By Golter standards they were cooperative and outgoing, to the extent of permitting secular scholars to study in the many libraries, archives and depositories the House had accrued over the millennia. A veneer of ecumenicalism allowed visits by monks from other orders, and numerous prisoners from all over the system convicted under a variety of religious laws were held in the House. Other visitors were discouraged.
Sharrow was accepted at the House because six years earlier her half-sister Breyguhn had smuggled herself into the structure in an attempt to find and steal the Universal Principles, one of the system’s many fabled lost Unique books. Breyguhn had failed in her quest; she had been caught and imprisoned in the Sea House, and it was because she was her closest relation that Sharrow was allowed in to visit her.
With what was-arguably-a rare exhibition of an underlying sense of irony, the Sad Brothers had made the recovery of the Universal Principles the condition for Breyguhn’s release. Whether this implied they did not possess the book but wished to, or that they already did and so knew the task was impossible, was a matter for conjecture.
At the far end of the causeway the stone-flagged road inclined upwards to a huge, crumbling central gatehouse which was the only landward aperture in the House’s blank curtain wall of seaweed-hemmed granite. The gateway’s deeply machicolated summit hung like a set of gigantic discoloured teeth over a throat blocked by a rusting, ten-metre-square door of solid iron. The massive door-and the whole gatehouse-leaned out over the causeway’s end in a manner which indicated either serious subsidence, or a desire to intimidate.
Sharrow picked a rock up from the fractured surface of the wheel-grooved causeway and slammed it several times as hard as she could against the ungiving iron of the door. The noise was flat and dull. Rock dust and rust flakes drifted away on the breeze. She dropped the stone, her arm sore from the series of impacts.
After a minute or so she heard metallic sliding, scraping noises coming from the door. Then they faded. After another minute she hissed through her teeth in exasperation, picked up the stone again and slammed it against the door a few more times. She rubbed her arm and looked up into the dark arches of the stonework, searching for faces, cameras or windows. After a while, the clanking noises returned.
Suddenly a grille opened in the door at chest height; more flakes of rust fell away. She bent down.
“Yes?” said a high, scratchy voice.
“Let me in,” she said to the darkness behind the iron-framed hole.
“Ho! ‘Let me in,’ is it? What’s your name, woman?”
She pushed her scarf down from her mouth. “Sharrow.”
“Full na-”
“That is my full name, I’m a fucking aristo. Now let me in, creep.”
“What?” the voice screeched. She stood back, putting her hands in her pockets while the grille slammed shut and a grinding, creaking noise seemed to shake the whole door. Finally the outline of a much smaller entrance appeared under the flakes of rust, and with a crunch a door swung open, large enough for a human to enter bowed. A small man in a filthy cowled cassock glared out at her. She held her passport in her right hand and shook it in front of his grey, unhealthy-looking face before he could say anything. He stared at the document.
“Cut the crap,” she said. “I went through it all last time. I want to speak to Seigneur Jalistre.”
“Do you now? Well, you’ll just have to wait. He-” the small monk began, swinging the door shut with one manacled hand.
She stepped forward, planting a boot in the doorway.
The brother looked down, eyes wide.
“Get… your… filthy… female foot out of my d-” he said, raising his gaze to find that he was looking down the barrel of a large hand gun. She pressed his nose with it. His eyes crossed, focusing on the stubby silencer.
He swung the door open slowly, his chain rattling. “Come in,” he croaked.
The silencer muzzle left a little white circle imprinted on the grey flesh at the tip of his nose.
“But, sire! She threatened me!”
“I’m sure. However, little brother, you are uninjured; a state subject to amendment, should you ever speak back to me like that again. You will take the Lady Sharrow’s weapon, issue a receipt, then escort our guest to the Chain Gallery and equip her with a visitor’s chain. At once.” The holo image of Seigneur Jalistre’s head, bright in the dim and musty gatekeeper’s cell, turned to her. The Seigneur’s broad, oiled face smiled thinly.
“Lady Sharrow, your sister will receive you in the Hall Dolorous. She has been expecting you.”
“Half-sister. Thanks,” Sharrow said. The holo faded.
She turned and handed her gun to the furiously scowling gatekeeper. He took it, dropped it in a drawer, scribbled quickly on a slip of plastic, threw it at her and whirled away. “This way, woman,” he snarled. “We’ll find you a nice heavy chain, I think. Oh yes.” He scuttled off, muttering; his own chain rattled along the wall-tracks to the doorway as she followed.
The monk snapped the manacle over her right wrist and rattled the heavy iron chain vigorously, snapping it taut against the wall a few times, jerking her arm.
“There,” he sneered. “That should keep you on the right track, eh, my lady?”
She looked calmly at the heavy blue-black manacle and ran her fingers lightly over the rough links of her chain. “You know,” she said, dropping her voice and smiling at him, “some people pay good money for this sort of treatment.” She arched an eyebrow.
His eyes went wide; he clutched at each side of his cowl, pulling it down over his eyes, then with one skinny, shaking hand pointed to the far end of the long, dimly lit gallery. “Out! Get out of my sight! To the Hall Dolorous and much good may it do you!”
The Sea House was a prison without doors. It was a prison within and around all its other functions.
Everyone in the Sea House, from its most senior Abbots and Seigneurs to its most constrained and punished prisoners, was manacled and chained. Each chain ended in a miniature bogey; a set of four linked wheels which ran along flanged rails set into the stones of every corridor, room and external space. These tracks, usually sunk into walls, often embedded in floors, sometimes crossing ceilings, and occasionally supported on little gantries like banisters and rails-traversing large open spaces, constituted the skeleton of the chain system.
The deepest track was narrower than a finger; it connected the senior Brothers to the House by means of intricately jewelled movements and fine chains spun from a choice of precious metals, the exact element used indicating further subdivisions of rank.
The outermost track was used for visitors as well as lay and honoured prisoners; it held a heavy steel chassis attached to an iron chain made from links thicker than a thumb.
The tracks in between provided for two grades of less senior Brothers, the House novices and their servants. Prisoners subject to harsher regimes wore drag-chains attached to their ankles and running on other, still more secure tracks; the lowest of the low were simply chained to dungeon walls. Legend also had it that there were secret places-deep and ancient, or high and (by Sea House standards) relatively modern places-where the chain system did not run, and the Order’s senior officers led lives of unparalleled debauchery behind supposedly non-existent doors… but the Sea House, and the chain system itself, did not encourage the investigation of such rumours.
Sharrow’s chain-guide wheels clicked as she followed a dark corridor which memory told her ascended to the Great Hall.
She encountered one other person on the way; a servant carrying a bulging laundry bundle and heading towards her using the same wall track as she. He stopped by a passing-circuit in the wall, flicked his own chain-guide through a set of ceramic points into the higher of the two tracks and waited-foot tapping impatiently-until she was almost level with him, then as she ducked he swung his chain over her head, down onto the track’s main line, and continued on his way, muttering.