Giles stood up abruptly. “It’s done! We have ten minutes to get the hell out of here.”
“Allow me,” said Molly. She picked up Giles and the six remaining Droods with her magic, and flew them all away through the painfully bright air, towards the Merlin Glass gateway.
Behind them, drones fell upon the bomb and tried to tear it apart, but the Armourer’s work defeated them. They beat at it with their rotting fists, and cut at it with their glowing swords, but the Armourer always did good work. On the top of the box, bright red numbers counted inexorably down to zero.
Molly flew Giles Deathstalker and the six Droods back over the ghoulville, her face a mask of desperate concentration. She dropped down to where the gateway hung unsupported on the open air, and flew them all through and into the War Room. I moved quickly to seal off the gateway to that particular location. Molly touched softly down beside me and looked proudly, almost triumphantly, at me, as though to say, See? I’m still me, still on the side of the angels. You can still trust me. I smiled reassuringly back at her. What else could I do? Even though her time in the ghoulville hadn’t affected her at all. Even though she didn’t even narrow her eyes against the unbearable light, or so much as cough at the unbreathable air.
The communications officer shouted that the bomb had exploded and the Heron’s Reach ghoulville was destroyed, and we all raised some kind of cheer. It didn’t feel like a victory with so many Droods dead.
Doctors and nurses rushed the six survivors away to the waiting emergency wards, to treat them for shock and check them for radiation damage. A couple tried to say they were ready to fight on, in other nests, but you could see their hearts weren’t in it. The Matriarch ordered them to stand down, and I think they were secretly grateful. I knew how they felt. I remembered the carnage on the Nazca Plain. It’s hard to fight an inhuman foe with only human resources.
Of course, I could almost hear Martha say. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and the world wouldn’t need Droods.
Harry Drood and Roger Morningstar took their two hundred armoured Droods and went to Siberia. Tunguska, to be exact, where something crashed into the Earth in 1908. The impact was so devastating it flattened trees for hundreds of miles in every direction, and the light generated by the impact was so bright that Londoners could read a newspaper in the streets at midnight. There are lots of theories about what it was that hit Tunguska all those years ago, everything from a meteor to a crashing alien ship to a miniature black hole…but no one knows anything for sure. Except us. We know. We know everything, remember?
As far as we knew, the Loathly Ones’ presence in Tunguska was just a coincidence. They had no idea what was still sleeping there, deep and deep under the permafrost, and we were all happy for things to stay that way. What if the drones should wake it up by accident? Molly had asked. Then we’d really be in trouble, I said.
The Loathly Ones had taken over a secret Soviet science city, X37, one of the highly classified research communities set up to run the kind of experiments the USSR just knew the rest of the world wouldn’t approve of. That’s why they set this one up in Siberia, so that, if things did go very badly wrong, there’d be hardly anyone around to object. X37 wasn’t on any official map, then or now, and had been pretty much deserted in recent years by the scientists and their families after the funding dried up. When the drones came, there was just a single troop of Russian soldiers, guarding a handful of scientists working on a new kind of food flavouring. They never stood a chance. X37 became a ghoulville, and no one even noticed. Except us.
Harry and Roger and their strike force passed through the Merlin Glass and arrived in a great open square in the middle of the secret city. The surrounding buildings seemed to have evolved, transformed themselves, in disturbingly organic ways. Wires and cables wriggled through the walls, threading through brick and stone like pulsing veins. More cables hung across the streets like spiders’ webs, or exposed nerve structures, pulsing slowly on the bright air. Strange combinations of technology and living things protruded from burst-out doorways and shattered windows, as though the buildings’ insides had grown too big for them. And, everywhere, the stark fierce light, and air so thick with unbreathable elements that it looked like the whole city was underwater. The armour protected Harry and the Droods; Roger didn’t seem to notice it at all.
They could see the tower from where they were, standing tall and grotesque and defiant above the blunt utilitarianism of the old Soviet architecture. Strange energies were crackling up and down the length of the tower, as though it were trying to force itself awake.
Harry and Roger looked quickly about them as a horde of demons came running right at them from every direction at once. They’d been alerted by the attack on the New Zealand ghoulville, and they were ready. But here, in this nest, all the drones were freaks and monsters. Whether it was a legacy of the old forbidden sciences practiced in X37 during the Cold War, or strange emanations from what lay sleeping under the permafrost, every drone here was oversized and monstrous. Terribly misshapen, with huge bones and long strings of muscle, stretched faces with slit mouths full of shark teeth, clusters of eyes, and even waving barbed antennae… they might have been human once, but they had left all that behind. The drones surged forward with fangs and claws, and improvised weapons, and Harry and Roger and the Droods went forward to meet them.
Fang and claw were no match for golden armour, and the Droods’ enhanced strength and speed made them a match for any monster. Harry wore the gold and fought alongside his people, striking down his enemies with brutal efficiency. Roger hung back from the main fighting, watching carefully. He was waiting. And when the first drones appeared with glowing swords clutched awkwardly in malformed hands, he was ready for them. He pointed a finger, and they exploded. He looked at them in a certain way, and blood burst from their mouths and eyes and ears. He spoke certain Words, and their rotting flesh melted and ran away down their bodies. Roger Morningstar wore his Infernal aspect openly, and even Harry couldn’t bear to look at him directly anymore.
For all the drones’ overwhelming numbers, without the radioactive swords they were no match for Drood armour and Hell magic. Harry and Roger took the point, and slowly but inexorably they fought their way out of the open square and headed for the tower. Every drone in the nest came running or sliding or hopping through the city streets, pressing together in the narrow intersections to block off the way to the tower, and it didn’t even slow the strike force down. They cut and hacked and hammered their way through the drones, killing everything that wasn’t them.
Harry stayed right at the head of his people, proving himself a magnificent fighter. The golden blades in his hands swept back and forth with supernatural speed, too fast for the unaided human eye to follow. Blood gushed over his gleaming chest and sprayed across his golden face mask, and just ran away, unable to get a grip. Drones attacked him singly and en masse, and never even slowed his advance. He had learned everything the Deathstalker could teach him about fighting with blades, and nothing could stop him now.