‘He was a good man, as floating chairs go,’ said Unwerth.
‘He was.’
‘I think he likened of me, to the end, and made his trust upon me, in some measuring. I hope so.’
‘I believe he did, Sholto. Gideon would not have kept in your company if he didn’t trust you.’
‘Well, I had a ship, and I was excrescently pliantable,’ Unwerth countered.
‘There is that.’
Unwerth frowned thoughtfully. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘I will be.’
Unbidden, he curled his short arms up around her shoulders and pulled her tight.
‘You will, indeed, be,’ he said.
‘Sholto,’ Kys said, sniffing, comforted by his little embrace. ‘He was there. I saw him.’
‘Who?’
She nodded. ‘The man who hurt you. Lucius Worna. He nearly killed me. I nearly killed him. I wish I had, for your sake. I would have done it, but he had the drop on me and teleported away. He–’
She paused.
‘What?’ Unwerth asked.
‘He teleported away,’ Kys whispered with growing realisation. ‘He called to Siskind and teleported away.’
She broke the embrace. ‘Siskind. Siskind! It’s got to be the same Siskind, hasn’t it? The Allure’s here. Throne, why didn’t I connect this before? The Allure’s here!’
She got up, and turned back up the stairs.
‘Can you scan for it?’ she asked as she ran.
‘It will be of significated disguise,’ he said, scrambling after her. ‘But I know its particulates. Its draft and measure, its signature. The Arethusa can match its pattern.’
‘Come on! Can’t you run any faster?’
‘There is a bigness to these stairs that I am not as copious with as your long leggage!’
‘Do you want me to carry you?’ she snapped.
He stopped. She stopped too, and looked back at him.
‘That would just be undignified, wouldn’t it?’ she said.
‘Incandescently,’ he replied.
Six
Red heat. Again, the gunshot sun.
The area around the lonely door is heaped with the mangled corpses of the black and white organisms.
I feel some pride that we managed to slay so many. Most of this was Angharad’s work.
There is no sign of life, but there is still the sense of dread, the shadow in the warp. I am trusting that the door will allow us to step away from this place. We cannot stay here long.
Angharad feels it. She watches the horizon, Evisorex angled in her grip. She is exhausted. She will not withstand another clash like the one we have just been through.
Nayl feels it too, coming new to this experience of stepping into another time-place. He raises his weapon, tense suddenly.
He was right. This is the only option. Staying in the House to die along with it would have been the decision of one foolish and weak.
I am weary and I am wounded, but I am not foolish and I am not weak. Not yet. Soon, perhaps. The damage I have sustained to my support systems, the leakage of fluid, may be critical. I believe I am already dying. Worse, my mind is frail and utterly incapable of defending us. Every movement is an effort to me.
‘What happens now?’ Nayl asks me, nervously.
‘We wait,’ I tell him, trying to hide from him how useless I am.
‘For how long?’
‘For however long it takes.’
‘They’re coming,’ says Angharad, the Carthaen steel bristling in her fists. ‘Evisorex thirsts.’
‘I’m sure it does,’ I reply. I look at Iosob, the child, the housekeeper. She is afraid. Things have never gone this way for her before.
‘Iosob?’
She fumbles with the key. ‘We wait.’
‘And then?’
‘Then the key may turn. But the door locked us here before. Your enemy... what was his name?’
‘Molotch?’
‘Molotch. He made adjustments to the door. He prepared it. It may not open again. He was very knowledgeable.’
I look out at the black headland of volcanic rock Angharad is watching.
‘What else do you know about him?’ I ask.
‘Nothing,’ Iosob says. ‘He came, he contained us. He killed some of the housekeepers to make his point. He was very skilled in his work.’
‘I have some skills of my own,’ I say.
‘But you no longer have the daemon.’
‘What?’
‘The daemon. The daemon that saved us, when the hooked things came the first time. It drove them back, and threw the door wide open. I assumed it was your daemon.’
‘You are mistaken. I don’t own a daemon,’ I reply. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The House knows,’ she says. ‘You brought a daemon in here with you, last time. A howling fury of the warp. It is the only reason you survived.’
