Simon Green - From Hell with love

I sent my thoughts up and out through my torc, and made contact with Ethel. Joining my mind with hers is like plunging into a great clear crystal lake-comforting and intimidating at the same time. Ethel doesn't operate on the same scale as humanity, though she likes to pretend. She's your best friend, who will always know better than you, or a somewhat absentminded god. I guess that's other-dimensional entities for you…

Hi! Hi hi hi! Welcome back, Eddie! Shame about the hotel. How are you? Did you bring me back a present?

"I never know what to get you," I said. "What do you get the invisible and immaterial strange matter entity who has everything?"

She sniffed loudly, which is an odd sensation to have inside your mind. It's the thought that counts.

"How is Grandmother? And the Council?"

Still arguing.

"Ah," I said. "Situation entirely normal, then."

People passed on by as I strolled unhurriedly down the long corridors and passageways, wandering through huge open rooms and tall galleries. Most people were never quite sure how to react to me. I mean, yes, I used to run the family, but now I don't. I've been declared a traitor, hailed as a saviour, known as a failure and the man who saved the whole of Humanity from the Hungry Gods. The family owes me everything, and a lot of them still resent me for hauling them out of their old complacency. Some nod and smile when they see me coming, while others make a point of stalking by with their noses in the air. But, since Droods are notoriously hard to impress, either way, most? just nod briskly and keep going. Which suits me fine.

Two large and ostentatiously muscular fellows were standing guard outside the doors to the Sanctity, where all important meetings are held, and all the decisions that matter are made. These guards had clearly been chosen for their brutal menace rather than their intelligence, because they actually tried to block my way. I gave them my best hard look, and they stepped reluctantly to one side, scowling like I'd just stuck a thorn in their paw. I had to open the doors myself. So I kicked them wide open, stalked into the Sanctity like I was thinking of renting it out as a Roller Derby rink, and nodded briskly to the small group of people sitting round the table in the middle of the great hall.

The Sanctity was suffused with a rich warm rose-red glow that filled every corner of the massive room. That was Ethel, manifesting herself in the material world. The light was calming and bracing at once, like a spiritual massage; it encouraged calm and composure and clear thinking, but since only Droods ever came here, it had a lot of work to do. The Matriarch sat at the head of the table, stiff and straight backed as always. Martha Drood was a tall, slender and entirely formal personage in her late sixties. She wore smart grey tweeds, elegant pearls, and her long blond hair was piled elegantly up on top of her head. She'd been a famous beauty once, and it still showed in her poise and her fabulous bone structure. We've had Queens that looked less royal. I have actually seen photos of Martha smiling, in her younger days, or I'd never have believed it possible. She glared at me steadily as I approached, for having dared enter the Sanctity without waiting to be invited in.

The Advisory Council sat on both sides of the table. The family Armourer, my Uncle Jack, nodded cheerfully to me. He was tall but heavily stooped, from years of bending over workbenches in the Armoury, devising really horrible surprises to throw at our enemies. He was still wearing his stained and scorched white lab coat, suggesting that he'd been dragged away from his beloved Armoury against his will, just when things were getting seriously interesting and/or dangerous. He was middle-aged now, and looking like he'd worked hard for every year of it. He had a gleaming bald pate, with grey tufts sticking out over his ears, bushy white eyebrows, and steel grey eyes. Under his lab coat he wore a grubby T-shirt bearing the legend WHICH PART OF FUCK OFF AND DIE DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? Uncle Jack smiled easily at me as I approached the table. He'd always had time for me.

"Eddie, lad! About time you turned up! Come and see me afterwards; I've got some great new gadgets for you to try out."

That was always going to be a mixed blessing, given that so many of his new gadgets had a tendency to go boom! when least expected, but I smiled gamely.

"Thank you, Uncle Jack. You always have the best toys."

Harry Drood, cousin Harry, looked at me thoughtfully from his chair set at the Matriarch's left hand. Harry always liked to be as close as possible to power. He'd actually run the family for a time, while I was away, and a right dog's breakfast he'd made of it. He was a pretty good field agent in his own right, but he'd only ever seen that as a means to an end. Harry believed in Harry much more than he ever believed in the Droods. Still, put him with his back to the wall and no way out, and he could be as brave and heroic as needed. His father was, after all, Uncle James, the legendary Grey Fox. Perhaps the greatest Drood ever. Harry leaned back in his chair and rocked easily back and forth on the rear legs as he studied me silently through his owlish wire-rimmed glasses. He'd already heard about the debacle at the Magnificat, and the loss of the Apocalypse Door, and he couldn't wait to hit me with every unfortunate detail, while he figured out how to turn it to his best advantage. Because that was what he did.

"Just once," Harry said calmly, "it would be nice if you could bring us back some good news after a mission, Edwin."

"You're allowed to lose? the occasional battle, as long as you win the war," I said, meeting his gaze squarely.

"Lose enough battles and you run out of war," said Harry.

"You want a slap?" I said. "Only I've got one handy…"

"Edwin!" the Matriarch said sharply.

"There will be no violence in this chamber unless I start it," said the final member of the Advisory Council: the Sarjeant-at-Arms. He sat to attention on his chair, a big ugly brute of a man with a face like a fist and muscles on his muscles. "Sudden and unexpected punishment is my domain. So take your seat at the table, Edwin, before I find it necessary to discipline you."

"Like to see you try, Cedric," I said, as I seated myself at the end of the table, facing the Matriarch. "Really would like to see you try. I kicked the crap out of the last Sarjeant-at-Arms, and he had years more viciousness under his belt than you."

"Yes," said the Sarjeant. "But I'm sneakier."

I figured honours were about even, but I changed the subject anyway, just in case. "Where's William? He's still part of the Council, isn't he? Surely we need the Librarian here, if we're to discuss the significance of the Apocalypse Door?"

"William is still away with the faeries, as often as not," said the Matriarch, regretfully. "I had hoped letting him live in the Old Library, away from the pressures of family life, might help to settle and stabilise him, but I can't honestly say I've seen any signs of improvement."

"The Librarian is a looney tune," said Harry. "Crazier than ever, if anything. He only appears at Council meetings through spiritual projections, insists his assistant Rafe acts as his food taster, and keeps wittering on about Something unseen that lives in the Old Library with him and steals his socks. It's well past time we retired him, and let Rafe take over as Librarian."

"William is a better Librarian crazy than most other men sane," the Armourer said stubbornly. "It's amazing how much that man knows, when he can remember it. No one knows the Old Library like he does. But he is only a part-time member of the Council now, Eddie. We've been forced to consider bringing in new members."

"Fresh blood," said Harry, with entirely too much relish in his voice.