Property of a Lady Faire (A Secret Histories Novel) (21 page)

“How?” I said. “How did you know we were here?” My voice cracked like a whip on the silence, but give Diment credit; he didn’t flinch.

“Don’t be silly, Eddie. I’m hardly going to tell you, am I? Might need to use that source again, someday.”

“Molly and I didn’t kill all those people at Uncanny,” I said. “We’ve been set up.”

“Well, yes, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” said Diment. “The fact remains, you were seen leaving the scene of the crime.”

“No, we bloody well weren’t!” said Molly. “We teleported out!”

“So you were there,” said Diment. “Thank you for confirming that. Makes this so much easier. I will say I was surprised to learn you were responsible for a mass murder, Eddie. You were always an agent first, and only ever a reluctant assassin. But you’re a Drood, and she’s the wild witch, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at all, really.”

“Who saw us leaving the scene?” I said.

“Presumably someone trustworthy,” said Diment. “Look, the Government has tasked MI 13 to bring you in, dead or alive. I would prefer alive, but if you insist on resisting . . .”

“Kill a Drood?” I said. “You’re really ready to go to war with my family?”

“You’re not listening, Eddie,” Diment said patiently. “You have been officially disowned by your family. Declared rogue, and no longer protected. Surrender, Eddie. Do it now, while you’re still in a position to strike some kind of deal.”

“What kind of deal?” I said.

“Eddie?” said Molly, looking at me sharply.

“I’m just curious,” I said.

“If you’ll stand down and go willingly, you’ll be allowed to hand over your armour on your own terms,” Diment said carefully. “It is the armour my current lords and masters want, after all. Imagine what MI 13 could do with its own armoured agents.”

“That is never going to happen,” I said. “After what I saw at the Wulfshead today, it’s clear your current lords and masters can’t be trusted.”

“That may or may not be the case,” said Diment. “It doesn’t make any difference. You don’t have a choice, do you, Eddie?”

“I always have a choice,” I said.

“Damn right,” growled Molly. “And right now I am choosing to be completely unreasonable, and downright violent with it.”

I smiled at her, behind my mask. “Exactly, Molly. Time to put these uniformed little snots in their place. But we need to do it fast and get the hell out before my family turns up to complicate things. Because you can bet one of our people inside MI 13 will have contacted them by now.”

“You have people inside MI 13?” said Molly.

“We’ve got people inside every secret organisation,” I said. “How else do you think we stay on top of everything?”

“That does explain a lot,” said Diment.

“Are you still here, Alan?” I said pointedly.

“Your family wouldn’t side with this bunch of creeps, would they?” said Molly. “I mean, they wouldn’t allow you to be handed over to the Government. Would they?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But they would let MI 13’s troops wear us down, so they could move in afterwards once we were exhausted. And then . . . at the very least they’d demand to know what was really going on. And we can’t tell them.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Diment. “What do you mean,
what was really going on
? What am I missing?”

“Almost everything, Alan,” I said. “Now hush—grown-ups talking.”

“Oh . . .
shit
,” said Molly.

I looked at her. “What?”

“Something’s happening,” said Molly. “And I really don’t like the feel of it.”

The black-uniformed soldiers all tilted their heads at the same time, receiving a new communication, and then they all turned and ran for the ends of the street as fast as they could move in their heavy body armour. Diment hurried after them, not even glancing back at Molly and me. Molly made as though to stop him, but I intervened. Diment was just a messenger boy. The soldiers hurried behind the roadblocks and then stood their ground, covering the street with their automatic weapons.

“They’re waiting for something,” said Molly.

“Seems likely,” I said. “I wonder what . . . I mean, what could MI 13 have that they think could bring us down? That their own people are afraid of?”

“I love the way you keep asking me questions, like you think I’ve got any answers,” said Molly. “I’m as much in the dark as you are!”

“Probably even more so,” I said generously.

And then I broke off, and studied the street ahead of me carefully, through my mask. The natural energies of the world had just changed. Something was forming in the air. I could See strange lights, pulsing, and there was a growing sense of
presence . . .
of something from Outside forcing its way into our reality. Forcing the edges of the world apart, so it could shoulder its way through. Molly saw it too, and sucked in a sharp breath.

