by Dan Abnett
‘Kara,’ she had whispered.
‘Might it be permeanable for you to come to the bridge, with all effluviancy?’
‘Problem?’
‘A very curiousnessity.’
‘I’ll be there in five.’
She had dressed in silence. Belknap hadn’t stirred.
‘Master Sholto?’ she said again.
Fyflank and the crew mates looked around at her, and backed away to make space for her. She stepped in closer and crouched down beside the shipmaster’s raised seat.
‘Mistress Kara,’ Sholto said, glancing around with a thin smile. He looked awful: pale, jowly, drawn.
‘Sholto, are you all right?’
He shook his head. ‘Forgive my unsanguine bearing. I fancy I took a little too much numbskull last night with your gentleman, the good doctor. He is a drinker of thirst, and I was thirsty, but not, in point all goodly made, a drinker.’
‘You have a hangover?’ she smiled, relaxing slightly.
‘A terrible head, as you ask, all of throbbing and whimsy. Never again, as I have told myself before. And such dreams, as I had. Quite a colostomy of nightmares.’
‘Why did you send for me, Sholto? Is it Ravenor? Has he signalled?’
Unwerth shook his head. ‘The grid has lit twice, with no reponderance from our friends below. They remonstrate themselves beyond our call. I sent for you because I was sent for in turn, so as it–’
‘Sholto?’ Kara said firmly.
He nodded. ‘I will cut to the cheese. Master Boguin was sitting night watch–’
One of the crewmen behind her, a portly fellow from Ur-Haven with less than adequate hygiene or dental maintenance, nodded expressively.
‘Master Boguin was on night watch,’ Unwerth continued, ‘here at this veritable station, and he detected a noise.’
‘A noise?’
‘A noise, in all certainty.’
Kara frowned. ‘A noise?’ she repeated.
Unwerth fiddled with the vox dials. ‘I’m trying to locale it again.’
‘What sort of noise?’ Kara asked.
Unwerth shrugged.
‘Well, internal or external source?’
To her dismay, Unwerth shrugged again.
Kara breathed carefully. Her head was killing her. ‘Sholto, I’m trying to be patient. What are you talking about?’
‘There’s something here,’ Master Boguin said. Fyflank growled in support.
‘Get up,’ said Kara. She was in no mood for this. Unwerth hopped down from the master’s seat and let her take his place. He stood on the deck beside her.
Kara settled down. She started to adjust the console controls. ‘You’re getting a vox signal? Another ship? Or just back-chatter traffic from Utochre’s vox-space?’
Sholto Unwerth simply shrugged again.
Kara gently turned the dials. A ghost frequency fluttered across the scope.
‘There!’ Unwerth said.
‘I saw it. Hang on.’
She made some alterations. The signal wave became cleaner. Kara peered at it. ‘That could be another vessel, pinging us with its primary auspex.’
‘In all assurity, there is no other vessel in range.’
‘I think you’re right,’ said Kara. ‘It’s not external. This print is a signal coming from inside the ship. Let me just–’
She halted suddenly, froze.
‘What is it?’ Unwerth asked.
She didn’t dare tell him. She was looking at her hands as they worked the instruments. Her right hand. There was a ring on the middle finger of her right hand, a ring that didn’t belong to her, and that she had no memory of putting on.
In one awful, sweeping moment, she was sure it was one of Carl’s.
‘Shit!’ she cried, pulling her hands back from the station as if stung. She tried to pull the ring off. It wouldn’t budge.
Unwerth was still staring at the flickering signal, a yellow zigzag pulse that rippled like a cardiogram across the vox-screen.
He leant in and made a final, tiny adjustment, locking the signal down. The noise came over the speakers.
It made all of them shiver.
It was the sound of a grown man, sobbing. It went on and on, shuddering tinnily from the console speakers, sob after sob, a wracking pain.
‘What in hell’s name is that?’ Kara whispered. She tried to sound defiant, but her words wilted as they came out. Her guts were like ice. ‘Where’s that coming from?’
‘I know not,’ said Unwerth, ‘except that I don’t like it.’
