The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (43 page)

As he pokes Magnusson’s shoulder the sergeant slowly topples sideways.

“— rep.” Jim stares for a moment. Then he keys his mike again. Unnaturally calm, he hears words coming from his mouth, as if from a distance: “Medic, Panther One, man down, man down. All vehicles, sitrep by numbers, report casualties…”

Nothing
(8,224).

Nothing
(8,225).

Nothi—
 

Alex has been alone in the circle of salt in the tent for ages. His knees are beginning to ache and he’s shivering with tension and a creeping sense of dread. But he’s got an ace up his sleeve. As soon as they left him alone he subvocalized a word of command and his counter macro was up and spinning in the edge of his vision. He keeps his gaze locked on the circle of salt, but its power to drag him in is broken. And so he is free to think.

He’s had too long to come up with questions and not enough time to come up with answers to his liking. Questions like,
if they don’t have a lock-up for prisoners, what does that say about how they look after them?
Or
how do I know she hasn’t already been murdered by her stepmother?
And
why don’t I send the first SMS alert now?

To which final question he
does
have an answer. Some time ago he furtively glanced up to see if anyone was watching him, then palmed his phone and sent the text, then put the phone away and went back to counting.
HELD PRISONER NOT DEAD YET.
No: just biding his time and counting all the grains of salt in the world.
Nothing to see here, Nothing
—

His skin abruptly tries to crawl off his body as the tent flap opens, admitting a luminous flare of daylight. It stops short of his feet, and he shudders. It’s a reminder that there’s more than just a circle of salt to bind him here. He has a tube of thick latex-based face cream in his jacket pocket, but he’s unsure whether as an englamoured prisoner he should possess enough agency to use it without instructions. Being burned by sunlight
might
be fatal: but revealing himself to be anything other than a helpless thrall would be an immediate death sentence, both for himself and for Cassie. So he tries not to show any sign of noticing the light of the daystar burning across the ground sheet close by his feet, glittering off the circle of white crystals.

A squad of soldiers enter the tent. The dull finish of their armor changes color as they come inside, darkening from patchwork green and brown camouflage to a flat slate gray; crystalline visors retract silently into metal helms as smoothly molded as any fighter pilot’s. Some of them wear swords with curved blades, which Alex vaguely recognizes as resembling cavalry sabers. Most of them bear
mana
maces, and all of them have the characteristic fine bone structure and graceful movements of the People. For a moment Alex’s perception of their attire oscillates rapidly from medieval knights to futuristic powered armor, then back again:
any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology,
he tells himself. Then he blinks as one of the six officers at the middle of the group – he’s pretty sure they’re officers, with an escort of guards – removes her helmet and shakes her sweat-dampened hair. The others follow suit, revealing a mix of men and women. Aside from the fine bone structure and elongated pinnae, they could be a bunch of cosplayers. But the staggeringly powerful sense of barely controlled violent magic surrounding them, the defensive wards inlaid like wiring diagrams from their greaves to their pauldrons, and the oxygen bottles slung over the officers’ shoulders, make it clear what they are.

“
This
is the prisoner?”
the woman asks contemptuously. Alex notices small details. The tension in her lips, the disturbing likeness of a dragon engraved on her helmet (if dragons had tentacles).
“It doesn’t look like much.”

Her adjutant reads glowing runes from the surface of a magic mirror.
“According to reports this one accounted for a pair of sentries, broke the containment ward on a peripheral site, and smashed six eaters with its bare hands.”

“Huh.”
Highest Liege narrows her eyes and stares speculatively at Alex.
“So appearances are deceptive as usual. Typical for this order-forsaken wilderness.”

Alex has been stared at by predators before. A year ago he took tea with an elderly gentleman of saintly mien, inside a government warehouse full of the vampire elder’s victims. And earlier, when he was a toddler, his parents once took him to visit a zoo: a tiger took exception to the babbling apes on the other side of the fence and loudly announced its desire to play with his bones. (He’s been scared of cats ever since.) Something about the Liege of dragons reminds him of that tiger, young and febrile and full of rage against the universe that will not give her what she wants. If she had a tail it would be lashing restlessly from side to side. Alex tightens his mental grip on his macros but keeps his eyes on the salt.
Pretend to count.
He’s ready to activate his defensive wards, but he can’t do anything here. Not trapped by daylight in a tent with a tiger and her officers, in the middle of an enemy camp surrounded by soldiers armed with semiautomatic death spells.

