone slumped on to the bench next to Angved with a clink of chains.
This newcomer had not been employed on factory duty. Angved would find out later that this was the difference between being blamed for the demise of a halfway secret and deniable desert skirmish and being blamed for the failure of a major invasion. He was thin enough to look starved, with a wild growth of beard and his hair matted and tangled. Between that and the dirt, it was hard to see much in his face save the creases and lines. Grime and harsh treatment went a fair way to bridging what was in reality a fifteen-year gap in their ages, and perhaps it was this that broke through Angved’s shell of self-absorption. For the first time since the Khanaphes business had gone sour, he found himself looking on someone else as a human being, a kindred spirit.
The guards had stepped back to the door, and up at the high table the senior engineers were arguing again. A slim book was being passed back and forth, almost torn in half as they fought to point out various pages in it.
Angved saw the newcomer looking at him, the eyes lurking in that overgrown