Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter

by A. E. Moorat

  Crack.

  Vasquez was just in time to roll to the side, her momentum taking her the wrong side of the circle but notching an arrow anyway, aiming blind through the flames and letting off three in short succession, hoping to catch the last raider.

  Where was it? Where was it?

  'Tell me,' the Queen had screamed, still aboard the coasting rack platform as it shot through the fire and across the floor, away from the centre.

  'Release me,' squealed the Arcadian from the other side, still straining at the ropes.

  'Tell me where he is!' demanded Victoria. She brought the platform to a stop and jumped from it, the rear of it now almost entirely engulfed by flames. Darting to the front she held her sword ready to slice through the Arcadian's bonds.

  'Tell me and you shall have your freedom,' she promised.

  'Do I have your word?' it asked.

  'You have it.'

  She raised the katana, ready.

  'Then you will find him...' began the wolf.

  Too late, from the corner of her eye, she saw it. A wolf, bursting from inside the circle of fire, Vasquez's arrows zinging around it. It was moving fast, and held one of the abseil lines, and as she watched it flicked the line so that it caught the top of a tall stone pillar, the sudden snag yanking the wolf up and around so that it was swinging towards them, leading with its hind claws. Instantly she moved to protect herself.

  But the Arcadian was not aiming to attack her. At the last second she saw its intent and there was no action she could take to stop it. The Arcadian landed with both its paws on the rack wheel-the wheel used to open the rack and stretch its unlucky victim-and span it.

  The prisoner had time for one scream of agony and it was torn apart, all four limbs ripped from its body, which slid, writhing from the device, the wolf's eyes rolling backwards in its head. The raider on the wheel threw back its snout in triumphant howl, grinned, drawing back its lips to growl at Victoria. At the same time an arrow thumped into its flank, then another, and Victoria was running it through with the katana just as Vasquez arrived, her nose wrinkling in disgust at the sight of the dismembered Arcadian.

  'No,' screamed Victoria, 'no,' and she was running to the torso, which still jerked and writhed, bending to it.

  'Where is he?' she screamed. 'Where is he?'

  She felt the last breath of the Arcadian on her cheek.

  Then, from across the way: 'Vasquez.'

  Maggie had been fighting two-sworded. Easily she fended off the wolves, her arms moving in a blur, the sound of the steel ringing in the room.

  'I'm going to kill your pal first,' said Maggie Brown as they battled, addressing the lead wolf, 'I'm going to open its throat and watch it bleed. And then I'm going to kill you. I'm going to slit you navel to neck and the last thing you see will be me, watching your guts drop to the floor.'

  And in one movement she crouched and span, slashing the first wolf's legs from beneath it and, as part of the same movement, opening its throat on the upswing. It sank to the stone, noiselessly.

  Maggie Brown didn't like to make idle threats.

  Which was the conclusion at which the lead Arcadian arrived, and hearing the howl of victory from across the way, seeing that the mission was accomplished, it ran. Maggie, regaining her feet, had raced after it, but was a second too slow to stop it bursting through the flame circle, grabbing an abseil line and beginning to shimmy, fast, towards the ceiling.

  'Vasquez,' she screamed now.

  But was too late. The wolf, strong and very fast on the line, had already reached the top.

  It scrambled through a window then stopped. For a second just its snout was visible.

  'I'll see you again, Protektor,' it taunted her.

  'Aye, well you can join the fuckin' queue,' bawled Maggie Brown, but the Arcadian was gone.

  XXXVIII

  When Victoria had first seen the interior of the Protektors' carriage she had been amazed.

  For on the outside, it looked like any other Royal coach: a Clarence, built to seat six, bearing the correct livery and crests. Inside, however, it could not have been more different. The large cushioned seats she was used to had been stripped out to make space for the Protektors' equipment, which, it seemed, mainly consisted of weaponry.

  'Is this the Quartermaster's doing?' she had asked, on that first occasion.

  'Yes, ma'am, we call it Bess. She runs faster and lighter than the usual model of Clarence, but is armoured against penetrating weapons, and will stop a bullet, and these windows? The Quartermaster developed a lacquer which, when applied to glass allows people to look out, but not in...'

