Penitent

by Dan Abnett

  ‘I mentioned the pistol for that very reason,’ I said.

  He shrugged. He glanced out of the culvert again, but there was no sign of the wild-man anatomists.

  ‘Why’d you come seeking for me?’ he asked.

  ‘I have been looking for you for some time,’ I replied. ‘Today, at last, I got a lead. Some intelligence that said you were here, so I came, and when I found you had partaken in this foolish blood sport, I followed you into the ossuary.’

  ‘Well, that was damn foolish in itself.’

  ‘I concur.’

  ‘What…’ he began.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, now you’ve done and found me, mamzel. And at some effort. What’ve you found me for, exactly?’

  Now I felt stupid.

  ‘I felt that I needed to… To thank you.’

  ‘Thank me?’

  ‘For your service to me.’

  ‘Did I do great deeds?’ he asked.

  ‘You were courageous when you had no cause to be, so yes.’

  He pursed his lips, and nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, mamzel, now you’ve thanked me. And I thank you for your thanks. What else?’

  ‘Well, that was all, really,’ I said.

  He laughed quietly. ‘That were a lot of risk and effort for two words,’ he remarked. ‘I think there’s more.’

  ‘More, sir?’

  ‘Were we lovers?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, only lovers make such rash gestures.’

  ‘We were friends, Renner,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said.

  I told him what it was. I told him Beta.

  We waited a while, until we were confident the anatomists were not nearby, then we set off again, following a route away from the hall of crucifixion. My head ached badly. I had a contusion on the back of my scalp the size of a bird’s egg, and blood matted my hair.

  Lightburn traced our route by way of the bone markers. Their placement had not been my imagination.

  ‘Why do you play this game?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m good at it,’ he said. ‘I make coin by it. The winner’s take is decent. It beats sittin’ with a bowl. The first time, that were easy enough. Yes, the dark is daunting, but where the other chancers rushed headlong, I tracked a way and left markers what I could retrace if I had to. The second time, easier. I followed me own marks. Third time, easier yet. There are hazards, true, like sink’oles, and the others in the game can cut rough, and seek to eliminate the competition.’

  ‘And this time?’

  ‘I brought a gun to keep safe. They gives you weapons, but they lets you take your own if you have ’em. And I’m glad I did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This time it’s changed,’ he said. ‘The bone-keepers’ve come up. I think it’s the storm. I think the rain has flooded out their levels.’

  ‘That’s what Eyling said,’ I remarked.

  ‘Eyling?’

  ‘Number nine.’

  ‘Ah,’ he nodded. ‘Well, they warned us the bone-keepers could make trouble, but this run is the first time I’ve seen ’em.’

  ‘They are murderous,’ I said.

  ‘They are,’ he agreed.

  ‘Eyling reckoned they had been driven up here by something in the very depths.’

  ‘The rain.’

  ‘No, something. He was not specific.’

  ‘The dark plays tricks,’ Lightburn said. ‘After just a few minutes, the mind starts to spin. It were Eyling’s first run.’

  ‘And his last.’

  ‘Indeed. He ’ad rattled his wits, that’s all.’

  We walked on. Some spaces were lit by the luminescent growth, but other passages were entirely lightless, and we were obliged to feel our way along cold, wet stone.

  ‘That thing,’ I said.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘The winged man, on the cross–’

  ‘That?’ Lightburn sniffed. ‘Them bone-keepers build things. You musta seen. Awful things, made out of the helpless dead. They are peculiar-mad, I think.’

  I did not tell him what I thought. I had only just won from him some limited trust. I chose not to tell him that I thought the winged man was real.

  ‘Have you heard the sea?’ I asked instead.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. It’s just another trick o’ the dark. Some sound of air, or water perhaps. Echoing and magnified. Yes, I’ve heard it. It ain’t the sea, but I confess it do sound like it.’

  ‘Is it not the sea?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re a long ways away from the coast, Beta Bequin,’ he replied, ‘and there ain’t no sea under Queen Mab.’

  I asked him how far we had to go. He told me some little way more. Our sojourn in the dark had been longer than either of his previous experiences.

