Daemons Are Forever sh-2

by Simon R. Green

  Giles worked as fast as he could, but he kept having to leave his work on the bomb to defend himself. His skill with his long sword was enough to keep the drones at arm’s length, but it was clear he was getting tired. For all his skill, he was just a man, without our armour to support him. He was slowing down, missing opportunities, and it was clear from his grim expression that he knew it. And all around him, the Droods were dying.

  A few broke, and tried to run. The drones in the town swarmed all over them and dragged them down, holding them to the ground until the armed drones could reach them.

  The last half dozen Droods, the six left alive out of the two hundred who had followed the Deathstalker in, formed a tight circle around him, and yelled at him to finish working on the bomb while they held back the drones. Giles nodded reluctantly, sheathed his sword, and knelt down beside the bomb, concentrating on the timer. The Droods fought fiercely, holding the armed drones at bay through sheer strength and speed, but we all knew the armour couldn’t support that level of exertion for long.

  “He’s not going to make it,” said the Matriarch. “They’ll get to him before he can finish. Armourer, can we detonate the bomb from here?”

  “Of course,” said the Armourer. “But he still has a chance. Don’t write him off yet. We have to give him every chance…”

  I started towards the Merlin Glass. This had all been my idea, my plan. I couldn’t leave Giles to die when there was still a chance I could save him. But even as I started moving, Molly sprinted past me and threw herself through the Merlin Glass gateway. I cried out, but she was already gone. She reappeared on the display screens, deep within the New Zealand ghoulville, flying through the bright, unbearable air with dazzling speed. She shot over the town in a moment and dropped out of the overbearing sky like an avenging angel, and the impact of her landing broke apart the ground before the tower. Hundreds of drones fell this way and that. She rose up, lightning swirling and snapping around her hands, and blasted away every drone she could see. They exploded where the lightning touched them, scattering rotting flesh and body parts in a hundred different directions. The beleaguered Droods raised a ragged cheer for her, and she grinned fiercely.

  Giles stood up abruptly. “It’s done! We have ten minutes to get the hell out of here.”

  “Allow me,” said Molly. She picked up Giles and the six remaining Droods with her magic, and flew them all away through the painfully bright air, towards the Merlin Glass gateway.

  Behind them, drones fell upon the bomb and tried to tear it apart, but the Armourer’s work defeated them. They beat at it with their rotting fists, and cut at it with their glowing swords, but the Armourer always did good work. On the top of the box, bright red numbers counted inexorably down to zero.

  Molly flew Giles Deathstalker and the six Droods back over the ghoulville, her face a mask of desperate concentration. She dropped down to where the gateway hung unsupported on the open air, and flew them all through and into the War Room. I moved quickly to seal off the gateway to that particular location. Molly touched softly down beside me and looked proudly, almost triumphantly, at me, as though to say, See? I’m still me, still on the side of the angels. You can still trust me. I smiled reassuringly back at her. What else could I do? Even though her time in the ghoulville hadn’t affected her at all. Even though she didn’t even narrow her eyes against the unbearable light, or so much as cough at the unbreathable air.

  The communications officer shouted that the bomb had exploded and the Heron’s Reach ghoulville was destroyed, and we all raised some kind of cheer. It didn’t feel like a victory with so many Droods dead.

  Doctors and nurses rushed the six survivors away to the waiting emergency wards, to treat them for shock and check them for radiation damage. A couple tried to say they were ready to fight on, in other nests, but you could see their hearts weren’t in it. The Matriarch ordered them to stand down, and I think they were secretly grateful. I knew how they felt. I remembered the carnage on the Nazca Plain. It’s hard to fight an inhuman foe with only human resources.

  Of course, I could almost hear Martha say. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and the world wouldn’t need Droods.

