The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (13 page)

“What, the move? So far I think it’s admin only. They want Quarry House, that’s for sure, but they’re going to need outlying bases all over the country for rapid reaction forces. Is this about your family thing?”

“Yeah, you could say that. I was trying to work out if I could avoid being posted here permanently.”

“Well, my guess is the answer to that is a yes,
if
you can figure out some way to make yourself indispensable elsewhere.”

“Thanks a million!”

“Tell you what, if I hear anything useful down here I’ll call you? I mean, there might always be an internal opening in Cheltenham that requires an expert in higher-dimensional transformational topology who’s allergic to sunlight, right? You never know.”

“Yeah, you’re right! Thanks.”

But even before they end the call Alex knows it’s not going to happen. He is doomed to be dragged back into the infantilizing maw of his family’s expectations. Nothing he can imagine will ever challenge his parents’ iron-clad expectations, or allow him to break out of the claustrophobic mold they’ve spun for him, without shattering them entirely. Forever the dutiful son, Alex can’t see any way to create a life of his own unless he can first escape from the city of his birth. You can take the boy out of Leeds, but you can’t take Leeds out of the boy: the strongest manacles are born in the blood.

And so he lies awake an hour longer, until the central heating lurches back into life with a distant groan and a throbbing gurgle of pipes. And when he finally dozes off in the predawn gloom, he dreams of a green-haired, mad-eyed girl who can shatter his world with a fingertip touch.

About a month before Alex visits Whitby, Gerald Lockhart attends another briefing – this time in a windowless basement storeroom in a grungy satellite office in Catford.

“Forget everything you think you know about the pointy-eared fuckers,” Derek the DM says genially, dropping a meaty hand with casual disregard on the grease-stained cover of a first edition
Monster Manual
that occupies pride of place on his desk. “It’s all moonshine and bullshit.”

The DM has taken a special interest in Professor McPherson’s Specimen B ever since the briefing at Audit House five months ago. He’s been particularly evasive for the past two months, closeting himself with Forecasting Ops’ spookier haruspices, and asking lots of pointed questions about ley lines (such as the geodesic linking The Burren with certain prehistoric sites in Yorkshire). Lockhart, who makes a point of keeping an eye on what his External Assets are doing, is perturbed: not so much by Derek’s more eccentric interests as by his secretiveness. But he’s finally invited Lockhart into his den, and Lockhart is determined to get to the bottom of the matter.

Lockhart winces slightly as the DM pulls a book off the shelf behind him – a late impression Allen and Unwin copy of
The Fellowship of the Ring
, its paper jacket slightly foxed – and drops it on the AD&D rule book. “No fucking Legolas here. They’re your classic forties Übermensch: Nazis with pointy ears and death spells.”

“You’re going to give me chapter and verse on what you’re doing,” Gerald says firmly, crossing his arms and leaning back on the swivel chair with the broken gas strut suspension. It creaks ominously. “Or I’m leaving.”
Life’s too short for your role-playing melodrama
is the subtext, although Lockhart is warily aware that calling the DM’s bluff is generally an unwise strategy. He’s the Laundry’s very own Prisoner of Zenda, except that after his escape and revenge he came back into the fold willingly, in return for a lavish budget and the organization’s tacit cooperation in staging his fantasy scenarios. Which makes him, in Lockhart’s world view, a dangerously loose cannon with the ear of Mahogany Row and the goodwill of both Forecasting Ops
and
the Auditors (which is bad enough), and a tendency to pull brilliantly polished rabbits out of suspiciously beaten-looking hats (which only makes things worse). “Explain yourself.”

“I began investigating after I got the briefing pack on Specimen B,” the DM says smugly, his voice deep and gravelly as a hundred-and-fifty-kilo toad (to which he bears a passing resemblance). “And it bore some structural…
similarities
… which got me digging, as it were.”

