“One minute,” said Bittner. I smoothed my skirt anxiously and then replaced the lead sporran. Around me, the other observers were tense, and Alrich, as always, was utterly still, no breath stirring his body. All of us were staring at Bittner’s white hands on the egg and listening to his voice over the intercom.
“It’s stirring. I can feel its movements. Its muscles are flexing within the shell.” He was milking the occasion for all it was worth. And why not? After all, this was the sort of thing that could make a career in the Checquy.
Besides, now I could feel it too.
It was there, faintly itching on the edges of my perception. I looked around to see if the others could sense it, but they were all intent on the adolescent prodigy communing with the waking monster. I had a twinge of last-minute doubt. Dragons had ravaged Europe before, killing untold numbers. In front of us was the last of a dynasty that had faded by the fourteenth century. An eleventh-hour surge of the bloodlines, and now we were watching it emerge.
I sensed the movement within the shell. Muscles flexed against their containment, and mine flexed in unconscious sympathy. I felt the stirrings of panic in my stomach. Normally, to use my powers I need to be touching someone. Occasionally, when someone is under major physical or mental pressure, I get hints of that person. But this was different. My fingers hooked into claws, and I strained against my own muscles to straighten them out. I wanted to spread my wings and scream into the air.
Bittner had fallen silent, but we could all see the egg rocking slightly. Then a claw cut through the shell, stabbing like a stiletto. It was neat, controlled, slicing through the egg and peeling off six-inch-thick sections. In a shockingly short amount of time, the egg had fallen away and we could see a mass of brown scales. Bittner spread his arms and the dragon uncurled, limbs stretching, tendons snapping into place. A serpentine neck drew itself out and up. Massive, fanlike wings were unfurled up into the sky. We watched, spellbound.
“My God,” whispered Alrich.
Bittner’s breathing was ragged over the intercom. We heard him gasp just before the dragon threw its head back and shrieked into the night. Centuries-old lungs were cut by air for the first time. Eyes opened and saw their first light. And I felt it all. It screamed again, louder, and we all clapped our hands over our ears.
“Rook Thomas?” Cahill asked uncertainly, and I saw that she was ready to give the order to the snipers.
“No!” shouted Bittner, whirling around to face us. “You must not! The dragon and I are bonding! We share a unique rap—” He was cut off abruptly as the dragon reached out and languidly clawed his head off.
I clapped my hands to my mouth, but my eyes were glued to the tableau. Around me the room reacted. People stood up, knocking their chairs over. Some shouted. One or two were ill. Alrich burst out laughing. Anthony put his hand on my shoulder as if to guide me away, and Cahill shrieked into the radio, giving the order to attack. In front of us, the courtyard was filled with flashes as the soldiers opened fire. Bullets swept through, and the glass flexed as bullets ricocheted off the dragon. I’d given orders for the strongest reinforced glass possible; these were the kind of windows the pope sat behind. Smoke curled up in front of us, and the dragon was lost to view. Its tail slapped against the glass then disappeared back into the clouds. Then a torrent of fire burst through, illuminating the smoke and the snow.
“Status? Status!” Cahill was shouting. There was no answer, and the smoke slowly cleared. The dragon was rearing back on its hind legs, unharmed, fanning its wings gently. Around the courtyard lay the scattered bodies of soldiers. Some lay on the roof, burning. There were bodies on the ground, torn apart. Against our window, a man hung down, eviscerated, his insides painting the glass red.
“Orrrr… fuck,” said Anthony behind me. The dragon reached out, plucked up half a guardsman, and began to devour it messily. With weak fingers, I opened my mobile phone and dialed.
“This is Rook Thomas. Can you hear me, Monica?”
“Yes, ma’am” came her voice. In the background the wind whistled, and I pictured her, bundled up tight against the cold, her hair tied back, watching the stars wheel above her as she waited patiently, standing on nothing. The dragon’s head swung down and around, and through the mirrored glass, it saw us. I felt its muscles tense and its talons slide out.
