The Man with the Golden Torc sh-1 Read online

  "What’s the mission?" I said flatly.

  The Matriarch smiled briefly for the first time. "Your mission is to take the Soul of Albion back to Stonehenge and rebury it under the main sacrificial altar, where it belongs. Once it is back in place, the Soul will be safe again. The Stones will protect it. In the wrong hands, the Soul could bring down England, and perhaps even the Droods."

  I was nodding even as she spoke. This had to be what Jacob and I had overheard them discussing, on his dead television.

  Martha called to half a dozen armed guards, who brought forward a great oaken chest sealed with solid silver bars and cold iron padlocks. On top of which the whole casket practically crackled with protective spells. The guards couldn’t have handled it more respectfully if it had been filled to the brim with nitroglycerin. They placed the casket very carefully at Martha’s feet, and then almost tripped over each other as they backed away from it, at speed. Martha gave them one of her best icy looks and undid the bands and padlocks with a Word. They snapped open, one after the other, and the defence spells immediately started warming up, until Martha shut them down with a quick gesture. The casket lid opened by itself, and Martha reached in and drew out a small silver jewel box, no bigger than her hand.

  She turned the delicate key in its lock, and the box opened to reveal a bed of red plush velvet and on it the Soul of Albion. A polished crystal sphere, no bigger than my thumb, it blazed with unearthly fires. It was impossibly, heartstoppingly beautiful, almost painful to the eyes, like the platonic ideal of every gem or jewel or precious stone that ever was. All across the War Room people stopped what they were doing and looked around, sensing the presence of something new and wonderful in their midst.

  The Soul is supposed to have fallen to Earth from the stars some three thousand years ago, but there are more legends about the Soul than you can shake a grimoire at. Terribly beautiful, impossibly powerful, linked forever to the land in which it fell. Martha snapped the lid of the jewel box shut, cutting off the brilliant light, and we all breathed a little more easily again. While its light blazed, it was almost impossible to think of anything but the Soul. Martha glared around her, and everyone quickly got back to work again. She locked the box and handed it to me. I accepted it gingerly. It felt strangely light, almost insubstantial in my hand. I slipped it into my jacket pocket, taking my hand away from the box as quickly as possible. On the whole, I think I’d have felt safer carrying a backpack nuke with the timer already running.

  "As long as the Soul of Albion remains in that box, it is protected by powerful masking spells," said Martha. "And the lead lining should shield you from most of the Soul’s destructive radiation."

  "Oh, good," I said. "I feel so much safer now."

  Long and long ago, so far back that history becomes legend and myth, someone used the Soul to perform a mighty magic, and now as long as the Soul of Albion rests in its appointed place within the great circle of standing stones that is Stonehenge, England is safe from all threats of invasion. (There is another legend, about three royal Crowns of Anglia, but that was always just a diversion.) King Harold unearthed the Soul and took it with him to Hastings in 1066, thinking it would help him stand off William of Normandy, the fool. After the battle, William the Conqueror personally oversaw the returning of the Soul to Stonehenge, and no one had moved it since.

  Until now.

  "I have to ask," I said. "Who the hell thought it was a good idea to bring the Soul of Albion all the way here in the first place? And have they been given a really good slapping?"

  Alistair sniffed and did his best to look down his nose at me. "That concerns policy, Edwin. You don’t need to know. Suffice to say…there were security issues involved."

  "However," Martha said quickly, "given the recent attacks on the Hall and now the Heart itself, it has been decided that the Soul should be returned to its rightful place, and the sooner the better. Originally, your uncle James was to have performed this mission. That’s why we called him back from the Amazon jungles. But we all feel that under…current circumstances, the movements of a major agent like the Gray Fox are bound to be more clearly monitored than usual. If any of our enemies discovered he was heading for Stonehenge, they might draw some very accurate conclusions. On the other hand, a fairly minor, semi-rogue operative such as yourself might well slip under their radar and go unnoticed."

