by Dan Abnett
Or as if the ocean outside was alive.
‘I have come seeking coherence,’ Ravenor said. Lucic made no objection. He stood back.
‘I have come seeking coherence,’ Ravenor repeated.
The figure that had brought them up on the hoist had walked slowly up the steps to join the others of its kind on the raised walkway.
‘Do you have names? Voices?’ Ravenor asked.
‘We have both,’ said one of the figures. Its speech was audible and precise, though little more than a murmur in volume. The voice seemed young too, although it was impossible to tell whether it was male or female.
‘Will you tell me your names?’ Ravenor asked.
‘Will you tell us yours?’
‘Is that essential for our transaction?’
‘No,’ said another of the figures, ‘though to receive accurate coherence, you must be truly known. This is not our function. It is up to the House to know you.’
‘What is your function?’
‘We are merely housekeepers.’
‘I see, and how will the House know me?’
‘It is learning already. You may speed the process by explaining your incoherence.’
Ravenor swung his chair around and faced Plyton. ‘Maud?’
‘Sir?’
‘I’d like you to escort Mr Lucic back down the hoist to our craft and watch over him there.’
‘Wait–’ Lucic began.
‘Does our guide need to be here any longer?’ Ravenor asked the hooded figures.
‘His function is complete.’
‘The housekeepers have spoken, Lucic,’ Ravenor told the prospector. ‘I thank you for your services of guidance and introduction, but I don’t want you around while this is happening. Remove yourself, stay with the underboat, and we can remain friends.’
Lucic glanced around, agitated and clearly unhappy. He knew he wasn’t in a situation where he could put up an effective argument or fight. He forced a beaming grin onto his slender face, and bowed. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I have no wish to fall out with you. Out here, a man needs all the friends he can get.’
Plyton gestured with the muzzle of the shotgun slung over her shoulder. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.
+Watch him, Maud.+
Plyton nodded. She was still not used to directly sent thoughts. She followed Lucic onto the hoist platform, pulled the lever, and they slowly dropped below the floor.
Ravenor turned back to face the housekeepers.
‘Explain what I can do in more detail.’
‘Describe the parameters of your incoherence, in plain terms,’ one of the housekeepers replied. ‘Allow the House to know you.’
‘And how is coherence communicated?’
‘The right key opens the right door,’ said a housekeeper.
Ravenor’s companions exchanged troubled looks.
Ravenor rolled his chair forward until he was directly beneath the watching housekeepers on the raised walkway. ‘I seek coherence,’ he announced, as if speaking not to them but to the chamber as a whole. ‘My name is Gideon Ravenor. There’s no point hiding that. I am searching for someone... a great enemy of mine, there’s no point hiding that fact either. He has eluded me for a long time, and driven me into a state of near ruin in my efforts to find him. The stars are a vast place, and he could be anywhere. I decided it would be better to search for something or someone that could tell me where and how to find him, than to spend lifetimes searching for him fruitlessly. The Wych House of Utochre has a great and ancient reputation for prediction. It is said the House’s accuracy in such matters is extraordinary. In my past life, I was an Imperial inquisitor and a loyal servant of the Ordos Helican. To seek out the guidance and psykcraft of a place such as this would have been deemed the act of a radical or a heretic. It would not have been remotely condoned by the men I called my masters. But I am rogue now, and desperate, and I am acting outside the scope, knowledge and permission of the Holy Inquisition. I am no longer an inquisitor. Perhaps I am damned, but I’ll surely be damned if I don’t know.’
The whispering voices of the House billowed around them. They reminded Kys uncomfortably of the rushing wings of the sheen birds at Petropolis. She was fighting the desire to weep. Ravenor’s spoken admission, even if it had been uttered with unnecessary emphasis to convince the Wych House, had been painful to hear. I am no longer an inquisitor. Perhaps I am damned.
Perhaps they were all damned.
‘The one I seek goes by the name of Zygmunt Molotch,’ Ravenor said.
The voices swirled, their whispers becoming more sibilant and sharp. They streamed around Ravenor like an eddying wind, like the frail sighs of phantoms.
Now they could all hear what the voices were saying.
Molotch, Molotch, Molotch...
At the base of the riser shaft, down in the gloom, Plyton led Lucic off the platform. She turned, dragged back the lever, and allowed the empty platform to trundle back up the shaft.
‘How do we get back up?’ Lucic asked.
‘Please Throne we don’t have to,’ Plyton replied. They both carried oil lamps taken from the platform. By the light of hers, Plyton indicated the spiral staircase. ‘That’s got to lead up somewhere,’ she said, ‘if needs be, but they need to hoist more than we do. Come on.’
They walked back along the service tunnel towards the docking pool.
‘So, you’re Maud,’ said Lucic lightly.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she replied.
They stepped back out into the gloomy wharf area, amongst the hanging, rusty chainwork and rotting machinery. The underboat sat quietly below them, moored against the wharf’s fenders by the heavy sea chains Lucic had fixed. The underboat’s top and side hatches were still open, and pale electric light shone out.
‘Checking in,’ Plyton said into her link.
The pilot servitor’s voice crackled back an acknowledgement.
‘Well, we could be in for a long wait,’ Lucic said, sitting down on the pier’s edge so his feet dangled over the drop into the pool. He set the lamp down beside him. ‘How will we pass the time if not in friendly conversation, Maud?’
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she replied.
Ten
‘I have a theory,’ Carl said.
‘About?’ Ravenor asked.
‘About how this place might work,’ Carl said. They were still waiting down on the theatre’s lower space. The housekeepers had not moved or spoken, not even when the empty hoist returned. The flutter of whispers came and went like a breeze.
‘Go on,’ Ravenor prompted.
‘I don’t think it’s the House itself. There might be some active material or device here that acts as a focus, but I think what really matters is where the House is.’
‘Interesting. Go on.’
‘I think it’s the ocean. I think it’s the ocean itself. Somehow, that responds and resonates to...’ he faltered. ‘Actually, my theory is rather weak and open-ended.’
‘I think you’re halfway there,’ said Ravenor. ‘That’s good reasoning, but you’re not taking it far enough. I agree the ocean is part of it, functioning as a resonating medium, but I think the real secret is the moon itself.’
‘Utochre?’
‘Yes. How often do we find crystals or crystalline materials employed in divination and prediction? Sensing crystals, scrying crystals, crystals used to refract and focus psy-impulses?’
‘Crystal balls?’
‘Exactly. The technique and belief is as old as man, and we’re not the only species to appreciate the method.’
‘The eldar?’
‘Precisely – the eldar. Mineral resonance. Let’s face it, it wouldn’t be wildly incorrect to define wraithbone as an organic gemstone. This moon is infamously rich in a myriad different forms of crystal deposit. The Wych House–’
‘–uses Utochre as a gigantic crystal ball,’ Carl said with a grin. ‘Am I close?’
‘I don’t know. If you are, it’s a cr
ude analogy, but those are the lines I was thinking along.’
Carl looked pleased with himself.
‘You were almost there ahead of me that time, interrogator. I soon won’t be able to teach you anything.’
‘The stuff I know,’ Carl chuckled.
The fluttering whispers suddenly stopped. The abrupt silence was a little unnerving. With a shudder, the Wych House adjusted its footing.
‘The House is ready,’ said one of the hooded figures.
‘Step up onto this level,’ instructed another. Ravenor guided his chair up over the lower steps onto the raised walkway, and his companions followed obediently until they all stood, waiting, beside the housekeepers.
They heard a rapid series of metal clanks and the whine of hydraulics. Slowly, ponderously, a broad, circular platform descended from the domed roof space on heavy telescopic stanchions. The platform fitted concentrically over the lower floor space but was several metres smaller in diameter. It lowered until it was precisely as far above the level of the raised walkway as the walkway was above the lower floor, creating a third tier to the chamber. The edge of the circular platform met the top of the steps jutting up and out from the raised circuit, and locked in place with a thump of mag-bolts. There was enough headroom beneath it for a man to descend to the lower floor space and walk around without ducking.
The circular platform was a thick and pitted disc of iron or steel with the six elevator stanchions, each one currently at full extension, rising like columns at regular intervals around its rim. Above it, black girders and the beams of the dome space slowly became illuminated by the gradually intensifying ghost glare of a dozen photo-lumin lamps.
The open space of the platform was empty apart from a single object: a half-open door, held upright in the centre of the platform by its frame. The door was old and made of wood, a very ordinary old door in a very ordinary frame.
They all stared at it for a moment. Above them, the House altered its foothold once again, and the motion caused the old door to swing back and forth in its frame slightly, as if blown by a breeze. It thumped to, and then swung open a hand’s breadth ajar.
‘I give in, what is it?’ asked Nayl.
‘A door,’ replied Angharad, who, Ravenor had found, could always be relied upon for a prosaic answer.
‘A door,’ Carl echoed. ‘Could it be what I think it is?’
‘It rather depends on what you think it is, Carl,’ Ravenor replied.
The housekeepers moved past them in procession, carrying lamps up the steps onto the door platform and arranging them around the edges of the disc. Ravenor lifted up onto the platform too and approached the door. The others slowly followed him.
‘A propylaeum tripartite?’ Thonius ventured, speaking in hushed tones. ‘A... tri-portal?’
‘That was my thought,’ Ravenor said. ‘Again, your deduction is excellent. As is your knowledge of abstruse lore and esoterica. Where have you come across the concept?’
Carl shrugged. ‘I remember finding references to the idea in study, years ago. I can’t... I can’t remember the reference.’
‘Sarnique’s Codex Atrox,’ Ballack said quietly, ‘and also The Ochre Book.’ He looked around at Ravenor and Thonius. ‘Access to such works is restricted but, like Carl, I have made use of my interrogator status for the purpose of study. Three years ago, working with Inquisitor Fenx on Mirepoix, we were called to investigate a cult, which, it was claimed, operated a functional propylaeum tripartite. It proved to be a hoax, but I did my research. This design matches the woodcuts in Sarnique’s work.’
‘Sarnique,’ Thonius nodded, ‘that’s the fellow.’
‘Are we supposed to believe this is a genuine tri-portal?’ Ballack asked, walking around to the far side of the door frame so they could see him through the half-open door.
‘Anyone fancy, I dunno,’ Nayl murmured, ‘telling me what you’re talking about?’
‘Carl? Ballack?’ Ravenor asked.
Thonius took a step forward until he was on the opposite side of the door to Ballack. He approached it gingerly. The door thumped slightly and loosely in its frame, as if caught by a persistent breeze.
‘A propylaeum tripartite,’ Carl said.
‘You keep saying that,’ Nayl chided.
‘A three-way door,’ Carl Thonius corrected with a disdainful look at the heavy bounty-man. ‘A mythical device of augury and divination. Its manner of function has never been explained, not even in psionic terms, though it may simply be a totem for psychic focus. An elaborate fetish.’
‘How does it work?’ asked Kys. ‘I mean... in what way does it work?’
‘It has one side here,’ said Thonius.
‘And a second here,’ said Ballack, from the other side of the door. ‘But if one passes through the door...’ Ballack hesitated. Neither he nor Thonius showed any willingness to perform that act. ‘Well, Kys, it is said that one finds a third side. A third way. The door transports the subject to another location in space-time entirely, a site where the answer to a specific question of augury may be learned.’
‘A portal?’ asked Kys.
Ballack shrugged.
‘Yes, a portal,’ said Ravenor. ‘The door is said to be able to convey a subject elsewhere. In fact, to more than one place, depending on the sequence of use and the complexity of the answer sought after.’
