Simon Green - For Heaven's Eyes Only

“Know thy enemy,” said William.

“Fine,” I said. “Go do your research in the Old Library. Find out things we can use against them. Sarjeant, how can we hurt them?”

“Give me a target,” said the Sarjeant, “and I’ll throw Droods at them till every single member of the conspiracy is dead. The problem with Satanists is that they can be anyone, anywhere, hiding within respectable institutions, using innocents as human shields.”

“Isabella did a lot of thinking about that,” said Molly. “She said . . . she thought she knew someone who might be able to at least point her in the direction of the conspiracy’s headquarters.”

“Did she mention a name?” I said.

“No. But then, Iz has contacts everywhere.”

“Call her,” I said. “Contact her. Now.”

But before any of us could do anything, Isabella was suddenly right there in the room with us, standing at the end of the table. She was a mental sending, not a physical presence. Her image was vague and unstable, semitransparent, trembling as though bothered by some harsh-blowing aetheric wind.

The Sarjeant slammed his fist on the table again and looked seriously upset.

“How the hell do you keep appearing inside Drood Hall, despite all the defences and protections I have put in place precisely to keep out persons like you?”

Isabella looked at me. “Haven’t you told him yet?”

The Sarjeant looked at me suspiciously. “Told me? Told me what , Eddie?”

“Later,” I said. “Iz, where have you been?”

“Going back and forth in the world, and walking up and down in it,” Isabella said calmly. “Talking to people. Making them talk to me. I found a certain person who was only too willing to tell me what I wanted to hear, after a certain amount of physical persuasion. A charming little rogue called Charlatan Joe.”

“I know him,” I said immediately. “Not sure I’d agree with the description. Joe’s a city slicker, a confidence trickster. A sleazy adventurer who never met a mark he couldn’t shaft. But it’s surprising how often he’s in the right place to overhear things that matter. . . .”

“Exactly,” said Isabella. Her sending shifted and trembled, as seethrough as any ghost for a moment, and her mouth moved with no sound reaching us, until she suddenly snapped back into focus again. “By being somewhere he really shouldn’t have been, while doing something anyone could have told him was a bad idea, dear Joe overheard something so big, so important and so shocking that it scared the crap out of him. So he dropped into a deep hole and pulled it in after him, determined to disappear until what he knew wouldn’t matter anymore. Except I can find anyone when I put my mind to it. And I know more about the darker magics than he ever dreamed of. I found him and made him cry, and after I’d wiped his nose for him he couldn’t wait to tell me everything he knew. To be exact: where the next big meeting of the satanic conspiracy leaders will be taking place. Not the upper echelons, like Alexandre Dusk and Roger Morningstar, but the guys at the very top.

“You haven’t got much time, Molly, Eddie. . . . It’s three hours from now, and they won’t be there for long. According to Charlatan Joe, they’re there to witness the first wide-range test of the mind-influencing machine on a city full of unsuspecting people.”

“Okay, that’s it,” I said. “We have to go right now. A full-on preemptive strike, a whole army of Droods led by all the field agents we can round up at such short notice. Hit the bastards hard when they’re not expecting it, stamp them into the ground, take out the machine and capture all the conspiracy leaders in one go.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms. “Three hours . . . Give me one hour, Eddie, to put a strike force together. It’ll have to be a really good size; we can’t know how many ground troops there’ll be, or what kind of weapons they might have. But we can do this. We can stop the conspiracy dead before they even get a chance to start the Great Sacrifice. Where are they, Isabella? Where are they meeting?”

“The setting is a deconsecrated cathedral at Glastonbury,” said Isabella. “Apparently it was turned into a hotel decades ago. It’s been completely refurbished as the Cathedral Hotel; runs business courses, that sort of thing. The conspiracy’s booked the whole hotel under different names, so you don’t have to worry about any innocents being involved.”

“Sounding better all the time,” said the Sarjeant.

“A deconsecrated cathedral,” said the Armourer. “These old-time Satanists do love their traditional touches. For masters of evil they can be surprisingly sentimental about such things.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said William. “And for the record—I can’t believe I’m being the calm voice of reason here—can I remind you, Eddie, the last times you went head-to-head with the Satanists didn’t go too well, did they? You were run out of Lightbringer House, and you had to be rescued from Under Parliament. You were lucky to get out alive even with your Drood armour. We need to talk about this. And yes, I know that phrase is dripping with irony where I’m concerned, but . . .”

“We don’t have time for academic discussions,” said the Sarjeant. “Three hours, remember? You think; we’ll organise.”

“Don’t worry, William,” I said. “This time we’ll be going in mobhanded, at the head of an army of armoured Droods. Like we did with the Immortals at Castle Frankenstein. The Satanists won’t know what’s hit them till it’s far too late.”

“I still don’t like it,” the Librarian said stubbornly. “Violence is playing their game.”

“Then we’ll have to play it better than them,” said the Sarjeant. “Isabella, what else can you tell us . . . ?”

But she was gone, not even a wisp of presence left at the end of the table. Molly tried to reach her, to regain contact, but couldn’t. She frowned unhappily.

“It’s not like she’s blocking me out; it’s as though she isn’t even there. Something’s wrong.”

“Maybe she thought someone else might be listening in,” I said. “She wouldn’t want to risk giving the game away.”

“Yes,” said Molly. “That makes sense.” But she didn’t sound happy about it.

The Sarjeant hurried off to organise the troops. The Armourer wandered off to go think destructive thoughts in the Armoury. William waited till they were gone, and then took me to one side for a few private words.

“I’ve been feeling a lot better since Ammonia Vom Acht’s . . . intervention,” he said. “My thoughts are clearer than they’ve been in . . . well, I don’t know how long.”

“I had noticed,” I said.

“I wanted to ask you about her. Ammonia.” The Librarian gave me a look I wasn’t sure I understood. “A most remarkable woman.”

“Remarkable,” I said.

“Excellent mind. There was a certain amount of . . . transfer, you see, when she made contact with my thoughts. She really was very impressive.”

“Impressive,” I said.

“So, you see, I was wondering . . .”

“She’s married,” I said.

“Ah. Of course she is.” He nodded slowly. “The best ones always are, aren’t they?”

He strode off, back to the Old Library, and I genuinely didn’t know what to think.

Over the next hour, the Sarjeant-at-Arms ran himself ragged all over Drood Hall, gathering up volunteers from every section and department, putting together a small army of more than a hundred Droods for his strike force. It was all I could do to keep up with him. Give the man his due: He’s good at his job. And if there’s a big fight on, there’s no one else in the family you’d rather follow into danger and sudden death, because you know he’ll move Heaven and Earth not only to get the job done, but to bring you back safely as well. All Droods are trained to fight from an early age, but few ever realistically expect to see action. Recent events—in the Hungry Gods war, and with the Accelerated Men attack—had changed all that. A lot of previously purely academic Droods had had to go out and fight, and much to everyone’s surprise they found they had a taste for direct intervention. So when the Sarjeant went looking for volunteers, he found them everywhere.