The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (16 page)

“I’ve got plenty of training courseware to keep me busy in the background,” Alex admits. “And a meeting about internal marketization of outsourced technical support services at four.” He rolls his eyes.

“Then you ought to get out of the office for a couple of hours after lunch.” Jez smiles wearily. “Go on, go visit the museum. It can’t do any harm, can it?”

And so it comes to pass that, instead of lunching in one of the Quarry House canteens and then slaving over a stack of training worksheets for a couple of hours, Alex scuttles out beneath a rain-heavy sky and spends the first half of the afternoon taking discreet thaum flux measurements on his smartphone while gaping at one of the largest collections of murder cutlery in the entire world.

The Royal Armouries collection was originally housed and stored at the Tower of London, where since time immemorial the monarchy (and subsequently the British armed forces) maintained a magpie’s nest of all things bright and stabby. But by the end of the twentieth century the collection was overflowing, and only a tiny fraction could be put on display. In the early years of the twenty-first century various national museum collections were moved away from London and its suburbs, on the not-unreasonable theory that improving the cultural life of the nation was a good thing. (In reality, the overheated property market in the capital meant that the Crown Estates could sell off central London sites, build and stock palatial new museums in outlying cities, and make a tidy profit at the same time.) The Royal Armouries were one of the collections that got the treatment. So a shiny new national museum was built in the Luftwaffe-flattened industrial wasteland of south Leeds, next to the Leeds Docks arts and cultural complex: a concrete invader from the War Dimension, with an entry corridor lined with heavy machine guns.
*

(At least, that’s the cover story.)

Alex makes his way in, past signs advertising a huge animated film festival that’s coming to town later that month, then walks the main corridor. Ahead of him a circular staircase spirals up a five-story-high tower lined with porthole-like windows. As he approaches it the thaum flux display on his phone rises alarmingly. In the middle of the floor, right below the stairs, sits an odd display case. He sidles up to it cautiously – it’s uncomfortably well-lit by daylight streaming through the ports above – and he tugs his jacket cuffs down over his gloves as the skin around his wrists dries and tightens painfully. It’s
not
a display case, he realizes, with growing astonishment: it’s an octagonal array of polished mirrors, angled upwards to show the reflected walls of the tower, a tower lined with —

“Holy shit,” he subvocalizes, awestruck.
We’re going to need swords: lots of swords.
The towering inner walls of the stairwell of the Hall of Steel are lined with cold iron. Halberds and spears and swords and arrows bristle at the sky, floral wreaths of death brandished triumphant at the ceiling. As he walks around the central reflector, peering into each mirror in turn, Alex sees two-thirds of a millennium of war hanging overhead. Almost without thinking, he invokes his counter cantrip: it reports three hundred and sixty-four blood-soaked items hanging on a wall. You can clean the stains off the metal, but you can’t erase the memories of souls swallowed: his V-parasites are excited, chittering in the back of his skull at their proximity to so much death. They’re not very clear on the flow of time: he senses an edge of frustration to their noise, for the food in question is centuries past its use-by date.

The thaum flux measured by the bluetooth widget in his pocket spikes as he stands in front of the reflector, then drops as he walks back towards the elevators. He rides up to the first floor in thoughtful silence, then through the darkened tunnel of Ancient and Medieval Warfare that leads to the War exhibition. The flux spikes again, and stays high, then the monitor begins to pick up the characteristic fingerprint of a ley line. His pocket dongle isn’t as sensitive and directional as a K-22, but it’s enough.
I’ll have to come back here with Pete,
Alex decides. As he walks past a display of horse armor through the centuries, the thaum flux continues to spike higher. Many of these pieces have seen blood spilled, he realizes. Some of those holes were not made by rust.

It’s easy to lose track of time in the windowless maze of weapons, and Alex forgets the outside world for a while. He’s gazing, increasingly disturbed, at an exhibit on the horrors of trench warfare when his phone vibrates.
Meeting in fifteen minutes,
it reminds him. “Shit,” he mutters, and goes to hunt for the way out.
I’ll come back later,
he resolves, and not just to map out the local ley line endpoint and isolate whatever unquiet piece of bloodthirsty history is powering it. The museum is only a ten-minute walk from the new offices: he wonders vaguely if it’s the sort of place you could take a date.

