The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (17 page)

He’s got to come, he’s got to
— The barista notices her. “Venti soy mocha with an extra shot, cream
and
cinnamon on top,” she rattles automatically –
come, he’s
got
to
—

“Hi!” Alex squeaks behind her shoulder, his voice breaking bat-high with nerves.

Cassie jumps. He moves surprisingly silently: he’s close enough that she can feel his breath. “Hi!” She sparkles back, then forces herself to get a grip. She’s not sure whether to be embarrassed or terrified at the way he sneaked up on her, and the way her heart pounds in his presence. Her next words are a huge bluff: “What are you having?”

“I’ll have a” – he hangs fire, stuttering silence for a few seconds – “a decaf latte?” Another pause. “I’m paying?”

“You don’t need to.” She’s not short of spending money: one of the skills she mastered on her first day as Cassie was walking up to a man in a suit, pointing at the nearest bank machine, and saying: “Give me a hundred pounds.” Their eyes glaze as they push the buttons for her, completely defenseless before her will.

“You’re a student, right?” He meets her eyes, but there’s no soulgaze there: just a wide-eyed smile. Either he isn’t trying (
He suspects nothing!
a reprehensibly dutiful part of Agent First howls triumphantly in the privacy of her mind) or she’s adequately shielded. “I’m working. Let me buy this one?”

“Okay!” It’s a strain trying to stay bright the whole time, but she manages somehow. The part of her that’s Cassie is engaging in some weird etiquette negotiation that she doesn’t quite understand, about gendered social interactions and the relative status of scholars and sorcerer-lords, but he seems well-intentioned and it’s too transparent to be an attempt to trick her into a transfer of fealty. “Did you finish your work?”

“Yeah, I’m done for the day.” As he says it a certain tension fades from his shoulders, and he relaxes very slightly.

Oh look, he’s remembered to be human,
Cassie’s shade remarks acidly. Seen through the eyes of the unenhanced Ms. Brewer, Alex is pretty much a dead loss in the charm stakes. It takes Agent First’s uncanny perceptions to see how much more there is to the boy than meets the eye. She studies Alex at close quarters. For an
urük
he’s not totally ugly, and his skin isn’t bad: but he’s wearing an implausible quantity of theatrical powder for some reason. Cassie’s memories suggest that this is
not normal
for a male office-worker in this place. Especially as the rest of him, apart from the
mana
that oozes from his every pore, seems determinedly mundane. “Huh,” she says, “I’ve finished work, too.” She pauses for a beat. “Are you in rep as well?”

“In rep—” He freezes again. (Original Cassie would find his zoning out hopelessly uncool. Agent First thinks it fascinating, as if he’s pausing while he works out how much he’s allowed to tell her. Like a parasitic wasp larva moving under the skin of an unwilling caterpillar host, the real Alex is struggling not to emerge prematurely.) “Oh, you mean acting? Sorry, no: it’s just my skin, I burn really easily.”

“You mean, sunburn?” She raises an eyebrow at that. “In
this
weather?”

Two coffees appear on the bar behind her: Alex produces a banknote, somewhat rumpled and sweaty from spending time in his trouser pocket. As he pays she takes her cup and walks towards a table, putting a little primate-signaling jiggle in her stride, glancing over her shoulder to see if he’s paying attention. She doesn’t dare attempt to englamour a magus – she’s not suicidal – but the
urük
appear not to castrate their magi to render them tractable, which leaves them interestingly open to other forms of manipulation.

“Sunburn.” Alex follows her as if hypnotized, but then sits opposite her and stares moodily down at his coffee. Then he glances up at her and his expression softens. “I came down with, with a medical condition about six months ago,” he admits. “I’m hypersensitive to sunlight, among other things.”

“Like a vampire,” she jokes.

He startles and nearly spills his coffee. “Vampires don’t exist!”

She stares at him. “If you say so.” She picks up a sachet of sugar and pauses for a moment, frowns. “What about Dracula?”

“Dracula’s a cultural archetype. A legend.”

Cassie opens the sugar and pours most of it into her coffee. The last few grains she allows to scatter on the table between them. Alex freezes for a couple of seconds.
Got you,
she thinks triumphantly. But then he looks up, faster than should be possible.

