* * *
Daud hit the floor with a heavy thud, waking him. He opened his eyes, blinking into the light of the lantern next to him, then rolled onto his side, bumping into the side of the red leather couch.
A dream. It was just a dream, nothing more.
He rolled again, his hand scrabbling for purchase as he pulled himself upright. The windows of the weird house were dark—night had fallen again.
How long have I been asleep?
Daud rubbed the back of his neck with his right hand. It felt stiff, but not sore—looking at it, the tracery of blacklines was still there, but fainter. He was feeling better, too. Tired, certainly, but definitely better.
Turning on the floor, he noticed something flash on the couch—the black mirror shard. From the angle on the floor, the shard should have been reflecting the strange, segmented ceiling of the room, but all Daud could see were gray clouds scudding across a dark expanse of nothingness.
He looked up, but the ceiling was there, intact. Looking back in the mirror, the image—the image of the Void—had gone. The mirror was just a mirror once more.
Daud pulled himself up on the couch and sank back into the soft leather.
He closed his eyes.
He slept.
* * *
When Daud woke again it was still dark. Was it the same night? He had no way of telling.
Daud swung his feet to the floor, then pushed himself up. He stood for a moment, getting a sense of his condition, judging his current state of being. He felt stiff, but there was no pain or discomfort. Just a nagging tiredness—nothing much, but enough to remind him that he was now marked in a different way.
Marked for death. How long he had, he didn’t know. He only hoped it was long enough.
He lifted his hand again and stared at the Mark of the Outsider. He flexed his fingers and pulled on the power of the Void, just a little. Immediately the Mark grew warm, but… it felt different. He was still marked, and the Outsider’s brand allowed him to draw power from the Void, but it was, well, harder. It took more effort, and as Daud concentrated, closing his eyes, it almost felt like thepower was erratic, less controllable, like his connection to the Void was slipping away.
Daud opened his eyes. He looked at his hand again, then shook his head and picked up his discarded glove and pulled it back on.
Time to leave.
The room Billie had brought him to wasn’t the only one with strange angled panels; as he explored the building, searching for an exit, it felt like he was moving more through the inside of a machine than a house. Some doors led to other rooms and hallways. Others led to dead ends that were nothing but steel boxes, and in other rooms the floors were uneven, the panels stuck at odd angles, revealing more mechanisms beneath.
The whole interior of the house was clearly designed to move, to be reconfigured. Why, Daud didn’t know, and he cared even less, but certainly the bizarre clockwork mansion of Kirin Jindosh was like nothing he had ever seen before.
He moved on, his route to the main doors—or at least the direction of the main doors, going by what he could see out the windows—circuitous, thanks to the jammed machinery of the building blocking his way. As he walked, he noted the levers that were scattered all around the place, but he didn’t want to start toying with them, even if there was still power to shift the architecture. Without knowing what he was doing, there was more than a fair chance he would just trap himself—if he wasn’t crushed in the process.
That was when he heard it—a loud clicking. Daud knew the sound—most recently from his time aboard the whaling ship that had brought him here. It was the sound of a gear wheel, the teeth spinning through a lever. And it sounded like it was coming from behind him—
He turned and jumped through a doorway, just as the floor beneath him dropped away by more than a foot before lifting back up and rotating, the entire base of the room turning on a huge axle. Daud watched as the walls opened out and the ceiling lifted, the gaps in the structure exposing gears and motors as the room was rearranged.
There was a clank. Daud saw one of the levers on the far side of the room flip, apparently by itself.
Another clank—this time from in front of him. Daud turned, looking down the corridor. At the end, the open door led through to another large room, and in the middle of that room—in line with the open door—was another lever. It moved again, entirely of its own accord, and the room ahead began to reconfigure.
The corridor in which he was standing began to disappear, the walls on either side lifting an inch and then sliding together. In just a few seconds, Daud would be crushed.
Ahead, the door was still open, but a steel panel was sliding up as the next room was lifted into the air. Glancing over his shoulder, Daud saw the room he had just left had gone, the corridor now a dead end.
As the walls of the corridor brushed Daud’s shoulders, he turned and sprinted for the rapidly closing gap at the top of the rising steel panel. He reached out and transversed forward, willing himself to slide through the gap even as he moved so he wasn’t cut in two.
He made it, skidding across the floor of the next room, the heavy rug piling up in front of him as his body pushed against it.
The clanking stopped, and the house was silent.
Daud looked around. He was in a library, the room devoid of furniture but lined with bookcases, the shelves tightly packed with leather-bound volumes. The Mark ofthe Outsider burned on his hand, but he had managed to draw on its power well enough, even if it felt harder
