is, and not as most people think it is. We both concentrated, and the torcs around our throats extended long filaments of strange matter, that shot up the sides of our faces to form really quite stylish golden sunglasses over our eyes. And through these special lenses we Saw the Magnificat as it really was-in every awful detail.
Major security defences surrounded the hotel on every side, roiling and spitting on the air in tight little bundles of spite and malevolence. Force fields, magic screens, avoidance spells and Move along nothing to see here influences. Floating curses, proximity mindwipes, soul scramblers, and bottle demons lying buried under the hotel patio like so many red-eyed trap-door spiders. Screaming ghosts with terrible teeth and claws, just waiting to be unleashed, and a whole bunch of really nasty transformation spells just waiting to be activated. All kinds of nastiness, spreading out from the hotel in overlapping layers of appalling vileness. And up on the roof of the hotel…
'Oh bloody hell,' I said. 'Luther, do you See what I See, up on the roof? Is that what I think it is? It is, isn't it? They've only got a bloody dragon up there!'
'And not just any old dragon,' said Luther, craning his head right back. 'Not one of those stupid and extremely ugly beasts the elves ride around on. That… is one of the Great Old Beasts of England. That is the Lampton Wyrm.'
'You have got to be kidding,' I said. 'Really? Who'd be crazy enough to dig that old horror up, and let it loose in the world? Is it tied down? Tell me it's tied down! Tell you what, I'll start running and you try and keep up.'
'Look at the rear left leg,' said Luther, entirely unperturbed. 'See the nice glowing chain? That's an elf binding. It'll hold, for the duration of the auction. After that, well, they must have some plan in mind.'
'It's times like these when I wish I'd paid more attention in class,' I said. 'I know we covered Old Beasts, but I'm pretty sure there was a girls' volleyball match going on outside the window that afternoon… The Lampton Wyrm was the one where if you cut it up, the pieces just joined back together again, right? How did they kill it, in the end?'
'They drowned it. Dug a great pit, filled it full of water, dragged the Wyrm into the pit and held it under till it drowned. Of course it didn't stay dead, but they covered the pit over with a really heavy-duty seal, and locked it in place with really powerful magics. So the Wyrm just kept on waking up and drowning again, over and over, for centuries. Not that I feel in any way sorry for it; the Lampton Wyrm killed thousands of people before it was stopped.'
'I think we can safely say it isn't in a? very good mood, now it's out,' I said. 'I'm almost sure it's looking right at us and I do wish it wouldn't. How in hell are we supposed to deal with something like that?'
'Well, here's my plan,' said Luther. 'It's up on the roof, so let's not go up there. Let us not, in fact, go anywhere near the bloody thing.'
'Good plan,' I said. 'I really like that plan. I want to marry that plan and have its babies.'
'You're weird,' said Luther.
We looked some more at the Magnificat Hotel. The strange matter sunglasses allowed us to See all four sides at once, in as much detail as we needed. And more and more defences kept popping up, revealing themselves openly, as though defying us to do anything about them.
'There are dimensional gates attached to all the outer doors,' I said. 'Preprogrammed to send you Somewhere Else if you open a door without the right passWord.'
'Standard operating procedure, when you're running an auction half the unnatural world would love to gate- crash,' murmured Luther. 'Crank your Sight up to full, and take a look inside the hotel.'
I concentrated, and the golden shades sent my Sight into overdrive. The outer facade of the Magnificat seemed to leap forward, filling my vision, and then I plunged through and in, looking around the deserted lobby. It was all very fine and luxurious, with no staff anywhere, and no security guards in sight. Presumably the auction people had a lot of faith in their outer defences. I would have. But there were no obvious guardians or booby traps, so I sent my Sight shooting up through the hotel, floor by floor. I spotted the odd group of security guards here and there, oblivious to my mental presence, all of them heavily armed but fairly relaxed. They weren't expecting any real trouble until the auction was up and running. But the sheer number of guards increased steadily as my Sight ascended, until finally I reached the top floor, and the site of the auction.