  Harry Drood and Roger Morningstar took their two hundred armoured Droods and went to Siberia. Tunguska, to be exact, where something crashed into the Earth in 1908. The impact was so devastating it flattened trees for hundreds of miles in every direction, and the light generated by the impact was so bright that Londoners could read a newspaper in the streets at midnight. There are lots of theories about what it was that hit Tunguska all those years ago, everything from a meteor to a crashing alien ship to a miniature black hole…but no one knows anything for sure. Except us. We know. We know everything, remember?

  As far as we knew, the Loathly Ones’ presence in Tunguska was just a coincidence. They had no idea what was still sleeping there, deep and deep under the permafrost, and we were all happy for things to stay that way. What if the drones should wake it up by accident? Molly had asked. Then we’d really be in trouble, I said.

  The Loathly Ones had taken over a secret Soviet science city, X37, one of the highly classified research communities set up to run the kind of experiments the USSR just knew the rest of the world wouldn’t approve of. That’s why they set this one up in Siberia, so that, if things did go very badly wrong, there’d be hardly anyone around to object. X37 wasn’t on any official map, then or now, and had been pretty much deserted in recent years by the scientists and their families after the funding dried up. When the drones came, there was just a single troop of Russian soldiers, guarding a handful of scientists working on a new kind of food flavouring. They never stood a chance. X37 became a ghoulville, and no one even noticed. Except us.

  Harry and Roger and their strike force passed through the Merlin Glass and arrived in a great open square in the middle of the secret city. The surrounding buildings seemed to have evolved, transformed themselves, in disturbingly organic ways. Wires and cables wriggled through the walls, threading through brick and stone like pulsing veins. More cables hung across the streets like spiders’ webs, or exposed nerve structures, pulsing slowly on the bright air. Strange combinations of technology and living things protruded from burst-out doorways and shattered windows, as though the buildings’ insides had grown too big for them. And, everywhere, the stark fierce light, and air so thick with unbreathable elements that it looked like the whole city was underwater. The armour protected Harry and the Droods; Roger didn’t seem to notice it at all.

  They could see the tower from where they were, standing tall and grotesque and defiant above the blunt utilitarianism of the old Soviet architecture. Strange energies were crackling up and down the length of the tower, as though it were trying to force itself awake.

  Harry and Roger looked quickly about them as a horde of demons came running right at them from every direction at once. They’d been alerted by the attack on the New Zealand ghoulville, and they were ready. But here, in this nest, all the drones were freaks and monsters. Whether it was a legacy of the old forbidden sciences practiced in X37 during the Cold War, or strange emanations from what lay sleeping under the permafrost, every drone here was oversized and monstrous. Terribly misshapen, with huge bones and long strings of muscle, stretched faces with slit mouths full of shark teeth, clusters of eyes, and even waving barbed antennae… they might have been human once, but they had left all that behind. The drones surged forward with fangs and claws, and improvised weapons, and Harry and Roger and the Droods went forward to meet them.

  Fang and claw were no match for golden armour, and the Droods’ enhanced strength and speed made them a match for any monster. Harry wore the gold and fought alongside his people, striking down his enemies with brutal efficiency. Roger hung back from the main fighting, watching carefully. He was waiting. And when the first drones appeared with glowing swords clutched awkwardly in malformed hands, he was ready for them. He pointed a finger, and they exploded. He look
ed at them in a certain way, and blood burst from their mouths and eyes and ears. He spoke certain Words, and their rotting flesh melted and ran away down their bodies. Roger Morningstar wore his Infernal aspect openly, and even Harry couldn’t bear to look at him directly anymore.

  For all the drones’ overwhelming numbers, without the radioactive swords they were no match for Drood armour and Hell magic. Harry and Roger took the point, and slowly but inexorably they fought their way out of the open square and headed for the tower. Every drone in the nest came running or sliding or hopping through the city streets, pressing together in the narrow intersections to block off the way to the tower, and it didn’t even slow the strike force down. They cut and hacked and hammered their way through the drones, killing everything that wasn’t them.

