The woman’s voice is harsh and full of a dangerous tension. Mo isn’t stupid. She freezes.
“Hold your hands straight out to either side, palms up. Speak or move and I’ll shoot you.” American accent, midcontinental twang.
Mo’s heart hammers thunderously. She can see the hole in the center of the cracked windscreen laminate now. She can’t see beyond the crazing, can’t tell if Zero’s dead body sprawls behind the wheel or if he somehow got away, but the driver’s door is closed so the odds are looking bad. Cassie doesn’t drive, does she? Where is she, anyway? Mo subvocalizes a macro, feels a tingle of power and sees ghost-lights in her mind’s eye, dotted around the courtyard. Two, in particular, might be crouching human forms, half-obscured behind a parked Maybach.
“Turn around slowly. Face me.”
Mo obeys. The woman is one of Schiller’s Valkyries, a straight-haired, blue-eyed blonde in a bloodstained white shift, her face a rictus of barely suppressed rage. There’s something faintly familiar about her. Any hope of escape withers at the sight of the Glock she holds in a two-handed shooter’s stance, five meters away; it’s aimed directly at Mo’s chest, and a red speckle of laser light from the tube clamped to its barrel tells its own story.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you,” the woman snarls. “Heretics and infidels! Servants of the Old Enemy! You did this!”
Mo licks her lips and takes a calculated risk. “Did what?”
“Everything!” the woman shouts. “Violated the Inner Temple! Shattered our Lord’s sanctum! Made me look like a fool in front of my boss and half the cabinet!” The penny drops: Mo is facing Ms. Overholt, the special advisor to the Minister for Magic. She’s working herself up into a frenzy of self-righteous hatred and Mo is absolutely certain that she’s going to pull the trigger in the next few seconds, but she’s clearly trained—the muzzle of the pistol never wavers. Mo works her suddenly dry mouth, reading a last desperate command—
Gravel rattles by her feet, and a fey, singsong voice calls out: “Over he-ere!”
Overholt spins and fires rapidly into the darkness as Mo dives for the grass behind her and yanks her invisibility around her like a caul, putting everything she’s got into it. The pistol is a rapid pulse of thunder, three rounds at a time—she must have an extended magazine, Mo realizes, and that’s really bad news: Glocks start at fifteen and go up from there—
Cassie’s silvery laughter echoes from the stables. “I know what you did!” she sings at Overholt. “You thought you could keep us out with your silly magic circle but we’re faster and smarter and better than you-hoo!”
Another three-round burst goes wild as Overholt spins round again and fires over Mo’s prone shadow-shrouded body. She grabs at the sod, terrified to release her grip on invisibility for long enough to speak another word of command before Overholt looks away. Where is Cassie? What’s she playing at? Then Mo realizes: when the barrier came down, Cassie reacquired her connection to her fount of power, and the OCCULUS team will be on their way in, with Alex and some unspecified heavy backup. All she has to do is stay alive—
Overholt turns to scan once more, then, without warning, throws back her head and shrieks. It’s an unearthly scream, appallingly loud: tendons stand out on the side of her neck as she vents a noise not meant for human lungs. Gooseflesh prickles on Mo’s body as Overholt’s hair begins to fan out in a halo around her head and she stretches onto the tips of her toes. Then she begins to rise, her eyes glowing as she gathers an aura of mana around her like a huge static charge prevented from seeking a path to earth. The muzzle of her gun is glowing now, the eerie green of a feeder’s eyes, and Overholt’s scream dopplers down into a ground-shaking roar of thwarted rage.
“You!” The thing that animates her howls at the night, at something or someone approaching across the lawn. Mo dares not look round, but raises her hand to her ear and taps her earpiece. “Okay Google, tell application OFCUT active ward maximum strength now,” she mumbles.
“Hello, I don’t understand that—”
Fuck. Computers. “Okay Google, tell app OFCUT active ward maximum strength now,” she speaks and scoots backwards as fast as she can on hands and knees, but Overholt is paying her no attention and she can’t tell whether it’s because her invisibility shield has held or because the unseen thing she’s reversing towards is so pants-wettingly terrifying—
“Yes, I can do that!” her phone warmly assures her, just as she stubs her left big toe painfully on someone’s shod foot and suppresses a yelp.
