Against A Dark Background (5 page)

Shortly after the Lip City explosion the World Court had legislated to forbid anybody else taking possession of the last remaining Gun, though of course every Antiquities specialist and team in the system knew damn well that the Huhsz-despite being prevented from saying so officially - would attempt to top any reward the World Court might offer for the fabled weapon.

She scrolled through the irreversible mutilations the World Court threatened to inflict on anybody obstructing the lawful sequestration of the last Gun, then clicked out of Antiquities Contracts to try another way of tracking down Cenuij Mu in Lip City, once more without success.

Tansil Bassidge rose early and made breakfast; the two women ate together in front of the kitchen screen, watching the all-hours news service, then Tansil took her to the airport for the dawn stratocruiser.

She napped during the flight, landing at Udeste City Intercontinental a couple of hours later, still just ahead of the dawn.

The region of Udeste lay just inside Golter’s southern temperate zone, jutting east into Phirar and west into Farvel, Golter’s largest ocean; bounded to the north by the Seproh plateau, its southern boundary was the narrow strip of the Security Franchise, which guarded the forests and fjords of the Embargoed Areas and - beyond - the mountains, tundra and cold desert of the historically rebellious province of Lantskaar, which stretched all the way down to the pack ice.

The Sea House lay at the very end of the final promontory of the Farvel Bight, a gulf which stretched in an almost unbroken curve nearly two thousand kilometres from the Areas to the House.

She hired a car and took the autotoll past and around the city-states, bishoprics, Corpslands, enclaves and family estates of Inner Udeste, then joined an interroute through the villages and farmlands of Outer Udeste’s western marches, across the moors towards the coast. The weather deteriorated continually throughout the journey, increasing cloud compensating for the rising sun so that she seemed to drive forever in a grey-brown half-light. Rain came and went in squalls. At the House limits the great chain-mesh fence’s one entrance straddled the small road in a clutter of ramshackle guard buildings on one side and a motley profusion of old, sad-looking tents on the other. A thunderstorm played over the broken hills to the north, and low cloud blanketed the sandy bluffs rising beyond the gate.

There was a short queue at the gate; the usual hopeful petitioners. She drove to the head of the column, sounding the car’s klaxon to shift the gaunt, hollow-eyed men and women out of the way. A scowling contract guard in a dripping camouflage cape walked up and pointed a carbine at her.

‘Okay; what’s your name?’ he said, sounding disgusted. He looked up and down the length of the rain-gleaming turbiner.

`Sharrow,’ she told him.

`Full name,’ he sneered.

`Sharrow,’ she repeated, smiling. ‘I believe I’m expected.’

The guard looked uncertain. He took a step back.

‘Wait here,’ he said, then added, ‘Ma’am.’ He disappeared into the guard cabin.

Moments later a captain appeared, fastening his tunic and settling a cap on his head; the guard she’d talked to held an umbrella over the captain, who wrung his hands as he bent to look in through the window at her. ‘My lady; we see so few nobles here . . . I’m so sorry . . . single names take us by surprise

1. 1. all the riff-raff we have to deal with . . . Ah, might one ask for identification? Ah, of course; a Noble House Passport . . . thank you, thank you. Excellent; thank you, thank you. An honour, if I may say so . . .
      

‘Well, don’t just stand there, trooper. The gate!’

Traversing the bluff and dropping back beneath the clouds to the downlands with their ruined and empty towns, and then to the canal-sectioned levels before the gravel beach and the great bay, took another half hour. The weather improved unaccountably when she reached the end of the road, where the creamy ribbon broadened out to become a spatulate apron whose seaward edge had disintegrated into rotten chunks of corroded concrete scattered like thick leaves across the sandy soil. Beyond lay Gravel Bay, a rough semi-circle bisected by the shallow curve of the great stone causeway and half-filled by the vast bulk of the Sea House. The bay’s upper slopes were brown and cream on grey, where decaying seaweed and a scum of wind-blown surf-froth lay tattered and strewn like rags across the grey gravel.

She got out of the car, carrying her satchel; a cold wind tugged at her hair and made her culottes flap. She buttoned the old riding-jacket and pulled on her long gloves.