“My lady, All-Highest requires you at the staff briefing.”
This from the man with the magic mirror, which is now smoking slightly, as if dry ice is boiling from its surface.

“Really?”
Her cheek quirks in something like a smile.
“Will the Liar be present?”

“A moment
–
yes, my lady.”
 

“Good.”
She addresses two of the guards, her voice modulating into the formal-imperative mode used for directing animals, zombies, and demons:
“You discovered a feral urük in the camp. Go: stand outside and see nothing until I call for you again.”

The guards step outside. That leaves four guards and four officers – two of whom make Alex’s skin crawl in a way he has learned to associate with the hostile gaze of other PHANGs. Out of the corner of his vision, he sees raised visors that reveal hairless faces, gender-indeterminate. He tenses, in the grip of a very uncomfortable premonition.

“My lady?”
It’s magic mirror man – the other non-PHANG, non-magi officer. He sounds wary.

“The Chief Liar is under geasa to report to my husband and to bring him an urük magus,”
she points out.
“If she can’t bring him an urük magus, tough. And she is currently too busy being debriefed by Second of Analysts to be bothered with trivial matters.”
A faint smile shows teeth:
“I believe your mount is scheduled for the next support mission. I will be outside while
—
”

Alex clears his throat – there seems little to be gained by playing dumb at this point.
“Is this necessary?”
he asks, his diction halting, keeping his eyes focussed on the salt grains in front of his feet. The defensive ward is ready on his tongue, but to use it will precipitate the barely leashed violence he senses all around. And one against eight isn’t just lousy odds, it’s suicidal – especially when at least two of them are PHANGs.

“It can speak!”
Highest Liege of Airborne Strike claps her hands together. Something like an expression of astonished delight spreads across her face.
“Marvelous!”
She steps close to Alex, staying outside the circle of salt, and inspects his face at close range. She has cat-breath: he forces himself not to recoil.
“I sense possibilities. Tell me, creature, did your captor take you by force? Did she bind you by your true name?”

Alex begins to frame an answer, then remembers his supposed place:
“I”
– he peers at his feet –
“can’t think
—
”

Highest Liege gestures at her soldiers:
“You and you: hold this one. If it tries to escape, kill it. You, break the circle. I want to talk to it.”

Alex finds himself at the focus of two maces as a trooper bends down before him and scatters the white powder with a finger, opening a gap. The noise in his head subsides.
“What?”
he asks, shaking his head, feigning dizziness.

“You
–
prisoner.”
She jabs a finger at him.
“Do you want to slay the one who bound you and brought you here?”

Alex nods, unable to believe his luck.
“Yes,”
he says. It’s a lie, of course, but he is coming to understand that the People are catastrophically bad at detecting bare-faced lies, because lying to superiors is forbidden by the
geases
that bind them.

“Good.”
She claps her hands again. A speculative light comes into her eyes.
“If I can free you from her geas will you fight her for me?”

What?
Alex is gobsmacked by the offer. But there’s no time to think:
“Of course,”
he says, trying hard to look as if he’s struggling to overcome Agent First’s nonexistent
geas
,
“but I can’t fight her
now
.”

First Liege seems to believe him, for her tooth-baring smile broadens.
“I will give you the opportunity, and if you satisfy me I will allow you to swear to me as vassal instead. It is a position of privilege: you shall have the honor of being my First of Urük Slaves.”
She taps him lightly on the forehead with her mace, sending a shock of power through him:
“By right of seniority, as Second-in-Line to All-Highest-Who-Holds-All-Bindings, I hereby release you from all obligations imposed by Third-in-Line to All-Highest. Now we will restore the circle and you will wait here until All-Highest and Third-in-Line, the First of Liars, arrive. Speak not of this conversation!”

