Simon Green - Property of a Lady Faire

“Do something!”

“I’m open to suggestions!”

I looked around, and spotted a surprisingly familiar face standing alone. Unnoticed by the other guests, the security people, and the blood-red men . . . because he wasn’t really there. And since I couldn’t do anything about the blood-red men, I thought I might as well check out the one thing that stood out. I gestured for the Lady Faire to stay put by the doorway, and moved cautiously forward. For the moment both sides in the fight seemed too busy to notice I’d arrived, and I wanted to keep it that way until I’d figured out something useful to do. I quietly approached the shimmering figure by the wall, and its head came slowly round to look at me. The Phantom Berserker nodded slowly, and waited for me to join him.

For a ghost, he looked surprisingly solid, but then, my armour gives me amplified Sight on many levels. To everyone else he was probably just a shadowy figure, unclear and insubstantial, unless you looked at him directly. To me, he was a tall, bulky Viking figure with the traditional horned helmet and a bear-skin cloak. His deathly pale face was drawn and gaunt. He had haunted eyes. Word was, agents from the Department of Uncanny had dug him up out of some ancient burial mound in Norway, back in the Sixties, and he’d followed them home. They didn’t have the heart to kick him out, so they made him an honorary agent, and he’d been with them ever since.

“Hello!” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the general bedlam. “Eddie Drood, remember me? The Regent’s grandson. I thought you were dead? I saw your body lying among all the others, at the massacre at the Department of Uncanny.”

“I was dead,” said the Phantom Berserker. His voice was hollow, and strangely distant, as though it had to travel a long way to reach me. “For a while I was alive again. But it didn’t last. Now I’m a ghost again. I’m surprised you can see me; no one else here can. But then, you’re a Drood, and the rules don’t apply to you, do they? It was all my fault, you know. What happened at Uncanny. All those deaths. All my fault.”

“Talk to me,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”

“I was the traitor inside the Department,” said the Phantom Berserker. “I opened the door, to let them in. This Voice came to me, out of nowhere, and it promised me things. Said it could provide me with flesh and blood, in a new body, so that I could breathe and move and feel again. A real live body, after so long as only a drifting spirit from another age. And I wanted that so very badly. I could materialise, from time to time, just long enough to be useful to the Department. But not for long. Never for long. And those brief flashes of feeling, of simple sensation, just made it so much worse when I had to go back to being immaterial again. My people knew what they were doing, all those centuries ago, when they cursed me to be the Phantom Berserker. I was so desperate to feel again, to live again, that I said I’d do whatever the Voice wanted. In return for a body.”

“Whose Voice was it?” I said. “Who did you make a deal with?”

“I don’t know,” said the Phantom Berserker. “The Voice put me to sleep, and when I woke up again, I was alive. I had a heart that beat and lungs that moved, and blood that coursed through my veins. I had hands that could touch, and a mouth that could taste. I think I went a little crazy then, for a while, indulging all my senses. After all the years of just watching people enjoy life and take it for granted. But it didn’t last. I’d been alive less than a day when the Voice came to me, inside the Department of Uncanny. And told me it was time to pay the price for what I’d been given. All I had to do was shut down the Department’s security systems and unlock the doors, and my debt would be paid. It didn’t seem like much to ask. Just an information grab, I thought. Such a small thing, to pay for this new body, and all its pleasures. I wish I could say I hesitated. I opened the door and let them in. I didn’t know what they were going to do. How could I?

“The bloody men swarmed in, an army of them. And the first thing they did was kill me, standing at the door. They struck me down with their bare hands, and just like that I was a ghost again. So weakened there was nothing I could do but watch . . . as they killed everyone in the Department. Everyone who’d been so kind to me . . . I watched them kill your grandfather. Watched them rip Kayleigh’s Eye right out of his chest. There was nothing I could do. Nothing.”

“Why are you here?” I said.

“Because the Voice still has power over me. Because I said yes to it, I have to serve it. Even though I swore to serve and protect your grandfather all my days. Do you know what it means, for a Norseman to betray his oath? I am in Hel, Eddie Drood. Still under the control of the man who ruined me.”

“You don’t have to serve him,” I said. “Death breaks all oaths, all bonds.”

“If only that were true,” said the Phantom Berserker.

“I think I know a way out of Hel,” I said. “Wait, and watch for your chance. And when you see an opportunity, take it. Whoever’s behind the Voice, I don’t think he’ll be able to resist turning up here, in person. And then . . .”

“And then?” said the Phantom Berserker.

“That’s up to you,” I said.

The Phantom Berserker turned away from me, not saying anything. And I couldn’t give him any more time, because I’d just seen Molly Metcalf, fighting fiercely in the middle of the crowd. I went to join her.

She’d conjured up a long sword of vivid blazing energies, and was using it to cut off heads as fast as she could get to them. Headless bodies of blood-red men went staggering this way and that, in pursuit of their lopped-off heads. No blood spurted from their necks. The heads went rolling here and there along the floor, kicked around like footballs. Now and then a body would find a head and clap it back into place, whereupon the wound would seal and fuse immediately. I wasn’t sure the right bodies were finding the right heads, but since the blood-red men were all identical, I didn’t suppose it mattered. All this was keeping a lot of blood-red men occupied, and taking them out of the fight, but not for long. And more of the blood-red figures were pouring into the Ballroom through all the entrances and exits. Dozens and dozens of them. They already far outnumbered the remaining security people, because all of the white-uniformed security staff who were coming had already arrived, and there seemed no end to the numbers of blood-red men.

Molly looked around and grinned briefly as I moved in to cover her back, and then we both went to work, cutting off heads and smashing in skulls with grim joy and great efficiency. The blood-red men should have learned to keep their distance from us, but something drove them on to attack us anyway.

“Where the hell have you been?” Molly said loudly. “As if I couldn’t guess. So what does the Lady Faire look like, in the flesh? Does she have both sets of bits?”

“I have no idea,” I said, wrapping myself in my armour and striking down blood-red men with vim and vigour. “She never undid a button while I was with her. All we did was talk.”

“Did she tell you where the Lazarus Stone is?”

“No.”

“Then maybe you should have undone some of her buttons,” said Molly.

It’s amazing how much damage you can do to people, with spiked armoured fists and a blazing energy sword. It was also amazing, and not a little disturbing, how fast the blood-red men could come back from so much damage. I scowled, under my featureless golden mask, thinking hard. There had to be a way to stop them . . .

The last of the security people were still fighting, well and bravely, but they were vastly outnumbered by blood-red men. The security staff had been forced into small defensive clumps, scattered across the Ballroom, firing bullets and poisoned needles and the occasional energy blast. But the blood-red men were still pouring in through all the doors, leaping across the bodies of their own fallen to get at the security people. Blood spread thickly across the ice cavern floor.