For Heaven's Eyes Only (38 page)

“Did she mention a name?” I said.

“No. But then, Iz has contacts everywhere.”

“Call her,” I said. “Contact her. Now.”

But before any of us could do anything, Isabella was suddenly right there in the room with us, standing at the end of the table. She was a mental sending, not a physical presence. Her image was vague and unstable, semitransparent, trembling as though bothered by some harsh-blowing aetheric wind.

The Sarjeant slammed his fist on the table again and looked seriously upset.

“How the hell do you keep appearing inside Drood Hall, despite all the defences and protections I have put in place precisely to keep out persons like you?”

Isabella looked at me. “Haven’t you told him yet?”

The Sarjeant looked at me suspiciously. “Told me? Told me
what
, Eddie?”

“Later,” I said. “Iz, where have you been?”

“Going back and forth in the world, and walking up and down in it,” Isabella said calmly. “Talking to people. Making them talk to me. I found a certain person who was only too willing to tell me what I wanted to hear, after a certain amount of physical persuasion. A charming little rogue called Charlatan Joe.”

“I know him,” I said immediately. “Not sure I’d agree with the description. Joe’s a city slicker, a confidence trickster. A sleazy adventurer who never met a mark he couldn’t shaft. But it’s surprising how often he’s in the right place to overhear things that matter. . . .”

“Exactly,” said Isabella. Her sending shifted and trembled, as seethrough as any ghost for a moment, and her mouth moved with no sound reaching us, until she suddenly snapped back into focus again. “By being somewhere he really shouldn’t have been, while doing something anyone could have told him was a bad idea, dear Joe overheard something so big, so important and so shocking that it scared the crap out of him. So he dropped into a deep hole and pulled it in after him, determined to disappear until what he knew wouldn’t matter anymore. Except I can find anyone when I put my mind to it. And I know more about the darker magics than he ever dreamed of. I found him and made him cry, and after I’d wiped his nose for him he couldn’t wait to tell me everything he knew. To be exact: where the next big meeting of the satanic conspiracy leaders will be taking place. Not the upper echelons, like Alexandre Dusk and Roger Morningstar, but the guys at the very top.

“You haven’t got much time, Molly, Eddie. . . . It’s three hours from now, and they won’t be there for long. According to Charlatan Joe, they’re there to witness the first wide-range test of the mind-influencing machine on a city full of unsuspecting people.”

“Okay, that’s it,” I said. “We have to go right now. A full-on preemptive strike, a whole army of Droods led by all the field agents we can round up at such short notice. Hit the bastards hard when they’re not expecting it, stamp them into the ground, take out the machine and capture all the conspiracy leaders in one go.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms. “Three hours . . . Give me one hour, Eddie, to put a strike force together. It’ll have to be a really good size; we can’t know how many ground troops there’ll be, or what kind of weapons they might have. But we can do this. We can stop the conspiracy dead before they even get a chance to start the Great Sacrifice. Where are they, Isabella? Where are they meeting?”

“The setting is a deconsecrated cathedral at Glastonbury,” said Isabella. “Apparently it was turned into a hotel decades ago. It’s been completely refurbished as the Cathedral Hotel; runs business courses, that sort of thing. The conspiracy’s booked the whole hotel under different names, so you don’t have to worry about any innocents being involved.”

“Sounding better all the time,” said the Sarjeant.

“A deconsecrated cathedral,” said the Armourer. “These old-time Satanists do love their traditional touches. For masters of evil they can be surprisingly sentimental about such things.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said William. “And for the record—I can’t believe I’m being the calm voice of reason here—can I remind you, Eddie, the last times you went head-to-head with the Satanists didn’t go too well, did they? You were run out of Lightbringer House, and you had to be rescued from Under Parliament. You were lucky to get out alive even with your Drood armour. We need to talk about this. And yes, I know that phrase is dripping with irony where I’m concerned, but . . .”

“We don’t have time for academic discussions,” said the Sarjeant. “Three hours, remember? You think; we’ll organise.”

