Beyond the lake lies the woods and copses that make up the far boundaries of our estates. Nice places for a walk or a picnic, provided you’re one of us. Anyone else walks those woods at their own peril. Not all of the trees are sleeping. Peacocks and griffins stalked across the lawns, dodging in and out of the sprinklers and the misty haze they spread on the air. For such a beautiful bird, peacocks have a really ugly cry. Griffins start out ugly, and their behaviour borders on the disgusting, but since they can see a short distance into the future they make marvellous watchdogs. Just give them enough raw meat, and something nasty to roll about in, and they’re perfectly happy.
I frowned as I considered the great hedge maze. It was constructed some time back, to contain Someone or Something that desperately needed containing, but it was all so long ago that no one now remembers who or why. When your family is as constantly busy as ours, it’s only to be expected a few things are going to fall through the cracks. Looking down from above, I could see a strange metallic construct, right in the middle of the maze, but absolutely no sign of life. Or movement. If you just stick your head into the opening of the maze, nothing happens. But it doesn’t happen in a very menacing sort of way. People who actually venture in don’t come out again. Now and again the family throws someone in that we don’t like very much, just to see what will happen. Sometimes we hear a scream, sometimes we don’t. So mostly we leave the maze alone.
The Armourer wants to set fire to it, just to see what would happen. But that’s the Armourer for you.
I enjoyed the view for as long as I could justify it, but I knew I was only putting off reporting in . . . so eventually I sighed heavily, and went down into the Hall via the winding back stairs. The Matriarch was waiting for me, and the Advisory Council. Of which I was a member, and a fat lot of good it had ever done me.
Walking through Drood Hall is like walking through History, with all the centuries jumbled together. The long corridors are packed with tribute (and/or loot) from all the ages of Man. We’ve accumulated important and valuable prizes from every period of human civilisation you can think of, including several that never officially happened. We’ve got Sir Gawaine’s suit of armour from the Court of King Arthur; a section of the Beayue Tapestry that had to be confiscated because it showed a Drood in action (Harald would have won that war if so many of the family hadn’t been busy with an extra-dimensional incursion); and a whole bunch of family por traits daubed by important masters. Nothing but the best for the Droods. We also have the Koh-i-noor diamond, the original Mountain of Light from India. And very definitely not the one Prince Albert ruined with constant recutting. That was just a duplicate. The real thing was far too important to be trusted to royalty. The last few Matriarchs have used the diamond as a paperweight, and for throwing at people. I’ve ducked it several times.
I sent my thoughts up and out through my torc, and made contact with Ethel. Joining my mind with hers is like plunging into a great clear crystal lake—comforting and intimidating at the same time. Ethel doesn’t operate on the same scale as humanity, though she likes to pretend. She’s your best friend, who will always know better than you, or a somewhat absentminded god. I guess that’s other-dimensional entities for you . . .
Hi! Hi hi hi! Welcome back, Eddie! Shame about the hotel. How are you? Did you bring me back a present?
“I never know what to get you,” I said. “What do you get the invisible and immaterial strange matter entity who has everything?”
She sniffed loudly, which is an odd sensation to have inside your mind. It’s the thought that counts.
“How is Grandmother? And the Council?”
Still arguing.
“Ah,” I said. “Situation entirely normal, then.”
People passed on by as I strolled unhurriedly down the long corridors and passageways, wandering through huge open rooms and tall galleries. Most people were never quite sure how to react to me. I mean, yes, I used to run the family, but now I don’t. I’ve been declared a traitor, hailed as a saviour, known as a failure and the man who saved the whole of Humanity from the Hungry Gods. The family owes me everything, and a lot of them still resent me for hauling them out of their old complacency. Some nod and smile when they see me coming, while others make a point of stalking by with their noses in the air. But, since Droods are notoriously hard to impress, either way, most ˚ just nod briskly and keep going. Which suits me fine.
