Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [38]
He shivered. He had crawled the length of the Hal from where he had fal en from the clock. The toxins in the dust must have relaxed him, because, apart from a few bruises, he was unhurt.
The only scars were inside. The twin hurts of misery and despair. To lie so close to the life-giving energies of the House's heart should be comforting, but the stone apron was cold and unresponsive. Barren, he thought.
In his mind, like echoes, he heard the whispering voices of long-lost Cousins calling him to join them. Why did he wait there? Why be alone? The echoing voices were hands that reached out to him. He longed to succumb to their embrace and be led by them into the darkness. That darkness where he no longer had to see anything.
But he could not cast off what he had witnessed. He pulled himself up the side of the Loom plinth and wiped at the dusty glass coffin that lay on the top. The figure that lay inside was serene and calm. A tribute of fresh flowers lay on Quences's ancient chest. Flowers still fresh after six and three-quarter centuries. There were no signs of the stab wounds in his chest.
It's a lie, Arkhew told the echoing voices. We have al been living a terrible lie.
'We know that,' they answered.
'Murderer. . . murderer,' he repeated aloud. A terrible sin for which he would be punished. That name should not be spoken. It was forbidden in the House.
Through the whispering gabble of voices, he heard footsteps approaching. He glanced round. It would soon be candleday.
He crawled for cover in the darkness.
'I thought so,' Innocet muttered to herself. 'How could I forget the date? I'm such a fool.'
She sat on her bed, turning the pages of the almanac with reverence. It was one of the few natural books in the House - a journal that she had endeavoured to work on every day since before the beginning of the dark despair.
Just as she daily wound her hair and worked to complete her rendition of the classic texts of the Old Time - all from memory. The only true edition in the House was stored on datacore and there was no power to read it.
She sighed. Her hand-written script had deteriorated badly in the last hundred years or so. There were places where it was an indecipherable scrawl. At other points, the improvised ink made from the juice of crushed saprophytes, or even once in desperation from her own blood, had faded completely. The dry, dry paper drank it completely.
Yet suddenly she saw the chance of an end. First an omen, and now this discovery.
It was nonsense, of course. An end? She wasn't even sure what that meant any more. No more darkness? No more gruel? No more re-darning the darns over the holes in the patches on their ragged clothes? Indefinable nonsense. She turned the pages of the almanac to verify her error.
While Housekeeper Satthralope grew more cantankerous and less approachable than ever, Innocet took it on herself to maintain any order in the House. She tried to keep up a moral stance, even if it was only for Cousin Owis's sake. But despite her best efforts, Owis slid al too easily under the influence of Cousin Glospin. What could she do in the circumstances? How could Owis know any better? The wretched creature had never once been away from the House. Glospin was nearly three times Owis's age, yet the two of them slunk around the House like new students barely out of brainbuffing. It was not the education that Innocet had in mind for her charge. One day, she foresaw a battle between herself and Glospin for Owis's soul.
52
This was how she passed her time. It was her burden. The routine that kept her from madness. A task that no other Cousin in the House of Lungbarrow had ever dreamt to undertake. She was not prepared to vouch for the sanity of any of them. She had her secrets too, but while the others found their own ways to survive or eventual y pass on, she did what she could to ease their passage.
She had checked the calculations three times with the same result. Full of foreboding, she closed the book and hurried back into the other room.
Jobiska was asleep again, her bowl of