Steelhands - Jaida Jones [213]
What we all needed was a hot meal, an even hotter bath, and a good long rest. Sadly, at the minute, all those things seemed so remote as to be almost completely unattainable—far more extraordinary than a dragon.
“I think we’d better call a meeting,” Antoinette said at last, brushing the stone dust off her skirts, “before any of this—or any of those”—she added, gesturing to the dragons—“gets out.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Adamo agreed.
SIXTEEN
TOVERRE
Days ago—perhaps even hours ago, though I’d long since lost track of time and its passage—the idea of a clandestine meeting held within a secret chamber of the Basquiat would have delighted me to my core. How marvelous and dangerous, I would have thought. But a great deal had happened since then, and I was a changed man. I’d been given my marvels and my dangers, my clandestine meeting held within a secret chamber of the Basquiat, and I was ready to see the back side of all these things. Quite simply put, I was sick of them.
It hadn’t helped my impression that, for the duration of said meeting, I was exhausted and itchy, not to mention incredibly filthy, and no one seemed to share my desperate need to pause the proceedings and take a bath. My own foulness was only a mite more distressing than everyone else’s. There’d been no one at the meeting who wasn’t caked with dirt and dust. At least our lives had no longer been in explicit danger—though it was difficult to believe even that after having seen what I had.
At least the Esar would not have the chance to arrest me just yet. I had real evidence now that I’d be too delicate for prison—especially if all prisons were so unhygienic.
At the meeting I’d placed myself strategically next to Gaeth, so I could lean on him whenever I began feeling drowsy—he was the cleanest of us all, somehow—and also so I could be certain that he wouldn’t disappear once more in the gathered crowd. As soon as this impromptu assembly was over, I was going to have some incredibly sharp words with him regarding the etiquette and bad manners involved in leaving your friends high and dry. It seemed to me that the poor fellow really was as hopeless as I’d always imagined him to be; as someone of better standing, not to mention considerably more advanced in the world of knowledge, it was my responsibility to take him under my wing until further notice.
I didn’t precisely relish the task, but neither was I dreading it as I might have, once.
We were fortunate Antoinette’s hidden chambers were so large, since we’d somehow managed to squeeze so many people into them—Antoinette; the remaining airmen; the Esarina; Laure, Gaeth, and myself; and also Troius, though fortunately we had not attempted to squeeze the rest of his men and the Esar’s personal guard in with us, as well.
The dragons—all four of them, or three and a half by Laure’s count, after the damage done to Ironjaw—appeared to be put out when they’d been told to stay behind and out of sight, banished once more to the tunnels. They’d done terrible damage to the floor at first, forcing all owners to be quite firm with the beasts until they did as they were told and curled up, though some managed this with far less metallic rumbling than others.
Laure’s in particular seemed to be difficult though I don’t know why that ought to have surprised me. We were all merely lucky that Laure herself hadn’t been born with claws that fierce.
At least the dragons were pleased to be given a job—guarding the guards, as it were, until such a time as we could decide what would be done with them. Because of lack of training, neither Laure nor the ex-airman Balfour could have remained in contact with them from such a distance, but Gaeth was able to, and so he kept tabs on them, telling us at intervals that all was still well and no daring idiot had attempted any mutinies just yet.
Troius, the short-tenured captain of his ill-fated platoon, had posed something of a problem since no one trusted him in the