The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (47 page)

“Huh.” Wilson slings the rifle over her shoulder: “Follow me anyway, I’m sure we’ll find something for you to do.”

Outside the soundproofed basement control room there’s a racket going on; it sounds like dueling road drills holding an argument with an industrial metal band. Metallic shrieks and groans joust with the intermittent hammering of the machine guns on the roof. Jez dashes up the emergency staircase, taking the steps two at a time; Brains, five years older and twenty kilos heavier, is panting by the time they arrive on the third floor at the makeshift ops center Lockhart established the night before.

They meet the man himself coming out of the door. “I’m taking this to the roof,” he says flatly. He’s found a ballistic vest somewhere, and is wearing it under his suit jacket in place of a waistcoat. “Are you warded?”

“Class eight,” Brains manages. “What’s going —”

“Too many civilians. Let’s see if we can draw their fire.”

Brains glances back and forth. Lockhart, he realizes suddenly, doesn’t expect to live through this. Neither does Jez Wilson. They’re both ex-Army and he has a numb feeling that they know more about this kind of situation than he does. “Can you manually run the perimeter cameras?” He realizes Wilson is talking to him. “Not in autonomous mode, I mean, manually designate targets for the basilisk guns?
Inside
Quarry House?”

“I could…” He trails off, horrified. “What?”

“I want you down in the camera control room behind a locked door,” Lockhart rasps. “They’re here to storm the building or reduce it to rubble. The wards are holding and we’ve got guns on the roof, but they’ll get inside our perimeter sooner rather than later. I’ll call you when that happens and then if you see anything or anyone on the ground floor you should assume hostile.”

“What, on my own —” Brains stares until Lockhart gives a sharp jerk with his chin.

“Go on,” Jez says, not unkindly. “This isn’t your kind of fight.”

They wait until Brains has scampered back into the emergency stairwell before Lockhart says, “Let’s hope he remembers to lock the door and keep quiet.”

“You think he’ll make it?” They head up the corridor past an open office door.

Lockhart steps inside briefly and hands her an Airwave radio and headset, then picks up a box of preloaded magazines. “Maybe.”

She snorts. “It’s going to take a miracle.”

They climb the last two floors to the roof at a more measured pace – there’s no point arriving breathless – and step out into chaos.

Every body that can fight, warm or otherwise, is already committed. Lockhart has been coordinating from the control room downstairs, but under the guns of the enemy and with the nearest reinforcements still an hour away he can do more good upstairs. Not that one more person is going to hold things together for much longer. If they had an active sorcerer of their own, someone from Mahogany Row, it might make a difference: but aside from Alex Schwartz (who is tied up elsewhere) there are no ritual practitioners on-site in Leeds this weekend.

The defensive wards around Quarry Hill are under such intense attack that their surfaces are visible to the naked eye, a shimmering indigo soap bubble the size of a city block that flickers with an unhealthy, oily sheen. It rings like a bell whenever one of the marauding enemy sorcerers hits it with an inordinate and wasteful invocation. The two machine guns on the rooftop cupola beneath the spire, and the other pair on the car park roof, rap out irregular conversational bursts, unimpeded by the occult barrier.

“Keep your head down,” Lockhart advises. “They’ve got some kind of kinetic weapon as well as all the thaumic lances, and the wards won’t keep a well-aimed arrow out. They might want to take the building intact if Dr. Schwartz is correct but that doesn’t mean they won’t go for an easy target.” He sounds disapproving. “Subtlety is
not
their —”

There is a loud
crack
and a section of sandbags in front of one of the GPMGs disappears. So does the upper half of the gun’s loader. Blood sprays everywhere, briefly.
“That,”
Lockhart snarls,
“
is
too much.”

Another Night Watchman shuffles forward to take his place. Face expressionless but for the glowing green eyes of the possessed, the undead guard begins to assemble a belt of ammunition —

“No!” shouts Lockhart, “Get down! Move! Not there,
there
!” Wilson grabs his arm to stop him darting forward in his frustrated urgency to see the zombie move the gun to a less exposed location.