Two large and ostentatiously muscular fellows were standing guard outside the doors to the Sanctity, where all important meetings are held, and all the decisions that matter are made. These guards had clearly been chosen for their brutal menace rather than their intelligence, because they actually tried to block my way. I gave them my best hard look, and they stepped reluctantly to one side, scowling like I’d just stuck a thorn in their paw. I had to open the doors myself. So I kicked them wide open, stalked into the Sanctity like I was thinking of renting it out as a Roller Derby rink, and nodded briskly to the small group of people sitting round the table in the middle of the great hall.
The Sanctity was suffused with a rich warm rose-red glow that filled every corner of the massive room. That was Ethel, manifesting herself in the material world. The light was calming and bracing at once, like a spiritual massage; it encouraged calm and composure and clear thinking, but since only Droods ever came here, it had a lot of work to do. The Matriarch sat at the head of the table, stiff and straight backed as always. Martha Drood was a tall, slender and entirely formal personage in her late sixties. She wore smart grey tweeds, elegant pearls, and her long blond hair was piled elegantly up on top of her head. She’d been a famous beauty once, and it still showed in her poise and her fabulous bone structure. We’ve had Queens that looked less royal. I have actually seen photos of Martha smiling, in her younger days, or I’d never have believed it possible. She glared at me steadily as I approached, for having dared enter the Sanctity without waiting to be invited in.
The Advisory Council sat on both sides of the table. The family Armourer, my Uncle Jack, nodded cheerfully to me. He was tall but heavily stooped, from years of bending over workbenches in the Armoury, devising really horrible surprises to throw at our enemies. He was still wearing his stained and scorched white lab coat, suggesting that he’d been dragged away from his beloved Armoury against his will, just when things were getting seriously interesting and/or dangerous. He was middle-aged now, and looking like he’d worked hard for every year of it. He had a gleaming bald pate, with grey tufts sticking out over his ears, bushy white eyebrows, and steel grey eyes. Under his lab coat he wore a grubby T-shirt bearing the legend WHICH PART OF FUCK OFF AND DIE DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? Uncle Jack smiled easily at me as I approached the table. He’d always had time for me.
“Eddie, lad! About time you turned up! Come and see me afterwards; I’ve got some great new gadgets for you to try out.”
That was always going to be a mixed blessing, given that so many of his new gadgets had a tendency to go boom! when least expected, but I smiled gamely.
“Thank you, Uncle Jack. You always have the best toys.”
Harry Drood, cousin Harry, looked at me thoughtfully from his chair set at the Matriarch’s left hand. Harry always liked to be as close as possible to power. He’d actually run the family for a time, while I was away, and a right dog’s breakfast he’d made of it. He was a pretty good field agent in his own right, but he’d only ever seen that as a means to an end. Harry believed in Harry much more than he ever believed in the Droods. Still, put him with his back to the wall and no way out, and he could be as brave and heroic as needed. His father was, after all, Uncle James, the legendary Grey Fox. Perhaps the greatest Drood ever. Harry leaned back in his chair and rocked easily back and forth on the rear legs as he studied me silently through his owlish wire-rimmed glasses. He’d already heard about the debacle at the Magnificat, and the loss of the Apocalypse Door, and he couldn’t wait to hit me with every unfortunate detail, while he figured out how to t
urn it to his best advantage. Because that was what he did.
“Just once,” Harry said calmly, “it would be nice if you could bring us back some good news after a mission, Edwin.”
“You’re allowed to lose ˚ the occasional battle, as long as you win the war,” I said, meeting his gaze squarely.
“Lose enough battles and you run out of war,” said Harry.
“You want a slap?” I said. “Only I’ve got one handy . . .”
“Edwin!” the Matriarch said sharply.
“There will be no violence in this chamber unless I start it,” said the final member of the Advisory Council: the Sarjeant-at-Arms. He sat to attention on his chair, a big ugly brute of a man with a face like a fist and muscles on his muscles. “Sudden and unexpected punishment is my domain. So take your seat at the table, Edwin, before I find it necessary to discipline you.”