“Dracula’s not real. I mean, the turning into a flock of bats thing, or a mist, the aversion to crucifixes – it’s all rubbish.”

She’s said or done something wrong: an invisible barrier has risen between them.
Was it the sugar? Did he notice?
“Okay, so they’re fictional.”
Or is it the narrative?
She shrugs. “But they’re fun in films or to read about. Smoking hot and scary at the same time.”

“There’s nothing hot about them,” he says with world-weary conviction; “it’s, if it existed it’d be a nasty disease, that’s all. One that kills most of its victims and makes life a misery for the survivors. One that prevents them having normal relationships and forces them to —” He stops dead, eyes bulging slightly as if he’s a sworn liegeman running up against the edge of his discretion and thinking better of what he was about to say. “Gack. Just joking.” He smiles weakly.

Agent First narrows her eyes, exaggerating her natural suspicion: she
knows
that expression. Any remaining doubts she might have harbored evaporate.
Yes, he’s a magus, master of blood magic and darkness and bound servant of power. Even if he’s resistant to the counting trap.
“Forget it, I was being silly,” she says, and smiles back at him. “Are you in town for long?” He nods lugubriously. Her stomach churns. She’s perilously close to losing him: every time she tries to turn the conversation somewhere productive she accidentally says something that disturbs him.
What am I doing wrong?
she wails. “I, I wasn’t expecting to run into you,” she says haltingly. “But if you work so close” – she gestures through the far wall in the direction of the building he disappeared into – “why, we’re practically neighbors!”

“I guess we are,” he says, and his expression slowly brightens. “I’m here on a temp assignment from London, but it seems likely they’ll make it permanent. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I suppose every cloud has a silver lining. How about you?”

“Oh, I’m here for the rest of the year. And I guess next year, too” – a flashover oracular vision of
next year
tells her otherwise, flames roaring skyward, despairing screams from beneath wrecked buildings, the sky a roiling black vortex of smoke – “if nothing bad happens. We’re going to do
Dracula
at Whitby for real next week, and they’ve offered us a one-week matinee run at the Playhouse if it goes well, but Easter vac is coming up, only I’m not going home —”

“Home?”

“To Hull.”

“Oh God.” His fingers are warm and dry against her hand, and at last she’s made a connection. “You have my deepest sympathies.”

Got you
…
“Where are
you
from?” she asks, frantically trying to keep up with this unfamiliar game of empathic bridge-building. (It’s quite unlike anything she’s experienced among the People: nobody would
dream
of speaking so. It’s not merely undignified, it’s degrading and leaves one vulnerable.)

“I’m from Leeds,” he admits glumly.

Cassie can’t help herself: she giggles, shocked. “You should run away while there’s still time!”

“I tried. They sent me back. There is no escape.”

“Listen, it could be worse.” Words rise from her stolen memories, an ancient prayer: “From Hell, Hull, and Halifax may the Good Lord preserve us, right?”

“I guess Leeds wasn’t around in those days. Otherwise they’d have included it.” He realizes he’s holding her hand and twitches as if to pull back, but she tightens her grip.

“You’re not getting away that easily,” she tells him, and she means it. (In her experience the truth is
always
better than a lie: the truth is unlikely to get your eyeballs melted in your head when it’s found out, unless your liege is having a particularly bad day.) Anyway, she has a feeling that she’d quite like to see him without his false skins, both the heavy makeup and the slowly dying caterpillar-caul of his Mister Normal disguise: she’s certain they conceal a spectacular butterfly, even though (she’s upset when she remembers this) she’s
geas
-bound to break it on her father’s wheel. “You stood me up at the after-party! I had to put up with that ass Jeremy droning on for hours about the Lair of the White Worm. It was no fun!”

“Um, I’m sorry —”

“How would you like to make up for it?” She smiles as she looks him in the eye and pushes just a
tiny
amount of willpower into her gaze. It’s enough, because he sits up. “It’s pretty fucking dull around here after hours, and my homies are all pissing off for a month in two weeks’ time – Easter vac, like I said – and I’m
not
going home to Hull!” She pouts, draws a deep breath, and pushes her chest out just a little.

