The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (18 page)

In his pale throne room beneath the bones of a long-dead sea, All-Highest awaits the report of Agent First of Spies and Liars. Honorable Second Wife, Highest Liege of Airborne Strike Command, occupies the lower throne to his left, chin propped on fist. To his right stands Her Excellence, Highest Liege of Heavy Cavalry. Arrayed behind them are the various members of their staff and assistants.

Their attention is focussed on a chair of limestone where Cassiopeia Brewer sits, fettered with bonds of iron. Skin stinking of terror, mouth stoppered with a gag of leather to muffle her shrieks, she cuts a pathetic figure: clearly the
urük
place little weight on displays of stoical fortitude in the face of inevitable martyrdom.

“The message.”
All-Highest gestures languidly at the slave woman in the stone chair:
“Put it to her.”

“Yes, Highness.”
Honorable Second of Analysts and Communicators steps forward, robes swishing against the floor. He bears a skullcap to which is wired the memory jewel so recently borne across the shadow roads by the coatl. The
urük
female squirms in the chair, trying to slither away from him. Tears trickle down her cheeks as she shakes her head violently, trying to mewl in her barbarous tongue.

All-Highest regards her with disfavor. Her noises are an irritating distraction. He would have had her tongue removed if he had not been waiting for this message from his daughter.

Second of Analysts grips the back of the barbarian woman’s neck and forces her to submit. As he lowers the skullcap atop her shaven head – she sports a tonsure, a recent imposition made necessary by the process in hand, but one which fails to make her look any less stupid and brutish – she stiffens as if in a seizure. Her eyes roll up in her head, and her neck becomes limp, so that her head is held up only by Second of Analysts’ grip. Then the spasm passes. The woman lifts her chin, a new intelligence glowing in her eyes. The mewling stops.
“Remove the gag,”
commands All-Highest.

“Father.”
The woman ducks her head briefly, as great a gesture of submission as her bonds permit.
“My memories are yours to command.”

All-Highest permits the merest ghost of a smile to flit across his lips. His daughter’s soul is fearless, even in such dire circumstances – entangled with an
urük
slave before a committee of all the powers. He is not unaware of the way Agent First’s stepmother glowers. This is to be expected. He would be astonished if she did not have plans for the offspring of his previous whelpings. Behind his right shoulder loom the golems of Punishment and Exemplification of Obedience, ready to excruciate any who should question his will. His new wife is not stupid: he trusts her to leave Agent First alone until she completes her report.

“Tell me, daughter, of the world you have found.”
 

For the next few hours Cassie’s mouth labors awkwardly around the unfamiliar lilting tonal phonemes of the High Tongue. Her accent is slow and barbarous, but behind the mangled words a keen intellect delivers news of its labor. Agent First speaks of lies and paradoxes, of a civilization without
mana
and a hidden empire that denies its own manifest existence. Much of her report is profoundly shocking to the staff of the Host of Air and Darkness: she sings of a dirty, terrifyingly overcrowded land where contrivances of mere mechanism run riot and a foul culture has taken root, showing signs of barbaric vigor but bereft of beauty. She sings of a monstrous, seething anthill capital that is in turn the regional hub of an even more populous center to the southeast. And then she sings of a fastness of honey-colored stone surmounted by a gleaming metal spire reeking of
mana
, that stands atop a hill in the midst of the city: a fastness surrounded by wards of power within which secretive magi work by day and night at tasks unseen.

This last captures All-Highest’s attention.
“Speak now of this hidden master you have identified,”
he demands, as Second Wife leans forward attentively beside him.

“He is a magus of their kind, an initiate of the blood-feeding brood, touched by power but left uncut and whole. I am unsure how they control him, but presumably they hold their magi in thrall through other means. I met him at dusk on the steps of the theater beside the regional palace of the hidden overlords, beneath the shadow of the steel spire. I am in the process of learning his background and gaining his trust: this is, perforce, not a process that can be hurried. Once obtained I intend to enter the palace under cover of his office, to seek those who rule from the shadows. I shall report further on their identity so that the Host shall be aware of their true nature and location, and I will then proceed as ordered
…
”
 

All-Highest is aware of his wife’s pensive frown as his attention drifts from the prisoner’s halting monologue.
“What troubles you, fairest?”
he asks idly, reaching to take her scale-gloved hand in his.

Her fingers curl into a tight fist, betraying tension.
“I dislike the gamble thy Host is drifting towards,”
she says – the word for
gamble
in the High Tongue refers to wagers on natural outcomes, not games of skill, for no wager on a game of skill can be truly free from the risk of interference.
“That one’s report is vacuous and lazy, a work of purest imagination scribed to cover a lack of diligence. The urük prisoner”
– she gestures at the subject –
“is clearly a useless mouth, a serf so ignorant of authority that it seems to this one that Agent First
deliberately
chose her in mockery of thy instructions. Her account of an empire ruled from the shadows, with neither will-to-power nor an immediate descent into anarchy, is a fairy tale to frighten infants. It adds naught to our understanding of the enemy. That we gain nothing from this is a sign that there is nothing to
be
understood in the first place: it is a sign of treachery, not of insight. If All-Highest will permit this one to send her task group to examine the territory from above, we will rapidly learn the truth about this so-called civilization without mana or authority.”

