Power Under Pressure (The Society of Steam) by Mayer Andrew P

Author:Mayer, Andrew P. [Mayer, Andrew P.]
Language: deu
Format: mobi
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2013-01-07T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13: Mistrials and Tribulations

CHAPTER 13

MISTRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

While Eschaton lectured Anubis on the stage, Jack peered around the conference room.

This Hall of Paragons was essentially his home now, and even after spending a few weeks inside these thick granite walls, he had to admit that he still felt less comfortable inside their cold shelter than he had when he arrived.

Soon after the events in the theater, Eschaton had called him up to the Hall of Paragons, telling him that his Blades would now be the main security force for the building. It would be their job to keep the peace as more and more would-be heroes (and villains) began to arrive.

Once he might have argued, but this wasn’t the time for that. He had taken over the Sleuth’s old quarters and turned them into something that approximated a home.

The old man had seriously eclectic tastes, but Jack could read, and he found himself whiling away the long, boring hours reading a large number of books.

Some were titles that he was vaguely familiar with, including many translated classics from across the spectrum of history. It had been a long time since he had opened a copy of The Odyssey, and the first time he had ever considered it as an adult. He had also consumed a number of old Wilkie Collins novels, which he was surprised to discover on the dead Englishman’s shelves.

It had taken him a good deal of time to get used to reading fiction again, and the made-up tales interested him even less now than they had when he was a boy. At least back then his head had been full of noble dreams, and the only men he had ever murdered were painted metal soldiers. Now that his experience of dying men was no longer an abstract idea, the battles that Homer described had taken on a very different tone.

But fiction was not his only area of study. He had also taken to reading the old man’s journals, many of which the Sleuth had put together into edited volumes. They were typeset and bound—clearly intended for eventual publication after a retirement that would now never come.

They were well written, if obviously embellished (and whitewashed). While Jack had only ever met the Sleuth face-to-face the once, during his time in the underworld he had heard enough stories of the Paragons to know that the Sleuth’s version of events often made the heroes appear far more reserved and honorable than any man actually could have been.

Still, seeing the events of the man’s life committed to the written word made him wish that Hughes hadn’t done in the old duffer before he’d had a chance to have written about his exploits with Jack and the Blades. He certainly would have liked to have discovered exactly how the old man had escaped through the labyrinth, although in retrospect it was clear that he’d had Anubis’s help.

He was rather wishing that he could be reading one of those journals now, instead of being forced to watch yet another round of Eschaton’s theatrics.

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