by Dan Abnett
The open space of the platform was empty apart from a single object: a half-open door, held upright in the centre of the platform by its frame. The door was old and made of wood, a very ordinary old door in a very ordinary frame.
They all stared at it for a moment. Above them, the House altered its foothold once again, and the motion caused the old door to swing back and forth in its frame slightly, as if blown by a breeze. It thumped to, and then swung open a hand's breadth ajar. "I give in, what is it?" asked Nayl.
"A door," replied Angharad, who, Ravenor had found, could always be relied upon for a prosaic answer.
"A door." Carl echoed.
"Could it be what I think it is?"
"It rather depends on what you think it is, Carl," Ravenor replied.
The housekeepers moved past them in procession, carrying lamps up the steps onto the door platform and arranging them around the edges of the disc. Ravenor lifted up onto the platform too and approached the door. The others slowly followed him.
"A propylaeum tripartite?" Thonius ventured, speaking in hushed tones. "A... tri-portal?"
"That was my thought," Ravenor said. "Again, your deduction is excellent. As is your knowledge of abstruse lore and esoterica. Where have you come across the concept?"
Carl shrugged. "I remember finding references to the idea in study, years ago. I can't... I can't remember the reference."
"Sarnique's Codex Atrox," Ballack said quietly, "and also The Ochre Book." He looked around at Ravenor and Thonius. "Access to such works is restricted but, like Carl, I have made use of my interrogator status for the purpose of study. Three years ago, working with Inquisitor Fenx on Mirepoix, we were called to investigate a cult, which, it was claimed, operated a functional propylaeum tripartite. It proved to be a hoax, but I did my research. This design matches the woodcuts in Sarnique's work."
"Sarnique," Thonius nodded, "that's the fellow."
"Are we supposed to believe this is a genuine tri-portal?" Ballack asked, walking around to the far side of the door frame so they could see him through the half-open door.
"Anyone fancy, I dunno," Nayl murmured, "telling me what you're talking about?"
"Carl? Ballack?" Ravenor asked.
Thonius took a step forward until he was on the opposite side of the door to Ballack. He approached it gingerly. The door thumped slightly and loosely in its frame, as if caught by a persistent breeze.
"A propylaeum tripartite," Carl said.
"You keep saying that," Nayl chided.
"A three-way door." Carl Thonius corrected with a disdainful look at the heavy bounty-man. "A mythical device of augury and divination. Its manner of function has never been explained, not even in psionic terms, though it may simply be a totem for psychic focus. An elaborate fetish."
"How does it work?" asked Kys. "I mean... in what way does it work?"
"It has one side here," said Thonius.
"And a second here," said Ballack, from the other side of the door. "But if one passes through the door..." Ballack hesitated. Neither he nor Thonius showed any willingness to perform that act. "Well, Kys, it is said that one finds a third side. A third way. The door transports the subject to another location in space-time entirely, a site where the answer to a specific question of augury may be learned."
"A portal?" asked Kys.
Ballack shrugged.
"Yes, a portal," said Ravenor. "The door is said to be able to convey a subject elsewhere. In fact, to more than one place, depending on the sequence of use and the complexity of the answer sought after."
He swung his chair away from the door. The others grouped around him. "I wasn't expecting this," Ravenor said, "which was foolish of me. Unless it proved to be fraudulent, the Wych House was always going to contain a truly dark secret. This is what we came all this way to find. I just don't like the idea of using it."
"Me neither," said Thonius.
"I'm still struggling with the basic concept." Nayl admitted.
"It's just an old wooden door." Angharad repeated, leadenly.
"We have to use it."
They all turned to regard Kys. She was watching the housekeepers set out the fluttering lamps and tapers around the rim of the platform.
"We've come all this way, like you said. We've broken every rule we care about. We knew we would be tampering with the dark, the heretical. I don't like this one bit, but we're in it now. We're committed."
"What are you suggesting?" Thonius asked her.
"What are you suggesting?" Kys snapped back. "Do we turn away? Go home? Give up? If we were going to do that, Throne help me, we should have done it months ago. We've come too far to get squeamish now."
+You're right, Patience. Thank you for being the voice of reason.+
+I don't feel very reasonable.+
"We're doing this," Ravenor said. "Well, some of us are. I won't risk the entire group. I need to leave someone here to cover our backs."
"That's assuming," said Angharad archly, "that this isn't just an old wooden door flapping in the breeze."
"Assuming that it isn't," said Ravenor. "Perhaps you'd like to come with me and find out? Ballack, Carl you too, please. Harlon, you and Patience stay put and keep watch over this flapping door."
A dark look crossed Nayl's face. He glanced at the swordswoman. "No, I-" he began. He stopped short.
+She'll be fine with me, Harlon, I promise. I'll take care of her. Besides, she can take care of herself. And her mind is wonderfully strong, marvellously resilient. There is a great deal of unworldliness she can withstand.+
Nayl glowered. "But-"
+I need your strength here. I need Kys here too, as a psychic link. Don't argue, Nayl.+
"I'd never argue with you."
+Harlon, I know how much you care about the Carthaen. I know everything. I will protect her.+
Nayl nodded, grudgingly. He caught Angharad's eye and made the fist-to-sternum punch salute of the clans. She returned it.
Ravenor caught Kys' mind intimately. +I'll try casting to you.+
+I'll be listening for you.+
+Keep us grounded, Patience.+
+I will.+
The entire rim of the platform was by then flickering with candles and lamps. More lamps had been brought out onto the raised walkway too. The theatre chamber's overhead lights dimmed to a slight glimmer.
The flutter of whispering voices swirled around them once more, for the first time in half an hour. The moment they ceased, the door slammed shut tight with a loud bang, and they heard the ancient lock turn.
"The House is ready for you," said one of the housekeepers.
"The door is ready to be unlocked," said another. They stood in a ragged circle around Ravenor's team on the disc.
"Who has the right key?" asked Ravenor.
Another chilling murmur of whispers.
One of the housekeepers stepped forward, taking hold of the key it wore around its neck.
"I do," the housekeeper said. The other housekeepers muttered softly, as if congratulating the chosen one.
"Who goes and who stays?" asked another of the hooded figures.
"I'm staying," replied Kys.
"Me too." Nayl grunted. The housekeeper motioned for them to follow. All but the chosen housekeeper processed slowly off the upper platform onto the walkway below. Kys walked after them. She paused and looked back.
"The Emperor protects," she called out.
+Not this time, I'm afraid."+
"Then you protect, Gideon," she said. She turned and walked down the steps.
Nayl moved to go after her. He stopped, and then strode deliberately back to Angharad and kissed her roughly on the lips. "Damn it," he growled. "I want to see you all again alive. Even you, Thonius."
"I'll be counting the minutes, dear heart." Carl grinned back.
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 th
e 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.
TWELVE
"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-séance 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 hammer 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.