“I’m not apologising.”
“No one’s asking you to,” said the leader.
His hand came up suddenly, holding a long, slender blade. He stabbed his own man in the eye, driving it in deep and twisting it. Blood spurted out, soaking his cuff and sleeve. He jerked the blade out, and his victim crumpled bonelessly to the ground and lay still. The leader flicked a few drops of blood from the blade, then made it disappear again. He then cleaned his hand and wrist fastidiously with a monogrammed handkerchief. He smiled at the monk.
“Is that acceptable to you?”
The monk nodded slowly. I think even he was a bit shocked at the calm and callous way the Satanist had put an end to the problem. The crowd seemed equally disturbed. There are some things you don’t expect to see, even at an arms fair. The monk nodded to his people, and the Bloodred Guard separated into two groups, taking up positions to line the walkway, to hold the crowds back as the Satanists moved off. Not one of them looked back at the one of their own they left lying in the dirt. The Bloodred Guard waited until the Satanists were a fair distance away, and then silently disappeared back where they’d come from. The watching crowd fell on the dead body and stole everything he had, including his clothes, his underwear and, when nothing else was left, even the body. I looked at Molly.
“Hard-core,” she said finally. “These new Satanists don’t mess around, do they?”
“What could be so important here that the Satanists couldn’t risk being thrown out?” I said. “So important they’d even kill one of their own over it?”
Molly shrugged. “Satanists do what Satanists do. You know what? I’m hungry. There’s a food stall over there. Buy me something.”
“Didn’t you bring any money?”
“Why would I need money? I’ve got you. Buy me something hot and spicy, and earn yourself some major boyfriend points.”
I escorted her over to the food stall, which offered steaming-hot curries with rice, and bowls of a dark brown soup with things floating in it. I looked at the grinning little Gurkha behind the stall, with his
Eat the Corporations
T-shirt.
“What kind of soup is that?”
“Hot!” he said cheerfully. “Fresh! Eat!”
So we had two big bowls of the soup, followed by a beef madras for me and a chicken vindaloo for Molly, with lashings of brightly coloured pilau rice. No utensils—it came on a paper plate, and you used your fingers. My fingers were so cold I could barely feel the heat anyway. I drank the soup straight from a paper cup, and it went down very well. Could have been mulligatawny, though I still wasn’t prepared to be quoted on what the floating bits might have been. There are some things man is not meant to know if he wants to sleep easily.
When we finally moved off again into the bustling crowds, it quickly became clear that something was in the air. Everyone seemed sure something special was in the cards, even if no one was too sure what. I asked about the possibility of the Drood-type armour making an appearance this year, subtly at first, and then increasingly openly, as it became clear this was the hot topic on everyone’s lips. Even though the new armour had been promised for years, and had never once shown up, the general feeling was that this might be the year. And no one wanted to miss it.
Molly and I followed one particular rumour right to the edge of the fair, but it turned out to be a young enthusiast showing off his new exoskeletal armour. Impressive to look at: a series of reinforced steel braces connected by microprocessors, powered by a hulking great power box on his back. But the first time the young inventor powered it up, it coughed and spluttered and then broke his left arm in three places. His moans of pain were drowned out by the laughter of the crowd. Tough audience. His assistants were still trying to prise him out of the exoskeleton when Molly and I moved away.
Since we were on the outskirts of the fair, we took the opportunity to look over the larger items on display, too big to be contained within the fair itself. A vertical-takeoff plane took up a lot of the valley floor, huge and gleaming, with really impressive-looking engines. Half a dozen flying motorbikes with antigrav generators instead of wheels. Even a giant robot some fifty feet tall. They had it sitting down, to keep it inside the fair’s force shields. It was Japanese, of course. They do love their giant robots. But since this one was made by Toyota, no one was taking it too seriously. There was even a massive U.S. Army tank that could be remote-controlled by the operator’s thoughts. It was a prototype, of course, and the current owner was very keen to sell it and disappear, before the U.S. Army turned up looking for it.