He’s still shuddering with the reverberations of First Liege’s resistible but painful compulsion when one of the troopers carefully pours more salt into the gap, closing the circle again. Then, five minutes later, the tent flap opens and he’s out of time for thinking.

A tall male, stockily built as the People go, his fluted armor so heavily inlaid with wards that it seems almost like a form-fitting circuit board, steps through the awning behind a pair of soldiers with drawn daggers and maces. Behind him follow four veiled and cowled magi, armor clicking under their daylight-proof robes, then a gaggle of adjutants and runners, all awaiting his command. His helmet is surmounted by a slim gold circlet, and the circlet in turn is set with a colorless stone. If it’s a diamond, it’s the size of the Koh-i-Noor. He turns eyes the pale blue of liquid oxygen on Alex, then glances at Highest Liege:
“Honorable Wife,”
he acknowledges as her staff go down on their knees around her in a muffled clatter of metal.

“Husband.”
This smile is toothless, the expression slightly surprised.
“I gather your daughter has returned?”

“All may rise. Yes, she has.”
The tent awning opens again. Cassie enters between two guards. Alex can’t help noticing that he and she are the only people present who aren’t wearing full armor. Or armed to the teeth, for that matter.
“I am well satisfied with her accomplishments. Here is the living proof, is it not?”

Cassie straightens up. She points at Alex:
“Father: as you commanded, I bring you the key to the enemy palace, bound by geas.”

Enochian tenses can be tricky, but Alex is paying attention:
bound
is ambiguous with respect to past and present. Another not-lie, another not-brick in the wall. He does his best to look sullen and frightened, steeling himself, and hoping that she knows what she’s doing and that there’s a way out of here that doesn’t involve losing too much blood. He keeps his eyes on the ring of salt, wondering what Cassie’s stepmother has in mind.

“Agent First of Spies and Liars has indeed done very well for herself,”
Highest Liege says, her tone hesitantly approving.
“Perhaps
too
well.”

Alex sees Cassie tense with the corner of one eye.
“What do you mean?”
she asks.

“Let’s see, shall we?”
Highest Liege addresses one of her bodyguards directly:
“It can’t tell us anything while it’s in that circle. Free it.”

A gauntleted hand descends on Alex’s shoulder and pushes him across the edge of the circle. He stumbles, reaching instinctively towards his phone pocket.
“Stop your hand!”
barks Highest Liege, and Alex realizes he can’t feel his fingers: they’re as numb as tent-pegs. A terror sweat floods the small of his back. Since his regular protective ward fried, he’s been reliant on his phone with its OFCUT apps for protection to a far greater degree than is wise. But phone batteries die in the field (usually when you most need them) and a phone won’t work as a phone
and
shield you from the raw power of an adept with an heir’s access to the Morningstar Empire’s most powerful binding.

Hours ago Alex made a judgment call to rely on his phone as a phone: it seemed like a good plan at the time. But now, with his hand numbed in obedience to the cold iron will that holds down the remnants of an occult empire that rose before the dawn of Rome, he’s defenseless in the middle of a triangle of predators. The peril of his position finally sinks in.

Behind and to his right stands Cassie. With the true sight that his release from all her bindings and subtle snares gives him he can see her as she truly is – which is no surprise, for she revealed herself to him earlier: but it’s still a shock to see her in company with her kind, for they are spread out across the opposite slope of the uncanny valley, and it has steep sides indeed. Some of them look almost normal, if etiolate otherkin wearing Spock-ears and steel armor can be described as normal. Cassie (in cloak and dagger drag) would be entirely unexceptional at any fancy dress party or convention masquerade. But her father and stepmother are something else. Seen through human eyes the People are subtly disquieting, inducing the quiet apprehension of sleek, well-fed carnivores contemplating their next meal. And that’s before Alex looks at them with his inner eyes open.

