Book 2 - Daemons Are Forever (52 page)

“The Stones look to be almost half a mile away; is that really the closest you can get us?”

“This isn’t a nest, as such,” I said. “Not a ghoulville. Just an underground base surrounded by layer upon layer of the best scientific and magical protections money can buy. We wouldn’t even know it was there if the tower wasn’t poking out of it, so to speak. You’ll have to sneak up on them. Unless you’ve changed your mind about going…”

“Of course I haven’t! It’s just… I don’t like this. It feels like a trap.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “But what kind of trap could Manifest Destiny put together that could hold Harry Drood, Roger Morningstar, and two hundred good men and women in golden armour?”

Harry smiled slightly. “You really suck at the inspirational thing, you know that?” He looked at Roger. “Let’s go, bro.”

“Oh please,” said Roger. “You know I don’t do that macho stuff.”

Harry and Roger led their strike force through the Merlin Glass, and I immediately closed the gateway behind them. Truman was a sneaky bastard, and I wouldn’t put anything past him, including deliberately revealing his tower’s presence as a way of tricking us into opening a gateway he could then take advantage of. But… it all seemed quiet enough. Molly took my arm and hugged it tightly to her side as we watched Harry hiss orders to his strike force to spread out across the open, grassy field, to as not to make a single target. Their golden armour gleamed dully in the sparse evening light. As far as the display screens could tell, they were alone in the field. Everything was still and quiet. And then Roger’s head snapped up and he pointed off into the gloom. And all around the scattered strike force, dark figures appeared from every direction at once, moving at impossible speeds.

The figures were human, but moving supernaturally quickly, impossibly fast, streaking across the open field at a pace even armoured Droods couldn’t have matched. The Droods turned to face them, lifting their weapons, but they almost seemed to be moving in slow motion compared to their attackers. As the figures closed in, their every movement was so fast as to make them just a blur on the display screens. Even their faces were unclear. They were just shapes, flashing through the evening gloom.

They swarmed all over the Droods, attacking and falling back almost before the armoured Droods could react. The attackers didn’t seem to possess any weapons, they just beat repeatedly at the golden armour with their bare hands. When that didn’t work, glowing knives appeared in their hands, and they struck again. And this time Droods went down as glowing blades sliced right through their armour to the men and women beneath. The strike force fell, one by one, unable to match their attackers’ speed even for a moment. Harry called his people back to make a defensive circle, but by the time he’d finished speaking half of them were already dead.

There was a clamour of raised voices in the War Room as everyone tried to come up with an explanation or a theory at once. Communications yelled at intelligence, who yelled at information, who yelled at records…and that was where the answer finally came from. Droods know everything, but sometimes it takes us a while to find it. Turned out there had been a report filed about the possibility of these people, from a file Callan found in Truman’s old deserted underground base. The Accelerated Men. Surgically altered, technologically enhanced, and drugged to the eyeballs, they were fanatics, burning up a lifetime’s energy to feed their unnatural speed. Dying to be fast. But then, Manifest Destiny has never been short of fanatics.

Giles Deathstalker arrived in the War Room, looking half dead but still determined, and had to be almost physically prevented from going in to help. I decided that. No point in throwing away more lives till we had some idea of what we were facing. Giles watched the display screens with avid interest. I almost expected him to take notes. It seemed he’d finally found something he hadn’t seen before, that he thought he could take back to his future time.

On the field overlooking Stonehenge, Harry’s remaining people had retreated to form a tight ring around Harry and Roger. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they were better able to defend themselves, and pushing their armour’s speed to its limit meant they could take out the occasional Accelerated Man with a vicious sword thrust. When these human lightning bolts crashed to the ground, dead at last, they looked like old men, their faces blasted by a terrible strain. The Droods fought on, still losing a man or woman here or there, the defensive circle slowly shrinking… Until suddenly the Accelerated Men began to stumble and fall, and collapse on the ground. At first I thought Roger had finally got some of his magic working, but it soon became clear that the Accelerated Men had just used up all their lives. They ran themselves to death.

