“I know the details of the key,” the Armourer said quietly. “So does the Sarjeant-at-Arms. No one else. Not even the Matriarch knew how to access Alpha Red Alpha, by her own command. It’s too dangerous. Eddie, you’re always complaining the family keeps secrets from you . . . this should cure you of that. Follow me down the ladder. Mind your step, don’t crowd me and when we get to the bottom don’t wander off and
don’t touch anything.
”
He went down the iron steps with an ease and agility that belied his years. The show-off. I followed him down more cautiously, and Molly brought up the rear, sticking so close to me she practically trod on my fingers. The trapdoor slammed shut over us the moment we were all inside. I was still in my armour. I have a tendency to do that when descending into complete darkness containing unknown threats. The steps seemed to fall and fall away below me, going down and down until my leg and back muscles began to cramp from the strain. The only sounds were the clanging of our feet on the iron steps, and the Armourer’s loud breathing below.
“It’s all right!” he yelled back up cheerfully. “The trapdoor’s supposed to do that! Safety feature. Not so much to keep lab assistants out as to keep anything here from coming up into the Hall.”
“Like what?” Molly said immediately.
“No idea,” said the Armourer. “But it’s best not to take chances.”
After enough descending that I was getting really fed up with it, I finally reached the end of the ladder, and my armoured feet found a rough stone floor. I stepped away from the ladder to get out of Molly’s way, and lights suddenly flared up, dazzling me for a moment. My mask quickly compensated for the glare, and I looked round a massive stone cavern stretching away in all directions. My first impression was that the cavern had to be bigger than the Hall itself, but that couldn’t be right, or the Hall would have collapsed into it long ago. Even so, it was really big. . . . The stone walls were covered with line after line of carefully delineated mathematical symbols, none of which meant anything to me. I looked at Molly, and she shrugged.
“Mathemagics,” the Armourer said cheerfully. “Designer theory, only supercharged. Don’t look at them too long, or your eyes will start to bleed.”
He had more to say on the subject, but I wasn’t listening. I was looking at what the huge cave contained, packing it from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, with only narrow walkways between: strange machines and intricate technology, and weird objects that might have been really high-tech or particularly worrying examples of abstract art. No flashing lights, no obvious control panels; often one piece would seem to slide or evolve into the next. Some parts were actually blurred or indistinct, as though my eyes couldn’t properly understand what they were seeing. Mile upon mile of colour-coded cables stretched back and forth across the cavern, linking everything together, and hung in a complicated web between the upper heights and the ceiling. I moved slowly forward into what I reluctantly recognised as one big machine. It was like walking through a technological jungle. Molly stuck close by my side. The Armourer was, of course, already ahead of us, bumbling along with his hands in his coat pockets, muttering happily to himself.
Things were constantly moving, rising and falling, or turning this way and that. Other parts leaned and slumped and sort of merged into one another. Some were slowly changing shape, as though unable to settle, humming loudly to themselves in an important sort of way. There were even things that seemed to be watching me thoughtfully. I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Except that for a machine that hadn’t been used in years, an awful lot of it seemed to be very busy. . . . All I knew for sure was that being down here creeped the hell out of me. It didn’t feel like a place where people should be, where anything as limited and fragile as people had any business being.
All my instincts were yelling at me to get the hell out while I still could, or at the very least give the machine a good kicking to make sure it knew its place.
“Armour down, Eddie,” the Armourer said quietly. “We don’t want to start anything.”
I did so, reluctantly. The first thing that hit me was how warm the cavern was, almost uncomfortably hot and humid. There was bristling static in the air, which smelt of iron filings and something burning. Molly slipped her arm through mine, and I patted her hand absently.
“Try not to be so impressed,” the Armourer said dryly. “It’s only a machine. All right, there’s a lot here I don’t understand as yet, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be useful to the family. Your great-uncle Francis was a brilliant man, Eddie, and only occasionally seriously disturbed. Yes . . . I can handle this. Turn it on. And off. Everything else should run itself, I think.”
