The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (23 page)

“Magus, your status if you please.”
 

She feels her back-seater shift his balance through the frame of the protective howdah.
“I am ready and my wards are prepared, Highest.”

Highest Liege opens her eyes and looks at the landscape around her, then at her mount’s scaly neck. She frowns, then wills it to shift color. Chameleon-like, the dragon responds, fading into the scenery. This is only the first of its defenses; before the People found and domesticated them the ancestors of firewyrms were prey to basilisks (likewise domesticated and turned to martial use).
If you can be seen, you are dead
is the watchword of dragonriders everywhere. As the blood-drinking sorcerer in the seat behind her begins his chant, Highest Liege finds herself increasingly unable to detect her mount, her seat, or indeed her own hands. She seems to be made of glass, and this amuses her enough to draw a brief, delighted chuckle, for she knows it to be a symptom not of psychosis but of the power of her back-seater’s defensive countermeasures. She takes a step forward, then another, driving her mount’s body via the brain parasite entangled with her own will: and she becomes huge and powerful and lighter than feathers. The breeze tickles her naked skin, an unbearable provocation, and she stifles the urge to draw breath and bellow a roar of challenge at the sky.

“Striker Two, prepare to follow.”
 

Her helm takes her words instantly to the ears of her Second, who acknowledges, promptly:
“I obey and follow, my lady.”

Highest Liege drives her awareness deep into the senses of her mount, and it seems as if it is
her
wings with which she catches the breeze, and
her
will by which she begins to fall into the sky – for dragons are far too heavy to fly like birds or bats or coatl: it takes much
mana
to lift a ten-ton monster and its cargo of death. The sunken valley drops away below, the world spreading its apron, shadows crossed by strings of amber lights stretching into the distance in all directions.

Striker One spreads its wings and soars, spiraling up and out from the marshaling zone beneath the frozen limestone waterfall, while Striker Two rises to take up position astern and to port. Then the two dragons commence their night patrol, while beneath them the first light cavalry battalion rides out of the shadow road.

On Friday evening, Alex belatedly realizes that if he’s going to take Cassie out for dinner with his parents he can’t ride his moped. The rear suspension is rubbish, it wheezes asthmatically with just one rider on board, and if it rains tomorrow evening she’ll get wet, which would be bad, wouldn’t it?

So he goes downstairs to the back room, where Pinky is fiddling with a compact milling machine and a chunk of wood, and clears his throat. “Uh, do you think it’d be possible for me to borrow the van tomorrow evening?”

“Nope.” Pinky doesn’t even look up.

“Oh.” Alex rethinks his approach and tries again. “I, um, it’s because I have a date tomorrow and I need to pick her up and get her home afterwards. A taxi will cost an arm and a leg, the busses don’t go there, and my bike’s no good. Any suggestions?”

Pinky straightens up and turns away from the workbench. “Coffee,” he grunts, and goes through into the kitchen. Alex trails behind.
Coffee
isn’t
yes
but it isn’t
no
either. Pinky picks up an elderly aluminum stovetop kettle, fills it from the tap, and puts in on the gas ring. “Decaf for you, I think,” he says thoughtfully, then begins to rummage in the cupboard. Bits of caffeine-related detritus rain down on the counter: an AeroPress, two chipped mugs, and something that looks like a prototype artificial heart with a trailing mains lead. “The van’s a works motor, and the contents of the back office – you didn’t say she’s staff, did you?”

“No.” Alex shakes his head. “Civilian.”

“Then you can’t drive the van.” Two more mugs appear on the worktop. “You’re on decaf, but the Vicar’s on full-fat, isn’t he?”

“What, Pete? He takes his coffee regular —” Alex looks around. “Where is he?”

“Out with Brains, fetching the tank from the MOT test center down the hill.”

“The —” Alex flashes back to the bizarre machine in the garage. “It’s
running
?”

“Not only is it running, it’s legally roadworthy.” The kettle begins to whistle, and for a minute Pinky is busy pouring, filling, and finally pumping. (The artificial heart or whatever it is makes an alarming repetitive gurgle-sploosh noise as it sucks near-boiling water and crams it through some sort of filter cartridge.) “You could borrow it, I suppose.”

“Is that even legal?” Alex ponders the possibility.

“Sure.
Technically
it’s also a company car, but there’s nothing secret about it except for a Fuller-Dee Tetragram to power a glamour that stops other drivers from crashing when they see it. And that’s just a bit of random graffiti in the leg-well until you plug your OFCUT device into the cigarette-lighter socket Brains installed and fire up the see-me-not app.”

“But, but driver’s license!”

Pinky thrusts a mug towards him. “Relax. Sure you’d need a category DM license endorsement – tracked vehicles – and you’ve only got a moped license. But” – his eyes swivel side to side, cartoon-conspiratorially – “you’ve got a warrant card. With the see-me-not ward nobody’s going to notice you – they’ll just see a totally forgettable car, and if you
do
get pulled over you just hand over your warrant card when they ask to see your paperwork.”

