A Web of Steam & Puppet Strings (Sevastyan #1)

Chapter One [Part 2]

A tug on the rope around my arm jolted me awake. I sucked in a breath of stale air and pried apart my eyelids. The perfect darkness made maneuvering impossible, but Eliza shuffled out of bed as if the bunker were still lit.

Months of this same practice had trained me to scrub the disorientation fast from my face and throw aside the afghan. The rope tugged urgently on my arm as Eliza stepped right over me and my cot, to the door. She couldn’t go much farther than that.

I grunted and groped around in the darkness for her wrist and wrestled blindly with the knot at her arm. “Hold on, Eliza.” Speaking to her was pointless. I knew in this transfixed state she couldn’t hear a word of it. “Quit squirming. Don’t you realize how difficult this is when you dance around like that? No? Of course not—There.”

Freed, she slid open the wooden door and joined the throng of others filing out of the surrounding compartments. The lights of the corridor burned my retinas and served as an equally appropriate reminder to readjust my blindfold and affix the black curls of my bangs to hide my eyes.

I whipped off my own rope cuff, scurried to my feet—tripped on the lump of afghan—and then stepped outside the compartment. A small crowd of blank, truly blindfolded faces filled my vision, and each of them marched on in the same trance-like state.

I spotted Eliza farther down the line of human machines, and the leather tread of my boots slapped the concrete to bring me to her side. I glanced her over and adjusted her wrinkled waistcoat and shirt collar. With the way she twisted and tossed in her sleep, it was only by the blessing of a miracle that her clothes stayed on at all.

A light bulb above flickered. The lot of us, uniformly dressed, a trail of ink gliding past the other vacant compartments, made no sound other than shuffling. The solid steel Doors that Never Open now stood gaping, the inscribed doctrines hidden. But the very last rule flickered again across my mind: ‘Do Not Fail.’

We pressed forward.

Hand-carved stairs took us from the cramped basement level to the extensive first floor. The division between the Chambers and the massive estate was stark as we crossed from our gray world to a land of fantasy. Our boots left the cracked concrete and stomped across flagstone floors into a hallway of immaculate tapestries, gilded wall panels, wallpapering of rich pallets, deep cherry oak vaulted ceilings, and air so sweetly perfumed that my sinuses tingled every time we were reunited.

The urge to stop and inspect the details on each piece of art caught up to me. It did every time. Even in the midst of our march to battle, all I wanted to do was tell our company to hold up a moment so I could take a better look at the complex strokes of the portrait of an Intangible general at war with the indigenous peoples of the colonies—distant relatives of most of us.

We marched down the corridor and turned left to the main hallway. My nerves vibrated beneath my skin. Finally, we passed through the archway and collected into a pair of crisp lines in the foyer of two elegant double doors that I knew were not the manor’s main entrance.

Greeting us was a man dressed in a formal military uniform. Who’s military, I hadn’t the faintest, but he was always equipped with panels of golden armor heavy on the flowery details, light on actually covering him. His helmet, however, never ceased to pick at my love for all things truly beautiful. The twining fingers of metalwork flowed off his skull as if he were sailing through the clouds, elegant swirls braced by a pair of wings that stretched high like horns. A second pair of wings came to a point midway down. A third pair folded in mid-flap above his spine.

It was truly, outrageously, inarguably…gaudy.

But also beautiful. A remarkable and likely eccentric Tangible artist had crafted this.