The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (44 page)

Highest Liege hisses.
“Your mother was a weakling, too.”
A jingle and creak of armor as she moves right, circling in front of Alex. Her hands move in small, tightly constrained gestures as Cassie steps behind Alex.
“The Host has no food for useless mouths in desperate times. You’ll join her.”

She gestures with her left hand and the awning of the tent blows open, a morning breeze sighing in to shift the grains of salt across the rug, forming dizzying patterns before Alex’s eyes that disappear as fast as his counter gets to them. Alex begins to mumble, keywords that trigger more macros in Old Enochian that he’s spent the past hours of immobility memorizing. The hunger redoubles: his eaters are becoming impatient.
“Remember our conversation?”
Highest Liege tells Alex conversationally, smiling brightly as her right hand flashes out to make a gesture in the air, a deflection ward against Agent First’s anticipated shot from behind cover.
“Now is the time. She’s yours!”

“Yes she is,”
says Alex, as he turns and jumps.

Pete’s coccyx takes a pounding as he guns Ilsa up the long and winding road towards the North Yorkshire moors.

The drive takes the best part of two hours, even though there’s virtually no traffic. Even the feral milk tankers that patrol the B roads to make collections at all hours are conspicuous by their absence. He’s able to open up the engine and let it rip, within reason: Brains’s refit with a modern four-banger seems to be stable, but he’s terrified that if he goes over fifty kilometers per hour he could throw a track, and then they’ll be completely stuffed. Once they pass Keighley he switches to the narrow and winding secondary roads, steering a wide course around Skipton on Lockhart’s advice. It’s a
really
weird way to be spending a Sunday morning: normally Pete would be in the vestry, drinking coffee and reminding himself of the running order of the day and the main talking points for his sermon. Not yet robed up to welcome the church-going public, but that’s definitely on the Sunday morning agenda. Whereas this particular Sunday he’s roaring along a country road between fields surrounded by dry stone walls, weighted down by layers of suffocatingly hot armor that’s older than any of the churches in the parish he’s nominally responsible for, while a mad scientist with a machine gun rides pillion.

Overhead he hears a distant droning. It’s a prop-driven aircraft, breaking the stillness: it must be military, he realizes. Lockhart has passed on the news about something on the moors south of Ribblesdale murdering airliners; the invaders have even shot down a fighter jet. Indeed, that’s part of Lockhart’s updated instructions. “Your goal is to get Alex and this girlfriend of his out of there alive, but if you see a chance to fuck up the antiaircraft weapons, that’d be very helpful in nailing down this mess. You’ve got a minigun and a couple of thousand banishment rounds: see to it.”

Easier said than done,
he thinks grimly. Not for the first time Pete worries that he’s made a horrible mistake, a life-altering and potentially fatal one. And he did it without even thinking to phone Sandy and talk it over first. When – if – he gets back from this, she’s going to have every justification for hauling him over the coals in her usual quiet, thoughtful way. The trouble is, it’s too late to back out now.
You volunteered to be a hero, don’t be surprised when they send you to fight dragons.

Nothing
moves on the A65 when they hit it from the south and turn west. It’s an eerie ghost road today. This sets Pete’s hackles on edge. He drives across the bridge over the River Aire, which is far busier up close to its headwaters than the placid flow that passes through Leeds, and half a kilometer later they rattle through Coniston Cold and the GPS sends him veering off to the right on a narrow country lane winding up into the hills. Ilsa rattles and grumbles as the trail rises and he turns onto the lane running atop Kirkby Brow. Then they’re descending again towards the valley, and Pete is so totally focussed on driving that when Pinky claps him on the shoulder to get his attention he nearly drives into the ditch to his left. He wrestles with the front forks and brakes, and Ilsa reluctantly grinds to a halt in the middle of the road.

“What?” he demands.

“Something’s wrong.” Pinky has to shout to make himself heard, but he holds up the display of his K-22 thaumometric analyzer. Pete flips his steel visor up to see better as Pinky scans the analyzer around in front of them. It goes wild when it points a fraction west of north, flux readings going off-scale; it drops off rapidly as he swings it clockwise, although there’s still some signal even when it’s due east. There’s nothing to the west. “Ley line’s to our east, west is dead, so what are we driving into?”

Pete squints up ahead, past the visitor’s center and the car park, trying to see over the treeline. The Pennine Way footpath runs through the site, past a row of Portakabin toilets. It’s early on a Sunday but there’s nobody about, which is distinctly odd. “Let’s take it easy. We’ve got to go off-road here anyway, the path’s a dirt track from here on.”

