Persephone focuses on the roofline, picks out the craggy pitch of the Palas with its gables and chimneys and turrets, and steers towards it.
Sane people do not go skydiving at night. They especially don’t go skydiving at night over mountainous terrain, then try to land on the steeply angled tiles of a castle roof, with a twenty meter drop to a cobblestoned courtyard off to one side…
…But nobody has ever accused Persephone Hazard of being sane.
She flares and lifts her knees to clear the spine of the roof, spills air and drops towards the tiles, slides jolting sideways towards the cornice below—and is yanked to a stop by the cable attaching her harness to the peak of the roof by a specially shaped grapple. There is nothing random about the grapple: she and Johnny went to great pains to study the roof earlier, taking photographs and measurements from the Marienbrücke hillside. The grapple is locked to the roof, held in place by her weight. The chute, in contrast, drapes loosely around her. Persephone rolls, putting her back to the roof, and gathers in the chute with both arms. Thirty meters away on the other side of the roof, Johnny is doing much the same. She can see movement at the other end of the Palas, fabric sliding across tiles. Good. She relaxes infinitesimally. So far, the plan is on track.
Five minutes pass.
Persephone has rolled up her parachute, knotting it in its own cords, and secured it to the strap of the kit bag dangling below her. Now she begins to pay out one end of the loop of rope that runs through the eye of the grapple, lowering herself towards the edge of the roof. The nearest of the high skylights, surmounted by its own steep gable, is below her and only three meters to her left. Removing an anchor from her sling and reaching out sideways, she levers between slates, feeling for a roof timber to drive the anchor into. Working in darkness takes time: fifteen minutes pass as she crabs sideways in silence, driving anchors every meter and carefully moving her attachment away from the roofline grapple. Finally she is in position, ready to lower herself alongside the gothic arch of the window. And so she descends.
The window is leaded, with a cast-iron frame. There are no security contacts on the glass or its surround; who would break into a castle from the rooftop? Persephone peers inside, sees no telltale shimmer of infrared LEDs. The castle security is tightly focused on the lower windows and outer approaches, and the display cabinets and paintings. Up here there’s nothing to worry about but the fire alarm. And the watchers.
A minute later, she lowers her kit bag and then herself to the parquet floor of the Hall of the Singers.
A shadow moves swiftly in the end gallery: “What kept you?”
“Bad positioning. Help me with this.” She kneels and begins to unpack components from the bag while Johnny assembles them. He’s still tightening bolts as Persephone removes her helmet, unfastens her harness, then unzips her coveralls. Beneath them she wears leggings and a black leotard; her dark hair is knotted in a tight chignon. She has a dancer’s physique—but a dancer would not be wearing the equipment webbing and pouches, or the mummified monkey’s hand strung on a leather cord around her neck. She puts her climbing harness back on over the leotard, dons the night vision goggles, then pulls a shoulder bag from the sack and stuffs her discarded overalls and helmet inside it.
“Okay, I think I’m ready, Duchess.”
Persephone checks her watch, a Seiko chronometer, synchronized to a broadcast time signal. “We are running late—ninety-six minutes to the conjunction.”
“Shit. Well, I suppose I’d better get moving, then.”
Johnny pulls out a pair of bent wires from his pocket and walks to the end wall. Whistling tunelessly he paces backwards, holding them before him; then, having found his distance, he switches direction and moves towards the middle of the floor. “Let’s see…just about here, I think.”
Persephone, who is watching from the gallery, narrows her eyes. “Fifty centimeters closer to the window.”
“If you say so, Duchess.” Johnny squats and begins to work at the parquet tiles. They form a beautifully polished herringbone pattern in rich mahogany, glued to the floorboards below with hot bitumen. With less than two hours to do the job, there’s no time for subtlety: Johnny systematically vandalizes them with the aid of a battery-powered jigsaw. First, he uses a cord to draw a circle a meter in diameter around his measurement point. Next, he carefully cuts a groove in the flooring.
Persephone, meanwhile, rolls the metal framework close to him. Then she pulls out a compact caulking gun, inserts a cylinder, and begins to draw a much larger circle on the floor around them. The oozing paste is silvery in the diffuse moonlight, gravid with metallic particles. She periodically pauses to draw arcane symbols around the outer perimeter. Once the circle is closed she retreats inside and then removes a ruggedized tablet computer from one of her pockets. It sports an expansion port, and this she attaches to the circle by a short cable.