  ‘Limehall is to the north, and our way is marked,’ he said. ‘I wonder if I’ll be the first back. There’s a decent purse in it if I am.’

  ‘But you may have lost the lead.’

  ‘I may have.’

  ‘Because you stopped to help me.’

  ‘I heard the commotion. You was in trouble.’

  ‘But you didn’t know who I was.’

  He looked at me.

  ‘You was in trouble,’ he repeated. ‘My burden asks me to help others, and shoulder their burdens as my own. And my burden is more important to me than a bag o’ coins.’

  ‘Still…’ I said.

  ‘I does what I does as a penitent soul in the gaze of the God-Emperor,’ he said. ‘And see how He rewards me? He sends me a friend what I didn’t know I had, one who’ll wilfully brave the dark to say a thank you. And one who, despite her modest and meek looks, like your rubricator or your steward’s secretary, can take down two bone-keepers hand-to-hand, and carries a gun of fine crafting.’

  He smiled.

  ‘I’m interested to know who me new old friend is,’ he said, ‘and what profession she follows.’

  ‘I will tell you,’ I said, ‘but not now.’

  I took his sleeve, and pulled him into the shadows of a stone pier. Water dripped on our heads and ran down our collars. I winced as the cold touched my head wound.

  ‘What?’ he whispered.

  I pointed. Ahead, along the cold and ruined gallery, anatomists were visible, a great many of them, entirely blocking our pathway to the surface.

  We agreed there were too many to rush and take on. Gangs of them were gathering, whooping and calling. The posted way out was closed, and I believed it would not be long before they would start to move back in our direction. I wondered if I might disperse them with my null, but I feared their communal fervour might insulate them against the effect, and that Lightburn, even forewarned, might choose to quit my company.

  Lightburn, for all his plain courage, was askance at the bone-keepers’ massing. I told him we had no choice except to find a way around. This he shook off.

  ‘There ain’t no way,’ he stated. ‘No way marked, or that I know. We could get most truly lost.’

  ‘It’s that or go back the way we came,’ I said. Retracing our steps might take hours, and would not be without considerable danger.

  He followed me then with great reluctance and misgiving. I found a side passage through the narrowest of stone slots, which obliged us to turn sideways and shuffle in order to squeeze through. The tight space pressed upon us, and forced us to draw shallow breaths, which further ratcheted our claustrophobic anxieties. The slot seemed endless. As we edged along, I feared it would continue to narrow until we were quite stuck. I tried not to dwell upon this possibility.

  The slender defile brought us at last to a low gallery built of old and heavy
stone. A torrent of brackish water flowed along its floor trench, and everywhere grew profuse and horrid fungi, with meaty bulbs and vase bodies, fat stalks, and heavy caps like leather. The air stank, but the open gallery was such a welcome relief from our prolonged compression, we were glad of it. Lightburn flexed his shoulders and stretched.

  ‘Where now?’ he asked.

  I pointed. I was sure the narrow slot had not curved, so the gallery we had reached ran parallel to our original route. We splashed along the lightless brook, for the fungal growth choked the narrow stepways on either side, and neither of us wished to touch the ugly colony. Some caps and stalks were so huge, they resembled the nursing stool the old veteran had sat on.

  ‘I think they might eat ’em,’ Lightburn remarked.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘The bone-keepers,’ he said. ‘They must eat something.’

  It was a disgusting thought, for the meaty caps and pitchers looked foul, and exuded a carrion reek, but I believed he was right. Further, it might well explain the derangement of the anatomist enclave. Any doctor or physik will warn against the ingestion of mycological substances, for the flesh of mushrooms conceals all variety of lethal toxins, and many psychotropic properties besides. The anatomists, deprived of other vittles, may have learned – through grim trial and error, I presumed – which forms were deadly, and which were edible. Those they fed upon would conjure visions, convulsions and phantasms, a practice they may have come to ritualise, as I had read some other cultures do. The anatomists lived in a constant hallucinogenic state, which would account for their awful creations. I wondered what they saw us as. Nightbred monsters, perhaps, which would prompt their homicidal attacks.

