'Eddie, lad! About time you turned up! Come and see me afterwards; I've got some great new gadgets for you to try out.'
That was always going to be a mixed blessing, given that so many of his new gadgets had a tendency to go boom! when least expected, but I smiled gamely.
'Thank you, Uncle Jack. You always have the best toys.'
Harry Drood, cousin Harry, looked at me thoughtfully from his chair set at the Matriarch's left hand. Harry always liked to be as close as possible to power. He'd actually run the family for a time, while I was away, and a right dog's breakfast he'd made of it. He was a pretty good field agent in his own right, but he'd only ever seen that as a means to an end. Harry believed in Harry much more than he ever believed in the Droods. Still, put him with his back to the wall and no way out, and he could be as brave and heroic as needed. His father was, after all, Uncle James, the legendary Grey Fox. Perhaps the greatest Drood ever. Harry leaned back in his chair and rocked easily back and forth on the rear legs as he studied me silently through his owlish wire-rimmed glasses. He'd already heard about the debacle at the Magnificat, and the loss of the Apocalypse Door, and he couldn't wait to hit me with every unfortunate detail, while he figured out how to turn it to his best advantage. Because that was what he did.
'Just once,' Harry said calmly, 'it would be nice if you could bring us back some good news after a mission, Edwin.'
'You're allowed to lose? the occasional battle, as long as you win the war,' I said, meeting his gaze squarely.
'Lose enough battles and you run out of war,' said Harry.
'You want a slap?' I said. 'Only I've got one handy…'
'Edwin!' the Matriarch said sharply.
'There will be no violence in this chamber unless I start it,' said the final member of the Advisory Council: the Sarjeant-at-Arms. He sat to attention on his chair, a big ugly brute of a man with a face like a fist and muscles on his muscles. 'Sudden and unexpected punishment is my domain. So take your seat at the table, Edwin, before I find it necessary to discipline you.'
'Like to see you try, Cedric,' I said, as I seated myself at the end of the table, facing the Matriarch. 'Really would like to see you try. I kicked the crap out of the last Sarjeant-at-Arms, and he had years more viciousness under his belt than you.'
'Yes,' said the Sarjeant. 'But I'm sneakier.'
I figured honours were about even, but I changed the subject anyway, just in case. 'Where's William? He's still part of the Council, isn't he? Surely we need the Librarian here, if we're to discuss the significance of the Apocalypse Door?'
'William is still away with the faeries, as often as not,' said the Matriarch, regretfully. 'I had hoped letting him live in the Old Library, away from the pressures of family life, might help to settle and stabilise him, but I can't honestly say I've seen any signs of improvement.'
'The Librarian is a looney tune,' said Harry. 'Crazier than ever, if anything. He only appears at Council meetings through spiritual projections, insists his assistant Rafe acts as his food taster, and keeps wittering on about Something unseen that lives in the Old Library with him and steals his socks. It's well past time we retired him, and let Rafe take over as Librarian.'
'William is a better Librarian crazy than most other men sane,' the Armourer said stubbornly. 'It's amazing how much that man knows, when he can remember it. No one knows the Old Library like he does. But he is only a part-time member of the Council now, Eddie. We've been forced to consider bringing in new members.'
'Fresh blood,' said Harry, with entirely too much relish in his voice.
'Howard has been in charge of Operations for some time now,' said the Matriarch. 'And done an excellent job. All right, he is over-bearingly arrogant, and his company is best enjoyed in very small portions, but he's very good at thinking outside the box. We can always insist he sits next to the Sarjeant, and issue the Sarjeant with a Taser. Being part of the Council might actually help teach him how to play nicely with others. Then there's Callan, who's been a real success as Head of the War Room. And yes, I'll admit that some days it does seem like he fell out of the sarcasm tree and hit every branch on the way down, but we can live with that. We've lived with worse.' She glared at me. 'I've allowed you to distract us long enough, Edwin. It is time to talk about what happened in Los Angeles. Why didn't you report here directly?'
