Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [74]
He had been ready for some time, when the message finally came. For the last few hours both he and Varsec had sensed the approach of it. Whatever they were here for, death or glory, it was coming.
Dusk had come and gone, as the messenger arrived, and Angved caught himself wondering what precisely they were being called to that had to be done under cover of darkness. The bland-faced, efficient Wasp-kinden come to fetch them had brought uniforms with him: tunics in the black and gold. ‘We need to make a good show,’ he explained, and neither of the prisoners asked for whom.
They were taken to a vast mass of stone shot through with small windows, encrusted with glyphs and friezes, fronted by vast colonnades. ‘The Scriptora,’ Angved guessed aloud, obscurely proud of having amassed some little local knowledge, even if it had only been for the purposes of knowing which parts of the city to knock down. From this gigantic mausoleum of an edifice, the Ministers governed their backward city. There were no Khanaphir in sight, though, only some Wasps guarding the entrance. The city’s leaders and their staff had been given the night off, it seemed.
As he was about to enter, Angved glanced back. In the centre of the square fronting the Scriptora was a truncated pyramid topped with an uneven ring of statues that resembled no Khanaphir he had ever seen. In the torchlight, their white stone took on a ruddy glow, and they seemed to dance a little, and even watch him, the flickering flames lending life to both limbs and eyes. Angved shuddered, obscurely unsettled, and hurried inside.
Bald, stern Colonel Lien was waiting for them, staring at the pair as though they were some faulty mechanism that might or might not be worth the fixing.
‘Stay behind me,’ he instructed. ‘Watch and learn.’
Angved was already watching. There were a half-dozen soldiers inside the Scriptora’s grand hall, but it was plain to his eyes that they were not simply the Light Airborne that their armour denoted. The way they stood, the nuances of their physiques, their ages: these were Engineers, and most likely men who had outranked Angved even when he had still been a lieutenant. Whatever’s here, it’s not to be known outside the Corps, he thought, and in that he was at once quite correct, and quite wrong.
There was the scrape of armour, and a handful of newcomers came striding into the Scriptora as though they owned it. Not the Khanaphir Ministers, though, but four men and a woman wearing a badge that made Angved twitch. The last time he had seen that open gauntlet, grey on grey, these people had been his enemies.
Lien must have expected some reaction from him, because he cast a warning glance over his shoulder. Angved was calm, though. Artificers were a practical, pragmatic breed, and he had not been deaf to the Corps rumour mill, even after being stripped of his rank. A look from Varsec suggested that Angved’s fellow prisoner was thinking just the same thing. The Iron Glove cartel had been working some remarkable miracles of artifice down on the Exalsee’s southern shores. Who they were, who led them, was a matter of some debate and of considerably more lurid speculation, but their credentials as artificers could not be denied, for all the Corps might wish otherwise. The Empire had never been shy of borrowing the inventions of other states and kinden for its artificers and, whilst this process usually resulted from armed conquest, trade was also an option wherever force would not yield results.
Still, what was this? The Glove and the Empire had been doing tentative business for a while now, but this piece of cloak-and-dagger promised rather more.
Four of the Iron Glove wore dark leathers, with blackened breastplates showing under their tabards, more like mercenaries than merchants. The woman and two of the men were Solarnese, the