by Dan Abnett
Nayl turned and plodded across the platform towards the steps.
He thumped down them and stood beside Kys, amongst the silent housekeepers, gazing up onto the door platform.
‘So, you and the warrior woman,’ Kys whispered.
‘Shut it.’
‘How long has that been going on?’
‘Two words, Kys. Shut the frig up.’
‘My lips are sealed,’ she smirked. ‘Unlike yours. Or hers.’
He glared at her. She pointed up at the platform. ‘You’re missing the show,’ she told him.
She turned to watch. Despite her smile, she had started to pray.
‘Are you content to begin?’ asked the housekeeper beside the door.
‘Oh, I can’t wait,’ said Thonius. Angharad looked bored. Ballack rested his good hand on the grip of his holstered weapon.
‘We are content,’ Ravenor replied.
The housekeeper removed the key from around its neck and slid it into the door’s ancient lock. The key turned with a loud, unlubricated clack.
The door opened.
Thonius snorted. Through the open frame, they could see the other side of the platform disc, the uninterrupted ring of the flickering lamps and tapers.
‘I’m really impressed so far,’ Thonius remarked.
+Quiet!+
‘This way,’ the housekeeper instructed, ushering them through the open doorway.
They stepped forward.
The door slammed behind them and locked itself.
Nayl turned to stare at Kys. She was wide-eyed, startled, terrified.
‘Holy living shit,’ Nayl said. ‘Did you see?’
‘I saw,’ said Kys.
They’d watched their comrades and the chosen housekeeper step through the door, watched the door slam.
Now there was nothing at all on the platform except the closed and locked door.
Eleven
‘What was that?’ Plyton asked, getting up suddenly.
‘What was what?’ asked Lucic. He had been playing jacks on his coat spread out across the grille deck of the dock.
‘Like a door,’ Plyton replied, raising her shotgun. ‘Like a door slamming somewhere.’
‘The House is old, and full of noises,’ the scrawny prospector remarked. ‘Get used to it.’
She ignored him, walked the length of the dock to the hatchway and shone her lamp pack up the service tunnel. Nothing stirred. She opened her link.
‘Checking in,’ she called.
‘Nothing to report,’ the pilot servitor crackled back from the docked underboat. She retraced her steps through the spooky shadows of the corroded machinery. The dock lights flickered slightly as the House took another step. Chains rocked and swung.
Lucic was sitting where she’d left him.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked sharply.
‘Playing jacks,’ he replied.
‘You were doing something with your coat!’ she snapped, aiming the shotgun.
‘Yes, Maud. I was playing jacks on my coat!’ He gazed at her with his bulging, thyroid eyes, his skinny face comically honest.
‘All right then,’ she said, lowering her weapon and sitting back down on a rusting coil winder.
‘You’re awful jumpy, Maud,’ Lucic observed.
‘Don’t talk to me.’
I am struck by the distinct impression that Carl is about to say, ‘I told you this was a waste of time.’
‘I told you this–’ he begins. His voice fails him. Like all of us, he is looking around, dumbstruck, astonished.
I cannot believe it either. I reach out, with almost instinctive alarm, and sweep with my mind.
This is no lie. Or, if it is a lie, it is a lie impervious to the scrutiny of even a mind like mine.
We are no longer aboard the Wych House. We are no longer on Utochre or, I’ll wager, in the Cyto system, or even in the Helican subsector. My chair’s internal horolog has just failed, erased, and restarted. A condition of portal transit, perhaps, or an indication we are no longer even in the same year as the one we left.
It is stunning and awful and fundamentally disconcerting. I look at Ballack, open-mouthed, gazing into the distance; at Carl, bending down to touch the hot, dry dust; at Angharad, narrowing her eyes and slowly drawing her Carthaen steel. Only the housekeeper, holding onto its wretched key, seems unperturbed. The hot wind flaps the housekeeper’s dark robes.
‘Everybody all right?’ I ask.