She can see at a glance that the situation is dangerously close to irretrievable. The enemy cavalry – eye-wateringly painful to look at, even with a defensive ward – are too close to the periphery of the defensive bubble around the foot of the hill. The guns can’t depress far enough to shoot down at them without the crews exposing themselves to whatever just made a hole in the roofline, and while the Night Watchmen are heedless of physical hazard (being dead) there aren’t enough of them. Meanwhile the mounted soldiers are clustering around covered palanquins from which the bubbles of defensive wards are expanding, and more of the riders will be circling around behind the complex —

“Do you have any grenades?” Jez asks the nearest defender.

“Only RPGs, and not enough of them.” Doris Knight points a thumb in the direction of a stack of boxes under the big satellite uplink dish. “But there’s an AA-12. Harry thought it would come in useful, bless his heart. Can you use that?”

“I’ll give it the old school try.” Jez makes a beeline for the stockpile and finds the big automatic shotgun and an unopened satchel of ammunition. A relatively short-range weapon, it wasn’t much use until now. “Can you spot for me?”

“There’s a reinforced sniper’s hide over on the west wing roof, I thought it would come in handy. But we’ve only got forty rounds.”

Together they crouch down behind a clutter of cell tower aerials and prepare their kit. It’s just a matter of time before the enemy try to storm the entrance: maybe the explosive shells will slow them down.

“What we need right now is a miracle,” Jez mutters during a gap in the gunfire. She raises her weapon and carefully aims through the firing slot.

Cassie is right about one thing: getting out of the camp is easy enough, as long as they stay close to the tents and supply stockpiles and keep out of sight of the soldiers massing at the foot of the cliff itself. The tents are mostly empty, and the few serfs left behind to handle teardown and transport are dull-eyed and deferential. Cassie doesn’t need to order them to pay no attention: to Alex’s blood-stunned eyes she glows with Highest Liege’s borrowed power, and they fall to their knees and prostrate themselves before her as automatically as if she’s a living god.

Which is a good thing, because Alex isn’t sure he can play the role of bodyguard effectively if push comes to shove. The armor chafes and fits poorly (it’s a miracle it fits at all, because he’s short and stocky compared to the
alfär
warriors), he has no more idea how to use the mace that goes with it than the terrifyingly technical-looking battle rifles on display in the Royal Armouries, and he’s stuck somewhere between a post-binge bloat-out torpor and total exhaustion from overexertion. Given an hour to recover he’ll feel better, and given a couple of hours of instruction and a couple of weeks of practice he might be able to make the mace glow blue and spit fireballs and lightning, but right now he feels like dead weight. Self-loathing dead weight at that. He’s done his job, delivered the smartphone to its target: Cassie clearly doesn’t
need
him at this point, not in any practical sense —

“Where are the sentries?” Cassie asks uncertainly as they pass the furthest tent and strike out across the gently sloping basin of the valley, into the trees paralleling the stone walls alongside the stream. “This is
wrong
. There
must
be sentries.” There’s a pile of oddly assorted statuary to one side, and a trampled trail that looks as if a small herd of elephants has stampeded down the valley floor towards Gordale Scar, but there’s no sign of dugouts or a defensible line: just traditional dry stone walls, defending against cows. Nor are the expected sentries visible. “Father must have stripped almost every living body from —” She does a double-take. “But this means he must think he can take the enemy palace from within with only a squadron! What is he
doing
? Did he think he could use you to —” Her eyes widen further. “He was going to steal your face and memories,” she says faintly. “Take the fortress by stealth and lower the wards when his forces arrive. Of course. Which means —”

Some half-glimpsed movement and the distant mutter of a tractor engine prompts Alex to turn and look up at the heights leading to the crest. “Look,” he says, turning and pointing.

Cassie’s eyes go wide. “FuckFuck!” She grabs his arm and yanks him towards the pile of human-shaped ashy stones. “Get down! Hide!”

Alex stumbles and falls, bashing a knee painfully on a withered stone arm with fingers clenched around the shattered concrete semblance of a Garmin GPS. Things become chaotic for a time. He has impressions of a surreally bright pink-tinted light, speckled and shimmering, that drenches the ground on all sides. A buzzing roar of automatic gunfire starts up: it’s very fast and weirdly familiar, and after a while he seems to hear the frequency of alternating mains current in it. It goes on forever, although forever can only be a few seconds, echoing and shimmering from the heights above them. Something bellows in agony, there’s a brilliant flash of lightning, and a thunderclap explodes from the cliff above the cove; the pinkish radiance cuts off abruptly. More gunfire follows, then another blinding explosion, like a power substation going up.

