“Oh God,” he says incoherently, and begins to weep over the body.
“Shut up,” she says through gritted teeth. “Hold your arm out.” She’s sliding something over his right arm—a sleeve. “Left arm now.” It’s a padded leather jacket, tight in the shoulders. It laces together: she begins to tie him into it. “You keep invoking some God but I don’t think he’s listening right now,” she adds in a quiet singsong under her breath.
“But I bit that man’s throat out, like I’m fucking Dracula . . .”
“Shut up. Stand up. Put this on. That’s right . . . if you were the kind of man who found it easy to do that kind of thing do you think I’d bother with you?” Her question takes him by surprise, rattling his introspective daze.
“How long has it been since your father left?” he asks as she snaps the breastplate into place around him. (It has cunning quick-release fasteners, more like the clips on a bulletproof jacket than the buckles and straps on the museum pieces in the Armouries.)
“Three . . . no, four? Minutes. No more.” Alex shuffles uneasily: his trousers feel warm and wet, and when he looks down there’s a dark stain across his legs. Blood or urine, he can’t tell. Cassie hands him a helmet. He pulls it on, feels an unfamiliar tight headband, and adjusts it so that it doesn’t pinch his temples. “Quick!” she urges, then yanks the glass face-plate down, grabs his hand, and tugs him towards the open back of the tent.
“Wait, my eyes—” But then he’s in daylight and his face isn’t on fire and he can see clearly through the tinted visor. “What are we doing?”
“Act like you’re a guard and I’ll get us out of here as long as we can avoid my father. Where’s your rescue party?”
“How should I—” Alex looks round. There’s a murmurous rumble and clatter from beyond the tents clustered between the pavilion and the edge of the cove. He can’t see the cause of the racket but from the snorting and snarling it sounds as if a cavalry troop is mounting up on Bengal tigers. He looks up, scanning the edge of the ridge above them, putting the picture together. Malham Tarn has been popular with school trips for decades, so much so that half the population of Yorkshire must have been here at one time or another, which means the walking path must be over there— “Wait, what’s that?”
Something monstrous moves beyond the top of the cliff. Alex sees a neck like a tree trunk and the body of a giant elephant—no, it’s a big-ass dinosaur, a sauropod, like a brontosaurus. He squints. There’s something wrong with its head, an efflorescence of tentacles and iridescence—
He looks away in time. The warded visor saves him, but he’s blinking rapidly and his eyes are stinging furiously as he draws breath to ask Cassie what they should do; which is why he hears, rather than sees, Pinky put his cunning plan into effect.
* * *
A droning roar like a storm god unzipping his chain of lightning reverberates from the clifftops.
Pete crouches down in Ilsa’s legwell, his shoulders hunched, as hot brass cartridge cases bounce off the limestone slabs embedded in the reverse slope of the hillside. Strays from the rain of hot brass ping and clatter off his shoulders. He can’t see what’s going on—this is a good thing—and he’s having difficulty even seeing the controls, which is perhaps less of a good thing. So he concentrates on keeping a tight grip on the mummified hand with the burning fingertips, tries not to think about where it came from or how its unfortunate owner met his end, or even why the Laundry’s armorer came to have it in the special stores room at the National Firearms Center. Obviously the government would have maintained a stockpile of Hands of Glory, the amputated appendages of hanged felons, even though they ended capital punishment in 1965. It’s all he can do to refrain from prayer. God probably doesn’t want to know what he’s doing here this morning, a borderline accomplice to evil in service to a greater cause. If you should find yourself on a slippery slope some questions are best left unasked, lest you find yourself already fallen from grace.
Pinky stands on the bench seat behind Pete, methodically directing a roaring torrent of gunfire over the rise. He beats the ground around the trenches with a heavy steel-jacketed rain, working the minigun by dead reckoning, for he can barely see the ends of the spinning barrels—the Hand of Glory is doing its job, and Ilsa has become a numinous vision of cobwebs on the breeze, functionally invisible. So are the things in the enemy dugouts, of course, and in this battle if you can be seen you will die: but iron and steel have a way of slicing through enchantments, especially when they’re augmented with a banishment circuit embedded in the base of each and every round.
