Time's Mistress by Steven Savile Page A

their artists. They were a connection with the creatures of this place and in studying them the images made a frightening pact with his imagination. It was possible, looking at them, to believe that the first men never crawled out of the primordial soup at all, that there was no Darwinian evolution, but that they emerged, erect, from this subterranean hell.
    By the wizardry of sheer willpower alone Nathaniel Seth broke their damned covenant and moved on, deeper.
    The air was different the deeper he descended; it went from stale to choked to dead.
    Even the quality of his footsteps changed, the stir of echoes thickening and muffling as the peculiar acoustics of the Stair took hold. They shifted from the reassuring solidity of stone to a hollow clang as the stair levelled out and he found himself walking along a vast metal embarkation platform.
    The left side of the platform was exposed. Brass rails ran the length of the platform, disappearing into the mouth of a tunnel at the far end. What might have been a brass egg rested on the tracks. As he moved closer he could see it looked more like a cage than an egg. It was easily large enough to confine a man. Seven thick bands of metal formed a mesh that came together to make the sphere. He walked slowly down the platform, marvelling at the construction of the place; it was akin to a subterranean railway station, the arched walls curving around the sphere, cradling it.
    It was like nothing on earth.
    Nathaniel Seth wasn’t alone.
    A woman—he knew it was a woman by the pendulous tears of her sleekly furred breasts—stood beside the brass sphere. She craned her head slowly, turning to face him. Her face, he saw in the flickering luminescence, was almost lupine in nature, with an elongated snout and deep-set eyes. He could feel her eyes on him as he moved along the platform—and so many more eyes as the infernal beasts watched him invade their realm.
    She held a brass spear, which she lowered as he neared, gesturing toward the cage.
    Close to, he appreciated her sheer size; the jackal-headed guardian towered over him, easily half his height again. Her muscles bunched and flexed, tense. There was nothing feminine about her.
    He bowed his head.
    “I come to offer your freedom,” he said.
    She had no answer for him.
    Instead, she reached forward with her sinister hand, resting it upon the brass casing of the sphere. It responded to her touch with the sound of clockwork mechanisms stirring. Cogs and gears ratcheted in the otherwise silent tunnel, and a moment later the hiss of a steaming piston was followed by a single sharp click as the coupling holding the lid of the sphere was released. The bands of brass folded back on each other one at a time. There was a leather harness on the floor of the sphere. She gestured with her spear again. He did not need prompting twice. Nathaniel Seth boarded the sphere. He stepped into the harness, pulling it up so that it rested on his hips, synched the straps and forced the buckles tight across his chest and arms. The harness was anchored at his feet to the brass casing. The pistons hissed again as the sphere closed around him. There were similar anchor points above him.
    He had barely secured them when the jackal-headed guardian rapped on the side of the sphere. It responded by rocking violently. The brass began to thrum as the rocking intensified, and then it began to roll, gathering momentum as it did. The rails set into the floor guided the sphere as it accelerated. The cage rattled and swayed as it went into free-fall. Strapped in, Seth twisted and jerked, spun head over feet with ever increasing ferocity as the sphere descended.
    Subterranean winds whistled through the brass casing, the sounds of sorrow amplified by the same acoustics that had toyed with his footsteps.
    His screams echoed all the way to the hollow heart of the world.
    O O O
    Millington found it hard to laugh off the implications of the corpse strung up across the Whispering