“Whatever that was, it’s distracted them.” Alex kneels, then stands, bracing one arm against a thing of horror that was once a scout troop leader. He leans around the ossuary stack and glances at the ridge line above.

The force assembling at the base of the cliff for All-Highest’s strike through the shadow road to the center of Leeds is breaking up: infantry head for the slopes up to the crest of the ridge, while mounted knights keep close to a core group who take shelter directly before the cave mouth at the base of the cliff. Meanwhile something is driving down the side of the hill, roughly paralleling the footpath. It takes Alex a moment to recognize what he’s seeing: it’s Ilsa, but there’s a pile of stuff on the back bench seat and the driver appears to be wearing a suit of armor.

“Come on,” he pants, tugging at Cassie’s arm. “Our ride’s here!”

“But we’ll —” She stands, looks round at the cliff, then back at the hills. “Run!”

Alex doesn’t stop to ask why. Cassie darts across the floor of the valley, keeping low and zigzagging between trees. He follows her, sticking close behind. There’s a wall and a row of tents and stacks of emptied crates between them and the cavalry, but they’re sure to be seen within seconds. He mumbles the trigger for his last field-expedient ward as he runs, hoping nobody tries to hit him with a death spell.
Now
he fuzzily remembers why Cassie is with him – All-Highest needs him alive in order to break through the perimeter defenses around Quarry House. Manic laughter bubbles up: he shielded her from the eaters he summoned with his body, now he’s her human shield.

There are shouts a long way behind him. The tiny half-track churns up a spray of grass and dry mud as it slews downhill in a barely controlled rush. Whoever’s driving is doing a good job of steering into the skid, but if he loses it they’re going to roll over on the slope. The mound on the back resolves itself into another figure in armor wearing what looks like a chain mail rug. It’s clinging for dear life to a multibarreled gun mounted on a post sticking up from the tow hitch.

A hundred meters until their paths converge. How fast can you run a hundred meters in armor? His suit only weighs about twenty kilos, but Alex is out of shape and it isn’t properly fitted to him. He feels a rumbling as the ground shakes behind him. He’s panting and Cassie is sagging, but his limbs feel weirdly light. The V-parasites are pulling their weight –
no, they’re pulling
my
weight,
he thinks. There’ll be a bloody price to pay later of course, and there’s a distant buzzing sound in his ears, like a lawnmower the size of a freight train. Ilsa is nearly at the bottom now, and the driver brakes hard and slews around until the guy on the back is facing them —

“Pinky! Brains!” Alex shouts. “It’s me!” He waves. Cassie waves. Then he’s staring directly down the fascicular barrels of a most enormous-looking Gatling gun.

“Who’s there?” shouts the gunner, his face completely obscured by the steel visor. He casts around, as if he can’t see. The vibration in the ground is growing: Alex hears snarling and shouting from behind.

He does a double-take. “Is that you, Pinky?”

“Good guess.” Pinky flips his visor up, then leans on the gun. Its barrel rises, pointing over Alex’s head. His face is flushed and shiny with sweat, and there’s something wrong with his eyes. After a moment Alex realizes they’re bloodshot and his pupils are massively dilated. “You’re going to have to work this thing.”

Whoever’s driving up front revs the engine and Ilsa growls. Cassie staggers, panting: Alex pulls her arm over his shoulder and staggers forward. “Move over,” he tells Pinky. “This is Cassie.” He clambers up on the middle of the bench seat and hauls Cassie up beside him. It’s a tight squeeze and he ends up standing with one foot between each of Cassie’s and Pinky’s, hanging on to the back of the minigun and trying not to touch anything by accident.

“Are we all aboard?” the suit of armor up front says in Pete’s mild tones: “Because I really think we ought to be moving…”

“GoGoGo!” screams Cassie. “Do something, Alex!” She wrestles a strip of ammunition over her lap like a seat belt, pulling more loops from the box behind them. As Pete shoves the half-track into gear and hits the gas Alex is thrown forward against the spade grips of the skyward-pointing gun, but he barely notices: he’s too busy gaping at the sight of an armored cavalry squadron in full cry.