The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (40 page)

Alex has done some stupid things in his time, but following a self-confessed renegade from a culture of psychopaths into an armed camp full of dragons and battle magi is near the top of his list, second only to accepting a job developing new algorithms for an investment bank’s high-frequency trading arm. (And look how well
that
turned out.) On the other hand: he has a working phone, a damsel in distress who needs rescuing, and he’s doing it of his own free will. That’s got to count for something, hasn’t it?

One moment he’s facing a swirling blue vortex of light. The next, he’s stepping onto an uneven hard surface – stone, he thinks, but worn and natural rather than poured concrete – in darkness that smells of night and grass, with an edge of burning iron and sulfur that sets his nose on edge. Blood, too, fresh human blood has been spilled here recently. He salivates and his teeth throb in his gums as Cassie squeezes his fingers one last time, and lets go.

Figures step out of the darkness with raised maces. She answers in the grating, inhuman phonemes of an alien language, the
alfär
High Tongue:
“Halt! I come by order of All-Highest of this Host. I am Agent First of Spies and Liars and this one is mine.”

Alex forces himself to stillness. Her speech is hard to understand, the phrasing weirdly stilted and the accent abominable – but it’s close enough to Old Enochian that he recognizes roughly two words in three. The four sentries, armed and armored like the two at the bunker, close in. One of them touches the tip of a mace to his back lightly: not pushing, just making its presence felt, as if it’s a gun. He keeps his face motionless, suddenly grateful that he lacks the long and expressive ears of these people.

“Welcome and hail, Agent First of Spies and Liars.”
A woman speaks, her hooded silhouette just visible against the shadows and starlight in front. There’s some sort of rocky outcrop overhead, although open ground is visible beyond the greeter.
“Is your vassal entirely controlled? I smell the power of the magi—”

“He’s entirely mine to control,”
Cassie replies sharply.
“A magus of the urük, bound and brought hither in accordance with the will of All-Highest.”

She’s not lying, Alex realizes, bewitched by the change in her speech and poise in this place. Cassie’s posture is abruptly assertive and overbearing, her voice sharp, bearing an acrid tang of authority. She’s very good at misdirection, he thinks proudly. The Civil Service has a term for this art: being economical with the truth. He begins to dare to hope.

His back pocket vibrates silently, as his emailed report departs on a pulse of radio waves. And now he is on a countdown. Assuming Lockhart agrees to his suggestion, assuming the clock in his phone hasn’t gone too far adrift while they walked the dream road together, they have a handful of hours to make this work. And then there are the unspoken
ifs
it depends on.
If
Cassie keeps her side of their implicit agreement, the part she hinted at, unable even to speak it aloud (for treason never prospers among the People).
If
he can play his part. If either of them fails, they’re probably both dead, or worse than dead, but at least Lockhart will know what’s going on now, and can set events in train —

“Hey, urük! Worthless human! You obey me, don’t you?”
Cassie’s words come as a shock but not a surprise. Alex nods slowly, trying to act dumb, then remembers: the People aren’t familiar with the body language of other hominin subspecies.

“I hear and, and obey, High Lady,”
he says haltingly in Enochian, not bothering to match her accent. (Best to sound barbarous: that’s the next thing to stupid in a bigot’s mind.)

“Witness and observe! It is domesticated and obedient! It even talks! Hasten now and bring word to All-Highest that I come to report, as ordered!”
Cassie’s whiplash expectation of obedience is unmistakable, part of her strident new personality.

“Yes, my lady. You: go.”
The woman who stands before them waves one of the guards off. She spins and runs away into the darkness, her armor (Alex is guessing here) muted, as if the sounds of metal surfaces clattering are muffled by distance.
“I celebrate your success. Please command your vassal to follow me: I will pen it with the
—
”

“No.”
Cassie crooks her finger at Alex and he steps closer to her, slowly. The guard behind him follows,
mana
-saturated mace pushing at the small of his back.
“He is mine and I will not surrender him until I have presented him to All-Highest as commanded.”
She bares her teeth in an expression that is anything but friendly:
“Lest happenstance deprive me of the evidence of the success of my mission.”