  The gallery led on without end, like an underground canal. There was some light, from odd luminous growths, and from the flowing water, which flashed like silver around our ankles, phosphorescent. The fungal colonies leaked matter and spores into the flow, I had no doubt, causing this effect. Lightburn and I were soaked from the knees down. I worried that the madnesses of the cave-growth might be absorbed through the skin.

  ‘This runs too long,’ Lightburn complained, after some minutes. ‘This gallery, it’s passed way beyond the turn north for Limehall.’

  I judged his estimation accurate, but there was no turn or exit we could take. Then I felt a cold breeze upon my face.

  After another forty paces, the gallery opened into a dark and open space. The ground fell away, and the flowing brook poured down jagged black slabs into the darkness below. I could see the water flash and glow as it cascaded, like a string of cold fire. Of the space itself, there was nothing but darkness, but we could sense by the airiness and cold that it was vast.

  ‘Where now?’ Lightburn asked as we paused upon the brink.

  I could see little. Lightburn reached into his pocket, drew out a small glow-globe, and lit it.

  ‘You have a light?’ I asked reprovingly.

  ‘Only a fool comes Below without a light,’ he answered.

  ‘Then why have you not produced it before?’

  ‘Because its charge is low, and I won’t have it run dry,’ he replied. ‘Gloom is one thing. I saves the globe for true dark.’

  He held the glow-globe up. Its light was indeed paltry.

  ‘This is true dark,’ he said.

  We still could not make adequate sense of the scale, for the globe’s sepia aura lit but a modest cone around us. But it was enough to see that, to our left hand, rude steps were cut into the rock beside the gallery’s mouth. They led downwards.

  I went first, with him close behind, holding the globe above us so we both might see. The steps were narrow – two persons could not pass on them, even chest to chest – and either old or poor-hewn. They were chiselled from the cavern wall, so that to our left was sheer wet rock and to our right an open drop into nothing. There was no railing, or hand-hold.

  We descended slowly, and with great trepidation. The footing was worn and slick. We hunched our left shoulders to the rock face, pawing with our left hands for some semblance of support, and took the narrow way one step at a time, left foot down, right foot to it, left down, right to it, painstaking and measured, tilting our weight and balance to our left sides, left legs, and the wall. It was another grim effort of concentration and anxiety, like the narrow slot we had braved. Here, the slot’s crushing claustrophobia was replaced by a sick fear of falling, of slipping and plunging into a measureless abyss.

  At first, I counted the steps under my breath, but gave up after seventy for it took all my will to concentrate.

  ‘There,’ whispered Lightburn at my ear, a flutter of fear in his tone, ‘look there.’

  Below us, the steps came to an end on a black platform, a floor of sorts. We reached it, and stood for a moment, letting our heart rates calm.

  Lightburn raised his little lamp.

  ‘Where do you–’ he began and then stopped. His words had echoed at once, an odd repeat that seemed cold and mocking.

  ‘Just echoes,’ I said, echoing myself.

  ‘Some space,’ he said, and the walls repeated. ‘It feels large.’

  He was right. There was only blackness, and it was curious how some blacknesses, identical to the eye, could feel impossibly large or oppressively tight.

  We ventured ahead, across jumbled stone blocks. I felt the breeze again, cold, and from our right.

  ‘Turn off the lamp,’ I said, and so did the echoes.

  He did so, puzzled.

  The darkness was complete, so utter, that I could not see my own raised hand. But, as we waited, I began to feel the breath of the breeze more strongly, and sensed its origin more clearly.

  We waited a minute longer.

  ‘You see?’ I asked.

  You see? said the space.

  ‘I see nothing,’ he replied.

  …nothing.

  I groped for him, and found his face, and turned it. Our eyes were adjusting to the engulfing darkness. There was a faint blue light far away, barely traceable. Light, in fact, was too strong a word. It was a pale blue smudge, like a scrap of moonbeam. The breeze was coming from the same direction.

  ‘Praise be your good eyes,’ said Lightburn.