At the end of the causeway stood two tall granite obelisks stationed on either side of the House’s artificial isthmus; stretched between them was an enormous rusted iron chain which would have blocked further automotive progress anyway, even if the concrete apron had connected with the ancient, time-polished flagstones of the causeway. A cold gust of wind brought the stench of rotting seaweed and raw sewage to her, almost making her gag.

She looked up. A little catchfire lightning played about the highest towers, turrets and aerials of the Sea House. The cloudbase, dark-grey and solid looking, hung immediately above. She had been here only twice before, and on neither occasion had the rain and mist permitted her to see more than the first fifty metres or so of the Sea House’s towering bulk. Today, all three hundred metres of it was visible, soaring dimly up towards the overcast.

She pushed a nosegay-scarf up over her mouth and nose, hoisted her satchel onto her shoulder, picked her way through the stumps of decaying concrete, stepped over the great iron chain, and - limping slightly, but walking quickly nevertheless - started down the rutted, cambered surface of the causeway.

At least, she told herself, the rain had stopped.

The Sea House was probably as old as civilisation on Golter; somewhere near its long-buried core it was claimed to rest on the remains of an ancient castle or temple predating even the zero-year of the First War. Over the millennia the building had grown, accreting about itself new walls, courtyards turrets, parapets, halls, towers, hangars, barracks, docks and chimneys.

The history of the planet, even of the system, was written on its tiered burden of ancient stones; here the age had demanded defence, leaving battlements and ramparts; here the emphasis was on the glory of gods, producing helical inscript columns, mutilated idols and a hundred other religious symbols fashioned in stone and wrought from metal, most of them meaningless for centuries; here the House’s occupants had thought fit to honour political benefactors, resulting in statues, relief columns and triumphal arches over walled-off roadways; elsewhere trade had been the order of the day, depositing cranes and jetties, graving docks, landing pads and launch gantries like flotsam round the outskirts of the House’s layered walls; on occasion information and communication had ruled, leaving a litter of rusting aerials, broken dishes and punctured shell domes crusting the scattered summits of the vast structure.

The current incumbents of the Sea House - who claimed despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary that they had inhabited it from the beginning, but who had certainly ruled there for the last five hundred years or so-were the Sad Brothers of the Kept Weight, one of Golter’s multitudinous ancient and arcane religious orders. They were exclusively male and claimed to believe in abstinence, continence and acquiescence to the will of God.

By Golter standards they were cooperative and outgoing, to the extent of permitting secular scholars to study in the many libraries, archives and depositories the House had accrued over the millennia. A veneer of ecumenicalism allowed visits by monks from other orders, and numerous prisoners from all over the system convicted under a variety of religious laws were held m the House. Other visitors were discouraged.

Sharrow was accepted at the House because six years earlier her half-sister Breyguhn had smuggled herself into the structure in an attempt to find and steal the Universal Principles, one of the system’s many fabled lost Unique books. Breyguhn had failed in her quest; she had been caught and imprisoned in the Sea House, and it was because she was her closest relation that Sharrow was allowed in to visit her.

With what was-arguably-a rare exhibition of an underlying sense of irony, the Sad Brothers had made the recovery of the Universal Principles the condition for Breyguhn’s release. Whether this implied they did not possess the book but wished to, or that they already did and so knew the task was impossible, was a matter for conjecture.

At the far end of the causeway the stone-flagged road inclined upwards to a huge, crumbling central gatehouse which was the only landward aperture in the House’s blank curtain wall of seaweedhemmed granite. The gateway’s deeply machicolated summit hung like a set of gigantic discoloured teeth over a throat blocked by a rusting, ten-metre-square door of solid iron. The massive door - and the whole gatehouse - leaned out over the causeway’s end in a manner which indicated either serious subsidence, or a desire to intimidate.

Sharrow picked a rock up from the fractured surface of the wheelgrooved causeway and slammed it several times as hard as she could against the ungiving iron of the door. The noise was flat and dull. Rock dust and rust flakes drifted away on the breeze. She dropped the stone, her arm sore from the series of impacts.