  Harry stayed right at the head of his people, proving himself a magnificent fighter. The golden blades in his hands swept back and forth with supernatural speed, too fast for the unaided human eye to follow. Blood gushed over his gleaming chest and sprayed across his golden face mask, and just ran away, unable to get a grip. Drones attacked him singly and en masse, and never even slowed his advance. He had learned everything the Deathstalker could teach him about fighting with blades, and nothing could stop him now.

  Roger strode along beside him, embracing his Infernal aspect, and the drones fell dead just for getting too close to him. Roger looked at last what he really was; a thing from the Pit walking arrogant and unleashed in the world of men, and poisoning it just by his presence. Wherever he looked, bodies exploded or burst into flames. Some he turned inside out and left to lie in the gutters. When he spoke, drones turned on themselves and tore each other apart.

  He smiled a devilish smile; home at last.

  The Droods forced their way along behind their leaders and killed everything that came within reach. The tower loomed up before them, a door opened at the base, and a whole new army of drones came staggering and lurching out, bearing hundreds of the glowing swords. Roger spoke a single dreadful Word, and they all exploded into flames, bright crimson fires that stank of blood and brimstone, and consumed the drones as fast as they could appear.

  Harry put the bomb in place, set the timer for a comfortable margin, and then he and Roger led the way back through the ghoulville to the Merlin Glass. They all trooped through into the War Room, and I shut down the gateway. The bomb went off, X37 was destroyed, and everyone in the room went mad all over again. Harry and Roger hugged each other, Roger’s aspect now safely suppressed again. The Droods armoured down and clapped each other on the shoulder and on the back, and there were even some tears and kisses.

  Victory can feel oh so fine. While it lasts.

  Mr. Stab and the Sarjeant-at-Arms led their strike force into the Punjab, in India. A narrow fertile valley surrounded by mountains, supporting a small population; a perfect target for the Loathly Ones. The quiet settlement became a ghoulville and no one noticed. It was, after all, the kind of place where one tribe wouldn’t lower themselves to speak to another, and none of them would speak to outsiders because authority was never to be trusted. They might want you to pay taxes.

  When the strike force passed through the Merlin Glass, the ghoulville turned out to be a collection of squat stone houses, half overgrown with slowly stirring vegetation, strangely mutated by the town’s other-dimensional energies. There were cracks in the bare stone ground that seemed to fall away forever, and the light was so bright it seemed to wash all the details out of everything.

  It was a scene out of some bare, abstract hell, and Mr. Stab seemed quite at home there.

  The drones were waiting again, but this time when they came surging forward to attack the invading force, the crowd seemed to split apart at the last moment, broken in two by an immovable object. They surged around this object, and did their best not to touch it, though they fell on the Sarjeant-at-Arms and the other Droods with all their usual ferocity. But they couldn’t touch Mr. Stab. Something about his no-longer-human nature actively appalled them. They couldn’t bear to be close to him.

  So he just walked straight forward into the roiling mob and began killing with an elegant grace, using a long, shiny knife that just appeared in his hand out of nowhere. He walked unopposed through the surging drones and did awful, terrible things to them, and they couldn’t even touch him. Mr. Stab smiled slightly, possibly remembering other times…

  The Sarjeant-at-Arms moved quickly in behind Mr. Stab, backing him up, and the strike force followed. The Sarjeant had never been one for swords and blades; he preferred to use the aspect granted him by the family to summon weapons into his waiting hands. All he had to do was gesture in a certain way, and a gun would pop into his hand, fully loaded. And the Sarjeant used these guns to shoot down any drone who showed up with a glowing sword, long before they could get close enough to do any damage. When a gun ran out of bullets, he just tossed it aside and summoned another. The rejected gun would disappear in midair, and there was never any shortage of replacements.

  Mr. Stab sliced up the drones, and the Sarjeant mowed them down, and the strike force moved inexorably forward, towards the tower on the horizon. They almost made it look easy. Mr. Stab danced through the slaughter, killing with a touch, the Sarjeant emptied gun after gun, and the armoured Droods struck down anything that came within reach. They soon came to the base of the tower, and more drones appeared from within, bearing an assortment of entirely unfamiliar weapons. The Sarjeant-at-Arms took no chances and shot them all down from a distance. The few that couldn’t be stopped by bullets, protected by strange, glowing armours or energy fields, proved no problem for the smiling Mr. Stab.