Alex’s eyes don’t glaze over, but they lose the tight focus as he visibly makes an effort not to let them drift south towards her chest. “How would you like to go see a movie together after work some time?” he asks.

“I’d like that a lot!” She pulls out her phone. “Hmm. Busy Thursday. A week next Friday I’m off to Whitby for the goth festival… how are you for tomorrow? Wednesday?”

“Tomorrow? That would be” – he blinks, surprised – “good.”

“Me too! Text me your number and Facebook name,” she says, and he turns his phone towards her: there’s an address book entry in the name of
Alex Schwartz
, and a menu option to send contact details.
Bingo!
Agent First thinks triumphantly as she keys in her own mobile number. She can barely believe it: Has he really told her his true name? (The
urük
seem oddly fearless about identity theft.) A moment later her phone vibrates. “YesYes!” Cassie beams at him like an out-of-control searchlight. “We have a date!”

That night, Agent First returns to the location whence she first arrived in this world. The actual spot is inconveniently close to the middle of Burley Road, which carries more traffic than she is comfortable with, so she waits until the backside of midnight, fuming. It will be necessary to relocate the anchor spot to a more convenient location, one connected to the local ley lines, but she doesn’t yet have enough
mana
to do so. Finally the traffic subsides enough to allow her to walk into the road, reopen the portal, and call the first of her agents through from the shadow roads where they have been waiting.

As luck would have it, the cloaked figure steps out of the glowing portal and begins to look around just as a late-night delivery truck rounds the bend, headlights flaring against the darkness. Agent First swears and bundles her disoriented minion out of the way before he’s flattened.

Hell of a way to run an invasion,
she thinks distractedly.
“Agent Second, report!”
she commands in the High Tongue.

“I hear and obey, mistress.”
Agent Second stares at her oddly, the whites of his eyes showing all around his dilated pupils: then he shudders and pulls himself together.
“Salutations from All-Highest, and you are to forward your report immediately. I bear a courier beast for your convenience
…
”

Agent Second throws back one side of his cloak and relaxes his grip. The coatl tastes the smoke-fouled air and hisses vehemently, then raises its hackles. The beast is venomous and can lash out if it feels threatened, even against those it is bound to. Agent First doesn’t flinch.
“Good,”
she says. She reaches into the top of her dress and tugs one of the memory gems loose from her necklace, then holds it in front of the courier.
“Excellent creature, bear my offering to All-Highest with all available speed.”
A forked tongue flickers out, sampling the air again. Evidently satisfied, the beast’s feathers droop slightly and it extends its neck, jaws gaping. There is a trickle of moisture and her hand lightens infinitesimally as the coatl swallows the crystal. It will reside in the beast’s gizzard while it makes its way through the shadow roads to All-Highest on his charnel throne, waiting for news from the enemy land.
“Release the beast,”
Agent First commands. Her subordinate makes obeisance to her, then carefully releases the coatl from beneath his garment. There is a flittering of scaly membranous wings and a diminishing hiss, then a flicker of light so far into the violet that it approaches invisibility as it returns to the unreality from which it was summoned by the Host’s magi.

She takes a deep breath and focusses on Agent Second.
“Come,”
she commands.
“We have much to discuss.”

“I hear and obey, mistress.”
She looks at him through half-human eyes, seeing to first approximations a tall, thin man, delicate-boned; the corners of his eyes smoothed by epicanthic folds, the helices of his ears stretched towards points at the top. His lips are plump, his long hair gathered in a braid – gender signifiers among their kind are not as they are among the
urük
. Like most of their species his skin is the brown of almonds, his hair black. The human tongue Cassie speaks has a word to describe him:
elfin
. It is no mere metaphor.

“Follow.”
She turns downhill towards Kirkstall Road, leading him along a side street past rows of hunched red-brick dwellings and trees that are still barely recovering from winter. Something, she thinks, is not quite right.
“Walk with me on this raised pavement: do not venture into the road lest”
– she is nearly bowled over as Agent Second leaps aside in shock when an elderly hatchback shoots past his right elbow –
“that.”

“What is-is
—
”
Agent Second stutters.