‘What the hell is she talking about?’ Nayl asks.
‘Iosob, what do you mean?’ I feel she is terribly confused, her memory of the traumatic incident patchy. Perhaps she mistook my mental powers for something darker.
Iosob looks away at the black outcrop, scared. ‘They’re coming again, Gideon who is Ravenor.’
‘Last time, you called them the Great Devourer, Iosob. I heard you. What are they?’
‘They are the future. Passing through the three-way door, we have seen them several times. Three hundred years from our now, they will come. Behemoth.’
‘What is Behemoth?’
‘Behemoth, Kraken, Leviathan.’
‘Iosob?’
She whimpers and drops the key. She bends down and searches for it in the dust.
‘The Imperium will shake. They will be the worst enemies mankind has ever faced.’
‘What are they called?’ I ask.
‘They don’t have a name yet,’ she replies, ‘not yet.’ She finds the key and rises again.
‘This is the future, then?’ I ask.
‘This is what the door shows. Three, four hundred years gone by from our now. This is what we have seen, sometimes.’
She glances around. ‘Oh, they’re coming back.’
‘The child is right,’ grunts Angharad.
‘I’ve got eighteen shells in this pump-shot,’ says Nayl. ‘What happens when they’re spent?’
‘Try the door, please, Iosob,’ I instruct. I look back at Nayl. ‘I have a feeling, Harlon, that just after you expend your seventeenth round, you’re going to wish you had stayed aboard the Wych House and died.’
‘Charming,’ he replies. ‘I can always count on you for a positive spin.’
Iosob tries the key in the lock. It refuses to turn.
‘The door is not ready,’ she tells me. ‘Or, well, it may not ever be ready.’
‘Keep trying the key, please.’
I wait. Nayl strides around me. ‘Gideon,’ he asks, ‘if the Wych House dies, how long will this damn door last?’
‘I don’t know. If it was anchored to the House, not long. I’m hoping, praying, it exists beyond the House’s dimensions.’
‘Well, that’s a relief,’ he mocks.
‘Ravenor!’ Angharad is alert suddenly. I turn and see what she has seen: a dust cloud rising above the black volcanic outcrop. It drifts slowly, a yellow oblong smudge.
‘More of them!’
‘Please, Iosob, try the key again.’
This time, miraculously, it turns. The door opens.
The door opens three times, in fact. To an empty, windblown steppe; to a hazed plain of duricrust under a night sky where what can only be the Eye of Terror swirls and crackles like a diseased sun; and then to a forest of white, glassy trees beside a green-black lake.
There is no immediate threat here, no sense of doom, no trace of life apart from the curious trees and small, pale wasps.
We rest there, just for an hour or two. We have to keep going, for I cannot tell how long we will have use of the door, or how many time
s we will have to walk through it before we find a time and place remotely connected to our origin.
But we can only go on if we rest first. We have no food, and cannot trust the lake’s water. I test it with my systems, and find it is unpotable. It isn’t even water.
Angharad lies down and sleeps. So does the housekeeper, her small head resting against the trunk of a glassy tree. Nayl paces up and down.
It is cold. Up through the white branches of the trees, the sky is a silky grey, and sprinkled with star systems I don’t know. How far away are we, I wonder? How many parsecs, how many years? Is this even our galaxy?
I try to rest my mind, and soothe it with psykana rituals, probing it for damage, cleansing it of fatigue. Meditation may restore some of my strength.
But I am aware of my body, I am aware of physicality, my shrunken form, cold and helpless and dense inside the chair. These are sensations the chair usually spares me.
I consider again what Iosob said. What daemon did she think she saw? If there is any truth to her words, I have one suspicion, one I cannot do anything about.
In extremis, when I had to ware him, there was something artificial in Ballack’s head that previous scans had not shown to me. To ware someone, though, gives a different, deeper insight. At the time, I had been far too busy – far too frantic – to pay it much heed, but now in quiet reflection, I remember it.
