The next level of protection kicked in, as twenty living scarecrows appeared out of nowhere. Old enemies who had died at Drood hands, resurrected as scarecrows, so they could atone for their crimes by defending the family- for as long as they lasted. Neither truly living nor dead, they were impossibly strong and mer ciless opponents. If you listen in on the right frequencies, you can hear them screaming. Forever. Individually, the Accelerated Men would be no match for them, but there were only twenty scarecrows, and thousands of superhumans.
I recognised some of the scarecrows; I'd fought them myself when I broke into the Hall, back when I was a rogue. Laura Lye, still wearing the tatters of a dark evening dress, complete with holed evening gloves. Mad Frankie Phantasm, in the remains of what had once been an expensive Saville Row suit. Bunches of straw stuck out of open wounds in grey flesh. Molly and I had torn them apart, but the family had put them back together again. Because that's what you do with scarecrows. You make them last. And then my heart lurched as I recognised one particular scarecrow-it was the legendary Independent Agent himself, Alexander King. I could still see the hollow in his chest, from where I'd punched out his heart, in his magnificent secret base at Place Gloria. I hadn't known they'd brought him here, and made a scarecrow out of him, but I should have known. Droods bear grudges.
The scarecrows hit the first row of the Accelerated Men, and made mincemeat out of them, grabbing at the black-clad supermen with their implacable gloved hands, and tearing them apart with brute inhuman strength. They tore arms out of sockets, stove in chests, and ripped the heads right off people. Blood spilled thickly across the lawns. The Accelerated Men struck out at the scarecrows with their own appalling strength, but the scarecrows' spongy bodies absorbed every blow, and they felt no pain. Every superhuman intruder they laid hands on died, but in the end their speed was only human, and the Accelerated Men were just so much faster. Once the intruders realised this, they just speeded up enough to avoid the scarecrows and kept going. The scarecrows speeded up too, with all the inhuman pace of their unhuman nature, but even so, they only caught stragglers. The Accelerated Men suddenly changed tactics and swarmed all over the scarecrows, piling onto them in greater and greater numbers,? until they bore the scarecrows down; and once they had them helpless, they ripped the scarecrows to pieces. I saw heads roll across the grass, cloth faces with human eyes, eternally suffering, endlessly hating.
The intruders were almost upon me now, appearing clearly through the thinning mists. I was thinking furiously. Doctor Delirium had cleverly adjusted the dose of the Acceleration Drug. These men were driven by homicidal rage, but they could still think, still plan, still change tactics as necessary. They would not turn on each other.
Some of them ran straight through the old hedge Maze, plunging through the heavy green walls as though they weren't even there, determined to get to the Hall by the quickest route possible. But those who went in didn't come out the other side. There weren't even any screams. The Maze just swallowed them up. Presumably, whatever was still trapped inside that Maze was still hungry.
The Accelerated Men concentrated on me for the first time. They recognised my armour, and a great cry of rage went up. I was the enemy they had been prepared for, and aimed at. For the first time, they produced weapons: all kinds of guns, scientific and magical. Cold blue steel and gleaming crystal. Doctor Delirium had armed them for bear. For all the good that would do. I was smiling behind my featureless golden mask.
The nearest Accelerated Man opened fire on me with incendiary bullets. They exploded harmlessly against my chest and head, thick trails of liquid fire running down my armour to set fire to the ground at my feet. I didn't feel the force of the explosions, or the heat of the flames. I just kept going, leaving a trail of blazing footprints behind me. More incendiaries slammed into me, bathing me in white hot flames, that just ran away, defeated.
Next they tried specially prepared cursed and blessed ammunition, but the torc protected me from physical and spiritual threats. You could damn me with bell, book and candle, or hit me with a bullet that had been exorcised, and neither of them would touch me. The Accelerated Men raked me with all kinds of bullets, and didn't even slow me down.