“We’re locked in,” she announces calmly as Johnny pauses to empty the saw’s dust bag again. The inner circle is two-thirds cut through.
“This will take another five minutes.” He reaches into a pocket, pulls out a compact power screwdriver and a couple of attachment points, and screws them into the cut-out circle. Without looking up he threads a wire through the hook-and-eye attachments and fastens it to the metal frame. Then he picks up the saw and cuts out the rest of the circle. Another minute with a pry bar and then the hand-crank on the portable crane, and the disk of flooring is dangling on a wire.
“Allow me.” Persephone leans forward and shines a penlight into the dark recesses below the floorboards. Thick timber joists as strong as a ship’s yardarm run from side to side of the dusty under-floor space, half a meter apart; it stinks of mouse droppings and ancient history. About forty centimeters below the floor there is another surface—the ceiling of the Arbeitszimmer, the royal study.
She winces slightly at the thought of what she’s about to do to the gloriously paneled and painted interior of the royal suite. Mad King Ludwig bankrupted Bavaria building this castle; he spent over six million marks on it—close to half a billion euros in twenty-first-century currency. But there’s a job to be done, and the price of failure is even higher.
She reaches into the pouch on her left hip with one gloved hand and pulls forth a velvet bag. Opening it, she teases out a chain of bright-polished white gold, each link of which is encrusted with glistening emeralds. She lowers the bag by its chain over the dust-strewn roof below. It stirs slowly, dangling away from the vertical. “The amulet points to the warded containment,” she says quietly. “We are out of position—at least two meters, perhaps three. Pass me the hand drill.”
“Are you sure? It’s no bother to raise another lid—”
“It may not bother you, Johnny, but I don’t like desecrating a work of art. Pass me the hand drill and hook me up.”
“It’s your funeral.” Johnny passes her the drill, then ropes her harness to the crane. Persephone takes a deep breath, then worms her way underneath the floor boards.
THEY HAVE BEEN ON, IN, AND UNDER THE HALL OF THE SINGERS in the Palas of the Neuschwanstein castle for nearly an hour at this point. There are no burglar alarms on this upper story.
That does not mean, however, that there are no guards.
PERSEPHONE HAZARD IS AT PEACE AMONG THE DUST BUNNIES of the under-floor spaces, mentally and physically in the zone as she worms her way towards the ceiling directly above the amulet’s indicated spot. Every fifty centimeters she stops and uses the drill to tap a hole in the floorboards above her, then screws another anchor into the woodwork, and walks one of her load-bearing cables forward. It’s slow, laborious work, and the palace is not cold—with the central heating running, so too is the sweat.
The amulet is dangling straight down now, and Persephone has begun to orient herself, rolling over to face the floor below, when the hair on the back of her neck begins to tingle. She reaches her left hand up to grasp the monkey’s fist at the base of her throat. A thrill of terror wa
shes through her for a moment before she forces herself to stillness. Whatever is happening overhead, she can’t crawl backwards fast enough to be out of the hole in time to help Johnny deal with it. But there are other options. She rolls onto her back, raises the hand drill, swaps out the bit for a thirteen-centimeter-hole saw, and applies it to the boards above her.
Meanwhile, Johnny—Jonathan McTavish, accomplice and loyal lieutenant and sometime adjutant in the 2ème Régiment Étranger de Parachutistes—has become aware that he is no longer alone in the ballroom.
No door has opened, nor window slid ajar. No human lungs breathe the still, nighttime air with him. Nevertheless, he is not alone. He knows this by a prickling in the tattoo on the biceps of his left arm, by the warming of the warding amulet on the chain around his neck, by the goose bumps in the small of his back, by the strange blood running in his veins. And he knows it by the faint luminous glow coming from the warding circle that Persephone inscribed around him before embarking on her dive beneath the floorboards.