“Ah, Chief Inspector! We meet again!” says a posh, avuncular, and utterly unwelcome male voice. “Having a spot of bother, are we? This is your lucky day: your Dr. Armstrong asked me to stage an intervention on your behalf.” He raises his voice and addresses Overholt in a tone that drops several hundred degrees in temperature. “This is my fiefdom. Your False Pretender is banished. Leave now in peace, or I will not be merciful.”
“You!” Anneka Overholt rumbles. Then the thing speaking through her larynx switches to Old Enochian, inflected in an accent like fingernails scraping down a blackboard and the drowning screams of waterboarded prisoners. “Emperor of Centipedes and ruler of corpses! I will eat your slaves and shit worshipers and you will rue the day you challenged me!” Then she begins to chant, uttering noises that periodically overload Mo’s hearing so that the horrific phrases seem to stutter and stumble between bursts of static.
“Oh, do shut up; you’re boring me.”
Mo can’t help herself: she whimpers. Every hair on her body is standing on end with the backwash from the thaumaturgic firepower converging on Anneka and the Mandate. She tries to crawl away, but her limbs aren’t answering her brain’s most urgent commands. The loss of control is mortifying and fills her with the horror of the bone-white violin. Going to die now, she realizes, despairing. A mind-numbingly powerful blanket of sorcerous power sweeps past her, rippling through the earth like the tracks of a main battle tank rumbling past her head at a range of centimeters; then the night lights up the green-white of a lightning strike with a pulse of noise so loud that it feels like a door slamming on her head.
The Mandate giggles. “Is that the best you can do?” he demands. “Why don’t you go back to sleep?”
Then he snaps his fingers and the world ends for a few seconds.
* * *
Darkness. A smell of burned hair. Mo moans quietly. She hurts, everywhere.
“Mo? Can you hear me?” She recognizes the voice. Pain rasps across her right shoulder. “Mo?” Someone prodding her.
“Hurts,” she manages.
“I’m not surprised.” Alex sounds worried.
“Is she alive?” Cassie demands excitedly.
The pain is subsiding. “Backwash.” She tries to open her eyes—they sting, but she succeeds with the second attempt. As the pain recedes she begins to notice other things. The back of her left arm is sticky. Her eyelids don’t want to stay open. Redness. “How bad. Am I?”
“It’s just like that movie!” Cassie is ebullient. “So spectacular!”
Mo groans again, then pushes herself upright. Her arms and legs are evidently working again, but she feels disgusting, and there’s a stench of voided bowels and warm dampness. Did I just wet myself, she wonders dismally, then decides to ignore the question. She raises a finger and taps something brittle and moist and a lump of something unspeakable falls from her ear. “Okay Google—”
“I think your phone’s toast,” says Alex, wiping his fingers on the grass. “I mean, your handbag’s on fire. Did you have it running as a virtual ward? If so, it died to save your ass.”
She pushes herself to her feet and tries not to retch at the stink. “What’s—”
“Just like Scanners!” Cassie enthuses. “She totally exploded all over you! Well, all over everyone, actually, but none of it stuck to him,” she clarifies. “Well, actually, her worm exploded, but as it was inside her—”
“Stoppit.” Mo gags. “Just stop. Wanna. Be
sick.” She has not, she realizes, pissed herself; she’s just covered in Overholt. She doubles over and tries to keep her airways clear as her stomach spasms. It’s not the proximity to sudden death that does it, but the immanent tank-track terror of feeling the Mandate’s power crunching past, taking aim at a frail meatsack animated by the will of the not-fully-awakened Sleeper. That, and the ghastly stench of whatever she’s covered in. “Needa. Shower.”
“Come on, we’ll sort you out.” Alex is solicitous, but inexplicably not solicitous enough to offer her his arm.
Mo staggers across the lawn between Alex and Cassie. They lead her past police and soldiers who are escorting dazed partygoers in the opposite direction, towards the pavilion, which has been pressed into service as a triage station. Alex waves off an offer of first aid. “She just needs a shower and a change of clothes,” he assures them, and the police are only too happy to focus on the nonwalking wounded.
“And a stiff drink,” Mo adds, sotto voce, and Cassie giggles.
They are crossing the ballroom towards the door to the Grand Hall and the staircase beyond, carefully avoiding the paramedics and police officers laying out the dead, when a woman in a black power suit steps out in front of them. “Ah, Mo. Long time no see,” she says, nodding congenially. “And who’s this?”
Mo boggles. “Did he bring you?” she demands. “I thought you were in Camp Sunshine.”