“Don’t worry, William,” I said. “This time we’ll be going in mobhanded, at the head of an army of armoured Droods. Like we did with the Immortals at Castle Frankenstein. The Satanists won’t know what’s hit them till it’s far too late.”

“I still don’t like it,” the Librarian said stubbornly. “Violence is playing their game.”

“Then we’ll have to play it better than them,” said the Sarjeant. “Isabella, what else can you tell us . . . ?”

But she was gone, not even a wisp of presence left at the end of the table. Molly tried to reach her, to regain contact, but couldn’t. She frowned unhappily.

“It’s not like she’s blocking me out; it’s as though she isn’t even there. Something’s wrong.”

“Maybe she thought someone else might be listening in,” I said. “She wouldn’t want to risk giving the game away.”

“Yes,” said Molly. “That makes sense.” But she didn’t sound happy about it.

The Sarjeant hurried off to organise the troops. The Armourer wandered off to go think destructive thoughts in the Armoury. William waited till they were gone, and then took me to one side for a few private words.

“I’ve been feeling a lot better since Ammonia Vom Acht’s . . . intervention,” he said. “My thoughts are clearer than they’ve been in . . . well, I don’t know how long.”

“I had noticed,” I said.

“I wanted to ask you about her. Ammonia.” The Librarian gave me a look I wasn’t sure I understood. “A most remarkable woman.”

“Remarkable,” I said.

“Excellent mind. There was a certain amount of . . . transfer, you see, when she made contact with my thoughts. She really was very impressive.”

“Impressive,” I said.

“So, you see, I was wondering . . .”

“She’s married,” I said.

“Ah. Of course she is.” He nodded slowly. “The best ones always are, aren’t they?”

He strode off, back to the Old Library, and I genuinely didn’t know what to think.

 

Over the next hour, the Sarjeant-at-Arms ran himself ragged all over Drood Hall, gathering up volunteers from every section and department, putting together a small army of more than a hundred Droods for his strike force. It was all I could do to keep up with him. Give the man his due: He’s good at his job. And if there’s a big fight on, there’s no one else in the family you’d rather follow into danger and sudden death, because you know he’ll move Heaven and Earth not only to get the job done, but to bring you back safely as well. All Droods are trained to fight from an early age, but few ever realistically expect to see action. Recent events—in the Hungry Gods war, and with the Accelerated Men attack—had changed all that. A lot of previously purely academic Droods had had to go out and fight, and much to everyone’s surprise they found they had a taste for direct intervention. So when the Sarjeant went looking for volunteers, he found them everywhere.

He assembled his strike force on the grounds outside the Hall and put them through their paces to see who was actually up to the job. He strode up and down, barking orders, watching closely as Droods duelled in their armour. I stood well back and let him get on with it. The Sarjeant had always been better at the military side of things than I ever had.

We had nine active field agents: all that had been present in the Hall, reporting in from completed missions. They should have been resting, recovering, but once they heard what the job was, we couldn’t keep them out. A dozen more were on their way in, but the odds were it would all be over before they could get here. We also had five ex – field agents retired from active duty for various physical and psychological reasons. They were just as determined not to be left out. They had things to prove, to the family and themselves. One of them was Callan.

“My deputy can run the War Room till I get back,” he said defiantly, standing beside me as we watched the Sarjeant run the strike force.

“You don’t have to do this, Callan,” I said.

“Yes, I do.” Callan stared out at the organised mayhem before him, so he wouldn’t have to look at me. “Last time I was out in the field, I had my torc ripped right off me by that bastard traitor the Blue Fairy. You have no idea what that felt like. I haven’t left the Hall since, even after Ethel gave me a new torc. I need to get out there, beat some Satanist brains in, prove to myself that I can still do this. That I’m still a Drood. Or I’ll end up back in my room again, refusing to come out, afraid of everything. I can’t go back to that, Eddie. I won’t go back to that. I’m going with you. You need the numbers. And besides . . . I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“You’ve always got a bad feeling about everything,” I said. “That’s why we put you in charge of the War Room.”