A jaw-rattlingly loud detonation sends an oily fireball rising over the crest of the hill. Pinky releases the firing switch. In the sudden ear-ringing silence, the echoes of the burst bounce back and forth between the hills. A monster bellows a plaintive soloist’s refrain against a chorus of higher-pitched human screams.
Pinky thumps Pete on the shoulder. “Back up ten meters!” he shouts in Pete’s ear.
“What? But that’ll put us on the ridge!”
“Yes! I need to see what’s back there. Let me finish this.”
Pinky slides back down behind the gun. This is a really bad idea, Pete tells himself as he twists the throttle grip. Ilsa lurches and begins to slowly reverse up the ever-gentler hillside. Pete orients himself by looking sideways at the steps, guessing how far he’s come, and he’s still crawling backwards when Pinky hits the firing switch again, the rotary gun barrels spin up, and the jackhammer roar resumes bashing on his helmet earpieces.
The world lights up pink as the grass in a circle around Ilsa ignites, smoking and sparking and fizzing. Pete’s skin prickles and he bursts into a cold sweat. Basilisk! He’s wearing wrought iron armor and holding a Hand of Glory, but the vegetation around here is quite capable of burning and the secondary radiation is also potentially deadly. If it wasn’t for the machine gun two meters behind his ears he could hear the grass flames hissing. He feels itchy and sick, squinting against the deadly light. Don’t look round. He screws his eyes shut. The basilisk is there—
A huge explosion shakes the ground from the vicinity of the enemy and the pink glare vanishes. Pete blinks furiously, trying to clear the green and purple blotches from his vision. I was looking away with my eyes shut, he realizes. How bright was that? Pinky lets go of the trigger and the echoes subside. “Pinky?” He calls. “Pinky?”
“Dude.” Pinky’s voice is shaky and muffled by the ringing in Pete’s ears. “I got them both.”
“Both what?”
“Fucking big-ass sauropod dinosaurs with compound eyes and tentacles around their mouths. And minders in armor. Shot one, then the other reared up and began flailing around and looked at it and then it like, exploded.” He pauses. “You’ll have to get us out of here.”
“Wait, what do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t see anything. I’m only flash-blind. I hope.” Pinky is matter-of-fact about his sudden loss of sight.
“Hell.” Pete thinks for a moment. “What should I do?”
“We’re still alive so they’re all dead back there. Clearly, or we’d be dead, too, sitting around with our thumbs up our ass like this.” Another pause. “Look for Alex and his chica down below. Pick them up and drive us out of here.”
“Okay.” Pete raises his visor. He feels shivery and his skin is prickling. The hilltop around them is scorched black and gray with ash, smoking and smelling of fireworks and ozone. He looks down at the hard-to-see tents in the floor of the valley. “How long have we got?”
Pinky doesn’t answer immediately, but the silence is filled by the ringing in his ears and a new uncomfortably familiar sound, like a lawnmower buzzing in the distance. “Just move,” says Pinky.
* * *
As the torrent of mounted cavalry floods down Vicar Lane, the flicker of hundreds of bodies exploding is joined by a crackling roar that drowns out the fain
t screams of the survivors.
In the control room inside Quarry House, Brains and Jez Wilson watch horrified for endless seconds as targeting stills flash up on the screens around them. “This is wrong!” Brains shouts, appalled. The mounted whirlpools of light seem almost immune to the carnage around them, but there are people on the pavement, people around the bus station, flickering statues that crack open with a violet flash and a sullen red glare as of molten lava. “Why isn’t it locking on properly?”
“I don’t care. Hit the kill switch.” Jez’s eyes are wide. “Shut it the fuck down on my authority, right now.”
“But we’ll—” Brains is already typing a series of commands. “Fuck, they’re coming at us—”
There’s a final eye-searing flash outside a nearby hotel and the sequence of camera stills freezes. “Fuck.” Brains mouses over one of the images. “There’s a cosplay convention in town? Who ordered that?”