Alex is missing some of the nuances here, for the speech of the People is not only oddly accented but flowery and full of words that strain the limits of his vocabulary – the Laundry’s analysts use Enochian as a tool, not an everyday tongue. But what he gets right now is the hissing disputation of two cats arguing over the fate of a captured mouse. He shudders and mentally rehearses the activation commands for two or three macros – brief memorized command sequences he can trigger at will if everything is about to go to hell.

“So Agent First has bound her first magus?”
the woman says lightly.
“How novel!”
She has a tinkling chuckle.
“It’s almost as if you’re taking after your father at last!”

“Are we waiting here forever?”
Cassie demands.

The woman seems to come to a decision:
“No, follow me. Guards, attend.”
She turns and strides into the night, Cassie following, Alex and his escort at the rear.

As they leave the shelter of the overhang Alex notices another group of armored figures heading towards the dream road at a jog: again, their armor is curiously muffled. They seem to coordinate without speech, he realizes, as if they’ve got radio headsets – or feel the invisible mental tugging of an intricate web of
geases
that prod them whenever they’re needed. He feels acutely aware of his own ignorance, of the dangers it exposes him to: Who are they following? Cassie seems to know their greeter, and vice versa, but —

They’re walking across the stone-strewn floor of a valley beneath a cliff that hangs above them like a frozen waterfall. The moon has set but the constellations are familiar. With merely human eyes Alex would be blind, but he can see well enough by starlight to know he’s been here before. This particular valley is familiar from a long-ago school trip. Malham Cove is a unique rock formation, popular with generations of Yorkshire geography teachers seeking an educational day of hiking for their classes. The ground is strewn with treacherous velvet shadows, some of which move if he stares at them too hard. Then some of the shadows shimmer and pull apart, leaving them walking along an aisle between rows of tents made of something like ripstop nylon –
silk?
he wonders, then:
Don’t be stupid.
There are more sentries, and there seems to be some silent recognition in play, some minutiae of gesture or microexpression opaque to him that nevertheless distinguishes friend from foe. Abruptly, they come to the entrance to one of the big pavilions, and this time there is light from a chilly sphere hanging from the central tentpole.

There’s some sort of ground-sheet beneath their feet. A row of field tables stand against one wall and a map hangs like a tapestry behind them. At least, Alex assumes they’re tables and a map. The tables are impossible, feathery metallic structures like cobwebs blown by a gallium-spinning spider. And the map seems to be made of parchment or hide of some kind, crudely stitched – but it shows a view which might as well be projected from Google Earth, in 3D. Colored triangles crawl across it, accompanied by strange ideograms similar to those he saw inscribed around the grid in the bunker. Two vampires –
no, magi,
he remembers – stand before the map. They wear plain-looking robes and cowls, and are by no means the most eye-catching individuals in the room: he wouldn’t know what they were but for the chilly blast of power that rolls off them in waves, summoning a matching echo in his blood. They focus on the markers, and where they watch, the map springs into tighter focus. A column of red and yellow polygons floods through an eczematous patch of tiled roofs, spilling ever closer to the huge blotch at the right-hand side of the map. It can only be a city, he thinks, sickly conscious that he may be too late to help.

“Ah, First of Spies! And what is this toy you have brought us?”
 

A tall man wearing gothic, fluted armor plate that shimmers oddly in the were-light steps close to Cassie and her guide, smiling without showing his teeth.

“Second of Field Artificers, this is the urük magus All-Highest bid me bring hither. He belongs to me. You may not have him.”
 

Alex blinks, dull-eyed, and does his best to resemble a turtle. Second of Field Artificers is the first male of the People he’s had a chance to get a close look at, and the sense of dread that already has his stomach in knots tightens further. They’re not terribly tall, these
alfär
, and they are fine-boned. Only the incredibly prehensile ears mark them out as non-human. But something in Second of Field’s expression frightens Alex almost as much as his one brush with a vampire elder, most of a year ago. There’s a coldly reptilian lack of affect to the man.
“Too bad. My magi are tired and food is scarce. If he’s bound I could use him.”

