Still, it was a nice enough night, only just past midnight, so we enjoyed a pleasant stroll through the brightly lit streets of Westminster, and happily discussed all the truly appalling things we were going to do to the Satanists at the meeting, once we got our hands on them.
We reached the House of Commons with a good half hour to spare, and one of Philip MacAlpine’s people was already there waiting for us. I recognised him immediately, having done business with him before, back when I was only another field agent in London, and still learning my craft. No one ever sent a minor functionary like Alan Diment out on anything important. Alan was a middle-aged, lower-rank courier, as quietly anonymous as any secret messenger should be. He was blond and blue eyed in a minor aristocratic sort of way, the kind that drifts into intelligence work because that was what Daddy did. He would clearly have liked to be mysterious, but didn’t have the poise to carry it off. I’ve no idea what he does at MI-13 when he isn’t running errands, but he’s trustworthy enough. If only because he doesn’t have the ambition to be treacherous.
He was actually walking up and down outside the House of Commons quite openly, looking very much like he didn’t want to be there. He nodded quickly to me as I approached, and managed a small but punctiliously polite nod to Molly.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said. “But orders are orders, and all that, needs must. . . . So here are two MI-13 security passes: one made out to Shaman Bond, and the other to . . . well, one other. Is she really . . . Yes, thought she was. Best not put her name down on a pass, eh? Don’t want to give the chaps inside a coronary. . . . The passes will give you access to the outer lobby, but
no farther
. I was instructed to say that in a very definite voice, and I think you’ll agree I gave it my best shot. Anyone bothers you, show them the passes and look mean, and they’ll leave you alone. Please don’t break anything,
please
don’t kill anybody and above all, please don’t do anything that might embarrass the department. We’re up for a budget review next month, and this is no time to be making enemies, so try not to make any trouble. . . .”
“Trouble?” I said innocently. “Us?”
“If you should be arrested, the department has never heard of you,” said Diment. “We’ll deny all knowledge of you, and swear blind the passes are forged. Would you like to sign for your passes?”
“What do you think?” said Molly.
“Oh, here,” said Diment. “Take the bloody things, so I can go home.”
He thrust two small laminated passes into my hand. Very official-looking, but carefully bland. No photo ID, because MI-13 agents don’t like to be remembered, and the official signatures were just scrawls. Perfect.
“Right. That’s it. I’m off,” said Diment. “I am going home to a warm bed and a hot wife, and if you should need any further assistance, feel free to phone anyone except me. Phone MacAlpine. He never liked me. Good-bye.”
And he strode off into the night, still muttering to himself. Molly looked at me.
“If I’d known it was this easy to break into Parliament, I’d have done it years ago. You know, I could get you a really good deal on several gallons of napalm. . . .”
“Another time,” I said.
Getting into the House of Commons was easy: Flash the passes around and look confident. The police on duty nodded to us. The security guards inside insisted on a close look at the passes, but bowed down to the implied might of MI-13. The outer lobby was exactly like it looks on television: very old, steeped in history and tradition. Full of people with vaguely familiar faces coming and going with an important air about them, even at this early hour of the morning. The business of government never sleeps, which is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes not. Occasionally someone very dignified and important would come striding through the outer lobby, on very important business, smiling graciously at the television crews waiting about, because you never knew when a camera might be rolling. The television reporters showed no interest in Molly or me. They didn’t recognise us, so we couldn’t be important.
A uniformed security guard with a large sniffer dog felt quite the opposite, and came forward to check us out. So I immediately knelt down and made a big fuss over the dog, rubbing his head and scratching behind his ears, and he wagged his tail happily as I spoke cheerful nonsense to him. The guard looked pained.
“Please don’t do that, sir; he’s working.”
“Oh . . . is he working, then? Is he?” I said to the dog. “Is he working then!”
“Soppy,” said Molly.
I showed the guard our passes, and he reluctantly dragged his dog away, only to be replaced almost immediately by a plain-clothed security man who seemed to take it as a personal insult that he hadn’t been briefed about an MI-I3 presence in advance. He looked down his nose at me, and then at Molly, and studied our passes very thoroughly, obviously just itching to find something he could say was wrong with them.