We are standing in a sweltering dust bowl of gritty red dunes, surrounded by an ominous ring of jagged, black volcanic outcrops. A strong desert wind drives the dust up at us, and I hear it pattering off the shell of my chair. The sky is a red haze of sickly light and whorled cloud banks. There is a star, flaring and wounded, blood-red like a gunshot wound to the sky.
I have no idea where we are.
I rotate my chair slowly, pict recording every millimetre of our surroundings on my chair’s internal recorders. I use the chair’s systems to sample the dust, the regolith and the air, and ping out with my internal auspex. This is a dead place. The air temperature is soaring and the rocks around us radiate hellish heat.
This is real. This isn’t a dream, or a vision, or an auto-seance trance. This is real, and I have to get used to that fact fast or lose my sanity.
The door is behind me, standing anachronistically in the middle of nowhere, tall and firm and closed tight. I watch Ballack move around it in a circle. He tries the handle, and finds it locked.
‘Master–’ he says to me. He has seldom called me that. He must be very afraid.
I circle the door myself, my chair’s impellers gusting up eddies of dust. I go right around it. It is as solid and real as the new world around us. Shut tight, one side baking in the alien sun’s glare, the other dark in shadow. The door itself casts a long, oblong shadow across the red dust.
‘Oh, Throne,’ Carl whines.
‘I would like to know where...’ Angharad says, her sword in her hand. ‘I would like to know exactly... I mean... where…?’
+Be calm.+
‘I want to know where we are!’ Angharad snarls, glancing at the housekeeper.
+Calm!+
I send a wave of reassurance into her, and stop her in her tracks before she has the housekeeper by the throat.
‘Is this the place?’ I ask. ‘Is this the place where I find my answer?’
‘Well, I don’t see Molotch anywhere around, so I’m guessing no,’ Carl whines.
‘It won’t be that simple,’ I tell him. ‘Will it, housekeeper?’
‘This is just the first step,’ the housekeeper replies in that oh-so androgynous way they have. ‘The first step. Your question was convoluted. The door will have to open several times, I believe.’
‘Then why are we here?’ Carl demands.
+Calm!+ I send again, to Carl this time.
‘This is a place the House wanted to show you. I don’t know why,’ the housekeeper says. ‘I am not told such things. It is not my function.’
‘What happens now?’ Ballack asks. Of all of them, he has kept his head the best.
‘We wait,’ says our hooded guide.
‘I don’t want to wait,’ Angharad says quickly. ‘I don’t want to stay here. Something’s coming.’
‘I sense nothing,’ I say, checking.
‘I see nothing,’ adds Ballack.
‘Something’s coming,’ Angharad insists, ‘something bad. Evisorex can taste it.’ The long steel is twitching in her hands. It is taking her trained double grip to contain it.
‘Over that ridge,’ she says. I regard the ridge she has indicated, a long, low line of black basalt rising from the dunes like rotted teeth from a gum. I sense nothing, but there seems to be a gathering pall of dust closing in behind the wild outcrop.
‘For Throne’s sake!’ Carl snaps. ‘I want to get out of here! Can we get out of here? Please?’
‘Calm down and–’
Then I feel it. I feel what
they’re all feeling: doom, a creeping, penetrating sense of doom and fear, as intolerable as the pervasive red light. It pulls at my mind, dark, like a shadow in the warp.
‘I don’t like this,’ says Ballack.
‘Housekeeper?’
‘We must wait for the door,’ the housekeeper replies.
‘Damn the door! Damn the frigging door!’ Carl cries. He throws himself at it, banging his hands against the wood and rattling the handle with futile effort. ‘Oh, Throne, master!’
He races around to the other side and tries again. ‘Let us back! Let us through!’
‘Stop it, Carl. Stop it now.’
But Carl Thonius won’t stop it. The fear has gripped him. He hammers and hammers and hammers–
In the theatre chamber, still and quiet, Kys glanced at Nayl. ‘Did you hear that?’ she asked.
They both looked at the door.
‘Nothing. Just the House settling again.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you hear the banging? Like someone thumping on the other side of the door?’
