“Go look under the stairs.”
Suddenly he looks round. “Where’s your violin?”
“Go look under the stairs.”
He stands and walks through into the hall. A minute later he comes back and sits down again, then takes a mouthful of wine. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes.” I nerve myself for the next step. “It’s warded, Bob. The violin lives there . . . for the time being.”
He puts his glass down. “You’re trying to give it up?” He sounds appalled and hopeful all at the same time.
The words come in a rush: “It’s too strong for me, Bob! It’s getting more powerful all the time, and I’m getting older, and there’s going to come a time when I can’t control it anymore. Michael—the SA—says I’m now the second-longest carrier it’s ever had. We’re looking for someone new, someone it can’t Renfield. But if we can’t find someone to replace me, it’s going to have to go back in the inactive inventory.”
He stares at me, clearly surprised. “What changed, love?”
“You did. I did.” I grab my glass and take a gulp of wine and then set it down hastily because my hands are shaking. “If you can, can do something, I’ll meet you halfway.” I don’t know if it’s a promise or a plea, but either way I mean it.
He takes a deep breath. “I can’t give up the Eater of Souls, Mo. Not, don’t want to—I mean, I can’t.”
“Can you make it safe?” I ask. “I mean, safe enough to be around me without, without . . .”
He stands and walks around the table: I stand, lean against him, let him hug me. “I really need to talk to someone about applied containment theory,” he says. “When I get time.” Which would be a diplomatic way of saying no.
“You’re very busy,” I tell him, trying not to sound as broken as I feel.
“I’m sorry,” he says. Letting go of me he repeats: “When I get time.”
“We’ve got all the time in the world.” I sniff, determined not to get teary.
“I don’t think so.” He looks at me, anxious and needy. We make a dismal pairing: barely treading water on our own, so weighed down by our personalized curses that we’re each looking to the other as a life raft. “It’s been well over a month already. Please don’t let this become the new normal, Mo. Please?”
But all I can do is mutely shake my head. It’s not up to me anymore. I’ve given up a lot to be here: if Bob can’t meet me halfway, I don’t see what possible future we’ve got.
* * *
On Friday morning I go to my weekly with Dr. Armstrong. I tell him about last Saturday’s dream, and my subsequent dealings with my instrument.
“That’s a rather worrying development,” he says after I wind down.
“The violin intruding in my dreams? Do you think it’s time for me to—”
“No, you’re still perfectly able to control him if you set your mind to it. I meant the location.”
“What? The ruined city?”
“The King in Yellow.” The SA closes his eyes for a few seconds. “I haven’t heard that name in a while. It’s disturbing.”
“What is it?” I did some digging, of course: there’s a thick file on it in the Stacks, but I didn’t have time to trudge round to Dansey House and sign myself in for an afternoon of reading dusty archives: I’m too busy fighting administrative fires. I told the analysts to follow it up for me, along with all the other manuscripts Freudstein stole, and it’s somewhere in their work queue.
The SA opens his eyes. “Carcosa is one of the legendary lost cities. Or rather, a legendary lost Neolithic civilization, nearly pre-agricultural, drowned like Doggerland and the great cities of the Nile delta and the Arabian Gulf when the sea levels rose after the last ice age. They had elaborate court rituals centered around the worship of the King in Yellow. Subsequently the foundational material for some not inconsiderable occultist foofaraw in the late nineteenth century. It’s a rite of binding, Dominique. Not unlike the ritual that certain meddling fools—who should have known better—tried to use to bind the Eater of Souls a couple of years ago.” His unblinking stare makes me feel very small. “They wrote an opera around one of the invocations. One of the solos—I do not know which; it’s too dangerous to read the score—installs a very small execution loop in the auditory cortex of anyone who hears it. If warded, one is safe, but if not, well, the first invocation anyone feeds you starts executing on your brain. Not nice. Carcosa is lost, and it is widely believed that it is lost because the King in Yellow bound his subjects in that manner, and unintentionally carried them all to a hell of his own conception or fed them to a god of his own devising or some such.”
“That particular manuscript was part of the British Library heist.” I don’t like where this train of thought is going.
The SA turns his lizard-heavy gaze on me for a moment. “Do you suppose it was Freudstein’s real target?”
“It would make sense.” Played on a non-occult instrument the loop would just be an earworm: a short melody, very hard to dislodge from one’s head. But played on a device able to perform polydimensional chromatic transforms, it’d leave the audience vulnerable to demonic possession by the first trivial feeder to come along. “But they’d need something like my instrument to, to install the loop.”
“Yes.” Dr. Armstrong is thoughtful. “There are certain disturbing rumors about the reason Dr. Mabuse commissioned the white violins—rumors along those lines.”
“Mabuse?” He was a man of whom many stories are told, none of them good. “But surely he didn’t actually stage a performance of The King in Yellow?”
“I don’t believe he had the opportunity to do so. Then all known copies of the score were destroyed during the war, or collected by institutions that were, shall we say, uninterested in sponsoring a performance.”
“It’d be grossly irresponsible to play it without working a protective ward into the refrain—”
My phone rings. Before I entered his office I set it to do-not-disturb: only a very short list of people can get through.
“’Scuse me,” I say.
The SA swallows whatever he was going to say. “Certainly,” he says, slightly stiffly, as I pull the smartphone out.
“Ah. It’s important,” I tell him as I glance at the screen. “O’Brien here. Speak.”
“Mo?” It’s Mhari. “We have an incident call-out.”
“Where?”
“Downing Street. It’s the Mandate.” She fills me in quickly. He’s somehow penetrated the security cordon, and is visiting the Government Chief Whip for tea and a chat in that worthy’s official residence. What he didn’t reckon with was the face recognition software running on the computers fed by the CCTV cameras around Whitehall. He can beguile a human watcher, but not a database system.
I get hot and cold and shivery with adrenaline, reflexively reaching for a violin case that isn’t at my feet. “How long has he been there?” I ask.
“Only ten minutes so far,” Mhari says eagerly. “We can get there if we hurry. Jim’s in the office with Torch and Bee—”
“Okay. Tell them to go ahead and deploy around the area, don’t wait for me. Don’t let the Mandate leave the scene but don’t interfere with him until I give the go-ahead. I’m coming back to the office to—no. Scrub that. Mhari, you know what’s in the safe in my office?”
“Ye-e-s . . .” She doesn’t sound happy.
“Tell Ramona to open the safe and bring the violin, in its case, then deploy. I’ll give her the combination over the phone. If there’s any trouble or if it tries to resist, don’t bother; I’ll swing by the office to collect it myself. Main thing is, I want everyone, and the violin, on deployment: I’ll meet you there directly. Can you do that?”
“Let me get this straight? You’re deploying without your—”
“No! I’m relying on security-cleared personnel
to bring it to me: I’ll collect it at the incident scene. You, Ramona, and Jim are all aware of its capabilities. I trust you know better than to mess with it.”
She laughs, slightly shaky. “No shit! It’s sunny outside.”
“So go as White Mask.” The Home Secretary wants a show? Let’s give her one.
“Yes, Mo.”
I end the call. The SA is watching me patiently. “Yes?” he asks.
“It’s the Mandate,” I tell him. “He’s gone too far this time. I’ve got to go—”
“I’m coming with you,” he says, unfolding himself from his chair. “You said it’s happening at the Chief Whip’s residence, didn’t you?” He rummages in his desk drawer and pulls out a bunch of ancient-looking keys.
“Yes—”
“Follow me.” He walks towards the curtained windows at the far end of his office. I stand and follow him, and he pulls back one of the ceiling-to-floor drapes at the side to reveal a narrow wooden casement, paneled, in which is set a keyhole. “Now let me see . . .” He works his way around the bunch of keys until he finds one to his liking. He inserts it in the keyhole, turns it, and the casement hinges open like a very narrow doorway. Beyond lies utter darkness. “Follow me,” he repeats, and slips sideways into the night.
I take a deep breath. “Where does this go?” I ask, tiptoeing after him.
“Sideways.” I can feel a smooth surface in front of my nose, and there’s another wall behind me: it’s so narrow I have to turn sideways, hoping I won’t get stuck. The air is cool and fresh, and for some reason I know in my guts that there’s no ceiling overhead, just an infinite expanse of not-sky. I glance over my left shoulder and see the rectangular column of light from the SA’s office dwindling with each crabwise shuffle. “Not far now,” he reassures me.
“What is this?” I ask.
“You know about the ley lines and bike paths. The shadow roads aren’t so different. Think of it as the institutional equivalent of hotelspace . . .”
He’s clearly been listening to Bob too much: So we’re taking an extradimensional shortcut. I don’t want to think about it. Extradimensional geodesics are wonderful until you run into someone or something else that’s coming the other way. Bob once ran into some shotgun-toting cultists on a shortcut: it’s why he has a ten-centimeter-long scar on his upper right arm. He got off lightly, though. Not all the users of such routes are human. Sometimes someone you know uses one to save a little time and you never see them again. I shudder and hurry after the SA’s receding shoulder. I can just see a twilight rectangle beyond him.
Most democracies have legislatures that meet in some sort of a parliament or senate building. The UK’s House of Commons meets in the Palace of Westminster, a gothic pile on the banks of the Thames, near the middle of the cluster of neoclassical government offices known collectively as Whitehall. (The Palace of Westminster isn’t as old as it looks: the original burned down by accident in the 1830s and this one is a replacement. It also got rebuilt in the 1940s, after it burned down for entirely non-accidental reasons.)
About a third of a kilometer away from Parliament there’s an unassuming little stretch of road called Downing Street, lined with eighteenth-century town houses that have gradually been hollowed out and turned into a warren of offices and residences for the three highest politicians in the government: the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the one nobody’s ever heard of—the Chief Whip.
The Chief Whip is the Prime Minister’s personal representative to individual MPs, telling them how they are expected to vote. And to give you some idea of how important the Chief Whip is in the British parliamentary system of government, that worthy lives at Number Nine Downing Street, next door to the Prime Minister. While my boss, the Home Secretary, as number four on the totem pole, doesn’t rate a residence on the street.
The SA steps out of a panel in the wall of a side corridor and into a marble-floored entrance lobby. I follow on his heels as he marches straight towards the front door, and I hurry to catch up with him. “Where are we?” I ask.
“Foreign and Commonwealth Office.” There are metal turnstiles and a security barrier ahead: he nods affably at the guard and slips through. I follow him, doing my best to look as if I belong here. We’re both dressed for the part, which helps: the SA in dark gray pin-stripe and me in a black trouser suit.
Out on the street, my phone vibrates. It’s Mhari. “Mo here. I’m with the SA on King Charles Street at the FCO building. Where are you?”
“We’re northbound on Whitehall, just pulling over beside the entrance to Downing Street. Ramona’s putting the flashers on.”
“Okay, we’ll be with you in two minutes.” I hang up and tug the SA’s sleeve. “They’re at the east entrance, round the block.”
“Poor timing on my part,” he says tightly, quickening his pace.
Downing Street is not open to the public. There are anti-vehicle defenses and electrically operated gates at either end, not to mention armed officers from the Diplomatic Protection Group. You do not park within spitting distance of those gates unless you’re the Police and it’s an emergency. Luckily we are the Police (technically) and it is an emergency (even if they don’t know it yet); also, my people have a uniformed Chief Superintendent to wave at the guards. But it’s still going to be a little bit tense.
When Dr. Armstrong and I come round the corner, we see Jim standing beside the van, head to head with a uniformed Inspector from SO17. Ramona’s watery chariot has sprouted high-vis markings and a strobing light bar; a red DPG car has drawn up behind the van and its officers are standing alongside, but they’re not pointing their assault rifles at anyone in particular yet. I take this to be a good omen.