Alex can
hear
the binding of the Morningstar Empire with the ears of his V-symbiont passengers, the chittering flock of febrile attention-points that clog up the back of his skull. They are perturbed. They leave his throat and sinuses feeling congested, as with incipient hayfever or a clot-growing nosebleed, as they crowd forward in their eagerness to feel the strength of the massive
geas
. And
he
can see it too, with the spectral vision the symbionts lend him: a greenish aura that extends tendrils to every head in the pavilion, one vast, pulsing branch leading through a fabric wall, presumably leading in the direction of the All-Highest’s army. It is centered on a fuzzy blob – the head of Cassie’s father, who is a lean-faced older male version of his daughter’s true form. Upon his brow the diamond brightens unbearably around a laser-stippled heart of light. His symbionts hunger for that light and fear it: it’s food for their kind, but so intensely concentrated that it promises dissolution and disaster if they approach it, as moths to a blowtorch. It’s all that remains of the willpower that sustained an empire, the last few drops of a mighty reservoir. Even so, it’s pushing on him hard enough that his temples throb. That will be the force of Highest Liege’s command, freeing him from obligations to Cassie —

(
Of course,
Alex realizes momentarily,
stepmom thinks Cassie bound me to both the imperial
geas and
to her own will, because that’s what stepmom would do.
Whereas Cassie avoided binding Alex entirely, by asking him to accompany her willingly after dissolving her own earlier
geas
.)

Barely a second has elapsed. The phone in Alex’s jacket pocket is buzzing like an angry swarm of bees: All-Highest is raising his hand.
“What is that?”
he demands.

“It’s a, a”
– there is no word for smartphone in Old Enochian –
“a far-speaker? An enchanted mirror
—
”

Highest Liege glances sidelong at All-Highest, then at Cassie.
“Is this correct?”
(Not, Alex notes,
Is he telling the truth?
)

Cassie’s ears lie flat in submission.
“I believe so. I have one, too: the urük use them freely.”

Highest Liege snaps her fingers peremptorily:
“Show it to me,”
she demands. This is a breach of protocol but All-Highest permits it – either indulgently, or with a weather eye to the possibilities of subterfuge and assassination by his ambitious young spouse. Alex’s fingers tingle painfully then are free to move again. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out the phone, and holds it towards her.

Highest Liege glares.
“What is this? I feel no mana.”

Cassie says tonelessly:
“Urük mechanisms do not use mana.”

All-Highest watches, face impassive, but Alex senses the blade of a guillotine rising inchwise towards the top of its guide rails.

“Make it work,”
says Highest Liege. Alex realizes the All-Highest’s consort is pushing for something, but he’s too rattled to be sure of exactly what. Waiting for him to scream and leap to bite out Cassie’s throat? He looks at the phone, which buzzes in his grip like an angry hornet – the thaum field counter is still running – then swipes his passcode.
22% battery remaining.
Without hesitation or outward sign that this is anything but routine he taps into the messages app, retrieves the draft of the second text message, and hits SEND. A small indicator is visible at the top of the screen:
remote monitoring client active.
A dialog flashes up (
Allow access to location services, microphone?
) and he hits
yes
immediately. Then he taps the soft key for voice recognition.

“Dial Cassie,” he says, very carefully trying not to think about what he’s doing. About Lockhart and the ops room in Leeds, monitoring everything he says through the phone’s microphone, tracking its location via GPS and internet. About the email he sent asking for what he gathers the Air Force calls a fire mission, zeroed in on the coordinates of his phone, wherever it happens to be at the time. About how likely he and Cassie are to be able to escape before —

The phone vibration intensifies briefly.
Incoming text.
He glances at the screen. It’s from Pinky:

Cassie’s phone begins to sing a song of sixpence, and she produces it from her belt pouch with a flourish, opens it up: “Hello?” she says, speaking English. Aside, to All-Highest, she observes:
“Urük mechanisms can only speak the urük tongues.”
(Because of course that’s how an
alfär
solution to the mobile phone problem would work, if they didn’t already use direct brain-to-brain transmission of pain.)

“Lockhart needs to know that I am in a tent with the emperor commanding the invasion force. It’s time for that drone strike. I’m going to make a run for it with Cassie a minute or two after we end this call.”

“I hear you,” Cassie replies, also in English. “Do you want me to keep faking commands or —”

“Enough,”
says All-Highest, and snaps his fingers.
“Can these contrivances compel obedience or influence minds remotely?”

