The head of the Engineers' delegation set the pile of clothing down on the table top. Adijine, sulking alone in bed, stared through the civil servant's eyes, then switched to an overhead camera.
Looking carefully, the King could see little round holes in the grey uniform material and matching craters on the well-worn boots where acid had eaten away. He tried to feel some shock of recognition on seeing the Army-issue gear, but he hadn't been paying that much attention when he'd been in the head of — he had to search for the name — Private Uris Tenblen.
One of the boots toppled and fell over, lying on the polished surface.
'Your plan,' the ambassadorial emissary rumbled, setting the boot upright again with one massive paw, 'fell through.'
He looked round the others in his team, receiving smiles and quiet chuckles. The Palace team sat silently, though some moved uncomfortably and a deal of close table-surface inspection ensued.
'We have,' the polar bear emissary said, obviously relishing each loudly spoken word, 'taken other precautions as well, but we shall be keeping a very careful and continuous watch on the ceiling above Chapel City, and not only have powerful sensors trained on the relevant area, but various missiles as well…"
Adijine swore. He'd half hoped the Chapel traitors would misinterpret the body which had fallen into their midst — maybe, he'd thought, they would assume the man had fallen from a hang-glider, or some apparatus that could climb along under a ceiling. But it looked like they'd guessed correctly.
'And I must say,' the polar bear said, drawing itself up in its seat and sounding appropriately sententious, 'even though we thought ourselves by now inured to the thoroughly reckless nature of our opponents, we have been profoundly shocked and disappointed to discover the completely irresponsible and utterly senseless depths — or should I say heights?' — the ambassadorial emissary showed his teeth and glanced round his appropriately appreciative team —'to which our previously at least ostensibly esteemed adversaries have been prepared to stoop to in their understandably increasingly desperate attempts to secure victory in this outrageously prosecuted, thoroughly unfortunate and — on our part — wholly unprovoked dispute.'
Adijine cut out there. That hairy white bastard was going to milk the situation for all it was worth, and doubtless at inordinate length.
He checked the representation of his private secretary's suite. There were calls waiting. He selected that of the Consistorian with special responsibility for Security.
Gadfium negotiated the lumber room. A flight of rungs set into the wall led her to a door and a lift shaft with spiral stairs running round it. The elevator appeared from above, stopped and opened its doors. Gadfium ducked under the stairs' safety rail and into the lift. She'd been hoping her other self had been kidding about going deeper but when the lift moved it was downwards, dropping her below ground level, deeper into the earth beneath the fastness.
– I'd better warn you there might be unexpected things ahead here.
– Such as?
– Well, people whose presence I can't warn you about.
– You mean outlaws.
– That's a little pejorative.
– We'll see.
– No, let's hope we don't see.
– You're right. Let's hope we don't.
– I'm going to put the lights out.
– Oh? Gadfium said as the elevator went dark.
– Help your eyes adjust.
'Oh, and I've always loved the dark,' Gadfium whispered to herself.
– I know. Sorry.
The elevator slowed and stopped, the doors opened and Gadfium got out into a darkness that was only just short of absolute. She could hear running water in the distance. Her feet splashed when she walked cautiously forward, arms in front of her, into what looked like a broad tunnel.
– Should be left here. Whoa. Stop. Feel forward with your right foot.
– It's a hole. Thanks.
– Look left? Yes; two steps left then walk on.
– Wait a minute; are there any cameras here?
– Not down here.
– So you're looking through my eyes-
– And I'm running an image enhancement program on what you're seeing. That's why I can see better than you can out of your own eyes.
Gadfium shook her head. — Anything I can do to help, apart from not keep my eyes open?
– Just keep looking all about, especially at the floor. Ah; here's a door. Turn right. Two steps. Right hand; feel?
– Got it.
– Careful; it's a vertical shaft. There's a ladder. Go down. And pace yourself; it's quite a way.
Gadfium groaned.
The city within the fourth-floor Chapel was formed in the shape of a magnificent chandelier which had been detached and lowered from the ceiling in the centre of the apse, above what would have been the chancel in a genuine chapel. It sat on a sheer-sided, three-hundred-metre-tall plateau which took the place of an altar, and rose in concentric circles of glowing, gleaming spires to the sharp pinnacle of the central tower. Formed from a metal framework wrapped with square kilometres of glass cladding interspersed with sheets of various highly polished stones, it looked out over the extravagantly decorated, elaborately columned length of the forest-floored Chapel and had been the monarch's traditional high-season residence for generations.
Uris Tenblen had fallen, still screaming hoarsely, onto the steep side of a tall spire in the second circle of the city, bounced once, hit a sheer wall opposite the spire, rebounded again and plummeted, still hardly slowed, into a flower bed on a stone-flagged courtyard. He had left a shallow elliptical crater in the earth and scattered blossoms like soft shrapnel as he'd bounced a third time and finally come to a halt crashing into a group of tables outside a cafe.
Most of Tenblen's precipitous descent and each successive part of its termination had been captured by an automatic camera on a seventh-level tower.
By the time a medic had arrived Tenblen had been quite irretrievably dead for some minutes, but the glancing nature of his first two contacts with the tower and then the wall, along with the comparative softness of his third impact in the flower bed, meant that there had been time for the alerted rebel Cryptographers to target and interrogate the dying man's bio ware. The Army, as a matter of course, retro-fitted devices to its soldiers' implants to prevent this sort of thing, but — as was not unknown when an individual sustained a series of individually non-fatal impacts — these had been slow to react, and the rebel army had been furnished with recordings of what at first appeared to be merely the nightmares of a dying man but which were later realised to be accurate if still horrific records of reality. They were also, collectively, war intelligence of the first order.
Deep beneath the fastness ground level, in a tiny alcove off a larger alcove off a great arched tunnel off an even more enormous tunnel, Gadfium — exhausted after her escape and the various ensuing traverses and descents — slept.
When she awoke it was to her own voice crackling in her head and breaking up.
— kup, will you? — thing — gon! — fium! —
She opened her eyes. A blast of fetid breath rolled over her. She looked along the dust-dry floor and in the grey almost-light saw what looked like two hairy tree trunks with something resembling a furred snake dangling between them.
She looked up slowly. The tree trunks were joined at the top; a bulging hairy cliff continued up to a tusked, seemingly eyeless head which was broader than her whole body. On top of the domed head was another head, pale and hairless and half human, staring down at her. Weaving above and to either side of it was yet another head, with tiny staring eyes and a thick, curved beak, balanced on a long, scaly, snake-like neck.