“Our historic records of this world are defective.”
Agent First is secretly pleased that her own reaction to this realm is not untypical. She is less pleased by her Second’s wild-eyed look. She hasn’t worked with this man for long, but something about his attitude seems subtly off.
“These are not savages: there is a civilization here, but it is very strange. They use very little mana, but they are not without powerful artifices
–
as you just saw, artifices that they make available even to serfs. They lie extensively and willfully, even to their lieges, using obfuscation and misdirection to conceal what is true
–
I have met only one individual who seemed bound by geas.”

“Ah.”
Agent Second is silent for a while. They pause at a street corner until there is no sign of traffic, then Agent First leads him on a mad feline dash across the road. Once they gain the safety of the opposite sidewalk, Agent Second asks hesitantly:
“Then these wheeled carts that speed so
–
they are used by
serfs
?”

“There are too many of them, far too many. Their breeding has spiraled out of control, and they live in huge hives and barrack-cities of which this one is far from the largest.”
 

“All-Highest will certainly wish to thin the herd,”
Agent Second opines.

Agent First’s stomach lurches at the idea. Cassie has a word for what she feels –
squeamish
– but the High Tongue lacks the concept. She pauses.
“What news of home?”

“The situation is desperate,”
Agent Second reports. His head swivels ceaselessly as he scans his surroundings:
“One of the supply depots was found to have been incorrectly sealed when we retreated into slumber. Those responsible have paid for their error, but the Host now have barely enough fodder on hand to feed the heavy brigade’s mounts for another tenday. After that time they will have to deploy the cavalry, or start eating the serfs.”

There is a third option, of course, but Agent First doesn’t even bother to enquire after it. Slaughtering the mounts is a non-option, for without the heavy brigade the Host will be unable to conduct offensive operations. She knows her father well enough to know what he will do.
“When is the attack scheduled for, and where?”

“All-Highest has not seen fit to confide in me, my lady. But the Intelligence Section is tasked as a highest priority with capturing and returning to headquarters a magus or other officer with credentials sufficient to gain access to the enemy palace. Bound to All-Highest’s will and alive for questioning. I suspect he plans a swift assassination under cover of a decoy offensive: conquest by subterfuge.”
Agent Second glances up and down the road, taking in the brutally oppressive buildings of fire-baked clay and stone.
“Are we alone?”
he asks.

Agent First pauses at another pedestrian crossing, glancing both ways along the road. Her sense of danger crystalizes in a split instant.
“I believe so,”
she says, careful not to look directly at Agent Second.
“Why do you ask?”

A grunt.
“Alas, I am bound and commanded to deliver the fond salutations of your stepmother
—
”

A dagger plunges through the darkness but misses its target. Agent Second grunts, falling into a defensive crouch. His movements are jerkily over-controlled.

Cassie’s grief and rage mingle as she pulls the veil of darkness tight around her and steps behind her former subordinate. That he
was
loyal to her she does not doubt: nor is there any doubt that Second Wife has chained him by power of her rank and turned him into an weapon. She can hear the tension in his panicky gasps as he finds his body compelled to perform actions that threaten to tear him apart, making an oath-breaker of him regardless of outcome. Agent Second cannot disobey the
geas
of the wife of the All-Highest, she who in other times could call herself Empress of the Morningstar. But the wages of treason are death: if his blade drinks Agent First’s blood his own life is forfeit under the
geas
she holds him with. It’s elegantly cruel, Cassie realizes: if Agent Second kills her he, too, will die, and thereby serve her stepmother’s purpose, but if
she
slays
him
her command will be weakened.

“Stop this,”
Cassie commands, casting her voice to echo off the damp brick walls behind.

Agent Second spins warily in place, unable to see her.
“I can’t,”
he hisses, pained. His face is creased in anguish.
“She won’t let me.”

“If you persist, we may both die.”
 

“Then you will have to slay me, my lady, for I cannot help myself.”
He lunges and lashes out again, his eyes screwed shut. Cassie dances backwards a step, two: she recognizes the tactic. Darkness will not be sufficient. She begins to spin a web of mist and night, muffling sounds.
“I am sorry,”
he adds, knife tip circling.