“Like to see you try, Cedric,” I said, as I seated myself at the end of the table, facing the Matriarch. “Really would like to see you try. I kicked the crap out of the last Sarjeant-at-Arms, and he had years more viciousness under his belt than you.”
“Yes,” said the Sarjeant. “But I’m sneakier.”
I figured honours were about even, but I changed the subject anyway, just in case. “Where’s William? He’s still part of the Council, isn’t he? Surely we need the Librarian here, if we’re to discuss the significance of the Apocalypse Door?”
“William is still away with the faeries, as often as not,” said the Matriarch, regretfully. “I had hoped letting him live in the Old Library, away from the pressures of family life, might help to settle and stabilise him, but I can’t honestly say I’ve seen any signs of improvement.”
“The Librarian is a looney tune,” said Harry. “Crazier than ever, if anything. He only appears at Council meetings through spiritual projections, insists his assistant Rafe acts as his food taster, and keeps wittering on about Something unseen that lives in the Old Library with him and steals his socks. It’s well past time we retired him, and let Rafe take over as Librarian.”
“William is a better Librarian crazy than most other men sane,” the Armourer said stubbornly. “It’s amazing how much that man knows, when he can remember it. No one knows the Old Library like he does. But he is only a part-time member of the Council now, Eddie. We’ve been forced to consider bringing in new members.”
“Fresh blood,” said Harry, with entirely too much relish in his voice.
“Howard has been in charge of Operations for some time now,” said the Matriarch. “And done an excellent job. All right, he is over-bearingly arrogant, and his company is best enjoyed in very small portions, but he’s very good at thinking outside the box. We can always insist he sits next to the Sarjeant, and issue the Sarjeant with a Taser. Being part of the Council might actually help teach him how to play nicely with others. Then there’s Callan, who’s been a real success as Head of the War Room. And yes, I’ll admit that some days it does seem like he fell out of the sarcasm tree and hit every branch on the way down, but we can live with that. We’ve lived with worse.” She glared at me. “I’ve allowed you to distract us long enough, Edwin. It is time to talk about what happened in Los Angeles. Why didn’t you report here directly?”
“I needed some downtime,” I said.
“So you could think up some excuses for your many failures on this mission?” said Harry.
“You always expect everyone to think like you, Harry,” I said. “I was only supposed to infiltrate an auction before it started, and liberate a single item. No one said anything about having to take on two heavily armed armies, and the Lampton Wyrm! I had to improvise. All right, the Apocalypse Door has disappeared, but this is Doctor Delirium we’re talking about! A mad scientist going through a midlife crisis. Anyone else would have bought a Porsche. How serious can this be?”
“The total destruction of the Magnificat Hotel is extremely serious!” said the Matriarch. “If only because so many people outside the family will have to be involved in explaining it away and cleaning up the mess! You and Luther not only failed to stop the two armed forces from reaching the Apocalypse Door, you couldn’t even identify one of them! ˚ And the Door has to be important, Edwin, and dangerous, or so many people wouldn’t be ready to risk so much just to get their hands on it. There aren’t many important and dangerous devices in this world that the family doesn’t know about, and that is in itself disturbing. Armourer!”
“Just resting my eyes, Matriarch!” He grinned at me. “Did you really turn the Lampton Wyrm inside out?”
“Yes, Uncle Jack.”
“Good boy. Love to have seen it. Yes, Matriarch, I’m getting to it . . . Ah. Yes. There’s no information at all about the Apocalypse Door in either of the family libraries. Of course, William and Rafe are still busy cataloguing and indexing the contents of the Old Library, so there’s still a good chance something will turn up . . . But given the sheer scale of the Old Library, that could take some time. And time is what we don’t have; yes, Matriarch, I am aware of that. Where was I? Oh yes. The two of them are making important new finds all the time, but we need to know what this bloody Door is now, or at least before Doctor Delirium makes use of it.”
