The knock on the door came again, and I went to answer it, glancing at the ornate Italian clock on the wall. Coming up to seven thirty a.m. Someone was going to pay and pay dearly for disturbing me at such an ungodly hour. Did I mention that I am not a morning person? I hauled the door open and glared out into the corridor, and there was my uncle Jack, beaming at me cheerfully.
“Hello, Eddie! Isn’t it a marvellous morning? Ready for the off?”
I growled at him, and tried an even fiercer glare, but it didn’t faze him in the least. He strode forward, and I had to step aside to let him in or he’d have run right over me.
“What are you doing here, Uncle Jack?” I finally managed. “Is there some emergency? I didn’t hear any alarms.”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. This is the day of the fair, my boy, and you don’t want to be late. I’ve decided I’m going with you.”
I realised I was still holding the door open, dressed in only my underwear, and there was a hell of a draught. I looked up and down the corridor, but there was no one else about, nothing to suggest any kind of trouble. I shut the door and looked blearily at the Armourer as he looked around my room and tried not to look too distressed at the state of it. I didn’t care. My room. If I want to live like a pig, it’s up to me. The Armourer stopped dead as he looked through the open bathroom door, and quickly turned his back to the sight of Molly on the loo. I managed a small smile.
“You take us as you find us this early in the morning,” I said. “I’m only up because Molly’s an early riser. Probably comes from living in a forest most of the time. Now, what’s this about the fair?”
“I’m going with you,” the Armourer said firmly. “I haven’t been out in the field for thirty-five years, and the odds are I never will again, now that I’ve been given the secret departments to run, as well as the Armoury. So I am seizing the opportunity for one last adventure, and to hell with Cedric. Who does he think he is, ordering me around, the bloody Sarjeant-at-Arms?”
“I didn’t know you missed working in the field,” I said. “I thought you were happy terrorising people in your Armoury.”
“Well, yes, but then there’s happy, and then there’s . . . happy,” said the Armourer, still carefully keeping his back to Molly. “All this talk about the fair has got the old adrenaline going again. I always thought of my yearly visits to the Supernatural Arms Faire as my own territory: the one time I could justify leaving the Hall and getting out into the world again. I need to do this, Eddie. I need to get out into the field and get my hands dirty one more time. Before I get old.”
People tend to forget that my uncle Jack was a field agent for many years, second only to the legendary Grey Fox himself, my uncle James. And that Jack was an agent during the coldest days of the Cold War, when every mission was life-and-death, and every decision you made mattered. And now, after all these years as the family Armourer, he’d heard the call again, like an old dog by the fire pricking up his ears as the pack runs past in full cry; and he had to show us all, had to show himself, that he could still do it. Who was I to say him no?
“All right,” I said. “You know the ground; glad to have you. But what about the invitation? If you’re going to use it . . .”
“I’m entitled to plus-one,” he said cheerfully. “And no one’s going to be that upset if I make it plus-two. I’m a familiar face. They know me.”
Molly came out of the bathroom, properly attired, with her magazine tucked under her arm. “I heard all that. When are we going?”
“Right now,” said the Armourer. “Halfway across the world, the Supernatural Arms Faire has already opened for business.” He looked at me. “I should wrap up warm, though, Eddie. It’s bitter cold where we’re going.”
The Merlin Glass dropped us off halfway up a mountain in Pakistan. It was midday, but the sky was grey and cloudless and the sun wasn’t even trying. It was a grey world, all rock and stone and dust, and not a sign of life anywhere. The air was fiercely cold, burning my lungs as I breathed it. I shivered, even inside my heavy sheepskin jacket, and stamped my boots against the cold, hard ground. It was a good thing I’d listened to the Armourer’s warning; leaving the Hall for here had been like stepping off a balmy beach and into a freezer.
We’d arrived some way along a rough dirt track heading down into a deep valley, where the Supernatural Arms Faire was already set up. Row upon row of stalls and booths and tents, swiftly erected and easy to tear down when leaving. It was like a small town, thrown up overnight. Crowds of people were already milling about, filling every inch of space between the various sellers. Someone with a sense of humour was flying from their stall a black flag with the skull and crossbones.