“I went out to fight the Accelerated Men,” said Callan. “Along with everyone else. I’m not like you, Eddie. I never enjoyed the violence of being a field agent. But I enjoyed it well enough that day. Sometimes . . . it does you good to strike back at the world that’s hurt you.”

And he went off to get involved in the mayhem.

We’d also found twelve retired field agents, the youngest being fifty-two, the oldest sixty-four. They all looked older than their years; life in the field does that to you. Most field agents don’t live long enough to retire; the great game chews most of us up long before that. So for these old men to still be around meant they had proved themselves very hard to kill. I had a hunch that could come in handy.

Everyone in the strike force was a volunteer; not one pressed or pressured man. News of the nature of the Great Sacrifice had spread quickly through the Hall, and the general feeling of outrage was so thick in the air you could practically taste it. So there was no shortage of people willing and eager to go and fight the Satanists, to prevent such an obscenity from taking place. And yet . . . even though I would be going out with over a hundred armoured Droods to back me up, I still had a terrible cold, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. As though I’d missed something—something important, even obvious . . .

On top of that, the last time I’d led an army of Droods out against an enemy, against the Loathly Ones on the Nazca Plains . . . it had all gone horribly wrong. We’d been ambushed, taken by surprise, outnumbered by hidden forces, and a lot of good men and women died badly that day. I went out at the head of an army, but all I brought home were body bags. . . .

Still, this time I had an ace in the hole. The Merlin Glass. It could drop us right on the Satanists, appearing out of nowhere, without warning. As long as I left it open, I’d always have a way out. If it was needed. If everything went wrong again.

At the last moment, Molly and Harry came out of the Hall to join us. I had wondered where she’d been. The two of them had clearly been talking together, because they were almost comfortable in each other’s company. Molly moved in close beside me, linked her arm through mine and leaned her head against my shoulder. She’d been talking with Harry about the time she and Roger were lovers, long ago. I knew that, and she knew that I knew. And we both knew this wasn’t the time to be concentrating on the past.

“I’m going with you,” said Harry, in a way that made it very clear there was no point in arguing with him. “Roger’s going to be there.”

“Probably,” I said. “You really think you can talk him out of this? Bring him back to the side of the angels?”

“Before you left Under Parliament,” said Harry, looking out across the grounds so he wouldn’t have to look at me, “before Roger let you go . . . you said you asked him if there was anything he wanted to say to me. Any message. He could have said any number of things: told me it was all over, told me he never really loved me, told me to go to Hell. . . . But he didn’t. I can still reach him; I know I can. . . . So I have to go, Eddie. I have to try.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “But don’t get in the way once the killing starts. This is war. And given what’s at stake . . .”

“I know,” said Harry.

The Sarjeant-at-Arms finally called a halt to his martial exercises, assembled his army before him and took the opportunity to bore the arses off them with what he probably thought was an inspirational speech. I looked the Droods over, and was quietly pleased with what I saw. They looked like soldiers ready to go into battle. They looked like an army. I put up with as much of the Sarjeant’s speech as I could stand, and then took out the Merlin Glass and activated it. The Sarjeant stopped talking as he realised no one was listening to him any longer. I shook the Glass out to full size, and then opened it up even further, pushing it to a greater size than I’d ever attempted before, finally ending up with a gateway some twenty feet square. I hadn’t been sure that would work, but it seemed stable enough.

I looked through the opening, and there was the Cathedral Hotel, right where the coordinates said it should be. A large building, clearly much rebuilt, with a slick modern facade. The sign said simply, CATHEDRAL HOTEL. Four stars. The only remaining vestige of the building’s original nature was an old bell tower stuck right on the end, presumably retained as a historical touch. Something for the tourists to take photographs of.

A massive car park sprawled out before the hotel, with neatly marked bays but only a handful of parked cars. No one about, no signs of Satanists anywhere. The whole place was quiet and peaceful on a warm sunny day. So far, so good. I decided it was time for a quick inspirational speech of my own. I turned to address the Drood army, and they looked at me expectantly.