“Not until All-Highest has made his determination,”
says Cassie.
“My father would not have called for such a prize without a use in mind for it.”

Alex tenses. Cassie and the Second of Field Artificers have shown no sign of noticing the woman who led them here leave. He’s fairly sure she’s some sort of officer, perhaps in charge of the guard detachment for this camp. Now there are only two sentries, although the one with the mace shows no sign of growing tired of holding it to the small of his back.

“All-Highest is on his way,”
Second of Field Artificers says with assurance;
“I believe he has some business to attend to with Air Defense. In the meantime, put your plaything over there, away from my magi.”
Cassie waves Alex towards the farthest corner of the tent.
“Secure him, then come with me,”
adds the officer, and before Alex can move his escort takes a step backward and throws a handful of white powder in front of his feet.

Shit. Salt. Alex can feel his V-symbionts’ anxiety as they demand to know how much, how many grains – then the sentry completes the job, upending a small pouch of salt in a circle around Alex’s feet. Cold sweat prickles on his forehead and he’s about to recite the word that starts the counter macro when he glances at Cassie. She minutely shakes her head. Ears motionless, she turns her back on him. Of course: body language among the
alfär
doesn’t encompass such gross neck-twisting gestures. So it’s a sign for him alone. He lets the circle of salt drag his eyes back down. Obviously it’s too early to act. He’s got to wait for the All-Highest to arrive first, to fill in the plan he and Cassie have danced around the edges of. To send the next queued message prematurely would be suicide.

Alex begins to count.

Leeds city center at half past five on a Sunday morning is about as desolate as it ever gets, night clubs long since closed and revelers snoring off their hangovers in their hotel rooms. There is some traffic, but word’s gotten around from the police to the council cleaning trucks: stay the hell out of town, there’s trouble on the wind. Pete turns his head to stare up York Street. Red, white, and blue lights are strobing in the near distance. As promised, the police are blocking all roads leading to Quarry House. They can’t stop the incursion, but they can try to prevent oblivious civilians from driving into a firefight.

Although Leeds grew as a city during the nineteenth century, its streets can hardly be described as a grid layout – unless the grid was designed by a species of alien space squid who hadn’t discovered Euclidean geometry. It was bombed by the Luftwaffe in the 1940s and subsequent attempts to rebuild it by pouring concrete and adding loops of motorway around the bomb sites didn’t help. In an attempt to make the traffic flow, early in the twenty-first century the planners designated a bunch of city center streets as the Inner Loop around the pedestrianized zone, and configured them for one-way traffic, much like a white-line-enhanced circle of Dante’s inferno. By day the three-kilometer stretch is full of passive-aggressive taxis and minicabs, but right now it’s nearly empty – which is just as well.

Pete guns Ilsa across the intersection with The Headrow, towards the side of the Town Hall and the General Infirmary (beyond which he plans to fork off in the direction of Headingley) as his earpiece coughs. “Yes?”

“Dr. Russell? Lockhart here. How much fuel do you have?”

“Wait one.” Pete has to crane his head forward to see the instruments. The petrol gauge on the antique half-track is more about wishful thinking than measurement. “I’m about three-quarters full. Why?”

“Change of plan, you may want to pull over.”

“Hello?” For the first time, Pinky speaks up. Pete startles, but keeps control of the vehicle as he brakes and pulls in alongside the original frontage of Leeds General Infirmary.

“What’s up?” Pete asks.

“We just got a fix on Alex’s phone.” Lockhart is worried. “Instead of Headingley he’s in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales, about seventy kilometers northwest. He’s definitely in contact, so instead of heading for the bunker we need you to get on the A65 out to Rawdon, then head for his current coordinates. You
do
have satnav, yes?”

“I think so.” Pete raises his helmet visor and hunts around the dash. “Hey, Pinky —”

“I’ve got GPS on my watch, I’ll give you turn-by-turn directions. If someone tells
me
where to go.” Pinky sounds grumpy.