The young Drood didn’t move. "Anything for the family."
I nodded slowly, understanding, acknowledging them all. "Of course. Whatever happens, I’m proud of all of you."
I charged forward and slammed the young Drood out of my way with a single backhand that lifted him up off his feet and sent him flying across the room. The other Droods hesitated, frozen where they were by uncertainty and shock, and then I was in and among them. Even house Droods have to go through basic training when they’re kids, but most never raise a hand in anger in their lives, in armour or out of it. They never stood a chance. I knocked them down and kicked them away, picked them up and threw them this way and that. They couldn’t be hurt inside their armour, but it knocked all the pepper out of them. A few tried to make a fight out of it, coming at me with wildly swinging fists. I picked them up and threw them at walls, and they crashed right through the woodwork. Molly used her magic to collapse the walls on top of them, pinning them down with the weight of the wreckage. They’d dig themselves out eventually, but by then we’d be long gone.
I smashed through the opposite wall and into the next room, and then the next wall and the next room, or the next corridor, on and on, heading always in a straight line through the structure of the Hall. At least the Sanctity was in the central building, and not one of the other wings, or it could have taken me hours. Walls that had stood for centuries fell under my armoured strength and cold, cold anger, and though more Droods came to meet me, in armour and out, and with all kinds of weapons, none of them came close to stopping me.
Occasionally the odds would get a bit heavy, as family members filled a room before me, but still none of them had field experience, and it was child’s play to outthink and outmanoeuvre them. I could have killed so many of them, but I didn’t. It wasn’t necessary. Sometimes I fooled them into fighting each other; one golden form looks much like another. Sometimes I buried them under piles of furniture or wrapped them in precious tapestries they didn’t dare tear. Once Molly stopped an entire crowd by threatening to overturn a glass display case full of delicate china, and a dozen voices cried out in horrified protest.
"Those pieces are irreplaceable!" cried an anguished voice as Molly tilted the case slowly so the china pieces slid jerkily across the shelves.
"They’re priceless! Historical treasures!"
"Then why are you hoarding them for yourselves?" snapped Molly.
"Why aren’t they in a museum so everyone can enjoy them? Back the hell off, or I’ll create a china jigsaw like you’ve never seen!"
"We’re backing, we’re backing!" cried the Droods. "Barbarian! Philistine!"
They all got out of our way in a hurry. Molly and I picked up the display case and carried it across the room, and the Droods scattered before us, crying out piteously for us to be more careful. I smashed a hole in the wall and stepped through, and Molly dragged the case into position to block the hole. We laughed, secure in the knowledge that the Droods would spend ages carefully moving the case aside so as not to risk damaging the contents.
More Droods in the corridor beyond. And these at least had seen some training. They held themselves well, all ten of them, fanning out so as not to bunch up and make an easy target. I didn’t waste time talking to them. I concentrated, applying what I’d learned from James, and grew supernaturally sharp claws on my golden hands. First thing a field agent learns is that any trick is a fair trick if it means you win and they lose. I took them down, one by one, fighting hand to hand, up close and personal. My claws ripped through their armour, and they cried out in shock as well as pain. Their flesh was torn, and they bled inside their armour, and that had never happened before. Some just turned and ran. The rest fell back, scattering, and Molly and I went straight through them.
A few saw Molly as an easier target. They went for her, reaching out with their golden hands, and she laughed in their featureless faces. She conjured up a howling storm wind that bellowed down the narrow corridor, picking them up and carrying them away, tumbling helplessly end over end like discarded toys the whole length of the corridor.
The remaining Droods all tackled me at once, knocking me off balance, and then piling on top of me as I crashed to the floor, trying to pin me down with the sheer weight of armoured bodies. Good tactic. Probably would have worked against anyone who wasn’t field trained and used to thinking around corners. I cracked open the floor beneath us with one sharp blow from a golden elbow, and our combined weight collapsed the floor. A great hole opened up and we all fell through, the other Droods kicking and screaming and grabbing at each other all the way down into the room below. I of course just grabbed the side of the hole with one hand and pulled myself up and out. The Droods below were so inexperienced it probably wouldn’t even occur to them that they could use the armoured power of their legs to jump back up again. Or at least not until Molly and I had already moved on.