“It’s gone badly. Begin now, please.” I was proud that my voice didn’t shake.
“Yes, ma’am.” Monica hung up, and I turned to Pawn Cahill, who was staring in shock at the various parts of her troops.
“Pawn Cahill, close the shutters please.” She stared at me, not processing, and I grabbed her hand. “Close the shutters!” A shock passed through her body; she looked at me with widening eyes and slapped at the controls at her side. Our view of the dragon was cut off as massive iron curtains rolled up out of the ground.
“Thomas, what the hell is going on?” demanded Sir Henry, grabbing me roughly by the shoulder and turning me to face him. “I demand you tell me—” He stopped talking, and everyone else stopped as well because they could hear what was happening. From above us, there was a shrill screaming sound that grew in volume and intensity. It built and built, and we all huddled together as the sound entered our heads and trembled through our bones. Then, with a resounding crack, it arrived. A shock wave struck, vibrating through the shutters and fracturing the glass although not shattering it. There was silence.
I reached out and touched the button Cahill had pressed, and the shutters slid down. In the courtyard, the spotlights had gone out, but we could see the corpse of the dragon lying on the ground. Its head had been severed neatly from its body, and in the gap, standing calmly at attention and covered in steaming dragon guts, was Pawn Monica Jarvis-Reed, who had just arrived from four miles above us armed with only her own indestructible body and some easily laundered clothes.
After that, as you can imagine, the evening broke up fairly rapidly, and if you’ll excuse me, I am now going to pass out from exhaustion.
Love,
Me
23
The two women lay on the floor staring blankly into space, dust settling quietly on their eyes. Their clothes were stiff with mildew, and all around them the cultists continued their chanting. A little way off, Goblet the hedgehog man was lying in a way that suggested he wouldn’t be going anywhere or doing anything for a while. Under a coating of fuzz, Shantay’s phone rang, playing a little electronic version of the Addams Family theme song.
Myfanwy sat up with a gasp. She drew deep breaths of musty air into her lungs, and her fingers scrabbled along the floor as her whole body strove to pump oxygen to where it was needed. She fumbled for the canteen of water on her belt and then spent a long time gargling and spitting, coughing out whatever was offending her system. Finally, she managed to look around and answer the phone.
“Hello?” she said hoarsely.
“Myfanwy?” came Poppat’s voice; he sounded frantic enough to forget about protocol. “Thank God! We’ve been ready to have the whole site leveled and torched! We’ve had that phone ringing for forty-five minutes!”
“Oh, really?” asked Myfanwy absently. “Well, don’t do anything to the house, I’ve figured out the problem.”
“Brilliant,” said Poppat. “Is Bishop Petoskey okay?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Myfanwy, leaning back against the prostrate form of her friend. “She’ll be fine in a minute or two, and this whole situation should be resolved in about half an hour.” She looked around at the mold coating the room. While she’d lain unconscious, new branches of fungus had grown out from the walls, covering the doorway and weaving a barricade across the windows. “Yeah, half an hour… or so.”
“Can I at least send in some troops?” the Pawn asked.
“Probably best not,” she said, watching as a new arm of growth slowly stretched its way across the ceiling. “I’ll call you back when it’s clear.”
“But you’re certain you’re okay in there?”
>
“Yep. I’ll call you back in a bit.”
“But what if—” he began, but she hung up.
“Nice guy, but he really needs to have that manual removed from his colon,” she remarked to the chanting drones. “Of course, you guys have your own problems, but at least you’re not dependent on standard operating procedure.” She sighed and looked disdainfully at the mold coating her clothes and skin. It itched and seemed to consist of equal parts black mildew and some virulently orangey-red spores.
Myfanwy called up in her mind a picture of the system she’d mapped out while tapped into the cultists. Once she’d figured out how it worked, the whole thing had proven… well, in fact it had proven to be horrendously complex. But at least now she understood it. With a mental twist, she disrupted all the tiny connections that made the spores a part of something larger. She blew on her skin, and the little flakes fluttered away dead into the air.