  The Sarjeant planted the bomb, set the timer, and then led his people safely back home. Another nest destroyed, another tower gone, with no losses or casualties. I started to relax. We’d just had a bad beginning. It looked like we were starting to get the hang of things now. Maybe we could pull this off. I said as much to Molly, and she nodded, smiling. I should have known better.

  Callan and the Blue Fairy took their strike force into a small settlement just north of San Francisco. Officially, the Blue Fairy was there as a volunteer to support Callan and watch his back. In practice, I’d had a quiet word with Callan and told him to watch the Blue Fairy. I still wasn’t ready to trust Blue yet.

  Their ghoulville had once been an integral part of the Summer of Love in the sixties; a central point for more sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll magic than any reality could comfortably bear. In these more hard-headed, materialistic days, the small town of Lud’s Drum was just a haven for shaggy old hippy types, burnt-out casualties of the drugs war, and a whole industry had grown up devoted to trading on the town’s disreputable past. Only people like us still kept a watchful eye on Lud’s Drum, because dimensional barriers in and around the town had been dangerously weak ever since Timothy Leary dropped a heroic dose of LSD and peyote there and tried to perform a remote exorcism on the Pentagon. As a result, the Loathly Ones took the town with hardly an effort. Lud’s Drum was one of the few places where drones could walk around openly without being suspected. Now Lud’s Drum was a ghoulville, and one of the last remnants of the sixties dream was now a living nightmare.

  Callan led his strike force through the harshly lit streets, cutting down drones with cold, almost clinical precision. He didn’t allow himself to be distracted by the crumbling candy-coloured houses, the soft undulating streets, or the endless waves of drones that fell upon his people with vicious, malevolent glee. He cut a path right through them, heading with stern resolve straight for the nearly completed tower in the very centre of the town. Callan might have a smart mouth and an irreverent attitude when dealing with authority figures, but nothing distracted him from his focus when he was out in the field.

  The Blue Fairy stuck close to him, guarding Callan’s back with surprising skill and purpose. He didn’t have a sword, or a gun; just a slender wand that he’d produced out of nowhere. Oh, this old thing, he said airily. Been in the f
amily for ages. In the ghoulville he produced a series of small but surprisingly effective magics that kept the drones at arm’s length. It shouldn’t really have surprised me that Blue knew how to fight. He couldn’t have lasted all these years, with the kind of enemies he’d made, without having developed some survival skills.

  Callan led his people by example, always pushing forward, not allowing himself to be stopped or even slowed by anything the demons could throw at him. His golden blades rose and fell, and blood flew on the air. Always moving doggedly forward, he brought them closer and closer to the tower through sheer martial expertise and an almost brutal determination. Watching him made me feel proud to be a Drood. This was what we were for; to fight the good fight, to strike down the bad guys, in humanity’s name.

  The drones had their glowing swords, and other equally awful weapons, but the Blue Fairy saw to it that they never got close enough to do the Droods any harm. He stabbed the air with his wand, a slender length of bone carved with elven glyphs, and wherever he pointed it, things went wrong for the drones. Over and over again. Blue scowled fiercely as he concentrated, skipping this way and that to ensure he never even came close to being in danger himself, but I got the feeling he was enjoying himself, nonetheless.

  He was half elf, after all, with an elf’s ingrained talent for death and destruction.

  They made it all the way to the base of the tower before everything went wrong. The tower rose up before them, like a jagged lightning bolt of alien technology and organic components driven into the ground with godly force. Its shape made no sense, as though it had more spatial dimensions than the human mind could cope with, and once again there was a definite sense that the thing was in some way alive and aware, and knew they were there. Callan planted the bomb at the base of the tower, with the Blue Fairy looking over his shoulder, while armoured troops formed a barrier to hold back the swarming drones.