“Shut down the far-seers!” shouted the Sarjeant-at-Arms, running forward. “I told you to shut down the whole section!”
“Armour up!” Ethel’s voice said suddenly, out of nowhere. “Everyone armour up! My strange matter will protect you!”
We all put our armour on, and the whole War Room was full of gleaming golden figures. The golden man who had been the Sarjeant-at-Arms moved forward, pushing others out of his way, and smashed the scrying pool with one armoured fist. The silver ectoplasm lost coherence immediately and ran away down the legs of the workstation. We all waited a moment, but nothing else happened. The Sarjeant grabbed up a fire extinguisher and put out the two burning far-seers. Their charred and blackened bodies just stood there. Callan gestured for some of his people to come and take them away and escort the surviving far-seers out of the War Room to the nearest hospital ward. The Sarjeant-at-Arms glared around him.
“All right, everyone armour down! The danger’s over. But stay cautious! Callan, you and Eddie stay in your armour, with me. You’re always boasting about your old scrying skills, Callan; use that magic mirror on the next bench, and See what you can See.”
Callan nodded stiffly, and then glanced at Molly. “You’d better stay back. You won’t have armour to protect you.”
“Please,” said Molly. “Remember whom you’re talking to.”
“Ah. Yes . . . quite,” said Callan. “On your own head be it.” He nodded to the Sarjeant and me. “Let’s do this.”
He moved over to the next bench, still covered with its shimmering screen. The Sarjeant and I moved in on either side of him, and Molly leaned in. At first all I could see was a dark bloodred light, shining from some new and terrible kind of sun. The town buildings stood as they always had, but the air in the streets shook and trembled like some unearthly heat wave. There were great cracks and rents the whole length of the road, as though earthquakes had torn through the underlying strata. As I watched, some of the rents slammed back together again, and then reappeared, like doors opening and closing. Waiting for something to come through them. And there was something
wrong
about the buildings. In slow and subtle ways they seemed to slump, to seep, to fall in on themselves, as though they couldn’t quite be bothered to keep up the facade of normality. Some of the shop signs were misspelt, or garbled, or just plain gibberish. Or perhaps words from unknown languages. Doors and windows were set in the wrong places, or in the wrong proportions, or tilted at crazy angles. As though the madness in this place were infecting the very structure of the buildings.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I said quietly to Molly.
“Not on this earth,” she said.
I looked to Callan, and he shrugged uneasily. “We’re getting some information as to what’s happening inside the dark circle, but there’s no telling how dependable the readings are. . . . The very building blocks of reality have been compromised. No linear time, no cause and effect, everything changing for no purpose, from moment to moment. . . .”
“The Satanists have blown apart the very rules that hold everything together,” said Molly. “Dropped a whole town into chaos. That’s some bomb. . . .”
“We can’t be sure they’re behind this,” said Callan. “Not yet. More important, we haven’t a clue how they did this. That’s why I called in the Armourer.”
He looked hopefully at my uncle Jack, but the Armourer shrugged without looking up from whatever he was working on.
“Would even Drood armour be enough to protect me in such an environment?” I asked him.
Molly looked at me sharply. “You’re not thinking of going in there, are you?”
“There could be survivors,” I said. “People trapped in there. What do you think, Ethel? It’s your armour.”
“I don’t know!” Ethel’s voice sounded definitely troubled, issuing from somewhere above us. “It ought to, but this is all new to me. I can’t see inside the dark circle, but from what you’re seeing . . . I’ve never encountered such extreme conditions before; and I’ve been around. But I designed your armour to survive whatever your reality could throw at it. And since strange matter comes from my domain, not yours . . . Roll the dice, and see what happens! I can’t wait to find out!”
“Sometimes her endless enthusiasm can get a bit creepy,” murmured Molly.
“I heard that!”
“Somebody’s got to go in there,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms, moving forward to glare at the images on the screen. “We have to figure out how this was done, before the conspiracy does it somewhere else. Next time they might go for a city. And yes, Edwin, we do need to check for possible survivors as well.”
“You’re all heart, Cedric,” I said.