Johnny slowly scans the room, looking for traces. His nostrils flare. This is not strictly a visual talent, nor does he expect his night vision gear to spot the heat trace of a living body in the gloom. He and the Duchess are here tonight to lay something to rest; there are beings that will not appreciate this work. Entities that will go unfed if the amulet is restored to its rightful place in the display cabinet of King Ludwig’s study, replacing the artful forgery that a long-dead cat burglar replaced it with decades ago. Things that do not appreciate the way the amulet’s power is blocked while it is confined in this place.
Johnny has what used to be called Witchfinder’s Eyes by the old women in the highland village where he was born. And there are some kinds of trouble he can see in the dark with his eyes closed. The gothic architecture and baroque decorations in the Hall of the Singers cannot disguise one aspect of the design of the room—that it is essentially a box chock-full of right angles.
The Schloss is a museum and a tourist attraction by day, a small and significant part of Bavaria’s cultural heritage owned and maintained at arm’s reach by the agencies of the state government. But it wasn’t built here, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, solely for the picturesque view. Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm II was not known as the Mad King by reason of mere psychiatric diagnosis alone, nor was the coup and subsequent assassination that ended his reign a matter of mere realpolitik. The Schloss was not built to be a temple to the Moon King’s Wagnerian fantasies. Tonight, on the eve of a certain recurring celestial alignment, the temple’s night watch are padding through the passages and stairs of the castle on black velvet paws, their eyeless muzzles questing for the stink of fear.
There is movement at the end of the room.
Johnny raises his hands round the back of his neck: he draws a pair of strange knives from their sheaths, their twin blades carved from flat slivers of some black glassy material.
Claws click on the parquet floor as a doglike darkness stalks into the hall.
There is no panic, but Johnny wets his lips. These things have no ears or eyes, but rely on other senses to find their prey. “Duchess,” he says quietly, “we’ve picked up a hound.”
The dog-thing fades in and out of view as it walks towards the warding circle. Shards of leg and head and torso ripple and stretch, rotating and distorting around an invisible reference point as it moves. When in motion it is an occult blur, but when it pauses its entire body is visible: a nightmare-black dog-shape, a gaunt eyeless hunter that doesn’t seem to be all there.
The ward is doing its work, for by its movements the hound appears baffled and uncertain. Nevertheless, Johnny tracks it tensely, throwing knife raised and ready. The knives snarl silently, eager to drink souls. They carry words of banishment, hopefully enough to send the hound back from whence it came…but perhaps not. One thing is sure: the instant one of the knives crosses the perimeter of the ward, the ward’s protection will vanish. At this range, if he misses his target, the hound will be on top of him within two seconds. And while Johnny wouldn’t blink at facing off against a timber wolf, these things are different. Even a momentary skin-to-skin contact with its rippling integument means death. He’s only going to get one shot at it.
The hound casts its blind muzzle from side to side, then pauses a couple of meters short of the ward, right in front of Johnny. It lowers its head towards the floor, and freezes, muzzle pointing straight down.
He throws once, in a blur.
There’s a blue flash as the knife splits the warding circle; simultaneously, a loud thudding noise comes from the vicinity of the hound. The dagger strikes the hound directly, splashing ribbons of green light from its flank. But it isn’t the hungry knife that causes the hound to thrash wildly and keel over, huge jaws snapping at its own belly. There’s another door-slamming sound. “Clear!” he calls, pitching his voice low as he steps over the shorted-out warding circle and approaches the hound, which is lying still now, limbs twitching tetanically. “It’s not quite gone yet,” he adds, as he sets the point of the other knife to the side of the hound’s throat and pushes.
There’s a moment of resistance, then he topples forwards, reaches out to catch himself with one hand against the floor. Of the hound there is no sign, save the knife and the splinters around the firing hole Persephone had drilled beneath it. “It is now,” he adds.
THE REST OF THE OPERATION GOES EXACTLY ACCORDING TO plan.