‘No,’ he replied, without confidence. As they watched, the door’s handle rotated to and fro, as if someone, somewhere, was trying to open it.
‘Shit!’ said Nayl, stepping forward. Kys stopped him.
‘There’s nothing we can do except wait,’ she told him.
+Carl!+
Ravenor’s command pulled him back from the door. He was sweating profusely from the overwhelming heat and the fear. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Housekeeper?’ Ravenor asked.
The housekeeper waited a moment or two longer, and then stepped forward and fitted the key back into the lock.
It turned, and the door reopened.
‘This way,’ the housekeeper said.
They hurried through the doorway and let it slam shut behind them. Ravenor heard it lock again.
Their body sweat turned clammy on their backs in an instant. Even more than before, they were overwhelmed by the sensation of being somewhere utterly and completely else. Not just because of the light and temperature conditions, but because of the infinitesimally altered pull of gravity, the imperceptible change of air pressure, the smell, the pheromone of the place.
Ballack drew his weapon. He glanced around. They were inside a stone cloister of Imperial Gothic construction. It was old, and eroded by time and weather. They could all hear the bash of ocean breakers striking an invisible shore nearby. It was dark, night. Stars were out in the clear black sky.
‘Master?’ Thonius whispered.
Ravenor was trying to reset his chair’s internal horolog. Its jumping readings were nonsense.
‘Master!’
Ravenor turned his perception outwards and scanned the location. ‘I know this,’ he said.
‘The door is locked,’ announced Angharad. The door stood behind them in the dim cloister, strange and out of place. ‘It’s locked from either side,’ she added, having tried both.
‘Those stars,’ Ravenor said.
Carl looked up. ‘I... I don’t know them.’
‘But we should,’ said Ravenor. ‘I’m checking them against my data coils, trying to find a match. ‘Wait, wait...’
‘We’re in the Ordo Malleus chapter house on Gudrun,’ said Ballack. He turned to look at them. ‘I wish I could claim some clever insight, sir, but it’s written here on the wall.’
Ballack showed them the ancient, faded plaque.
‘But this is a ruin,’ said Thonius.
They moved out along the cloister and into the crumbling, stunted wreckage of the chapter house that spread out across an overgrown headland. The place had been reduced to this state many years before. Weeds and climbing plants festooned the tumbled stones, twitching fretfully in the night wind off the sea.
‘I was here a year ago!’ Ballack cried. ‘It was intact, I swear, it was intact and–’
‘This isn’t a year ago, or a year hence,’ Ravenor said. ‘I don’t know when we are. I think the door is showing us some important consequence of fate. I believe we are in our own future.’
‘Look–’ said Angharad. Across the bay, where the night sea crashed relentlessly against a broken shore, they could see the desolate, empty silhouette of a great city.
It had been dead for many years.
‘Great Throne of Terra,’ Ravenor murmured. ‘That’s Dorsay.’
He rotated his chair to face the housekeeper. ‘Take us back through the door,’ he said.
‘The door is not ready.’
‘Take us back through the door! Now!’
The door opened and closed behind them again, thanks to the housekeeper’s key.
A summer evening waited on the other side. The long, low rake of a recently harvested field stretched down in the easy light towards a bank of hedges, with trees beyond. A slowly fading sky above was ribboned with white clouds that were just taking on the colours of dusk.
A hundred metres away down the field, a plain wooden chair sat forlorn amongst the hewn, dry strands of the crop.
Birds sang, twittering overhead in the twilight and chasing in the hedgerows. A few early stars had come out on the depth of the sky.
A lone figure was toiling up the field towards the chair.
Ravenor turned his own chair and regarded his companions. They stood in front of the locked door, which rose improbably from the field crest behind them.
‘Stay here,’ Ravenor instructed.
‘But–’ Ballack began.
‘Stay here and do nothing unless I signal.’
He coasted away across the dead stubble and followed the slope of the field down towards the lonely wooden seat. The figure was approaching, walking up into the twilight air with confidence and effort.