“Given how seriously wrong your first little trip went,” said Molly, “why keep this around? I know something really potentially dangerous when I see it, and I’m looking at it right now.”
“Because Francis always had a reason for everything he did,” the Armourer said patiently. “Not always an obvious reason . . . Alpha Red Alpha was never intended to be just a bolt-hole for us to hide in; he had all sorts of ideas for it. He wrote them down in his workbooks, and one day we’re going to break that code, and then, my word, we’ll know a thing or two. No, Molly, Droods never throw anything away that might be useful someday. And this would appear to be Alpha Red Alpha’s day. I do see what you mean, though. To be honest, being down here after all these years is disturbing the piss out of me.”
He came to a sudden halt before one huge machine as big as a house, rising all the way up to the high ceiling. It was like a plunging waterfall frozen into solid crystal, with glowing wires running through it like multicoloured veins, etched with row upon row of strange symbols and studded with pieces of clearly alien-derived technology. It all surrounded a massive hourglass some twenty feet tall, fashioned from solid silver and glass so perfect you could barely see it was there. The top section of the hourglass was full of shimmering golden sand, all of it in place, with not one golden mote falling down into the chamber below.
“When I activate Alpha Red Alpha,” said the Armourer, “the golden sands will start to fall. And the engine will rotate us out of this reality and into another. When the bottom section is full, it means we’ve arrived. Upon return, the golden sands will fly back up again. As I recall, it’s really quite . . . unnatural to look at.”
“All of this?” I said. “Built around an hourglass?”
The Armourer nodded unhappily. “Your great-uncle Francis was a seriously weird person.”
Molly and I went back up into the Armoury, leaving Uncle Jack with the dimensional engine. He said he needed some quality time with it. The trip back up the iron ladder didn’t seem to take nearly as long as the trip down; perhaps that was a safety feature, too. Once we were both back in the Armoury, I shut the trapdoor and contacted Ethel to ask where the Sarjeant-at-Arms was.
“He’s in the ops room, Eddie, being very in charge. And can I just say, whatever it is you’ve got down in that hole, I don’t like it. It’s far too complicated for its own good, and it puts my teeth on edge. And I don’t even have teeth.”
There didn’t really seem to be any answer to that, so Molly and I stepped through the Merlin Glass into the operations room. We could have walked, but the ops room is all the way across the Hall, in the south wing, and I didn’t think we had the time. Besides, people would have wanted to stop me and ask questions, and I wasn’t in the mood. The guards on duty in the operations room nodded brusquely to Molly and me as we appeared out of nowhere, which was a sign of how much things had changed. The leader of the ops room is Howard, a buttoned-down man in a buttoned-down suit that doesn’t suit him. He nodded quickly to me and went back to studying his display screens. Howard has incredible organisational skills and a very real sense of passion where the family’s security is concerned. He used to be one of the Armourer’s finest lab assistants, but he turned out a bit too serious for that, so the Matriarch kicked him upstairs, where he could work out his basic vindictiveness against the family’s enemies in a more useful way.
The operations room is our really high-tech centre, designed to oversee all the Hall’s defences, from force shields to weapons systems to really powerful long-range sensors. The surprisingly reasonably sized room was always packed full of the very latest equipment and the besttrained technicians to run it all. But there was none of the hustle-bustle and basic urgency that always characterise the War Room. These people knew their job and performed their various tasks calmly and expertly, standing between the family and all the outside forces that would threaten us. They sat in comfortable chairs before technology they knew better than the backs of their own hands, and everything they might need was always within reach. There was a really long waiting list to work in the ops room.
The Sarjeant-at-Arms turned away from the communications people to talk briefly with Howard, and then moved over to join Molly and me.
“I’ve put together the army you wanted, Edwin. Nearly eighty percent of the family are ready to go to war. Those too young or too old to fight will make up a skeleton staff, to run all the necessary systems in our absence. No one wanted to be left out.”
“Maybe we should leave some behind,” I said. “In case we don’t make it back.”
