Time's Mistress by Steven Savile

except for a dizzying drop, ninety-nine feet down, but slowly the ripples in the air began to solidify, hinting at the steps they were. Even so there was no substance to them. It was a vertiginous sight, down through the dome of the great Cathedral, through the nave and down into the quire vault and deeper still, past Wren and Nelson’s tombs and into the crypt with its famous dead and still deeper, losing itself in the belly of the black earth.
    “This is the stair?” He said doubtfully.
    “The Catamine Stair lies beyond. This is the doorway, nothing more. It is deeply rooted in the earth. Walk with faith, through the holiest of holies as you descend into what the frightened children call Hell.”
    “A sweet irony,” Seth said, repelled and yet still drawn to the seemingly endless drop.
    “Indeed. Now go, it will not remain open long without more blood, and I have a hankering for more of yours, truth be told.”
    “Be grateful I still have need of you, construct. But I warn you now, and just this once: continue to vex me and I will put an end to your miserable existence once and forever, as simply as this,” he snapped his fingers to emphasise his point. The homunculus sneered but lapsed into silence.
    A hangman’s wind was blowing down from Tyburn, though of course it wasn’t Tyburn anymore; the gallows tree was gone and in its place the glorious Marble Arch stood, but old deaths still clung to that wind. No amount of pretty buildings and new names could cleanse the spirit of the place or expunge the blood from the soil. It would always be a hangman’s wind that blew in from the west of the city.
    Smiling to himself, he stepped out into nothing.
    O O O
    The Catamine Stair lanced all the way down into the very heart of the earth.
    He walked, at first tentatively, each step felt out with care, and then with more and more surety as each new footfall was met by resistance from the air, and then by the clay steps of the stair itself as he disappeared beneath the surface, through the vault and lower.
    It was a long walk; but then he was walking through the realm of the dead to the hollow core of the earth, beneath the crust and the mantle and down, down, deeper and still down. It was dark but he had no need of light; he adjusted a simple ocular device which was to all intents and purposes identical to a run of the mill pair of glasses, though through a series of filters these altered the perception of his eyes, denying them the gift that was colour. Behind the lenses his world reduced to black and shades of grey. Beyond the glass frame fragments of colour still burned; they came to him as hallucinatory flashes, sparking and blazing at random.
    A curious lichen limned the steps themselves, giving off a faintly phosphorus glow. It was enough for him to see by.
    The Stair itself began as a cramped spiral, coiling around and around on itself dizzyingly, every twenty feet gained taking him through three complete rotations. With every turn and turnabout he felt all sense of his own place within the universe begin to drift.
    He noticed markings on the walls. Many were reminiscent of those on the Homunculus Cross, though the deeper he travelled the more deviant they became. The iconography was elemental at first, but it mutated, displaying perverse sexual deprivations, animalistic couplings, wild bestial rutting, horned figures presiding over the ritualistic rape and slaughter. It was almost as though he were descending into the murkier aspects of the human psyche, those dark whims rendered in images daubed on rough walls. Other shadowy renditions showed vaguely angelic creations, the offspring of the bacchanalia. In others still, women gave birth to giants too vast to be contained within their bodies, their flesh torn open. Cave paintings, animals, fire, the hunt, death, sex and life, all caricatures of those primitive essences. They were compelling, hypnotic, they craved the eye, filling the mind with the base memories of