“No,”
Cassie replies.

“Useless toys, then. Take them,”
All-Highest orders. To a guard:
“Secure the urük.”

Alex can’t stop his arm extending. Highest Liege plucks his phone from his nerveless fingers, steel-sheathed fingertips scraping the screen. Cassie stares daggers at her stepmother, but hangs up and hands her phone over. Highest Liege gives All-Highest a look, then hands the clearly-not-cursed magic mirrors to one of All-Highest’s bodyguards. Another guard pulls Alex back into the circle of salt and pushes his head down to stare at the scattered crystals, but not before Alex silently utters the command to restart his counter macro. He stares at his toes, feigning fascination while he eavesdrops.

All-Highest turns to his daughter.
“This urük magus. Can it get us inside the citadel?”

“It works in the enemy citadel, Father: I met it outside the fastness but observed it entering and leaving freely.”
 

“Good enough.”
The rumble of an adult male lion’s voice, deep in his throat. A tonal shift follows, as All-Highest addresses another:
“Infantry Second, ready the strike column as ordered. Magus First, take your staff and join the column. Guards, attend me.”

Alex is weak-kneed from tension and blood-hunger: he itches to run, but forces himself to stillness and a semblance of passivity.
Not yet.
There is a muffled clatter of armor and the spider-legs-on-scalp crawling sensation of half a dozen magi and several officers leaving the tent, but he’s still nowhere near alone – All-Highest goes nowhere without bodyguards, and the pricking in his thumbs (and the rattling buzz from his phone’s thaum detector) tells him that some of them carry enchanted weapons of quite startling power.

“Daughter.”
All-Highest’s voice modulates again. Proud indulgence.
“You have exceeded my expectations of you, which were admittedly low. I thought you
weak
: I am no longer confident of this judgment. So there is that.”
Another tone shift, threatening:
“Honorable Wife. I was interested to hear of your special instructions to Agent Second of Spies and Liars.”
There is a muffled rattle throughout the tent, as of a dozen armored bodies shifting their balance in anticipation.
“I make no determination
yet
, but one of you may be weak, and one of you may be disloyal, and I am not sure which. It matters not: this urük will suffice to gain entry to the enemy’s citadel, so I choose to indulge your mutual animosity.”

“Wait
—
”
First Liege pleads urgently, but All-Highest’s voice rolls on, now in the thunderous cadence of the imperative command mode.

“I leave this tent now, with my guards, to afford you dignity while you settle your differences. One of you will leave the tent with the urük magus bound to your will; the other will be dead. By surviving you will disprove the charge against you, be it of weakness or disloyalty.”
(
Fuck me,
Alex thinks dismally,
he’s setting up a trial by combat?
) A pause.
“The urük magus
will
be rendered to me tractable and bound, or you will
both
die.”
(No, worse:
they’re going to fight for control of me
…
)

The clank and thud of All-Highest’s retinue leaving the pavilion is joined by a more distant pounding outside, as of infantry marching in file. Alex concentrates, steeling himself for what he’s terrified is coming. Then, without waiting for the inevitable, he triggers all his defensive macros at once.

Time slows: the air warms and thickens, syrupy, light shifts towards the red end of the spectrum and dims. The chittering of V-symbionts in the back of his head rises towards a deafening roar. Alex’s stomach contracts painfully and his jaws clench, but he forces himself to stand with bowed head inside the circle of salt for a thousand subjective years.

Footsteps move, a sideways crab-shuffle within the tent. It’s Highest Liege and Cassie –
no, Agent First,
Alex forces himself to remember – circling warily around him.
“You should be dead,”
Highest Liege says contemptuously.
“Weakling.”
The word, in the People’s dialect of Enochian, carries connotations of corruption and perversion, of wrongness and waste.
“Like your sister.”

Cassie moves sideways again, sliding towards Alex’s left.
“Assassin,”
she says coolly.
“Liege-killer.”
The word for
Liege
that she uses is gendered female, so she can’t be referring to the All-Highest, but the compound noun
Liege-killer
is even stronger and more offensive than
weakling
.