The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (4 page)

Pete parks his suitcase at the top, then starts down the staircase, boots clattering on the treads. The skeleton of a motorized winch squats rusting on a rail that spans the top of the stairwell, unused since the last time anyone needed to move furniture in and out of this horribly expensive hole in the ground. “Remind me again who thought this was a good idea?”

“Don’t be silly, Alex, it’s perfectly safe: it’s maintained by our cuddly friends Mr. Telereal and Mrs. Trinium, it says so right on the rusting sign by the front door. If we slip and break our necks or get ourselves electrocuted in the waterlogged subbasement, squatters are
sure
to find our bodies within a few months – aha!” At the bottom of the stairwell they find another lobby. An arch-roofed corridor, ceiling festooned with ominously fat cables, slopes down into the ground. The fluorescent tubes flicker, their ballast circuits dying, but about a third of them are still working and it’s enough to see that, although the paint is peeling and the tunnel smells musty, the floor is clear. “The way in is down here, according to the map.” Pete refers to a thick sheaf of photocopies that he clutches in one hand. “There’s supposed to be a caretaker in residence, but I don’t see any sign of —”

Alex’s nostrils flare. “We have company.”

“Jolly good: you go first.” Pete nudges him forward.

“Bastard,” Alex says without any real rancor; “I want danger money.”

“If the caretaker shoots you I’ll sign off on your hazard pay.”

The corridor curves as it descends. Just as the entrance stairwell disappears from view behind them, they come to a wide vestibule. A huge steel blast door, painted so many times that it appears to have developed map contours, is very pointedly wedged open with a pry bar jammed under its lower lip and wooden chocks rammed into its hinged edge. Beyond the door a different corridor veers off at right angles, its walls painted institutional cream. They’ve clearly been renewed not less than a decade ago. (The tunnel beyond the blast door comes to a dead end punctuated by heavy steel grilles into which a steady breeze blows, evidence of well-maintained air conditioning fans.)

“Oi! Who are you —”

Alex was aware of the caretaker’s presence almost from the bottom of the stairwell. His stertorous breathing is almost as loud as the distant traffic noise. But he waits until the man shuffles into view before reaching into his pocket and pulling out his warrant card. “Ministry of Defense, Alex Schwartz and Peter Russell. We’re on your approved visitors list for this week.”

The caretaker is about sixty, the heavy burden of his years slowly crumpling him into an envelope of wheezing lassitude wrapped around a bloated core of abdominal discomfort. He wears a security guard’s uniform, but Alex can’t help noticing that he’s tucked his feet into a pair of rubber waders with a fake wool lining. His breath smells…
bad
: or maybe it’s not his breath. His exhalations merely smell of cheap stale cigarettes. But something else, some miasma he carries with him like a shroud, makes the things in the back of Alex’s head stir and chitter in the darkness. Alex clamps down, but Pete is oblivious as the caretaker makes a show of examining the warrant card. “We’re here to conduct a site visit and check the works list.” Pete brandishes his stash of photocopies, which Alex now sees includes blueprints and floorplans for the ancient radar control bunker turned regional emergency center, along with what is probably a surveyor’s report listing what will need to be done in order to restore it to operational capability – if not for a nuclear war, then for another equally grim purpose. “If it’s in order, I’ll be back tomorrow with another inspection team. You’re living in the Regional Commissioner’s rooms, aren’t you? Can you give us the tour of the accessible areas? We’d particularly like to see the broadcast suite, the telephone switchroom, the generator and supply rooms, and the air conditioning units.”

“Aye, I can do that, but I was ’aving me tea? Can tha be waiting five minutes?”

“Did someone say tea?” Pete brightens. Alex doesn’t have the heart to translate the word into London-speak: tea means supper up here.

“Nay, but I can be making tha’a cuppa. Come along now.” The caretaker turns and shuffles wearily back into the depths of the secret nuclear bunker, a hermit retreating into his cave. Pete glances at Alex, who shrugs before turning to follow their host. It’s not as if he’s got anything better to do this evening…

A lot of stuff has happened in the month since I wrote about visiting Leeds, and I’m not sure I understand it all.

(Of course, that probably puts me ahead of the game: it turns out that most people understand
nothing
.)

The short version: my working life stopped being boring almost immediately after the visit to the bunker. In fact, everything got unpleasantly exciting! Although not all at once, of course. You know the urban legend about how if you put a frog in a saucepan of cold water and bring it slowly to a boil, the frog won’t notice the heat until it dies? I was that frog. Mind you, at first I thought it was my personal life that was getting exciting, and pleasantly so at that. I had no idea about the huge events taking place in the background and what they would mean for me. Or for
us
.