Molly leaned heavily against me, shuddering violently despite being wrapped from chin to toe in a long coat of ermine fur, topped with a fluffy white hat she’d pulled down to just over her eyes. Her face had gone white from the cold, with bright pink spots on her nose and cheeks. She looked adorable.
“You look adorable,” I said.
“I never know what to wear to these formal occasions,” she said. “Bloody hell, it’s cold. My nipples have gone hard.”
“Not in front of the Armourer, dear,” I said.
Uncle Jack was almost unrecognisable, buried in the depths of a heavy black duffel coat. He was peering happily down into the valley, rubbing his bare hands in anticipation. He smiled back at us.
“Cold? This isn’t cold! Seven years ago, when the snows came early and a wandering polar bear was heard to remark that it was a bit nippy, that was cold! This is merely bracing! Get a good lungful of that crisp mountain air. There’s no pollution out here.”
“Of course not,” I said. “It couldn’t survive the cold. I can’t feel my ears.”
Molly looked down at the arms fair and sniffed loudly. “Is that it? A bunch of tents, and not even an open café to sit around in? Not exactly big on creature comforts, are they?”
“It’s an arms fair, girl, not a fashion show!” said the Armourer. “You don’t come here to sip your Starbucks and enjoy the ambience; you’re here to look at guns and wonder how best to buy up all the good stuff before your enemies find it.”
“Gun nuts,” she said sadly. “Weapons geeks. The horror, the horror . . .”
The Armourer made a big show of rising above her. “Follow me, and watch your footing on the path. Even the local mountain goats have been heard to mention that the going can get a bit tricky underfoot; and it’s a long way down. And be careful if you have to exert yourself; at this altitude, the oxygen can get a bit thin. So don’t be too proud to mention if you start feeling light-headed or confused. There are oxygen stations set out at regular intervals; use them. Coin operated, but they take all the major currencies. Except the yen. Don’t ask. Now, let’s go see what surprises await us this year. Oh, and Eddie, I know you’re passing as Shaman Bond here, but . . . don’t show me up. I want to be able to come back here again next year.”
I glared at him. “I’m an experienced field agent. I know how to behave.”
“No, you don’t. You’ve never known how to behave. That’s why we made you a field agent, so you could work off your anger doing nasty things to bad people. And, Molly, please don’t kill anyone. Not unless you feel you absolutely have to.”
“Of course,” said Molly, smiling cheerfully.
The Armourer set off down the narrow trail with the ease of long familiarity, leaving Molly and me to stumble along after him. We clung to each other for comfort and support, and to share body warmth. I’d got too used to my armour insulating me from the harsher environments of the world. The surrounding mountains were massive grey walls of rough stone, with ragged cracks and crevices and not a sign of life anywhere. A suitably grim setting for a fair dedicated to death and destruction. The mountaintops had dustings of snow, picked up and tossed around by gusting winds too high up for us to feel.
And up above the mountaintops, I could make out the shimmering heat haze of heavy-duty force fields hiding the fair from the outside world. Force shields were necessary to hide the various energy systems and magical emanations from the exhibits on display. So many new energy spikes in one place would have raised eyebrows and set off alarms in every tracking station in the world. The Armourer said there were also a whole bunch of magical protections in place to hide the presence of the force fields. Because the sudden appearance of such powerful energies would arouse suspicion in themselves. As in,
What have you got to hide?
The Supernatural Arms Faire had been around for a long time, and it survived by being very thorough and very paranoid.
“If your family has known about the fair for such a long time, why haven’t they done something about it?” said Molly, holding on to my arm with a death grip as a stream of pebbles shot out from under her foot.
“Better to let it be, so we can keep an eye on what’s happening,” I said. “If we spook them, they’ll shut it down, wait a few years, and then start it up again somewhere new, even more secret and underground. And then we’d have to waste precious time and resources hunting them down again. This way we get to see who’s producing what, and who’s buying it, whilst at the same making sure all of our weapons are as up-to-date as we like to think.”
I glanced back the way we’d come, just in time to see a long straggling line of local people passing by on a much higher trail. Men, women, children and donkeys, all heavily laden. Some of them glanced down into the valley, but it was clear they didn’t see a thing. As far as they were concerned, they were alone on the mountain, following the trail their ancestors had laid down centuries before. The fair’s protections were working. The locals kept going, carrying on with their everyday lives as they had for generations, with no idea of how close they’d come to one of the world’s most dangerous secrets.