  "Spell out the catch for me," I said. "Just so I can be sure I’ve got it right."

  "I would have thought it was obvious," said Martha, meeting my gaze unflinchingly. "If you are noticed, and your mission deduced, the odds are that every bad thing in the world will come for you, desperate for a chance to get their hands on the legendary Soul of Albion."

  "And then my mission turns into a suicide run," I said, nodding slowly. "No wonder you felt the need to bribe me with the offer of a place on the council. The odds are you’re sending me to my death."

  "But will you do it?" said the Matriarch. "For the family, and for England?"

  "Of course," I said. "Anything for England."

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dangerous Lab Interns

  So I went off to pay a visit to the family Armourer. Bit of a dry old stick, but there’s nothing he doesn’t know about weapons, devices, and things that go boom, whether scientific or magical in nature. In the more than likely event of something going horribly wrong on my new mission, it was clear I was going to need all the serious weaponry I could get my hands on, if I was to protect the Soul of Albion from all comers.

  I wanted a new gun. A big gun. A really, really big gun. With atomic bullets.

  The family armoury is situated a decent distance beneath the west wing, set even deeper in the bedrock than the War Room. That way when (rather than if) the whole armoury finally blows itself to hell, it won’t take the rest of the Hall with it. The Armourer and his staff, geniuses one and all though they may be, and enthusiastic to a fault, have always had a tendency towards the kick it and see what happens school of scientific enquiry. They also have unlimited access to guns, grimoires, and unstable chemicals. I’m amazed this part of England is still here.

  The present armoury is set up in what used to be the old wine cellars, behind vast and heavy blast-proof doors. Designed to keep things in, rather than out. The cellars are basically a long series of connected stone chambers, with bare plastered walls and curving ceilings, all but buried under a multicoloured spaghetti of tacked-up electrical wiring. The fluorescent lighting was a sometime thing, and the huge air-conditioning system grumbled constantly to itself. The stone chambers were full to bursting with the Armourer’s extended staff: researchers, expediters, mechanics, weaponeers, and human guinea pigs. (Someone had to test each new device. This was decided by a lottery among the staff, and the loser was the one who wasn’t smart enough to fix the outcome in advance.)

  The armoury is always coming up with new weapons devised, constructed, and tested right here in the labs. Which is why the place is always so appallingly noisy. I stood by the closed blast-proof doors awhile, waiting for my ears to adjust to the din. Men and women with earnest, preoccupied faces bustled back and forth, giving their whole attention to the latest generation of deadly devices they were producing for agents to use in the field. And hopefully getting all the bugs out in advance. I could still remember the explosive whoopee cushion, which didn’t, and the utterly impenetrable arm-mounted force shield, which wasn’t. No one paid me any attention at all, but I was getting used to that.

  Lights flared brightly, shadows danced, and lightning crawled all over one wall like electric ivy. Sharp chemical stinks fought it out with the gentler aromas of crushed herbs, while molten metal flowed sluggishly into ceramic moulds, and smoke drifted gently on the air from the latest unfortunate incident. The armoury didn’t have a first-aid box; it had its own adjoining hospital ward. A hell of a lot of people crowded around test benches and futuristic lab equipment, alchemical retorts and silver-bullet moulds, and of course the ubiquitous c
omputers and chalked pentagrams. Most of these very busy people were cursing loudly and emphatically as they tried to persuade their latest projects to do what they were supposed to without exploding, melting down, or turning the experimenter into something small and fluffy. Somebody close to me reached for a handy lump hammer, and I decided to go somewhere else.

  I strolled through the labs, keeping an eye out for the Armourer. Doorways opened in midair, giving brief glimpses of faraway places, and a test animal imploded. A desperate young intern chased through the labs, flailing away with a butterfly net, trying to catch an oversized eyeball with its own fluttering bat wings. I’m sure it had looked perfectly reasonable at the drafting stage. No one paid any attention to these little disruptions, except to jump just a little, absentmindedly, at the latest bang. Just another day, in the armoury. When you’re working at the cutting edges of devious thinking, you have to expect and allow for the occasional setback, along with regular stinks, spatial inversions, and the odd unexpected transformation. Everyone who worked in the armoury was a volunteer drawn from a long list of applications, carefully selected from those in the family who had clearly demonstrated they had far more brains than was good for them. (Often accompanied by an unhealthy curiosity and a complete lack of self-preservation instincts.)