He reached one of his mutilated hands over towards the vox-system’s main switch and threw it, shutting the system down. The screen went blank and the chasing zigzag signal wave vanished.
But the sound of the sobbing man kept coming from the speakers.
Eight
‘You had better see this,’ Nayl said.
They were thirteen hours into the trip. The pilot servitor was suddenly slowing the cavitation system and back-thrusting with the ventral fans. Kys came forward into the pilot house and let Ravenor use her eyes.
‘There’s your Wych House,’ Nayl said.
The underboat’s rigged stablights were illuminating something in the murk ahead, a structure suspended below the glowing roof of ice.
‘Oh God-Emperor,’ Kys muttered, craning forward between Nayl and Lucic.
‘Quite a thing, isn’t it?’ the prospector said.
The Wych House was an armoured metallic orb three hundred metres in diameter. ’Neath side, everything was upside down. The orb was supported on five articulated mechanical legs, which gripped the canopy of ice above them. As they approached, the House scuttled back a few paces, its bladed claws scuffing the ’neath side of the ice cover. It was walking on the underside of the pack ice as if the pack ice was land.
‘There’s a legend on Loki,’ Nayl began. ‘The hut of a witch that runs through the forest on the legs of a game bird.’
‘Baba Yagga’s hut,’ Kys murmured.
+Baba Yagga’s hut.+
‘Baba Yagga,’ Nayl nodded. ‘You’ve heard of it?’
+It’s not an old Loki legend. It’s an Old Earth legend.+
‘That so?’ asked Nayl.
+That is so. Bring us in.+
Nayl glanced at the pilot. ‘Bring us in.’
Lucic shook his head. ‘Wait. I need to broadcast the proper greetings. If we just close in, it’ll run.’
‘Run?’
‘I’ve seen it run, if it’s scared, or feels threatened. It can out run this boat.’
+Send the greetings.+
‘My boss says send the greetings, Lucic,’ Kys relayed.
‘He’s a psyker, then?’ Lucic asked. ‘I thought as much.’
Kys and Nayl exchanged looks. ‘At this stage,’ Nayl said, ‘we really don’t care what you think, Lucic. Send the greeting. Do what we paid you to do or you’ll be leaving this underboat through the wet-lock with no breathing apparatus and a bullet up your arse.’
‘I don’t answer for him,’ said Kys quietly, ‘but he’s more than capable of that, so don’t piss him off.’
Lucic pursed his lips and entered a contact code into the underboat’s transponder. He checked it for fidelity once, and then pressed ‘broadcast’.
They heard and felt the pulse of the system through the hull.
They waited.
‘Does it usually take this long?’ asked Kys.
Lucic tapped a long, scrawny finger against his bony chin. ‘No. The House is worried. Nervous. Probably because we’re bringing a psyker aboard.’
‘It can sense that?’ Nayl wondered. He saw the look on Lucic’s face and shrugged. ‘Of course it can.’
Kys leaned forward suddenly. ‘It’s sending something. Throne, missiles?’
Nayl leaned on the controls. Two darting shapes had burst from the Wych House and were racing towards them, leaving bubble tracks in the semi-glazed water behind them.
‘Relax,’ said Luci
c, ‘pilot fish.’
The missiles slowed as they neared the underboat, and turned, flashing and pulsing. The pilot servitor underwent some form of seizure, and began to act mechanically. His mind and systems were locked to the navigation systems of the Wych House. He steered them in, following the blinking pilot fish skimming just ahead of them.
The bulk of the Wych House loomed over the little underboat. They were being drawn up into a lighted cavity on the underside of the armoured orb.
The pilot fish zipped in ahead of them and vanished.
‘We’re going in,’ said Nayl.
‘Lock and load,’ Ravenor ordered from the passenger trunk. Angharad rose and clutched her sheathed steel. Maud Plyton got up and racked her combat shotgun. Ballack drew his laspistol and checked its heat. Carl rose to his feet and double-clicked the slide on his autopistol.
Nayl flipped his handgun out of its rig, banged back the slide, and put it away again. He glanced at Kys.
‘You ready?’
Kys had slid out two kineblades, one in each hand. She nodded.
‘We’re ready,’ Nayl announced.
