“What was it?” I said. “What did you see?”
Rafe shook his head. He didn’t want to say, as though just naming or describing it might be enough to summon it back. Finally, he whispered one word.
“White . . .”
I left him sitting huddled up against a stack, clutching his knees to his chest, looking around with wide, shocked eyes. I used the Merlin Glass to summon medical help for William. A doctor in a blood-smeared white coat came through, and examined William quickly but thoroughly. He ran gentle fingers over William’s broken head, while shooting me an accusing glance.
“I do have other patients to attend to, you know. Other people who need my help. This is nothing serious. Bad, but fixable. Upstairs, we’re so packed we’re running triage, sorting out the save-able from the hopeless. The Librarian can wait.”
“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?”
“All right, all right!” Rafe took a moment to compose himself, and then fixed me with his cold arrogant gaze. “It doesn’t matter what I tell you. It won’t help. We’re always ten steps ahead of you. I’ve been plundering the Old Library of useful items ever since you rediscovered it. I was put in here, years ago, to work as an assistant in the Armoury. To get a good look at new weapons before they were put into the field, so we’d be ready for them. Pure luck put me in charge of the Library—all of the Droods’ secret knowledge, under my control! And then, the Old Library, with all its forgotten secrets and treasures . . .”
“How long did you work for me?” said ˚ the Armourer. “Did I ever know the real Rafe?”
“Oh, I think I’ll let you work that out for yourself. The Old Library . . . I’ve been systematically removing anything that even mentioned the Immortals, their history and practices, along with anything else we didn’t want you to know about. When I’d finished with that, I started removing any books we didn’t have: unique editions, original manuscripts and folios, that sort of thing. It wasn’t difficult to keep William from noticing; he’s always been easily distractible. Any time he did spot a missing volume, I just blamed Zero Tolerance fanatics. I did slip a few in Truman’s direction, for Manifest Destiny, so I could point the finger if necessary, but never anything important. We were quite happy for him to keep you busy, but we never trusted him. He could have been dangerous, if only his viewpoint hadn’t been so terribly limited. I also removed certain Books of Power, that were weapons in their own right. You can never have too many weapons, and besides, you wouldn’t have appreciated them.”
“Having established that you’re a thief as well as a traitor,” I said, “let’s get to the important stuff. Have the Immortals joined forces with Doctor Delirium and Tiger Tim, to exploit the Apocalypse Door?”
Rafe hesitated. The Armourer leaned in, and showed him the horse needle.
“Of course we’re working together! We’re big, big enough to take in anybody, to get what we want. We would have taken the Door for ourselves, in Los Angeles, if you hadn’t interfered. But we always look forward, never back. So we made a deal, with Doctor Delirium and the rogue Drood, offering them our resources in return for access to the Door.”
“What do you want with the Apocalypse Door?” I said. “Are you really going to risk the Doctor opening it?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Rafe. “You have to understand; there were only ever twenty-three original Immortals. The man who first made contact with the Heart, and his immediate family and friends. Though there have of course been many long-lived offspring, down the years. Immortals can’t breed with each other, so children can only ever be half-breeds. You’d recognise the names of some of them. Important people, movers and shakers. We can be anybody we want to be. We’ve been a lot of famous people, down the centuries. Kings and kingmakers, philosophers and generals, heroes and villains, great artists and celebrities. Sometimes for power and glory, sometimes to protect ourselves, but mostly just for the fun of it. We do so hate to be bored. The Immortals are everywhere, ensuring that the world goes the way we want it to go. We’re on both sides of every argument, every conflict, every war. Sometimes for profit, mostly just to watch you dance to our tune.
“Of the twenty-three original Immortals, only nine remain. We can die. We were made Immortal, not invulnerable. But we are a large family, larger by far than you Droods. Thousands of offspring to serve the Elders, who serve the Leader, the man originally touched by the Heart. Oh yes; he’s still with us. And even more serve us throughout the world, knowingly and unknowingly. We own the world. We own you. We’re your worst nightmare; an organised extended family of Anti-Droods. The real secret rulers of Humanity. You Droods only thought you ran the world. We just let you handle all the dull, boring bits. You worked for us, and never knew it.”
“All right,” I said steadily. “What’s changed? Why are you ready to reveal yourselves, over the Apocalypse Door?”