It’s Tuesday afternoon and the sky is covered by a slate-gray slab of cloud, the vanguard of a frontal system blowing in across the Pennines. The canyonlike pavements on the south side of the city center smell of rain and dogshit, and Alex is footsore and irritated as he nears the end of his beat. He’s carried the K-22 scanner out past the Royal Armouries, around a chunk of the Inner Loop, and almost as far as the strip mall on the site of the old Tetley’s Brewery. Now he’s working his way back to Quarry House. His eyes ache, the skin on his face feels hot and dry beneath his factor-200 sunblock, and the logging app on his phone has barely budged the whole while. This part of Leeds is stubbornly dead. Yes, there was a spike in the car park at Staples – old breweries were often built on the site of springs – and there was another, stronger one on the side of the canal lock behind the Armouries, but the Armouries isn’t on his route today. Anyway, it’ll probably get assigned to someone else as soon as the team from Exorcism Services in Liverpool arrive on Wednesday.

In the meantime, however, Alex – whose contract of employment stipulates that he is not required to go out in daylight at any time unless under exceptional circumstances meriting hazard pay – has just racked up
four hours
of stumbling about in overcast daylight. To PHANG senses this is as searing as high noon in the Sahara desert. He’s in a profoundly bad mood as he trudges across the Playhouse car park towards the side entrance to Quarry House. It occurs to him to wonder whether he has grounds to file a formal complaint against the idiots who assigned him a daylight task that could perfectly well have been carried out after midnight.
It’s ableist at a minimum, displaying a lack of sensitivity for diversity in the workplace
—

“Hey, Quincey! I mean, Alex! What are you doing here?”

Alex’s train of thought derails instantly under the impact of a sparkling smile framed by verdigris hair. The owner of the smile is wearing a black biker’s jacket over a polka-dot dress, black leggings that terminate in giant Doc Martens laced almost up to her knees, and electric blue bootlaces. Her hair is the color of church bells left out in the rain, tied up in pigtails that reveal multiply pierced ears rising to adorable little points. For a moment he can’t work out why she looks familiar: then he flashes back to Whitby, the Brides of Dracula, and his borrowed jacket.

“You’re, uh —” He racks his brain, aghast at how easily his traitor memory let slip her name.

“Cassie?” she says, still smiling brilliantly.

His throat clenches. It feels as if his ward is burning – but that’s obviously psychosomatic because the back of his brain is shrieking
Help! A girl is smiling at me! I don’t know what to do
, and he seems to have forgotten how to breathe. But after a second he manages to say, “Hi, Cassie,” and then he contorts his face at her,
almost
like a normal human being grinning or baring his teeth or something.
Oh God don’t show her your teeth.
“I work in that office. What are
you
doing here?”

“I work” – a toss of her head indicates the squat windowless block to the left of Quarry House, a Mini-Me to the government building’s Dr. Evil – “there! At least right now, I mean, I’m enrolled in a course in theatrical design and management and we’re doing practical work backstage at the Playhouse.”

They stand in the half-empty car park and smile at each other like amnesiac star-crossed lovers who know they’re supposed to say something but who have both lost the script. But what is going through their heads in those few seconds couldn’t be more different:

For Alex, it is as if the gray heavens have briefly parted to admit a single perfect sunbeam, focussing on the patch of pavement in front of him where Cassie is standing. She’s a girl, and she’s smiling at him, and she remembered his name from a brief encounter more than two weeks ago, and if his brain was a computer it’d be throwing segmentation faults and dumping core because this is so utterly outside Alex’s lived experience that he doesn’t know what to do next. Unlike the late and unlamented Evan – the PHANG pickup artist – Alex is somewhat introverted, timid, and under-socialized. Cassie is out of his league: but she’s being
friendly
. And, truth be told, standing in a car park smiling at her like an idiot is the most fun that he’s had for days. Even though it’s beginning to rain, and the ward around his neck feels like it’s choking him.