“Okay . . .” she said. “That doesn’t look or feel like anything I’m familiar with . . . Feels nasty, though.”

“This is high tech, not magic,” I said. “Though admittedly, beyond a certain point it gets really hard to tell them apart. MI 13 is establishing some kind of Gateway, to let something through. And something pretty damned big too, given the size of the opening. Where the hell is MI 13 getting the kind of power they’d need, to open a Gateway this size? And what would they be bringing here, that they believe can take on a Drood in his armour?”

“Are you talking to somebody else?” said Molly. “Because I know for a fact I already told you I don’t know anything!”

“Sorry,” I said. “Just thinking out loud and trying not to panic . . . Given everything that you and I have already tackled, from Hungry Gods to a worldwide Satanic Conspiracy, what could MI 13 be bringing to the table on a Government department budget? Hold everything . . . Do you See those energies bleeding out from the edges of the Gateway?”

“Are you asking me, or is this just another . . . ?”

“Do you See them?”

“Yes! What are they?”

“Tachyons. Time particles . . . We’re looking at a Time Gate! A transfer point, connecting one period in Time with another. Bringing something here, from the Past or the Future.”

“Now that’s just cheating,” Molly said briskly. “And just a tiny bit alarming on any number of levels . . .”

“This kind of technology is way beyond anything MI 13 should have access to,” I said, honestly shocked. “My family has always kept a very close eye on anyone messing around with Time. And there are Certain Others, who have been known to step in and make certain organisations and individuals never happened, just to put a stop to things like this.”

“Could Black Heir be helping MI 13 out?” said Molly. “They’re responsible for cleaning up all the weird tech left behind after alien incursions.”

“Black Heir know better than to meddle with things beyond their remit,” I said. “They survive by being useful, and not at all threatening. Oh, wait a minute . . . Yes! Got it! When MI 13 abducted those people from the Wulfshead Club earlier, one of them must have been an alien or a time traveller! There’s always one or the other passing through. MI 13 must have confiscated their tech before throwing them back. The bloody fools . . . messing around with things they can’t hope to understand or control, all in the name of ambition . . . This is what made Diment’s bosses brave enough to take on a Drood. And the wild witch, yes. But what have they found, what are they summoning through that Gateway . . .”

“Brace yourself,” said Molly. “The energies are changing. The Gateway’s opening. Looks like the show’s about to start.”

“I wonder if they’ve got a T. rex,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to have a go at a T. rex.”

“You go right ahead,” said Molly. “I’ll stand way over there, and watch.”

The Gateway hung on the air, halfway down the street, like a hole in reality itself. Strange lights flickered in and around it, while even stranger energies radiated away from the razor-sharp perimeter. Odd emanations pulsed and flared as the Gateway stabilised, enforcing and embedding itself in the world. Weird things began to happen in the street—other-dimensional fallout, warped probabilities. Half a dozen soldiers at the far end of the street turned suddenly inside out, flowering in bloody messes. Others melted, running away like candle wax. A few simply exploded. More disappeared, forced out of reality by the Gateway’s overpowering presence.

Birds fell dead out of the sky, and it briefly rained blood.

Buildings on either side of the street began to slump, bulging out as though tugged forward by some strange new gravity. Windows exploded, under too much pressure. The ground shook and then cracked beneath our feet, and deep booming voices issued up from far below. The sky turned strange colours, and the air suddenly tasted sickly sweet. And then the Gateway firmed, a perfect circle, cut out of reality. Not as big as I’d feared—maybe thirty, forty feet in diameter . . . But just its presence here was seriously bad news. At least the world had stabilised around it now. Everything seemed back to normal, apart from the damage already caused. And of course the dead soldiers were still dead. I wondered if Diment’s bosses thought their losses were worth it. Or if they even cared.