  It was Hicks who had told her all of that, fair bursting with pride.

  It was Hicks, who on the journey out to the tower, had been driving; now Vasquez sat in the driver's seat and inside, the carriage felt empty.

  They travelled in silence: the Queen, Melbourne and Maggie Brown.

  Victoria unstrapped the katana sheath and hung it up, next to the spinsaw and short sword. She wished she'd had them all now-that she had taken all of them into the tower with her. Maybe the extra weaponry would have helped.

  Or maybe not.

  But whatever had happened in there, they hadn't been expecting that. None of them had. She put her elbows to her knees and placed her head in her hands. She grieved for Hicks and Hudson; she yearned for Albert.

  They had cleared up. Opening the iron maiden, the dead wolf inside swung out on the door, pinned to it by the spikes, its blood having pooled to the floor. They dragged the corpse to the centre of the room, then done the same with the other dead Arcadians, taking them to where the paraffin fire still burned, where they formed a makeshift funeral pyre.

  Vasquez had stood, a faraway look in her eyes, disconsolately feeding the limbs of the dismembered prisoner into the flames, Maggie having already tossed its torso on to the fire. Melbourne, meanwhile, had taken the body of Hicks by the arms and was dragging it over to the pyre.

  'No,' commanded Maggie Brown, 'I'm not putting my boy on there-not with them.' And so they had fashioned a suitable plinth for Hicks, using part of the platform from the rack which all of them had lifted on to the fire, so that he could be given the appropriate send-off

  When they had paid their respects, Victoria indicated the torture equipment. 'Lord Melbourne,' she said, 'I want you to see to it that this apparatus is destroyed. You will never torture a prisoner again as long as I am monarch, is that clear?'

  'Yes, ma'am, if that is your wish.'

  'You may be assured that it is,' she said.

  She looked at Maggie Brown, about to say something but then thought better of it.

  And then, they had taken their leave.

  'How,' said Maggie in the carriage, breaking the silence and gloom that had hung over them since leaving the tower, 'how could they have known? You,' she was addressing the Prime Minister, 'you said the Tower was the last place they would look and that in any case Lanthorn was a secret. Even if they came to the fortress in search of their prey they should not have known about Lanthorn, but they knew exactly where we were. How could they?'

  'They're demons, Maggie,' said Melbourne, who was nursing his banged head, 'we don't even know the half of what they're capable of.'

  'Oh, really?' snapped Brown, her voice growing louder, 'then why has it never happened before? In case you haven't been keeping up on current events, Prime Minister, we just got our arses kicked in one of the most secure buildings in the country. We just lost another Protektor, a good man. We lost a prisoner...'

  'I know,' bellowed Melbourne in return, 'I know exactly what we have lost, thank you very much.'

  'I'll tell you what we have lost,' said the Queen. She was pulling on her hat, ready to arrange a scarf over her face. When they arrived at the Palace, they would gain entrance via a door known only to a few, and from there make their way to the Queen's apartments, but even so, she couldn't risk being seen by one of the staff, not in the state she was in now, bl
oodied and bruised from the battle, her skirts black with smoke. 'We have lost our last hope of finding Albert.'

  Melbourne and Maggie shared a look. The carriage shook and rattled around them.

  'We will find him,' said Melbourne.

  'How, exactly?' asked Victoria. 'What scheme have you up your sleeve to locate my missing husband?'

  'I have yet to formulate a strategy,' admitted the Prime Minister, 'certainly we may, with the very greatest reluctance, have to consider going public with the issue.'

  'Go public?'

  'To the police and newspapers, ma'am. In the absence of any concrete leads it may be the only option available to us.'

  The Queen suppressed a shudder, staring out of the window. 'Then it would turn into a circus,' she said.

  'Possibly, ma'am.'

  'And he would be lost for ever.'

  'No, Your Majesty,' said Melbourne, 'you are not to cast down all hope. For we will find him, I am sure of it.'

