by Dan Abnett
She looked down at the drink in her hand and set it down. "Excuse me," she said, and walked towards to the apartment's exit.
"Patience," Kara called after her.
"Not now, Kara," Kys replied, and slammed the hatch behind her.
There was a long silence. The fire guttered in the grate.
"Kys will move past this in time," Ballack said. "She will accommodate this, and-"
"Shut up, you ninker," Kara snapped. "You don't know the first thing about what we-"
"Kara," said Carl quietly.
Kara breathed in and out hard. "Forgive me, Ballack. This is a difficult time for us, and I shouldn't have said that to you. I know you were only trying to help."
"It's all right," said Ballack. "I'm aware I am an outsider here, new to this company. I should remember that."
"What happens now?" asked Plyton. "I mean, apart from the fact that it's over and everything?"
"There may be some traces left here on Utochre of Molotch or Worna," said Ballack. "Some leads, some signs of their handiwork. They went to a lot of trouble setting this up."
"And if we find them?" Kara asked.
"Molotch is still out there," said Ballack. "Our mission is still not completed. If we can find a single lead, I say we use it. In Ravenor's name, we use it. We track Molotch to ground and make him pay for what he has done."
"Closure?" asked Kara.
"Closure," Ballack agreed. "It's all we have left. And it's what Ravenor would have wanted."
Kara nodded. Plyton shrugged, tears in her eyes, then nodded too.
"It's not at all what he'd have wanted," said Thonius, rising to his feet and dropping his blankets.
"What?"
"Come on," said Thonius, looking at Kara. "This is stupid. This is becoming mindless. We've torn ourselves apart hunting for this heretic, and still he eludes us. Maybe it's time we recognised that he's always going to beat us."
"No."
"Well, Kara Swole, I say yes," said Thonius. "And, funnily enough, I think I'm in charge here now. I am Ravenor's interrogator. That gives me acting command in his... his absence. There is only one course of action left open to us now."
"And what might that be?" asked Kara.
Thonius shrugged. "We should go directly to Thracian Primaris and present ourselves to the High Conclave of the Ordos Helican. We should make full account of our misadventure, in all detail, and throw ourselves upon the mercy of Lord Rorken."
"No," said Kara.
"Again, yes, Kara," Thonius said, clearly and precisely. "We broke all the rules, and we still failed. I doubt very much I've got a career left, but I know what's right. Ravenor should have done this months ago. It behooves us to make amends and start repairing the damage we have done. Even if it means we offer ourselves up to the most stringent discipline of the Inquisition."
He limped across the room, picked up Kys' abandoned drink, and knocked it back. "Let's pack up and make our way as penitents. Let's try to make good the wrong we have wrought. It's too late to even think otherwise."
Gideon, I'm so sorry. I should not have left you.
Two floors down from the apartment, Kys sat alone in the dim stairwell of the ancient building and wept. Two floors down was as far as she'd got after storming out. She'd been intending to find a saloon or a bar, to purchase a drink, and maybe get into a pointless argument or a fight. But her legs had failed, and she'd sat down on the worn wooden steps.
Ravenor was gone. Ravenor was dead. Harlon was dead. Nothing would ever be the same again. Ever.
She heard footsteps coming up the stairwell below her. A resident of the block, perhaps. She ignored the approach, hoping whoever it was would step by her and leave her be, perhaps mistaking her for some stack wretch who'd come into the building to attempt begging.
The footsteps came closer. Someone sat down on the stairs beside her.
"I... I am abjectly aloof for any words to make fulsome expression," said Sholto Unwerth.
Kys laughed despite herself. "Where did you come from?"
"I was, foremost, checking of the lander, so that with all convenientness, it might be ready to take us aloft."
"Is it ready?"
"It is, Patience."
He reached into his pocket and offered her a handkerchief. "Avoid that part," he said, indicating, "for I may have subsequently blown on it. The rest is quite fresh."
"Don't look at me," she said, her eyes streaming. "I have snot coming out of my nose."
"It is quite dark," he said, looking around. "I can define little of your mucus, so modestly is assured."
She laughed again.
"Is it true?" he asked.
She nodded and blew her nose.
"Well, I am five saken," he said.
"Five?"
"It is one more than four saken," he replied. "It is a level of grief behind which there is no furthestmost."
"Except six?"
"Pray no one ever experiences six saken," Unwerth said. She could see he had small tears in his eyes.
"I am pre-empt," he said quietly. "I am stricken. I am beside yourself."
"I'm glad of that," she said.
"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 you run any faster?"
"There is a bigness to these stairs that I am not as copius 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.<
br />
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 times 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 r
ather 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 wherever 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.