For Cassie, it’s as if the dark and turbid mists of destiny have blown away to reveal a coruscating finger of prophetic brilliance, lighting up the asphalt car park around her. The oracular stone of power at the base of her throat is shrieking in the back of her head,
This is the one
, as she smiles, awestruck, at the young magus standing before her with a puzzled smile on his face. Agent First is attuned to
mana
, and Alex is full of it. She sensed it briefly along the cliffside path in Whitby, but she’d been unsure: she’d left the stone back in her room in Leeds, unwilling to risk it as part of her stage costume. She’d invited him to the party in hope of getting a closer look but he never showed up, and she’d gradually persuaded herself that she’d been wrong, jumping at shadows after so long alone in the field. But now she can see him with the oracle stone against her skin, and her toes and fingertips are on fire with his power. Alex is clearly a practitioner of considerable power. The refrain of one of Cassie’s dad’s favorite songs runs through her head –
bait the line, set the trap, catch the man
– and her knees weaken, an outcome bred in the bone by five hundred generations of selection for deference to power. But she forces herself to face him down, keeping her smile-mask intact, showing no sign of terror or adoration.

And so they stand and smile at one another, both unsure what to do next, until Alex’s “I’ve got to check in at the office —” collides with Cassie’s “Fancy a coffee?” And they stall.

“Coffee?” Alex echoes.

“Office?”

“There.”

“Where?”

“Second floor, west wing, uh, I
really
need to drop this file off before I go home for the day but I can be out in fifteen minutes —”

“That’s okay, why don’t we meet up in the Playhouse bar?”

“Where —”

“That door there.” Cassie points vaguely. She’s afire with his power. Alex burns by daylight, metaphysically, and although he dresses like an accountancy clerk and his skin’s a mess there’s a strength to him that makes her certain that everything Cassie thinks she knows about the
urük
empire’s masters is wrong. “I’ll wait around.”

“Uh, okay. Yeah, be right back, don’t go ’way…”

Alex nearly trips over his own feet as he stumbles hastily towards the side entrance to the government office complex.
What,
he wonders bewilderedly,
is happening to me?
He’s more used to summoning demons, drinking blood, and consorting with vicars than he is to being invited to join cute green-haired girls for coffee. But as he rushes back to room 424 to drop off the K-22 kit and download his readings, he can’t help feeling a strange, light-hearted hope that this chance encounter might mark the start of another stage in his life.

Oh, Father.
Cassie waits at the Playhouse bar, trying not to tap her toes impatiently as the barista polishes glasses by the dishwasher and natters to one of his heavily tattooed buddies.
Let me be right about this one. Just this once.
She forces herself to stillness, calling upon resources that Agent First has learned over the course of a lifetime of deadly lessons.
He
must
come!
He
must
!

In Whitby she’d expected him to follow her to the party, englamoured – she’d seen her own eagerness reflected in his eyes, the attraction of power towards its own reflection – but then he’d evaporated into the night, leaving her swearing, without even a hair or drop of blood for her to track him by.

Now she’s let him go
again
– but at least she knows: second floor, west wing, Ministry of Truth.
Alex works for the government.
Which, as she now understands, is a proxy for the exercise of power by the unseen sorcerers who rule this nation from the shadows. They are curiously diffident, these magi, for ones who only a century ago ruled an empire upon which the sun never set. In recent years they seem to have stepped back behind a curtain of silence, making a pretense of delegating their power to a strange, toothless commonwealth and a queen of no particular magic. They leave the steel gauntlets of martial glory out for younger upstart nations to play with: but they are still here, lurking in the background. Of that much Agent First is utterly certain. If it were not so, Great Britain would have fallen long ago, wouldn’t it? In Agent First’s world, the ineluctable law of power is that you rule or you die.

To Agent First, the puppet show of democracy that Cassie believes in is obviously a child’s tissue of attractive lies, set before the cattle to enable the secret rulers to dominate them without fear of uprisings. It obviates the need to instill
geasa
of binding upon every individual subject, making possible huge economies of scale in the application of
force majeure
. (Subjects whose mind-bogglingly vast numbers beggar Agent First’s imagination: it makes no sense, who
needs
that many slaves?) But to rule effectively from behind the stage curtain, the unseen theatrical directors that call the tunes in this production must send actors out among the audience to work their will. Alex shows every sign of being such a person. Outwardly he wears the guise of a gray man – deliberately average and forgettable. But he is robed in tremendous power for those with an inner eye with which to see him – an inner eye which most of the
urük
appear to lack. And he works for the government. What else could he be, but an agent-magus serving the secret rulers?