“Then where is she? If she was in shape to walk away by herself then why is she hiding? And if she wasn’t, then who carried her off? And why can’t I hear her at all?” Karlini’s head drooped lower, into the hands that were there to receive it. “I’d like to believe something like that happened, but there’s no evidence.”
“Maybe Shaa’s brother has her.”
“We never saw a sign he was interested in what we were up to here.”
“Maybe - maybe the Creeping Sword part was fighting the Iskendarian part like he said, and made Iskendarian think he’d wiped her out when he really hadn’t, and then he came back later and... I mean, the way he told his story to Shaa, it didn’t sound exactly like what I saw.”
“All right,” said Karlini, “all right.” He levered himself to his feet. “Let’s go back in there and have another look.”
“Would you like to kill your friend Favored?” Wroclaw inquired, “or should I?”
Wroclaw and Haddo were stretched out on a narrow landing, between one tunnel and the next, their feet barely out of the water. The pipe whose outlet they had discovered in the moat had angled sideways in a smooth curve to lead clearly under the palace walls and a lung-crushing distance beyond. A minute or so into his frantic sprint, it had been clear to Wroclaw that if there were no air-filled outlet somewhere quite near he was about to die; he had passed the distance he could possible retrace and still escape asphyxiation. But they had been in luck; perhaps the reservoir of air in Favored’s flying vehicle was limited itself, or perhaps their own lung capacity was greater than average. In any case, the passage had tilted back up, and they had broken through the lapping surface into an antechamber hung about with light-globes turned so low their glow was almost purple. More of them stretched away down another tunnel, this one horizontal and filled only with humid air.
Urgent mission or not, there was no way to proceed without a pause for recuperation.
“Think you knows Favored here are we?” wheezed Haddo.
“Why are you asking me? He’s your friend. You’re the expert.”
“His own ideas always has he had.” Water still squelching from his cloak, he levered himself back to tottering feet. “On should now we go.”
They trudged down the passage. There was more than enough clearance for Favored’s vehicle but no sign of the floating ball itself. The tunnel was not long, however, and after a few snaky bends and a rope-and-belay across a wide pit they were brought up short by a massive sealed door studded with rivets perched darkly across the entire bore of the passageway.
Haddo stood back and put his hands on his hips, his eye spots shooting sparks of red at the barricade. “Know I in there are you! Door open or wrath feel!”
A moment passed in silence. Then a tinny voice echoed from the gloom of the ceiling in front of the door. “Go away, Haddo, I’m busy.”
“Fah!” spat Haddo. “Away go I not! Business of you precisely the problem is! Warn will I not again!” He shrugged back his sleeve and extended toward the door a thoroughly reptilian claw.
“Haddo,” said Favored’s voice, “this ain’t no game. I’ve got poison gas that can burn you down where you stand. Now get out of here - you’ll thank me when I’m finished anyway.”
“Traitor are you!” Haddo snarled, on the verge of total incoherency. “Scapula help are you, but world rule he would! All of he destroy he will! Worse than that are you - us kill now with gas promise you!”
An amplified sigh rattled from the ceiling grate. “All right, you can wait in the isolation chamber. But no fast stuff, I’m warning you, Haddo. I’m not gonna let anything distract me.”
The tall hatch clanked and creaked, then broke its seal against the wall with a hiss of escaping air. A breeze ruffled their clothes. Beyond was a smooth chamber, featureless but for three smaller exit doors and Favored’s Flotarobolis, resting on its landing skids in the middle of the cramped floor. Haddo scuttled beneath the exhaust vanes as Wroclaw edged in around the now-quiescent side gear-train linkages. The door swung ponderously shut again behind them.
Wroclaw gazed at the three closed exit doors. “A particular old proverb comes to mind,” he remarked.
Favored’s voice came one more time from a new grate atop the entrance hatch. “Get your hands away from that, Haddo - you mess with the attitude jets and your cloak is a dishrag.”
“Edge on, you are,” Haddo noted. “Situation reviewing are you?”
A wheel set in the center of the door on the left spun and then the door made its own hiss and creaked open. Haddo led the way through another tunnel into a small chamber containing several chairs facing a wide window that seemed not only very solid but very thick. Visible through the window was a different room, somewhat larger, lit with a stark white light by glowing strips in the ceiling and strange displays on the hulking boxes that lined the walls. One panel on the mechanism across the room from them showed exceptionally realistic light-pictures, in over-stimulated colors, of various scenes they had recently witnessed: the entry hall with its four doors and the parked Flotarobolis, the outside tunnel where it approached the hatch, the pool into which they had emerged following their underwater journey; and other locales that were similarly impossible to immediately place.
At right angles to their vantage point, though, was an apparatus that appeared to be the feature of central importance. Another wide picture-screen cast its radiance over a work-desk, set into which was an array of fingertip-sized keys bearing on their tops unfamiliar runes. Seated at these controls in a swiveling chair cranked up to its full height extension - and still as a result barely having his head clear the level of the desk - was Favored-of-the-Gods. Piled around him on the floor were boxes and sacks and bundles he had apparently carted in on his own, since they were choked with perishable provisions - potatoes and broccoli and cabbage, carrots and stoppered flasks of dark liquids and a wrapped side of smoked fish, sourdough bread and a churn of butter and a good two dozen sweet rolls. Perched precariously at the side of the desk was a half-eaten ear of corn on a dish and a mug of what might be orange juice.
“Would you say your friend is preparing for a siege?” Wroclaw said to Haddo. Behind Favored’s chair was a cot, too. It appeared to be part of the original furnishings, though, since it was fastened securely to the floor by a rotating tilt-mechanism, and as much of the sleeping-surface as was visible around the pillow and bedroll spread out on top was metal, too. Suspended above the cot by a wire from the ceiling was a glossy white helmet; Wroclaw didn’t even want to guess what that might be for. For that matter, it was difficult for him to decipher most any of these bizarre apparatus.
That was not, apparently enough, Favored’s problem, however. It would be difficult to learn from his example, too, since the message-board he was observing most closely was almost edge-on to their observation gallery. In a panel above the primary screen was another matrix of views of scenery, and Wroclaw was pretty sure the vistas that were showing pertained intimately to the environs of the Stadium of State, where the Knitting ceremony by now was surely reaching its climax. At least part of Shaa’s surmise was presumably thus confirmed. Unless Favored was working at some cunningly unlikely cross purpose, the Scapula did have a confederate, and Favored was it.
On the other hand, the more speculative part of Shaa’s hypothesis - the one that had prompted him to slip into Wroclaw’s ear an additional message of watchful wariness - had to be downgraded in probability, unless the game had the additional convolutions required to put him off the pace. From the way Haddo was sputtering and growling at Favored through the window now, and the bright flashes his eye-sparks kept reflecting off the obviously shielded glass, it seemed all the more unlikely that Haddo was in league with Favored too. Wroclaw had been disinclined to view Haddo as a thoroughgoing traitor, even with his increasingly craggy behavior of the recent days, so having that theory meet the dust was all to the good with him. Of course, that didn’t help at all in dealing with Favored.