Live and Let Drood: A Secret Histories Novel (5 page)

“This room is trying to tell us something, Eddie, and I’m pretty sure
Get the hell out of here while you still can
would be a fairly accurate translation.”

“Hell with that,” I said. “It’s taken long enough, but I think I’ve finally found a clue. There’s no way I could be wrong about how you get down into the family Armoury. I’ve been sneaking down there to pester Uncle Jack since I was ten years old.”

“Maybe they made a new entrance while you were gone,” said Molly, moving quickly sideways to avoid a stream of dust falling from the ceiling. “Maybe they blew up the old one.”

“I haven’t been gone that long,” I said. “You couldn’t rush a major change like that through the Works Committee in less than a twelve-month. You don’t know what bureaucracy is until you’ve been part of a family that’s been around for centuries.”

“But the trapdoor is intact,” said Molly. “Which would suggest…”

“Yes,” I said. “It would.”

I grabbed the heavy iron ring set into the top of the wooden trapdoor
and hauled it open with an effort. It started to slam backwards onto the floor, and Molly and I grabbed it at the last moment and lowered it carefully down. More dust was falling in thick streams from the ceiling, and I was getting a strong feeling that one good slam might be enough to bring the whole thing down. Once, I wouldn’t have given a damn, but not having my armour was making me cautious. The trapdoor opening revealed an unfamiliar set of stone steps leading down into gloom. Old, scuffed steps, polished smooth by much hard use. The stairs had clearly been there a long time. I led the way down, with Molly treading close on my heels and peering over my shoulder. I was just as fascinated as she was. We were in new territory now, and for the first time I began to wonder if things really were as they appeared to be.

The stairs gave entrance to the Armoury, which looked exactly as I remembered it. The family had set up its Armoury in what used to be, centuries earlier, the old wine cellars. The heavy, specially reinforced blast-proof door was intact, but once again it hung partway open. I squeezed through the gap between the door and the frame, with Molly pressing so close behind me that she was breathing heavily down my neck.

The lights flickered on as we entered the Armoury proper. It’s really just a long series of interconnected stone chambers with bare plastered walls, curved ceilings high above, and mile upon mile of multicoloured wiring tacked carelessly into place across the walls, crisscrossing in patterns that may or may not have meant something to somebody at some time. All the overhead fluorescent lights were working, but I realised immediately that I couldn’t hear the usual strained sounds of the air-conditioning. The air was stale, but there was no smell of smoke or sign of fire damage.

“I don’t see any signs of a firefight,” said Molly, looking quickly about her. “No bullet holes, no energy burns or anything more extreme to suggest the people here fought back…”

“No,” I said. “But there has been a hell of a lot of looting. Look at all the gaps.…I’m not seeing half the things I should be seeing. No computers, no weapons. Even the shooting range is empty. It’s all so quiet.…
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the Armoury this quiet before. There was always something going on; Uncle Jack or his assistants working on some new way to blow themselves and everybody else up. It’s eerie.…”

I walked slowly between deserted workstations and abandoned testing grounds that should have been full of loud noises and general excitement as Uncle Jack’s technicians happily risked their own lives and others’ testing appalling new weapons of mass disturbance. Nothing had been destroyed in the Armoury, unlike in the War Room or the Operations Room, but the enemy had stripped the place clean. They hadn’t been interested in precious pieces of art that would have sold for millions, but state-of-the-art weapons? Those were different. I checked everywhere, but there were no golden-armoured bodies, no heads on spikes, not even a splash of dried blood. A few things had been overturned here and there, but no signs of any struggle. Which was just…wrong. No matter what the odds or the threats, Uncle Jack and his lab rats would have fought to the last to keep the Armoury out of the hands of our enemies. Hell, Uncle Jack would have blown the whole place up before he’d risk letting Drood weapons fall into the wrong hands. So why didn’t he?

I stopped and looked about me in frustration. “This would have broken Uncle Jack’s heart,” I said finally. “To see his precious Armoury stripped bare…”

Molly nodded understandingly. “The Armoury was always his pride and joy. Eddie, the information in his head would have made him invaluable. Do you think… ?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to think anymore. Hello. What’s this?”