  (The really dangerous thinkers were either rapidly promoted to purely theoretical projects or sent to alternate dimensions and told not to come back till they’d calmed down.)

  The current crop of interns looked like science nerds everywhere, all heavy spectacles and plastic pocket protectors, except that some of them wore pointy wizard’s hats as well. A lot of them were wearing T-shirts under their lab coats, bearing the legend I Blow Things Up, Therefore I Am, Even If Someone Else Suddenly Isn’t. Science nerd humour. They all looked very earnest and very committed, and if they survived long enough would eventually be promoted to the somewhat safer environs of the research and development labs. It did seem to me though, as I wandered through the chaos in search of the Armourer, that the old place held a lot more people and projects, along with a greater general sense of urgency, than I remembered from my last visit, ten years ago.

  Two of the more brawny types were sparring with electrified brass knuckles, sparks crackling and spitting fiercely on the air as they swung and parried. One girl had her head stuck deep in a fish tank, proving she could now breathe underwater. Impressive, but I couldn’t help thinking the gaping rows of gills on her neck would be a bit of a giveaway in polite society. Not far away, an unfortunate young man had stopped proving he could now breathe fire, because it had given him hiccoughs. Unpredictable and highly inflammable hiccoughs. Someone led him away to put an asbestos bag over his head. I didn’t see why they couldn’t just stick his head in the fish tank, next to the girl.

  And someone had blown up the firing range again. There’s always someone trying to break the record for biggest and most powerful handgun.

  I finally spotted the Armourer up ahead, striding back and forth through the caverns, keeping a stern eye on everyone and everything. He paused here and there to dispense advice, encouragement, and the occasional clip on the ear, where necessary. The Armourer was strict but fair. I waited until he came back and settled at his usual testing bench, and then I slipped in beside him. He glanced briefly at me, sniffed loudly, and went back to what he was working on. It takes a lot to surprise the Armourer.

  A tall, middle-aged man with far too much nervous energy, he wore a permanently stained white lab coat over a T-shirt saying Guns Don’t Kill People; I Kill People. Two shocks of tufty white hair jutted out over his ears below a bulging bald pate, and under bushy white eyebrows his eyes were a steely gray. His expression rarely changed from an habitual scowl, and while he had once been tall and imposing, he was now bent over by a pronounced stoop, legacy of so many years spent leaning over workbenches and lab projects that always needed fixing in a hurry. Or maybe just from ducking a lot. I sat beside him for a while, waiting for him to say something, but as always it was up to me to tear his attention away from his latest project.

  "Hello, Armourer. Good to see you again. The old place seems very busy, just at the moment. Are we preparing for a war?"

  He sniffed loudly again. "Always, boy. Always."

  He plugged a thick electrical cable into a socket, tripped half a dozen switches, and then looked expectantly at a computer monitor wrapped in mistletoe and strings of garlic. Nothing happened. The Armourer hit the computer with a hammer, and I quickly took it away from him.

  "Give that back!" he said, scowling fiercely. "That’s my lucky hammer!"

  "Lucky?" I said, holding it carefully out of reach.

  "I’m still here, aren’t I?"

  I put the hammer down at the opposite end of the bench. "What’s the problem, Armourer?"

  He sighed as he realised he was going to have to talk to me after all.

  "Seems like everyone in the Hall is trying to draw power from the Heart, all at the same time. Every damned department at once. I’m supposed to have priority, but it’s all I can do to elbow my way into the queue. If I have to go upstairs and complain, there’ll be tear gas and shrapnel flying through the common rooms…"

  "Why is there so much demand for power?"

