Simon Green - For Heaven's Eyes Only

“Close the door,” I said. “And set a guard outside. No one leaves this room.”

The Armourer gestured urgently, and half a dozen Droods went back out into the corridor and shut the door firmly. The Sarjeant-at-Arms came over to stand before me.

“We’ve evacuated all the surviving prisoners back to the Hall. William’s there with Ammonia, and Molly’s there with her sister. Everyone else in the castle is dead. All the Nazi clones, all the Satanists—though we lost some good people doing it. Their names will be remembered.”

“I see you got your armour back,” I said.

“You didn’t think I’d invent something as important as the clicker and not have something to overrule it if necessary, did you?” said the Armourer.

“Did you get all of the teleport gateways?” I said. “Are you sure you didn’t miss any hidden ones?”

“We’ve got people checking,” said the Armourer. “But, Eddie, listen, I have to tell you—”

“No,” I said. “This is more important. This room contains the upper echelons of the conspiracy, and their leader. Philip MacAlpine.”

“Never liked him,” said the Sarjeant, after a pause. “Good at his job, but never for the right reasons.”

The Armourer shook his head slowly. “He did good work with James and me. But his heart was never in it.”

The Sarjeant-at-Arms looked out over the quiet crowd of Satanists, who were cowed by the presence of so many Droods in their armour. There were still a lot of defiant faces, but none of them was stupid enough to try anything. The Sarjeant nodded once.

“This is the last of them. We have to deal with them, here and now.”

“Deal with them?” I said.

The Sarjeant turned his featureless mask back to me. “Kill them, Eddie. Kill every single one of them. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No,” I said. “They have to die. Not for justice, or revenge, or even for the awful thing they planned to do. But because if we let them live, they’d try to do it again. That or something worse. They have to die here, and their dreams and plans and bad intentions with them. No mercy. Not for them.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms.

He used his gift to call two heavy machine guns into his hands, and then he walked towards the waiting Satanists and opened fire on them. He moved the guns smoothly back and forth, cutting the Satanists down in rows, and stepped calmly over the dead bodies of the fallen to get at the next. Most tried to run, but the golden figures were there to stop them, striking them down with cold armoured fists. There was screaming, pushing and shoving, people trying to use one another as human shields. Cries for mercy, promising to do anything we wanted, make any reparations we wanted, inform on all their contacts, do anything for their lives . . . but mostly they screamed. None of us had anything to say to them. How could they hope to be forgiven, to be shown mercy, after what they’d done and planned to do? Let them go to God, and see if he had any mercy for them.

They had to die, because it was our duty to make sure they could never harm anyone again.

It didn’t take all that long. The Sarjeant-at-Arms’ guns finally fell silent, and only Droods were left standing. A few armoured figures moved carefully among the fallen bodies, but there were no merely wounded. The Sarjeant was very efficient. He looked round him at all the bodies lying slumped and piled across one another and nodded once, contemplating a job well-done. The guns disappeared from his hands. And then we all turned to look at the only two people left standing in the room who weren’t us. Philip MacAlpine and Alexandre Dusk stood together on the stage, looking defiantly back at us. I started toward them, and the Sarjeant and the Armourer came with me. MacAlpine looked quickly around, but there was nowhere for him to go. Alexandre Dusk smiled smugly at me. The bullet wound in his forehead was almost completely healed. He lifted his hands, and dark energies spit and swirled around them.

“I have my power, and I have my shields,” he said. “You can’t kill me, and you can’t stop me.”

“Wrong,” said the Armourer. He raised his clicker, snapped it once, and the magics surrounding Dusk’s hands disappeared. He looked at his hands dumbly for a moment, and then looked back at us. The Armourer smiled. “There are all kinds of clickers. Eddie, would you care to . . . ?”

I stepped forward and jumped up onto the stage. MacAlpine backed quickly away, but Dusk was still too stunned to move. He opened his mouth to say something, and I grew a long golden sword from my right hand and cut off his head. The body slumped to the stage, gouting blood. The head fell to the stage, rolled over the edge and ended up at the Sarjeant’s feet. The mouth was still moving, until the Sarjeant stamped on it. And that was the end of Alexandre Dusk.

I looked at Philip MacAlpine and he snarled back at me. “You can’t have me!” he said, his voice high and ragged. “I don’t care what you’ve got. I made a deal! It was promised to me that nothing in the world can harm me.”

“Hell always lies,” I said. “Except when a truth can hurt you more. You should know how deals with the Devil always work out.”

“I can’t be harmed! My own people tried to kill me in a hundred different ways, hoping to replace me as leader. I have drunk poison, soaked up bullets, laughed at curses! Nothing can touch me anymore. Your armour is worthless against me.”

“Yeah, right,” said the Sarjeant, behind me. He strode forward across the stage and launched a golden fist at MacAlpine’s head with enough force to tear it clean off the man’s shoulders. Except suddenly, impossibly, MacAlpine’s hand came up to intercept it. The golden fist slammed harmlessly into MacAlpine’s palm, stopped dead. And while everyone watched, MacAlpine closed his hand hard and crushed the serjeant’s hand inside his armour. He couldn’t break the golden strange matter, but he could destroy the hand inside it. We all heard the bones break and shatter. The Sarjeant grunted once. MacAlpine let go, and the Sarjeant fell back a step, nursing his injured hand to his chest. He didn’t cry out.

The Armourer looked at MacAlpine thoughtfully. “I wonder what a golden ax would do to his neck?”

“Don’t,” I said. “He really is protected. Sarjeant, have all the wounded been evacuated? Is there anyone else left in the castle?”

“All gone,” said the Sarjeant.

“Then let’s get the hell out of Schloss Shreck, and leave MacAlpine here. Sealed inside the Timeless Moment forever.”

“Ah,” said the Armourer. “We have a slight problem there. As I tried to tell you . . .”

I looked at him. “What?”

“When we smashed the teleport systems, we accidentally set off a self-destruct mechanism,” said the Armourer. “Designed to seal off the Timeless Moment so nothing could get in or out. One last dog-in-the-manger stratagem . . . We found the destruct mechanism, but its workings are protected by powerful shields. We can’t get at it. The best we can do is keep resetting the timer every sixty seconds. There’s a Drood doing that right now. The trouble is . . . the self-destruct mechanism is so powerful it’s affecting Alpha Red Alpha. Basically, if the destruct mechanism goes off, our machine will be destroyed, too. And Alpha Red Alpha takes a lot more than sixty seconds to fire up. We’d be stuck in here forever. Which means . . .”

“One of us has to stay here,” said the Sarjeant. “To keep resetting the timer until after the Hall has safely gone.”

Some days, the hits just keep on coming.

“I’ll stay,” the Sarjeant said. “I know my duty. My job is to protect the family.”