“Later.” Jez pushes back her seat and keys her headset. She updates an unseen observer on the situation, biting back her words, then turns to him: “All right, we’re useless down here so it’s all hands on deck upstairs.” There’s an SA80 rifle on her desk. “Do you know how to use one of these?”
Brains slumps, then stands up. “I could pull the trigger. Doubt I’d last long enough to need to know how to reload it.”
“Huh.” Wilson slings the rifle over her shoulder: “Follow me anyway, I’m sure we’ll find something for you to do.”
Outside the soundproofed basement control room there’s a racket going on; it sounds like dueling road drills holding an argument with an industrial metal band. Metallic shrieks and groans joust with the intermittent hammering of the machine guns on the roof. Jez dashes up the emergency staircase, taking the steps two at a time; Brains, five years older and twenty kilos heavier, is panting by the time they arrive on the third floor at the makeshift ops center Lockhart established the night before.
They meet the man himself coming out of the door. “I’m taking this to the roof,” he says flatly. He’s found a ballistic vest somewhere, and is wearing it under his suit jacket in place of a waistcoat. “Are you warded?”
“Class eight,” Brains manages. “What’s going—”
“Too many civilians. Let’s see if we can draw their fire.”
Brains glances back and forth. Lockhart, he realizes suddenly, doesn’t expect to live through this. Neither does Jez Wilson. They’re both ex-Army and he has a numb feeling that they know more about this kind of situation than he does. “Can you manually run the perimeter cameras?” He realizes Wilson is talking to him. “Not in autonomous mode, I mean, manually designate targets for the basilisk guns? Inside Quarry House?”
“I could . . .” He trails off, horrified. “What?”
“I want you down in the camera control room behind a locked door,” Lockhart rasps. “They’re here to storm the building or reduce it to rubble. The wards are holding and we’ve got guns on the roof, but they’ll get inside our perimeter sooner rather than later. I’ll call you when that happens and then if you see anything or anyone on the ground floor you should assume hostile.”
“What, on my own—” Brains stares until Lockhart gives a sharp jerk with his chin.
“Go on,” Jez says, not unkindly. “This isn’t your kind of fight.”
They wait until Brains has scampered back into the emergency stairwell before Lockhart says, “Let’s hope he remembers to lock the door and keep quiet.”
“You think he’ll make it?” They head up the corridor past an open office door.
Lockhart steps inside briefly and hands her an Airwave radio and headset, then picks up a box of preloaded magazines. “Maybe.”
She snorts. “It’s going to take a miracle.”
They climb the last two floors to the roof at a more measured pace—there’s no point arriving breathless—and step out into chaos.
Every body that can fight, warm or otherwise, is already committed. Lockhart has been coordinating from the control room downstairs, but under the guns of the enemy and with the nearest reinforcements still an hour away he can do more good upstairs. Not that one more person is going to hold things together for much longer. If they had an active sorcerer of their own, someone from Mahogany Row, it might make a difference: but aside from Alex Schwartz (who is tied up elsewhere) there are no ritual practitioners on-site in Leeds this weekend.
The defensive wards around Quarry Hill are under such intense attack that their surfaces are visible to the naked eye, a shimmering indigo soap bubble the size of a city block that flickers with an unhealthy, oily sheen. It rings like a bell whenever one of the marauding enemy sorcerers hits it with an inordinate and wasteful invocation. The two machine guns on the rooftop cupola beneath the spire, and the other pair on the car park roof, rap out irregular conversational bursts, unimpeded by the occult barrier.
“Keep your head down,” Lockhart advises. “They’ve got some kind of kinetic weapon as well as all the thaumic lances, and the wards won’t keep a well-aimed arrow out. They might want to take the building intact if Dr. Schwartz is correct but that doesn’t mean they won’t go for an easy target.” He sounds disapproving. “Subtlety is not their—”
There is a loud crack and a section of sandbags in front of one of the GPMGs disappears. So does the upper half of the gun’s loader. Blood sprays everywhere, briefly. “That,” Lockhart snarls, “is too much.”
