Sergeant Karr and six armed guards sprinted down the spiral stair, their iron-shod boots clattering against the steel treads in a rhythmic, dropping roar that echoed down the central shaft.
Captain Vane didn’t drop Chancellor Morn to the floor. He carried the struggling administrator four paces across the gallery and slammed him down into an iron-framed drafting chair beside the main release console. The impact drove the breath from Morn’s lungs with a wet grunt. Before the High judge could scramble upright, Vane reached down, seized a length of three-strand hemp parcel cord from the mail crate on the floor. Then it bound Morn’s wrists securely to the iron arms of the chair.
Morn slumped in the seat, his velvet coat torn at the collar, his chest heaving, his eyes wide and bloodshot. His hands, tied fast to the cold iron struts, twitched with nervous spasms, the fingertips scraping against the pitted metal. He looked like an old, discarded puppet whose strings had been cut by an impatient stagehand.
Ivara Quill stepped past the captain. She didn’t look at the ropes, and she didn’t look at the bruises forming on Morn’s throat. She was a land-mapper who had spent seven years calculating the heat-powered stresses of an unexploded mountain. Her single eye was fixed on the instrument board.