“We have some time,” I said. “Doctor Delirium always makes threats first, just to show he has the power. And so he can demand his pay off in postage stamps. Not a bad investment, given the current economic conditions. Unless his midlife crisis is really kicking in, and he wants respect more than he wants payment. He might make use of the Door briefly, just to show he can.”
“We need to have an answer in place before he tries anything,” the Matriarch said heavily.
“Normally we’d just grab someone low down in his organisation, and squeeze the information out of them,” said Harry. “But he’s called all of his people back to his main base in the Amazon rain forest, nailed all his doors shut and set fire to the moat. Full security measures and state-of-the-art defences. We took over a CIA surveillance satellite, and tasked it to give us coverage of the area for forty minutes. Got some really good images. No one can get anywhere near his base now without setting off all kinds of alarms and booby traps. No one’s allowed in or out, until this business is over. We could try bombing him again . . .”
“No we couldn’t,” the Armourer said firmly. “If you’d studied the satellite images properly, you’d have seen the brand-new force field generators. I don’t know who sold him the offworld tech, but it’s prime stuff. Very powerful. Doctor Delirium may be delusional, but he isn’t stupid. He knew we’d be coming after him, and he’s clearly learned from past mistakes.”
“I want to know where and how Doctor Delirium learned of the Apocalypse Door,” said the Matriarch. “Who could have told him of a device so obscure even we’ve never heard of it? The Doctor rarely leaves his base in the Amazon, and the only research he’s ever shown any interest in concerned his own field of expertise . . . So someone from outside must have contacted him, told him about the Door, and where he could find it.”
“Take it a step further,” said the Armourer, scowling fiercely. “Why didn’t these people make use of the Door themselves? Did they intend for the Doctor to do all the dirty work of grabbing the Door from the auction, with the intention of taking it away from him later? Did they know the other army was going to show up?”
“Maybe the auction people set it up themselves, for the insurance?” I said.
The Matriarch looked at me. “If you don’t have anything useful to contribute, Edwin . . .”
“Who is there out there,” said the Armourer, “who knows more than we do?”
“Even though the family doesn’t like to admit it,” said Harry, “there are a number of well-informed people and organisations, some almost as experienced as us. Do I really need to mention the Carnacki Institute, the London Knights, or the Deep School, the Dark Academy? And there’s always the Regent of Shadows . . .”
“We don’t talk about him,” said the M
atriarch, very sternly.
There was a short pause, as we all avoided each other’s eyes.
“These people are all long shots and you know it,” I said finally. “I say we need to look closer to home. Inside the family.”
“Paranoia doesn’t suit you, Edwin,” the Matriarch said patiently. “The days of Zero Tolerance and Manifest Destiny are over. Those traitors have been executed, expelled from the family, or very forcibly shown the error of their ways. The family is united again. I have seen to that. If the Droods are to thrive and prosper again, and take their place on the world stage, it is vital we are all singing from the same hymn sheet.”
“I do like a good male voice choir,” said the Armourer wistfully.
“I’m not talking about traitors within the family,” I said doggedly. “I’m more concerned with infiltration. A dying mercenary in the ruins of the Magnificat claimed to be part of an organisation that’s always been our greatest bogeyman: the Anti-Droods. Another family, dedicated to everything we oppose. He used the phrases wolf in the fold and serpents at our bosom. That implies an enemy who is someone we trust, someone who’s worked their way inside this family, just to work against us. It has happened before. Remember Sebastian? He was one of us, until he was possessed by a Loathly One. We never did find out who killed him, presumably to keep him from talking. We have to face up to the possibility that someone inside the family is not what they appear to be.”
“But maybe . . . that’s what he wanted you to think,” said Harry. “A dying man’s last chance to mess with your head, and spread distrust inside the Droods. There can’t be an Anti-Droods. There just can’t. We’d know.”
“We didn’t know about the Apocalypse Door,” said the Sarjeant. He was frowning thoughtfully, clearly considering certain names. And I didn’t like the way he looked at me.
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