Questland by Carrie Vaughn

Author:Carrie Vaughn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358346500
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

16

* * *

Cheat Code

The cave swallowed us like a mouth. The bleed of torchlight from outside vanished. The rock walls were dry, rough, and clearly excavated. Mined, as if by Dwarves.

Just when the darkness closed in on us, the walls opened into a cavern. No, not a cavern, which implied rough stone and dripping water—this was a warehouse-sized space with carved pillars at regular intervals, decorated tile on the floor, and gilding on the polished walls, so that the light from dozens of sconces reflected and expanded until the whole place glowed. This was a palace, the pride of the Dwarf realm, one of the great halls under the mountain—

Arthur Beckett stared, awestruck. He hadn’t seen the hall in its current form, I assumed. Even the soldiers of Torres’s squad gazed up and around in wonder. The carts lined up near the wall, and the Dwarf folk worked to unharness the Wargs and take them through an archway. Did they live in some kind of pens or stables? Or did they just get switched off and put in a closet? Others unloaded the prisoners, sitting us on the floor in our respective groups, Arthur and the foresters off to one side, Torres and his squad to the other, lining us up as if for inspection.

“Oh, dude, Craig, what happened to your face?” One of the Dwarves leaned in close to Hapless Craig.

“Rambo over there punched me!” He jerked his chin at Rucker, who winked at him.

The captor had the gall to laugh. “I wish I could have seen that!”

“That’s right, Ted, laugh all you want—”

Robin Hood finally elbowed Craig—awkwardly, given they were both tied up—and left him grumbling.

“You’ve been busy,” Arthur said to Tess.

“Yes,” she said curtly, and passed him by. She stopped in front of Torres. “Is it true? A Coast Guard crew died running into the shield?”

He considered her a moment, then answered. “Yes.”

The word fell like a weight, and the silence in the hall grew heavy. “So there are criminal charges waiting for someone at the end of all this.”

“That’s not my concern. I’m a private contractor. Lang Analytics hired my team to return control of the island to the corporation. That’s all I care about.”

“You said you had a message from Harris.”

“My inside jacket pocket, left side.”

She made a show of it, keeping eye contact with Torres while tugging open the zipper of his fatigues, reaching inside slowly, feeling around. Like she could actually make him uncomfortable. Unperturbed, he wore this wry, inscrutable half-grin the whole time. When she finally drew back, she had the thumb drive in hand.

“You know what this says?” she asked. Exactly what Arthur had asked when he got his message, and I really wondered about what kind of corporate culture Lang had promoted. These people must have been paranoid before the energy shield ever went up around the island. How paranoid had they gotten after?

Instead of playing it right there, Selvachan pocketed the drive. I was disappointed. I really wanted to know if her message was the same as Arthur’s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.