Harry and Roger and the dozen or so remaining Droods looked slowly about them. Piled up around them lay dozens of old men with time-ravaged faces. They could never have been intended to last long. They were just a means to an end; to forcing the Droods back into one easy target. A terrible blast of light slammed aside the darkness, a light so strong and fierce it had presence and impact. The Droods started to scream. Roger clung onto Harry, shouting Words of Power that were almost washed away by the terrible light. And then, just like that, the light snapped off. Evening returned, but all the Droods were gone. Only Harry and Roger were left, clinging to each other. Harry was holding Roger up. The hellspawn was almost out on his feet, exhausted of strength and magic.

Only two men left, to save the world.

The War Room went mad again. It took a bit longer to get the answer this time, but it was no less disturbing when the Armourer finally supplied it. He admitted he was guessing, but it rang true. Truman had set up his new base under Stonehenge in order to seize control of the Soul of Albion, that impossibly powerful scrap of starstuff that fell out of the sky millennia ago. Truman had taken it for his own and used Loathly One technology to turn it into a weapon, a Soul Gun. He’d found a way to release its energy in short bursts, and anything bathed in the angry light of the Soul was banished, blasted right out of this reality.

The Droods we’d lost wouldn’t be coming back.

Harry and Roger were calling desperately for help. It slowly went quiet in the War Room as everyone looked to the Matriarch, and then to me, for orders. Martha stood very still, wringing her hands together, staring at the display screens. I thought hard. And while I was thinking, the Soul Gun fired again.

Roger must have sensed it coming, because he straightened up abruptly and pushed Harry behind him. The terrible light flared up, destroying the night, an illumination so overpowering it was beyond colour; something you experienced with your mind and soul rather than your eyes. But Roger stood up to the light and faced it down, standing between the light and the man he loved, defying the light of the Soul Gun with every last thing he had in him. The Soul Gun blazed, and Roger met its awful power with unflinching will.

Survival couldn’t have done it, or fear or anger, but this was love. And in the end the Soul Gun faded first.

The light snapped off, and Roger fell to the ground like a dead man. Harry put his arms around the unresponsive body and rocked him back and forth, crooning like a child. In the War Room, everyone looked at me. I took a deep breath.

“Giles, Molly, you’re with me. Martha, locate Mr. Stab and the Sarjeant-at-Arms and get them here. And someone find me Subway Sue. We’re going into Truman’s bunker to take out the tower, and for that we need the Damnation Way.”

A
nd it was all going so well… relatively speaking. Now it looked like all our previous successes had been for nothing, and I was going to have to pull off one of my last-minute, odds-defying, race-against-time-and-save-the-bloody-day miracles. I don’t think people appreciate just how much those things take out of me. On the big main display screen, Harry Drood was helping a dazed and shaken Roger Morningstar to his feet. Roger had just saved Harry’s life at the risk of his own, and it was hard to tell which of them looked the most surprised or shocked. They leaned on each other tiredly and spoke for a while, but we couldn’t hear what they were saying. The communications people worked frantically to try to restore sound, urged on by the Matriarch’s unwavering glare, but without success. Apparently when the Soul Gun went off it supersaturated the aether with other-dimensional energies. We were lucky we were still getting a picture, though the communications officer had enough sense to imply that rather than state it openly to the Matriarch. On the display screen, Roger and Harry headed uncertainly across the grassy field towards Stonehenge, presumably in search of an entrance to Truman’s underground bunker.

Just the two of them, against Truman and all his armies. I suppose people can always surprise you, especially if one of them is a half demon.

I did try to call them back, tell them reinforcements were on their way, but they couldn’t hear me. I even tried contacting them through Strange, but he couldn’t help either.

“It’s the tower,” he said, sounding strangely subdued. “It’s complete, Eddie, and almost ready to activate. It’s alive and aware, though not in any way you would recognise, and I can hear it thinking. It knows I’m watching. It comes from a stranger place than I do, an even higher dimension… The sheer power locked up in this thing is frightening. The Invaders, the Many-Angled Ones, the Hungry Gods are coming… and I’m scared, Eddie.”