The next room was a trap.
I recognised the place the moment I entered it. The room was called Time Out, and it was full of ornate clocks and timepieces from across the centuries, covering all four walls with everything from water clocks to atomic devices. I never did like Time Out; always struck me as a sinister place, when I was young. Full of the ticking of a million mad clocks. In this room time itself could be slowed down, extended. A day could pass in here between the tick and tock of a clock outside. Time Out was originally put together back in the nineteenth century to make possible the observation of certain delicate scientific and magical experiments, but these days it was mostly used by students reviewing and cramming for an imminent exam.
I knew something was wrong before I was halfway across the room. All the heavy ticks and tocks around me had taken on a strange dying fall, and the air was thick as syrup. I looked back at Molly, still stuck in the hole in the wall I’d made, her movements little more than a snail’s pace. There was nothing wrong with her. It was the room. Time was slowing down, trapping me in the room like an insect in amber. Like a prisoner in a cell with invisible, intangible bars. I could cross the room in a few seconds only to find that days had passed outside it, and the whole family waiting to meet me.
I raised my Sight, and the air seemed to shimmer around me, thick with slowly congealing forces. It wasn’t something I could fight with my armour. All its strength and speed meant nothing next to the inexorable power of time. From all around me came the slowing remorseless ticking of the million mad clocks, nailing me down, pinning me in place like an insect on display, transfixed on a spike.
I lashed out at the grandfather clock next to me, and the heavy wooden case exploded under the impact. I ripped out the chains and the pendulum and threw them aside, and the great old clock was silenced. And time’s growing hold on me seemed to hesitate…I grabbed up a seventeenth century carriage clock and crushed it in my golden hand, and cogs and pinwheels flew out of it. Time’s hold slipped away from me just a little. I could feel it. I laughed aloud and rampaged round the room, smashing all the clocks, destroying everything I could lay my hands on, until Molly was suddenly striding across the room towards me, demanding to know what the hell I was doing. She hadn’t noticed anything. I stopped, breathing hard, and looked around me. The room was a mess. And time moved normally on its way, ticking and tocking along as though nothing had happened. I shook my head at Molly and headed for the far wall. No point in trying to explain. There wasn’t enough time.
I smashed through the wall as though it was cardboard and stepped through into the corridor beyond. My feet shot out from under me, and suddenly I was plummeting the length of the hallway, scrabbling frantically for handholds on the walls as they rushed past me. Someone had changed the direction of gravity so that the wall at the far end of the long hallway was now the floor, and the two walls just the sides of a really long drop. I fell all the way to the bottom, tumbling helplessly, until the far wall came flying up towards me like a flyswatter. I tucked myself up into a ball, got my feet underneath me, and used my armoured l
egs to soak up the impact as I hit.
Luckily, it was a really solid wall. Old stone, thick and sturdy. I hit hard, and the stone cracked from top to bottom, but it held. I took a moment to get my breath back. The hallway stretched endlessly above me, the walls like mountainsides. I could see Molly way above me, looking out of the hole I’d made in the wall, peering anxiously down at me. I yelled at her to stay put. I thought hard as my heart rate slowed reluctantly back to something like normal. The family had to know the fall alone wouldn’t be enough to kill me. This was just another delaying tactic. It was all they had.
I forced myself out of the broken stone wall, damaging it still further, and looked up at Molly. "Stay put! I’ll climb up to you!"
"I could retrieve you with my magic!" she yelled back. "Maybe even undo the gravity inversion!"
She really did look a long way off. Maybe someone was messing about with space here, as well as gravity. Or were they connected anyway? It was a long time since my old science classes.
"No!" I yelled back. "Don’t do anything! Your magic could set off the Hall’s inner defences!"
"You mean this isn’t—"
"Hell, no! This is just some crafty little bugger showing off his lateral thinking."
I punched a hole in the left-hand wall that used to be the floor, carefully pulled my golden hand back out again, and then made another hole. I kept on punching holes until I had enough hand-and footholds to get started, and then I climbed up the wall, heading back to Molly. I picked up speed as I got the hang of it and got a rhythm going, and soon I was scuttling up the wall like a giant spider. ( I winced as the thought occurred to me, and I pushed it firmly away.) I soon reached the hole in the wall where Molly was waiting, and she helped pull me back through. We both looked down at the long drop below us, and the wall opposite.
"Now what?" said Molly.
"When in doubt, use brute force and ignorance," I said. "Climb on my back."
She gave me hard look but finally did so, holding on tightly as I walked back across the room we’d just come through. Then I took a good run up to get some speed going, jumped through the hole and across the gap, and smashed through the far wall into the room opposite. Molly jumped down from me, slapping dust and splinters from her hair and shoulders.
"I don’t want to have to do that again, ever," she said firmly. "Next time, I’ll fly us across."
I looked at her. "I didn’t know you could fly."
"Lot of things you don’t know about me. You should see what I can do with a Ping-Pong ball."
I looked around the room and once again I recognised it. I always thought of the long narrow chamber as the souvenir room. It was crammed full of old trophies and mementos and a whole bunch of basically interesting old stuff that my various ancestors had brought back from their travels around the world. Books and maps, objects and artefacts, and some odd and obscure items that presumably meant something to someone once but whose stories were now lost and forgotten. To a young Drood like me, they were all wonderfully interesting and fascinating, with their hints of a much bigger world outside the Hall. I spent a lot of time here as a child, leafing through the books and playing with the pieces. At least partly because I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I was still fond of a lot of the exhibits, so I was careful not to break anything else as I made my way across the room. I pointed out a few of my favourites to Molly.
"That’s the skull of a vodyanoi from pre-Soviet Russia. Those are genuine Thuggee strangling cords from the Hindu Kush. That lumpy-looking hairy thing is a badly stuffed Chupacabras from Chile. Which if anything smells worse dead than it does when it’s alive. And all the intricate carvings in that cabinet are scrimshaw carved from the bones of a great white whale."
"You should charge admittance to the Hall," said Molly. "You could make a fortune out of the summer trade."
The door ahead of us slammed open and my grandmother Martha Drood, the family Matriarch herself, strode into the room to face me, accompanied as always by her consort, Alistair. I stopped abruptly, facing them, and they stopped where they were, maintaining a cautious distance. Molly moved in close beside me, reassuring and supporting me with her presence. I was glad she was there. Even after all that had happened, after all that I’d discovered…Martha was still the Matriarch, the will and authority of the Droods. And once I would have died rather than fail her.
The Matriarch wasn’t wearing her armour. Of course not. That might have come across as an admission of weakness, and Martha’s arrogance would never allow her to see me as a serious threat. Not even after all I’d done. For a rogue to triumph against the will of the family was unthinkable.
So I armoured down too. Just to show my contempt.
"Hello, Grandmother," I said. "Alistair. How did you know where to find me?"
Alistair smirked. "Intercepting your path wasn’t exactly difficult, Edwin. All we had to do was follow the wreckage and destruction, draw a straight line to the Sanctity, and then get here ahead of you."
"You always were very direct, even as a child," said the Matriarch.
"That’s why I chose this room, for our…little chat. The number of times I had to send someone to drag you out of here because you weren’t where you were supposed to be…You always were such a disappointment to me, Edwin."
Molly looked at me. "It’s your family, Edwin. How do you want to handle this?"
"Very carefully," I said. "My grandmother wouldn’t be in here, facing me without serious backup, unless she was confident she had some really nasty cards to play."
"This is the Drood Matriarch?" said Molly. "Well, colour me impressed. The queen bitch of the family that runs the whole world. Hatchet-faced old cow, isn’t she?"
The Matriarch ignored her, fixing me with her cold gaze. "Where is James?" she said harshly. "What did you do to James?"
"I…killed him, Grandmother," I said.