Using the amulet as a guide, Persephone drills a thirteen-centimeter hole in the ceiling of the Arbeitszimmer. She fastens the amulet to a fishing line and lowers it through the hole. Peering through a compact fiber-optic probe, she lowers her payload towards a display cabinet in the shape of a grotesque miniature oak chapel that squats beneath a mural depicting scenes from the legend of the Holy Grail. There is a glass screen and velvet ropes to keep visitors from getting too close, and there are under-carpet pressure sensors and infrared body heat detectors—hence the ceiling approach. The amulet descends towards the front of the cabinet, tugging like a magnet beside an automobile. Then there’s a sudden yank on the cord, a crunch of fine woodwork, and a shattering of glass. The amulet slams into the center of the display, where its identical twin rests on a velvet pad; the replica is sent flying as the wards inlaid in the floorboards under the parquet around the cabinet flash lightning-bright.
Persephone tenses; but there is no shrill of bells. Pressure plates are seldom tuned to hair-trigger sensitivity, lest the security guards are called out every time a mouse scurries across the floor at midnight. Nor do body heat detectors work on pieces of extravagant jewelry, whether or not they are imbued with grotesque and unpleasant powers by their former owner. She permits herself a sigh of relief. Then she turns her attention to retrieving the replica of the Moon King’s amulet from the bottom of the cabinet: a fiddly fishing job, but one familiar to any child who has wasted their pocket money on an amusement arcade grab-machine—and far more rewarding. It’s just like old times, really.
Finishing, she coils up the fishing line, weights it down on top of the ceiling boards with her hand drill, and retreats back to the Hall of the Singers—making sure to take the spent cartridge cases from her silenced pistol with her.
“Done here,” she says as Johnny pulls her out of the hole in the floor. “Just the one hound?”
“The next time I see ’em hunting in a pack will be the first.” He checks his chronometer. “Thirty-two minutes to alignment. Is it in place?”
Persephone glances at him, scrutinizing his face: he’s as stoical and imperturbable as ever. “Ever walked past a big electromagnet with a ring of keys? It knows where it belongs. The wards still work after all these years. Nothing to worry about.” She smiles, buzzing with exultation. The amulet is back in place, another chink in this world’s defenses repaired just in time. The replica installed in place of the stolen original by an uninformed but highly proficient jewel thief is safe in her bag, earmarked for delivery to its final resting place.
The incursion will be exposed tomorrow, recognized for what it is by security guards boggling at the ingenuity of the cat burglars who came so close to stealing the Mad King’s crown jewels the night before.
“Let’s go!”
Persephone gathers her climbing ropes and stalks towards the windows, ready to abseil to the forest below in preparation for the long midnight walk to the rented safe house in Füssen. Tomorrow they will dispose of their equipment and meet with an agent who will take the not-invaluable forgery (itself containing over a hundred carats of blue diamonds and black fire opals, supplied to the jewel thief by a very special collector to whom the original was vastly more interesting than any collection of unenchanted gems) and make it disappear. Then they will depart by light plane, and it’s back to the cover of the everyday whirl of the celebrity culture vulture circuit for her, and the adventure tour business for Johnny.
As she pauses on the window ledge to check her harness, Persephone feels more alive than she has in ages.
2.
SKILLS MATRIX
MS. MACDOUGAL SQUINTS AT ME DISAPPROVINGLY OVER THE top of her Gucci spectacles: “This year you’re going to take at least three weeks of Professional Development training, Mr. Howard. No ifs, no buts. With great power comes great authority, and if you want to stay on track for SSO 5(L) you will need to acquire an intimate and sympathetic understanding of the way people work outside the narrow scope of your department.”
I will say this for Emma MacDougal: she may be a fire-breathing HR dragon, but she doesn’t short us on training opportunities. “What should I be looking at?” I ask her.
“The Fast Stream track: leadership and people management skills,” she says without batting an eyelid. I nearly choke on my coffee. (It’s a sign of how far I’ve come lately that when I’m summoned to the departmental HR manager’s office I rate the comfy chair and the complimentary refreshments.) “This is foundation work for your PSG and Grade Seven/SCS induction.” Which is HR-speak for promotion: Professional Skills for Government and Senior Civil Service. “Your divisional heads have endorsed you for SCS, and I gather you’ve shown up on the radar Upstairs”—she means Mahogany Row—“so they’ll be taking a look at you in due course to decide whether you’re suitable for further promotion. So it’s my job to see you get the grounding you need in essential operational delivery and stakeholder management. You’re going to have to go back to school—Sunningdale Park.”
The Apocalypse Codex Page 2