Another Night Watchman shuffles forward to take his place. Face expressionless but for the glowing green eyes of the possessed, the undead guard begins to assemble a belt of ammunition—
“No!” shouts Lockhart, “Get down! Move! Not there, there!” Wilson grabs his arm to stop him darting forward in his frustrated urgency to see the zombie move the gun to a less exposed location.
She can see at a glance that the situation is dangerously close to irretrievable. The enemy cavalry—eye-wateringly painful to look at, even with a defensive ward—are too close to the periphery of the defensive bubble around the foot of the hill. The guns can’t depress far enough to shoot down at them without the crews exposing themselves to whatever just made a hole in the roofline, and while the Night Watchmen are heedless of physical hazard (being dead) there aren’t enough of them. Meanwhile the mounted soldiers are clustering around covered palanquins from which the bubbles of defensive wards are expanding, and more of the riders will be circling around behind the complex—
“Do you have any grenades?” Jez asks the nearest defender.
“Only RPGs, and not enough of them.” Doris Knight points a thumb in the direction of a stack of boxes under the big satellite uplink dish. “But there’s an AA-12. Harry thought it would come in useful, bless his heart. Can you use that?”
“I’ll give it the old school try.” Jez makes a beeline for the stockpile and finds the big automatic shotgun and an unopened satchel of ammunition. A relatively short-range weapon, it wasn’t much use until now. “Can you spot for me?”
“There’s a reinforced sniper’s hide over on the west wing roof, I thought it would come in handy. But we’ve only got forty rounds.”
Together they crouch down behind a clutter of cell tower aerials and prepare their kit. It’s just a matter of time before the enemy try to storm the entrance: maybe the explosive shells will slow them down.
“What we need right now is a miracle,” Jez mutters during a gap in the gunfire. She raises her weapon and carefully aims through the firing slot.
* * *
Cassie is right about one thing: getting out of the camp is easy enough, as long as they stay close to the tents and supply stockpiles and keep out of sight of the soldiers massing at the foot of the cliff itself. The tents are mostly empty, and the few serfs left behind to handle teardown and transport are dull-eyed and deferential. Cassie doesn’t need to order them to pay no attention: to Alex’s blood-stunned eye
s she glows with Highest Liege’s borrowed power, and they fall to their knees and prostrate themselves before her as automatically as if she’s a living god.
Which is a good thing, because Alex isn’t sure he can play the role of bodyguard effectively if push comes to shove. The armor chafes and fits poorly (it’s a miracle it fits at all, because he’s short and stocky compared to the alfär warriors), he has no more idea how to use the mace that goes with it than the terrifyingly technical-looking battle rifles on display in the Royal Armouries, and he’s stuck somewhere between a post-binge bloat-out torpor and total exhaustion from overexertion. Given an hour to recover he’ll feel better, and given a couple of hours of instruction and a couple of weeks of practice he might be able to make the mace glow blue and spit fireballs and lightning, but right now he feels like dead weight. Self-loathing dead weight at that. He’s done his job, delivered the smartphone to its target: Cassie clearly doesn’t need him at this point, not in any practical sense—
“Where are the sentries?” Cassie asks uncertainly as they pass the furthest tent and strike out across the gently sloping basin of the valley, into the trees paralleling the stone walls alongside the stream. “This is wrong. There must be sentries.” There’s a pile of oddly assorted statuary to one side, and a trampled trail that looks as if a small herd of elephants has stampeded down the valley floor towards Gordale Scar, but there’s no sign of dugouts or a defensible line: just traditional dry stone walls, defending against cows. Nor are the expected sentries visible. “Father must have stripped almost every living body from—” She does a double-take. “But this means he must think he can take the enemy palace from within with only a squadron! What is he doing? Did he think he could use you to—” Her eyes widen further. “He was going to steal your face and memories,” she says faintly. “Take the fortress by stealth and lower the wards when his forces arrive. Of course. Which means—”
The Nightmare Stacks Page 42