He leans forward, confidingly. Lockhart manages not to flinch. “Let me give you a scenario. Imagine you’re, oh, I dunno, Doctor Impossible and you’ve just come out of your time capsule from the year 1940. You’re looking forward to unleashing your Vril-powered clone army and taking over the world, but before you can get your marching mojo on it’s a good idea to do due diligence and figure out who you’re taking over the world
from
.” Lockhart nods. “Well now, you don’t take long to discover that the USA is top dog, right? And you’re going to go up against them eventually. But first, you want to figure out how they’re going to react. I mean, why start a land war in Asia when you can just pay off a couple of corrupt customs officials?”

Lockhart’s eyes narrow imperceptibly. “Go on.”

“Well, thanks to Specimen B we now have confirmation that they’ve been out there for a very long time indeed, if not so much in the past few hundred years. And what I figure is that everything we know about these pointy-eared fuckers has been filtered through medieval monks from word-of-mouth accounts by terrified peasants. Who
escaped
, meaning they weren’t valuable enough to the aforementioned PEFs to be worth keeping. It’s like, I dunno? Trying to work out the mechanics of K Street lobbying and beltway politics and the US State Department by listening to an illiterate goatherd from Kandahar who got kidnapped by US Special Forces and was released when they confirmed that, no, he didn’t know where the Taliban received their subscriptions to
Penthouse
and
Guns and Ammo
.” The DM pauses for breath. “We’re reading what the monks thought was worth writing down, the edited accounts of goatherds nine hundred years ago who had the great good luck to be seen as too harmless to be worth a bullet the night SEAL Team Six blew through the village.”

“And the body?”

The DM shrugs. “Everyone gets unlucky sooner or later. And we know the pointy-eared fuckers stopped operating on our patch, in our world, not long afterwards. Reports just stop
dead
. Like they gave up on us as too poor to be worth enslaving. Or maybe the folks back home threw their equivalent of World War Three. Or they decided to regroup… or something.”

Lockhart thinks for a minute. “Let us stipulate that those are the facts. What do we know about Specimen B’s people?”

“Let’s see.” The DM leans back in turn and stares at the ceiling tiles. There’s a disgusting brown-edged stain where something has leaked from above. “They got speech later than us, but that doesn’t mean they’re unsophisticated. They had to spend hundreds of thousands of years longer than our ancestors making do with hand signals and guesswork – which means they had theory of mind, working out what everyone else in the tribe was thinking by observing their behavior and ascribing intent to it, long before they got words. Silent killers who worked in packs, because that kind of brain-work requires a high-energy metabolism and unless they were a tropical-only band of peaceful fruit-eating hippy fuckers, they were hunters. They got speech late, maybe less than fifty thousand years ago if Processor McPherson’s cladistic analysis is right. Hell, they might even have developed writing first.”

The DM absent-mindedly picks up a set of translucent dice from a stationery organizer on his desk and begins rolling them on the blotter. The decaying thaum field of a thousand hopeful gamers’ wishes, harnessed by the DM’s occult paraphernalia, slows to local lightspeed when the dice hit the blotter: they glow ghostly blue with Cerenkov radiation.

“Go on,” prompts Lockhart.

“Let’s say they get speech, and they got theory of mind, so they get religion pretty soon, too – an emergent side effect of ascribing intentionality to aspects of their environment. Animism, polytheism, whatever. They probably discover ritual magic pretty fast because their brains are predisposed to modeling complex entities. Abstract thinking.” Lockhart begins to sit up. “But they’re not like us psychologically. They’ve got a much shorter history of selection for social living with non-relatives. What kind of society would a species of smart, fast, predatory ritual magicians come up with?”

