The Keep

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1Voices were all about him.

Hovering in the moon-hazed darkness they rose and fell like a blustering wind through summer tree-tops. Now near, now far. Now loud, now faint. Now incoherent and wild. Now clear and distinct and full of significance.

Slowly, and almost imperceptibly, a faint but familiar resolve whispered in their wake.

He must listen to them — reach into their urgent susurration — grasp what they were saying. For surely there was meaning to be found in them if he could just touch it?

They had been coming to him since his arrival here, drifting through the half-place between the worlds of waking and sleeping where dreams and reality were inextricably entangled.

Yet with this resolve came the remembrance that his very awareness, his realization that he was, was sufficient to disturb this strange sending. And a too wilful act, a deliberate listening, would end it as abruptly as the fall of an axe.

As it did, yet again.

Slipping intangibly away from him, the voices were already fading into an unknowable distance, dwindling into the soft hiss of his frustrated breath as his eyes flickered open and the dim snow-lit morning world formed about him, solid and real. Now there would be only memories of memories to linger hauntingly through the quieter moments of the day.

Though he knew it would be futile, he could do no other than close his eyes and try to recapture the sounds before they were lost utterly. There was stillness, contentment even, in the waking comfort of his bed and the soft darkness of the early hour. Whatever problems the day might bring — and it would probably bring more than a few, he knew — nothing could be done here either to precipitate or avoid them.

It was good.

But, less than smoke in the wind, the voices and whatever message they were carrying had gone — scattered by his waking and dispersed beyond any retrieval by his seeking after them. The tools of the mind that normally served him so well lurched after them, though half-heartedly. They were too coarse by far to capture and secure so fragile a quarry.

Were the voices the residue of a forgotten dream?

Not an answerable question. He rarely remembered his dreams but, when he did, those fragments that remained with him were, for the most part, prosaic and unthreatening; usually artless patchworks of recent events. They rarely carried either mystery or terror.

Were they an echo of some distant activity in the Keep, carried to him along unseen ways through its ancient stonework? What activity? He glanced at the window. The low snow-filled sky was greying. No one else would be up at this time. Besides, he doubted that anything could echo through this place, so massive was every aspect of its construction. And, too, he was not one to be roused by a mere noise.

Were they no more than the sound of his own breathing intruding into his half-wakened brain?

Possibly, he supposed, though it seemed unlikely. They were too varied, too complex, too full of subtle rhythms to be merely a throttled snore.

He rubbed his eyes and ended the pointless inquiries. They had to have their run, like dogs sniffing about a courtyard — intent and with apparently deep purpose — but they would bring back no prey. Lying back he yawned and stretched extravagantly then pulled a wry face. Whatever the voices were — the word “voices” persisted with him — they at least served to wake him early, a feat which a wide range of mechanical devices and parental and wifely reproaches had never succeeded in doing in the past.

“I sleep well because I’ve a clear conscience,” he would protest.

“You sleep well because you’re a lazy sod,” was the non-mechanical consensus. And, in his clear conscience, he could not wholly deny this. Brisk rising was not one of his stronger virtues.

This was just another puzzle. For though the voices did not wake him sharply, they left him wide-awake and reluctant, perhaps unable, to go back to sleep again. Thinking back over a lifetime of reluctant risings, this was in many ways even stranger than waking him in the first place.

Still, that was how it was. He threw the sheets back and swung out of bed, shivering slightly as the room’s cold embraced him.

A tall, stiff-shouldered clock, a relic of the previous occupant of the room, stood by the door. Its intimidating presence made him want to cower when he passed it and his first active decision of the day was the same as it had been the previous day: he really should get round to having the damned thing moved. He squinted peevishly at the ornately decorated face which lowered back at him in its turn like a malevolent and tattooed dacoit. Its fingers, drooping like mustachios, confirmed what the dull sky had already told him. It was early. No bad thing, he conceded reluctantly. Laggard he might be at early rising, but he always enjoyed the feeling of advantage that it gave him. It stretched the day.

