Margaret nodded, impressed both by the youth’s source of inspiration and the degree of knowledge he seemed to possess, which was of a far greater range than the limited worldviews of most of the uneducated rural villagers she had come across here in the Congo.
‘That’s a fine choice, Sergeant Tesla,’ she commented, making sure to meet the young man’s eyes with her own so that she could convey the sincerity of her comment.
The youth smiled with a brief flicker of shy pride, which was quickly extinguished as his countenance reverted to its former stony blankness.
‘Please follow me,’ he instructed as he turned away from her and marched off at a brisk pace.
She hurried after the teen as he moved with rapid and easy familiarity through the maze of corridors. Margaret was very curious about the architecture that surrounded her, and it was all that she could do to keep her eyes on the young man ahead of her rather than to stare in awe at the massive, continually curving stone walls. There were no right angles here, it seemed, and no straight lines. Everything was circular, curved, concave, convex. Indeed, the only geometric and perfectly flat surface seemed to be that of the floor beneath her. Constructed of river rocks, it was polished smooth and glossy, and it shone beneath the gently pulsating, multicoloured light that emanated from the bioluminescent fungi grafted onto the walls.
They started up a spiral staircase, and the pace at which the soldier ascended it in front of Margaret left her quite out of breath when they eventually reached the top. But as she turned the bend that opened into the dining hall, any opportunity to regain the oxygen which had deserted her lungs vanished; the sight of the spectacular, cavernous space before her caused her to stop dead in her tracks.
‘This … this is amazing,’ she gasped.
‘I see you are impressed by our dining hall.’
The General’s rich baritone voice snapped Margaret out of her state of awe and back into the surreal present.
‘I … yes, yes, it’s incredible!’ There was no use in trying to conceal her childlike awe – this sight was too overwhelming in its magnificence for her to feign any sort of nonchalance. Margaret continued to stare all around her in amazement as she spoke. ‘How old did you say this city was?’
‘This castle is around two-thousand-five-hundred years old. It has taken us decades to restore it to the full glory of how it was in ancient times, but it was so well-constructed that most of what you see is still the original material. This is the Moon Chamber, and you are fortunate, because tonight is a full moon.’
The dining chamber consisted of a vast, circular stone floor, crowned by what appeared to be a gigantic crystal dome. The crystal of which the dome was constructed was of a transparent blue hue and seemed almost jagged in texture. It had the rather spectacular effect of simultaneously diffusing, amplifying and refracting the light of the full moon above, thereby illuminating the entire space with a gentle bluish-white glow that was light enough to read by.
In the centre of the Moon Chamber was a round table, constructed of deeply polished hardwood, cut from the trunk of a tree whose girth rivalled that of thousand-year-old sequoias in North America. Around this table sat three people, their features illuminated in tones of red, orange, burgundy and ochre by a multitude of candles. The General was seated on the chair closest to the entrance to the hall, while to his right and left sat two strangers. One was a rake-thin middle-aged Nordic woman, whose hair hung about her bony, marble-pale shoulders in a thick mess of platinum dreadlocks. The other was an elderly Brazilian fellow, short and rotund, upon whose bulbous nose was perched a pair of thick soda-bottle spectacles, the curves of which mirrored the roundness of his features. Unlike everyone else Margaret had seen in T’Kalanjathu, these people were dressed in civilian clothes. The General, meanwhile, was magnificently attired in his formal dress uniform.
All of them paused their conversation as Margaret entered the room, and the General stood up from his ornately carved, high-backed chair.
‘Welcome, Dr Green,’ he said with a warm smile. ‘Please, take a seat.’
Margaret nodded, feeling a slight nervousness tightening in her throat. She swallowed her anxiety and tried to appear confident as she strode over to the table, a little too cockily perhaps, where a place opposite the General had been prepared for her. Brushing an errant wisp of mousy hair out of her eyes, she tried to take a seat, struggling to move the heavy chair. Noticing her difficulty, the General immediately stood up to assist her.
‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘These chairs are hewn of a type of ironwood native to these forests. It is exceptionally dense and durable, but as you can see, it makes for rather cumbersome furniture.’
Margaret grunted and yanked the chair out herself, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. She did not want any assistance whatsoever from that man – no, that thing, that monster, whatever the General was. A flush of panic immolated her with a terrible and all-consuming heat as she realised she had forgotten about his mind-reading powers.
‘I’m fine, er, it’s fine,’ she stammered, not daring to look him in the eye.
‘Are you sure, Doctor?’
‘Yeah, yeah,