The DM smacks his hands down on the dice, locking them to the desktop as he stares into Lockhart’s eyes. “They’re going to grab each other by the mind and
squeeze
,” he announces, gripping the handful of dice in one meaty palm. “You’re going to get a society based on cognitive binding.
Geases
all the way down. It’ll make Feudal Japan look like an anarchist utopia. Either you’re a master – a sorcerer – or you’re a slave. Or a less powerful sorcerer: a vassal.” He blinks rapidly. “They’re smart, too, so they’ll make progress. Hierarchy holds them back: a Dark Lord is a single point of failure for the Dark Empire. If you can stick a dagger in his kidneys while he isn’t looking you’ll trigger a feeding frenzy among the First Circle. Possibly they’ll go high feudal, with reciprocal obligations and a great-chain-of-being shtick, so everyone knows how the succession works. Or maybe they’ll go full Aztec, and offload all the magic onto a succession of high priests driven mad by blood. But I see no way these fuckers are going to be perfect floaty Tolkienian peaceniks.”

“I hear you.” Lockhart is laconic. “But if that’s the only reason you’ve been hiding for the past five months…”

“Nope.” Derek shakes his head. “Because the question I’ve been asking is, what happens now? We’re hitting peak thaumaturgy. We’re sending up the bat-signal loud and clear: we’ve got magic and we’re using it. Back when the PEFs last poked around this neighborhood we were in the dark ages. There was nothing to steal but our fleas. Only now… if they’re still out there, are we suddenly going to get our very own personalized answer to the Fermi Paradox?”

Lockhart’s eyes go wide. “What did Forecasting Ops say?”

“Forecasting Ops read the fucking tea leaves and did a double-take, my son. Forecasting Ops are deeply unhappy. You know how it goes when they try to predict the future and someone else is doing the same thing, how the interference effects mess with them and turn it into a muddy blur? Well that’s happening.”

“Oh dear.”

Lockhart’s mustache twitches unhappily.

“You can say that again.” They sit in silent contemplation for almost a minute.

“You have a plan,” Lockhart nudges.

“I have a plan.”

“But…”

The DM sighs lugubriously. “FO’s best projection is that shit’s going to kick off in the next month, somewhere in the north.”

“Yorkshire. Leeds, even. Right.” Lockhart nods. He’s been involved in the Leeds relocation planning for nearly a year.

“It could be.” The DM glances at him slyly.

“So what do you want me to do about it?” Lockhart asks, losing patience.

“Cameras.” Derek smacks his lips. “We need a way to spot them if they show up, don’t we?
Cameras.
Forecasting Ops were very definite about that: it’s all about the peepers.” He blinks rapidly, then looks at Lockhart again. “They couldn’t be any more direct. The closer they get to telling me what to do —”

“The less reliable the forecast becomes, yes, I understand.” Lockhart dry-swallows. “What exactly do you need?”

“All the street camera time in the world. A technical team. And a bunch of feet on the ground who don’t have enough of a clue what they’re up against to run away. One set of feet in particular: I’ve been reading his file and I think he’ll rise to the occasion nicely once I set him up.” The DM stretches expansively. “Three to two nothing happens. But that remaining forty percent contingency? You’ll thank me later.”

“Write me a memo: I’ll make sure you get everything you ask for.” Lockhart stands to leave. “But you’d better be right,” he adds off-handedly.

“What? If they’re not out there it won’t cost you…” He trails off, catching Lockhart’s icy stare. “What?”

Lockhart slides his half-moon glasses off his nose, and very deliberately pulls a lens cloth from his breast pocket. He begins to polish them, considering his response carefully. “This isn’t a game, Derek.”

“I know it’s —” The DM pauses. “What do you mean?” he asks in a thin, worried voice.

“Games iterate. You win, you lose, you get another throw of the dice.” Lockhart examines the surface of his spectacles in minute detail, looking for dust motes. “In real life there are no health potions, no respawns. People play for keeps. You should play this one as if the Auditors are going to drag you away and cut your throat if you lose the round.” His gaze flickers back to the DM, a myopic blue-eyed squint: “Because what you’ve just described to me is not a game, Derek: it sounds more like CASE NIGHTMARE RED.”

Agent First of Spies and Liars dances along the shadow roads that lead through the timeless void of the eternal now.

