When the disk was gone the egg-shaped floater retracted the rod that had become their craft. The egg itself hung in their midst for a moment, then whirred softly and sped away, leaving the three humans momentarily unattended.
They stood in the center of an octagonal room, with a door in the center of every second wall. The ceiling above them was white glass, glowing softly. A faint scent of dampness and ozone reached them. No music played.
“Where's the Skyler?” Thaddeus's voice asked from somewhere overhead.
The three of them glanced at one another. “She changed her mind, decided not to come,” Imp explained.
“What's that savage doing here?"
“You told the transport that you wanted three humans, so we brought three humans. Bredon wanted to come, so we brought him,” Geste said.
“If he gets in the way, I'll kill him."
“I'm sure Bredon understands that,” Geste answered.
Bredon nodded.
“Have it your way,” Thaddeus said. “I don't suppose it matters, and I don't really give a damn. Take off your clothes."
Bredon glanced at his companions. Imp glanced at Geste. Geste looked up and demanded, “Why?"
“You know why,” Thaddeus's voice replied. “You could have whole arsenals tucked away."
“What if we refuse?"
“Then you don't see Aulden and the rest."
Geste looked at the others, shrugged, and began peeling off his tunic.
Imp did something to the waistline of her dress with her fingertips, and the entire garment slipped free and fell to the floor. She wore nothing else. Bredon blushed, and looked to his own clothing.
When they were all naked, the loud voice overhead said, “Step through the door beneath the red light."
Bredon turned, and saw a tall doorway with a small red spot glowing above it. The door that had filled that doorway was gone, perhaps slid aside, perhaps dissolved, he had no way of telling. He followed the others through the opening, trying to be as calm about his nudity as they were. He knew, from references the others had made and things he had seen back in Arcade, and even from the childhood tales he remembered, that the Powers did not worry about sexual propriety much, but his own upbringing had been fairly traditional, and he was not accustomed to walking about naked in the company of a woman he was not about to take to his bed. He had not seen Kittisha the Weaver naked until his second night with her, and then only by dim firelight, yet here Imp was parading before him in full view.
The doorway led into a short corridor with gleaming metal walls, and as Bredon stepped into it he felt an odd sensation, as if his skin were buzzing silently. A sudden flash, so brief that he was not sure he had actually seen it, turned the tingling to an uncomfortable warmth, like the bad sunburn he had once gotten as a child. He looked, and saw that his skin was reddening slightly.
That old burn had resulted from a full light of carelessly lying in bright sunlight, after a long spell of convalescence from prickle-fever had left him pale and weak; it did not seem credible that a near-instantaneous flash could have caused the same thing, but his skin certainly felt burned. He marched on, ignoring the discomfort.
Then he was through the corridor and in a small room panelled in white. Three simple white robes hung in the air.
Geste took one, and Bredon another; Imp hesitated before donning the third. “Where is Aulden?” she demanded.
She received no reply. For a long moment the three of them stood there, waiting for whatever was to happen next. Bredon took the moment to notice that Imp's robe reached almost to her ankles, and Geste's to mid-calf, while his own came only to his knee.
Then the wall opposite their entrance slid aside, revealing a larger room, of gray stone like the octagonal chamber they had first arrived in. This room, however, was not empty, as the others had been.
Chained to the far wall were seven people, four men and three women, all wearing white robes like those Bredon, Geste, and Imp had just put on. All seven sat slumped against the stone, their wrists, ankles, and necks bound by massive bands of metal, linked by tangles of heavy chain to each other and to ring-bolts in the wall behind them. All seven appeared to be sunburnt in varying degrees, presumably by Thaddeus's machines.
Bredon immediately recognized the woman in the center as Lady Sunlight; even without her shimmering garments, even with her hair matted and bedraggled and her skin an uncomfortable shade of red, she was unsurpassably beautiful, and he felt something twisting and churning inside himself at the sight of her chained. He fought for control of himself, struggled not to simply run to her side.
“Aulden!” Imp shrieked. She dashed forward and flung herself upon the man at the far left of the group, a sturdy, sandy-haired man with a long nose and only a faint pinkness to his skin. Bredon remembered his face from the quick glimpse Thaddeus had given them.
Aulden looked up just before Imp landed on him. His expression was a compound of surprise and joy at the sight of her, but Bredon thought he saw an underlying hopelessness.
“I don't believe this,” Geste muttered, standing in the doorway. “Chains! Genuine steel chains!"
Distracted for a moment from Lady Sunlight, Bredon started to ask what else Thaddeus would have used, but stopped himself. He could have used any number of methods of confinement, from barrier fields to neural repatterning.
Chains, however, worked quite well enough.
Imp and Aulden were smothering each other with kisses, and the other six were looking up with some interest at the newcomers. Bredon suddenly found himself overcome with shyness, faced with so much attention from strangers.
“Hello, Geste,” one of the women said, a brown-haired, round-faced woman.
“Hello, Sheila,” the Trickster replied.
“Who's that with you?” she asked. “Has someone got a new body?"
“No, no, nothing like that; this is Bredon the Hunter, from a village out in the grasslands."
Bredon bowed in acknowledgement, looking only at Lady Sunlight, hoping to see some sign in her reaction that she saw him as something more than an ordinary savage.
Lady Sunlight said nothing, did not react visibly at all.
“Pleased to meet you,” Sheila replied. “Forgive me if I don't stand up.” She rattled her chains with a wry shrug. “So, what brings you here?"
Geste smiled.
Bredon tore his eyes away from Lady Sunlight, forcing himself not to stare at her any longer, and looked at the other captives; they were not impressed with Sheila's banter. The dark, intense little man he guessed, from descriptions in old legends, to be Rawl the Adjuster. The third woman, sallow-skinned and black-haired, had to be Madame O. Both the other two men were big, black-haired, and brown-eyed, but one was pale and heavily bearded, while the other was swarthy and had only a light, grey-flecked beard; Bredon had no way of guessing which was Brenner of the Mountains and which was Khalid.
“Are you going to get us out of here?” the swarthy one demanded.
Geste's smile vanished. “I wish I knew,” he said.
“That,” said Thaddeus from behind them, “is not the answer I wanted, indicating, as it does, a certain lingering hope that outright surrender can be avoided."
Geste and Bredon turned around slowly; Imp, still wrapped in Aulden's arms, paid no attention.
Thaddeus stood in the doorway from the metal corridor, a towering black-haired figure in brown leather-or a synthetic approximation of leather. Bredon was not certain just how he could tell, but he had the impression that this was a real person, not a transmitted image. Perhaps it was because this Thaddeus stood his awesome full height, at least two and a half meters.
“Hello, Thaddeus,” Geste said.
“Hello, Geste. Are you satisfied now that I have not tampered with my captives?"
“Well, no, not yet. I just got here."
“Imp, are you satisfied?"
Imp looked up, brushing hair out of her face. “It's Aulden-but how could you treat him like this, you monster?"
Thaddeus shrugged. “I don't love him as you do."