Myfanwy then reached out with her fingers and touched the back of Shantay’s hand. Under her touch, spirals of silver spread out liquidly across the American’s skin, thickening and joining themselves until she was entirely made of metal. Her hair gave off little fizzling and crackling sounds as the metal coiled itself down and over her dozens of braids, like sculpture made by the most dexterous and anally retentive artisan in the world. The mold that had coated her skin was scythed off by the spreading metal, and Shantay glittered in the near darkness.
Myfanwy stared in awe at her friend, a fashion model dipped in quicksilver. Her finger on the back of Shantay’s hand was grubby compared to the shining perfection beneath it. But she resisted the urge to draw back and instead sent another little message down through the metal skin and coursing along into Shantay’s system. Shantay shuddered, as if she’d been shocked by electricity. Once, twice, and then she sat up, opening her eyes. While her skin was silver, her eyes were hard and shiny, like black gemstones.
“Wakey, wakey,” said Myfanwy. “I’m sorry we don’t have any coffee or tea, but that’s what you get when you elect to take a nap in a manifestation site.”
“That,” said Shantay hoarsely, “was no fun at all. I feel like I brushed my teeth with a loaf of old bread.”
“Yeah, well, not to fret,” Myfanwy said with a sigh. “I figured out the problem.”
“So you know how to stop all this?”
“Sure, it’s as simple as doing this.” She blinked.
And the chanting stopped.
So what exactly did you do?” asked Shantay. They were sitting in the lobby of a youth hostel waiting for a car to come get them, surrounded by a crowd of backpacking students from Australia and America. Both of the women had insisted on showers after they emerged from the house, but the Checquy headquarters in Bath had been packed full of Pawns, soldiers, and doctors, all of them trying to do fifty things at once. No doubt they would have stepped aside in the face of Myfanwy’s superior rank, but their need was greater. There hadn’t been a vacancy in any hotels (“There’s some sort of convention in town, Rook Thomas. I’m dreadfully sorry”) and so it had been the youth hostel or nothing. Apparently they didn’t let you use the Roman baths anymore, not even if you were a Rook.
“It’s hard to describe, but it involved disrupting the flow of instructions from the fungus to the hosts. The main thing is, I was able to get them to shut up and open all those little pods down in the cellar where they were keeping our troops,” said Myfanwy.
“Do we know what they were trying to do?” asked Shantay. “I mean, other than grow something that looked like the back of my refrigerator?”
“Well, didn’t our friend with the spines say that he was worried about it spreading? Maybe it was going to eat Bath or something. It was growing. It wasn’t going to stop.”
“A mold bomb?” asked Shantay, looking around in irritation as she was jostled by a college student carrying a backpack twice her size.
“I guess. That’s not what’s worrying me though,” said Myfanwy. Her brow furrowed for a moment as she thought. “There was something funny about Goblet.”
“The fact that he’s a high-ranking member of your organization who’s apparently engaged in treasonous activities?”
“Well, I’ll admit that that’s a trifle peculiar,” allowed Myfanwy. “But that’s not it.”
“Maybe the fact that he implicated your counterpart in the conspiracy in front of an important representative from a foreign government?”
“Well, not just that,” said Myfanwy with a bit of irritation.
“How about that we have to go back to London for that dinner thing, and you look like a wreck?”
“You know, you’re not helping. Ah, the car is here. Thank God.”
“So,” said Shantay. “Does this mean we’re not stopping to take the waters?”
Norman Goblet
Goblet was inducted into the Estate during a time of change. The original curriculum and philosophy of the Estate had been a combination of the postwar mentality and the traditions of the Checquy—a sort of hybrid military camp/guildhall. It was certainly an improvement on the previous master-apprentice approach, but as the years passed, the Checquy decided that a new system was needed. Drastic changes were made. With this reformation of the Estate and its methods, there were some kinks that needed to be worked out, and, in my opinion, Norman Goblet stands out as one of the kinkiest.
Make that the most kinked.
