Heaven always did have a thing for martyrs. . . .
I didn’t have to do this. I could turn and run, let the Satanists follow me. I could lead them to the Sarjeant’s forces. No. I couldn’t do that. I had no idea where the rest of my family was. And if the Satanists got out of this room . . . I couldn’t take the risk that they did have some last hidden teleport gate to let them escape the castle and the Timeless Moment. Let them escape back to Earth, and the Great Sacrifice . . . And all the children in the world. No. I had to hold them here for as long as I could. And hope my family got here in time.
I was reeling on my feet now. I hurt everywhere. One eye was puffed shut, and there was so much blood in my mouth I had to keep spitting it out. The agony in my sides was cracked ribs, maybe broken. It was an effort to raise my arms now. I was a ragged, bloody thing, all out of strength, held up by only a simple determination not to fall to scum like this. I wasn’t fighting anymore, just trying to protect myself as best I could, spraying blood into the faces of my enemies with every breath, because my nose was broken. The only reason they weren’t landing more punches was because I was swaying so much. I kept my head down and my hands up, and laughed at them with crushed and bloody lips.
They finally got close enough to grab me, fastening onto my arms and shoulders with clawed hands, trying to drag me forcibly from the doorway, and I fought them with all the strength I had left. Making them fight for every inch. Not for pride’s sake. Not even for my family’s sake, but because I couldn’t let them do what they planned. I had to save the children.
Because there was no one there to fight for me when I was a child, and my parents left me in the cold arms of the family.
And then suddenly they all let go of me and backed away. I almost fell without their fierce hands to hold me up. I stood swaying in the doorway, peering at my enemy with my one good eye, and then, dazed as I was, I heard the pounding of golden feet on the marble floor behind me. The Satanists were backing away into the auditorium now, yelling at one another. I watched them numbly, half-blind and half-dead, while Philip MacAlpine screamed instructions from the stage, trying to rally his people. I managed a small smile then. I was having a little trouble accepting the fact that I was still alive, but you couldn’t be dead and still hurt this much. I slowly realised that MacAlpine had descended from the stage and was ploughing through his own people to get to me.
“You’ve spoiled it all!” he screamed at me. “You always have to spoil everything! You’ve destroyed my career and my life and my wonderful plan, but I’ll still see you dead!”
He lunged forward, a small ceremonial dagger in his hand, reaching for my heart. I vaguely remembered something like that happening before, back in the Hall, so I waited till the last moment, till he was almost upon me, and then I spit a mouthful of my blood into his eyes. He cried out, staggering to a halt, suddenly blinded and confused. And it was the easiest thing in the world for me to step forward and take the knife away from him. I could barely feel the smooth bone handle in my swollen hand. MacAlpine fell back into the crowd, fighting his own people as he tried to get away from me. I slowly opened my hand and let the knife fall to the floor. It wasn’t like I had enough strength left to use it. I was amazed I was still on my feet. So I stood there and watched the upper echelons of the new satanic conspiracy panic and scream at one another, while from behind me came the sound of my family racing to my rescue.
Golden figures were suddenly all around me, and golden hands held me up, supporting my weight. The relief was so great I almost cried. More golden figures streamed past me into the auditorium, and the Satanists scrambled back through the raked seating, fighting one another in their desperate need to get away. Blank golden faces loomed up before me. I really didn’t like the way my reflection looked in those golden masks. I heard the Armourer’s voice.
“Dear God . . . Eddie, my boy, what have they done to you?”
One figure armoured down, and there was the familiar face of my uncle Jack, filled with shock and horror and rage at what he saw. His strong engineer’s hands took hold of me and supported me. I tried to smile at him, and blood ran down my chin from my ruined mouth.
“They have a clicker,” I said, speaking as clearly as I could. “Like yours. Took my armour away. But I still fought them.”
“Of course you did,” said Uncle Jack. “You’re a Drood.”
He produced his own clicker and snapped it before me. My armour flowed out of my torc and encased me from head to toe in a moment. I sighed blessedly as all the pain washed away, soothed by the armour. I felt strong and sharp again. My armour couldn’t heal me, but it could hold me up. I took a deep breath and straightened up. My head was clear again. I looked quickly round the auditorium.
“Close the door,” I said. “And set a guard outside. No one leaves this room.”
The Armourer gestured urgently, and half a dozen Droods went back out into the corridor and shut the door firmly. The Sarjeant-at-Arms came over to stand before me.
“We’ve evacuated all the surviving prisoners back to the Hall. William’s there with Ammonia, and Molly’s there with her sister. Everyone else in the castle is dead. All the Nazi clones, all the Satanists—though we lost some good people doing it. Their names will be remembered.”
“I see you got your armour back,” I said.
“You didn’t think I’d invent something as important as the clicker and not have something to overrule it if necessary, did you?” said the Armourer.
“Did you get all of the teleport gateways?” I said. “Are you sure you didn’t miss any hidden ones?”
“We’ve got people checking,” said the Armourer. “But, Eddie, listen, I have to tell you—”
“No,” I said. “This is more important. This room contains the upper echelons of the conspiracy, and their leader. Philip MacAlpine.”
“Never liked him,” said the Sarjeant, after a pause. “Good at his job, but never for the right reasons.”
The Armourer shook his head slowly. “He did good work with James and me. But his heart was never in it.”
The Sarjeant-at-Arms looked out over the quiet crowd of Satanists, who were cowed by the presence of so many Droods in their armour. There were still a lot of defiant faces, but none of them was stupid enough to try anything. The Sarjeant nodded once.
“This is the last of them. We have to deal with them, here and now.”
“Deal with them?” I said.
The Sarjeant turned his featureless mask back to me. “Kill them, Eddie. Kill every single one of them. Do you have a problem with that?”
“No,” I said. “They have to die. Not for justice, or revenge, or even for the awful thing they planned to do. But because if we let them live, they’d try to do it again. That or something worse. They have to die here, and their dreams and plans and bad intentions with them. No mercy. Not for them.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms.
He used his gift to call two heavy machine guns into his hands, and then he walked towards the waiting Satanists and opened fire on them. He moved the guns smoothly back and forth, cutting the Satanists down in rows, and stepped calmly over the dead bodies of the fallen to get at the next. Most tried to run, but the golden figures were there to stop them, striking them down with cold armoured fists. There was screaming, pushing and shoving, people trying to use one another as human shields. Cries for mercy, promising to do anything we wanted, make any reparations we wanted, inform on all their contacts, do anything for their lives . . . but mostly they screamed. None of us had anything to say to them. How could they hope to be forgiven, to be shown mercy, after what they’d done and planned to do? Let them go to God, and see if he had any mercy for them.
They had to die, because it was our duty to make sure they could never harm anyone again.
It didn’t take all that long. The Sarjeant-at-Arms’ guns finally fell silent, and only Droods were left standing. A few armoured figures moved carefully
among the fallen bodies, but there were no merely wounded. The Sarjeant was very efficient. He looked round him at all the bodies lying slumped and piled across one another and nodded once, contemplating a job well-done. The guns disappeared from his hands. And then we all turned to look at the only two people left standing in the room who weren’t us. Philip MacAlpine and Alexandre Dusk stood together on the stage, looking defiantly back at us. I started toward them, and the Sarjeant and the Armourer came with me. MacAlpine looked quickly around, but there was nowhere for him to go. Alexandre Dusk smiled smugly at me. The bullet wound in his forehead was almost completely healed. He lifted his hands, and dark energies spit and swirled around them.
“I have my power, and I have my shields,” he said. “You can’t kill me, and you can’t stop me.”
“Wrong,” said the Armourer. He raised his clicker, snapped it once, and the magics surrounding Dusk’s hands disappeared. He looked at his hands dumbly for a moment, and then looked back at us. The Armourer smiled. “There are all kinds of clickers. Eddie, would you care to . . . ?”
I stepped forward and jumped up onto the stage. MacAlpine backed quickly away, but Dusk was still too stunned to move. He opened his mouth to say something, and I grew a long golden sword from my right hand and cut off his head. The body slumped to the stage, gouting blood. The head fell to the stage, rolled over the edge and ended up at the Sarjeant’s feet. The mouth was still moving, until the Sarjeant stamped on it. And that was the end of Alexandre Dusk.
I looked at Philip MacAlpine and he snarled back at me. “You can’t have me!” he said, his voice high and ragged. “I don’t care what you’ve got. I made a deal! It was promised to me that nothing in the world can harm me.”
“Hell always lies,” I said. “Except when a truth can hurt you more. You should know how deals with the Devil always work out.”
“I can’t be harmed! My own people tried to kill me in a hundred different ways, hoping to replace me as leader. I have drunk poison, soaked up bullets, laughed at curses! Nothing can touch me anymore. Your armour is worthless against me.”
“Yeah, right,” said the Sarjeant, behind me. He strode forward across the stage and launched a golden fist at MacAlpine’s head with enough force to tear it clean off the man’s shoulders. Except suddenly, impossibly, MacAlpine’s hand came up to intercept it. The golden fist slammed harmlessly into MacAlpine’s palm, stopped dead. And while everyone watched, MacAlpine closed his hand hard and crushed the serjeant’s hand inside his armour. He couldn’t break the golden strange matter, but he could destroy the hand inside it. We all heard the bones break and shatter. The Sarjeant grunted once. MacAlpine let go, and the Sarjeant fell back a step, nursing his injured hand to his chest. He didn’t cry out.
The Armourer looked at MacAlpine thoughtfully. “I wonder what a golden ax would do to his neck?”
“Don’t,” I said. “He really is protected. Sarjeant, have all the wounded been evacuated? Is there anyone else left in the castle?”
“All gone,” said the Sarjeant.
“Then let’s get the hell out of Schloss Shreck, and leave MacAlpine here. Sealed inside the Timeless Moment forever.”
“Ah,” said the Armourer. “We have a slight problem there. As I tried to tell you . . .”
I looked at him. “What?”
