The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  They’re walking across the stone-strewn floor of a valley beneath a cliff that hangs above them like a frozen waterfall. The moon has set but the constellations are familiar. With merely human eyes Alex would be blind, but he can see well enough by starlight to know he’s been here before. This particular valley is familiar from a long-ago school trip. Malham Cove is a unique rock formation, popular with generations of Yorkshire geography teachers seeking an educational day of hiking for their classes. The ground is strewn with treacherous velvet shadows, some of which move if he stares at them too hard. Then some of the shadows shimmer and pull apart, leaving them walking along an aisle between rows of tents made of something like ripstop nylon—silk? he wonders, then: Don’t be stupid. There are more sentries, and there seems to be some silent recognition in play, some minutiae of gesture or microexpression opaque to him that nevertheless distinguishes friend from foe. Abruptly, they come to the entrance to one of the big pavilions, and this time there is light from a chilly sphere hanging from the central tentpole.

  There’s some sort of ground-sheet beneath their feet. A row of field tables stand against one wall and a map hangs like a tapestry behind them. At least, Alex assumes they’re tables and a map. The tables are impossible, feathery metallic structures like cobwebs blown by a gallium-spinning spider. And the map seems to be made of parchment or hide of some kind, crudely stitched—but it shows a view which might as well be projected from Google Earth, in 3D. Colored triangles crawl across it, accompanied by strange ideograms similar to those he saw inscribed around the grid in the bunker. Two vampires—no, magi, he remembers—stand before the map. They wear plain-looking robes and cowls, and are by no means the most eye-catching individuals in the room: he wouldn’t know what they were but for the chilly blast of power that rolls off them in waves, summoning a matching echo in his blood. They focus on the markers, and where they watch, the map springs into tighter focus. A column of red and yellow polygons floods through an eczematous patch of tiled roofs, spilling ever closer to the huge blotch at the right-hand side of the map. It can only be a city, he thinks, sickly conscious that he may be too late to help.

  “Ah, First of Spies! And what is this toy you have brought us?”

  A tall man wearing gothic, fluted armor plate that shimmers oddly in the were-light steps close to Cassie and her guide, smiling without showing his teeth.

  “Second of Field Artificers, this is the urük magus All-Highest bid me bring hither. He belongs to me. You may not have him.”

  Alex blinks, dull-eyed, and does his best to resemble a turtle. Second of Field Artificers is the first male of the People he’s had a chance to get a close look at, and the sense of dread that already has his stomach in knots tightens further. They’re not terribly tall, these alfär, and they are fine-boned. Only the incredibly prehensile ears mark them out as non-human. But something in Second of Field’s expression frightens Alex almost as much as his one brush with a vampire elder, most of a year ago. There’s a coldly reptilian lack of affect to the man. “Too bad. My magi are tired and food is scarce. If he’s bound I could use him.”

  “Not until All-Highest has made his determination,” says Cassie. “My father would not have called for such a prize without a use in mind for it.”

  Alex tenses. Cassie and the Second of Field Artificers have shown no sign of noticing the woman who led them here leave. He’s fairly sure she’s some sort of officer, perhaps in charge of the guard detachment for this camp. Now there are only two sentries, although the one with the mace shows no sign of growing tired of holding it to the small of his back.

  “All-Highest is on his way,” Second of Field Artificers says with assurance; “I believe he has some business to attend to with Air Defense. In the meantime, put your plaything over there, away from my magi.” Cassie waves Alex towards the farthest corner of the tent. “Secure him, then come with me,” adds the officer, and before Alex can move his escort takes a step backward and throws a handful of white powder in front of his feet.

  Shit. Salt. Alex can feel his V-symbionts’ anxiety as they demand to know how much, how many grains—then the sentry completes the job, upending a small pouch of salt in a circle around Alex’s feet. Cold sweat prickles on his forehead and he’s about to recite the word that starts the counter macro when he glances at Cassie. She minutely shakes her head. Ears motionless, she turns her back on him. Of course: body language among the alfär doesn’t encompass such gross neck-twisting gestures. So it’s a sign for him alone. He lets the circle of salt drag his eyes back down. Obviously it’s too early to act. He’s got to wait for the All-Highest to arrive first, to fill in the plan he and Cassie have danced around the edges of. To send the next queued message prematurely would be suicide.