I knelt down beside a workstation. Something had caught my eye, but I wasn’t sure what. It turned out to be a small black blob on the floor. Molly crouched down beside me, looked at the blob and then looked at me.

“All right; I’ll bite. What’s so significant about a small black blobby thing? What is it?”

“It’s a portable door,” I said. “Uncle Jack used to hand them out like
travel-sickness pills to every agent going out in the field. Just slap one of these against any flat surface, and hey, presto! Instant door!”

“So why did he stop handing them out?” said Molly, instantly cautious.

“Something about unacceptable side effects,” I said, weighing the blob in my hand. “And if the Armourer thought they were unacceptable…This must have been overlooked.”

“Take it anyway,” said Molly. “We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

“Damn right, I’m taking it,” I said. I slipped the thing into my pocket, straightened up and looked around me. “It’s useful, but it’s not a weapon. I want something that goes
bang!
in a horribly destructive and disturbing way.”

And then my head snapped round suddenly as a Voice said
Eddie!
I looked back and forth, but there was no one else in the Armoury. I looked at Molly.

“Tell me you heard that, too.”

“Of course I heard it! Someone said your name in a seriously spooky way. But I scanned the whole place before we came in here, and I am telling you we’re the only ones here. No other life signs anywhere, and that includes lab specimens. So who…Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I’m getting something.…”

She moved slowly between the empty workstations, turning her head back and forth, scowling fiercely as she searched for something she could sense but not see. I was concentrating on the Voice. It had definitely sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it. I knew I’d heard someone call me by my name in just that tone of voice before, but…Molly stopped suddenly before a pile of junk on the floor and cried out triumphantly. She knelt down and stuck both hands into the pile before I could stop her, and pulled out the Merlin Glass. She jumped up to show it to me, brandishing the small silver-backed hand mirror.

“Result! This is more like it, Eddie!”

“Could you please stop waving it around so…heartily,” I said carefully. “That is a very powerful and very dangerous object, and this is the
Armoury, after all. The Glass was worrying enough as it was, before it got broken in Castle Shreck, and God alone knows what state it’s in now after Uncle Jack’s been tinkering with it.”

Molly sniffed airily but wasted no time in pressing the Glass into my hands. I accepted it cautiously and looked it over. The Glass had been created for the Drood family by Merlin Satanspawn, way back in the day, and it had many useful properties. But it had been very badly damaged during the Drood assault on the Immortals at Castle Shreck, to the point where it didn’t work at all anymore. The reflective surface had been cracked from side to side, and given that a whole lot of people thought there might be something or even someone trapped within the reflection, I made a point of handing the damaged mirror over to the Armourer first chance I got, with strict instructions to drop it somewhere secure, like a black hole, if he couldn’t mend the thing and make it safe to use. Frankly, I’d never expected to see the thing again.

But here it was, back in my hand. And completely uncracked. The Glass was clear and unmarked, as though it had never seen any damage at all.…

“I didn’t know the Merlin Glass could speak,” Molly said doubtfully. “Let alone call out to you.”

“Maybe it never had anything to say before,” I said. “But this is a magical instrument, after all, made by Merlin himself.”

“You said the mirror was cracked. Now it isn’t. Could it have repaired itself?”

“Who knows?” I said. “I don’t think anyone in the family knows for sure anymore why Merlin gave the Glass to us in the first place. Or what it was supposed to do. I never did get around to reading all the instructions Uncle Jack wrote out for me. I have to say…I don’t think the Armourer did this. I mean, he’s good, yes, but he’s no Merlin Satanspawn.”

I hefted the hand mirror thoughtfully, turning it back and forth and checking every detail. Something about it didn’t look right, didn’t feel right. I’d held it often enough, used it often enough, to know that
the weight and heft of it in my hand now was subtly, unnervingly different. Wrong. I said as much to Molly.

“Are you sure?” she said immediately. “I mean, it has been repaired. There are bound to be some differences.…”

“It’s not that. I’ve handled the bloody thing often enough to know that something’s not right about it! It’s never something you just take for granted; with an artefact this powerful, it’s like juggling a live hand grenade every time you use it.”

