most of his mind off to me, but I found out about the Daemon and one or two other bits and pieces of useful information. The main thing though is that Crowley has given me a golden opportunity to rescue the Daemon.’
‘So come on, tell me: why is it so all-fired important that you abduct this Daemon? Are you mixed up with the Blood Brothers? Are they making you do this? Do they want the Daemon back in NoirVille so they can milk it of its blood?’
Ella sighed. ‘It’s too difficult to explain, Vanka. All I can tell you is it’s something I have to do; I have to help the Daemon escape Crowley and take her to NoirVille.’
‘I don’t like this, Ella. I think all this milking of Daemons is wrong.’
‘Vanka… please… you’ll just have to trust me: this has got nothing to do with stealing the Daemon’s blood. I don’t mean the Daemon any harm, quite the contrary in fact. But I do need your help to rescue her.’
Vanka shook his head. ‘It’s madness, you know. To kidnap a Daemon from under the nose of Heydrich is… madness. And even if you succeed, the SS will hunt you down.’
‘The Demi-Monde is a big place. And once I get to NoirVille I intend to disappear.’
Wasn’t that the truth?
‘Yeah, but anyone helping you will have to disappear too. They’ll need a new name, a new identity, a new home, a new life. To evade the SS will cost a lot of money. It’ll take a fortune in bribes and hush money.’
‘How much?’
He shrugged. ‘I dunno. Probably half a million guineas.’
‘Vanka, how would you like to earn a million guineas?’ enquired Ella quietly.
Vanka looked up from the doleful consideration of his near-empty glass of Solution. ‘A million guineas?’ He laughed. ‘No one’s got a million guineas. That’s more money than in all of the ForthRight.’
‘No it isn’t. The Ministry of Psychic Affairs has over fifteen million guineas to its credit in the Blood Bank in Berlin.’
‘You learnt that while you were holding Crowley’s hands, didn’t you?’ There was a distinct flavouring of admiration in Vanka’s voice.
‘Correct. I now know all the Ministry’s bank account details, all the passwords they use to access it… everything. I could clean out their account like that.’ She snapped her fingers.
‘Then why are you telling me this?’ asked Vanka suspiciously.
‘Why aren’t you down at the Bank now, making yourself a very rich woman?’
‘Because I need your help. I need your help to make that Daemon vanish from Dashwood Manor.’
‘A million guineas?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Just tell me why you put on that act with Crowley. Why did you vamp him?’
‘Crowley is suspicious of me so I acted out what he expected me to be: a pantomime WhoDoo mambo. It worked too: he just dismissed me as a brainless, oversexed Shade. And a man who’s thinking what it would be like to jump my bones ain’t thinking about the things he should be thinking about.’ She gave Vanka a grin. ‘I thought I vamped him pretty good: what do you think?’
‘I think you could… well, never mind what I think.’
For five minutes Vanka strode up and down the shabby room lost in thought. Finally he turned to Ella. ‘Okay, Miss Thomas, you’ve got a deal.’
Ella leapt up out of her chair, threw her arms around Vanka’s neck and pressed her lips firmly against his.
It was Vanka who broke away. He gave Ella a sideways look. ‘Remember, Ella, I’m only human.’
And that, Ella decided, was the big problem.
22
The Demi-Monde: 55th Day of Winter, 1004
The greatest and most compelling aim of UnFunDa -Mentalism is to reclaim the racial purity of the Aryans (as the direct descendants of the Pre-Folk) lost during the Fall and to eliminate all contaminating UnderMentionable aspects from the population. Whilst modern Eugenical studies contend that, over ten generations, it will be possible to breed out the UnderMentionable impurities from the Aryan people, it will also be necessary to sup -plement these more considered aspects of Eugenical policy with Exterminationist strategies designed to eliminate – finally and totally – UnderMentionables from the breed -ing pool. This policy of Extermination I call the Final Solution.
– My Struggle: Reinhard Heydrich, ForthRight Free Press
It was bad enough when word came that Comrade Leader Heydrich would be personally interviewing the Daemon and that the interview would be taking place at Dashwood Manor. That, by itself, was enough to throw the household into panic.
It was the codicil to the message that had threatened to reduce Trixie’s governess to gibbering insensibility. The instruction that His Holiness Comrade Crowley was intent upon holding a seance in the Manor’s ballroom, a seance that the Leader and other notables would be attending, had been almost too much for the woman’s fragile constitution to bear, especially as it was to be, according to the note, ‘a seance designed to unlock the Daemon’s darkest secrets and to use whatever conjurations and adjurations are necessary to make said Daemon pliant and obedient’.
Trixie’s governess almost crumbled under this weight of responsibility and the thought that the Manor would soon be the venue for something as outre as a WhoDoo seance. To have her home playing host to a psychic and – so they had been warned – a Shade witch was intolerable. And when the gang of rather uncouth workmen had arrived to construct this mysterious thing called a hounfo in the Manor’s ballroom she became nigh on hysterical. But after a quiet word from the master and a glass of twenty per cent Solution, she rallied and turned all her nervous energy towards preparing Dashwood Manor for the Leader’s arrival.
Under Governess Margaret’s impassioned – and often tearful – instruction the servants polished and scrubbed, swept and tidied until the Manor was immaculate and smelt of beeswax and bustle. Never had the Manor been so clean and polished nor the wooden floors buffed to such a dangerously lustrous sheen. But for Trixie the most singular aspect of this premature Spring-cleaning was the servants being instructed to take down all of the mirrors that hung in the hallway and in the drawing room.
Her father noted Trixie’s confusion. ‘The Leader has an aversion to mirrors. He will not look into them,’ he said by way of explanation. This only fuelled her curiosity.
‘But why?’
A shrug from her father. ‘Who knows, Trixie? The Leader is different from the rest of us mere mortals. Perhaps,’ he added in a whispered aside, ‘he does not wish to see what he has become.’ This thought made the Comrade Commissar pause for a moment and then he edged closer to his daughter. ‘And we must be careful of what Reinhard Heydrich has become. As my daughter, Trixie, you will be introduced to the Leader, but it is doubtful whether he will deign to talk with you. But if he does, you must answer his questions correctly as a good Daughter of the ForthRight. No demurral and none of your famous sarcasm. You may be young, Trixie, but your youth will not protect you: just remember it is treason to express doubts about the rightness of what the Leader says or does. For a female to question the ForthRight’s ultimate victory over the other peoples of the Demi-Monde is HerEsy.’ He paused for a moment as though running through a mental checklist. ‘You know your UnFunDaMentalist catechisms? You may be asked to recite them by Heydrich; the man is a stickler for Party dogma.’
A nod from Trixie.
‘Excellent.’ He placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘And keep that Eyetie slave of yours out of sight. Heydrich hates the Medi races almost as much as he hates Shades and nuJus.’
Despite their having been advised that the Leader would not be arriving at the Manor until the evening, Heydrich’s cavalcade swept into the grounds a little after one o’clock that afternoon, the Leader’s Mercedes steam- limo set in the middle of a phalanx of armoured pantechnicons full of SS militia.
Captain Dabrowski had drawn up his company in front of the house to provide an honour guard, but he and his men were ignored by the four black-uniformed men who clambered out of the steam-limo and across the driveway’s swept gravel to the steps that led to the main doors of Dashwood Manor. Trixie knew them all; their