  Alex begins to count.

  * * *

  Leeds city center at half past five on a Sunday morning is about as desolate as it ever gets, night clubs long since closed and revelers snoring off their hangovers in their hotel rooms. There is some traffic, but word’s gotten around from the police to the council cleaning trucks: stay the hell out of town, there’s trouble on the wind. Pete turns his head to stare up York Street. Red, white, and blue lights are strobing in the near distance. As promised, the police are blocking all roads leading to Quarry House. They can’t stop the incursion, but they can try to prevent oblivious civilians from driving into a firefight.

  Although Leeds grew as a city during the nineteenth century, its streets can hardly be described as a grid layout—unless the grid was designed by a species of alien space squid who hadn’t discovered Euclidean geometry. It was bombed by the Luftwaffe in the 1940s and subsequent attempts to rebuild it by pouring concrete and adding loops of motorway around the bomb sites didn’t help. In an attempt to make the traffic flow, early in the twenty-first century the planners designated a bunch of city center streets as the Inner Loop around the pedestrianized zone, and configured them for one-way traffic, much like a white-line-enhanced circle of Dante’s inferno. By day the three-kilometer stretch is full of passive-aggressive taxis and minicabs, but right now it’s nearly empty—which is just as well.

  Pete guns Ilsa across the intersection with The Headrow, towards the side of the Town Hall and the General Infirmary (beyond which he plans to fork off in the direction of Headingley) as his earpiece coughs. “Yes?”

  “Dr. Russell? Lockhart here. How much fuel do you have?”

  “Wait one.” Pete has to crane his head forward to see the instruments. The petrol gauge on the antique half-track is more about wishful thinking than measurement. “I’m about three-quarters full. Why?”

  “Change of plan, you may want to pull over.”

  “Hello?” For the first time, Pinky speaks up. Pete startles, but keeps control of the vehicle as he brakes and pulls in alongside the original frontage of Leeds General Infirmary.

  “What’s up?” Pete asks.

  “We just got a fix on Alex’s phone.” Lockhart is worried. “Instead of Headingley he’s in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales, about seventy kilometers northwest. He’s definitely in contact, so instead of heading for the bunker we need you to get on the A65 out to Rawdon, then head for his current coordinates. You do have satnav, yes?”

  “I think so.” Pete raises his helmet visor and hunts around the dash. “Hey, Pinky—”

  “I’ve got GPS on my watch, I’ll give you turn-by-turn directions. If someone tells me where to go.” Pinky sounds grumpy.

  “You’re not to use satnav!” Lockhart snaps. “You will follow the route as directed from this office. Which will be plotted to avoid contact with enemy outriders,” he adds, slightly less oppressively. “We are losing camera coverage on the highways north and west, and that’s where the incident reports are clustering. You don’t want to go that way.”

  “Understood—” Pinky sounds a whole lot less grumpy all of a sudden.

  “Is Alex all right?”
Pete asks.

  “He’s texting and emailing updates, so for the time being we presume so, yes.” Pete’s stomach lurches. Texting us updates can cover a multitude of sins, including captured by enemy and held at gunpoint. “We want you to be prepared to extract or support him if necessary.”

  “Okay. Where are we going?” Pinky asks. Lockhart tells him, and Pinky starts swearing. “It’ll take us hours to get there and back again!”

  Lockhart is unsympathetic: “There are reports of dragons: all flights are grounded. He’s depending on you.”

  “Okay, we’re on our way,” says Pete. He’s unsure whether to feel relieved (they’re heading away from the onrushing incursion, taking a route that will give it a wide berth) or apprehensive about what they’ll find at the far end.

  “Drive on,” Pinky tells him. “Then at the end of the street, hang a left and keep going up the Burley Road for as many miles as it takes.” Pete lowers his visor and puts Ilsa back in gear again, then moves off with a grating and rumbling of tracks and chain mail.

  * * *

  Daylight finds a pall of smoke rising from burning buildings and crashed cars as the Host rumbles through the northwest suburbs of Leeds at a trot, the sun glinting off the heads of their lowered lances.

