by Dan Abnett
"Oh Throne!" Nayl cried, running to them. The door slammed shut in its frame behind them.
With a sob of pain and exhaustion, Ravenor let Angharad go. She swayed, but she was conscious. Blood dripped from her mouth. Nayl tried to hold her, but she pushed him off. She took two long steps towards Ravenor's dented chair and rested the tip of Evisorex on its front cowling.
"You bastard," she rasped. "Without my permission. Without my permission! You were inside me. You were me."
"I apologise," said Ravenor.
"You have violated my honour and the honour of my clan. You were inside me! I alone choose who gets to be inside me! That was mind-rape! I should gut you for this offence and-"
"I apologise." Ravenor repeated. "I did what I had to do. Ballack and Thonius may be alive, alive right now, because of what I did."
Angharad sank to her knees and let Evisorex slip to the deck. She shook with wracking sobs. Nayl crouched beside her and held her.
"But as a consequence, we are doomed," said Ravenor. "I am so very sorry I have brought you to this end with me. The House is flooding and dying. There is no escape."
"There's got to be," said Nayl, looking up. He suddenly pushed Angharad away and leapt upright with his shotgun raised. A black and white shape, tail high, had just crept onto the upper platform behind Ravenor. It stole forwards, claws scratching off the deck plates. It raised its head, sniffing and yapping, its tongue stabbing out between its teeth.
"Same to you," said Nayl, and killed it with a single shot. Its thrashing body flew backwards off the platform. Nayl looked around at Ravenor. "There's got to be a way out."
"I can't find one." Ravenor replied. "I have been searching. I'm right, aren't I, housekeeper?"
The housekeeper looked up sharply. Its cowled head had been bowed. It was toying with the key in its hands with grazed, bleeding fingers.
"Yes," the housekeeper replied. "We have no boats, no escape pods. When the House dies, we die too."
"That's a load of-" Nayl began.
"Harlon," said Ravenor calmly. "His fatigue was so great, he could barely summon the effort. When the House dies, it will let go of the ice above. It will fall, and when it falls, it will fall into the abyss. What was it Lucic called it? Wholly Water, Harlon. Without a measurable bottom. In a minute or two, the water pressure will crush the House like an egg. Even at my best, I couldn't protect us, certainly not long enough to get us back to the surface. Even then, the ice... and, as you may have noticed, I'm not at my best."
"The Plyton woman was right," said Angharad softly. "This place will kill us more surely than the void itself."
"No," murmured Nayl. "Screw this, no. We don't just give up and wait to die."
"Sometimes, that's a warrior's fate," said Angharad. She picked up her steel and wiped the blade before sheathing it. The blade was stained and bruised with acid.
"Balls to that." Nayl snapped. "That's fancy warrior talk. I'm a paid gun. We think percentages. I don't worship any frigging honour code. Lu was right about that. About me. I worship chances, edges, survival. We have a way out."
"No, Harlon." Ravenor sighed. "We're done."
Nayl glared at Ravenor. "We have a frigging way out!" he insisted. "We still have one way out left to us." He nodded towards the door.
"Absolutely not," said Angharad with a shudder. "You haven't seen what's through there."
"You have."
"That's why I won't go. It's death."
"You survived it, lady."
"Barely."
"We can survive it together."
"It's death, Harlon Nayl," she said flatly.
"So is this," he said. "I'd rather die fighting for a chance than roll over and wait for death to get me."
The Wych House shuddered again, and tilted more steeply. They had to hold on. Nayl looked down. Through the mesh of me platform he could see black water pouring up through the riser shaft to flood the floor space below them. Fires, caught by the swirling water, guttered and went out.
"Last call," he said. "Who's with me."
Angharad raised her head and wiped the blood from her mouth. She drew her sword. "I am, I suppose," she said.
There was a long pause, broken only by the death throe explosions of the House. "So am I," said Ravenor. He turned his chair to face the housekeeper.
"Come with us," he said.
The housekeeper nodded.
"We need your key."
The housekeeper nodded again.
"What's your name?" Ravenor asked.