“Um.” Alex sips his decaf cautiously, gears spinning in his head. What Pinky is proposing is bad, naughty, and wrong – but he’s right. The van’s off-limits, his moped is no good, and as for Pete’s big bike…
what if she wears a skirt?
Alex asks himself. And anyway, Pete will probably be riding it home to London tomorrow morning. He’s got family, after all.

Alex also has a vague idea that the kind of girl who studies drama and dresses as a vampire in Whitby on Halloween might be amused by his turning up for a date driving an antique half-track: or at least take it in her stride.

“If you don’t like it, you can borrow the hovercraft,” Pinky says, as a rumbling noise outside heralds the triumphant return of the Kettenkrad. “But you might have some trouble with the hills.”

Agent First dreams uneasily in the early hours of Saturday morning.

She dreams of standing, stiff-legged, on a darkling plain beneath a sky of tattered, speeding clouds. Behind her stands a frozen waterfall of stone. Her feet rest on a limestone pavement much like the landscape above her father’s redoubt. But this is not her home. There is no flicker of in-falling meteors lighting up the night, no vast disk of snowy dust and rock arching overhead to occlude the southern half of the sky. She wears the clothes of a young woman of the
urük
, but her wrists and ankles are fettered with cold iron and her stomach is as empty as a slave’s. Two of her father’s soldiers hold her upright between them: her knees are too weak to support her. They drag her before her stepmother, who is flanked by a pair of magi. From their leaden expressions she can tell that they’re half-starved, exhausted by the working of great art. First Liege smiles contemptuously at her.

Oh,
thinks Agent First,
this can mean only one thing.
She tenses leaden limbs that feel too short, too weak to support her.
“Your life will be mine.”
She rallies, mustering what defiance she can for her death-curse. Not that curses work, as a rule, but —

“I don’t think so.”
Her stepmother’s ears go up, signaling smug satisfaction, and she motions the elder of the magi towards her.

Agent First tries to pull away, but the soldiers hold her in place when the thin-faced eunuch leans close, his grimace revealing razor-sharp canines. He locks gazes with her, and her shreds of bravado slip away in the face of the hangman’s horror in his eyes. She screams in fear as he yanks her head back and sinks his teeth into the soft flesh at the base of her throat, then in pain as the blood flows. Too bad he hasn’t ripped an artery: there is no abrupt gout of merciful release here, just the hungry lapping of a soft-tongued parasite suckling on her venous circulation.

Barbed appendages latch onto the surface of her mind, tearing and compressing, and she shudders, horrified as her self-image contorts and shrinks.

“Before you depart, your father gave me a sending for your true self,”
says First Liege, leaning close. She peers into Agent First’s dying proxy’s eyes with hungry fascination.
“Deliver this dream tomorrow at dead of night. Time is running out. You received your orders from your Second. Present yourself and your prize”
– clear-eyed contempt shines through First Liege’s words –
“to All-Highest no more than thirty hours from now.”
(As the People count time, there are twenty hours to a day.)
“Find the nearest ley line, it will take you to him. He is eager to see what you have accomplished. As am I.”

“W—w
—
”
Agent First can’t feel her lips or toes and fingers. The pain is subsiding now, supplanted by a tingling chilly numbness in the periphery that is nevertheless exquisitely sensitive and unpleasant, as if the edges of her being are dissolving.

“He will arrive tomorrow,”
says her stepmother, almost sympathetically. She takes Agent First’s sagging head between her hands – the magus is holding her upright, arms around her chest and his face nuzzling against her throat – and now she, too, gazes into Agent First’s raw and battered soul as it recedes, stabbing a mental image at her.
“Be present by noon on the morrow or your loyalty will be questioned, little rabbit.”

There are many things Agent First would say to this if she was present in her own person, and not dying, palsied and shaking, in the grasp of a magus. But her mind is not her own: she can feel pieces of Cassie Brewer slipping away into darkness, the ground crumbling beneath her identity. She can’t feel her hands and feet anymore, and her tongue is a huge and cumbersome block of timber between the numb white steles of her teeth. Even the vampire’s grip is fading from her awareness as his parasites suck the life from her brain, all memories fading. The last to go is the dark poisoned well of her stepmother’s gaze.

It’s Saturday evening.

Alex has spent the afternoon in a nervous tizzy, worrying about what to wear. He’s combed and re-combed his hair in instinctive fear of Mum’s reaction, ironed a shirt and run straight into the question of what to wear with it. One of his office suits from the bank would be overkill, jeans and a hoodie would be underkill, and as for in-between… to tie, or not to tie? In the end he chickens out, goes for chinos and a tweed sports jacket, shoves a tie in his jacket pocket
just in case
, and finishes it off with a cashmere scarf and a matt-black motorcycle helmet with mirror-finished visor. Daft Punk meets Stephen Fry.