Ravenor approached the waiting chair. He stopped short ten metres away. The residue of the harvested crop, the remaining stalks, had been carefully raked and twisted into a circle around the wooden chair. The circle was five metres in diameter, with the wooden seat at its dead centre. Ravenor recognised the complex weaving and design of the circle’s rim.
He hovered outside it, waiting, as the figure approached up the slope.
The figure arrived, stepped into the corn circle, and sat down on the chair. He was breathing hard. The legs of the old wooden chair rested unevenly in the loose soil, and set him at an angle.
‘Well, hello,’ the man on the chair said at last, dabbing at his brow with a handkerchief. He was a portly man in late middle age, dressed in a high-buttoned, green silk suit. His thick dark hair and beard were perfectly groomed. ‘I was wondering when you’d get here. You are Gideon Ravenor, aren’t you? Of course you are. So we meet, finally, face to face.’
He leaned forward. ‘Uh, you do know who I am?’
‘Yes,’ said Ravenor.
‘Excellent!’ replied Orfeo Culzean. ‘So, let’s talk.’
Twelve
Maud Plyton was pacing. Her footsteps rang up and down the docking pool’s deck. Lucic watched her with some amusement.
She looked at her link wistfully, but for the umpteenth time decided she shouldn’t disturb whatever was taking place in the upper chambers of the House.
She was slipping the link back in her coat pocket when she heard a muffled sound.
‘What was that?’ she demanded, turning to look at Lucic.
‘What was what?’ he grinned at her.
‘I heard a noise.’
‘This again? Maud, come on! You’re so jumpy. You’re getting quite paranoid.’
Plyton stepped towards him and brought the heavy combat shotgun up. ‘I heard a noise,’ she hissed, ‘the trill-tone of a link.’
‘You’re imagining it.’
‘Get up and back away,’ she told him. Lucic rose, and took a few steps backwards down the dock. He left his coat spread out on the decking, the loose jack pieces scattered across it.
Keeping her eyes on Lucic, her gun raised in her right hand, she stooped and lifted the coat by the collar
and threw it over on the decking.
‘Hey!’ Lucic cried. The jack pieces tumbled away across the deck, and most fell through the grille into the water below.
Kneeling, Plyton patted down the empty coat with her left hand, feeling into the pockets, her eyes never leaving the prospector.
‘Stuff your “hey”,’ she said. Her left hand emerged from a deep pocket holding a worn, old link device. ‘You lying bastard.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Lucic said. ‘Since when was it against the rules to own a link?’
‘Who were you talking to? Who were you signalling?’
Lucic didn’t reply. His meagre mouth became tight and pinched below his blade of a nose. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Maud.’ He looked down at the deck.
‘Who was it, Lucic?’
He looked up at her again, a broad smile slowly extending across his face.
Without turning, she knew why. She went cold. She felt the muzzle of a weapon press against the back of her head.
‘Like I keep saying,’ said Lucic, stepping forward and taking the shotgun from her, ‘out here, a man needs all the friends he can get.’
Nayl took a strip of dry jerky from his pocket and tore off a chunk with his teeth. He offered the fistful of food to Kys. She shook her head.
‘Waiting makes me hungry,’ he said.
The door had been silent for over an hour. Nayl and Kys idled on the raised walkway, sometimes walking up onto the top platform to take a closer look at the door. The housekeepers had all remained as still as statues.
‘So, you and Angharad?’ Kys asked.
‘It’s a private thing.’
‘A private thing for how long?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Will it matter to Gideon?’
Nayl scowled. ‘I don’t want to hurt him, but it’s none of his business.’
‘You must have known it would matter to him, or you wouldn’t have hidden it.’
‘Shut up, Kys. You don’t know anything.’
‘You know I do.’ She paused suddenly and looked away. ‘Nayl–’
He was already reaching for his sidearm, but it was too late.
The heavy hatches around the theatre chamber’s walls slammed open and figures surged in onto the raised walkway: a dozen grizzled, hard-bodied men in grubby combat armour and fur-trimmed hostile environment suits. They aimed their lascarbines and shotguns with a professional confidence that matched their stony expressions.
