Read Against A Dark Background for Free Online Page B

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
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