Vaults of Terra: The Hollow Mountain by Chris Wraight

Author:Chris Wraight
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2019-05-31T10:08:09+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Yessika huddled in the corner, wrapping her arms around her knees and trying to shrink into the shadows.

She had always been good at that. There were many shadows in Courvain, and it paid to know how to shrink into them, to merge with them, to avoid being seen, to avoid being heard.

Yessika was hardly alone in this. A signal attribute of all the citadel’s menial class was its capacity to dissolve into nothing, to be unnoticeable, to blend into the background like one of the timeworn mottos carved into the lines of steel panels. They went with their heads lowered, with their hands clasped, with their feet pressed softly against the stone. Yessika, however, was particularly good at it. She was tiny, a waif of a girl, with limbs that looked so thin they might snap under a finger’s pressure. She was like a breath of wind, her mother had told her. Like a gust of hot, silt-pocked air from the outside, caught for a moment under the yellow glare of a lumen, before sliding out again towards Throne only knew where.

It was not that the regime in Courvain was particularly onerous – there was no outright cruelty from the superiors, at least not the abuse that tales said was rife across many other closed Imperial institutions – but all of them knew, to some degree or other, the clandestine nature of what went on in the cells and hidden chambers. It did not pay to hear too much, just in case a stray secret might creep out from under a locked door and attach itself to you. There was always work to do – supplies to carry, surfaces to wash with the caustic blocks of antisep, errands to run for the lords of the Upper Tower – and that made it easier to clear one’s mind of uncomfortable thoughts. At the close of each dark, cloistered day, there was gruel and synth-lactose, and tubs of water to wash in, and hard cots free of lice, and that was a good and fortuitous thing, so best not to ruin it by paying too much attention or being noticed.

Of course, Yessika had been noticed now, by the new interrogator. She remained in awe of her, in truth. Her armour, her bearing, her speech. She must be infinitely wise, must Spinoza, and infinitely powerful, perhaps only a little less so than the Lord Crowl himself. They had not spoken together for a long time, but Yessika still remembered the single piece of fruit she had been given, and the way it had burst across her chapped lips, and the juice that had trickled into her mouth, and the secret pact that had been sealed. In return, she had only been able to give her tiny snippets, things that most people in the citadel already knew, but she had done as she had been bid, and kept her eyes open. One day, she knew, she would see something truly important, and then

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