“But . . . why pick a nowhere place like Little Stoke?” said Callan.
“To test their new weapon,” said the Armourer, looking up from doing something unnatural with a bunch of silicon chips and some mistletoe.
“Then why remove the people before they unleash the weapon?” said Molly.
“Maybe they want them for test subjects for other weapons,” said the Sarjeant.
“I don’t like the way we’re playing catch-up with the conspiracy,” I said. “Always one step behind. I say we storm Lightbringer House in force, use every field agent available. Smash through their defences, grab everyone there and ask them a whole bunch of really pointed questions.”
“Way ahead of you, as always.” The Sarjeant-at-Arms sniffed. “We sent our people in while you and the Armourer were off playing tourist at the Supernatural Arms Faire. But the Satanist conspiracy people were all long gone. Their files with them. And no, they didn’t leave a forwarding address. They stripped the place clean and vanished into the undergrowth the moment you and the Metcalf sisters left the premises. Some of our best people are currently tearing the whole building apart, in case they missed something, but right now there’s no sign anyone was ever there.”
“Hold it,” I said. “No booby traps?”
“They left in a really big hurry,” said the Sarjeant.
“Something must have frightened them,” Molly said artlessly. “But then, Iz and I always did believe in making an impression.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t leave skid marks,” I said solemnly.
“Try to be serious, Edwin,” said the Sarjeant. “This is a serious situation.”
“I know,” I said. “Someone has to go into Little Stoke and see if anyone survived.”
“Of course,” said the Sarjeant. “I’m sure survivors could provide us with valuable information as to what happened.”
“No,” I said flatly. “We go in and rescue them, because that’s what Droods do. We exist to stand between the innocents and the horrors of the hidden world.”
“Ah, Eddie,” said Harry, drifting over to join us. “Always intent on the small things, and missing out on the big picture. Anyone who got left behind in that town wouldn’t survive long under those conditions. It’s already too late for them. Which means we need to concentrate all our resources on working out how this appalling attack was orchestrated. Here’s your tea, Callan. They were all out of Jaffa Cakes.”
Callan accepted his tea with bad grace and sipped at it suspiciously before grudgingly nodding approval. “Always said you’d make a good tea boy, Harry.” And then he looked round sharply as a far-seer farther down the row called out to him urgently. We all hurried down to join the young man at his station, and he goggled for a moment, overwhelmed at having so many important members of the family all staring at him at once. But give the man credit; he recovered quickly and nodded jerkily at the monitor screen before him.
“Virgil Drood, at your service. Don’t blame the messenger. I picked this up off the feed we’re intercepting from the CIA satellite. What you’re looking at is a hill outside the dark circle. Conditions there are completely unaffected by . . . whatever’s happened in the town. It seems we have observers, just teleported in. Ten men, three women, some of them . . . familiar faces.”
We all crowded in around him, studying the screen. Thirteen people were standing on top of a grassy green hill overlooking what had been Little Stoke, chatting cheerfully among themselves. It was only a visual image—no sound. One of the men was Alexandre Dusk, leader of the Lightbringer House Satanists. And standing right next to him was Roger Morningstar, son of the legendary James Drood and a lust demon out of Hell. The half-breed hellspawn who fought alongside the Droods because he’d fallen in love with one of us. And now there he was, standing quite chummily with Dusk, nodding and smiling as they looked down on the dark circle below. They both seemed quite pleased with what they’d done. Harry turned to Callan.
“We need sound. We need to hear what they’re saying.”
“I’m sorry,” said Virgil. “We’re lucky to have visual under these conditions. Getting sound is going to take some time.”
“Then get a lip-reader in here! We must have one somewhere. We need to know what they’re saying!”
Alexandre Dusk looked round suddenly, and seemed to stare right out of the screen at us. I don’t think he could See us, but he knew someone could See him. He smiled a wintry smile, snapped his fingers, and the image disappeared from the screen. Virgil worked his controls fiercely and then sat heavily back in his chair with frustration.
“We’ve lost the feed.”
“Then get it back!” said Harry.