“I was: Persephone let me out, and the SA signed off on it.” Iris nods at her companions. “Who are these? New blood, I see?”
Mo swallows. “Iris, meet Dr. Alex Schwartz and Cassie Brewer, yes they work for us and I’ll introduce you properly later but right now I need a shower and a change of clothes and we really ought to be leaving.” She has to raise her voice to be heard over the hoarse screaming echoing up through the open door leading to the basement lounge.
“I’d noticed.” Iris’s lips quirk. “You might as well make yourself at home; I’m sure Schiller’s people will have left something that fits in their suite. West wing, second floor, room 309,” she adds. Something behind Mo wheezes, a long sighing exhalation like the air departing a corpse’s lungs, and she begins to turn.
“NoNo—” Cassie says just as Iris raises her right hand and gestures at the drunkenly staggering green-eyed chief financial officer whose attempt at stalking them is somewhat impaired by the unshed trousers wrapped around his ankles—then there is a flicker of radiance and the body collapses, animating pattern banished back to wherever the never-living come from. “Oh, that was neat! Can you do it again? May I watch?”
Iris gives Cassie the hairy eyeball. “I think you’d better help Dr. O’Brien upstairs,” she suggests. “She looks as if she’s about to keel over.” There’s a disturbance near the entrance to the chapel; evidently someone else is in a hurry to escape. “Don’t you worry about the feeders, I’ll keep them contained until He gets everything wrapped up.”
Mo’s shoulders slump. “So it’s true.”
“What? You’re up against a greater evil and you still have qualms about making common cause with a lesser one?” Iris sniffs, but there’s a twinkle in her eyes. “Go on, get away with you.” More shamblers are heading their way; Iris steps aside to clear Mo’s path and raises her hand again, to bar them.
“Come on,” Alex urges her. He looks slightly queasy.
“Let’s,” Cassie says fervently, and nudges Mo towards the sweeping staircase. Nothing else blocks their way, and the upper levels look to be eerily quiet after the chaos below stairs. “What was that?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say Schiller was trying to induct the government into his cult until you-know-who blocked him. Which means—”
They’re almost at the top of the first flight of steps when the front door opens below them. Schiller’s greeters are conspicuously absent as a solitary figure in top hat, white tie, and tails, with silver-topped cane tucked under one arm, paces through the entrance and pauses dramatically.
Mo’s knees turn to jelly as the new arrival turns its face upwards and directs the full weight of its vast, drily amused attention on her. “What now?” she asks, a faint note of resentment in her voice.
“Just taking care of business.” He raises his top hat and inclines his head. “Dr. O’Brien, I see you survived after all! And in such elevated company. You do know that your companion is not entirely human…?”
Mo’s self-assurance is shot, but she pulls herself together just enough to put a brave face on things. “Yes, I am aware of that. So, uh, your priestess is waiting for you down in the basement.” She waves at the door to the cellar stairs. “You may need to know the combination to the lock, it’s—”
“Entirely irrelevant.” The implicit force behind his awful smile will give her nightmares in the days and weeks to come. “When I told you that you would serve me, I was giving you a true seeing: you are mine now, and forever more. However, I’ve decided that I don’t want to be the Home Secretary anymore. I’ve raised my game; what this country needs to see it through the coming stellar conjunction is firm government under an enlightened ruler, and I’ve decided I’m exactly the best possible candidate for the job!” The living avatar of the Black Pharaoh beams up at her, like a distant supernova blazing through mist rising from the liquefied atmospheric oceans of a frozen outer planet. “Michael asked me, on behalf of the Board of Directors of your agency, if I could deal with the situation here. Give him my best regards when you see him, and let him know that thanks to Schiller’s diligence in distributing those silly little hosts, I will have the cabinet entirely under control by the end of the night.”
“Eep,” says Cassie, as timidly as a mouse facing a rearing cobra.
“I’ll be sure to tell him you said that,” Mo says snippishly. She takes Cassie’s limp hand and tugs, gently. “Goodbye!”
“Be seeing you!” the Mandate calls lightly as they trudge upstairs to help themselves to the facilities in the suite Schiller and his handmaids reserved for their own use. And Mo is so exhausted and frightened that she neither notices nor pays any heed to the beetle-black Jaguar spinning its tires on the gravel out front, in its driver’s haste to evade the descending flyswatter.