“Do that.” Pinky hesitates. “If you see trouble, do an immediate U-turn and brake while I hose it down. If I hit you on the shoulder it means
drive
. Got it?”

Pete nods, gorget and helmet rattling. Another thought strikes him: “What about gates and stiles?”

“If you see a gate with nothing beyond it, park up and I’ll open it and let you through. If you see a gate with hostiles beyond it, treat as trouble. If you see a gate and there are live hostiles
behind
us, remember you’re driving a tank.”

“Amen.” Pete checks the fuel gauge (adequate, if it isn’t lying through its teeth) and engine oil temperature (hot but not embarrassingly so), then guns the throttle. “Okay, here goes nothing.”

The Pennine Way is one of Britain’s best-known national trails, running for over four hundred kilometers along the Pennine hills, the backbone ridge of England. It follows field paths through the Yorkshire Dales National Park – in which Malham Cove and the famous limestone pavement are located – and due to erosion it’s expressly closed to bicycles, never mind off-road motorbikes, sport utility vehicles, and half-tracks driven by vicars in armor. Luckily the near-total lack of traffic, not to mention hikers and ramblers, means there are no witnesses to Pete’s desecration of a national treasure.

There seems to be some sort of camp or fairground – lots of tents, although it’s hard to see clearly – nestling in the base of the cove, but the footpath diverts Pete away from the edge of the ridgeline. It’s quite deeply eroded, so that at times Ilsa is surrounded by meter-high ramparts of packed dirt and grass. They bump along at a tooth-rattling twenty kilometers per hour as the ground rises below them. It’s sweaty, hot work wrestling with a Kettenkrad in steel armor, but the eroded gully finally ends as the incline steepens, giving way to a flight of shallow steps carved into the hillside and held in place with wooden boards.

“Damn.” Pete brakes to a halt and stares at them. It’s a personal affront. How on earth do you take a half-track up a staircase? But then he realizes: the steps are shallow. A motorbike or a four wheel drive truck would have a hard time, but Ilsa is low and long and has tracks. Taking the rise at an angle would be asking for trouble, but this is nowhere near a thirty-degree slope. He half-turns and sees Pinky looking up at him. He raises his visor. “I’m going to drive up the slope,” he calls. “It’s convex near the top, so I’ll turn round and reverse the last bit. Staying, uh, hull down.”

“Are you sure you can make a safe turn up there without rolling over?” Pinky sounds dubious.

“Yes, I think so.” Pete hopes he sounds more confident than he feels.

“Okay, then do it. Just keep your lid down and don’t expose us to the skyline.” Pinky holds up the thaumometric analyzer. “Whatever’s beyond the crest is putting out a flux footprint the size of a necromantic summoning.”

Pete slides Ilsa into first gear, low ratio, and crabs sideways across the grass, sliding slightly until the track cleats grip and begin to bite into the hillside. He twists the throttle grip carefully and eases up on the clutch until the front forks begin to rise alarmingly. The engine bellows beneath his seat as Ilsa begins to climb the slope. To his right there’s a steep drop-off, angling towards the cliff edge; to his left, the steps. Ahead, the brow of the slope is a sudden horizon masking a view of empty sky. Once he’s moving he doesn’t dare stop or change direction. If the half-track begins to slide – or worse, rolls – he and Pinky will have to jump or be crushed.

The minute it takes to climb the rise feels like forever, and Pete has a subjective eternity in which to worry. He spends it angsting about what they’ll find at the top, about what might be radiating that dangerous thaum flux, about whether it can hear them coming. But eventually the ground begins to level out. The steps are of uniform height, but now they’re set further and further apart. When at last the ridgeline begins to creep close, Pete slows to a crawl and then, very carefully, locks the right track and slews Ilsa round until he’s facing out across the cliff overlooking the hanging glacial valley. Finally, with the half-track leaning alarmingly to the right, he brakes the left track to a halt, selects reverse gear, and begins the opposite turn to bring Pinky’s jumpseat round to face the crest of the rise.

“Stop.” Pinky’s hand on his shoulder. “Wait here, I’m going to take a look.”

“What, on foot?” Pete is appalled. “But I thought you said we mustn’t show ourselves —”

“Nope, not going to do that. Brought a selfie stick for my phone.”

