The Emperor's Edge 3: Deadly Games

The Emperor's Edge 3: Chapter 15 Part 2

The corridor sloped upward. Closed hatches marked the walls to either side, each with a reader set nearby at eye level. Sicarius did not slow to try any of these. He obviously had a destination in mind. Or maybe their eyeball only opened communal doors, not private laboratories.

They passed another ladder leading down, and Basilard tried to imagine a map of the place in his mind. They could no longer be above the tunnel they had run through on the first floor, because there had been no ladders leading up before the one they had taken. How much of a maze might this place be? He hoped Sicarius knew where he was going.

After the ladder, the corridor continued on in a straight line. Its riveted, gray walls offered no alcoves or niches for hiding in, should someone come out shooting at them.

The narrow passage ended at another barrier. In a chamber on the other side, the back of a large black chair was visible before a control panel and a horizontal, oblong porthole. Dark water pressed against the glass. It could be night or day at the lake surface and no one would ever know down here. Around the chamber, lever- and gauge-filled panels ran from floor to ceiling. Many held multi-hued glowing protuberances, all amorphous, more like fungi that had grown there naturally than mechanical devices. Was this the navigation area? Basilard struggled to imagine this unwieldy ship—if one could call it that—floating up a river, but it had to have arrived somehow. Perhaps it could become compact for travel.

Sicarius waved the eyeball before the reader on the wall, but this shimmering field did not fade away. He plucked a piece of lint from the floor and tossed it at the barrier. It burst into flame and disappeared.

Basilard stepped back, far back.

The owner of the eyeball didn’t have access to that room? he asked.

Apparently not. Sicarius wiggled the eyeball about in front of the reader again. He must have expected it to win him entry.

The chair rotated, and Basilard jumped. He had not realized anyone was sitting in it. A tall, gray-haired man in a white coat scowled at them. The navigator, perhaps, and maybe a practitioner as well. Though he bore no weapons openly, he showed no fear at the prospect of intruders on his threshold.

Back? Basilard signed, aware of the alarm still throbbing, of shouts in the distance. It sounded like someone had discovered the dead guards.

Sicarius decided it was the time to engage in a staring contest. Maybe he thought the practitioner would wither under an unrelenting gaze—or at least come over and open the door.

The gray-haired man lifted a hand. A crackling yellow ball formed in the air before his fingertips.

Basilard backed further. That could only be a weapon, and if it could go through the barrier...

Sicarius crouched, ready to spring. He must believe the barrier had to drop for the man to launch the weapon.

Boots pounded in the corridor behind them. Basilard gripped his knife and nodded to let Sicarius know he would provide time for him—if he could. He did not know how he would dodge pistols in the tight corridor.

He ran down the passage anyway.

Before he reached the ladder, two guards stomped into view, one behind the other. In the narrow space, Basilard almost missed spotting a gray-haired woman in a blood-spattered white coat striding after them. She toted a two-foot-long cone, and, judging by the way she held it over the guards’ shoulders, trying to target Basilard, it was a weapon. He had to focus on the first problem: the two guards and the pistols in their hands.

The first man dropped to one knee, pointing his firearm at Basilard, while the second remained standing and aimed over the first’s head. The distance between Basilard and them was too far to charge before they could fire.