  "Don’t ask me. Ask bloody Alistair!"

  I recognised the tone. "All right; what’s Alistair done now?"

  The Armourer gave me his best put-upon expression. "First the Matriarch increases my budget, and my workload, and tells me my projects have top priority until further notice; and then bloody Alistair comes poncing in here and announces he’s chosen the armoury as the best place to start his latest efficiency drive. So now not only has my workload gone through the roof, but I have to account for everything we do and use, in triplicate! If I’d wanted to spend half my life up to my elbows in paperwork, I’d have shot myself in the head. Better yet, I’d have shot bloody Alistair in the head, and it may yet come to that. So far I’ve taken to just ignoring the paperwork and using his increasingly distraught memos as toilet paper. And then sending them back to him."

  I couldn’t help smiling and nodding. Typical Alistair: penny wise and pound foolish. Always trying to be useful in the worst possible way. Someone once suggested, well out of Grandmother’s hearing, that the best way to bring down our enemies would be to send them Alistair as a gift. I suddenly stopped smiling. Someone in the family was a traitor…and what better way to handicap the family than by undermining and disrupting the work in the armoury? I shook my head reluctantly. I really liked the idea of nailing Alistair as the traitor, but I knew for a fact he’d had to go through all kinds of security checks before the family would allow Martha to marry him. If there’d been even a hint of anything suspicious about him, they’d have found it. I looked around abruptly as the Armourer jabbed me warningly in the ribs, and there was Alexandra Drood, bearing down on me like a heat-seeking missile.

  "What the hell are you doing down here, Eddie?"

  "Hello, Alex," I said easily. "Good to see you again too. You’re looking deliciously stern, but then you usually do. Especially in certain dreams I’ve been having, involving you in leathers in a dungeon…Don’t look at me like that. I’m here to pick up something in the small but deadly line, for my next mission. What are you doing down here?"

  She stood squarely before me, fists planted on her hips. "I run this place now. I’m in training to take over from the Armourer, when he retires."

  I looked at the Armourer. "Retiring? You? Really?"

  He shrugged uncomfortably. "Comes to us all, Eddie. I’m not getting any younger, despite all my experimenting in that area, and the family depends on the armoury for new ideas and new approaches, as well as new weapons. Maybe it is time for a change. I just oversee things, these days. Paperwork, remember? Alexandra takes care of all the day-to-day business. And does it very well."

  He actually managed a real smile for her, which she ignored, her fierce glare fixed on me. I considered Alexandra
thoughtfully. She was a cousin of mine, from the same year as me. We’d attended a lot of classes together, and she always was teacher’s pet. A first-class student, and the first to tell you so. Alexandra was tall and blond, with a balcony you could do Shakespeare from. Every inch the Aryan ideal, and twice as scary. Her lab coat had been starched to within an inch of its life and was dazzlingly white. She was pretty enough, in a totally intimidating sort of way, but she always gave the impression that she was about to lunge forward and bite you. And not necessarily in a good way. She glared at me with more than her usual ferocity, and I instinctively looked around for some raw meat to throw her. She prodded me hard in the chest with a forefinger.

  "Careful, dear," I said. "In some cultures, that means we’re engaged."

  "I am not your dear!"

  "You have no idea how safe and secure that makes me feel, Alex."

  She took a few deep breaths to steady herself, which did very interesting things to her balcony. I had to look away for a moment. When Alexandra spoke again, her voice was icily calm and controlled.

  "I’d heard you were back, Eddie. I don’t know how you have the nerve to show your face in the Hall. You turned your back on the family, after everything they did for you."

  "Because of everything they did to me. I still serve, but in my own way."

  "There can be only one way! You betrayed the family trust; the old traditions of duty and responsibility. You ran away from the Hall. Away from me."

  "I’d have died by inches if I stayed here, Alex. You know that."

  "You should have stayed away. You have no place here any more. No one in the family wants you here. No one. Now get the hell out of my armoury before I have security throw you out."