“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.
The armed m
en in front of me stopped firing and fell back to let someone else through. He was carrying a massive armament known in the trade as Puff the Magic Dragon. He was a big man, and he still had to strain to carry the thing and point it in my general direction. He opened fire, and the long barrel pumped out five thousand explosive rounds a second. The sheer pressure of so many bullets slamming into me at once actually pushed me backwards. My strange matter was absorbing every single bullet and suppressing every explosion, but the sheer impact pressed me back like a fire hose. Until I dug my golden heels in. The wooden boards shattered underneath me, and my golden feet dug deep into the hard, stony ground. My backward momentum slowed and then stopped, my golden feet leaving long, deep grooves in the ground. I held my position, leaning slightly forward into the thundering fire, like a swimmer breasting the tide. And then, step by step, I forced my way forward against the pressure of the bullets. They hammered into me, raking across my chest and gut and then up to my head, but none of them could touch me. Until finally I stood right before the man and his gun, close enough that he could see his white, wide-eyed face reflected in my featureless golden mask. And then I ripped Puff the Magic Dragon out of his nerveless hands, broke it over my knee and crumpled the two pieces into junk with my armoured hands.
“Run,” I said. And he did.
I looked around, and Molly stepped out from behind a particularly sturdy booth. Even a Metcalf sister has enough sense to hide from that dragon. A man with an automatic rifle stepped out from a booth opposite and opened fire on her. I didn’t even have time to react. Molly stuck out one hand, and the bullets turned into butterflies in midair long before they reached her. Pretty pink butterflies, like animated scraps of sugar floss. But Molly had been through a lot recently, and her magic resources had to be running low. And the man didn’t seem to be running out of bullets. They inched steadily closer towards her before turning into butterflies and flying away. I left it as long as I could, for Molly’s pride’s sake, but in the end I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I picked up the nearest booth and hit the man with it. He disappeared from sight without a sound. Molly lowered her hand, breathed heavily for a moment and then glared at me.
“I could have taken him!”
“Of course you could,” I said. “I got impatient.”
A man stepped out from behind another booth and pointed one of the cloned monkey’s paws at us. He said the activating Words, and all its fingers fell off. The man threw what was left on the ground and stamped on it, then realised Molly and I were still watching him, at which point he quickly removed himself from the vicinity. That’s what you get for buying cheap knockoffs.
I looked around, but the walkways were deserted. The fair was almost empty. The crowds had seen what Drood armour and one really annoyed witch could do, and had lost all faith in the weapons the Supernatural Arms Faire had to offer. A great roar of engines overhead made me look up, and there was the vertical-takeoff plane hovering directly overhead. Huge and sleek and shiny, it must have manoeuvred into position while I was distracted, its noisy approach covered by the sound of gunfire. It rotated slowly overhead, held up by the massive down-draught of its engines. The pounding air slammed against my armour, blowing up great clouds of dust and dirt to blind me. Molly had already retreated to shelter, and sent a brisk wind my way to disperse the clouds.
The plane’s targeting system finally locked onto me, and it opened up with every weapon it had. Heavy machine-gun fire sprayed across me, followed by two supersonic missiles. My mask shut down again as the world disappeared in fire and noise. When I could see again, I was standing in a large open space, with all the surrounding stalls and booths blown apart or blown away. Quite a few more were on fire. Molly was standing some distance away, protected inside one of her special protective fields. But I didn’t know how long she could keep that going, so I ran forward and jumped up into the air, propelled by the powerful strength of my armoured legs. I think the VTO pilot guessed what I was up to at the last moment, because the plane started to rise, but I was already there.
I grabbed onto the undercarriage with one extended golden hand, the fingers closing hard, sinking deep into the metal. I hung there for a moment beneath the plane, and then pulled myself up so I could get a good grip with my other hand. I hauled myself up onto the wing and stood up. The massive VTO engines roared deafeningly, trying to maintain balance as I strode along the wing, heading for the cockpit. I could see the pilot staring out at me unbelievingly. I grabbed the cockpit roof and tore it away, the steel shrieking as it ripped and buckled under my grasp. The pilot panicked and hit the ejection button. He shot up past me, his chair leaving a trail of flames behind it that washed briefly and ineffectually over my armour.