“MI-13,” he said sniffily. “I am Peregrine Le Behan.” And he looked down his nose again, clearly expecting the name to mean something to us. I think we were both supposed to bow down and offer him our firstborn, to appease his wrath. When we looked back at him blankly, he glared at both of us. “No one from your department cleared this with me! Or anyone from Drood Hall. Oh, yes, Eddie Drood and Molly Metcalf . . . I’ve read your files. You’re trouble, both of you, and I want to know what you’re doing here with MI-13 passes!”
“At least I’m not one other anymore,” said Molly.
“The fact that we’re using the passes should tell you that we’re not here as ourselves,” I said. “As far as you’re concerned, as far as anyone’s concerned, there’s no need to make a big deal of this. We’re just two MI-13 people having a quiet look round. No need to panic anyone, is there?”
Le Behan sniffed loudly. “These passes have no validity, since they weren’t cleared with me. So I’m confiscating them. And you will both have to come with me while I make further enquiries. I’m sure we can find somewhere suitably depressing to hold you while I find out what’s really going on. You should never have been allowed in here in the first place.”
“Allowed?” I said, and something in my voice made him fall back a step. I smiled coldly. “No one allows Droods to do anything. We do what needs doing, and minor functionaries like you get the hell out of the way, if they don’t want to be trampled underfoot.”
Le Behan started to splutter something officious and suitably outraged, so I armoured up my right fist and held it up in front of his face. He stopped talking immediately, his wide eyes fixed on the golden spikes rising up from my knuckles. He actually whimpered a little. He jerked his gaze away and looked at Molly. She smiled unpleasantly, snapped her fingers and turned his expensive shoes into a pair of dead fish. Le Behan looked like he was going to burst into tears.
“Now be a good little functionary, Peregrine, and piss off,” I said. “Or we’ll get cranky.”
“Seriously cranky,” said Molly.
“And give me back the bloody passes,” I said. He thrust them into my hand, and I gave him a hard look. “Remember: We were never here. Or we’ll fix it so you were never here.”
“Ever,” said Molly.
Le Behan squelched mournfully away in his dead fish, and I made my armoured fist disappear. No one noticed. No alarms. No one was paying us any attention at all. The television people were still waiting for someone important to show up. Security in the outer lobby was seriously rubbish. I’d have to have a word with someone about that later.
Molly and I wandered around the outer lobby, looking the place over. The old walls looked solid enough, but my torc-backed Sight led me immediately to one particular section tucked away in a corner. As we approached, several quite powerful
move along; nothing to see here
avoidance spells kicked in, more than enough to divert normal attention. Molly brushed them aside with a sweep of her hand, like clinging cobwebs. As we drew closer, my Sight showed me a massive door set into the wall, made of solid gold. Molly made admiring noises.
“Is that really solid gold . . . ? It is, it is! Tons of it! Well, one up on the Wulfshead’s silver door . . .”
“Don’t get any ideas,” I said. “The door is fused to the wall; you couldn’t pry that loose with an enchanted crowbar.” I ran my fingertips across the gleaming gold. It was unnaturally warm to the touch, and subtly unpleasant. As though there were something really nasty on the other side. “This isn’t just gold, Molly. It feels . . . inhabited.”
“Could this be the same material as your armour?” said Molly.
“Good question,” I said. “Obviously not the strange matter of my current armour, but . . . the Heart got up to a lot of stuff that most of the family never got to hear about. No . . . No. I don’t think so. London Undertowen had already been in existence for centuries before the Heart crashed into our reality. This is probably a coincidence.”
But I couldn’t seem to make myself feel comfortable about that, even as I said it.
“How do we get in?” Molly said briskly. “Without our having to do something urgent, violent and attention-gathering?”
“We use the passWord,” I said; and I said it. The golden door swung smoothly and silently open before us.
“How did you know that?” said Molly.
“Because Droods know everything,” I said.