The function rooms had all been opened up and combined into one great display area. There were people everywhere, moving back and forth, transporting objects, and getting everything in order. The security guards just stood at their stations and watched them do it. Because the guards were alive, and the auction people weren't. They would probably have looked quite normal to the unaided eye, but Seen through my golden shades, they were quite definitely dead. Zombies. They hefted and carried, they set things in motion, they checked lights and items and cargo manifests, and not one of them had a soul. The did have quite colourful auras, which showed they were being remote-controlled by overseeing minds elsewhere. The Really Old Curiosity Shoppe people never appeared in public, even at their own auctions. All the staff, and even the auctioneer himself, would be dead men walking, remote-controlled from a safe distance through a series of cutouts, so none of the controllers could be identified or tracked down. And given that they were, when you got right down to it, just a bunch of thieves… it was basic common sense.
They only ever spoke through the mouths of the dead, so even their voices could never be identified.
'The security guards are all local boys,' Luther's voice murmured in my ear. 'Familiar faces, no one special. Guns and muscle, from off the rack. You can hire thousands just like these. Only here to place themselves between the more valuable items and any possibility of damage, even if the poor fools don't know it. Hmmm. That's odd. I can't seem to See any of the auction items clearly. Can you?'
'No,' I said, after a moment. 'Every time I concentrate on a specific item, it goes all blurry. Which means they're hidden behind stealth screens. Really powerful screens, if our Sight can't punch through. We can't even be sure the Apocalypse Door is in place yet.'
'It's there somewhere,' said Luther. 'Or Doctor Delirium wouldn't have committed himself to a personal appearance… Wait a minute. Hold everything. Something's happening on the floor below.'
I pulled my Sight down a floor to match his, just in time to see Doctor Delirium and his troops appear through a dimensional door. It wasn't much of a door, just a by the numbers rip in space and time, forced open through brute force and energy, but it succeeded where a more sophisticated gateway might not have. The Magnificat's defences were targeted at a much better class of intruder. This attack was so basic it sneaked in under the radar. The Doctor hurried through, followed by twenty or thirty heavily armed and armoured men from his own special fighting force. You could always recognise members of Doctor Delirium's private army, because he made them all wear his own special black and gold uniforms. They looked like escapees from a production of The Pirates of Penzance, if the costume lady had been on crack that week. Still, they established a perimeter and took up positions like they knew what they were doing, and they held their guns like they knew how to use them. A mercenary is still a mercenary, even if he is dressed like a dick.
The floor's security guards were no problem. A nerve gas grenade had preceded Doctor Delirium through the dimensional door, and the guards went down almost immediately, without managing a single warning shot. Presumably the Doctor had protected his people against the gas in advance. The man was a genius with chemicals, when he could be bothered.
'This is why the Doctor wasn't worried about being outbid on the Apocalypse Door,' said Luther. 'The sneaky bastard's come early, to grab it for himself. Why is he so keen on this item, Eddie? Getting the Really Old Curiosity Shoppe people mad at you is never a good idea, if you like having your organs on the inside. They have a bad temper, a long reach, and they bear grudges for generations. What is this Apocalypse Door, that Doctor Delirium's ready to risk everything to get his hands on it?'
'The clue's probably in the question,' I said. 'I'm guessing the Door is a lot more Apocalyptic than we've given it credit for. And the Doctor wants it because… he's not getting any younger. All his great plans have come to nothing, mostly thanks to us, and his name has become a joke. He's a delusional scientific mastermind, but he gets no respect. He's fed up being laughed at, he's mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore.'
'Midlife crisis, in other words,' said Luther.
'Exactly. He has a scheme to rule the world, and all he needs to make it work is the Apocalypse Door.'
'A real scheme?' said Luther. 'One that would actually work?'
'Yeah,' I said. 'And if my arse had teeth it could play the banjo. A real plan? Come on, this is Doctor Delirium we're talking about.'
'Even an idiot can get lucky, if he has a powerful enough weapon,' said Luther.