She cried out briefly then; a lost, devastated sound. She crumpled as though I’d hit her and might have fallen if Alistair hadn’t been there to hold her up. She pressed her face against his chest, eyes squeezed shut to keep the tears from falling. Alistair glared at me over her bent head. I wanted to see her suffer for what she’d done to me, to all of us, even to Uncle James, but in the end it was disturbing and even sad to see such a legendary facade crack and fall apart right in front of me. I’d never seen her show any honest emotion in public before.
"You killed my son," she said finally, pushing herself away from Alistair. "My son…your uncle…He was the best of us! How could you, Edwin?"
"You sent him to his death, Grandmother," I said steadily. "Just like you tried to send me to mine on the motorway. Remember?"
I stepped forward to confront her with all the other things I had to say, but to my surprise Alistair stepped forward to face me, putting himself between his wife and the rogue who threatened her. He stood tall and proud, doing his best to stare me down, and for the first time, he actually looked like a Drood.
"Get out of my way, Alistair," I said.
"No." His voice was high but steady. He had no authority, no power, and he knew it, but in his refusal to remove himself from the line of fire, he had a kind of dignity at last. "I won’t let you hurt her anymore."
"I don’t want to hurt her," I said almost tiredly. "I don’t want to hurt anyone. That’s not why I came back. But I have something important to do and not much time to do it in. Take her out of here, Alistair."
"No. This ends here."
"I have Oath Breaker," I said. "And Molly has Torc Cutter. Even the Gray Fox couldn’t stand against that."
"You used Torc Cutter on your own uncle?" Alistair looked at me with horror. "Dear God; what have you become, Edwin?"
"I don’t know," I said honestly. "Awake, perhaps, to all the lies and betrayals…It’s time to cut the rotten heart out of the family."
"I have a weapon too," Alistair said abruptly, and just like that there was an old-fashioned pistol in his right hand. It would have looke
d primitive, even pathetic, if I hadn’t recognised it. If I hadn’t known it for what it was. Alistair nodded grimly, seeing the knowledge in my face. Even Martha was shaken out of her grief by the sight of the gun.
"Alistair! Wherever did you get that? You can’t use it! I forbid it!"
"I’ll do whatever I have to to protect you, Martha." Alistair was looking at me, but the gun was trained steadily on Molly. "You stand very still, Edwin. Or I’ll hurt your woman, just as you’ve hurt mine. I know none of you ever really thought of me as one of the family. Never thought I had it in me to fight the good fight like the rest of you. But I love this family and all it stands for, just as I’ve always loved you, Martha. And this is where I prove it."
"Please, Alistair," said Martha, trying for a calm and reasonable voice.
"Put away the gun. Let me handle this."
"How can you love the family?" I said to Alistair. "Knowing what you do about the Heart? About the price we pay to be what we are?"
He frowned, suddenly uncertain. "Martha? What’s he talking about?"
I looked at Martha. "He doesn’t know, does he, Grandmother? You never told him. Never told him why he can’t ever wear the golden torc."
"He’s not part of the council," she said dully. "He never needed to know, so I never told him. It would have been…cruel. You always were too softhearted, Alistair."
"Not here, not now," he said. "Not when he dares to threaten you and the whole family. You do know what this gun is, don’t you, Edwin? Of course you do. Why don’t you tell your little witch friend what it is?"
"Yes, Eddie," said Molly. "You know I hate to be left out of things."
"That…is a Salem Special," I said. "It’s a witch killer. It shoots flames summoned up from Hell itself. Or so the records say. No one’s used the awful thing in centuries." I glared at Alistair. "I can’t believe you’re even thinking of using a Salem Special. You put your soul at risk just by handling it."
"It’ll stop you, and that’s all that matters," he said. He smiled briefly, nervously. "Fight fire with fire, eh? Oh, I know it won’t hurt you, Eddie. You’ll get your armour up in time to protect you. But it’ll do terrible things to your pretty girlfriend…So you’re going to stand very still, Edwin, until the rest of the family get here, take your weapons away, and put you under arrest. Or I’ll burn your woman alive before your eyes."
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