The Peacock Cloak

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 triumphant cry echoed from the stone all around them and up and down the stairwell.
    Shoe gave an exultant hoot and kissed his fellow-criminal wetly on the cheek.
    “Piss off, you pervert,” protested Pennyworth, laughing and pushing him away.
    The staircase wound straight down into the ground, dimly lit by more of glowing cubes, to a depth equivalent to four or five storeys. There was single landing half way down. But none of these details were of any interest to the two thieves, for down at the bottom of the stairs they’d seen just what they’d been hoping for: another well, like the one they’d uncovered at the archaeological dig at Last Resort. Even from five storeys up they could see the same mysterious absence within it, neither a surface nor a gap: neither light nor dark, neither rough nor smooth.
    Shoe smiled broadly.
    “Lead on my friend,” he said.
    “We did it!” shouted Pennyworth gleefully, setting off down the stairs at a run. “We are the best, you know that, Shoe? We found a way out of Last Resort, and now we’ve found a way out of this dump too. We are the best.”
    “Where do you think it’ll take us this time?” asked Shoe.
    “Who gives a shit? As long as it’s somewhere that’s not here.”
    “Yeah,” said Shoe, “or back in Boringsville on Last Resort.”

    But on the landing halfway down, deep below the surface of wherever this empty planet was, he stopped and grabbed Pennyworth by the arm.
    “What?” demanded Pennyworth impatiently, wincing at the sound of his own voice echoing up and down the stairwell.
    They had been surrounded by silence ever since they arrived on that chequered platform, had heard literally nothing at all in their whole time here except for the sounds they made themselves. But down here, where every breath and footstep echoed and re-echoed from the silent stone, the stillness seemed even more intense. You really had to make yourself speak, for it felt dangerous to break that stillness with the rough echoey self-conscious sound of a human voice.
    “Look,” said Shoe, “a door.”
    “What?”
    Pennyworth glanced, without curiosity, at an archway that led off the landing into a corridor. It had writing over it in the old, cursive script, quite different from the spiky letters that shouted from billboards and illuminated signs in the city where they grew up.
    “You ran straight past it,” Shoe said.
    Pennyworth looked at him incredulously.
    “Of course I bloody ran straight past it, Shoe! There’s one of