She risks everything on a question.
“Does All-Highest know of this treachery?”

“I know not.”
Agent Second moans faintly, a string of drool dangling from his lower jaw.
“His wife ordains your death, my lady. I am sorry
—
”

For a moment he rallies. Tendons stand out in his neck as his back arches, fighting the dragon lady’s
geas
. He stumbles, arms thrown wide, and Cassie recognizes a gathering rumble behind them.

The moral calculus is hazardous, unavoidable. She darts forward and punches his shoulder, shoving him off-balance.

“I’m sorry, too!”
she mouths, as a horn blares and brakes screech. Agent Second seems to fall forever, but it can only be a split second before he vanishes beneath the wheels of the articulated lorry. She doesn’t stay to watch, but whirls and runs, horrified, metallic-tasting stomach acid rising at the back of her throat.
It was one or both of us,
she rationalizes, trying desperately to un-see what she witnessed, to un-hear the sounds of Agent Second being dragged beneath the wheels, the driver’s face a pale circle glimpsed through the windscreen —

After a couple of minutes, Cassie slows to a walk, panting. Her mood, uncharacteristically light until recently, is now tainted with fear and apprehension. It is not because she mourns for Agent Second. He was demonstrably incautious, and allowed her stepmother to corner him in isolation for long enough to impose her murderous compulsion. His weakness brought its own reward down upon his neck. But at the end he rallied, resisting the enemy’s will for long enough to give Cassie an opening. She recognizes that she is alive through his act of self-sacrifice, and that her position has gone from marginal to precarious. She is still under orders, charged by All-Highest with gathering intelligence on the
urük
empire’s occult rulers. She can no more fight that
geas
than she can still her rebellious heartbeat by will alone. But now she knows for a fact that the mistress of dragons wants her dead. She can be certain that any aid that will be granted her is tainted with treachery, voluntary or compelled. Her own command has been compromised and her own agents can no longer be trusted. She is alone in this place of exile with only the knowledge of the coming invasion to reduce her isolation to something she can comprehend – and the invasion itself will imperil her.

Perhaps the report she dispatched via Agent Second’s coatl will serve to redeem her name in her father’s esteem. But somehow she doubts it. In truth, she’s even coming to doubt her sanity, or at least the value of her stolen memories.

The messy decentralization of Cassie’s world is a calculated affront to the intellect: it makes no sense to one of Agent First’s kind. They
know
that there can be no society without
mana
to provide power and
geasa
to bind the weak and empower the elevated. All-Highest is as likely to be offended by the ugliness of her report as he is to be persuaded by her insight. At home, everyone can see the intricate web of obligations that connect them to the great chain of being, all the way from All-Highest at the apex to the lowliest slave at the bottom. But Cassie feels the imprint of no such will upon her memories and upbringing. Nor does she recognize the pattern Agent First is seeking. Cassie’s queen is not a terrifying sorceress presiding over her empire from a moonlit throne atop a tower of skulls, but a figurehead in a pink twinset and pearls, smiling and waving. She presides over a raucous parliament of self-important men in suits: the only thing they can strike dead with a glare is a sound bite.

Agent First might reluctantly credit Cassie’s understanding of her world if there was truly no
mana
here. But there
are
magi: she’s met one. She senses it on Alex’s skin, smells it curdling on his breath. If he’d show her his teeth she could see it for herself. She has walked the streets around Quarry House and every footstep set her skin crawling, raised the hairs on the nape of her neck with the numinous power embedded in the fresh concrete paving slabs. The only explanation she can see that fits the facts is the hand of a hidden puppeteer, animating the ministries of state through the strength of their will-to-power and their magically enforced oaths of fealty. There
is
magic here, and where there is magic and will there
is
power, and where there is a source of power there
is
a ruler, and a ruler
is
a single point of failure that can be dominated and controlled. But finding that ruler, and a weakness by which she can reach them? She barely knows where to begin.

Whether All-Highest will even bother to review her full report, or hear her thoughts on this subject, is anybody’s guess. The only way to convince him would be to present him with incontrovertible evidence – nothing less than a captured enemy magus would do. And she is on her own, with no way to get word home before the invasion force itself arrives.

What’s a spy to do?