The housekeeper slowly lowered the hood of its gown. It was a she, a young girl barely into adolescence. Her face was thin, pale, and fringed by cropped, blonde hair. "I am Iosob," she said.
"I am glad to know you, Iosob," Ravenor said. "Open the door for us."
The girl raised her ancient key and fitted it into the lock. It turned, and the door opened. Nayl and Angharad stood beside her, weapons raised and ready.
The door opened. Gunshot red sunlight glowed out. They all recoiled at the alien smell.
"Let's go, if we're going," said Harlon Nayl, racking the slide of his shotgun.
They stepped through the door, and it slammed shut behind them.
A second later, the Wych House died.
They were being shaken around like beads in a drum. Thunderous water had entirely flooded the docking pool, but the upthrust of current was such that the underboat couldn't right itself or dive. Twice, the boat slammed into the dock roof. Water seethed around them, aspirated, shimmering with bubbles. Kys, Plyton and Ballack had all been cut or bruised by impacts sustained from the underboat's violent capture. Thonius, dead, as far as Kys was concerned, had fallen off his bench seat. He rolled, leaden, across the trunk flooring.
Only the pilot servitor, strapped into his chair, was intact.
"Get us out!" Kys yelled at him, holding on tight. "You wanted to get us out, so get us out!"
"I can't!" the servitor wailed back, fighting with the helm controls. "The pressure wave coming in is too great! It's forcing us up into the dock roof!"
The underboat heaved and slammed again. Warning lights lit up. Plyton was thrown the length of the trunk. Ballack, clinging grimly to handholds, blood pouring down his leg, stared at Kys.
"Blow all the ballast," he suggested.
"Would that work?" Kys asked the pilot frantically.
"Do I ask you how to do your job?" the pilot snapped back. "No, it wouldn't work!"
"Ask him why." Ballack yelled.
"Why?" Kys relayed.
"Because I've already blown the ballast," the pilot replied. "What am I, an amateur? I'm hardwired to drive underboats and I'm telling you, miss, that we're-"
An upswell of water hit them and punched them into the dock roof so hard the hull buckled. Klaxons sang out, but they were all too busy falling and rolling. Kys landed on Ballack, who screamed in pain.
"Oh good Throne-" the pilot began. He had seen how fast and violently the needle of the depthmeter was spinning.
"What?" Kys demanded.
"We're dropping!"
With one last, aching shudder, the Wych House lost its grip on the ceiling of ice. It fell away in a huge, expanding cloud of ice particles and streaming, exhaling air. Legs flailing, it sank like a stone into the dark expanse of Wholly Water yawning below.
The darkness embraced it. Its superstructure began to crimp and crush with the pressure. Fluttering, winking trails of silver bubbles streamed up from its vents like contrails.
The falling House rotated, rolled, and inverted.
Upside down, the docking pool flushed out violently. The stricken underboat flew up out of the entry hatch like a cork.
"Steady it, steady it!" Kys yelled, holding tight to the seat back.
"I'm trying!" the pilot servitor cried. His augmented hands pulled at the steering controls. The ventral fans spun, floundering, drowning in the under-rip of the falling House. The pilot hit the cavitation drive.
The underbo
at struggled, dragged down, then turned its nose upwards. They shot up, like a released buoy, hull plates groaning and bending.
"Where's the House?" Plyton asked, struggling into the pilot house. Kys shook her head. Far below, in the blackness, they glimpsed a falling structure that swiftly dropped out of sight into the abyss.
"Auspex?" Kys asked the pilot servitor.
He hit several switches.
The scanner system painted the descending House as a small yellow blip.
"Great Throne." Ballack whispered. He had climbed in beside them, staring at the console.
The blip dropped away into the lower depths. It fizzled once, twice, and then vanished forever.
"Crushed by the pressure," the pilot servitor said. "It's gone."
Kys sat back and began to cry.
No one said anything for a very long time.
FIVE
"Tell me again, slowly," said Kara Swole, "what happened when you went through this door."