Ilsa bounces slightly as Pinky steps down, and Pete feels cold in spite of the sweaty padding and layers of steel. He changes gear just in case, although it seems unlikely they’d still be sitting here undisturbed if anyone had heard them coming. With Ilsa idling, he hears the droning from above again, like the world’s largest mosquito circling lazily as it looks for blood.

Seconds pass, then Pinky materializes beside Ilsa’s left track – now parallel to the steps – surprisingly quietly. He taps Pete. “There’s something fucking bizarre over the ridgeline, all right.” Pinky fumbles with a rectangular leather box, about fifteen centimeters square and four centimeters deep, sealed with a tarnished padlock. “I’m going to need you to be very, very calm and very clear about what we’re going to do,” he says, in the sort of voice normally used by doctors explaining to their patients that they’ve got cancer.

Yup, he thinks we’re going to die now,
Pete tells himself, trying the idea on for size: it’s a bad fit, but they don’t have time for dramatics, so he dismisses it. “What’s over there?”

“About two to three hundred meters in front of you, on the other side of the ridgeline, there are a bunch of bad guys dug in – they’ve got slit trenches – around something I couldn’t see properly. I burned out my phone camera trying to lock onto it,” he adds conversationally. He unlatches the box and opens it, to reveal a mummified human hand, crudely amputated at the wrist: Pete cringes as he recognizes it. “I suspect it’s some kind of basilisk gun. Or maybe a real basilisk. Two of them. They’re big, about the size of trucks. I don’t know if they’re armored, but they’re what Lockhart wants us to nail, for sure.”

“Oh.” Pete thinks for a moment.
Don’t ask about the hand.
“How come they haven’t heard us?”

“Maybe they have, but we’re out of sight. Thing is, our usual toys won’t work on this. For sure they’ll have heavy defensive wards.
Luckily
we had the foresight to bring a giant can full of whoop-ass and they’re criminally sloppy about posting sentries, maybe because they’re on a high spot and anyone who gets a direct line of sight on them is dead meat. But if Lockhart’s not yanking my chain, Alex is in the tents in the valley, right under their nose, and if they see us as we’re riding back down there we’re dead. So we’ve got to kill them first before we rescue the princess. Here’s how we’re going to do it…”

Sixth of Second Battalion rides close behind the front rank of skirmishers as her squadron pounds through the stony canyons of the
urük
hive, spreading death and chaos in all directions.

The sun is above the horizon by the time they clear the improvised obstacles from the peripheral highway and, passing a methodically arranged row of night soil ponds surrounded by woods, find themselves advancing along continuous built-up roads lined with the dense, ugly red-clay hovels of the enemy. Abandoned carts are strewn alongside every side street, providing far too much ground clutter for comfort. The main boulevard narrows rapidly, forming a chokepoint barely wide enough for four to ride abreast. Meanwhile the buildings rise to two, three, even four floors.

They encounter the first site of serious resistance three kilometers before they reach the enemy palace at the heart of the hive. A slab of poured-stone store houses on one side of the approach road buzzes with an ominous energy. It’s competently warded, with an aggressive defensive posture that promises grief to any who try to breach it. The first two skirmishers to gallop towards it come under fire from bullet-throwers on the flat roofline. Sixth swears and calls them back, but one of their mounts is limping, roaring and snarling its fury at the steel-jacketed bullet embedded in its left haunch. (A mere horse would be screaming and convulsing, or dead, but the Host’s mounts are made of sterner stuff, and it is already regenerating skin and muscle around the wound, forcing the fragment to the surface.)
“Enemy defenses ahead,”
Sixth calls to her field pyromancer:
“Reduce them.”

“As you command.”
The magus’s enclosed palanquin moves forward, then the golems that carry it go to their knees, joints locking into position, as the sorcerer raises her periscope.
“Range eight hundred and fifty paces, bearing minus forty
–
that is the target? The warded building?”

“Confirmed,”
snaps Sixth.

“Cover,”
the pyro calls laconically. It’s a formality at this range. For a couple of beats nothing happens, then the air between the cavalry lance and the building begins to shimmer. Abandoned carts sink on their melting wheel-rims, then burst like so many fiery roses as their fuel tanks rupture. Pale, almost colorless flames erupt from the eaves of buildings opposite, and a decorative row of trees planted on the opposite side of the road go up like torches. The fortified building holds for a handful more beats, and Sixth of Second steels herself for counter-battery fire – but then the defensive ward around the Arndale Centre office quenches.