After a minute or so she heard metallic sliding, scraping noises coming from the door. Then they faded. After another minute she hissed through her teeth in exasperation, picked up the stone again and slammed it against the door a few more times. She rubbed her arm and looked up into the dark arches of the stonework, searching for faces, cameras or windows. After a while, the clanking noises returned.

Suddenly a grille opened in the door at chest height; more flakes of rust fell away. She bent down.

‘Yes?’ said a high, scratchy voice.

‘Let me in,’ she said to the darkness behind the iron-framed hole.

‘Ho! “Let me in,” is it? What’s your name, woman?’

She pushed her scarf down from her mouth. ‘Sharrow.’

‘Full na-’

‘That is my full name, I’m a fucking aristo. Now let me in, creep.’

`What?’ the voice screeched. She stood back, putting her hands in her pockets while the grille slammed shut and a grinding, creaking noise seemed to shake the whole door. Finally the outline of a much smaller entrance appeared under the flakes of rust, and with a crunch a door swung open, large enough for a human to enter bowed. A small man in a filthy cowled cassock glared out at her. She held her passport in her right hand and shook it in front of his grey, unhealthy-looking face before he could say anything. He stared at the document.

‘Cut the crap,’ she said. ‘I went through it all last time. I want to speak to Seigneur Jalistre.’

‘Do you now? Well, you’ll just have to wait. He-’the small monk began, swinging the door shut with one manacled hand.

She stepped forward, planting a boot in the doorway.

The brother looked down, eyes wide.

‘Get . . . your . . . filthy . . . female foot out of my d-’ he said, raising his gaze to find that he was looking down the barrel of a large hand gun. She pressed his nose with it. His eyes crossed, focusing on the stubby silencer.

He swung the door open slowly, his chain rattling. ‘Come in,’ he croaked.

The silencer muzzle left a little white circle imprinted on the grey flesh at the tip of his nose.

‘But, sire! She threatened me!’

‘I’m sure. However, little brother, you are uninjured; a state subject to amendment, should you ever speak back to me like that again. You will take the Lady Sharrow’s weapon, issue a receipt, then escort our guest to the Chain Gallery and equip her with a visitor’s chain. At once.’ The holo image of Seigneur Jalistre’s head, bright in the dim and musty gatekeeper’s cell, turned to her. The Seigneur’s broad, oiled face smiled thinly.

‘Lady Sharrow, your sister will receive you in the Hall Dolorous. She has been expecting you.’

‘Half-sister. Thanks,’ Sharrow said. The holo faded.

She turned and handed her gun to the furiously scowling gatekeeper. He took it, dropped it in a drawer, scribbled quickly on a slip of plastic, threw it at her and whirled away. ‘This way, woman,’ he snarled. ‘We’ll find you a nice heavy chain, I think. Oh yes.’ He scuttled off, muttering; his own chain rattled along the wall-tracks to the doorway as she followed.

The monk snapped the manacle over her right wrist and rattled the heavy iron chain vigorously, snapping it taut against the wall a few times, jerking her arm.

‘There,’ he sneered. ‘That should keep you on the right track, eh, my lady?’

She looked calmly at the heavy blue-black manacle and ran her fingers lightly over the rough links of her chain. ‘You know,’ she said, dropping her voice and smiling at him, ’some people pay good money for this sort of treatment.’ She arched an eyebrow.

His eyes went wide; he clutched at each side of his cowl, pulling it down over his eyes, then with one skinny, shaking hand pointed to the far end of the long, dimly lit gallery. ‘Out! Get out of my sight! To the Hall Dolorous and much good may it do you!’

The Sea House was a prison without doors. It was a prison within and around all its other functions.

Everyone in the Sea House, from its most senior Abbots and Seigneurs to its most constrained and punished prisoners, was manacled and chained. Each chain ended in a miniature bogey; a set of four linked wheels which ran along flanged rails set into the stones of every corridor, room and external space. These tracks, usually sunk into walls, often embedded in floors, sometimes crossing ceilings, and occasionally supported on little gantries like banisters and rails -traversing large open spaces, constituted the skeleton of the chain system.

The deepest track was narrower than a finger; it connected the senior Brothers to the House by means of intricately jewelled movements and fine chains spun from a choice of precious metals, the exact element used indicating further subdivisions of rank.

The outermost track was used for visitors as well as lay and