“You don’t understand! The feed is gone because the satellite is gone. It isn’t there anymore. Something blasted it right out of orbit. And according to my readings, the observers are gone, too. I suppose it’s too much to hope that they might have blown up, too.”
He tried an uncertain smile on us, but none of us was in the mood for even the slightest of jokes. We all looked at one another, and then we looked at Harry, who’d moved away a little to be on his own. He was rubbing his chin with jerky, shocked movements, thinking hard.
“I didn’t even know Roger had left the Hall,” he said almost plaintively. “He didn’t tell me he was going anywhere. Ethel, when did Roger Morningstar leave Drood Hall?”
“Right after the last council meeting, when you were all together,” said Ethel. “He left on his own, through a dimensional door he created on the grounds.”
“Didn’t you ask him where he was going?” said Harry.
“Not my place,” said Ethel. “You people do so value your privacy, even if I still don’t understand why.”
“Once a hellspawn, always a hellspawn,” the Sarjeant-at-Arms said heavily. “I did warn you, Harry. Everyone warned you. Never trust a hellspawn.”
“Roger’s been . . . different ever since he returned from Hell,” said Harry. “The trip you insisted he go on! Maybe they did something to him there. . . .”
“The question is,” said the Sarjeant, talking right over Harry as he addressed the rest of us, “how long has the hellspawn been working against us? How long has he been conspiring with our enemies, passing on secret information, including details of our missions?”
“No need to rub it in, Sarjeant,” I said.
“He was present at council meetings!” said the Sarjeant. “Because of you, Harry! Think of all the things he knows about this family! I’ll have to reset all the security measures, change all the codes and passwords, beef up our defences . . . and recheck every piece of information acquired from every mission he was involved with!”
“He fought alongside us against the Hungry Gods, and the Accelerated Men, and the Immortals!” said Harry. “He risked his life to fight in our cause, because of me! There must be a reason for this. . . . I have to go to Little Stoke.”
And then he stopped and couldn’t say any more. His face had gone pale and sweaty, and his hands were shaking. I knew why. We all did. He was remembering his time in the ghoulvilles, towns taken over by the Loathly Ones and removed into a separate reality. Terrible places. Sanity destroying. Soul destroying. We all knew Harry had been affected by what he’d seen there, what he’d had to do there. None of us said anything. A lot of Droods came back spiritually wounded from fighting in the ghoulvilles. Those who did come back.
“Roger’s not there anymore,” I said, carefully. “You heard Virgil; he and the others teleported out.”
“I have to know,” said Harry. “I have to be sure. I need to talk to him. . . .”
“Of course you do,” I said. “But there’ll be another time. I have to go into Little Stoke. You have to stay here. You’re needed in the War Room to help Callan and the Armourer work out how this was done. And there’s always the chance Roger might return here to the Hall. You need to be here for that.”
“Why would Roger come back?” said Callan, to show he was keeping up with the rest of us.
“Because Dusk doesn’t know who was watching him on the hilltop,” said the Sarjeant. “The hellspawn doesn’t know that we know he’s a traitor.”
“We don’t know that!” said Harry. “And Roger would know who was watching him. He’s always been very . . . gifted. He won’t come back here because he’d know I’d be waiting for him. I wouldn’t shoot him on sight, and I wouldn’t let anyone else do it. I’d want to talk to him. Hear his side. But if he really has joined the conspiracy . . . he hasn’t betrayed just me; he’s betrayed my family. His family, as much as mine.”
“No one would expect you to go up against Roger,” I said.
“I would,” said Harry. “If he has turned traitor . . . I will kill him. Anything for the family.”
Hell hath no fury like a lover scorned,
I thought, but had enough sense not to say out loud.
“I’m going to Little Stoke,” I said. Because it needed doing, and because I knew a trip into that disturbed place would destroy Harry. So, tired as I was after the arms fair and Ammonia Vom Acht, it was all down to me. Again.
“You are not going in on your own,” Molly said firmly. “I’m going with you.”
“Not a good idea . . .” I said carefully.
“You never take me anywhere,” Molly said cheerfully. “You wouldn’t last ten minutes in that place without me to watch your back, and you know it.”