It was a block. A baffle, artificially imposed, almost undetectable, a very sophisticated piece of psychic architecture. It was designed to keep a part of Ballack’s mind invisible to me. I have seen the type of thing before in my life, most particularly in a technique honed by the Cognitae, which they called the Black Dam.
What was he hiding behind it? What was his connection to the noetic school? Did he install the dam himself, or was it placed there without his knowledge by someone else?
Was it Ballack who left a footprint on Maud Plyton’s psyche?
Has Ballack been hiding a daemon in his mind all along?
‘Gideon?’ Nayl took a step closer to the silent chair. The surface of it was scratched and battered, with a patina that looked as if it had been sandblasted. Congealed fluid clogged some of the deeper gouges.
‘Gideon?’
‘Harlon?’ Ravenor’s voxponder wheezed and replied.
‘Were you asleep?’
‘I think so. I think I must have been.’
‘Ah, sorry. It’s hard to tell.’ Nayl looked around. Angharad was curled up and slumbering like a cat. The housekeeper looked like a lost child, huddled in a storybook woodland. ‘It’s been about three hours. Actually, that’s a guess, because my chron is acting really funny, but my gut says three hours.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘And it’s getting darker and colder.’
‘We should use the door again,’ said Ravenor.
‘Do you think it really will take us home?’ he asked.
‘I doubt we’ll get anything as precise as that,’ said Ravenor. ‘I’m hoping for a recognisable Imperial location, even a remote one or a ship, within five years either way of our exit point.’
‘Five years?’ Nayl asked, doubtfully. ‘As much as that?’
‘If we get as close as that, I’ll be content,’ Ravenor replied. ‘I’m rather afraid the door’s operating system is impaired. It’s no longer opening in response to a question of coherence. I think we’re travelling at random. I’m not even sure that the locations it’s opening for us are going to be compatible with human forms.’
Nayl raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s a nice thought I hadn’t yet considered. So the next time we open the door, it could lead to... what? An airless world? A toxic atmosphere?’
‘The open void. The warp. The heart of a star. Or back to the Wych House. This escape route comes with no guarantee it is an escape route at all. We may have simply postponed our fate. In the light of that, I’m sure you’ll agree, five years and a few light years out would be something of a miracle.’
Nayl nodded thoughtfully. ‘You never did tell me if you got an answer,’ he said.
‘I got part of one. The door took me to Molotch, or to the world where he was hiding, at least.’
‘Where was that?’
‘There was no way to tell. Orfeo Culzean was waiting for me there.’
‘To kill you?’
‘To talk to me.’
‘You’re joking!’ Nayl laughed.
‘He had a proposition. He wanted to make a pact with me. It seems he and Molotch are deeply concerned about Slyte.’
Nayl rubbed the bruises Worna’s hand had left on his throat. ‘Slyte?’
‘Culzean was suggesting that Molotch and I worked together to combat Slyte. He wanted us to put an end to our fight and work in unison against a mutual enemy. I said no.’
Ravenor fell silent. He had no intention of telling Nayl the details of the conversation.
‘If you’d said yes?’ Nayl asked.
‘Culzean would have sent us back through the door, and Worna would have conveyed us off Utochre to whereever Molotch was waiting. Because I said no, he used the door as a murder weapon.’
‘I thought the Slyte business was over. I thought we’d gone past the critical point. What does Molotch know that we don’t?’
‘Perhaps nothing. We may know more about it than him. He may not be aware that the critical point, as you put it, has passed.’
‘I doubt that,’ said Nayl. ‘Since when has he ever known less than us?’
‘Wake the others,’ Ravenor said.
The next turn of the key brought them out onto a ragged plateau of ancient, crumbling granite. Extreme age had caused the rock to rot and lose its constitution. Beyond the plateau, a ragged world stretched away under a sky threaded by blinking whiskers of lightning.
The next opened the door to a fogbound marsh. It was humid, and the air was bad. So was the standing water. Thread-thin worms writhed in the mire, pulsing their wretched mouths and firing millivolt electrical impulses that prickled at the travellers’ legs as they waded around.