'I needed some downtime,' I said.
'So you could think up some excuses for your many failures on this mission?' said Harry.
'You always expect everyone to think like you, Harry,' I said. 'I was only supposed to infiltrate an auction before it started, and liberate a single item. No one said anything about having to take on two heavily armed armies, and the Lampton Wyrm! I had to improvise. All right, the Apocalypse Door has disappeared, but this is Doctor Delirium we're talking about! A mad scientist going through a midlife crisis. Anyone else would have bought a Porsche. How serious can this be?'
'The total destruction of the Magnificat Hotel is extremely serious!' said the Matriarch. 'If only because so many people outside the family will have to be involved in explaining it away and cleaning up the mess! You and Luther not only failed to stop the two armed forces from reaching the Apocalypse Door, you couldn't even identify one of them!? And the Door has to be important, Edwin, and dangerous, or so many people wouldn't be ready to risk so much just to get their hands on it. There aren't many important and dangerous devices in this world that the family doesn't know about, and that is in itself disturbing. Armourer!'
'Just resting my eyes, Matriarch!' He grinned at me. 'Did you really turn the Lampton Wyrm inside out?'
'Yes, Uncle Jack.'
'Good boy. Love to have seen it. Yes, Matriarch, I'm getting to it… Ah. Yes. There's no information at all about the Apocalypse Door in either of the family libraries. Of course, William and Rafe are still busy cataloguing and indexing the contents of the Old Library, so there's still a good chance something will turn up… But given the sheer scale of the Old Library, that could take some time. And time is what we don't have; yes, Matriarch, I am aware of that. Where was I? Oh yes. The two of them are making important new finds all the time, but we need to know what this bloody Door is now, or at least before Doctor Delirium makes use of it.'
'We have some time,' I said. 'Doctor Delirium always makes threats first, just to show he has the power. And so he can demand his pay off in postage stamps. Not a bad investment, given the current economic conditions. Unless his midlife crisis is really kicking in, and he wants respect more than he wants payment. He might make use of the Door briefly, just to show he can.'
'We need to have an answer in place before he tries anything,' the Matriarch said heavily.
'Normally we'd just grab someone low down in his organisation, and squeeze the information out of them,' said Harry. 'But he's called all of his people back to his main base in the Amazon rain forest, nailed all his doors shut and set fire to the moat. Full security measures and state-of-the-art defences. We took over a CIA surveillance satellite, and tasked it to give us coverage of the area for forty minutes. Got some really good images. No one can get anywhere near his base now without setting off all kinds of alarms and booby traps. No one's allowed in or out, until this business is over. We could try bombing him again…'
'No we couldn't,' the Armourer said firmly. 'If you'd studied the satellite images properly, you'd have seen the brand-new force field generators. I don't know who sold him the offworld tech, but it's prime stuff. Very powerful. Doctor Delirium may be delusional, but he isn't stupid. He knew we'd be coming after him, and he's clearly learned from past mistakes.'
'I want to know where and how Doctor Delirium learned of the Apocalypse Door,' said the Matriarch. 'Who could have told him of a device so obscure even we've never heard of it? The Doctor rarely leaves his base in the Amazon, and the only research he's ever shown any interest in concerned his own field of expertise… So someone from outside must have contacted him, told him about the Door, and where he could find it.'
'Take it a step further,' said the Armourer, scowling fiercely. 'Why didn't these people make use of the Door themselves? Did they intend for the Doctor to do all the dirty work of grabbing the Door from the auction, with the intention of taking it away from him later? Did they know the other army was going to show up?'
'Maybe the auction people set it up themselves, for the insurance?' I said.
The Matriarch looked at me. 'If you don't have anything useful to contribute, Edwin…'
'Who is there out there,' said the Armourer, 'who knows more than we do?'
'Even though the family doesn't like to admit it,' said Harry, 'there are a number of well-informed people and