“Not always,” she said sweetly. “Or we wouldn’t need to be here, would we?”
“True,” I said.
Inside the door, a narrow stairway of very old, very smooth and worn-down stone steps led away into darkness. They looked old enough to have actually been Roman. I looked back, but no one was paying us any attention. The door’s avoidance spells were protecting us. I led the way down the steps, Molly following close behind. She wanted to go first, but I wouldn’t let her, and then she wanted to walk beside me, but the steps weren’t wide enough; so she settled for walking close behind and sulking. There was no handrail, so we had to press our shoulders hard against the rough stone of the adjoining wall to be sure we didn’t accidentally get too close to the edge of the steps, and the apparently bottomless drop beyond.
We went down and down and down for quite some time. When I looked back the way we’d come, the light at the top was already gone, shut off by the closing door. The only light came from floating balls of pale green fluorescence, bobbing along on the air before us, leading the way down, like more than usually dependable will-o’-the-wisps. They paused when we paused, but were always careful to maintain a respectful distance, no matter how much I tried to close the gap. The shadows were deep and dark, and the long drop to our side still showed no sign of having any bottom. We descended, following the lights, until I lost all track of how deep we were.
“How deep do you think it goes?” said Molly.
“All the way,” I said.
“I hate answers like that,” said Molly.
The rough stone wall boasted many overlapping layers of graffiti, laid down over centuries, in many different languages and dialects, including a few traces of Latin. I pointed out one of the clearer sections to Molly.
“Any idea what that says?”
“Sorry,” she said. “That is in no way classical Latin. It could be saying, ‘Biggus Dickus will make your eyes water,’ for all I know.”
Some of the writing became clearer as we descended, though many were of ambiguous intent.
The Juwes Are the Men Who Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing. King Mob Leads the Way. We Are All Lilith’s Children. Dagon Has Returned!
That last one looked very recent.
My legs began to cramp up, from the strain of the continuing descent, and my back was killing me. Molly had to be feeling it, too, but she didn’t complain, so I couldn’t. I gritted my teeth against the pain and kept going.
“You’d think they’d have an elevator put in, in this day and age,” I said.
“Whom would you trust to run it?” said Molly.
“Good point,” I said. “Is it just me, or is the air getting seriously cold . . . ?”
“We’re a long way from the sun down here.”
“That’s probably the point.”
“Have you ever visited London Undertowen before?” said Molly. “I mean, you have the passWord. Even I don’t know the passWord.”
“I’m a Drood field agent in London,” I said. “I get to know all the passWords. But no, I’ve never been down here before. This was always more Matthew’s province than mine. He mixed with the authorities, the movers and shakers; worked all the important cases and knew all the important people. I knew about London Undertowen . . . heard all the stories. This is the shadow world, the distorted mirror image of the world above, where the tail wags the dog. As below, so above. They say that all new members of Parliament are brought here after they’re elected, dragged down into Under Parliament to be shown where true power lies. And those who won’t kneel or bow their head are driven mad or killed.”
“I’ve heard those stories as well,” said Molly. “And for once, I really hope they aren’t true.”
Sometime later, and by then I had no idea at all how much later, we reached the foot of the stairs. Molly and I stopped and leaned on each other, breathing hard. We took it in turn to massage some feeling back into our legs and rub each other’s backs, and when we were ready we looked around. We were standing in a narrow stone tunnel lit by a few of the green lights bobbing up by the ceiling. The stone walls gave every indication of being authentically ancient, with the original tool marks still plain to the eye. We followed the corridor for a while, took a sharp left turn, and found ourselves in a large but surprisingly pleasant stone grotto. Bright electric lights pushed back the darkness, which still filled a number of empty doorways leading off. Thick rugs and carpets covered the floor, comfortable furniture was scattered around, and there was even a bar. People stood around chatting cheerfully. Quite a lot of people. If not for the setting, it could have been any party, anywhere. A few people glanced in our direction as we arrived, but no one seemed particularly interested. Because if we were here, it could only be because we were expected.