She smiles at him fiercely. It is an expression of shared complicity and ambition that fills him with pride.
“We will review the matter on the morrow,”
he replies.
“How many of your wing are available to fly?”

“Two can take wing immediately; the other six can be awakened at your command. All we await is word that the road has been widened sufficiently to accommodate them.”
 

All-Highest makes a snap decision:
“Then you must make haste to awaken all your riders. Of their mounts, prepare two for flight as soon as the shadow road is ready
–
Second of Magi shall serve as your guide. Hold the rest in reserve, ready to awaken and support the Host when we are ready to ride forth together. It would please us if you were to prepare terrain maps of the target city that Agent First spoke of, assuming it exists outside her imagination. If it is not simple confabulation, then it will be an ideal target for our first thrust: we will find the urük leaders there, and use Agent First to open a traitor’s gate so that we may bring them to the path of obedience through stealth while the Host holds their attention.”

His gaze turns back towards the prisoner on the limestone throne.
“Return this one to her cell.”

There is a department on the fourth floor of the New Annex that does not exist.

Or rather, it exists conditionally, paradoxically. Sometimes it’s there; at other times it has never been occupied. Until two years ago, its state of neverness was localized on Dansey House, the Laundry’s former headquarters building – now a bulldozed sinkhole of thaumaturgic contamination surrounded by construction hoardings. More recently it has migrated without authorization to another building. And it is a vital part of the agency, for all that many people don’t believe it’s even real.

This is the Forecasting Operations Department, where one is supposed to imagine that crystal-ball gazing precognitives may or may not tickle the tummy of Schrödinger’s cat while juggling ampoules full of hydrogen cyanide and giggling madly at the whirling fogbank of the uncertain future.

I’ve never visited Forecasting Ops, but I’ve been given a backgrounder about what they do, and it’s fascinating stuff when it isn’t boring. Fascinatingly boring, in fact. On the one hand, they claim to be able to foretell the future. That, on the face of it, is insane. It would allow them to create and operate a Turing Oracle, an abstract function that can resolve undecidable problems (including the Halting Problem) in O(
n
) time.
NP
-complete? No problem!
P
-Space- and
P
-Time-complete functions? Trivially soluble. Put me in charge of Forecasting Ops for a month and I’ll cure my annoying V-parasite infestation in one easy computational step – and break any /files/08/14/76/f081476/public/private key pair you care to point me at for an encore. But no: they’re not interested in curing Krantzberg syndrome or its relatives. They’re just in the wholly mundane business of
predicting the future
.

I find this deeply, offensively foolish. As if the future is predictable at that level! But abusing the Oracle is a
political
imperative, or so I am informed. They send reports around on a regular basis, discussing the most mundane matters with a lamentable lack of abstract insight. Mostly they make for terribly dull reading (“status is green: no existential threats anticipated”). Sometimes they’re just perplexing (“the rain of fish over York Minster next Thursday lunchtime has been cancelled”). And sometimes Forecasting Ops
doesn’t exist
– this is apparently a rare but critical paradox that emerges when the existence of Forecasting Ops will itself lead to a detrimental outcome, resulting in the department retroactively cancelling its own establishment until the threat is past.

(I am not convinced by the underlying metalogic of this proposition; it appears to be undecidable even in
P
-Time. But that’s what you get for playing with Turing Oracles, I guess.)

It is Wednesday, and I am back in the windowless office at the Headingley Arndale Centre, catching up on my paperwork. I will confess I am finding it somewhat difficult to concentrate: I have a date this evening and I am not sure what I’m supposed to do – Wikipedia is maddeningly uninformative on the subject, and other sources range from unreliable (citation needed!) to actively misleading. However I am conditionally confident of the accuracy of the advice Pete gave me, which was to treat any behavior showcased by the male lead in a Hollywood romantic comedy as dangerously abusive. (
Do not
: follow her home; break into her house to watch her sleep; put spyware on her computer or phone; send giant bouquets of flowers signed YOUR SECRET ADMIRER; boil her family’s pet rabbit; and so on.) I am therefore using paperwork as a distraction from life, rather than vice versa. And that’s why the weekly update from Forecasting Ops catches my attention:

I find these recommendations troubling.

I’ve worked with an OCCULUS unit before – six months ago, during the debacle at the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY storage warehouse in Watford – and the idea that Forecasting Ops think it would be a good idea to deploy one within sixty minutes of Huddersfield makes my skin crawl. Huddersfield is just down the road from here (along the M62 motorway). It’s part of the western extremity of the West Yorkshire conurbation which peters out in the foothills of the Pennines, just before the motorway crosses the border into Lancashire.

I’m not sure quite what a “major extradimensional intrusion” means when it’s translated from the FO jargon, but if Forecasting Ops are suggesting that an armed response unit equipped with heavy thaumaturgic firepower ought to be deployed on our doorstep, it can’t be anything good.