And then he stopped and couldn’t say any more. His face had gone pale and sweaty, and his hands were shaking. I knew why. We all did. He was remembering his time in the ghoulvilles, towns taken over by the Loathly Ones and removed into a separate reality. Terrible places. Sanity destroying. Soul destroying. We all knew Harry had been affected by what he’d seen there, what he’d had to do there. None of us said anything. A lot of Droods came back spiritually wounded from fighting in the ghoulvilles. Those who did come back.
“Roger’s not there anymore,” I said, carefully. “You heard Virgil; he and the others teleported out.”
“I have to know,” said Harry. “I have to be sure. I need to talk to him. . . .”
“Of course you do,” I said. “But there’ll be another time. I have to go into Little Stoke. You have to stay here. You’re needed in the War Room to help Callan and the Armourer work out how this was done. And there’s always the chance Roger might return here to the Hall. You need to be here for that.”
“Why would Roger come back?” said Callan, to show he was keeping up with the rest of us.
“Because Dusk doesn’t know who was watching him on the hilltop,” said the Sarjeant. “The hellspawn doesn’t know that we know he’s a traitor.”
“We don’t know that!” said Harry. “And Roger would know who was watching him. He’s always been very . . . gifted. He won’t come back here because he’d know I’d be waiting for him. I wouldn’t shoot him on sight, and I wouldn’t let anyone else do it. I’d want to talk to him. Hear his side. But if he really has joined the conspiracy . . . he hasn’t betrayed just me; he’s betrayed my family. His family, as much as mine.”
“No one would expect you to go up against Roger,” I said.
“I would,” said Harry. “If he has turned traitor . . . I will kill him. Anything for the family.”
“I’m going to Little Stoke,” I said. Because it needed doing, and because I knew a trip into that disturbed place would destroy Harry. So, tired as I was after the arms fair and Ammonia Vom Acht, it was all down to me. Again.
“You are not going in on your own,” Molly said firmly. “I’m going with you.”
“Not a good idea . . .” I said carefully.
“You never take me anywhere,” Molly said cheerfully. “You wouldn’t last ten minutes in that place without me to watch your back, and you know it.”
“We do have other field agents in the family,” said the Sarjeant. “You don’t have to do this, Edwin.”
“I’m the only field agent who’s right here, right now, with experience operating inside ghoulvilles,” I said. “Who else is there?”
The Sarjeant-at-Arms looked at Callan, who shrugged uncomfortably. “We have five field agents currently operating in England, but none of them could get back to the Hall inside three or four hours.”
“And even then, you’d still have to wait for the Armourer to find a way into the dark circle,” I said. “Whereas I . . . have the Merlin Glass.”
“Hold hard,” said the Armourer, looking up from his work. “There’s always the chance that if you use the Glass to open a door between here and there, what’s inside the town might burst through into Drood Hall!”
“I would never let that happen,” said Ethel, a touch haughtily. “I guarantee the integrity of Drood Hall against any and all threats. Trust me. I’m a doctor.”
“I still think you should rest, Eddie,” said the Armourer. “Let me design something to protect you, give you an edge. . . .”
“There isn’t time, Uncle Jack,” I said. “We have to sort this mess out before it starts spreading.”
“You’re right,” said the Armourer. “Get us all the information you can. And, Molly, don’t let him do anything too dumb in there.”
“Damn right,” said Molly.
“I don’t have anything useful to offer you,” said the Armourer. “And this bloody thing is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. . . . Remember your armour is equipped to study your surroundings and record everything it encounters. Knowledge can be ammunition in a situation like this. So bring back as much data as you can.”
I looked at him for a moment. “Do you have anything, any weapon that could do what the Satanists did in Little Stoke?”
“No,” said the Armourer. “Not a damned thing. Not even in the Armageddon Codex. What has been done in that town is a crime against reality itself.”
“How long before you could come up with some kind of defence?” said the Sarjeant.
“Depends on what kind of information Eddie brings back,” said the Armourer. “So let’s stop wasting his time with unnecessary chatter. Eddie, go.”
“Got it, Uncle Jack,” I said. But I still hesitated and looked at Molly. “You’ve seen what’s happening in the town. There’s no guarantee that Drood armour will be enough to protect me. And you don’t even have that.”
“I have been to Heaven and Hell and Limbo,” said Molly. “And a whole bunch of other really extreme places not even dreamt of in your limited philosophies. I can survive this.”
“Of course you can,” I said. “I’d bet on you against the whole damned universe.”
“You say the sweetest things sometimes,” said Molly.
I activated the Merlin Glass and opened up a doorway into what remained of Little Stoke, while everyone else retreated to what they hoped was a safe distance. A lot of people hid behind things. Like that would make any difference. A series of violent images swept across the full-size Glass, flashing by so fast I couldn’t keep up with them. Stars and flames and blindingly bright lights; dark, monstrous shapes rearing up to look in my direction; the whole physical world grown hideously soft and leprous; all of it under a sky the colour of dried blood. I looked away for a moment, to rest my eyes, and found Harry hadn’t retreated with the others.
“You don’t have to do this, Eddie.”
“Yes, I do, Harry,” I said. “It’s the job.”
He nodded briefly. I turned to Molly, who was peering into the Merlin Glass, fascinated.
“You ready, girl?”
“I came out of the womb ready.”
“I can believe that. Probably demanding a stiff drink and a harsh word with the midwife. Let’s do this, before one of us gets a rush of common sense to the head.”
“When has that ever happened?”
We laughed briefly, I armoured up and we both stepped through the Merlin Glass. Out of the sane and sensible world into a place where reality had been broken. With malice aforethought, the bastards.
Stepping into what was left of Little Stoke was like being clubbed around the head with a baseball bat soaked in LSD. Everything was wrong, different, corrupted . . . and constantly changing. The ground surged and rocked under my feet, rising and falling like a ship at sea. I glared about me, but it was hard to see anything clearly through the disturbed air. My armour was doing its best to protect and insulate me from my surroundings, swiftly adapting to cope with this new, ever-changing world. I could actually feel my armour straining as it thickened and improved itself, moment by moment. My second skin was under constant assault from a world that hated it.
Gravity came and went, fluctuating wildly, so that I felt light as air one moment, and as though I had a mountain on my back the next. Nothing was constant or dependable. Except my armour. It pushed back at the world, refusing to be affected or altered in any part, and I stood straight and tall under a bloody sky, safe and solid and untouched by anything Little Stoke could throw at me.
I looked around for Molly and found she was standing right beside me, but now floating quite happily in midair. She stood on nothing, defying the uncertain ground, surrounded by a shimmering field of unnatural forces. She looked down at me and I nodded briefly. She gave me a thumbs-up, and I went back to studying the surroundings. It was hard to get a hold on anything. Whichever way I looked, nothing made sense. Directions seemed to snap back and forth, so that left and right changed places or swirled around, and even up and down weren’t always where I thought they should be. Little Stoke did remind me of a ghoulville, as I’d expected; but this town was worse, much worse. Someone had studied ghoulvilles, and learned from them, improved on them. The sheer psychic pressure of not being able to depend on anything was almost overwhelming. All I could feel was loss, and horror, and growing hysteria. My sanity was taking a real beating. Part of me wanted to fall to the ground, curl up in a foetal ball and pray for it all to go away. But I couldn’t do that. I was a Drood, and I had a job to do.
I looked up. “Molly, is this Hell?”