By the time Molly and I finally reached the bottom of the valley and the outskirts of the fair, the Armourer had already flashed his invitation around, reassured the fair’s security people, forewarned them about me and Molly, and was off chatting happily with old friends. He walked around quite openly, nodding and smiling to people who nodded back quite cheerfully—people who would have done their utmost to kill him on the spot if they’d even suspected he was a Drood. But then, he had the best kind of cover; he really was what he was pretending to be . . . just another weapons enthusiast.
He strolled up and down the long rows of stalls and booths, peering at everything, picking up the occasional item to study it more closely and ask detailed questions, clearly enjoying himself tremendously. Every now and again he’d meet up with some old acquaintance from previous fairs, and then they’d stop right in everybody’s way for long conversations about what was worth looking at. No one made any fuss. Like the Armourer said, the fair liked having the enthusiasts around. They added character. All the people Uncle Jack knew were clearly in the same line of work as him; the outfits and the accents might differ, but they all had the same boyish smiles and wide-eyed enthusiasm when it came to various means of murder and mayhem.
They thought the Armourer was one of them: a retired old weapons maker with too much time on his hands, filling his retirement with happy interests. I made a point of standing close enough that I could eavesdrop on what was being said. There’s nothing quite like standing before some stall, apparently browsing, to let you hang around with your ears wide-open. One of the Armourer’s old friends used to work at Area 52 in the Antarctic, while another was a Russian exile who used to work at a secret Soviet science city in what was now the wilds of Georgia. Others worked for corporations, or secret agencies, or certain well-known names with delusions of grandeur and more money than sense. But no matter who they were, or used to be, the refrain was always the same: The fair was not what it used to be; the stall and booths used to be bigger and more varied, there was far too much hype and not enough substance, and the youngsters showed no respect at all.
After a while I let the Armourer go; he knew what he was doing, and I wanted to look at the weapons. The first booth I stopped at specialised in steampunk technology, featuring outmoded weapons of mass destruction from a calmer, more civilised age, when arms could also be works of art. What was once cutting-edge had become cute and interesting, passed by and superseded by relentless science, now brought back as antiques and curios—and collectibles, of course. Nothing like a patina of history to add layers of value.
Standing beside the booth, and actually lowering over it, was a great steam-powered automaton, the Iron Mann of the Plains. STILL IN WORKING ORDER, claimed a sign set out before it. Blue-black steel, gleaming and polished to within an inch of its life, with flaring red eyes in its immobile face, and huge arms and legs. In its day, the sign proclaimed, the Iron Mann of the Plains could outrun a steam train and lift the heaviest of weights, and had a Gatling gun built into its chest. Unfortunately, the booth owner confided, you had to keep stoking the thing with coal to keep the steam pressure up or it clanked to a halt. And then it was a real bugger to get it going again. Brilliant, but never very practical, its time in the sun over almost as soon as it had begun.
The booth owner was very keen to show me a series of series of carefully polished lenses from thirteenth-century Arabia, which when properly arranged could focus sunlight into a laser beam. But he didn’t seem particularly keen to demonstrate the effect. Perhaps it wasn’t sunny enough. Beside me, Molly had got interested in an eighteenth-century phlogiston flamethrower. Molly raised an eyebrow.
“Science proved that phlogiston didn’t actually exist.”
“It worked perfectly well until then,” said the booth holder.
We moved on. A surprising number of people recognised one or the other of us. Sometimes both. No one was in the least surprised to see Shaman Bond at the Supernatural Arms Faire; I’d gone to great pains to establish his reputation for turning up anywhere. I’ve always liked being Shaman Bond; my cover identity doesn’t have my restrictions or responsibilities. And people are nearly always happy to see Shaman Bond, whereas if Eddie Drood turns up it always means trouble for someone. Several of those we met were surprised to see Molly and me together: the notorious chancer and the infamous wild witch of the woods. In fact, one passing acquaintance actually leaned in close so he could murmur, “Too much car for you, Eddie,” in my ear. I didn’t hit him. It would only have attracted attention. It didn’t help that Molly found the whole situation hilarious. And then I came to a sudden halt as our way was blocked by a very wide, wide loud person I knew only too well.