The plane lurched back and forth, its balance gone without the pilot to adjust the engines. The nose turned down, and the plane plummeted back to earth, heading straight for the fair. There were still a lot of people down there, stumbling lost and confused up and down the walkways. I couldn’t let the VTO plane crash into the fair and kill them all. So I rode the plane down, leaning back and shifting my weight this way and that to guide its descent. The armour gave me the feel of the plane almost immediately, and a shift of my armoured weight at exactly the right times was all it took to steer it in the right direction. I rode the plane all the way down, over the fair and on into the valley, and then I jumped away at the last moment. I landed easily, my armoured legs soaking up the impact, and the VTO plane hit the valley floor hard and skidded along for some time in a billow of smoke before finally skidding to a halt in a shower of sparks. No fire, no explosion, nothing. I shook my head and ran back to the fair.
Still, what a ride . . .
I saw the Armourer facing off against the remote-controlled tank, and headed over to back him up. A great, hulking steel monster, the tank roared towards my uncle, who stood his ground and let it come. The tank fired shell after shell at him, each one dead on target, exploding against his armour without driving him back an inch. When the smoke from the explosions cleared, he was still standing where he had been, though some of where he had been standing wasn’t there anymore. I could tell from the way he was posing, arms folded easily across his chest, that the Armourer was enjoying himself. It might have been thirty years since he’d seen action in the field, but he was still every inch a Drood agent. Besides, all those years working in the Armoury had probably made him rather blasé about being blown up. The Armourer waited until the tank was almost on top of him, and then he leaned forward, ducked underneath and lifted the whole front of the tank up off the ground. Its tracks turned helplessly, unable to get a grip. The Armourer walked slowly forward, step by step, raising the tank up and up until it tipped over onto its back. It hit hard, and a series of things went bang inside it. Streams of black smoke billowed out of cracks in its sides, along with bursts of flame from electrical fires.
I went to stand beside the Armourer, and Molly came tripping up to join us. She threw her arms around me and hugged me as best she could through my armour. I held her carefully, mindful of my armour’s strength.
“How could you tell which was me?” I said.
“Your armour is quite different from everyone else’s,” she said, leaning against my chest. “You don’t realise how much you change it subconsciously these days.”
I looked at my uncle, in his basic old-fashioned skintight golden armour, and he nodded his featureless head. “She’s right, Eddie. Your armour has an almost medieval affect. Like some Arthurian knight. I guess the Drood is in the details, these days.”
A great shadow fell over us. The giant Japanese robot was up and on its feet and looming over us. Fifty feet tall, broad chest, massive arms and legs, hundreds of tons of steel and all the latest technology. The chest opened up to reveal row upon row of energy weapons, the squat barrels sparking and crackling with discharging energies. The face had been painted to resemble some old-time Japanese demon, and the eyes flashed fiercely. The giant robot raised its arms s
lowly and menacingly. It stepped forward, tripped over its own feet and fell flat on its face. The impact shook the ground like an earthquake. Molly and the Armourer and I watched it closely, but it didn’t move again.
“Told you,” said the Armourer.
We headed back to what was left of the Supernatural Arms Faire.
Those people who hadn’t been able to leave or escape, or didn’t want to abandon their stalls or merchandise, stood around in small groups for comfort and mutual support. They regarded us with suspicious eyes as we walked past, but said nothing, not wanting to draw attention to themselves. More than half the stalls and booths and tents had been destroyed or ruined, and the whole place was a mess. Fires burned here and there, and smoke drifted this way and that on the gusting wind. The Bloodred Guard appeared out of the ruins and spread out to stand before us. We stopped and bowed politely. The head monk sighed and turned to his fellow guards.
“Knock it off, guys. We are way out of our league. Everyone stand down and see what you can do to help the injured. There are still people here who need our help. If that’s okay with you, Drood?”
“Carry on,” said my uncle Jack. “But don’t let anyone go. There will be questions.”
“These people need doctors, not interrogators,” said the monk.
“They’ll get help,” I said. “We’re the good guys.”
“Yeah, right,” said the monk.
He and his fellow guards turned away to do what needed doing. There was a general air of we’re not being paid enough to fight Droods, which was only reasonable.
The Supernatural Arms Faire was now officially over. Half of it was in ruins, the other half was still on fire, and there was no one left to sell anything to. A good day’s work, I thought. Except there was no trace of the Satanists anywhere, or the people they’d kidnapped. We were going to have to do something about that.
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