Drafted in at the age of twelve, Norman Goblet was the darling of his teachers. This new incarnation of the Estate was based on the classic boarding-school model. So the Estate was remade as sort of an Eton with tentacles. In any case, in every such academy, there is always one student who plays the game just the right way, who is made head of house (yes, they had houses back then. Thank God they disbanded them a couple decades back), gets grades that are good enough to keep him out of the bottom set but not so good as to mark him as a swot, and sucks up to the headmaster so hard that he leaves the man a desiccated husk. Such a youth was Goblet. His ability to kick ass was matched only by his ability to kiss ass. Naturally overbearing and pompous, he would be an ideal Court member. So it came as no surprise when he was appointed school captain and earmarked for greatness in the Checquy.
It was a matter of no small satisfaction to his peers when he failed to live up to the promise he’d shown. After some unremarkable performances at the Annexe, he was moved to Bath, which was then the highest action site in the Isles. I gather this was based on the recommendation of his old headmaster, who was keen to see the golden boy thrive. But thrive he did not, remaining in Bath even as the number of supernatural occurrences waned. Eventually he was made head of the region, partly out of the Checquy’s sheer embarrassment and partly because it was clear that there wouldn’t be a great deal for him to mess up.
I meet with Goblet biannually, once at the yearly review session when all the region heads come to the Rookery and again at the executive Christmas party. To be perfectly honest, he doesn’t strike me as particularly noteworthy. Kind of bitter, but I can understand that. He’d been as much as promised a seat on the Court, and it never materialized. Which was good for the nation, but not so great for Goblet.
“Ingrid, are all of Gestalt’s bodies coming to the reception tonight?” Myfanwy asked, holding the mobile phone with her chin as she paged through the purple binder. She and Shantay were flying back to London, and she was trying to find the section that described the penalties for treason. She’d browsed through the section at one point and vaguely recalled a long list of punishments culminating with the guilty party being ritually trampled to death by the population of the village of Avebury, which seemed unlikely, or at least somewhat difficult to arrange.
Back in the mold house, she’d spent several minutes figuring out how to make Goblet’s spines retract into his body. Then she’d draped his coat over his head and led him by the hand out of the building and into the trailer, taking great care not to let anyone see who he was. Myfanwy was not keen to have eve
ryone know that a high-ranking member of the Checquy had been responsible for the whole thing. She’d arranged for Goblet to be transported to the Rookery and put somewhere where he wouldn’t be inconvenient. As it was, it looked likely that the incident was going to enter the realm of Pawn legend. Supposedly there hadn’t been any threat in the past four decades that the Barghests couldn’t overcome. And now that scrawny Rook—you know, Thomas, the skinny little girl who threw up in the Estate swimming pool that one time? Yeah, she went in after the strike team was eaten and then walked out complaining she needed a shower and a box of chocolates.
When Myfanwy had reached the incident trailer, she’d found her team looking very alert, eager, and keen to follow orders. A contingent of Checquy scientists, who had been standing by in a sterile compartment of the trailer with eagerly poised scalpels, had entered the house cautiously, after she’d assured them that they were no longer in danger of being swallowed up. A Pawn armed with chain saws had gone into the basement and spent a messy half hour slicing open the pods she’d told him would be there. Inside had been the Barghests, all of whom were in justifiably bad tempers. The cultists were being carefully removed from their dead, graying little cocoons and documented, in an effort to figure out who the hell they were. The whole house had been curtained off from the public with big sheets of plastic that were inscribed with dire warnings about asbestos, and samples of everything inside were being collected to be studied under a microscope.
“Yes, Rook Thomas,” said Ingrid calmly over the phone. “The Lord and Lady like the effect of all four bodies, and they are quite keen to impress the Americans. They’ll expect you to be wearing something formal. Might I suggest the crimson dress? The one that Greek woman made you buy?” There was a long, awkward silence, since Myfanwy had absolutely no idea what her executive assistant was talking about. A crimson dress? How out of character. As far as Myfanwy could tell, everything in Thomas’s wardrobe was black, gray, or white.
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