We walk up towards the cluster and I pull my warrant card in readiness, but the SA beats me to the punch. As an armed officer moves to intercept, he gives the man a saintly smile and says, “I’m with him,” nodding at Jim. The constable staggers slightly, then recovers and steps aside.
“Sorry,” I say as we shoulder past: “Transhuman Force.”
Jim seems to be having a little problem with the officer in charge of the Downing Street watch. “We haven’t been notified of any problem—”
“You won’t be. A four-sigma supervillain has gained access to the Chief Whip’s office. Anyone capable of calling for help has already been disabled.”
There is a whirr from the direction of the van: Ramona is lowering herself from a side door using some sort of wheelchair lift. “Dr. O’Brien,” she calls.
I join her, leaving the SA to assist Jim in giving the creditably tenacious Inspector a backgrounder. “Thanks,” I say as she hands me my instrument case. Is it my imagination or is Lecter unusually quiet? I walk back over, just in time to hear the SA calmly deliver what should be the definitive smackdown.
“The gentleman who the Chief Whip is currently playing involuntary host to walked right in because your men were unable to see him. Luckily, his ability to cloud minds is not so effective on CCTV cameras: Why don’t you ask the control room for confirmation?” Dr. Armstrong smiles his saintly but subtly terrifying smile, then speaks, head tilted to one side as if he’s listening to an invisible earpiece: “It is now 11:58. Ask them to confirm that at 11:43 a gentleman in a three-piece suit and a bowler hat walked up to the gate and was admitted, then proceeded to the door of Number Nine, where he was also admitted by the officers on door duty. That’s our man.”
“But that’s impossible—” begins the Inspector, as I notice a blur of motion behind him. It’s Bee; she jumps right over the two-meter-high spiky steel gate, then flashes along the street, covering the distance to the Chief Whip’s front door in under a second.
“You appear to have another intruder,” Jim tells the Inspector. “Good thing this one’s a trainee constable, isn’t it?”
“Back off!” The Inspector is so focused on the threat
under his nose that he doesn’t take his eyes off Jim, even though the Diplomatic Protection Group constables on the other side of the barrier are making a beeline for—
“Can we leave this for later?” I butt in, doing my best to be visible: “We have to apprehend the Mandate immediately!” I hold out my warrant card in front of the Inspector’s nose and shove every gram of willpower I’ve got into it. He recoils in alarm. I don’t dare look away from him: if my suspicion about what’s happening to me is right, it’s quite possible that if I break eye contact he’ll suddenly forget I’m even standing in front of him. It’s always more pronounced when I’m stressed: people seem to stop being able to see me, as if I’m not just socially invisible . . . “Torch, I want you to trip the fire alarms in Number Nine just as soon as you see Bee’s in position. Try not to set the building alight, it’s Grade One Listed and there are people inside. Jim, Ramona, get those officers to safety if the Mandate kicks off. I’ll cover if it turns hairy.” Mhari is hiding in the van, but I can’t blame her: it’s a bit bright out here today. I heft my violin case, finger on the quick-release button, and wish I’d had time to pick up some noise-cancelling headphones to hook into Lecter’s pre-amp. They degrade the sound quality, but given who we’re up against . . .
“You c-can’t—” the Inspector stutters: I’m impressed. He has real willpower. “You’ll answer to the Home Secretary!”
“I certainly hope so. Now let us in, otherwise I promise you that you’ll be the one who’s up in front of Professional Standards tomorrow.”
A thin plume of white smoke begins to trickle from an attic window at Number Nine. “Oops,” someone says aloud. An alarm siren keens. In the street, four or five officers are somehow tying themselves in knots. Bee let them get just close enough to think they’d got her, did the I’m-just-a-petite-and-harmless-girl thing to avoid provoking a restraint hold; then before they can get the cuffs on she’s behind them, in front of them, performing cartwheels in the street—then she vanishes just as the door to Number Nine opens and everybody inside begins crowding out.
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