Perhaps the voices were nothing more than some self-induced device designed by his deeper — better? — nature to ensure this outcome?

That was a new thought.

He dismissed it. If good intentions had been his saviour he would have been a regular dawn riser long before now.

A spasm of irritation shook him. He had enough to do without wasting his time fretting about clocks or, still less, mysterious sounds. Anyway, intriguing though these might be, they must surely be some figment of his imagination, even if he hadn’t the imagination to work out what it might be yet. Indeed it would be surprising if working in this place did not stir something in the muddier depths of his minds.

He busied himself with washing and changing but did not turn the main light on. That would have blackened the gradually lightening window and shrunk his world to the confines and comforts of this solitary room which could well have lured him back to the warmth of his bed after all. Better to let the day seep into him.

Better to let the Keep seep into him.

The thought made him pause as he shaved. It was peculiar, he reflected. He had mapped many buildings in his time and some of those that had been acquired during the New Order’s recent expansion had been remarkable and unusual. There had been those cities in the east where high soaring, sky-scarring towers sentenced their populations to jostling insignificance in bleak, wind-scoured streets; streets that were shrouded in permanent shadowed twilight except sometimes at the extremities of the day when the sun’s blanching touch might sere along them. And in the west there had been those rambling, half-subterranean conurbations of interlinked and ill-defined dwellings. Mapping them had been peculiarly difficult, but their dominant feature was not measurable — the smell, or rather smells. He shook his head at the memory. He did not want to recall too much of that. At least not before he had eaten.

But nothing he had ever seen had been remotely like this great isolated pile. As he had wandered about the place as part of his preliminary study to work out how he might begin this new task, his professional eye had automatically searched for familiar lines and shapes and patterns that would help him order and arrange the building in the catalogue of his experience. But there had been nothing. Not even distant resonances from the sketchbooks and historical texts of his student days. And, so far, that had remained the case, both inside and outside the building. This place was truly unique.

That it was the work of one mind was all too apparent, but whose was beyond any speculation. And what could it have been? When had it been built? Or why? Or, for that matter, how? The rock from which its huge stones had been cut was not to be found in this region and, apart from the seemingly insurmountable difficulty of hauling them through the mountains, it verged on the inconceivable that they had been hewn, slotted, notched, and positioned with such accuracy by brute manual effort. Yet they must have been, for, whatever else this place might prove to be, it was not new, nor even recent. The weathering of those same stones was at least one thing that was familiar — this was an ancient place.

“One step at a time,” he said to the puzzling image waving a razor at him from the mirror. There were enough routine technical problems associated with surveying this place without wasting his time turning over questions to which there might well be no answers.

He could always ask, of course...

The image became uneasy. The New Order did not appreciate needless speculation, still less too much active curiosity. He had his allotted task. He must do it efficiently and accurately. That was all he need concern himself with. It was sufficient that this place was theirs now and thus part of their greater intent. It was more than sufficient that they had employed him. It was a mark of their trust in him — an acknowledgement of previous work well done and duties faithfully fulfilled. He should be careful not to jeopardize any of this. True, he was good at his job — very good — but this was not necessarily a guarantee of continued acceptance — and there were always plenty others who would scrabble to replace him if he showed himself to be... unsuitable.

He splashed the remains of the foam from his face with cold water then dried himself briskly. That was something that need not be dwelt on. It was not going to happen. He had too shrewd an eye for the reality of his position to risk it with carelessness. He must remain both efficient and inconspicuous.

Do your job. Observe the procedures and all would be well.

Procedures were everything under the New Order.

Keep your curiosity and your speculation to yourself.

He reminded himself again that there were plenty difficult “ordinary” problems associated with this place which would have to be solved if he was indeed to fulfil his instructions.

Some of these were taxing him a little while later as he stood in the fresh-fallen snow by the sole entrance to the Keep.