by Baen Books
Gaston had been in the army a long time and led many a patrol.
“You won’t have any problems, Sergeant. The area has been completely pacified so you won’t need helmets or armor. Just have a few sweets handy to give the kids. You’ll have dedicated artillery support on instant notice. Friendly tanks will already have the crossroads secured when you arrive. Choppers will be in to extract you zero eleven hundred hours without fail.”
He’d heard the bloody lot. Any briefing given to the PBI, Poor Bloody Infantry, could be expected to be a mixture of wishful thinking and sheer bleeding lies. You just got on with it anyway and hoped the body count wasn’t too high.
A cold wind blew along the platform. It lifted a dirty piece of paper and wrapped it around Gaston’s legs. He pulled the sheet off and examined what was the top of an old torn poster with faded colors. A slogan written over a Union Jack and a silhouette of a First World War Tommy exhorted Britishers to enlist. He tossed the paper back into the wind and wiped his fingers on his jacket. What on Earth was a “Britisher”?
A tube train rattled sounding nearby but it didn’t come through the station. The side of the tunnel was lined with grimy tiles. Many were cracked and some had fallen. He walked along the platform until he reached an exit and peered in but it was too gloomy to see much.
A black cat stalked out of the tunnel and looked Gaston up and down. Not impressed, it stalked up the platform with an air of magnificent disdain.
“Yeah, you and me both, pussy,” Gaston said.
Somehow the presence of the animal was reassuring. Gaston pushed on up the tunnel. What else could he do? It got darker and rougher underfoot the deeper he went in until he tripped over something. Gaston fished out an electric torch key ring. The bright white light of the LEDs lit up a cave. He swore and turned around to retrace his steps but could find nothing but a dead end. Someone was playing games.
The cave opened onto a gulley in mature oak woodland. The sun was low on the horizon and obscured by clouds so it wasn’t all that much brighter than the cave. Ground cover was sparse, mostly grass and ferns. This was what the Thames Valley must have looked like before the trees were cleared and London built. None of this was real, so it must be the Otherworld. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He wasn’t cleared or trained for solo Otherworld penetration. That was what the witches of the Coven and Jameson got the big buck salaries for.
A path meandered through the woodland so he followed it. Pipistrelle bats flitted between the trees, intercepting the evening insect swarms. The back of his neck itched, like he was being watched. He looked carefully around. Something bulky moved deep between the trees. He caught a flash of horns so it was probably just a deer. He hoped it was just a deer.
“Caw!” A raucous shriek from over his head made him jump.
“Are you trying to scare me to death?” Gaston asked the crow perched on a branch over the path.
The crow looked at him cocking his head from side to side and shuffling its feet. It leaned forward and just for a moment it reminded him of his fellow passenger in the special tube carriage.
The crow laughed.
Gaston blinked. Okay, crows were mimics, but a laugh?
The crow laughed and laughed, the cry becoming ever more maniacal. Static built up. Gaston knew that meant magic. He definitely wasn’t paid to handle magic. He thought to run, but where? In any case his legs wouldn’t obey him. They firmly stayed rooted to the ground like he’d turned into one of the oaks.
A black streak erupted along the branch and the crow launched itself into space. Feathers spilled down where a clawed swipe raked the bird’s tail. The crow fluttered out of sight among the trees, its outraged squawks fading into the distance. The black cat sat on the branch and observed Gaston. It looked bored.
“Thanks, cat,” Gaston said.
It ignored him and began to clean a white-spotted forepaw with great care.
Gaston shrugged and went on.
A horn sounded in the distance. It brayed discordantly in a key not used by people; brassy notes that projected overweening arrogance and menace. He quickened his pace. The horn sounded again, closer this time. He broke into a trot, jumping over branches strewn across the path. Another fifty meters and he heard bodies crashing through the woods behind and on each side. The horn sounded closer. He put his head down and ran.
A branch snagged his foot and he pitched forward in a roll, letting momentum carry him back on his feet. The first dog broke from a patch of ferns on his left and leapt for his throat. He didn’t remember drawing the Glock from under his arm but it was in his hands in the SOE grip.
He fired twice and the dog sailed past him without contact. Another appeared, bounding up the path. Gaston raised the gun but the double tap had no effect. He fired twice more and the dog rolled over coughing blood.
The animals weren’t all that large. He didn’t recognise the breed but they looked like bulky whippets. The problem was that more poured out of the undergrowth in a semicircle around him. They hunted silently, which was far more frightening than if they barked. They made short rushes from all sides, one feinting an attack to get his attention while another rushed him from a different direction.
He laid down a barrage of fire until the gun clicked on empty. Had he really fired seventeen rounds? He used the plastic pistol as a club, batting away one animal as another bit into his arm. The surviving pack moved in. A dog leapt at his throat.