One man stepped forward and pointed a strange apparatus at me: a weird combination of glowing metals that surrounded and enveloped me in a strange glowing field. I knew what it was, the moment it touched my armour: a stasis field. Inside it, Time could not move. They could hold me here, like an insect in amber, and not one moment would pass for me until it was all over. Except, Droods have a similar weapon, and we've all been trained in how to deal with it. The strange matter of my new armour, being quite literally not of this world, has a resistance to Space and Time; all I had to do was set the strength of my armour against the field, and push steadily forward. For a long moment nothing happened, strain as I might, and then the glowing energy field coruscated wildly around the golden fist I pushed into it, and the field shattered and was gone. I lurched forward, back in Time again.
Some of the Accelerated Men had weapons that were clearly the product of alien technology. Energy weapons, distortion field generators, and other less familiar things. Weird energies hit me from a dozen different directions at once, crackling and crawling all over my armour, searching for a weak spot and a way in, before finally falling away defeated. One Accelerated Man appeared out of nowhere, right in front of me, and fired something at me, at point-blank range. He had a teleport gun, powerful enough to blast an enemy through Time and Space to somewhere else. He really shouldn't have used it against my armour. The energies rebounded straight back at him, and a moment later the air was rushing in to fill the vacuum where he'd been standing.
Another Accelerated Man appeared before me, with a new kind of gun. I stepped forward and punched him in the face before he could use it. The blow ripped the head right off his shoulders, and sent it rolling a dozen feet away. The body crumpled to its knees, blood spurting from the ragged stump? of its neck. I kicked it out of the way, and ran on. Some blood had sprayed across my armour, but it quickly fell away.
I like to think of myself as an agent, rather than an assassin, but I have been trained to do what's necessary, when I have to. And no one attacks the Droods where we live, and survives to boast of it.
But all the time I was thinking, Where the hell did they get all these amazing weapons? Doctor Delirium? Tiger Tim? The Immortals?
I grabbed up a machine gun that had been torn from its mounting in the ground, and sprayed bullets around me. Accelerated Men were thrown this way and that by the impact of the bullets, but the grounds were wide and open, and the Accelerated Men seemed to be everywhere at once. They were crossing the lawns at superhuman speed, but most of them were still a long way short of the Hall itself. I kept firing till I ran out of bullets, and then tossed the gun aside. There were dead men lying everywhere, blood soaking into the ground, but I hadn't even opened up any holes in the advancing waves of superhumans. They just kept coming, thousands of them, more and more arriving all the time, and they didn't care how many of them died. They were riding the Acceleration Drug, raging with the dark joy of being more than human, focusing only on the enemy they'd been aimed at, and the need in their poisoned minds to hunt and hurt and kill, and glory in it. For as long as it lasted.
They came at me with glowing battle-axes, that shattered against my armour. They hit me with gloves made out of shimmering metals, and the gloves shattered and fell apart. I didn't feel the blows at all. I grew golden blades from my hands, and cut down anyone who came within reach, with vicious brutal blows. Accelerated Men threw themselves upon me bodily, clinging with desperate strength to my armoured arms and legs, struggling to pull me down. They piled up on me, trying to force me to my knees through sheer strength of numbers. But I stood firm, and would not fall.
I threw them off, one by one, grabbing them with hands so strong they cracked and broke the bones of my enemies, throwing the Accelerated Men long distances before they hit the ground hard, and did not rise again. I punched in chests, stove in heads, and broke arms and legs and necks. I stabbed and cut and hacked. I threw them down and trampled them underfoot. I killed and killed until there was no one left to kill, and then I moved forward again. And felt nothing but a cold focused rage. No mercy, no quarter, for the Accelerated Men. This was where Droods lived, and they should not have come here.
I'd been back for only a few minutes, but with everything that had happened, it felt like hours. And I hadn't really achieved anything. For all the Accelerated Men I'd killed, thousands more were streaming past me on all sides now, heading for the Hall with murder in their hearts. I looked back, wondering whether I should fall back and raise the alarm, and to my relief I saw the main entrance doors slam open, and a great force of Droods came out to defend the family home, led by the Armourer and the Sarjeant-at-Arms.
I knew them immediately, even though they were fully armoured, by the awful weapons the Armourer and the Sarjeant were carrying. Hundreds of armoured Droods came pouring out after them, because when an enemy comes, everyone fights. Every man and woman, no matter what they normally do. All Droods are trained to be
