The Darkside Of The Sun

the ship park was on the far side.
    They split up. Dom dodged among the groups, keeping an eye open for Widdershins robots. Hrsh-Hgn loped stiffly in what passed on Phnobis for a conspiratorial walk.
    Dom was halfway across the glittering floor when he glimpsed Joan entering the hall, with three security robots on either side of her. She seemed to dwarf them. She looked determined.
    He ducked back and a hand gripped his shoulder. He spun round.
    The man was smiling. The smile looked awkward on that face.
    He saw the blue robe and the heavy gold band around the neck, and Dom remembered. He tried to back away, but the hand followed him. It was the man at the party.
    ‘Please don’t be afraid.’ Dom squirmed under the grip. There was a flurry and the hand flew off his shoulder, Ig’s needle-sharp teeth buried in a finger. But the man did not scream, although his faced paled. Dom stepped back into the embrace of a robot.
    He took off. Strictly speaking, flying within the bounds of the Bank was illegal. He just hoped the Bank would not interfere.
    The sandals were built for one, though they could operate in strong gravity fields. Below them two other robots were staring vacantly upwards, and across the floor two more had Hrsh-Hgn cornered.
    There was an eerie calmness about the vertical flight. The roar of the crowd dropped away, leaving only the underlying thunder of the Bank. He looked into the robot’s multifaceted eyes, which mirrored the corona effects on the surrounding pillars.
    ‘You’re a Class Two, aren’t you?’ he asked.
    ‘That is so, sir,’ said the robot.
    ‘Are you equipped with any motivation towards personal safety?’
    ‘No, sir.’ The robot glanced down. ‘Unfortunately.’
    Dom kicked his heels together and went into a dive. Thirty yards above the floor he twisted and felt his shirt tear as the robot lost its grip. It continued to fall in a long arc which ended abruptly in a glistening pillar of germanium. There was a flash and a rain of hot droplets.
    Two other robots were rising from the floor on lift belts. Dom shot upwards, giddily, watching the distant roof grow. It was specked with black dots. It was only when he drew nearer he saw that they were caves.
    It was hot near the roof. The air roared into the caves and Dom flew with it, because there was nothing else to do. He swam in a torrent of warm air, which buffeted him as it thundered along a tunnel.
    And over Hell.
    He was able to look down for a few seconds before the Hell-wind caught him.
    He had been carried out into a mile-wide ventilation shaft. Between his feet the walls narrowed down, mile after mile, lit at the end by a white-hot eye. Thunder rolled around the shaft. It sounded like the churning of distant mighty engines. And the heat was palpable, tangible, like a hammer. It caught him like a leaf and fired him like a bullet.
    Dom tumbled out of the shaft and towards the stars, balanced on a gout of superheated air. Night was all around him. In one direction – up and down had lost their usual positions – was the web of cold stars. In the other there was just one, a hungry red eye with a white pupil.
    It seemed to drift away. Smoke from the grav sandals streamed around him. Something else had caught him, something which was always waiting, beyond the light. He wondered, dimly, through layers of pain, what it was touched him almost pleasantly, freezing his breath in his throat and making a pattern of crystals across his blistered skin.
    Widdershine are agile. Among the fishers the awkward, the clumsy soon lost all their lives, and something of this rubbed off among the Board families. And so Dom landed on his feet, hard, and fell forward into the snow.
    He knew what snow was. Keja had sent him a preserved snowflake from one of the colder regions of Laoth, and it looked something like the thin frost that briefly mantled the polar swamps of his own world, in the coldest winters. But Keja had not said that there could be so many of them.

7
    On Widdershins it was Hogswatchnight, which coincided with Small Gods in the greater Sadhimist calendar. It usually meant a larger klatch meeting, or a number of klatches would join together in celebration, but by midnight every group would be split so that each member watched the dawn alone. But as the older Sadhimist averred darkly, one was never fully alone at Hogswatch. By dawn, perhaps, some men would be poets or prophets or even be possessed of a new minor talent, like being