* * *
Raymond Schiller flees for his life, screaming silently at the emptiness inside his head.
For the past two years he has never been alone within his skull; sleeping or waking, he lives every day in the mindful presence of divinity, of the sleeping god he awakened in the temple on the dead plateau. His first attempt at summoning the Christ-thing was thwarted, but his god is no longer comatose. Deities, like brain-damaged humans, can experience a locked-in state in which they are aware of the passage of time and of people around them. And if you try hard enough to gain such a god’s attention, so hard that you loan them a part of your own brain, they may answer your prayers.
Schiller’s prayers were answered on the third day, kneeling before the wrecked sarcophagus in the crypt beneath the temple—cut off from Earth by the severing of the portal through which he had entered—and his god made its wishes clear. It would take more than a handful of souls to bring the Sleeper to full awakening now—a number closer to fifty million, rather than the five thousand he tried with previously, will surely suffice—but the Sleeper is nothing if not subtle, and in its divine majesty it showed Schiller, through dreams, what tools and stratagems he must employ if he was to gain absolute control over such a cornucopia of sacrificial power.
And it was all going so smoothly, right up until the moment when Anneka, glassy-eyed and panting, lowered herself carefully onto Norman Grove’s eager middle-aged erection and tensed, her pelvic floor muscles contracting around the sheath of scar tissue that surrounds the host that grows inside her in place of her womb and ovaries, and whose open cyclostomal jaws lie just behind her labia—
—bit down hard, then pushed herself up with her arms, gasping from the pain as half her host tore away from her, like the worker bee’s barbed stinger that stays behind
in its target—
Schiller felt her moment of transcendent joy, and then the horror as, all of a sudden, the newly spawned host was ripped away from his soul, muted, blinded, deafened by the deadening numb silence that engulfed all his scattered organs. The other hosts, the eaters of tongues, had fallen silent too: What is this? What blanket of mutilation falls across his will? Why can he no longer hear the dreams of god resonating in his mind? Who has stolen his grace?
Chittering vile pests, icy parasites from outside the world, invade his empty vessels, stealing flesh and will and memories. Schiller tears himself away from the communion rite and runs. The newly inducted Inner Temple members—ministers of government one and all—are still functioning, and he sends them to the surface to aid Anneka in hunting down the intruders who have violated the glory of the coming of the Lord. But his beautiful handmaids are half-exhausted by the effort of shedding the new hosts and bringing so many to the faith, and some of them are stunned by the same assault that Schiller was barely able to resist. He flees by the emergency fire stairs at the back, and as he does so he feels a vast and horrifying sense of dread steal over him. It casts a shadow as large as his god, but penumbral and chillingly amused rather than warm and loving. The one who casts the shadow out of space is approaching the front of the house, and Schiller knows, with a flat sense of despair, that if the shadow bearer notices him then that will be all over—
Drenched in chilly sweat, shivering in the night air, Schiller yanks his surplice and vestments over his head and throws them to the ground. He stumbles down a narrow servants’ passage at the back of the house, then through a scullery door and out past the stables yard at the rear. His car is parked there but he senses the presence approaching across the grounds and flees, heading away towards the front of the house. He knows he must escape, knows that any who fail to do so will be taken by the ancient foe. But he’s still human enough to want to save those closest to him; if only Anneka hadn’t—
There is a flare of green-white pain in his mind, a sense of Anneka’s desperation and rage and love of the Lord, then the echo of a terrible voice asking, “Is that the best you can do?” And he blanks for a few minutes. When he comes to himself he’s in the driving seat of an unfamiliar car—a big cat snarling from the hub of the steering wheel—racing through darkness along a narrow road between hedges, overhung by the boughs of ancient trees. “London,” he tells himself. “Got to get to London.” The Falcon is parked at Stansted, and if he goes there he can run for home—but maybe they’ll be waiting for him? First he needs to visit the apartment in Docklands, check in with his people, see if it’s safe to run and, if so, where. The climax of tonight’s communion was to be his holy union with the CFO of a big internet search company in Europe. But he was to induct another new handmaid afterwards, in the apartment, wasn’t he? A temple whore, a missionary, to bring the joy and the light and the host to as many powerful men as possible. He was saving himself for her—well, the part of him he shed and left in the fridge two days ago—but that’s not necessary now. What is necessary is his passport: without it they won’t let him fly home.
The Delirium Brief Page 39