‘Tunnels!’ she hissed. ‘I hate tunnels. Pits, caves. Dark-always dark-rooms. Where is he leading us? We’ve passed countless ramps leading to higher levels-what is the fool looking for?’
Rautos had no answers, so he said nothing.
Behind Breath, Sheb and Nappet were bickering. Those two would come to blows soon; they were too much alike. Both vicious, both fundamentally amoral, both born betrayers. Rautos wished they would kill each other-they would not be missed.
‘Ah!’ cried Taxilian. ‘Found it!’
Rautos moved up to the man’s side. They stood at the threshold of a vast eight-walled chamber. A narrow ledge encircled it level with the passage they had just traversed. The actual floor was lost in darkness below. Taxilian edged out to the right, lifting his lantern.
The monstrous mechanism filling the centre of the expanse towered past level after level-only a few with balconies to match the one they were on-until it vanished high overhead. It seemed to be constructed entirely of metal, gleaming like brass and the purest iron, eight cylinders each the size of a city tower. Spigots jutted out from bolted collars that fastened the segments every second level, and attached to these were black, pliant ropes of some sort that reached out like the strands of an abandoned spider’s web, converging on huge boxes of metal affixed to the walls. Peering downward, Rautos could just make out a change in the configuration of the towers, as if each one sat upon a beehive dome.
His gaze caught and held upon one piece of metal, bent so perfectly between two fittings, and he frowned as if silts had been brushed from some deeply submerged memory. He groped towards it, fighting back a whimper, and then the blinding clouds returned, and he was swept away once more. He reeled and would have fallen from the ledge had not Breath roughly pulled him back.
‘Idiot! Do you want to kill yourself?’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry. Thank you.’
‘Don’t bother. I acted on instinct. If I’d thought about it, I probably would have let you go. You’re nothing to me, fat old man. Nothing. No one is, not here, not one of you.’
She had raised her voice to make certain everyone else heard her last words.
Sheb snorted. ‘Bitch needs a lesson or two, I think.’
Breath spun to face him. ‘Hungry for a curse, are you? What part of your body do you want to rot off first? Maybe I’ll do the choosing-’