Up close, it was the same fine, desiccated debris that lay around the hall. Long, long ago, those cold, greedy creatures had used up all the vital energy of their once life-giving planet. Now they used their science to suck it from other, younger realms.
Adams was on his feet quickly, turning and looking for a target. ‘I swore I’d die rather than come back here, Major.’
‘And we would have died.’ Thacker spat out grey phlegm and picked up his own appallingly dusty rifle.
‘There’s nothing for us here. If they shut the door on us, we’re trapped forever. The last bullet will be for me, but the second to last is yours if you don’t think of something fast.’
‘Get a grip, man. The Land Rover is on top of the machine. They can’t get to the controls.’ He looked back at the floating door, the hole in the air that led back to the hall. At first he could see only sky, but by looking obliquely through it, he caught glimpses of fallen wall, broken vehicle, shifting ash.
‘But we can’t go back.’
‘There must be something here.’
‘No Ankhani. They’ve all crossed over.’
The landscape was barren. Devoid of anything, living or dead, and ground down through aeons of wear that the highest relief was a small hill. Perhaps once it had been a mountain to rival Everest: now it was only a pimple on a plain.
Adams looked around for a second time. ‘We need to get to the Cathedral.’
‘The what?’
‘The place where they took Jack for his… changing. It’s a sort of building.’
‘Where is it?’
‘If we climb the hill, we can see it.’
The Ankhani sky was populated by dim, blood red suns, exhausted to the point of collapse. Thacker nodded. ‘Be lucky to see anything in this light.’
‘You get used to it.’
‘I’m sorry, Adams. I thought what I did was best. I wasn’t going to let those monsters take us.’
Adams kicked the ground. ‘I meant what I said, although I suppose we can have a look, see what we can find.’
‘Thank you.’
Thacker had been an army officer for a long time, long enough for most of the people he knew to be in the army or connected with it in some way. People who were used to either giving orders or being ordered. Adams was neither to him, and it was Adams who had realised it first.
So they walked side by side up the hill, and from the top they could see in the distance a tall spire that seemed to grow straight from the blighted ground.
‘I take it that’s it.’
‘There were Ankhani there, in the shadows. They didn’t interfere with us, mind. Just looked on.’ Adams’ expression showed he’d rather go anywhere than that grotesque building. ‘I don’t know why. They could have killed us a hundred times over.’
‘Second guessing these things is pointless. They do what they do because they want to.’ Thacker gazed at the spire. ‘Or they have to: biological imperative and all that.’
They kicked dust as they walked, Thacker’s stride becoming increasingly weary.
‘When we were here before, Master Robert thought we might be a very long way from home. He couldn’t recognise any of the stars in the sky. Have your astronomers found their planet?’
‘They’re your astronomers, too, Adams. No, I don’t think so. I don’t even know if this place should exist. The sky back home is full of bright stars, wherever you look, however far away you look. Here, it’s dead. Like we’re at the very end of time itself.’ Thacker looked up again at the dying light. ‘Einstein said space and time were the same thing, that one was just an expression of the other. I suppose, there might be some part of the universe like this◦– the first to be created would be the first to dissolve back into the void.’
‘Some Eden,’ snorted Adams.
‘Perhaps they fell further than your name-sake.’
They had arrived at the cathedral. It was fantastically tall, stretched like Jack Henbury to be a hideous parody of what it faintly resembled. Walls flowed like molten skin, arches stretched like strands of mucus, the dark spaces breathed in restless sleep.
‘We went in,’ said Adams, seeing Thacker hesitate.
‘You’re a braver man than me.’
‘That might be so, but it’s a long way to come for nothing.’ He stepped over the threshold, and let his eyes accustom to the gloom.
Thacker held his rifle ready, and reluctantly joined him.
Inside, it only had the semblance of darkness. Thacker found that he could see rather well. The walls themselves seemed to ooze weak light like a cave sweats beads of moisture. There were no shadows: only his and Adams’ bodies were formless because they were unlit.
In the first large hall, they found Jack’s instrument of torture, a great shining metal wall streaked with blood and excrement, tears and sweat.
As Thacker looked up at it, Adams spoke quietly in his ear. ‘Would you do it? Would you give yourself up to pain like you never knew before, just to save England?’
‘If it was the only way? I don’t know. But we haven’t got eighty years. We need something that’ll work now.’ And Thacker was glad that he didn’t have to step up to the wall and let it tear him apart as it turned him into a god.
Adams went to look in another aisle, and came back shortly to report: ‘You’d better take a look at this.’
What he found was the junkyard of millennia. Everything the Ankhani had ever used and exhausted, they seemed to have thrown away here. It stretched, a pile of jumble tossed against one long wall, forever. Most of it had turned to dust, but there were objects embedded in that dust, shapes of promise and warning like bones in a grave.
Thacker chose at random, and dipped his hand in. He came out with a deeply corroded metal bar, as thick as his finger in some places, and pitted to within a hair’s breadth of snapping in others.
‘This is hopeless,’ he said. ‘We could search from now until Doomsday and not cover a tenth of this.’ He threw the bar back, and watched as it fell into the dust and was instantly lost.
‘Then we look somewhere else,’ said the ever-practical Adams. ‘Somewhere we can see what we’re looking at.’
‘But what if it’s here? The very thing we’re looking for?’
‘You’ll have to pray it’s not.’
‘Damn you, Adams!’
‘Damn you too. I never wanted to come here. I would rather have taken my chances with the monsters and had an end to it all.’
Thacker put his hand to his head. It was still bleeding, and he wondered how much blood he’d lost. He felt awful; tired beyond belief, unable to string two thoughts together without the utmost concentration, and above all, weak. ‘We have to try, man. It’s what makes us who we are.’
‘Then get up, Major. Get up and try.’
Thacker realised he’d slumped to his knees. He used the rifle to lever himself upright, and staggered off like a drunkard.
They walked through the vast spaces of the cathedral, looking at the heaps of aeons-old debris, scattering some, leaving others, despairing always.
Then at the moment they thought it useless, they came to an armoury.
At first, they didn’t know what it was: a space, like all the others, different but the same, but this time with massive stone sarcophagi on the ground. The tapered boxes were thick with dust, time having smoothed the edges and erased any symbols.
‘These are huge,’ said Thacker, putting down his rifle and running his hands over the lid of the first one.
‘Shaped like coffins,’ said Adams. ‘Are you sure you want to open one?’
‘No. But this is the only thing we’ve found that hasn’t crumbled to dust.’ He put his shoulder to it, and made no impression.
Adams joined him, and they strained together. The lid moved a fraction.
‘Again,’ said Thacker, ‘we have to push harder.’