Simon Green - For Heaven's Eyes Only

I strode through the Merlin Glass, Molly at my side, Harry and the Sarjeant all but treading on my heels. The Drood army filed through after us. In a few moments we were all through the Glass and spreading out across the empty car park. And that was when it all changed. The calm and quiet scene before us disappeared, gone in a moment, swept away like the illusion it always was. Between us and the hotel stood a massive army, thousands of heavily armed Satanists, with Alexandre Dusk standing at their head . . . smiling complacently at me.

“It’s a trap!” yelled the Sarjeant. “Defend the Glass! It’s our way home!”

But when we all turned to look, the Merlin Glass was only a twenty-foot-square mirror reflecting our shocked faces. I tried half a dozen different control Words, but the Glass was just a glass. The Satanists had blocked it again, like they had in Under Parliament. I was getting really tired of that. I turned to Molly.

“It was all false information, designed to lure us into a trap. Could Isabella have been turned? Could she have been one of them all along?”

“No!” Molly said immediately. “She couldn’t hide something like that from me. She never had any time for Satanists. They must have captured her. No wonder we saw only a sending in the Sanctity. It was an illusion, never her at all. What have you done with my sister, Dusk, you Satanist scumbag?”

Alexandre Dusk smiled easily at Molly and me. He looked very relaxed, very at his ease, as though he were out to enjoy the sunny day, not standing at the head of an army ten times the size of mine. He nodded easily to me, the condescending bastard.

“Why do you think Roger let you go?” he said, in an infuriatingly reasonable tone of voice. We knew Molly and Isabella were still hanging around, waiting for a chance to jump in and rescue you, so we made that possible. When they teleported you out, we were waiting, and it was a simple task for a few of our more accomplished sorcerers to reach in and grab Isabella and materialise her in one of our places of power. She never even saw it coming. And while she is a very talented young lady, we have some very powerful people of our own these days. People who can tell which way the wind is blowing.

“Then all we had to do was send you the image of her, and have her say our words with her mouth. Present you with an urgent deadline so you didn’t have time to think about it, and an opportunity too good to resist. So you’d charge right in, Eddie, like you always do. And here we all are! Ah . . . so many Droods in one place. Unprecedented! So many torcs for us to take from your dead bodies and make our own.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “Like that’s going to happen.”

Dusk’s smile didn’t falter in the least. “I’m really looking forward to this, Eddie. There are still those in the world waiting for you to save them from us; I shall make a point of sending a severed Drood’s head to each and every one of them, to stamp out that last trace of hope.”

“Arrogant little prick,” I said. “You’re facing an army of Droods. A sane man would be running by now. Not that it would do any good.”

“One hundred and seven Droods, by my count,” said Dusk, still entirely unruffled, and I was beginning to wonder why. “Whereas I have one thousand three hundred highly motivated men and women, armed with all the very latest weapons. Your precious and much-vaunted armour is a thing of the past. You are yesterday’s men. We are cutting-edge.”

I had to smile. “You didn’t keep up with the memos, did you? We’ve upgraded.”

Dusk made an annoyed, frustrated gesture, upset that we weren’t properly impressed and taking his threats seriously. “You’re all going to die, Droods! And your pathetic antiquated morality with you!”

“Not going to happen,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms briskly. “A battle can go either way; any good soldier knows that. But even if you should destroy all of us, it wouldn’t make any difference. Whatever happens, the family goes on. Droods maintain.”

“You don’t know what you’re facing,” said Dusk, his voice cold though his face was flushed. He wasn’t finding this as much fun as he’d thought he would. He kept giving us the right feed lines, and we kept refusing our cues. We were supposed to realise we were already beaten and shiver in our shoes, try to surrender, maybe even beg for mercy so he could laugh in our faces as he turned us down. We shouldn’t only be staring defiantly back at him and laughing in his face. He gestured at the ranks and ranks lined up behind him. “Allow me to present our very latest acquisition, courtesy of one of those brilliant minds we abducted from the Supernatural Arms Faire. We have our own armour now. Modern armour. He really was ready to present Drood-equivalent armour at the fair this year, only we got to him first. Step forward, boys.”

A dozen men stepped forward to show themselves off. At least, I assumed they were men. It was hard to tell.

“This new armour is state-of-the-art living superplastic, pre-programmed to follow direct instructions from its wearer via a cybernetic mind-link,” Dusk said proudly. “Indestructible, endlessly adaptable, capable of taking on any shape or function the mind of the wearer can conceive. A thousand weapons in one, combined with an absolute defence. Every wearer an army in his own right.”

And then he stopped, because there was a certain amount of quiet sniggering going on in the Drood ranks. Dusk glared back and forth.

“Sorry,” I said. “Terribly rude, I know, but . . . is that it? Really? That ’s your modern armour?”

“They look like toy soldiers,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms.

He had a point. They did. Covered from head to toe in a dull grey plastic, smooth and featureless, like grown men dipped in liquid plastic and allowed to harden. I kept wanting to look at their feet for the bases they should be standing on. Some of them were holding plastic rifles, the material of the guns blending seamlessly into their plastic hands. Their faces were rough and blurred versions of the features under the plastic, like any toy soldier.

“Go!” Dusk said angrily to his plastic men. “Show them what you can do! A special bonus to the first man to bring me a Drood head!”

The plastic men surged forward inhumanly quickly, followed by more than fifty others from the ranks. The plastic armour stretched smoothly with every movement. Those without guns extruded swords and axes from their plastic hands, with fiercely sharp edges. Some had rifles; some had handguns; some had machine guns, though I still hadn’t worked out what they were going to fire. Plastic bullets? Against Drood armour?

And then . . . it all started to go wrong. The plastic armour began to change, the basic grey flushing with bursts of swirling colours. Dark, angry shades of red and blue and green, feverish purples and sick yellows. Swirling on the surface of the plastic armour like infected oil slicks.

The wearers stumbled to a halt and looked at one another confusedly. Strange bulges and eruptions rose and fell in the armour, the surface bubbling and seething as it burst out in new shapes. Some hunched over; some sprouted wings; some grew extra arms. Shocked and startled voices cried out from inside the armour. Some blossomed into strange new shapes, violent and aggressive and increasingly inhuman, reflecting the thoughts and wishes and inner needs of the wearers. Some became medieval demons, complete with horned heads and cloven hooves and clawed hands. Roger Morningstar had clearly made an impression.

But the changes didn’t stop there. The men inside the armour were screaming now, in pain and horror and anguish, begging for help. Some of them became living gargoyles, twisted and misshapen. Some expanded jerkily, in bursts and spurts, till they were ten, twenty feet tall, wavering uncertainly as they struggled to support their own weight. Others became warped, monstrous things, horribly inhuman, the kind of things that chase us in nightmares. Dusk’s army was crying out in shock and alarm, and beginning to back away, shouting that something had gone wrong. And it had. The changes continued, the plastic armour forming horrid abstract shapes from the depths of the unconscious mind. Things that hurt the human eye to look at, impossible for the conscious mind to deal with.