Charles Stross: The Hidden Family

Roland’s vision dimmed and his head hammered like a drum. His knees began to give way and he fell forward, feet slipping on the damp floor. Sullivan rolled off him with a shout of dismay. “What’s—”

Roland fell flat, whimpering slightiy as one knee cracked hard on the concrete. Red, everything seemed to be red with bits of white embedded in it, like an explosion in an abattoir. He rolled over, sliding slightly, smelling something revolting and sweet as the noise of Sullivan being violently sick reached his ears.

The pounding headache subsided. Roland sat up, dismayed, staring at the wall behind him. It was chipped and battered, stained as if someone had thrown a tin of blackish paint at it. The smell. Roland leaned forward and squeezed his eyes shut. The blackness stayed with him, behind his eyelids. “Belt and braces.”

Sullivan stopped heaving. The stench refused to clear. Roland opened his eyes again. The post room in the basement of Fort Lofstrom had been painted with blood and bits of flesh and bone, as if a live pig or sheep had been fed through a wood chipper. There were small gobbets of stuff everywhere. On his hands, sticking to his trousers where he’d fallen down. He pulled a hunk of something red with hairs sprouting from it off the back of his hand. The furniture was shredded, and the door hung from its hinges as if an angry bull had kicked it.

“Belt and braces,” Roland repeated hoarsely. “Shit.”

Sullivan straightened up. “You sent Poul into this,” he said flatly. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.

“Shit.” Roland shook his head. A pair of legs, still wearing trousers, still attached at the hips, had rolled under the big oak table in the middle of the room. A horrified sense of realization settled over him. “Why hasn’t someone—”

“Because they are all fucking dead ,” Sullivan hissed, moving to the side of the door and bringing his gun up. “Shut up!”

Silence. The stink of blocked sewers and slaughterhouse blood and recent vomit filled Roland’s nostrils. His skull pounded, bright diamond-flashes of light flickering in his left eye as the edges of his visual field threatened to collapse. He’d walked too soon after taking the beta blocker, and now he was going to pay the price. “Matthias planted a claymore mine on a wire at least once before,” he said quietly. “Well, someone did—and my guess is Matthias. Sloppy work, using the same trick over. Think there’ll be another one, or will he have used something else?”

“Shut up. ” Sullivan darted around the corner and stopped, his back visible: Roland cringed, but there was no explosion. “Yeah. Looks like it was an M18A1, we keep about a dozen in the armory. This here’s the clacker. Bastard.”

“See any more?” Roland shuffled forward slowly, still woozy and in pain from the too-hasty transfer.

“No, but—wait.” Sullivan came back into the devastated post room and looked around twitchily, ignoring Roland.

“What are you after?”

“Some kind of pole. Lightweight. And a flashlight.”

“Let me.” Roland shambled over to the curtain-covered sigil and yanked hard on the curtain. The curtain rail bent and he grabbed it, pulled it away from the wall. “Will this do?” he asked, carefully not looking at the knotwork design on the wall behind it.

“Yeah.” Sullivan took the rod and went back out into the corridor, advancing like an arthritic sloth. “Fuck me, that was bad.”

A thought struck Roland. “Are there any explosives in the armory, apart from the mines? And detonators?”

“Are you kidding?” Sullivan barked something that in better times might have been a laugh. “About a hundred kilos of C4, for starters! And gunpowder. Shitloads of it. Some of his farms, they’ve been, well, productive. Matthias took a serious interest in blowing things up, you know?”

“Gunpowder.” Roland digested the unpleasant possibilities this news opened up. “The fort should be locked down. Where is everybody?”

“Like I said, dead or gone.” Sullivan looked around at him. “What are you going to—”

Roland pushed past him. “Follow me.”

“Hey wait! There might be mines—”

“There won’t be.” Roland dashed down the corridor. There was a servant’s staircase at the end. He took the steps two at a time, until he was gasping for breath. “He dismissed the help. Good of him.” The staircase surfaced in the scullery, and the door was shut. “If I’m right, he’s put the whole damn fort on a time fuse. It could blow any minute.”

“A bomb? There could be more than one, couldn’t there?”

Roland opened the door half an inch, running a finger up and down the crack to make sure there were no wires. “It’s clear.”

“If you do that too fast—”

“Come on!” Through the scullery and up another short flight of steps, round a corner, then into the main ground-floor hallway. The fort was eerily empty, cold and desolate. Roland didn’t bother with the main door, but instead opened an arched window beside it and scrambled through. “Stables!”

Matthias might have sent the servants away, but he sure as hell hadn’t thought about the livestock. Sullivan and Roland saddled up a pair of mares, and the guard worked one of the big gates open while Roland waited, clutching a blanket around his shoulders. “You go get help,” Sullivan panted up at Roland. “I’ll go see if the armory is wired. I might be able to stop it.”

“But you’ll—”

“Shut the fuck up and listen for once! If you get help, you’ll need a safe post room to walk through, won’t you? I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing it for the others. Go get the gods-damned Clan and get back here as fast as you can. I’ll see it’s safe for you.”

Roland paused for a moment. “Take my keys,” he said, and tossed them to the guard. “They’re a master set—only place they won’t get you into is the old man’s office.”

Sullivan took the keys, then watched until Roland disappeared around the first bend in the road before he turned and headed back into the compound thoughtfully. He hadn’t expected it to be this easy: He hadn’t even had to hint about the place being booby-trapped. Now all he needed was time to complete the boss’s business, and a lift home, then he could claim his reward.

The meeting was winding down in a haze of fatigue, recriminatory posturing, and motions to hear trivial complaints. Miriam slumped back in her seat tiredly. Please, let this be over, she thought, watching Iris from the other side of the room. If she was aching and bored, her mother must be feeling ten times worse.

Baron Horst of Lorsburg had the floor, and was using it for all it was worth. “While the provisions of article eighteen of the constitution are still valid, I’d like to raise a concern about paragraph six,” he droned, in the emolient tones of a lay preacher trying to get across the good message without boring his flock into catatonia in the process. “The issue of voting partners failing to attend to bills of—”

He was interrupted by a tremendous banging on the outer door. “What’s that?” demanded Julius the ancient. “Sergeant! Have silence outside the room!”

The sergeant-at-arms marched over to the door, yanked it open, prepared to berate whoever was outside—but instead took a step back.

Roland lurched into the room. He was dressed for the road in a battered gray coat and a hat pulled down over his face: His expression was deadily. Miriam had another surprise coming: Brill was right behind him. “Permission to approach the Dean of Security?” he rasped.

“Approach,” Angbard called. “And explain yourself. Assuming the news is fit for public hearing.”