Read The Peacock Cloak for Free Online

platform to the colonnade.
    “What are you doing Shoe?” moaned Pennyworth.
    Again Shoe declined to answer.
    “Talk about out of the frying pan,” Pennyworth complained as he hurried after his silent companion.
    He caught up with Shoe as he reached one of the archways. They looked out over the planet surface, turned and looked back at the artefact on which they stood, then looked out at the planet again. The chequered platform, strewn here and there with blown sand, was raised some three metres above the surrounding desert. A flight of marble stairs led down onto the surface, its lower steps buried in sand.
    And this was a proper desert. There are half-hearted deserts that have cacti growing in them, or shrubs, or tufts of yellow grass, or even small trees. But there were no features at all in this one but rocks and stones, each with an overlapping set of faint moon shadows.
    “We can’t cross that,” said Pennyworth
    “No,” said Shoe, finally breaking his silence. “And anyway, the whole place might be like that for all we know. You can’t cross something if it hasn’t got another side.”
    “We’ve had it, haven’t we?” groaned Pennyworth.
    Shoe shrugged and began to walk round the edge of the colonnade, noticing, now that they were close, that all the olive trees in their urns were dead. The twigs were grey and had long since lost their bark.
    Reaching the corner of the colonnade, they turned and continued along a second side of the platform, passing another flight of stairs that led down into the sand.
    “Maybe we should have listened to that guy,” said Pennyworth. “What’s his name? Graves.”
    “What?” said Shoe. “That drip? Nah. Never. Start doing what men like that tell you and you might as well be dead anyway.”
    They turned along the third side.
    “Hmm,” said Shoe.
    Like the other sides, this side had stairs going down from it, but they didn’t lead directly onto the ground but onto to a subsidiary stone floor, also paved in black and white marble, a little below the current ground level of the desert. A wall protected it from being overwhelmed with sand, though blown sand was still building up on the flagstones, and especially in what had once been an ornamental pond in the middle, partially burying the dried bones of several carp. Two huge urns, one on each side of the pond, held the brittle white skeletons of substantial trees.
    Pennyworth and Shoe ran down the steps. They found that the stone floor opened into a hall underneath the raised platform they’d been walking on. The hall was a hundred metres long and twenty wide, its floor paved once again in black and white, its walls and ceiling very smooth with a faint decorative design carved into them of swirling organic shapes. Two thick columns like tree trunks stood in the middle of the long space, holding up the platform above.
    “I don’t like this place one bit,” Pennyworth muttered, and, even though he spoke quietly, his voice seemed to echo right up and down the hall. “It’s like a museum or something.”
    Away from the light of the three moons, the cavernous room was illuminated only by cube-shaped objects set at intervals into the walls that gave off a low pinkish light. Some of the light cubes were dimmer than others, and some were at their last ebb, not really illuminating anything at all, just glowing and flickering like old embers. A few had died completely.
    “Yeah,” said Shoe, “but if there’s going to be a way out, it’ll be somewhere down here, I reckon. Think about it, Pennyworth. That well back at Last Resort was way down below that old ruin.”
    The odd thing about the hall was that there was nothing in it, and no doors either, other than the one through which they’d entered. But right in the middle of it, between those two fat columns, was the balustrade of a descending spiral staircase.
    Shoe and Pennyworth leaned over the balustrade and looked down.
    “Yes!” Pennyworth shouted, and his