The long version…

Because of the whole stored-institutional-knowledge thing I’m supposed to make this a complete account of what happened this April. To fill in the gaps between what actually happened to me, and what was happening elsewhere, a lot of this is going to consist of a fictionalized account of documented events. (Don’t worry, I have expense claims and memos to work from.) I’m also trying to pull together reconstructions based on interviews with an uncommonly well-informed source, random bits of guesswork, and of course my own workplace confessional.

Oh, and Cassie, if by any remote chance you ever read this? I’m very, very sorry…

Some time before Alex had his fateful cliffside encounter in Whitby, then visited the moribund bunker housing the Leeds War Room, an audience was held in another underground bunker that would ultimately have a huge impact on his life.

The bunker lay beneath a plateau in the foothills of a mountain range at the western end of a large landmass. Bleached slabs of white limestone pavement poked through holes in the plateau’s surface like the bones of a mummified continent showing through its desiccated skin. Constellations similar to those of Earth wheeled across its skies every night, but the darkness was not relieved by sunlight reflected from a giant moon. Instead, the plateau was illuminated by the sickly radiance of a planetary ring, a cyclopean arch of green-gray rubble circling the waist of the world. From time to time the flicker of meteors lit up the southern horizon, for planetary rings are seldom stable. The debris belt created by the shattering of the moon had already bombarded the equatorial latitudes, leaving a pockmarked belt of sullen, glowing craters around the world. Autarchies had been shattered, hermit kingdoms destroyed. Almost a billion had died in war, plague, starvation, and madness. But worse was yet to come, as what passed for civilization on this world guttered and faded beneath the penumbra of a darkness deeper than eternal night.

The few surviving warriors of the Host of Air and Darkness hibernated in caves beneath the plateau on the murdered continent. They had been there a long time. The once-natural network of limestone vaults and water-worn grottos had been extended to provide an underground fortress for the western defenders of an empire. Since the war, it had been pressed into service as a deep survival bunker. Dispersal bays near the surface, close beneath overground blast doors, were occupied by the hibernating bodies of the Host’s aviation group. Shafts spiraling down into deeper bedrock housed the stasis cocoons of armored cavalry; deeper still, access corridors drilled by civil engineering magi riddled the plateau, leading to slave barracks and supply depots.

The members of the Host were not exactly human, but neither were they entirely alien. Picture, if you will, a human primatologist’s eyes widening in excited recognition as they see the twitching ears and elegant features, then utter the fateful words:
“Another species of gracile hominid, only with hypertrophied pinnae
—
”
before horrified recognition sets in (followed by a swift and gruesome death). The word they use to denote their own kind in the High Tongue might best be translated as People. But in form and in mind the People were no closer to a contemporary human being than to a Neanderthal.

Most of the sleepers lay in an envenomated coma, wrapped in cocoons spun by purple-bodied spiders the size of fists. They hung in rows beside the huge gauzy cauls of their war-steeds. Here and there among them festered a browning chrysalis, its occupant deceased. The rotting husks of hominid skeletons, mummified lips drawn back from silently screaming jaws, were a mute testimony to the desperation of this gambit: hibernation was far from foolproof, especially on the scale of an army group fleeing across a gulf of centuries. The Host had already lost many of its number. Before much longer the survivors would be forced to awaken for the last time, to eat and recover their strength, lest their sleep deepen into eternal death.

This desperate flight into the unknowable future had been forced upon the All-Highest by the total logistical collapse of the Morningstar Empire. It had started when the acolytes of one or another of the Dead Gods had performed a ritual that shattered the moon, opened the way to the realm of demons, and plunged the entire world into chaos. Famine, war, and nightmarish alien intrusions had spiraled out of control in every nation, wrecking the intricate hierarchies upon which civilization depended, leaving only chaos and death behind. Only a few far-flung military outposts had survived around the world, untouched by virtue of their remote locations and deep defenses. And this base was now the last surviving remnant of the Morningstar Empire.