I tried to see what was going on beyond the Gateway, but that was too much, even for my mask. It was like looking at a different kind of Space, where the most basic rules were utterly different. Like one of those pictures that were all the rage a while back, where if you focused your eyes just right, you could see another image inside the picture. Three dimensions, hidden inside two. What was inside the Gateway was simply too complicated, or perhaps too real, for me to make sense of, even with my armour’s help. Time has substance, but not any kind Humanity can comprehend. And then something stepped through the Gateway and into our world, and I stopped worrying about theoretical stuff.

I knew a real and present danger when I saw one.

“What the hell is that?” breathed Molly, pressing in close beside me.

“A blast from the past,” I said. “From the Droods’ past.”

“I should have known,” said Molly. “It’s always about your family, isn’t it?”

The new arrival was a man in full armour. Medieval plate armour, with strange curves and angles, gleaming bitter yellow like diseased candlelight. The figure was completely enclosed from head to toe, and carried a long sword on one hip and a battleaxe on the other. Its helm had a countenance as blank and featureless as mine. Nothing to give any indication of a human face behind it. The figure stood inhumanly still, but I had no doubt it was looking at me, and a terrible chill ran down my spine.

“I know what that is,” I said. “I’ve never seen one personally, just pictures in a very old book, but . . .”

“It looks old,” said Molly. “Or at least old-fashioned. Is it one of the London Knights?”

“No,” I said. “Arthur would never have suffered a thing like that to sit at his round table. I never actually thought they were real, just a cautionary tale, to scare impressionable young Droods . . .”

“Eddie! What is that thing?”

“That is a False Knight,” I said. “Magical armour—a living thing in its own right, permanently bound to its wearer. Metal forged from the pits of Hell, they say. Once put on, of your own free will, it can never be taken off. The wearer gives up being a man to become something more and less than a man. Made over, into a new and powerful thing. Unbeatable, untouchable. A False Knight.

“The armour feeds on blood and death and suffering. Everything it kills makes it stronger. It lives to kill, and kills to live. The False Knights were created centuries after Arthur’s fall at Logres, intended as an answer to the Droods. There’s a reason they call that period the Dark Ages. This was the last desperate gamble of the Order of Steel—bad guys, who believed Might Made Right and they were the mightiest of all. Only the Droods stood between them and a reign of blood and horror. To destroy the armoured Droods, the Order of Steel made a deal with the darkest force of the Dark Ages and gave themselves up, to be False Knights. A whole army of them.

“We destroyed them all, in one great battle. Over a thousand years ago, in Tintagel, in Cornwall.”

Molly looked at me uncertainly. “You can take a False Knight, can’t you?”

“One, probably,” I said. “But there was more to the story . . .”

And that was when a great company of False Knights came striding through the Gateway, from out of the Past and one of my family’s darkest legends. Row upon row and rank upon rank, filling the whole end of the street with their sickly gleaming armour. They marched in perfect lockstep, with inhuman timing and precision. The sound of their metal boots hammering down in unison filled the air, and echoed back from the surrounding buildings. Their arms swung heavily at their sides, their hands clenched into metal fists, and not one of them had a face on the front of his bitter yellow helmet. I’d never understood before just how disturbing that could be, even though I’d used the same trick myself, for so long. To look at something you know can see you, even though it doesn’t have any eyes . . . The False Knights crashed to a halt as the last of them emerged from the Gateway. Standing so still, in their ranks, looking straight at me, and Molly.

The surviving MI 13 soldiers at that end of the street turned to run. One look at the False Knights was all it took to persuade them they wanted nothing more to do with any of this. Even their officers couldn’t bully or threaten them into holding their ground. I couldn’t see Diment anywhere, or his secret masters. No doubt they were watching, from somewhere they thought was safe. But nothing and no one was safe now, not with False Knights in the world.

“I was afraid of that,” I said, as steadily as I could. My mouth was dry, my lips numb. I had to swallow hard a few times before I could continue. My skin was crawling under my armour, and I could feel my heart hammering painfully fast. “At the battle there was one company of False Knights who just vanished. My family never did find out what happened to them. Well, I guess we know now, don’t we? Those damned fools running MI 13 opened up a Time Gate and brought them here. They have no idea what they’ve unleashed on this world . . .”