The underboat slowly entered the House’s docking pool.
Huge hydraulic clamps had once lifted underboats in and out of the docking pool and secured them to the wharf, but rust and neglect had long since rendered them useless. They protruded like the rotting claws of behemoth crabs from the gantry, trailing streamers of calcite and algae into the soupy dock basin. As the underboat surfaced, its fans blowing and sputtering the grease ice coating the pool’s surface, Lucic opened the upper hatch, and climbed out to make them steady, using dirty old chains and hooks that dangled from the gantry piers.
The docking pool was dim, illuminated only by the underboat’s light rig and a few faded lumin strips high up in the arched roof. The skeletal bulk of the gantry wharf and the perished docking clamps made distressing silhouettes above them, and the light cast wan, foggy reflections off the slowly wallowing, viscous surface of the pool. A pair of corroded metal ladders allowed them to clamber up onto the wharf platform. Nayl opened the larger side hatch so that Ravenor could move out and rise to the walkway.
‘Bad air,’ muttered Carl. The House’s atmosphere held the sickly tang of an air supply recirculated and poorly scrubbed too many times, like a starship that had been sealed in transit for too long. There was no sound, except for the slap of the grease ice, the dying thump of the underboat’s fans, and the brittle clump of their footsteps. Nayl, Lucic and Plyton switched on lamp packs.
‘Cold,’ Plyton shivered, buttoning her coat. Her mood seemed to have lifted, however, now she was out of the underboat’s drab metal confines.
‘This way,’ said Lucic, and set off down the walkway.
‘Why don’t they keep this place in good order?’ Carl wondered aloud.
‘It’s not a way station or a depot,’ Lucic replied, gesturing with one gangly arm. ‘The residents of the House expect those who come here to be perfectly capable of leaving again without supply or repair.’
‘Residents?’ Ravenor asked. ‘How many?’
Lucic shrugged. ‘They don’t tell me things like that. Come on.’
Ballack and Nayl pushed past him to lead the way. The metal surfaces of the decks, walls and machinery around them were caked in rust, or limed with verdigris and blooms of algae. There was an open, unlit hatchway at the back of the wharf platform, a hatchway that had clearly been open for so long, corrosion would not allow it to be sealed again.
The deck beneath them shuddered. All the loose chains and hanging filaments in the dock swayed and clanked. Every weapon in the party rose ready.
‘Don’t panic,’ said Lucic, ‘the House just took a step to steady itself. Get used to the sensation.’
The hatch led through into a service tunnel where the lights had long since burned dead, or had been robbed out for spares. Their weaving lamp beams caught strange surface mottling on the walls, but it wasn’t rust.
‘Look at this,’ said Carl, training his lamp. The area of wall he was illuminating was entirely covered in a curious, tight patterning that appeared to have been etched. As he moved the beam around slowly, they could see that the pattern covered everything.
‘What is that?’ Kys asked, leaning close.
‘Fingerprints,’ said Angharad.
‘No, it can’t–’
‘Fingerprints,’ the Carthaen repeated.
‘She’s right,’ Ravenor said, his transponder a dry rattle in the darkness beside them. ‘Human fingerprints.’
The prints were life size, packed in so close to each other that barely a scrap of wall remained unmarked. They looked as if they had been left by thousands upon thousands of finger touches, but the touch of a fingertip did not excise its shape perfectly into bare metal in miniature bas-relief.
‘They must have been engraved,’ said Carl, ‘but the workmanship is astonishing. Who has the time to engrave so many individual, perfect marks?’
‘This is the House,’ Lucic replied, in an annoyingly off-hand way.
‘What’s really astonishing,’ said Ravenor, ‘is that every single print is different.’
A ripple of deep unease ran through them. For the first time, Ravenor felt the inscrutable Angharad register a scintilla of fear.
The service tunnel continued on for thirty metres and opened into a wide, drum-shaped chamber. This was also unlit. Their lamp beams revealed a rickety metal spiral staircase against one wall, leading up into the shadows to a roof hatch. The centre of the chamber was occupied by a cargo hoist, a cage of machinery surrounding a low, rectangular plinth crusted in filth and oil residue. Above it in the ceiling, the dim space of a riser shaft yawned like a throat. The rest of the chamber was cluttered with metal litter and rusting machine junk. There were two other doors, both of them sealed forever by rust and decay.