The door opened and closed behind them again. A vast rift valley of yellow rock, gouged out under a selpic blue sky, spread out in front of them. The valley was ten kilometres wide, and four or five deep. It was achingly hot, and the heat was dry. The air smelled like metal.
‘Leave this place quickly,’ Ravenor said. His chair systems were reading a blaze of solar radiation.
Next, a small coral atoll in the middle of a choppy ocean washed violet by small, wobbling jellyfish in vast profusion. There was no other land in sight. The sky was a pink haze. A booming sound kept echoing out across the distance. Very far away, indistinct in the haze, some great, basking shape rose from the sea and rolled slowly back in.
‘Next,’ said Nayl.
Next was a dark, black forest, bitter and damp. The air hinted at advanced decay, and the merest pricks of white sky penetrated the thick, black fronds of the trees. They moved a little way from the door, hoping to see signs of habitation or perhaps a trail. Odd sounds knocked and chirruped in the darkness. Tiny black flies began to buzz around them. Angharad brushed them away from her face. They were very small, like fleas.
In a few seconds, the clouds of them had become unbearably thick, blackening exposed skin and swirling into nostrils, ears and eyes.
‘Exit!’ Ravenor ordered. Iosob struggled with the key, moaning through tightly pursed lips as she tried to shake off the flies.
Ravenor summoned a little of what was left of his will and let it wash out, sweeping the flies away for a second.
The door opened.
Here, a bone yard, a windy, cold desert of blue-grey dust. The chasing wind fanned horsetails of loose dust off the tops of dunes. The vast, dry bones of long dead animals covered the landscape as far as they could see, tumbled in disarticulated heaps, half submerged in the dust. These animals had been giants. The sky was a mottled brown, and the las-fire streaks of shooting stars, all descending at the same forty-five degree angle, flickered across it l
ike sparks off a grinding wheel. Ravenor’s three companions crunched out amongst the bone waste, spitting phlegm black with dead flies out of their mouths.
‘Open the door again,’ said Angharad, humourlessly.
Iosob obeyed, and they came into a city. It was a frigid, bare place of cyclopean blocks under a yellow sky dominated by a ringed gas giant. There was little doubt at all that the city was not of human construction.
‘Have you seen anything like this before?’ Nayl asked. Sound had a strange, hollow echo to it. The cold air held a sweet tang, like sugar.
‘No,’ said Ravenor. They wandered the area around the door for five minutes.
‘It’s been dead a long time, hasn’t it?’ asked Angharad.
‘No,’ said Ravenor. ‘I can feel something here, a presence.’
Nayl raised his gun.
‘It’s far away,’ said Ravenor, ‘but I can feel it. It’s not human.’ He turned his chair. ‘Open the door again, please, Iosob. I don’t think we’re safe here.’
As they went through the door, Nayl wondered quite what Ravenor had felt to make him so sure of that.
The next place was an arid plain, cracked and shrunken like sun-damaged skin. Weird succulent plant growth, like sprouts of brain tissue, formed forests on either side of the parched plain. A few kilometres away, the rusted, buckled shell of some colossal machine lay derelict on the ground. It looked like part of a starship, but what kind they couldn’t tell. There was no time to debate or investigate. The atmosphere was barely breathable. Nausea enveloped them, and they started to gasp and choke.
It seemed to take forever for the key to turn.
‘Throne!’ Nayl exclaimed as they made their next exit. ‘Be careful! Watch your step!’
The door had opened onto a narrow platform of rough-hewn, untreated wood. It was part of a massive, and not altogether reliable-looking, matrix of scaffolding erected around a huge, decaying ouslite tower. They were close to the top, in bright midday sunlight and fresh wind, and the platform was a thousand metres above the hazy sprawl of a huge city. Hundreds of dirty smoke trails rose from the city roofscape.
The platform swayed as they moved gingerly out across it. Iosob held onto a scaffold cross-member and refused to look down. She shut her eyes.
‘I don’t like this,’ she said.