  Entering an enemy’s capital is one of the most dangerous tasks any land army can undertake. First there is the siege and the breaching of walls, tangible and otherwise. Then there is the grim prospect of advancing in the face of ambush at every corner, hostile warriors who know the ground intimately using each building for cover, of enemy magi dug in behind enchanted fortifications nullifying one’s death spells and casting curses and glamours of their own—and that is before the final approach across the death ground surrounding the enemy sorcerer’s keep, guarded by demons and the reanimated corpses of all those who have died earlier in the conflict, beneath skies patrolled by dragons and under the purview of basilisks, subject to attack by monstrous summonings. Normally it’s a job for infantry with heavy support; cavalry have no place in such an assault, losing the advantage of maneuver that makes them so valuable on open ground.

  But the Host’s entry into the urük capital is not like that at all.

  The urük are lazy and incompetent defenders, unable to contain the sprawl of their serfs’ hovels within decent walls. Their roads meander across hill and dale without checkpoints or wards of any kind, much less stone ramparts sanctified with the blood of human sacrifices. While they are profligate with bottled lightning and eyeballs on sticks they seem to have very little idea of security, unless it is their way to build such ugly, sprawling, chaotic hives of laborers that intruders can’t find their way through to the overseers.

  Sixth of Second Battalion rides at the head of her fourth squadron, beside the standard. Two of the battalion’s countermeasure magi and the unblind horrors they control follow close behind. In compliance with All-Highest’s wishes, the First and Second Battalions have split up into four columns, running parallel across a front roughly half a kilometer wide. She rides with one of the inner columns, which keep to the broad urük highway they followed as far as the fringe of the city. The other three columns ride along backstreets and crash through fences and hedges between curiously pointless yards planted with animal fodder. They make no effort to remain unseen, but rely on their visual countermeasures. The urük seem to have no idea about prostrating themselves or avoiding the attention of their betters, and so the front of the column is marked by a chaotic shattering of windows and burning doorways as the savages gaze upon their new masters and spontaneously combust. They die in the hundreds, and the stench of roast flesh and burning wood rises up on every side, and still there is no sign of organized resistance. It’s almost, Sixth of Second thinks queasily, as if they don’t understand the concept of combined arms warfare.

  The cavalry advances for an hour through endless masses of near-identical houses and drab store buildings, finally pausing beside the fount of mana spiraling out from the ley line anchor towards which they have been riding. Here, as their storage cells refill, the scouts report another large road ahead. And this is where they meet the first organized resistance.

  This road is wide—by the markings the urük paint along such tracks, it seems to be built to accommodate six carts side by side—and there is an embankment planted with grass and trees to either side. According to the maps supplied by Airborne, this road circles the urük stronghold. It’s the perfect place for an outer city wall: either one built of stone and patrolled by a garrison, or a shrike-fence of impaled living dead. But there is no wall. Nor are there any random urük-carts beetling along until their drivers see their death rise before them and expire. Instead, the way is blocked by a row of white-painted carts with flashing lights atop their lids, spanning the circular plaza where the two main roads meet. (This plaza contains only a circular bed of vegetation. It lacks a guard tower, gibbet, or crucifixion tree, or any other symbol of authority to remind the serfs who they belong to.)

  Sixth orders a pause as the circle comes into view between the trees lining the boulevard leading into the city. “Scout troop, clear the approach to that plaza. Second magus, provide cover.”

  The file of cavalry pounds forward, maces raised to scour the trees and buildings set back to either side of the road. Roofs shatter and crack, and trees go up like flares. But there is no more resistance than they have encountered so far, until the first four riders approach to within two hundred meters of the plaza. Then slingshots crackle into life, deafeningly loud and with a ridiculous tempo of fire: their wielders must be magically enhanced. Then a much louder roar heralds the arrival of some sort of crew-served projectile weapon. It lances towards the riders on a plume of flame and explodes.

  Sixth of Second feels the sudden knife-sharp absence of two of her soldiers and the dulled-but-informative excruciation of two more as steel-jacketed pellets smash through armor and split skulls. “Second Lance, wheel and flank left. Fourth Lance, flank right. First and Third, forward under cover. Fire at will.”

  There is a staccato banging as of giant slave lashes, then the flare and rumble of urük-carts torching off, the rock oil they carry in tanks boiling and exploding as the mana-charged impulse of a dozen cavalry maces slam into them. There are screams, abruptly punctuated by the pop of deflagrating skulls. Sixth receives the all-clear from the lance leaders and approaches the roadblock. The wreckage of eight or nine white-and-red carts lies crumpled and burning, scattered across the intersection. Two more carts, these ones much larger and painted green, lie on their sides. The smoking corpses of the urük are sprawled behind these futile barricades, some of them in blue/black uniforms, others in the colors of dappled dirt. Charred, twisted limbs grasp strange angular contraptions: these must be urük bolt-throwers. “Troop leaders, report,” Sixth calls.

  “Scout: two dead, two down but serviceable. Bullet wounds—they’re using steel.”

  Sixth twitches irritably. Iron is the oldest countermeasure; slaves are crucified merely for touching implements made of the metal. Bolt-throwers that can punch through armor at close range could be deadly, if the enemy has anything resembling defensive wards. The rocket weapon in contrast looks nasty but is ineffective against warded armor. To all appearances, the enemy have no battle magic whatsoever. Sixth begins to wonder if perhaps All-Highest’s plan for the Host’s diversionary advance might be excessively cautious, rather than the last-ditch gamble she believed they were engaged in. “Magi first through fourth, chameleon cover. Magi five through eight, melt any eyes that see.”

  Magus sixth: “What about the electric orbs?”

  Sixth: “Those too.” She waves at her adjutant, who raises the staff. The cavalry company forms up around her and the march resumes, crossing the Leeds ring road and the flaming wreckage of three police Armed Response Units and a platoon of Territorial Army soldiers. Smoke rises on the morning breeze as the Host burns a clear-cut half a ki
lometer wide on either side of their advance, firing a path through the thickening suburbs as they advance towards the witch queen’s palace at the center of the urük-hive, now barely seven kilometers away.

  * * *

  Shortly after the Sixth Battalion crosses the ring road, decisions are made in the Quarry House control room that will subsequently be found wanting.

  Gerald Lockhart, SSO8(L), Colonel (retired), Bronze Team Incident Controller (Headquarters North), has been on duty since 9 p.m. on Saturday night, after putting in a full day’s work on other affairs during the preceding day. He was called in by the DM, in response to an urgent update on the previous week’s assessment by Forecasting Operations. And he was OIC when the office received a notification of a Code Red incursion from trainee operations officer Alex Schwartz—me—shortly after midnight.

  Over the following eight hours he coordinated with the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police gold commander at Elland Road, the OCCULUS incident crew operating out of Wakefield, and the operations room established at Army GHQ in Andover. He has also briefed the Assistant Director of Operations at the New Annex in London, and (most recently) a very perturbed assistant to the Chief Secretary to the Cabinet Office in Whitehall. By dawn on Sunday he had been awake for over thirty hours, tracking a crisis of ever-expanding but indeterminate scope. A large body of operational research demonstrates that human beings suffer disproportionately from fatigue-induced errors of judgment after twelve hours of concentration at work; while Gerald Lockhart had long experience of pushing himself under crisis conditions, he was about to make a fatal mistake.

  The garbled reports coming in to the incident room outlined a cone of silence approaching the city from the northwest. Outside the cone everything appeared normal, but within it, queries were not responded to in a timely manner, or at all. The Police gradually became less communicative and helpful as their assets were increasingly committed and their situational awareness degraded. Their emergency response telephone centers were overwhelmed by reports of road traffic accidents, house fires, and missing persons. The police helicopter was grounded, crew flying hours exceeded and an urgent maintenance interval overrun—it had been quartering the skies for hours, from one messy single-vehicle FATACC to another all night long, and the helicopter unit’s ground controller reluctantly took the decision to withdraw it for urgent maintenance. Requests were submitted for helicopter support from other regions, but more aircraft would not arrive before mid-morning. At six thirty, purely on the basis of the spike in accidents, the police commander on duty put the major incident plan into operation, alerting regional hospitals and calling up off-duty personnel: but the expected influx of injuries hadn’t materialized.