"We were in the hellish red place at first," Ballack said. "It just had a feeling to it, a terrible feeling of menace. Then the housekeeper opened the door again, and we went through to a place that was near Dorsay, on Gudrun. But it wasn't now, it was... the future. Many years in the future."
"This portal took you to different places and times?" Kara asked cautiously, like a scholam tutor examining a pupil's elaborate excuse for inconsistencies.
"Yes," said Ballack. "It was a distressing and disorientating experience. The door was in control all the time. It made us wait while it opened, as if it was choosing what to show us next. That is how I understood it to work. You asked it a question, and it took you to places from which some answer or answers might be discerned. What those answers are, I believe, is very much a matter of interpretation."
"And then?"
"And then it took us to another place. A rural field. I don't know the time or the place. A man was waiting there for us. Ravenor went down and spoke with him, then he returned and told us we were going back."
"Who was the man?" asked Kara.
"It was the facilitator, Orfeo Culzean," said Ballack.
"How do you know?" asked Kara.
"Ravenor told us."
"I don't remember him saying anything of the sort," said Carl Thonius.
They looked around at him. Carl was sitting in the window seat of the Berynth's apartment main room, huddled in blankets. His haggard face was especially thin and pale, and discoloured by bruises and dozens of linear scabs. His voice was an unhealthy whisper.
"My dear Carl," said Ballack gently, "you were quite agitated at the time. I doubt you remember much of anything."
Thonius shrugged and looked away, out through the window. Once they'd got clear of the House, and there had been time to attend to him, Kys and Plyton had found Carl to be only superficially hurt, his face and body battered and scratched. His death-like state, from which he had gradually recovered, had been put down to severe shock.
"Culzean," said Kara rising to her feet. "So he and Molotch were three steps ahead of us the whole while. It was all a trap, in other words, down to Worna being on hand to close the House down once you were in."
"It worked well, didn't it?" said Kys bitterly.
Kara took a deep breath. She had come down to the surface the moment Kys had restored contact. She could still not believe the news they had broken to her. Ravenor and Nayl, dead. Angharad too. Dead and gone. Everyone was numb. Grief would follow, later.
She looked around the room: Carl, the most physically hurt of them all, huddled in the window seat; Ballack by the fire, his ugly leg wound bound and strapped, a walking cane to hand; Maud Plyton in the corner, lost in her own thoughts, staring at the floor; Kys, standing by the door, head bowed, suffering the most intensely.
Kara stepped towards her and, not for the first time since their reunion, embraced her. They held onto each other for a moment. The two of them had lost the most. Gideon Ravenor and Harlon Nayl had been their true friends and comrades for a long time. Kara fought the urge to cry. She could feel the heat of sorrow rising. She held it back.
They all seemed to be looking to her now, the heart of the shattered group or, at least, what remained of it. Kys was too wrapped up in anguish and self-loathing to be a leader. More than once, as she had haltingly told Kara of Ravenor's death, she had said, "I should have stayed with him. I left him behind."
Kara let Kys go, and made her sit. She looked back at Ballack. "The rest now. Let me hear it. I want to hear it."
"We went back through the door. It took us to a hive somewhere, as if it was playing with us, refusing Ravenor's request to take us home. Then back to the red hell again. Once it had us there, it refused to open anymore. That was Molotch's trap for us. I believe he may have commanded the door somehow to take us to that place and maroon us there where those things could find us and kill us. I would not put such a feat past Zygmunt Molotch."
"Nor I," said Carl. "Except..."
"Except, Carl?" Kara asked.
"Why so elaborate? I know Molotch has a penchant for the baroque and theatrical, but why all that? Why take us to Culzean? Why arrange a meeting where they conversed for some minutes? Why not just kill us?"
"He wanted something from us," said Kys, looking up. "He wanted something from Ravenor. A deal, I think. Worna could have just killed us, but he was waiting for something. Waiting for... orders to kill us or spare us."
"That's right," said Plyton, speaking for the first time in hours. "Lucic and the gunman holding me had a conversation to that effect. They were waiting for word to come. They were holding us until they knew if we could be friends or not."
"Friends?" Kara echoed.