In her gloved right hand she holds a mace of power; with her left she swings a thurible of burning incense, its chain fastened to her bare wrist by an iron manacle. The velvet choker she wears around her throat is fastened with a clasp bearing gems of memory and a rare, precious oracle stone to help her distinguish destiny from lies. On her fingers she wears rings of power. Her target is a shadow world, one of a myriad of alternate realities that can be molded to the will of the People. It is a penumbral land of ghosts, bereft of law and lore alike, its primitive denizens defenseless before the Host’s invading might. Her orders bind her to steal their names and faces and, eventually, their truths: she is required to ensnare them in a cunning harness of lies and present them to her father the All-Highest, that he might tie them to his will.

It does not occur to Agent First that the denizens of this shadow world might defy her father’s
geasa
, much less that they might do so successfully. It has never happened before. In all the shadow worlds, her kind have never encountered a subspecies of People who can defy the Host. Not only is it unthinkable, a considerable body of philosophical/religious thought holds that it is impossible, a nonsensical proposition. The People are the pinnacle of primate evolution, for if it were otherwise they would already have been discovered and subjugated (or exterminated) by a more aggressive, dominant subspecies. That they have not been brought low already demonstrates that such an outcome is impossible: obviously no such alien conquerors exist. The People
are
the master race, the Autarchate of the Morningstar Empire
is
their greatest creation, and the Host of Air and Darkness is the highest and last surviving expression of their martial prowess. Failure, it follows, is not only not an option, it would be indistinguishable from treason. Or so she has been raised to believe.

At least her assignment to this mission removes her from the baleful purview of her father’s consort. Out of sight means out of mind. Or so she can hope.

The road Agent First travels spirals through a higher-dimensional space, to which she has been granted access by the Host’s magi. There is a vestibule in one of the subsurface caverns, its floor paved with artificial coral shot through with veins of semiprecious crystals, grown
in situ
in the form of a grid to channel the magi’s power into a gate to the shadows cast by spacetime itself. The road before her has the semblance of a glowing pathway stretching across a stark plane of darkness. An infinite distance above her, a ghostly manifold of points of light glitter coldly. These are not stars but singularities opening off the edge of the alien fractal that gives access to the universes compatible with the Host’s physical laws. Each pinprick of light is a gate leading to another shadow land. (The darkness between them contains an infinity of points representing entrances to members of the set of worlds with physical laws incompatible with existence. This is the dark anthropic zone, universes within which life cannot survive.) As she dances, the stylized moves carry her along the road in strange bursts of motion, the landscape shifting and reconfiguring around her. You do not travel the ghost roads by walking, unless you are willing to die of old age. Here, geometry is an expression of power: the ritual dance of the shadows manipulates distance.

Agent First follows a seldom-traveled route, abandoned these past thousand years. It leads to a shadow inhabited by round-eared brutes, ignorant and easily domesticated. Long ago Agent First’s predecessors sent reconnaissance teams hither, hoping to find lands fit for conquest. The place they found was indeed inhabitable, but so dismally bereft of anything worth taking that nobody in their right mind would consider it a fitting home. The natives fled in terror, or fought wildly and viciously with crude iron weapons. Some few were captured, bound, and transported to the empire for interrogation (and to provide cruel but short-lived entertainment for their captors). When the Duke of the Western Lowlands subsequently terminated the exploration program, some of the surviving prisoners were expelled back to the world of their birth, as living testimony to the unwisdom of meddling with the People: hopefully they instilled a healthy fear of their betters among their fellows before dying.

It is Agent First’s privilege to be the first of the People to set foot in this shadow realm in a thousand years and spy out the lay of the land for the invasion to come. As likely as not, this will be her only such opportunity. She goes first, as befits her rank. When she sends for her command (what remains of it) the rest of the Spies and Liars will follow her. Far behind, her father’s magi continue to chant, pumping
mana
into the road, stabilizing and broadening it. Once their preparations are complete, the Host will emerge in all its glory.

