The door is yanked open abruptly—they’ve got some kind of remote locking override—and a hand grabs her shoulder roughly. “On the ground now!” says the soldier.
“I don’t think so.” Fabian Everyman, also known as the Mandate, unfolds himself from the backseat and stretches as he steps clear of the car, his voice a low singsong that nevertheless wraps fingers of steel garroting wire around the throats of everyone who hears him. A nerdy-looking young man in jeans and a hoodie appears out of the darkness and blurs towards him; but he merely snaps his fingers and the youth collapses to the gravel, motionless. A faint popping and stench of burning skin betrays the disintegration of every military-strength defensive ward within hearing range. “Captain Stevens, make yourself known to me. Everyone else, be still”—he pauses—“you may breathe,” he adds, as if it is an afterthought for the benefit of the human statues frozen on every side. “You too,” he nudges the fallen—civilian? Laundry operative?—with the brightly polished toe of one dress shoe.
Iris is perturbed to find that she is free to move. Clearly her Lord’s intent privileges her. She steps out of the car and walks around to his side as one of the soldiers stumbles, almost sleepwalking, away from the big truck. Beyond it, something sparks and crackles in the gravel—a line bisecting the road, and the plantation of trees. A ward of some kind, and a big one if she’s any judge of things.
“I’m—I’m Stevens. H-he”—a faint gesture at the ground—“Dr. Schwartz, our Continuity liaison.” He stops moving.
Fabian smiles in the darkness. “I did wonder about him—not terribly military, is he? I believe Dr. Armstrong told you to expect me. Report, Captain.”
“Yuh … yessir.” Stevens clearly finds it a painful effort to speak, much less to think. “The, the police marksmen inside opened fire as we approached. One injured, condition stable, then the big ward went up around the house. Our K-22 shows a thaum field off the scale and the cops aren’t answering on Airwave or mobile phone—”
“I can clear the ward for you, Captain. Tell your men who I am and I will release them.”
“Yessir. Men, this is our back-up-up … new Masterrrr…” Stevens sounds as if he’s having trouble enunciating the words. One side of his face is slackening as Iris watches. His voice drops an octave, slurring drunkenly but gaining an uncanny echo: “All glory to the Black Pharaoh!”
“That’s enough.” Fabian snaps his fingers again. “Be free again to serve me, soldiers of England. You too, Doctor.” The unseen grin fills the darkness again; a million blind, many-legged things cringe in reverence before him in the woods. “Ah, hmm. I shall take care of the crude barrier presently. You and your men”—he nods at Stevens—“will deal with the police and the handmaids of the False Pretender. You will find the worst of their works in the cellars. My priestess will go before me; I shall grant her the power to deal with the Pretender’s minions.” A vast and airy power clamps itself around Iris’s mind and it is all she can do not to cry out in terror and awe as the night falls away before her strange new senses. “I grant you”—his gesture takes in the soldiers—“protection from what you will face this night.” Muffled swearing tells Iris that she’s not the only recipient of her Lord’s weird benediction. “I shall wait in the Grand Hall. When you find the Prime Minister, bring him before me.” He pauses. “Iris? I want you to leave the car open and the keys on the driver’s seat.” A grinning skull wreathed in flames of darkness howls with mirth before her inner eye. “Just a little jape at the expense of the Pretender.”
Iris hastens to prepare the car as her Lord directs. A soldier climbs into the cab of the big fire incident control vehicle and a moment later its engine grumbles and it rolls away from the driveway. Her Lord stands in its wheel tracks, facing the curtain of eerie green radiance that blocks the steps to Nether Stowe House. Other soldiers disperse to either side, behind the tree line.
Does he think he can—she begins to think, just as Fabian makes a gesture and the defensive ward bursts, pulsing outward into the night like a breath of wind from the abyss.
Then the shooting starts.
*
The former stable block is a three-story stone building facing onto a cobbled courtyard at one side of Nether Stowe House. The courtyard itself is reserved for parking at these events, both for the catering suppliers and for those guests whose status extends to chauffeur-driven limousines. Here the drivers wait with their cars, awaiting a call to drive round to the front of the house to collect their passengers.
Mo trots around the back of the pavilion and is halfway across the expanse of lawn when the hair rises on the back of her neck, a moment before a crackle of automatic gunfire thunders out from beyond the front of the building. She flops to the grass, swearing and frightened, pulling her invisibility tight around her like a shawl; but invisibility won’t make a blind bit of difference to a random bullet, and all she can do is pray that all the shooting is around the other side of the house.
“CANDID, MADCAP, shooting just started, is this you?”
“MADCAP, CANDID, can confirm perimeter ward just dropped, OCCULUS moving forward, defenders returning fire. Can you take cover?”
Mo risks looking up, briefly. The floodlights cast long, razor-edged shadows across the lawn she’s lying on, revealing it to be as flat as a crepe. “I’m in the middle of the lawn. How about I head for the cars?”
“Do it. Alex is inbound with help. I’ll direct him your way.”
“Over,” she murmurs, rolls to her knees, and hikes up her skirt—the gown is ruined, but it’ll help her blend in with the shadows if she loses her invisibility—then knots it out of the way, and lurches into a crouching, erratic run, breathing heavily. “I’m too old for this stuff,” she pants under her breath.
The cars are parked in a neat row before the barred stable doors, gleaming in the moonlight like black and silver beetles—only bridal corteges come in white, and for some reason it strikes Mo as ludicrous that nobody ever drives a lime-green or purple candy-fleck limousine—and the drivers are either snoozing at the wheel or have gone elsewhere. She steps off the lawn, wincing at the sharp-edged tarmac and gravel underfoot, and casts around for Persephone’s Bentley. There it is, at one end, windscreen a silvery sheen in the night—
Something tickles the edge of her senses. She focuses, relaxing her invisibility as she peers into the night. The sheen on the windscreen doesn’t shift as she walks forward, it’s as if it’s part of the windscreen, not a reflection; and there’s a black dot at its heart—
She hears the clack of a gun being cocked directly behind her. “Freeze!”
The woman’s voice is harsh and full of a dangerous tension. Mo isn’t stupid. She freezes.