The Emperor's Edge 3: Deadly Games

The Emperor's Edge 3: Chapter 12 Part 1

Footsteps rang on the other side of Basilard’s door. He leaped out of his cot. The hours he had spent searching, pressing, pulling, and pounding his fists had not revealed any weaknesses in his prison.

The door opened, revealing the burly young soldier who had held a pistol on him earlier. An equally young and burly man accompanied him, though this one had a scraggily rat tail hanging down his back and wore no military clothing. Both pointed pistols at Basilard.

“Move,” Rat Tail said.

Basilard measured both men as he squeezed past them. The tight doorway and corridor forced closeness, and he thought about trying for their weapons, but they watched him carefully. And what if he did overpower them? He had no idea where he was or how to get back to the city. Hoping he would not regret it later, he decided to wait for a better opportunity to escape.

The men pushed him through a corridor so narrow his shoulders brushed the walls, and he had to duck frequently for pipes that crossed overhead. He waited for a porthole that would provide a glimpse of their location, but nothing broke the monotony of the dark gray bulkheads. The glowing orbs provided the only lighting, and he had no idea if it was night or day outside. Oddly, though engines pulsed somewhere in the structure, he had no sense of forward movement nor the rise and fall of waves.

Clanks, clacks, and a rhythmic sucking sound came from ahead. The engine room? The corridor ended at a chamber, but a transparent barrier filled with glowing yellow tendrils that writhed about like snakes blocked the entrance. Basilard blinked, questioning his eyesight.

“Stop,” one of the guards said before Basilard reached the entrance.

The man pushed him aside and stepped forward. He leaned into a bronze box mounted on the wall at head level, and he pressed his face close to a concave indention. A blue pulse of light washed over his face.

The shimmering tendrils winked out, and the guard stepped through. The second guard shoved Basilard from behind.

They entered a chamber cluttered with pipes, equipment, moving machinery, and tanks of yellowish blue liquid. Flesh-colored blobs floated in some. Machinery and pipes filled the center of the space and one could go left or right down confining aisles jammed with consoles and narrow tables, or perhaps those were beds. Some lay horizontal and others were tilted upward to stand against the wall. Trays near them held scalpels, saws, and scissors.

Basilard swallowed. He did not know what this place was, but it was nothing so innocuous as an engine room.

The men prodded him toward the far aisle. He rounded a tight corner and stopped. Two red-haired women leaned together, heads almost bumping. One wore her hair in a long braid and the other had hers pinned up in a wild swirl of hair. They spoke in soft tones. Litya and the sister.... What was the name? Metya.

One of Basilard’s guards cleared his throat. The women turned in unison. They were twins, identical except for a few freckles and an old half-moon scar on one’s temple. He picked Litya out as the woman without the marking.

As one, their eyes shifted up and down, studying Basilard. Under other circumstances, he might have flushed with embarrassment—he was naked, after all—but there was no sexual interest in their perusal. He struggled to keep from squirming under their scrutiny.

The aisle behind them held more beds, occupied by nude men and women. Most were propped upright against the wall, the people held tight by leather straps, but the bed behind the twins lay in the horizontal position with a muscular man on it, not strapped like the others but chained, the links so secure that he could do no more than lift a hand or twitch a toe, though he did neither while Basilard watched. Cords snaked from a machine to coin-sized, spider-like devices with the tips of the “legs” digging beneath the skin on the man’s naked chest. Translucent tubing ran from a pulsing green globe, and a viscous fluid of the same color flowed through it and into a needle in his arm. Not just his arm. His vein.