“I told you, it’s complicated,” Rafe said sullenly. “The Elders now believe that immortality isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. Are they, in fact, missing out on something? As in, the greater experiences and possibilities of an afterlife? Don’t look at me like that. Don’t be so limited in your thinking. They’ve lived for centuries. They’ve exhausted all the pleasures of this world, and now they lust after new adventures in the next world. Heaven. Paradise.
Why settle for anything less? But, they’re afraid of Hell. After all the things they’ve done. They believe the Apocalypse Door can be . . . turned. Reversed. Made over, into a Paradise Door. So they can open it and go straight through into Heaven. After Doctor Delirium and Tiger Tim have served their purposes, we’ll take the Door away from them, turn it around, and then all the Elders will go through into Paradise, and explore all the pleasures that may be found there.”
He smiled at the Armourer, in a silly sort of way. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You slipped me a dose of your truth drug, didn’t you?”
“Right into the main feed tube,” said the Armourer. “You were so busy boasting you never even noticed.”
“Bastard.”
“Keep talking,” I said. “What happens to the Immortals, after the Elders pass on?”
“Well, to start with, everyone else moves up one place. Promotions all round! The eldest remaining offspring will take control, and the Immortals go on. Forever and ever and ever. We may not be technically immortal, like the Leader and the Elders, but we still live many lifetimes. Some of us are quite keen for the Elders to go through the Door, so we can take over and run things the way we think they ought to be run. It’s our time now, and we’ll make the world jump . . .”
“Don’t you want to go to Paradise?” I said.
Rafe sniffed loudly. “The Elders might believe in the Door; the rest of us have more sense. They’re old and tired, they’ve lost their appetite for life. We want to make the world dance to our tune, and eat it all up with spoons. Oh, the plans we have . . . You’re really not going to like them.”
He giggled happily.
The Armourer and I moved away from the Immortal in his chair, so we could talk quietly together. As a Drood, you learn to believe ten impossible things before breakfast, and have a plan ready to deal with them by lunchtime. But this . . . was a bit much.
“Is this even possible?” I said to the Armourer.
“Storming Heaven, and forcing your way in?” said the Armourer.
“I doubt it. Theologically flawed, at best. But who knows what living for thousands of years has done to these people’s minds? The point is, if they believe it, they could open the Apocalypse Door and let loose all the hordes of Hell, while thinking they were doing something else entirely.”
“I can still hear you, you know,” said Rafe. “The Elders dictate policy, and leave us poor bastards to carry it out. The Door is a supremely powerful artefact, and that’s all that real
ly matters. We will master it, as we have mastered everything else that has come into our possession. We will uncover its true nature and capabilities, and use it to make us even more powerful. Because that’s what we do. If the Elders disappear through it—fine. After they’ve gone, we’ll use the Door to blackmail everyone. The governments of the world will do anything, give us anything, as long as we promise not to open the Door.”
“I thought you already ran the world,” I said.
“Indirectly,” said Rafe. “The Elders always believed in keeping to the shadows, lest the world discover just how few of them there were. They ruled by pulling strings; a lot of us youngsters yearn to be more hands on. And get our hands dirty.”
He giggled again, while I looked at the Armourer.
“How much more do you think we can get out of him?”
“Don’t look at me,” said the Armourer. “I haven’t used this truth stuff since nineteen sixty-two. I’m surprised it still works. I was just bluffing, to put him in the right frame of mind. It’ll take me a couple of days to whip up another batch. And I’ve no idea what repeated use might do to him. He could tell us everything he knows, from his childhood on, or his brains could start leaking out his ears. Not that I care, after everything he’s done. Arrogant little shit. But, I’d ask your questions now, if I were you. While he’s still feeling talkative.”
I turned back to Rafe. “What other traitors are there, inside the Droods?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” said Rafe, grinning widely. “Lots and lots . . . Probably. Not just Immortals, either. We’re not the only ones who understood the advantages of having a man on the inside . . .”
“That could be merely an opinion,” murmured the Armourer.
“Just because he believes it’s true, doesn’t mean it is. I can’t believed we’re riddled with traitors and informers. I’m sure we’d have noticed . . .”
“How many Immortals are there, posing as Droods!” I said to Rafe. “I want names!”
From Hell With Love: A Secret Histories Novel Page 22
