The Crocodile nods and he’s dropped his smile, which is a bad sign: the gloves are coming off and I wonder, horrified, How the fuck did the BBC get their hands on a level six defensive ward? as I realize this is a setup and meanwhile he’s leaning forward, closing in for the kill—
“Perhaps you could explain to the viewers why the surviving invaders are being treated as asylum seekers, Mr. Howard? Wouldn’t terrorism charges be more appropriate? Or a war crimes investigation?”
Shit! That’s not supposed to be public knowledge. Which means there is a leak somewhere. As the scriptwriters on Yes, Minister observed, the ship of state is unique in that it’s the only vessel that leaks from the top down. Our oath of office should prevent anyone inside the tent from pissing out … which means someone in the government is briefing against us, probably at cabinet level. We are totally off the talking points now: nobody briefed me for this. Fuck! Time to pass the blame.
“The … survivors … of the attacking force include a number of slaves and other victims who were there unwillingly. The Home Office has conceded that in some cases there is a case for them to claim refuge from persecution.” Pass the blame. “I’d like to remind you that the enemy military made extensive use of human sacrifice and other forms of necromancy to power their attack.” All of which is entirely true, but—
“I’m not talking about the slaves, Mr. Howard. Why is the All-Highest, their leader, claiming asylum? Can you explain?”
Fuck. Fuck fuckityfuck fucksticks really bad swear words.
“Let me emphasize this: what came through the gate in Malham Cove was the last surviving military force of a nation that had just lost the magical equivalent of a nuclear war. Also their dependents. And slaves. They can’t go back; sending them back means sending them to their certain deaths. The enemy All-Highest who ordered the attack is dead. The current All-Highest was not in charge of the attack, and on inheriting the position immediately ordered the unconditional surrender of the, ah, attacking force.” That is, the Host of Air and Darkness: the surviving armored cavalry forces of the Morningstar Empire. Don’t say elves, there’s nothing terribly Tolkienesque about this bunch and the good PR would just make them harder to handle. “Accommodating their unwilling victims was a precondition of the surrender. In return, the current All-Highest is actively cooperating with us in restraining their military forces. None of them are able to, ah, go back. The world they came from is—it’s been overrun by alien horrors.”
Not to mention that sending them back would risk drawing the attention of the undead nightmares they were fleeing, who might well pick up the trail in our direction and decide not to stop at eating just one civilization—but I can’t say that on live TV news, people might complain to Ofcom about the nightmare fuel.
“But—asylum, Mr. Howard?” The eyebrow is at full extension. Time to shut this down.
“I’m sorry, it’s not my job to set policy. That question is better directed to the minister responsible.”
Paxo is indignant. “A minister responsible for a department that didn’t officially exist until the week before last? That’s simply not good enough, Mr. Howard!” Bastard. “I’m sure we’ll get some better answers when we have a cabinet minister in charge. But one final question for you: can you explain to the viewers why you are reportedly known to other members of your agency as the ‘Eater of Souls’?”
For a moment I see red: blood splattered all up and down the blue-screen back wall of the studio. But no, that would be bad, and worse, it would be unprofessional. Also, the ward he’s wearing under his shirt collar is powerful enough that I could break it, but I’d probably set fire to his hair in the process. It would look bad on camera. And also-also—I suddenly realize this is the wrap-up question: I get the last word in so I can select what to give him.
I summon up a sheepish smirk: “When I was junior, I used to put my foot in my mouth rather a lot. The nickname stuck.”
And the light on the camera goes out.
*
The government’s occult secret service goes back further than most people realize.
Our oldest handwritten records were left behind by Dr. John Dee, the noted mathematician, alchemist, and astrologer who worked for Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spymaster. Back in his day, everything ran on a nod-and-a-wink basis. It was part of the Crown Service and established by Royal Prerogative, which basically means Lizzie Tudor wrote a letter saying “make it so” and appointed Frankie the Fixer to run it. The Invisible College (as it later became known) operated as an informal gentleman-dabbler’s club until the Second World War. Then wartime expansion and the systematization provided by the Turing Theorems led to the incorporation of the Laundry as a division inside the Special Operations Executive, when Winston Churchill wrote an “action this day” memo using the authority vested in him by His Kingliness George the Umpty …
(You get the picture.)
Now, back in the day the Invisible College ran entirely on ritual magic. But ritual magic doesn’t work reliably, because ritual magicians tend to succumb to Krantzberg syndrome, a very nasty spongiform dementia caused by microscopic extradimensional feeders (parasites attracted by magical manifestations of information processing). Over time they nibble the practitioner’s cerebral cortex into lace, which tends to bring the practitioner’s career staggering to a palsied conclusion. And that’s assuming they don’t inadvertently succumb to the greater feeders, such as feeders in the night: predators that make themselves at home in neural networks like, oh, the human cerebral cortex, and take over the body to go in search of more brains to chow down on. (Thereby leading to myths, legends, and Shaun of the Dead.)
There are a handful of cognitive infections that grant ritual practitioners a degree of immunity to eaters—PHANG syndrome (vampirism) is one of them, and the for-want-of-a-better-word elven invaders seem to have come up with some kind of occult vaccine. And then there’s little old me. (I’m … let’s say “unique” and tiptoe away from the subject.) But all these mitigating techniques have severe drawbacks, and as a result there are old ritual magicians, and there are bold ritual magicians, but there are no old, bold magicians. They don’t survive, and they tend to have unique skill sets, thereby defeating the first principle of bureaucracy: that nobody is indispensable.