Finally he goes downstairs. Brains is sitting at the kitchen table, doing something on an iPad. “Do you have the k-keys?” he asks, all but breaking into a stammer.

“Keys?” Brains looks momentarily lost. “Oh, so you
do
want to borrow Ilsa?”

“Ilsa?”

“The Kettenkrad. C’mon, I have to check you out on the controls.”

Five minutes later, Alex is sitting on an ancient motorbike saddle in a steel bathtub, with a petrol engine gurgling busily behind him. He sets his phone to vibrate: there’s no way he could hear it through his helmet and the engine and track noise. “Clutch pedal on the left, brake pedal on the right, handgrip throttle on the right handlebar,” Brains points out helpfully. “The gears are like a car – three forward, one reverse, and this lever selects the low ratio. You’ll need to double-declutch because there’s no synchro—
ouch
,” as Alex stuffs it into first gear with a grate of gear teeth. “Headlamp, indicators, hazard flashers. (We added that.) To steer, pretend it’s a car: at low speed the handlebars engage the track brakes, at high speed the front wheel provides steering input.”

“Right, right.” Alex eases up on the clutch pedal carefully. The bathtub shudders, jerks forward, and the engine stalls.

“It helps to release the handbrake.” Brains chides. Alex nods rapidly; he can see that another sixty seconds of this is going to cause Brains to re-evaluate the wisdom of lending Alex his toy.

“How about I back out of here, then take it down the hill for a spin around Potternewton Park?” Alex asks. “That way I can get used to changing gears in low ratio without risking it in traffic.” The park is off-limits to vehicles, but with the no-see-em in operation he should be safe enough.

“That’s a good idea. But first, see if you can get it out of the driveway.”

Alex gets Ilsa started again, engages first gear without any hideous crunching noises, and eases out into the quiet residential street. At the bottom of the hill there’s a sharp right turn onto Harehills Lane – a commuter rat-run plagued by speeding idiots in hatchbacks – then an immediate left through the park gates. At this time of evening the park is mostly empty of joggers and dog-walkers. For the first minute, Alex gingerly experiments with the throttle and sticks to the footpaths. Then he pinches himself – Ilsa is an off-road vehicle, after all – points the handlebars at the grass, and guns the throttle.

Clattering around the grassy slopes of the park in a pint-sized half-track is tremendous fun, and the tracks (which rumble and grate on the road) are nearly silent. Alex finally gets the hang of shifting gears. But time is getting on, the light is fading, and the address Cassie gave him in Headingley is a few miles away. Luckily it’s en route to his parents’ place. So he drives back up to the park gates, turns onto Harehills Lane, and sets off in search of his date.

By some miracle, he does not crash.

Ilsa grunts and squeals like a pig humping a farm tractor. She sways at speed, shimmies worryingly above forty miles per hour, and vibrates excitedly until Alex eases off the throttle in a cold sweat. The heater is rubbish, the suspension is antediluvian, and the instruments rudimentary. Most of the creature comforts he expects of, say, a third-hand Honda moped, seem to have been replaced by things better suited to the minion of a particularly demented supervillain: it’s not as if he expects to get any mileage out of the set of snow chains that clutter up the tiny baggage compartment, or the pintle-mount for the air-cooled machine gun. A few idiots honk their horns at him or flash their lights at him, but it’s his speed they’re complaining about, not his tracks or the Wehrmacht insignia painted on the fuel tanks. He drives past a parked police car without attracting any notice; the no-see-em glamour is clearly doing its job.

Google Maps takes him to the door on time, and he parks around the corner. Then, taking his courage in both hands, he raises his helmet visor and rings the bell.

The door bursts open: “Alex? Eee! I thought you’d forgotten me!” Cassie grabs him and drags him inside. She kisses him on the mouth, and by the time his circuit breakers have reset she’s wrapped her arms around his waist. “I’m so glad you came,” she says breathlessly.

“Er…” Alex’s larynx seizes up as his mental circuit breakers trip out once more.

“Which way to your chariot, my lord?” She relaxes her grip, giving them both room to inhale.

“I’m – I’m parked round the corner. I brought you a spare helmet,” he adds hesitantly as she opens the door and drags him out onto the pavement again. “Are you going to be okay like that?”

“YesYes!”

His pupils dilate as he sees what she’s wearing. “Um. That’s very – striking. When I said fancy, I, uh, wasn’t expecting fancy dress…”

Cassie squeezes his hand. “My flatmates are going to a costume party late tonight and I was looking for an excuse to wear this! You should come too! Isn’t it great?” She twitches an ear-tip at him.

“Yes, but what are you? I mean, who are you supposed to be?” Alex asks, mesmerized.

Cassie strikes a pose. “I’m a high-born lady of the Host of Air and Darkness! A child of the All-Highest of the hidden people, a courtier at the Unseelie throne!” She lets go of his hand and twirls quickly in place, nearly bowling over a passing dog-walker with a flare of her heavy black cloak. “It’s very
me
isn’t it? YesYes?”