He could not move much anyway. Metal straps at his ankles, waist, throat and wrists pinned him in place to a slatted interrogation bench held at twenty degrees off the vertical. His mind had its own fetters. Warding codes kept him from interacting with machinery. Each attempt to reach out was met by a wall of screeching binaric that did nothing for his pain. But his eyes were uncovered, and he could look around freely.

The table was in a large room made small by clutter. Red light gave it a sanguinary, arboreal air, like a forest floor at sunset. Bunches of cabling hung down from the ceiling in liana-like profusion. Banks of machines lined every wall and more stood in badly placed islands like the trunks of giant trees.

Walls of dials ticked with metronomic regularity. Cogitators on down time burbled self-diagnostic cant and made smug pronouncements as to their optimal functioning. A metre away from Cawl was a trio of servitors who oversaw the running of the room. He recognised the type. Only the brains were required for the task, but for whatever macabre reason their bodies had not been pruned back fully. They were heads, mounted like trophies on the wall, and even retained their faces as coverings of dead grey skin over their skulls. From neck caps their spinal columns and the disembodied remnants of circulatory systems plunged, rootlike, into glass cylinders of nutrient fluid.

More cables ran over the floor in dangerous, foot-snagging twists, furthering the illusion of an electric forest. Beyond Cawl's immediate vicinity, the chamber opened up into an octagonal shaft. He supposed he must be in the private chambers of Domina Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigma. The domicile was more machine shop than home, a garage for a mechanism that owed nothing to humanity. It therefore had little in the way of material comfort, but the shaft was dominated by a vast articulated cradle within which Cawl assumed the domina rested and was serviced when she wasn't scuttling around the connected stations of the Heptaligon. Only that detail made his location clear to him. He could otherwise have been anywhere.

He was left alone for an age. One hour, twenty-two minutes, three seconds, according to this internal chronograph, though on the human scale it felt a lot longer than that. He was alone, unconnected from the noosphere. Without the constant background chatter of machinery and conjoined souls that made up the hinterlands of a tech-priest's consciousness, Cawl was left isolated and alone. It was cruel.

Belisarius Cawl - Tech-Acolytum. He was therefore defiant when the domina finally came to interrogate him.