She brought the vehicle splashing out of a greasy, polluted stream and charged it up the wet-dark sand to the bottom of a dip between two tall dunes.
The Sea House lay in the rain-dulled distance, its dark bulk shrouded in squalls and cloud. Its top hundred metres were hidden, the spires and towers vanishing into the murk like the giant trunks of a petrified forest.
The cold wind gusted; a stench of rotting seaweed flowed around the stationary vehicle like a slimy, stroking hand.
“Ah-ha,” said Feril.
“Yes,” she said, tilting the wheel towards the slope of gravel beach beneath and squeezing the throttle. “Ah-fucking-ha.”
The monowheel skimmed easily across the weed and pools in the bay, climbed the greasy stones of the causeway’s steep sides without a pause and came to rest near the middle of the isthmus, facing the Sea House and standing absurdly on its single disc like a resting bird. She climbed out; Feril remained in the vehicle.
She walked, limping, to the great iron door overhanging the incline at the end of the causeway. Her hands were empty; they shook. Her belly grumbled and she felt faint. The blood pumped and coursed within her, and with each beat of her heart the whole vast edifice seemed to quake and pulse and shiver, as though for all its mountainous solidity the Sea House was merely a projection, something held in the power of her blood-quickened eyes.
There was no sign that anybody had noticed her approach. Clouds bundled round the House’s crenellated slopes, snagged there and were dragged away again. The rain was cold on her face. She reached the tilted gatehouse and found a heavy stone. She slammed the rock against the great iron door repeatedly. Chips of stone and rust fell together to the damp cobbles. Her muscles ached; the bones in her arms seemed to resonate with each quivering concussion.
“All right! All right!” a voice said. She dropped the rock and stooped to the opened grille.
“What do you want?” the voice said from the darkness.
“In,” she said.
“What?”
“Let me in,” she said.
“Who are you? What’s your name? Have you made an appointment?”
“No. Let me in. Please let me in. It’s very important.”
“What? No appointment? This is disgraceful. Certainly not, go away. And if that’s your car, you can’t park there.”
“Stand away from the door,” she said, stepping slowly backwards.
“What?” said the small, scratchy voice.
“Stand well away from the door if you want to live,” she called, still walking backwards. “Stand back!”
She turned and ran, waved to the android in the monowheel, then dived to the causeway’s flagstones, her arms over her head.
The monowheel’s cannon boomed eight times in quick succession; immediately following the first blast there began an answering sequence of eight thunderous explosions. After the last, she got up and ran to the monowheel, which was already moving towards her. Feril put out a hand and hauled her easily into the cockpit.
She took the controls as Feril leant back, sending the monowheel curving down the causeway while debris was still falling from the wrecked gatehouse. As the monowheel splashed into the shallow pools among the weed at the bottom of the causeway, the Sea House’s great iron door fell forward in one vast, dusty, smoking piece and slammed into the slope, cracking the causeway and throwing flagstones and cobbles into the air. The rest of the gatehouse’s facade crumbled and slid, collapsing into a smoking pile around the fallen door and leaving a huge broil of dust above a ramp of rubble and a dark, gaping breach.
The monowheel sped away, charging round the curve of the bay in front of the Sea House’s curtain wall and into the slack retreating waters of the old tide, wading to a point in the towering walls a third of the way round the structure from the wrecked gatehouse.
“There,” Feril said.
She turned the vehicle towards the scooped trench of a weed-draped tunnel in the towering granite walls.
The monowheel crept up the stinking sewage outfall to a portcullis of corroded iron bars. A torrent of dirty water fell from a level half-way up the two-metre diameter grille. She picked up the laser.
“It looks very rusty,” Feril said. “Try nudging it.”
She sent the monowheel forward; the iron frame creaked then shifted. She reversed the monowheel quickly. The portcullis fell forward, splashing into the tunnel and releasing the dammed-up pond of sewage behind. She heard it flowing past them, and almost passed out with the smell.
They travelled another twenty metres up the sewer before reaching a junction beyond which the pipes became too narrow for the monowheel. They looked up; grey light filtered down through a grating. Feril stood on the top of the vehicle and pushed the grating up and back.
The android climbed out; she passed it the Lazy Gun, then Feril pulled her up to join it. She strapped the Gun to herself while Feril replaced the grating. She handed Feril the laser rifle anal kept the pistol for herself.
They were in a broad, damp gallery; tall windows on one side contained not a single intact pane. Rain gusted in. Moss grew on dulled mosaics underfoot as the woman and the android jogged along to the darkness of a doorway. They turned a corner and ran right into a small monk walking towards them, one iron-manacled hand chained to the wall at his side, his gaze fixed on the steaming bowl he was carrying.
Sharrow bumped into the monk, splashing the gruel over his habit and the wall at his side. He looked angry for a moment, then his mouth fell open as he saw the android. His brows furrowed as he looked at their chainless hands. He had time to look frightened, briefly, before Sharrow cracked his head off the stones above his chain track; he slid unconscious down the wall.
Feril looked back at the prone figure as they ran on.
They climbed what seemed a never-ending spiral of steps rising out of a vast gallery, exiting at the top of a massive stone tower and crossing to the main House over a thin stone bridge, high over an ancient deserted dock where dilapidated cranes stood pierced with rust and coated with moss. Thigh-thick lengths of rope lay coiled on the rotting dock-sides like enormous worm-casts.
They followed the chain system through draughty corridors and dark halls, turning each time the number of rails decreased. They had to hide twice as monks passed them in gloomy corridors. The second group carried rifles and were running in the direction of the distant gatehouse.
The chain system’s inset hierarchy took them constantly upwards and inwards, ascending broad, shadowy flights of steps, ramps that spiralled and zigged and zagged higher and higher into the middle then upper levels of the House. Halls and balconies, tunnels and corridors filled the stone-space; their feet sounded off paving-slabs, wooden planks, ceramic tiles and pierced metal. The tracks on the walls were reduced to two, then one as they penetrated the vast building.
Finally they found a corridor whose walls were quite smooth, with no rails whatsoever. They walked cautiously into a small, walled courtyard ceilinged with chill grey mist where bedraggled plants lay beaded and heavy with moisture. What appeared to be a well in the centre of the courtyard looked down into a vast hall where they saw tiny figures moving to and fro. A rancid draught of air rose from the well, bringing the noise of small, alarmed voices.
They looked round the windows facing onto the hidden garden. Feril nodded at a door in one corner.
It wasn’t locked. They walked into a short corridor lined with pornographic holos. Feril stopped outside a door. She could hear voices now, too.
They burst in. The girl in the bed gave a shriek and ducked under the bedclothes. The fat, naked man sitting at the screen whirled round, his eyes wide. A senior brother’s habit lay folded on a chair. She lasered the screen; it had been on sound only. The naked man put his arms up, sheltering himself from the debris of the exploded screen.