"I heard them say it," said Plyton. "That very word. The bounty hunter seemed to doubt it. I think he was pretty certain they'd just end up executing us. But from what's been said, I think it depended on Ravenor's answer to whatever this Culzean was offering."
Kys shook her head. "What in the name of Terra could Molotch and Culzean have been proffering that could have made us friends? I mean, what? What were they thinking? Ravenor would never side with Molotch, for any reason."
"Well, he clearly said no," said Thonius.
"But there must have been a chance he'd say yes," said Kara, "or they wouldn't have gone to all that effort."
"Whatever, he said no," Thonius snapped. "Which is why we were sent back into Molotch's trap. That was his insurance, to wipe us out if Ravenor refused him."
"That's when the door wouldn't open?" Kara asked Ballack. The interrogator smoothed back his long white hair and nodded. "And then the creatures came for us. I don't know what they were. I have never even heard of their like. They were-"
"Awful," said Thonius quietly. "Beautiful."
"That's a strange choice of words," said Kys. "I saw them too, remember?"
"So did I," shuddered Plyton. "They weren't beautiful, they-"
"Anything that is so immaculately designed to do what it does is beautiful." Thonius cut in. "They were the most terrifying things I have ever seen, but they were perfect too. Perfect killing machines, so driven and single-minded and pure."
"Pure evil," said Ballack.
"Not even that," said Thonius. "Just pure. Just themselves. Hungry and alien, implacable. Utterly lacking in any emotional or intellectual quality we might recognise except ruthless, relentless hunger. I'd rather have tried to reason with an ork, or a scion of the Archenemy. At least they have needs and urges and ambitions, diction and intellect. At least there could be, however unlikely, a basis for dialogue. But those things... Molotch chose his assassins well."
"So the door was locked," Kara said to Ballack. "These things were upon you. I have to ask... how did you get out?"
Kys rose and walked into the adjacent room to pour herself a drink from the stand. Her nerves were shot but, more particularly, she didn't want any of the others to see how incapable she was of controlling her tears. They streamed down her cheeks. Her body ach
ed, and her hands shook as she selected a clean glass and filled it with amasec.
Gideon, I'm so sorry. I should not have left you.
Through the open door behind her, she heard Ballack's voice.
"We were overrun. It was a nightmare. We were seconds away from being torn to ribbons. Ravenor was waring me and Angharad. It was relentless, just a blur of instinct and frenzy. Then Carl fell to them. I thought he was dead for sure. I thought I was next."
Kys sipped her drink, listening.
Ballack's voice had dropped low, and had become strained with emotion. "There was... there was a sudden flash. Red light, red energy. I remembered thinking it was all red, but everything was already red in that place. This was intense and sudden, like a bomb going off. The energy flared like-"
"Like what?" Kys heard Kara ask.
"Like pain. Like rage. It tasted of rage and fury. I swear, it was a psychic event."
"Ravenor."
"No," Ballack whispered. "I don't think so. It didn't come from him. It was just there, a daemonic spasm from the depths of the immaterium. It lashed out, and burned the creatures off us. It threw them back, melted and twisted and broken. It saved us. It blew the door open, against the door's will."
"Then what?"
"I don't remember. Just scraps, really. I remember staggering back through the door, still under Ravenor's control. I'd found Carl on the ground, surrounded by the slaughtered ruins of a dozen creatures. Ravenor willed me to pick him up, and of course I did."
Kys walked back into the doorway. "It was psychic," she said. Kara looked around at her. "I was in the theatre chamber when the door blew. Ballack is absolutely right. It was a psychic event. I felt it. I smelled it. It was raw and uncontrolled. It was feral. I assumed it was Ravenor's doing. I assumed it was his desperation."
Kara nodded, adding as she did so, "And then?"
"Ravenor was wounded, dreadfully wounded," Kys said. "Ballack was out of it, conquered by pain. Carl was unconscious too. Ravenor told me to get them clear, to get them back to the underboat. He told me he would follow as soon as he had Angharad. And like a fool, I obeyed him. I took them, and I made my escape and I left Gideon there to die."