Molly and I found the Armourer holding court with a group of his fellow enthusiasts, making disparaging comments about everything on display, and enjoying the general laughter. He was quite happy to see Molly and me again, though he made a point of not knowing who we were in front of his friends. He couldn’t resist showing off in front of us, though, explaining exactly what was wrong with all the oversize items.
“The VTO is a great idea,” he said grandly. “Rises up like an angel, flies like an eagle, steers like a cow. The flying motorbikes are an even better idea, but the antigrav outriders run off batteries that need recharging every twenty minutes, and God help you if the power runs out while you’re still in midair. Don’t even get me started on the giant robot.”
Molly and I took an arm each and steered him firmly away so we could talk to him on his own, and brief him about the appearance of the Satanists.
“Could their appearance have anything to do with these big items?” I said.
“Oh, no, stuff like this turns up every year,” said the Armourer. “It’s not supposed to be practical; it’s engineers showing off. They’re always saying they’ve finally fixed the design flaws, but they never have. Never met a giant robot yet that didn’t trip over its own feet. Satanists, though, that is new. What do they want here?”
“Weapons?” I said. “Like everyone else?”
“People like them usually work through second or even third parties,” said the Armourer. “Never let the left hand know what the left hand’s doing, and all that. And they’ve always been behind-the-scenes types, never showing off in public. Something’s up. . . .”
We were heading back into the fair proper when the massed tuxedos rounded a corner right in front of us. And I recognised one of them. I grabbed Molly and the Armourer and hauled them into a concealing side walkway. The Satanists marched right past us without pausing.
“I recognised the big guy next to the leader,” I explained. “From Lightbringer House.”
“Are you sure?” said the Armourer.
“He got really close to me with a flamethrower,” I said. “You never forget the face of someone who’s tried to kill you. I had my armour on at the time, so he won’t know me; but they all saw your face, Molly. . . .”
She looked after the Satanists and smiled unpleasantly.
“Want me to lure him away from the others and turn him into something soft and squishy?”
“No,” I said. “But if we could lure him away from the pack and scare some information out of him . . . about the Great Sacrifice, for example . . .”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” said the Armourer.
“Hold it, hold it,” said Molly. “You can’t be involved in this. He can’t see your faces. I’m no problem; he’s already seen mine. So you two hold back, and watch a professional at work.”
The Armourer looked at me. “Is she always like this?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
He grinned broadly. “Lucky boy . . .”
We set off purposefully after the Satanists, Molly out in front. But even before she could make a move, something alerted them and they all slammed to a halt as one. Their heads came up like hounds scenting the air, and then they all turned round as one and pointed at Molly. Who was so surprised she stood there and let them do it. The Armourer grabbed me by the arm and hustled me off to one side. I didn’t like leaving Molly on her own, but I couldn’t afford for Shaman Bond to get involved. If people got a good look at what he could actually do, they might start making comparisons with the Droods . . . and I’d never be able to be him again. I liked being Shaman Bond. Molly would understand.
Hell, she’d probably be really mad if I butted in and stole her thunder.
She didn’t seem particularly troubled that all the Satanists had her in their sights. In fact, she was smiling her really dangerous smile.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s do it. Let’s see what you’ve got, boys.”
And to the watching crowd’s surprise, the Satanists turned and ran. They sprinted up the walkway, the leader stabbing his finger at every stall he passed; suddenly every stallholder, every weapons maker and designer blinked out of existence. Molly and the Armourer and I pounded after them, and the crowds scattered to get out of our way. The massed tuxedos broke up, little groups of them charging up and down the narrow walkways, stabbing their fingers at the stalls and disappearing every scientist or engineer who worked on the fair’s weapons.
That was what they’d come here for. Their plan was becoming clearer to me by the moment, now that they’d been forced to commit themselves. Why steal the fair’s weapons when you could steal all the weapons makers and put them to work for you? That was why their leader hadn’t been too concerned when he kept being turned down. He gave them each his card! Probably contained some tracking device, some signal for their teleporter to lock onto. I kept running after the Satanists, and man after man disappeared.