When the full scale of the disaster had first become apparent, All-Highest resolved to wait out the collapse of civilization, to carry intact into the future the last surviving army on the continent. But the collapse had been deeper and more catastrophic than anyone imagined – not merely the wreckage of empire but the actual looming extinction of the People as a species beckoned. Death and madness from beyond the stars claimed everybody who still lived on the surface of the world. The skeleton staff who stood watch down the years waited for some indication the sleeping Host might safely emerge to recolonize the surface: but as the years stretched into decades, and decades into centuries, conditions on the roof of the world became worse and the warehouses beneath the bone caves slowly but inexorably emptied. Now they held barely enough food,
mana
, and materiel to support the Host through a single week-long schwerpunkt maneuver. All-Highest, his headquarters staff, and his magi might live like rats in a cellar for another decade or two while they searched for a way out past the rampaging nightmares that stalked the hellscape above: but the end-game was becoming clear.

The Host was originally a perimeter force, surrounded by the savages of the outlying archipelago. Its task was to guard the empire’s sparsely populated western coastline against invasion by the enemies who dwelt beyond the chilly ocean. All-Highest had originally been no more than a slave-general, bound by the iron will of his queen, the undisputed ruler of the Morningstar Empire. It was not a choice command, far from the seat of power in the lush lowlands of the drained inland sea far to the southeast. But the empire had fallen, the queen and her heirs crushed in the capital by the fall of a kilometer-long meteor early in the Necromancers’ War. Of all the far-flung war camps, only this chilly northern outpost had survived unscathed – nearly fifty-five degrees north of the equator, far beyond the zone of bombardment.

When the imperial court and army high command died together in the meteor strike, the intricate network of magical bindings that held the empire together had propagated down the chain of oaths of fealty, until it landed like a dying god’s battle hammer on the brow of the highest ranked survivor in the hierarchy. The slave-general was driven half-insane when the royal
geasa
wrapped themselves around his mind, bringing to his will the power to command and release an entire empire: but he survived the fall and its aftermath, and now all that was left belonged to him.

The general’s quarters were built within a natural limestone cavern, the roof of which was decorated with the dangling ossified fangs of stalactites. In shape it resembled a castle in the antique mode, built from pink marble imported from the southeastern uplands; in truth it had been forged as a single structure from heat-metamorphosed limestone, assembled by war-magisters at the command of one or other of a previous general’s military architects. Flying buttresses supported its decorative, steeply pitched roof; crenelated battlements adorned with the fossilized bodies of name-stripped felons gathered a bone-pallid patina of limestone beneath the constant drizzle of underground rain. The fruiting bodies of bioluminescent fungi lay in shelves and smears of color around the walls of the grotto, and a meandering underground stream wrapped around the palace in its horseshoe wandering. The hiss and rumble of underground falls could be heard, very faintly, from the stream bed as it flowed out of the chamber beneath a scaly pelt of living rock.

While small and austere by the standards of a God-Emperor, the palace is pleasing to the eye and is furnished with all the conveniences that a commander might require during years or decades under siege. There are carpets of sweet-smelling purple grass, furniture carved from exotic hardwood timbers from other continents, walls hung with tapestries and paintings of limpid beauty that depict scenes of leisure and comfort forever lost to the devastation of war. Within the principal audience room at the center of the chateau there is a throne of white bone, intricately carved from the mortal remains of the honorable regimental dead. (Felons may be left to fossilize by rooftop happenstance, but it is a sign of recognition to be incorporated after death into a seat of authority.) Around the throne are arrayed the All-Highest’s counselors, children, and concubines: variously standing, sitting, or abasing themselves as their respective ranks dictate.

In their midst All-Highest broods upon his charnel throne, listening as a brazen golem merges the reports of the scouts who go about the overworld into a stentorian rumble of intelligence. Words cascade through All-Highest’s mind in a wash and tumble of power as he grapples with the vexatious question of what to do, and contemplates the wisdom of a course of action that has been proposed by Most Honorable Second Wife, Highest Liege of Airborne Strike Command.

Second Wife is young, hungry, and fearsomely ambitious: she displaced formerly Honorable First Wife (Highest Liege of Armored Cavalry) in his affections six months previously, shortly after his decision to abandon the plan to sleep past the end of the world. First Wife did not react swiftly or favorably to the change in circumstances: Second Wife stole her true name, and now First Wife’s mortal husk dangles from a machicolation beneath the roof of the high tower, calcifying slowly, as an adornment to Second Wife’s ambition. All-Highest is not stupid. He has bound his new spouse to fealty and enjoined her against interfering with his other children or taking certain actions to his or their detriment. She will have to prove her mettle before he will allow her to give him an heir. But at this moment, as she follows the report from the overworld with her own proposal, he can taste the sharpness of her mind, like an overeager knife: