“You look like you’re ready for a fight,” I said. “Good. I’ll lead you through the Merlin Glass. No armour—not yet. We don’t want to freak any innocent passersby. Straight across the car park and into the hotel. Armour up then. The Satanists have block-booked the hotel, to ensure their privacy. So once you’re in there, if they’re not clearly hotel staff, stamp them into the ground. No warnings, no mercy. They won’t be taking prisoners and neither will we. Except for their leaders: Alexandre Dusk, Roger Morningstar and anyone with them. Take them alive, if you can. We have questions.”
“Kill them if they stand; kill them if they run,” the Sarjeant said bluntly. “Don’t hold back. For everything these bastards have done, and everything they plan to do . . . death is the only answer, the only justice.”
“The mind-influencing machine should be on the premises somewhere,” I said. “Take it intact, if you can. Just to make the Armourer’s day. But if it looks like someone’s trying to run it, kill them and smash the machine. Your armour should protect you from all outside influences, but we’re not taking any chances on this mission. All right, that’s it. Good hunting.”
I strode through the Merlin Glass, Molly at my side, Harry and the Sarjeant all but treading on my heels. The Drood army filed through after us. In a few moments we were all through the Glass and spreading out across the empty car park. And that was when it all changed. The calm and quiet scene before us disappeared, gone in a moment, swept away like the illusion it always was. Between us and the hotel stood a massive army, thousands of heavily armed Satanists, with Alexandre Dusk standing at their head . . . smiling complacently at me.
“It’s a trap!” yelled the Sarjeant. “Defend the Glass! It’s our way home!”
But when we all turned to look, the Merlin Glass was only a twenty-foot-square mirror reflecting our shocked faces. I tried half a dozen different control Words, but the Glass was just a glass. The Satanists had blocked it again, like they had in Under Parliament. I was getting really tired of that. I turned to Molly.
“It was all false information, designed to lure us into a trap. Could Isabella have been turned? Could she have been one of them all along?”
“No!” Molly said immediately. “She couldn’t hide something like that from me. She never had any time for Satanists. They must have captured her. No wonder we saw only a sending in the Sanctity. It was an illusion, never her at all. What have you done with my sister, Dusk, you Satanist scumbag?”
Alexandre Dusk smiled easily at Molly and me. He looked very relaxed, very at his ease, as though he were out to enjoy the sunny day, not standing at the head of an army ten times the size of mine. He nodded easily to me, the condescending bastard.
“Why do you think Roger let you go?” he said, in an infuriatingly reasonable tone of voice. We knew Molly and Isabella were still hanging around, waiting for a chance to jump in and rescue you, so we made that possible. When they teleported you out, we were waiting, and it was a simple task for a few of our more accomplished sorcerers to reach in and grab Isabella and materialise her in one of our places of power. She never even saw it coming. And while she is a very talented young lady, we have some very powerful people of our own these days. People who can tell which way the wind is blowing.
“Then all we had to do was send you the image of her, and have her say our words with her mouth. Present you with an urgent deadline so you didn’t have time to think about it, and an opportunity too good to resist. So you’d charge right in, Eddie, like you always do. And here we all are! Ah . . . so many Droods in one place. Unprecedented! So many torcs for us to take from your dead bodies and make our own.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “Like that’s going to happen.”
Dusk’s smile didn’t falter in the least. “I’m really looking forward to this, Eddie. There are still those in the world waiting for you to save them from us; I shall make a point of sending a severed Drood’s head to each and every one of them, to stamp out that last trace of hope.”
“Arrogant little prick,” I said. “You’re facing an army of Droods. A sane man would be running by now. Not that it would do any good.”
“One hundred and seven Droods, by my count,” said Dusk, still entirely unruffled, and I was beginning to wonder why. “Whereas I have one thousand three hundred highly motivated men and women, armed with all the very latest weapons. Your precious and much-vaunted armour is a thing of the past. You are yesterday’s men. We are cutting-edge.”
I had to smile. “You didn’t keep up with the memos, did you? We’ve upgraded.”
Dusk made an annoyed, frustrated gesture, upset that we weren’t properly impressed and taking his threats seriously. “You’re all going to die, Droods! And your pathetic antiquated morality with you!”
“Not going to happen,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms briskly. “A battle can go either way; any good soldier knows that. But even if you should destroy all of us, it wouldn’t make any difference. Whatever happens, the family goes on. Droods maintain.”
“You don’t know what you’re facing,” said Dusk, his voice cold though his face was flushed. He wasn’t finding this as much fun as he’d thought he would. He kept giving us the right feed lines, and we kept refusing our cues. We were supposed to realise we were already beaten and shiver in our shoes, try to surrender, maybe even beg for mercy so he could laugh in our faces as he turned us down. We shouldn’t only be staring defiantly back at him and laughing in his face. He gestured at the ranks and ranks lined up behind him. “Allow me to present our very latest acquisition, courtesy of one of those brilliant minds we abducted from the Supernatural Arms Faire. We have our own armour now. Modern armour. He really was ready to present Drood-equivalent armour at the fair this year, only we got to him first. Step forward, boys.”
A dozen men stepped forward to show themselves off. At least, I assumed they were men. It was hard to tell.
“This new armour is state-of-the-art living superplastic, pre-programmed to follow direct instructions from its wearer via a cybernetic mind-link,” Dusk said proudly. “Indestructible, endlessly adaptable, capable of taking on any shape or function the mind of the wearer can conceive. A thousand weapons in one, combined with an absolute defence. Every wearer an army in his own right.”
And then he stopped, because there was a certain amount of quiet sniggering going on in the Drood ranks. Dusk glared back and forth.
“Sorry,” I said. “Terribly rude, I know, but . . . is that it? Really?
That
’s your modern armour?”
“They look like toy soldiers,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms.
He had a point. They did. Covered from head to toe in a dull grey plastic, smooth and featureless, like grown men dipped in liquid plastic and allowed to harden. I kept wanting to look at their feet for the bases they should be standing on. Some of them were holding plastic rifles, the material of the guns blending seamlessly into their plastic hands. Their faces were rough and blurred versions of the features under the plastic, like any toy soldier.
“Go!” Dusk said angrily to his plastic men. “Show them what you can do! A special bonus to the first man to bring me a Drood head!”
The plastic men surged forward inhumanly quickly, followed by more than fifty others from the ranks. The plastic armour stretched smoothly with every movement. Those without guns extruded swords and axes from their plastic hands, with fiercely sharp edges. Some had rifles; some had handguns; some had machine guns, though I still hadn’t worked out what they were going to fire. Plastic bullets? Against Drood armour?
And then . . . it all started to go wrong. The plastic armour began to change, the basic grey flushing with bursts of swirling colours. Dark, angry shades of red and blue and green, feverish purples and sick yellows. Swirling on the surface of the plastic armour like infected oil slicks.
The wearers stumbled to a halt and looked at one another confusedly. Strange bulges and eruptions rose and fell in the armour, the surface bubbling and seething as it burst out in new shapes. Some hunched over; some sprouted wings; some grew extra arms. Shocked and startled voices cried out from inside the armour. Some blossomed into strange new shapes, violent and aggressive and increasingly inhuman, reflecting the thoughts and wishes and inner needs of the wearers. Some became medieval demons, complete with horned heads and cloven hooves and clawed hands. Roger Morningstar had clearly made an impression.
But the changes didn’t stop there. The men inside the armour were screaming now, in pain and horror and anguish, begging for help. Some of them became living gargoyles, twisted and misshapen. Some expanded jerkily, in bursts and spurts, till they were ten, twenty feet tall, wavering uncertainly as they struggled to support their own weight. Others became warped, monstrous things, horribly inhuman, the kind of things that chase us in nightmares. Dusk’s army was crying out in shock and alarm, and beginning to back away, shouting that something had gone wrong. And it had. The changes continued, the plastic armour forming horrid abstract shapes from the depths of the unconscious mind. Things that hurt the human eye to look at, impossible for the conscious mind to deal with.
I knew what was happening. The living superplastic was linked directly to the wearer’s mind through a cybernetic implant. Similar to how Droods operate our armour. But these new armoured men hadn’t had Drood training. In the family, we are taught from an early age how to control what we think about our armour, so we always have full conscious control. These unfortunate men had lost control to their subconscious minds, and were producing shapes from the under-mind, reflecting hidden needs and desires. Monsters from the id. Evil shapes, monstrous forms, nightmare impulses never meant to escape into the waking world. Without the mental discipline drilled into every Drood from childhood, the armour was giving each wearer what he really wanted. . . .
The plastic shapes were constantly changing now, flickering from one thing to another in the blink of an eye, directed by long-buried needs and unacknowledged motivations. Clashing appetites and raw jealousies and sexual hungers ran loose, given form and purpose in the ever-adaptable superplastic. Until finally they turned on one another, the Drood enemy forgotten in their instinctive need to pay off old hurts and envies. No discipline, no direction, just every man for himself. Except that what was left inside the plastic armour wasn’t really men at all.
I turned to the Sarjeant-at-Arms. “I’ve had enough of this. They’re Satanists. Hit them hard, Sarjeant.”
“Like I need you to tell me that,” he said, and charged forward, yelling for his men to follow him. And we did.
We all surged forward, glorious in our gleaming golden armour, and slammed into the front ranks of the enemy. The plastic shapes didn’t stand a chance against our strange-matter weapons. The men and women beyond them had weapons of all kinds, scientific and magical, most of it strictly forbidden. And none of it was worth a damn against Drood armour. When the bullets and energy blasts and attack magics broke and shattered and ran harmlessly away from our armour, their confidence broke. They had no discipline, had no idea what to do; they’d been told to expect a weakened, demoralised enemy, and they’d believed it, the fools. We moved swiftly among them, striking them down with spiked gloved fists and golden swords and axes. Bones broke and shattered, flesh pulped and blood flew on the air. We had no mercy in us. Not for them. Not after what they’d done, and what they planned to do. We were fighting to save a whole generation of children from slaughter and horror. We struck the Satanists down and trampled them underfoot in our eagerness to get to the next target, a wild and vicious exhilaration in our hearts.
We were born to fight evil, but we rarely get our hands on the real thing.
We slammed through the enemy ranks, and they shattered and fell apart before us. Some fought; most turned to run; none escaped. The Sarjeant saw to that. He sent his people off to surround the enemy and block their escape routes, driving them back to their deaths. Some threw down their weapons, tried to surrender, begged and cried for their lives. But we had no time for that. They gave up every right to civilised treatment when they joined the Satanists. They had sworn their lives and souls to evil, given up everything that made them human.
You can’t simply join the Satanists. You have to buy your way in with blood and murder, horror and the suffering of innocents. You have to do things from which there can be no coming back, no chance of atonement or redemption. You don’t just sell your soul; you spit on it and throw it away.
They belonged to Hell, and that’s where we sent them.
I moved steadily through the ranks of the enemy, smashing in chests and crushing skulls, moved by an implacable cold rage. I have always thought of myself as an agent, not an assassin, but if ever I have felt justified in what I do and what I am, it was on that day. Some evils are so great all you can do is stamp them out to keep them from contaminating Humanity. But even as I fought I never lost control, because it wasn’t enough to just strike down the rank and file. Dusk was still out there somewhere. And if he got to the mind-influencing machine . . . I fought on through the ranks, my spiked golden fists rising and falling tirelessly while blood ran endlessly down my armour . . . heading for the Cathedral Hotel.
Molly was right there with me, grabbing Satanists by their shirt-fronts, hauling them in close and screaming, “Where’s my sister? Where’s Isabella? What have you done with her?” right into their faces. But no one even knew what she was talking about, so she threw them aside and moved on, searching for someone who would know. Now and again someone would make the mistake of attacking her, and Molly would strike them down with some swift and nasty magic and keep going.
I’d almost reached the far edge of the conflict when Harry suddenly ran past me, leaving the fighting behind and heading for the hotel. The Sarjeant yelled angrily after him, thinking he was abandoning the battle, but I knew where he was going. I hadn’t seen Roger Morningstar anywhere in the ranks of the army, which meant that if he was here he was inside the hotel. Harry was going to find him. So I went after him. The fight was already won; it didn’t need either of us. And if Roger was there, I wanted to be there when he met Harry.