He swung his chair away from the door. The others grouped around him. ‘I wasn’t expecting this,’ Ravenor said, ‘which was foolish of me. Unless it proved to be fraudulent, the Wych House was always going to contain a truly dark secret. This is what we came all this way to find. I just don’t like the idea of using it.’
‘Me neither,’ said Thonius.
‘I’m still struggling with the basic concept,’ Nayl admitted.
‘It’s just an old wooden door,’ Angharad repeated, leadenly.
‘We have to use it.’
They all turned to regard Kys. She was watching the housekeepers set out the fluttering lamps and tapers around the rim of the platform. ‘We’ve come all this way, like you said. We’ve broken every rule we care about. We knew we would be tampering with the dark, the heretical. I don’t like this one bit, but we’re in it now. We’re committed.’
‘What are you suggesting?’ Thonius asked her.
‘What are you suggesting?’ Kys snapped back. ‘Do we turn away? Go home? Give up? If we were going to do that, Throne help me, we should have done it months ago. We’ve come too far to get squeamish now.’
+You’re right, Patience. Thank you for being the voice of reason.+
+I don’t feel very reasonable.+
‘We’re doing this,’ Ravenor said. ‘Well, some of us are. I won’t risk the entire group. I need to leave someone here to cover our backs.’
‘That’s assuming,’ said Angharad archly, ‘that this isn’t just an old wooden door flapping in the breeze.’
‘Assuming that it isn’t,’ said Ravenor. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come with me and find out? Ballack, Carl you too, please. Harlon, you and Patience stay put and keep watch over this flapping door.’
A dark look crossed Nayl’s face. He glanced at the swordswoman. ‘No, I–’ he began. He stopped short.
+She’ll be fine with me, Harlon, I promise. I’ll take care of her. Besides, she can take care of herself. And her mind is wonderfully strong, marvellously resilient. There is a great deal of unworldliness she can withstand.+
Nayl glowered. ‘But–’
+I need your strength here. I need Kys here too, as a psychic link. Don’t argue, Nayl.+
‘I’d never argue with you.’
+Harlon, I know how much you care about the Carthaen. I know everything. I will protect her.+
Nayl nodded, grudgingly. He caught Angharad’s eye and made the fist-to-sternum punch salute of the clans. She returned it.
Ravenor caught Kys’s mind intimately. +I’ll try casting to you.+
+I’ll be listening for you.+
&n
bsp; +Keep us grounded, Patience.+
+I will.+
The entire rim of the platform was by then flickering with candles and lamps. More lamps had been brought out onto the raised walkway too. The theatre chamber’s overhead lights dimmed to a slight glimmer.
The flutter of whispering voices swirled around them once more, for the first time in half an hour. The moment they ceased, the door slammed shut tight with a loud bang, and they heard the ancient lock turn.
‘The House is ready for you,’ said one of the housekeepers.
‘The door is ready to be unlocked,’ said another. They stood in a ragged circle around Ravenor’s team on the disc.
‘Who has the right key?’ asked Ravenor.
Another chilling murmur of whispers.
One of the housekeepers stepped forward, taking hold of the key it wore around its neck.
‘I do,’ the housekeeper said. The other housekeepers muttered softly, as if congratulating the chosen one.
‘Who goes and who stays?’ asked another of the hooded figures.
‘I’m staying,’ replied Kys.
‘Me too,’ Nayl grunted. The housekeeper motioned for them to follow. All but the chosen housekeeper processed slowly off the upper platform onto the walkway below. Kys walked after them. She paused and looked back.
‘The Emperor protects,’ she called out.
+Not this time, I’m afraid,’+
‘Then you protect, Gideon,’ she said. She turned and walked down the steps.
Nayl moved to go after her. He stopped, and then strode deliberately back to Angharad and kissed her roughly on the lips. ‘Damn it,’ he growled. ‘I want to see you all again alive. Even you, Thonius.’
‘I’ll be counting the minutes, dear heart,’ Carl grinned back.