“When we smashed the teleport systems, we accidentally set off a self-destruct mechanism,” said the Armourer. “Designed to seal off the Timeless Moment so nothing could get in or out. One last dog-in-the-manger stratagem . . . We found the destruct mechanism, but its workings are protected by powerful shields. We can’t get at it. The best we can do is keep resetting the timer every sixty seconds. There’s a Drood doing that right now. The trouble is . . . the self-destruct mechanism is so powerful it’s affecting Alpha Red Alpha. Basically, if the destruct mechanism goes off, our machine will be destroyed, too. And Alpha Red Alpha takes a lot more than sixty seconds to fire up. We’d be stuck in here forever. Which means . . .”
“One of us has to stay here,” said the Sarjeant. “To keep resetting the timer until after the Hall has safely gone.”
Some days, the hits just keep on coming.
“I’ll stay,” the Sarjeant said. “I know my duty. My job is to protect the family.”
“No,” I said. “It has to be me.”
“Why?” said the Armourer. “Why does it always have to be you, Eddie?”
“Because I led us in here,” I said. “I know my duty. Anything for the family. Take me to the self-destruct mechanism, Uncle Jack. Sarjeant, get everyone else out of here.”
“Fair enough,” said the Sarjeant.
“No!” said MacAlpine. “You’re not going anywhere!”
He surged forward, his hands reaching for my throat. I whipped out the Merlin Glass, activated it and slapped it over MacAlpine. And the Glass sent him away.
“Where did you send him?” said the Sarjeant.
“Back to the cryogenic chambers,” I said. “To play with the other monsters.”
“The Glass!” said the Sarjeant. “You could wait till the last minute, then use it to transport you to the Hall just as we’re leaving!”
“No,” said the Armourer. “I’ve shut down the shields here, but the castle’s main protections still hold. They won’t let the Glass transfer anything out of the castle. I’m sorry, Eddie, if that’s what you were counting on. . . .”
“I wasn’t,” I said. “But we can use it to jump to the mechanism, can’t we?”
“Of course,” he said. “Take the family home, Sarjeant. Prepare Alpha Red Alpha. As soon as I return, we’re leaving.”
The Merlin Glass followed the Armourer’s instructions and delivered the two of us to a small back room full of strange old-fashioned equipment: great bulky stuff, with lots of vacuum tubes and heavy wiring. One large grey box was ticking down the seconds. The armoured Drood standing next to it hit the reset button, and the timer returned to counting down the minute. The Armourer gave the Drood his marching orders, and sent him back to the Sarjeant through the Glass. Which left him and me and the box.
“Don’t ask me what it is, or how it interferes with Alpha Red Alpha,” said the Armourer. “The people who worked here originally let their minds run in some pretty strange directions. I could spend months here taking things apart. . . . But we haven’t got months.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I know what to do. Time for you to go, Uncle Jack.”
He armoured down to show me his face. He looked like someone grieving at a funeral. “It isn’t fair, Eddie. You’ve done so much for the family. . . . I’m an old man. I should stay.”
“No,” I said immediately. “They need you to work Alpha Red Alpha. And besides, you’re far too valuable to the family. What would the Droods do without their Armourer? Someone has to do this. And I need to do it.”
“Why?”
“Penance,” I said. “And no, you don’t get to ask what for.”
“You were always my favourite nephew,” said the Armourer. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what to say to you, Eddie.”
“Say good-bye to Molly for me,” I said. “Make sure she knows how much I always loved her.”
“She knows,” said Uncle Jack. “Eddie . . .”
“Yes?” I hit the reset button.
“I have to take the Merlin Glass with me. It’s no use to you here, and it’s far too valuable to the family to leave behind.”
“Of course,” I said. “Molly will be able to use it to help Alpha Red Alpha get you home safely.”
I handed the Glass over. The Armourer took it reluctantly.
“It was the best toy you ever gave me, Uncle Jack,” I said.
He looked like he desperately wanted to say something, but couldn’t. So we shook hands, very formally.
“You did good, Eddie,” he said. “You’re a credit to the family. You will be remembered.”
“Then make sure they remember the real me,” I said.
I pulled up a chair and sat down beside the stubbornly counting self-destruct mechanism. I wondered how I’d know when the Hall was gone. . . . Best give it an hour, and then . . . What we do in Heaven’s gaze matters most. And one time pays for all.
I sat in my chair, looking round the room. I didn’t armour down; its strength was all that was holding me together. I kept an eye on the descending countdown, making a little game out of how late I could leave it, and looked back over my life. Enjoying my triumphs, cataloguing my sins, regretting all the things I’d meant to do but never got round to doing. I wished I’d made a better fist of running the family, while I had the chance. Wished so many good Droods hadn’t died in action, following my plans. And then there were all the many things I’d meant to say to so many people, because you always think you’ll have more time. Molly and I never talked enough. Not about the things that really mattered. I’d always meant to marry her, eventually, but it never seemed to be quite the right moment. I hoped she’d understand why I had to do this. Probably not. She never did have much time for guilt or penance.
I wished I’d taken more time to talk with Uncle Jack about all the marvellous things he and Uncle James did. I could have talked with him about my parents . . . but I never did.
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