The Sarjeant shook his head firmly. “They all know what’s at stake, and they all want to be a part of the fight. The Satanists can’t be allowed to win, or there’d be no point in coming back. Everyone’s ready; we’re waiting for you to provide us with a target.”
So I told him about the Timeless Moment, and Alpha Red Alpha, and the Sarjeant took it all in his stride. Right up to the point where William the Librarian suddenly appeared in the ops room wearing a flak jacket and jeans and a Rambo-style headband, demanding loudly to be allowed to join the attack force. I couldn’t help noticing he was still wearing his bunny slippers. He strode up to us, looking awkward but determined, and the technicians he passed stopped what they were doing to look at him with surprise and something very like awe. They’d all heard of the Librarian, and his story had only grown in the telling. None of them had ever seen him before. In fact, this was the first time that I knew of that he’d left the Old Library, except to appear very reluctantly for the occasional council meeting. I was surprised he could even find operations without a ball of string to follow. I nodded easily to the Sarjeant as the Librarian joined us.
“Oh, yes, I forgot to mention. The Librarian says he wants to go into battle, too.”
“No, Uncle William,” the Sarjeant said very firmly. “You can’t join the actual fighting. You’re far too valuable to the family.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere, young Cedric,” said the Librarian. “I have to do this. Those Satanist arse-wipes are holding Ammonia prisoner, and I have to rescue her. I have to. I owe her.”
The Sarjeant looked at me. “Is he . . . ?”
“Apparently,” I said. “When she made contact with his mind, it seems she made quite an impression on him.”
“But she looks like . . .”
“Looks aren’t everything, Cedric,” I said sternly.
“She has a magnificent mind,” said William dreamily. “Really. You have no idea. I’m sure we’ve got a lot in common.”
We all looked at one another, but none of us felt like saying anything. There was always the chance that Ammonia had put something inside the Librarian’s head, something to make herself attractive to him . . . but would William’s friend Pook have stood for that? I didn’t think so. Still, Ammonia and the Librarian . . . I hadn’t seen that one coming. Maybe it was the meeting of two minds. . . .
And, of course, she was already married. But then, the course of true love never did run smooth. I didn’t say any of this out loud. I didn’t want Molly laughing at me. She always says I’m far too romantic for my own good. And this from a woman who reads one bodice ripper after another.
“You have to let me in on this,” William said stubbornly, “because I know where we’re going—into the Timeless Moment. Laurence wrote a whole book about what he found inside that unnatural place. Ah, you didn’t know he’d actually gone in there, did you? He led a team of local resistance fighters in, to attack the satanic conspiracy in their headquarters. Seems the Satanists built themselves a very special home away from home inside the Timeless Moment. A castle, Schloss Shreck—or, more properly, Castle Horror. He had a lot to say about it, and I’ve read every word of it. So I’m going with you, Cedric. Because you’re going to need what I know.”
I looked at the Sarjeant, leaving it up to him, and he sighed quietly. “You’re going to have to look after him, Edwin. I am going to be too busy killing Satanists.”
“Hold hard,” I said. “Back up and go previous. You need to understand we’re not just going in there to kill everything that moves that isn’t us. There are people in this castle who need rescuing. The townspeople of Little Stoke, Molly’s sister Isabella and, most probably, Ammonia Vom Acht. Maybe even some of the abducted weapons makers from the Supernatural Arms Faire. Some of them might have refused to work for Satanists, and some of them are old friends of the Armourer. This can’t be only an extermination run, Sarjeant; it’s a rescue mission, too.”
“We’ll do what we can for those people,” said the Sarjeant. “Bring them all safely home if we can. But our first priority has to be putting the conspiracy out of business before they can start the Great Sacrifice. All the children in all the world are depending on us. The Satanists aren’t going to surrender or negotiate; either we kill all of them or they’ll kill all of us. They have to be wiped out to the last man, very definitely including this mysterious leader of theirs, or it could all start up again. This is war, Edwin, to the last man, or the last Drood, if need be.”
“Understood, Sarjeant,” I said. “When will your army be ready to go?”