Agent First is equipped as befits the leader of a forward reconnaissance team. Her choker is encrusted with memory jewels, containing a full transcript of her predecessors’ experiences of the target realm, and empty gems waiting to receive her own reports. At the front she wears a splendidly mounted fire opal, a thief’s stone. The rings on her fingers and thumbs are of purified rare earths, packed tight with wards, crammed with invocations ready to release – so energized that her metacarpals hum. Around her back and upper arms runs an intimate, intricate tattoo of power that binds a glamour to her skin. It will blind anyone looking at her to her true nature: unless they have strong occult protection, they’ll see only a pretty young female of their own kind, pleasing to the eye, harmless and instantly forgettable. Later, when she finds a suitable victim, she will use most of her
mana
– stored power – to steal a true name by force and assume the owner’s identity, memories, and personality (meanwhile sending the victim back to her father’s redoubt as a slave bound by her
geas
). But for now, she is anonymous. By the standards of the People her attire is inconspicuous and dowdy, if of a richness and quality that would be taken for signs of royalty by the awestruck captives retrieved on one of the earlier raids. They are the garments of her caste: boots, a robe and trews of dark green velvet edged with lace, black gloves and hose spun from the silk of false widow spiders and shot through with charms. Over it all she wears a black hooded cloak, fuliginous and dull as death.

The meta-space through which the shadow roads lead lies beyond time and space but not beyond fatigue. Agent First is flagging, her reserves dwindling. There is sweat in her axillae, a slow burn in muscles and tendons, and her joints ache as she dances on. The pungent astringency of the incense in her thurible helps somewhat, keeping her focussed and active. It also lays a tenuous smoke-trail that will linger, allowing those who eventually follow her to sense the correct road. She follows in the footsteps of Messenger Seventh of Polaris Ascendant, the last courier to come this way. His memory diamond is clenched between her teeth, a bitterness goading her on as her body jerks and pirouettes, replaying the exact moves of his ritual dance. Even her breaths and pauses are perfect echoes of his motions. To deviate would be a disaster, until she has reopened the closed portal at the other end of the path and anchored it in place. Once that task is done any member of the Host who has been granted the Keyword will be able to follow her back and forth without effort. But for now she is performing the dance of the opening of the way, and if she falters or stumbles she will be lost forever among an infinity of worlds.

Agent First dances ever onwards until eventually she glimpses the end of her path in the distance. At first it is little more than a vanishing point. It slowly brightens, glowing like a pale blue dot hovering in the infinite depths of the space above the plane the path traverses. Finally it seems to descend, approaching the level of the horizon. There is a humming sense of power beneath her feet, the barely leashed strength of a ley line resonating with the similar conduit buried beneath the evaporated sea on her own world where the Host have made their final stand. Now the ghostly blue radiance grows brighter, and from the semblance of a vanishing point the end swells into a circle.

Agent First pushes herself onwards, chest tight and muscles burning. The circle swells before her until she sees it as a silvery arch that rises above the path, engraved with symbolic bindings. Its glow is a brilliant flare of ghost-light, the radiative emission of photons slowing abruptly as they cross the membrane separating this not-space from the shadow universe beyond.

Up until this point, Agent First has painstakingly kept her mind clear, empty of verbalizations and any thought that might contaminate or undermine her determination to see this path through to the end. But now she can barely contain a flash of fierce triumph:
Mine!
she thinks, embracing with her will the world beyond the gate. There is an undernote of fear, of course – notably the fear that her new stepmother will have contrived to corrupt her path. But that would require subtlety: and the mistress of dragons is not noted for her discreet approach to disposing of obstacles.

Agent First lowers her thurible to the not-ground beneath her feet, unlocking the bracelet that chains it to her wrist. She licks her parched lips, and coughs, and then she speaks (or more accurately croaks) the Keyword, pronouncing the phrase of binding that will lock the thurible to the gate. She raises her mace of power and lightly thrusts it into the center of the blue-glowing void.