The Satanists had worked this all out in advance. They’d been doing really well until Molly got too close.
The Bloodred Guard came running again, but far too late. The Satanists had made their way right through the fair, from one side to the other, and taken everyone they’d tagged. I looked at the Armourer, and he nodded sharply. We ducked into the concealing shadows of an abandoned booth, subvocalised our activating Words, and armoured up. The freezing cold disappeared in a moment as the golden strange matter swept over me, and I felt like I was fully awake for the first time. I looked at Uncle Jack and saw myself reflected in his gleaming armour: a golden agent of law and order. Or at least, Drood law and Drood order.
We burst out of the booth, and a lot of people started screaming. The crowd took one look at us and scattered, running full-pelt for the exits. The Bloodred Guard stopped dead in their tracks. Uncle Jack and I tore off after the Satanists. One turned, took up a magical stance and thrust a splay-fingered hand at us. A brilliant flare erupted in the air between us, an incandescent glare so bright and vivid my mask had to shut itself down completely, sealing me in darkness to protect my eyes. I could hear people crying out and panicking all about me. I stood still, waiting, and the mask quickly adjusted to the fading glare and cleared again. People were staggering around, clutching at their ruined eyes. The Bloodred Guard were dazed, but recovering. Hard stock, these monks. The Satanist was gone, running full-pelt to catch up with the others at the edge of the fair. The Armourer was already heading after them, and I hurried after him. All across the fair, those who hadn’t been blinded were already charging towards preprepared teleport gates and dimensional doors. None of them wanted anything to do with Droods. Even the stall and booth operators were rabbitting. They thought we’d come to shut them down.
“We let ourselves be played,” the Armourer said harshly as I ran alongside him. “All the time we were laughing at the tuxedos, they were preparing to snatch the weapons makers right out from under our noses! This is bad, boy, really bad.”
“Not least because everyone else thinks we’re responsible for all this!” I said. “Sooner or later, someone is going to get really aggressive with us.”
“We have to stop the Satanists!”
“If we can catch them,” I said.
There was chaos everywhere now, as the whole fair went crazy. Everyone who didn’t have access to the teleports or the dimensional doors was running for the hills, or, more properly, mountains. The telltale shimmer overhead was gone, which meant the force shields were down. No point in hiding, now that the Droods were in the fold. And an increasing number of really pissed-off people weren’t even trying to run. They grabbed the nearest weapons and opened fire on the Armourer and me. And Molly, who’d caught up with us. I moved quickly to put my armour between her and the gunfire. The Armourer dropped back to cover the rear. All kinds of guns opened up on us from every direction at once. The din was deafening. Bullets hammered into me. My armour absorbed them all easily, and the Armourer sucked up punishment behind me. Molly ducked down between us and peered interestedly out to either side.
“I think we’ve upset them,” she said. “I’ve never had so many guns aimed at me at one time before. It’s really quite exhilarating. Are you going to call in reinforcements from your family?”
“I hardly think so,” said the Armourer, turning calmly this way and that so his armour could absorb bullets more efficiently. “Two Droods are more than enough. I think we need to shut this event down, Eddie. Preserving the fair is no longer a credible option. Take as many of them alive as you can; we can use their information. And some of them are old friends, after all. . . .”
“You have to admire his ambition,” Molly said to me.
Half a dozen men pressed forward to the front of the crowd and opened up on us with heavy-duty automatic weapons. The bullets hammered into my armoured chest and head, and flew past me to chew up the nearby stalls. One of the flimsier structures all but disintegrated, collapsing in a cloud of dust and pulverised wood and metal. I walked steadily forward into the hail of bullets, my armour soaking up the impact so I didn’t feel a thing. The Armourer waded into the people in front of him, golden fists rising and falling, and unconscious and broken bodies crashed to the ground. Uncle Jack seemed to be quite happy to be back in the field again.