“You could leave,” I said. “Get out of our world, withdraw to your own dimension.”

“And leave you and your family defenceless? No. That’s not the kind of other-dimensional presence I am. I like this world, and you people, and your weird way of doing things. You’re fun. The Hungry Gods would just eat you all up, and never even know what it was they were destroying. They’re vicious, evil, and basically quite stupid gods, when you get right down to it. I won’t desert you and your family, Eddie. Some things deserve to be fought, just on general principles.”

“Thank you, Ethel,” I said.

“Ah hell,” said Strange. “What are friends for?”

And that was when Subway Sue scurried into the War Room. She’d made an effort to clean herself up, including a new set of clothes that had clearly been intended for a rather larger person, but she still looked like she’d come to steal something, and stress and strain had put twenty years into her furtive face. To her credit, she was also trying hard not to look too smug at being proved right and necessary after all.

“Got the feeling you were looking for me,” she said, “So here I am. Would I be right in assuming that all your plans have gone tits up, and using the Damnation Way has become the only viable option?”

“Got it in one,” said Molly.

“Damn,” said Subway Sue. “Then we really are in deep shit.”

Molly took Sue over to one side to bring her up to date on what had been happening, and just how deep in it we really were, and I took the moment to think about exactly who I was going to take with us. Molly, of course, for a whole bunch of reasons. Not the Armourer; Uncle Jack would be needed here if we screwed this up. Giles Deathstalker, because he was the most impressive fighting man I’d ever met. And Mr. Stab, because he was…what he was, and because he was so bloody hard to kill. I would have liked Callan, but he was still out of it. So the final member of this little death-or-glory team would have to be the Sarjeant-at-Arms. Partly because I wanted someone with me I could trust to follow orders, and partly because I needed someone I could depend on to fight to the last drop of his blood, for the family. Someone…expendable.

I never used to think things like that, before I became head of the family.

I looked over at Molly and Subway Sue, chatting and giggling together like the old girlfriends they were, and it was a nice touch of normality in a severely strained world. It gave my heart a bit of a lift, to see that such small happinesses were still possible. But I still wasn’t too sure what to make of Sue’s Damnation Way. The name really didn’t inspire confidence. But, if it could drop us off right inside Truman’s bunker…one forceful pre-emptive strike could still take out the tower and put an end to all this. No more nests, no more towers, no more Loathly Ones.

Except for the one remaining inside Molly. Still eating into her body, her mind, her soul. What good to save the world, if I couldn’t save the woman I loved? With Molly gone, all I would have left would be the family, and a lifetime’s cold duties and responsibilities. There had to be a way to save her. There had to be. Because I didn’t want to live in a world without Molly.

She looked around, saw me looking at her, and smiled brightly. I smiled back. She hugged Sue quickly and came back to join me. She hugged me, and I held her close. I didn’t want to ever let her go, but I did. I couldn’t have her suspecting what I’d been thinking.

“You looked like you needed a hug,” Molly said briskly. “Hell, practically everyone here does. But I’m not that sort of girl. These days. I’ve been talking to Sue; she says she can summon up an entrance point to the Damnation Way any time you’re ready, but…she’s exhausted, Eddie. I mean, really out on her feet. It’s only guts and determination that’s holding her up. I don’t know where she went, or who she had to deal with, to obtain the secrets of the Damnation Way, but she paid a high price.”

“Then we need to get this moving as soon as possible,” I said. “Molly, I need Subway Sue to go with us. Is she up to that?”

“She says she is.” Molly scowled and shrugged. “I can’t tell her no. And you wouldn’t, would you, Eddie?”

“We need her,” I said steadily. “The world needs her.”

“Funny,” said Molly. “It never needed her before.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “And what about me? Do you need me with you, on this? Can you trust me so close to a tower, given my…condition?”

I smiled at her. “I’ll always need you, Molly. Do you really think I’d go anywhere without you?”