  'Lord Melbourne,' she said and her voice betrayed the great exasperation and impotence she felt (She: the Queen of England. Helpless!), 'please don't tell me what you think I wish to hear. You say we'll find him. Find him where?'

  Melbourne spread his hands. 'If we only knew, ma'am.'

  'Why has there been no news? Why no ransom demand? No attempt made to capitalise upon his disappearance?'

  'We can only guess, ma'am.'

  'And what might that guess be?' she snapped.

  'Ma'am?'

  'Am I to believe that they may be torturing Albert right now?'

  Melbourne swallowed.

  'Don't be about to lie to me, Prime Minister,' barked the Queen, warningly.

  'It is, of course, possible, ma'am, yes, despite what the Arcadian told us.'

  'They are not so squeamish as we, it seems,' murmured Maggie Brown, and Victoria saw Melbourne wince.

  'What did you say?' she demanded of Maggie.

  'Nothing, Your Majesty,' said Brown truculently, her lips tightly pursed.

  'No, pray tell,' pressed Victoria, 'if you have something to say, please tell the whole carriage.'

  Maggie looked at her with flinty eyes. 'I merely said that perhaps our enemies are less squeamish than we are when it comes to torture.'

  'Or less civilised?'

  'Maybe so...But perhaps we could have found out where Albert had been taken if we'd just cut straight to the chase instead of holding a public inquiry into the rights and wrongs of torturing a deviant.'

  'Maggie...' chastised Melbourne.

  'In fact,' continued Brown, warming to her theme, 'perhaps we would never have lost the Prince in the first place if you'd let Vasquez take the shot in the maze.'

  'She could have hit Albert.'

  Maggie snorted. 'That girl could take the eye out of a wasp. She would not have missed. And anyway, I gave the order. I don't give an order like that lightly, Your Majesty. She would not have missed.'

  'It was in the heat of the moment,' said the Queen, a little mollified, 'I had not time to think.'

  'Aye,' retorted Maggie Brown, darkly, 'perhaps you acted out of instinct.'

  'Maggie,' snapped the Prime Minister.

  'I beg your pardon?' said the Queen, but she did not get an answer, for the carriage, which had some moments ago, crunched on to the gravel of Buckingham Palace, now stopped, and the door had been opened, and there stood John Brown.

  'Your Majesty,' he said, to the Queen, bowing his head, 'Prime Minister, Maggie.' He looked about the interior of the carriage. 'You are missing a member?'

  'Don't ask, John,' said Maggie sadly.

  John cast his eyes downwards a moment, his sorrow evident, then said, 'I have messages, Maggie. Prime Minister,' he addressed Melbourne, 'a carriage is awaiting to take you to a secure location until the danger has passed, for the news that reaches us is of an uprising that has occurred at the House of Commons-something, Maggie, that may require our skills...'

  XXXIX

  Quimby had sat nervously in the Strangers' Gallery of the House, watching the members discussing the Factory Bill yet again, talk of which had caused a great tumult. Many of those members who in the past had talked so passionately in favour of reform seemed to have changed their position on the issue, and this had created great confusion and clamour amongst those present.

  'They appear to be bending to our will, sir,' said Perkins, who sat next to him, his shoe and sock off, in order to give his leg some air.

  Quimby worried at a nail and bit his lip.

  'Perkins,' he said, 'the question of whether or not they do our bidding is irrelevant when placed alongside the larger issue that concerns me.'

  'And that is, sir?'

  Quimby looked at his manservant, who noted that his master's face bore its worry-that he looked drawn and tired.

  'Their appetite, Perkins,' he said, his voice strained. 'What the bloody hell are we going to do if they get hungry?'

  'We've no evidence they've acquired a need for human flesh, sir.'

  'We've no evidence they haven't, either,' hissed Quimby. 'How long have they been in here debating this thing anyway?'

  Indeed, the debate, which had begun in the middle of the afternoon, had gone on.

  And on.

  And on.

