Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

Another explosion sounded from the House, then another and another. She saw debris rise and fall amongst some distant towers after one blast, and smoke started to rise from the vast building in a dozen different places.

She looked back at Geis’s slack, dead face.

A tremor shook the sand under her feet. The bandamyion, just starting to hunker down again, jerked upright and looked from side to side, grunting in distress.

She closed her eyes and waited for the Lazy Gun’s own thermonuclear farewell.

There was an almost inaudible rumbling for a few seconds, something close to infra-sound felt in the bones and the water and the ventricles of the heart and brain.

Then nothing.

She opened her eyes. The Sea House was still there. A few dark wisps of smoke rose from it. A grey-brown cloud flowed out of the stables entrance and drifted on the breeze. The bandamyion had hunkered down again, and looked annoyed at having to get up and move away from the smoke. It trotted along the weeded slope under the high granite walls, shaking its head and snorting.

She sat there for a while, beside the dead man on the cold sands in the foul wind and the soaking drizzle.

Eventually she rose slowly, favouring her injured side.

She looked around. The bandamyion was a still-moving tawny dot half-way round the side of the Sea House. A few small twists of smoke rose amongst the building’s undisturbed topography of towers. In the distance, the waves of the new tide creased grey across the horizon.

Nothing else moved that she could see.

She hobbled to the sword lying on the sand. She tried switching it on, but its flat edges remained dull. She let it fall back to the sand.

She lifted her face to the drizzle and the evening greyness, staring into the flat expanse of dull sky, as though listening for something.

She lowered her head and stood for some moments. She gazed from the sand at her feet, across the pools to the gravel banks and on up to the seaweed and the spray-froth beyond, and over that to the grey streaks of gravel and the weed-choked sands that rose into the tall dunes.

She shook her head and limped across the sands to where the HandCannon lay. She picked the gun up, turned it over in her good hand, blew sand off it and stuffed it into her jacket pocket.

Then she started back, retracing her steps towards the impassive granite walls of the Sea House.

She shook a handkerchief free from her breast pocket as she walked and started tying it round her nose and mouth, using only one hand; her muttered curses accompanying this undertaking were snatched and flung away by the stiffening breeze.

A little later the monowheel vehicle spun backwards out of the sewer outfall, pirouetted vertically like a saluting mount, swung down across the greasy slope of stones at the base of the House’s walls, dodged uncoordinated gunfire from a nearby tower and accelerated quickly away across the tide-flooding sands.