Like the service tunnel, every part of the chamber’s walls was covered with fingerprints.
‘Do we go up?’ asked Nayl.
‘We wait,’ said Lucic.
‘For what?’
‘Just wait. We can’t rush them. This is their party now.’
They waited in edgy silence. The House rocked gently again, as it took another adjusting step.
‘This–’ said Plyton.
‘Shhhhhh!’ said Nayl. He was gazing up into the open darkness of the riser shaft above them.
A light came on far above them. It was thin and washy, a dirty fuzz of yellow radiance that penetrated only very faintly to their level. There was a distant, muffled thump of heavy gear, then a grinding noise. The hoist was descending.
It came down the shaft slowly, bringing the wash of light with it. The hoist was an open-sided, rectangular platform that matched exactly the dimensions of the plinth at the foot of the shaft. It lowered into view and settled with a resounding metal clang. Half a dozen mismatched oil lamps and bottle tapers stood on the platform, higgeldy-piggeldy, shedding their dirty, smoky glow. A figure stood in their midst, short, slender, like a youth or a child. The figure was shrouded in a hooded, floor-length cloak, and no face could be detected under the cowl. Ravenor hesitated from scanning. He did not want to provoke the residents of the House.
The figure wore an old, large, rusty key on a ribbon around its neck. It looked like the sort of antique key that might have once opened the gatehouse of a pre-Heresy bastion.
The figure gazed at them.
‘These people come seeking coherence,’ Lucic called out, taking a step forward. There was a nervous tremor in his voice. ‘I am their guide.
For a brief moment, there was a murmur of voices in the air around them, an unintelligible flutter of whispering, hissing voices, overlapped and urgent.
Then it died away. The figure raised its left hand and beckoned them onto the hoist platform with a single, slow gesture.
As Ravenor steered his chair onto the platform, he knew he’d just tasted the first, undeniable trace of the Wych House’s psykcraft.
Nine
The hoist carried them slowly up eighty metres of rusty riser shaft into a vast circular theatre that was lit around its edges by thousands of candles and lamps. The floor was formed of metal grille plates, and arranged on a split level, with a raised ring walkway around the outside of the chamber divided by an iron handrail from a circular central floor space. There were several heavy duty hatches at intervals around the chamber walls.
The hoist platform brought them up on the edge of the inner floor space. Above them, at the limits of the candlelight, the theatre chamber’s domed roof was a mass of support girders and heavy black frames in shadow.
They looked around, assessing their circumstances. Their weapons were sheathed and holstered, so as not to cause problems, but they were ready.
Angharad glanced at Nayl and nodded across the chamber. On the far side from the hoist, the room’s raised ring walkway had a broad set of seven metal steps set into its lip, virtually identical to the set that rose from the centre floor space to the ring walkway itself. This upper set interrupted the encircling handrail and jutted out into the chamber over the inner floor space, leading to nothing.
They’d all seen it. Nayl glanced up into the roof’s shadows. Was there something concealed up there that required step access when it descended?
The robed figure walked off the platform onto the lower level. They followed, halting as the figure stopped and turned to face them again.
‘Hell’s teeth!’ Nayl growled.
A dozen more hooded figures, identical to the first, were suddenly standing on the raised walkway above them, staring down. They’d heard no hatch open. There had been no flicker of the candles. Each of the newcomers had a key around its neck, but no two keys were identical.
‘Someone say something,’ Plyton whispered. ‘The tension is killing me.’
Another flutter of sighing, hissing voices breathed around them. Ravenor tentatively reached out with his mind. The situation was precarious, but he dared not wait any longer. Immediately, he encountered a strong background aura of psychic activity. The place was alive with it, as if it saturated the walls and the deck. It was resonating in a slow, gentle pulse, like breathing, but it wasn’t coming from the hooded figures. They were utterly blank and inert to his inspection. The aura was around them all, as if they stood within a vast, psy-active mind.
