“No he can’t,” I said flatly. “You give William top priority. He knows things no one else in the family knows. Take him up to the hospital wards through the Glass, and make sure he gets to the front of the queue. Don’t make me come looking for you.”
The doctor sighed. “Go ahead, bully me! That’s what I’m here for.” He called through the open Merlin Glass for stretcher bearers, and then peered across at Rafe, still shuddering and staring. “Want me to take a look at that one too? Though I’m pretty sure I can diagnose shock from here.”
“He stays with me,” I said. I wasn’t ready to say we had an Immortal in the family. Not just yet.
They took William away, still unconscious, and I took Rafe back to the Armoury. He clung to me like a child. I told the Armourer everything that had happened, and he looked at Rafe with cold, angry eyes. He pulled Rafe away from me and thrust him into the diagnostic chair, tightening the restraining straps around him with almost brutal efficiency. He then attached all the sensors, checked the display screens, and put the tubes in place. Rafe jumped and flinched a few times, but didn’t say anything. Away from the Old Library, he was quickly regaining his old composure and self-control. He looked at the Armourer and me with a cold and thoughtful gaze. The Armourer finished his work, stepped back to look at the display screens, and then scowled fiercely.
“Wait a minute, that can’t be right . . .” He checked all the connections again, fiddled with a few things, and even gave his computer a warning slap; but when he checked the display screens again he still didn’t like what he saw. “These readings . . . they’re just wrong. They’re barely human. Half of what I’m looking at makes no sense, and the other half . . . Whatever the Immortals are, Eddie, they’re a long way from anything we’d call human.”
“Of course,” said Rafe, sitting calmly and at ease in the diagnostic chair, as though he’d chosen to sit there. “We’re better than human. We don’t have your . . . limitations.”
He had all of his poise and arrogance back, the same superior attitude he’d shown me with his knife at William’s throat. He surreptitiously tested the restraining straps, and smiled slowly.
“A diagnostic chair,” he said easily. “One of the few things that might actually hold me. You can’t tie down an Immortal with ropes and chains. But, it’ll take me a while to break free from this, so off you go, Eddie; ask me your questions. I might answer them. I might even tell you the truth.”
“You even look like you’re trying to escape,” said the Armourer, “and I will have the chair do really quite appalling things to your central nervous system.”
“So you’re the Drood torturer, now?” said Rafe. I knew that wasn’t really his name, but it was hard to think of him as anyone else, even when the look on his face had nothing to do with the young Librarian I’d thought I’d known. He sneered at the Armourer. “I don’t think so. You Droods don’t have it in you to be really ruthless. Not like us.”
The Armourer punched Rafe in the face. A sudden, vicious blow, with all of the Armourer’s strength behind it. I heard Rafe’s nose break, and saw blood fly on the air as the force of the blow whipped
Rafe’s head around. The Armourer studied Rafe calmly. He wasn’t even breathing hard. Rafe sat stunned in the chair, blood coursing down his face. I didn’t know which of us was more startled by what had just happened: Rafe or me. I’d never seen my Uncle Jack do anything like that before. Certainly not with a defenceless prisoner. Rafe looked at me.
“Are you going to just stand there, and let him do that?”
“Sure,” I said. “I might even join in. I like William.”
“We all like William,” said the Armourer.
And he hit Rafe again, right in the eye. It was a hard, solid blow, and the sound was loud and unpleasant. People around us hesitated, decided quickly it was none of their business, and got on with their work. Rafe strained briefly against his bonds, breathing hard.
“I can keep this up all day,” said the Armourer. “You can’t. Traitor.”
“I am not a traitor,” Rafe said thickly. He spat out a mouthful of blood. “I’m not a Drood. I never was. I’m an Immortal. You can’t treat me this way.”
“People forget I used to be a field agent,” the Armourer said easily. “And those who do know, prefer to forget the kind of things field agents had to do, in that coldest of wars. Hard men, for hard times. We were men, in those days, making hard necessary decisions, to do hard necessary things, to keep the world safe. I haven’t been that man for some time, but I still remember how to get things done.”
“What happened to the original Rafe?” I asked the man in the chair.
He spat out some more blood. “Removed and replaced, long ago.”
“How long ago?”
He smiled. “Before you came back. You never met the real Rafe.”
“Is he dead?”
“Of course,” said the Immortal, smiling easily. “We detest loose ends. Never leave anything behind that might come back to haunt you.”
He shook his head sharply, back and forth, back and forth, and then the Armourer and I fell back a step as flesh rippled all across Rafe’s face. The cheekbones rose and fell, the chin lengthened and the nose narrowed, and just like that, a whole new face stared back at us. Completely different features, with an unbroken nose and an unsmashed mouth, fierce green eyes that shone with a cold intelligence. A whole new person was sitting in the diagnostic chair, staring at us with unbridled arrogance.
It was the face of a teenager, with ancient eyes.
“All of us can do this,” said the young man who used to be Rafe. Eerily, he was still using Rafe’s familiar voice. “All of us Immortals. See, Armourer: no broken nose, no blood. You don’t scare me, because you can’t hurt me.”
“Don’t put money on it,” said the Armourer. “I’ve spent twenty years in this place, learning how to damage people in new and inventive ways. About time I got my hands dirty again.”
Probably only someone who knew the Armourer as well as I did would have been disturbed as I was. Uncle Jack had played up to the mercenary, Dom Langford, to put him in the right frame of mind. But the Armourer wasn’t playing a role anymore. He was deadly serious. And I . . . didn’t know what to think. The thing in the chair was seriously freaking me out. It was one thing for the display screens to imply he wasn’t human, and quite another to see it demonstrated right in front of you.
“Talk,” I said. “Tell us everything you know.”
“Or?” said Rafe.
“Or I’ll take you back down to the Old Library,” I said. “Lock you in, and leave you alone with whatever it is that doesn’t like you.”
The Armourer looked at me. “William was right? There really is Something living down there?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Big time. We’re going to have to do something about that, when we’ve got a spare minute. Though when I say we, I mean someone a damned sight braver than I am.”
The teenager squirmed unhappily in the chair, the tubes clattering quietly around him. He was breathing hard, and he didn’t look nearly as certain as he had. The Armourer glanced at the display screens.
“He’s not faking it. If I’m reading the screens right, he’s seriously traumatised . . . What the hell did you see down there, Eddie?”
“Ask me later,” I said. I leaned in close, to glare right into Rafe’s face. “What’s your name? Your real name?”
He smirked. “Call me Legion, for we are many.”
“You want another slap?” said the Armourer. “This is taking too long, Eddie.” He held up a hypodermic needle big enough to frighten a horse, and shot a thin stream of clear fluid out the tip. “I have truth right here, in liquid form. I don’t care what the screens say, he’s close enough to human for this to work. Slide the needle past his eyeball and into the forebrain, and he’ll tell us things he doesn’t even know he knows. Of course, a certain amount of brain damage is inevitable. So, Rafe, tell us what we need to know. And the first time you don’t answer, or the screens tell me you’re lying, in goes the needle. I don’t care how many doses I have to deliver. You can’t have too much truth, can you?”