And then —

Agent First steps out of the shadow roads, her night vision damaged by the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the portal. As the portal closes behind her darkness descends abruptly. She takes stock, using her other senses. The ground beneath her feet is hard, level, and flat. The air is cold and damp, speaking of rain, but there is a horrible dead taste in the roof of her mouth – there is no vegetation here, it’s like a cold, damp desert – and it is noisy, so noisy, a background roar like a distant waterfall and, approaching, a thunderous growl and bright lights —

She leaps backwards into darkness, nearly trips over her cloak, and catches her heel on a stony uprising. She tumbles and recovers in a roll, her heart hammering. And so it is that by tripping on a curbstone Agent First narrowly avoids being flung across the road by a BMW whose driver is more interested in his cellphone than in avoiding pedestrians wearing dark clothing at night.

Hyperventilating on the cusp of a fight/flight reaction, Agent First leaps to her feet and spins round. She searches her immediate vicinity for other threats. She finds herself standing on a narrow path of poured stone slabs that flanks a broader, lower roadway. Thundering wheeled carts with glaring lights and angry faces rumble past in orderly queues, their pasty-faced occupants squinting into the darkness through curved windows. The carts screech and grumble and stink like the smoky oil lamps of a slave barracks, powered by some cryptic force. After a second, shaky glance Agent First realizes they are not a threat to her as long as she stays out of their path. They are confined between the raised strips at either side, guided along the road bed by painted glyphs. Furthermore, the stone buildings to either side bear signs in an inscrutable script, oriented to be visible to the occupants of these carriages. Such are the hallmarks of civilization, regulation, and traffic: they’re not
her
kind of traffic (and the carts seem to her to be sluggish, smelly, noisome, and potentially dangerous), but it’s a far cry from the wilderness populated by savages that she’d expected to find.

Clearly the centuries since last a member of the People traveled to this place have brought changes.

On the side of the footpath opposite the road of carts, Agent First sees a wall of rough-hewn stone bricks held together with mortar. Branches overhang it from behind. Opposite, across the cart track, rows of cramped houses built from baked red clay bricks display locked doors and curtained glass windows to the road. They are all offensively ugly, although the darkness of night – pierced by a sullen amber glow from lights on metal poles – draws a merciful veil across their exteriors. Agent First slows her breathing and tugs her cloak into place around her. There will certainly be changes after the conquest, and for the better: the buildings hereabouts are so grotesque they’re not even fit for a slave barracks. All-Highest will have the architects responsible crucified in due course. In the meantime, Agent First shudders fastidiously and nerves herself to ignore the pervasive crudeness which seems to be a hallmark of this world.

Some of the buildings close to the footpath display wide glass frontages, illuminated from within as if to deliberately display the contents. These must be public warehouses of some sort, where the serfs can come to collect their rations. Waiting in the shadows she observes as a cart rumbles and slows, amber lights blinking lazily on one side before it turns into a sidestreet and comes to a halt. An occupant climbs out – heavily built compared to one of the People, dressed in well-made but extraordinarily drab clothes, all in shades of gray and black. He walks up to the door of the nearest ration store and goes inside: a bell tinkles. Perhaps two hundred heartbeats pass before he emerges, bearing a nearly flat, square box of cunningly molded wasps’ nest.
Do they domesticate insects?
she wonders. (That would explain the buzzing and roaring of their carts.) A smell reaches her, the aroma of hot fresh bread and cooked meat. He climbs back into the cart, starts it again, and it moves off into the stream of traffic.
I will come back here later and sample the food,
Agent First decides, willing her hunger pangs into submission. Like the rest of the Host she has subsisted on time-frozen rations for too long. The smell of hot food, even if only the provender of the cattle-folk, is insidious and seductive. But it will have to wait until she has acquired a face, and memories, and identity – to say nothing of a grasp of the locals’ Low Tongue.