I turned the hand mirror over and studied the design on the back. The silver scrollwork was definitely different. I showed it to Molly, and she traced the raised edges with a fingertip.

“There’s some kind of inscription worked into the design, but I’m damned if I can make head or tail of it,” she said finally. “Not Celtic, not Sumerian…not Kandarian or Enochian…It is vaguely familiar, but I can’t get my head around it.”

“The design has changed,” I said. “But I couldn’t tell you how.”

“Put it away for now,” said Molly. “It’s enough that we’ve got it and the enemy missed it. We’re here to look for weapons. Remember?”

I slipped the Merlin Glass into the special pocket dimension I keep in one of my jacket pockets. I always like to have somewhere secure about me to store dangerous things. If only so I can get at them quickly in an emergency and throw them at other people. I breathed a little more easily with the Merlin Glass safely stored away, and looked at Molly.

“Speaking of horribly powerful things that the world is undoubtedly better off without…I’ve been thinking about the Forbidden Weapons. I need to be sure they’re still secure within the Armageddon Codex.”

Molly looked at me sharply. “You don’t really think the enemy could have got into that. Do you?”

“I don’t know what to think anymore,” I said. “But given that we are talking about weapons so powerful my family locked them away, only to be used when reality itself is under threat…”

“We should take a look,” said Molly.

So I led the way, to the very far end of the Armoury, to the final and
very off-limits stone chamber. The Armageddon Codex is kept in a very private, very separate pocket dimension, for maximum security. To get to it you have to pass through the Lion’s Jaws—a giant stone carving of a lion’s snarling head, complete with mane, perfect in every detail. Not stylised in any way, it looks like the real thing, only some twenty feet tall and almost as wide. The Lion’s Jaws are carved out of a dark, blue-veined stone, so long ago that no one now remembers who did the work. It’s a lion to the life; the eyes seem to glare, the mouth seems to snarl and the whole thing seems ready to lunge forward at any moment and have your head off. To open the Codex, you have to pass through the Jaws, and if you don’t have the proper clearances…at best, they won’t open. Rumour has it that if you so much as put your hand in the Lion’s Jaws and you’re not pure of heart, the Jaws will bite your hand right off. The Armourer had assured me that this was just a story to keep young Droods from messing with the thing for a dare, but I wasn’t sure I believed him. The Lion’s Jaws always looked hungry.

“You want to try opening it?” said Molly, who knew no fear.

“I don’t have the key.”

“Who needs a key when you have me?”

“No, Molly,” I said very firmly. “I’m not doing anything that might upset it without the Armourer present. He’s the only one who knows the correct Words to access the Codex. I just need you to use your magics to make sure no one’s pressured him into opening it. Make sure the Jaws are still closed and the seals haven’t been compromised. You can do that, can’t you?”

Molly sniffed loudly and gave me a withering glare, which wasn’t actually an answer. She struck a witchy pose, ran her hands through a series of smooth mystical gestures, and muttered meaningfully under her breath. I’m pretty sure a lot of it was just for show, to make a point, but I had enough sense not to ask. Molly stopped abruptly and shook her head firmly.

“The Jaws are still firmly closed. No one’s even tried to open them. And if you could See the layers upon layers of protections laid down on this thing, you wouldn’t try to open it, either. This is some seriously
strong shit, Eddie. If the enemy had tried to force their way in, or even just meddle with the seals, all that would be left of them would be a series of greasy stains on the floor here.”

“Good to know,” I said. “All that matters is that the Armageddon Codex is secure.”

“Yes, but we can’t get to them, either!” said Molly. “The weapons of the Codex are lost forever! No more Oath Breaker, Winter’s Sorrow, the Time Hammer and the Juggernaut Jumpsuit! The most powerful weapons in the world…Just think what we could have done with them!”

“Exactly,” I said. “The mood I’m in, I couldn’t be trusted with them. I would blow the world apart, if that was the only way of taking my enemy down. No. It’s better this way. With the Armourer…gone, no one can get to them. I think the world will be just that little bit safer, with the Armageddon Codex locked away forever. It’s enough…that our enemies don’t have them.”