  The reason for its length, of course, was that each of Quimby's revenants, numbering fifteen in all, had stood up to give a speech opposing the act. Quimby had not asked them to. Over the past few days, he had entertained up to five ministers a day, with invitations for meetings, tea, drinks, lunch and dinner. On more than one occasion, Perkins and Egg had been carrying the body of an MP to the basement, ready for the resurrection, when the next guest had been knocking on the door. Each zombie had been released back in the wild bearing instructions that they must represent Quimby's interest at all times and these-supplied to him by Conroy, of course-had included opposing the Factory Bill; indeed any reforming measures. Being MPs-even MPs who were, in the strict medical sense of the word anyway, dead-they had seized the opportunity to vocalise their changed sentiments at length.

  All of them.

  Each of whom had been greeted by either derision or angry shouts of disbelief regarding their change of mind, depending on which side of the House it was doing the shouting.

  Every single one gave a lengthy speech, which was followed by what felt like hours of mutinous discord, which on each occasion only abated after much banging of a gavel by the progressively more red-faced speaker.

  Now, it was almost midnight.

  And they had not eaten.

  Good Lord, how long could they last without it? Along with his instructions regarding their new constituency of one, Quimby had informed them that eating human flesh was wrong and on no account were they to do it, deliberately phrasing the instruction in a jocular manner, in an attempt not to implant an idea in their head which would not otherwise have been there.

  What if it had, though? What if him saying that had induced in them a subconscious need for human flesh?

  'How long would you be able to go without eating, Perkins?' he asked.

  'Normally just a few hours, sir.'

  'What if I had specifically told you not to?'

  'Then longer, sir.'

  'Indefinitely?'

  'Oh no, sir, I'd need to eat eventually, I'm afraid.'

  'And it would have to be human flesh, would it?'

  'Oh yes, sir, nothing else quite hits the spot.'

  Quimby stared down into the House where Lord Granger sat with Lord Tennant, the latter enthusiastically feeding himself from a plate resting on his lap, that was piled high with chicken drumsticks. As Quimby watched, Tennant shoved a chicken drumstick into his mouth, his face slick with grease, then picked up another drumstick and offered it to Granger.

  Who refused.

  Granger, that fat pig, who had never been known to refuse food, especially if it was free. Over on the other side of the house, Sir Montague Tales sat with a glassy-eyed expression. Another of
Quimby's revenants sat with his head jerking about in a manner resembling that of a bird.

  A hungry bird.

  This was bad, thought Quimby, very bad, and he was suddenly struck with the need to defecate.

  'Keep an eye on them, Perkins,' he commanded, 'I shall return presently.'

  He found the toilet as before, settled onto the wooden seat, retrieved his hip flask...

  'Quimby.'

  'Christ!'

  Quimby leapt what felt like several feet from the box of the toilet. 'Christ,' he repeated, 'are you trying to bloody kill me?'

  'I cannot be held accountable for your nervous disposition, Quimby,' said Conroy. 'I hope your state of mind has nothing to do with our arrangement, which continues to proceed as planned, I trust?'

  Quimby took a large drink of whisky before answering, his hand shaking as he did so.

  'It does,' he managed between gasps as the liquid lit a fire in his throat.

  'Excellent,' purred Conroy, 'excellent. Then last night's resurrection went as planned?'

  Quimby finished the hip flask. 'It did, it did,' he gasped.

  'Then we have our majority?'

  'Yes,' said Quimby, holding on to the wall of the cubicle for support.

  Somebody banged at the door.

  'I think you had better tell him, Quimby,' whispered Conroy.

  'It's busy,' shouted Quimby.

  The door rattled.

  'It's busy,' repeated Quimby.

  The rattling stopped.

  'And they do our bidding?'

  'They do,' said Quimby.

  'Then this stage of the operation is complete.'

  'And what now?' said Quimby, 'is our business concluded?'

  'Oh no, my Lord, not by a long way yet.'

  The door began rattling again. Then there was something thumping against it, as though the person on the other side was putting their shoulder to it.

  'What the blazes?' said Quimby. He was standing up, pulling his trousers from around his ankles and stepping out of the tiny cubicle to meet Conroy, the two of them pressed up against each other in the toilet.