  …your good eyes.

  ‘You just have to use the darkness sometimes,’ I replied.

  …use the darkness sometimes, use the darkness sometimes.

  He turned the globe back on, and it seemed dazzling to our dark-accustomed sight. Though we could no longer see the fuzz of moonlight, we were sure of its position. We set off across the giant blocks, helping each other step up and across from one uneven slope to the next.

  ‘The roots of the city,’ he said.

  …roots of the city.

  ‘Or of older cities that came before,’ I replied.

  …cities that came before, the darkness teased.

  Queen Mab was as old as anywhere, and it had risen across the ages, layer upon layer, building its foundations on the strata of the past. These blocks were of immense age, and they had been fashioned by masons long before they slumped. What walls had they been? The bulwarks of what towers? What name had they owned? What lords and rulers had they known? This was not, I felt certain, the other city, the City of Dust. That was extimate, a simultaneous reality. This was the deep past, the buried relic of the eras that had preceded mine.

  The moonlight shone to us, a pale gap. When we came to it at last, tired and short of breath, it revealed itself as a great archway, a stone gate of cyclopean columns. Cold air issued from its mouth. I could hear a distant rushing, a rolling crash, like the beating of giant wings, or–

  Or the sea. The rolling of an ocean.

  I stepped towards the immense arch. Beyond its frame lay an endless void. I sensed a tide below me, a great weight of water lapping at invisible rocks. I smelled salt-air, and could just make
out a line of horizon, very far away. The source of the light we had followed was not apparent, but it seemed to swell, ethereal, from whatever clouded sky hung above the unseen sea.

  It was a way out, or a way to elsewhere at least. It was no sea, for that would have been an impossibility. An underground lagoon, perhaps, or the vast cistern of some previous metropolis. I wondered how Lightburn and I might pass across it, for we had no boat. I wondered, too, why I shrank from it. I had longed for a way out of the underworld, but this did not seem to be it. Beyond the ancient arch was not ‘out’, it was deeper still.

  I heard a cry, from out in the gloom, like the wail of a seabird turning in the air above the invisible waters. It was the most lonely sound I had ever heard. Whatever lay beyond the arch, it was a voyage I had no wish to undertake. It felt, though I could not fully articulate the reason, that only terror lay beyond that threshold.

  But we had come too far to be thwarted. I looked around. More fashioned blocks lay around the mouth of the arch, great slabs of ouslite. One, chipped and haggard, taller than me, seemed set as a marker. Inscriptions had been carved into it, and these then deliberately defaced, leaving only a few letters behind. I peered at it in the cold gloom.

  Whatever had been inscribed originally was gone. What remained, worn by ages yet still discernibly in the fine style of classical Enmabic, read:

  KIN G DO OR

  Was that the name of the arch? The name of the monarch who had raised it? It was not any name I knew from Sancour’s history, but seemed more a nursery name, from fairy tale. But then, so is ‘Queen Mab’.

  Besides, ‘King Door’ was not what had been writ here originally. An afterwards hand had struck away the original text, and left these few letters as a riddle, or a joke. And the handiwork of those who habituated this underworld place was manifestly mad, and without reason or logic.

  The cry came again, but this was Lightburn.

  ‘Here, Beta Bequin!’ he called. He was nearby, to the left of the massive archway. Like me, it seemed, he had felt no wish to step through the portal called the King Door.

  By the light of his upraised globe, I saw what he had found. It was a staircase, leading upwards. And it was no narrow or rough flight like the one that we had descended with our hearts in our mouths. It was a grand thing of great majesty, ten metres wide, with fine, wide marble steps. Dirt and dust cluttered it, but its noble scale had not faded. The walls were proud masonic masterpieces of columns and ornate acanthus, that still showed the residue of the gold leaf that had once adorned it. This was a passageway of state, a ceremonial staircase by which some great monarchs might descend in all pomp, flanked by lifeward guards and chancellors, from their palace to their royal docks, or by which high ambassadors of foreign lands might be admitted, with fanfare and solemn drum, to a regal court.