A black leather-clad arm tipped with claws intercepted the leaping canine, slicing through its neck. A black boot smashed the spine of a dog worrying his leg. A charging dog halted abruptly, skidding on its haunches. Karla caught it in one hand, ripping out its throat with the other. She hurled the corpse back at the pack.
Karla moved through the gloom like a quicksilver shadow, kicking, clawing, biting, leaving a trail of broken bodies in her wake. Gaston dropped the magazine from his pistol and loaded a fresh clip. He raised the gun but couldn’t make out a target in the mayhem long enough to get off a shot. Karla followed the dogs into the trees. Agonized howls indicated when she caught one. Eventually, it went quiet.
Gaston held the Glock in both hands, ignoring the pain in his arm. The thick material of his jacket had absorbed most of the bite. A branch swished behind him. He whirled, raising the pistol.
Karla stood right behind him, eyes like glowing chips of emerald ice. Blood ran down the side of her face, dripping from her long protruding fangs. Her arms were covered in gore and her hands ended in long hooked claws. His pistol sights were lined on the bridge of her nose. For a long time neither moved.
“One day, monster, your usefulness will be over,” Gaston said, evenly.
He reluctantly lowered the pistol and replaced it under his arm. He and Karla had a history. The trooper she had killed had been his girlfriend. On the other hand this was not the first time Jameson’s pet monster had saved his life.
A whimper attracted his attention. The animal with the shattered spine was trying to crawl away using its front legs. Its paralysed rear quarters dragged behind.
“I like dogs,” Karla said happily, the words slurred out through fangs.
She picked the animal up with one hand and bit deep into its neck. It only struggled for a short time. Gaston walked off in disgust.
He had travelled but a little way when a tall figure sporting a magnificent set of antlers pushed through the ferns and straddled the path in front of him. The creature wasn’t a stag. It walked on two legs for one thing and wore clothes for another, a russet-brown tunic over trousers of Lincoln green. Its right hand held a bronze horn and in its left a long spear with a leaf-shaped steel blade at the tip.
The stag-man put the horn to his lips and blew a short note that set Gaston’s teeth on edge. He had the Glock in the SOE grip. The stag drew back the spear so Gaston fired a double tap, then a second. He might as well have been blowing bubbles. The bullets were hitting, the tunic jerked where they struck, but they had no effect.
The heavy spear thrust forward and Gaston threw himself to one side, landing awkwardly on a tree root. The pistol flew from his hand. He lay winded for a second. The spear lifted over him then surged down.
And stopped dead, six inches from his heart.
Karla had the shaft firm in both hands. The stag pulled it clear, spinning her round. She went with the flow, turning full circle with the grace of a ballet dancer to confront the stag as it moved in to stab her. She flowed like fluid black lightning around the thrust, evading it by millimetres, and grasped the spear shaft in one clawed hand. The other struck like a sword, shearing through the wood.
She tossed the spear head behind her. The stag raised the broken spear in an overhead grip. It ended in a jagged splinter. A wooden stab wound could be lethal to Karla’s kind in a way that mere bullets weren’t. If the situation bothered her then she hid her fears convincingly. She bounced lightly on the balls of her feet, beckoning to the stag.
“Come on then, if you think you’re hard enough,” Karla said, quoting the time-honored jibe used by the British Army and the England football supporters club to intimidate truculent opponents.
The stag took a step towards her.
“To the death,” Karla said.
The stag paused.
“Duel to the true death? With you Dearg Due?” the stag said in a rich baritone voice.
It seemed to consider, cocking its head to one side in a surprisingly birdlike manner. Karla grinned at it, showing her teeth.
“Well, we’ve all had a long day. Perhaps another time.”
The stag vanished into the shadows among the trees.
#
The path ended at an old barn with blacked out windows. Gaston knocked at the door and was ushered in to a British Museum study laboratory. The walls were concrete painted battleship grey and a large square metal duct ran across the ceiling. Benches covered with academic papers, curios and bits of laboratory equipment lined the windowless walls.
“Professor Fairbold?” Gaston tentatively asked the grey-bearded man in a lab coat.
“Major Jameson’s daemon,” Fairbold said delightedly, looking at Karla and ignoring Gaston. “What a pleasure. I did not realize you would be coming.”
“Um, Professor?” Gaston started.
“But how did you get through the wards around the Museum, my dear? Did Jameson make special arrangements with the Director without telling me? You really shouldn’t be here.”Fairbold shook his head, scattering dandruff over his lab coat.
“Um, Professor, we have a situation,” Gaston said, somewhat desperately.
“Really?”
Gaston gestured through the still open door. Was the man blind or half witted?
Fairbold stuck his head out. “Fascinating, fascinating, that’s the Otherworld you know?”
“Yes, I do know. Don’t go out. Things lurk in the trees.”Gaston made a grab for the professor’s arm, as he showed every sign of exploring, and shut the door firmly. Just on the off-chance he opened it again but the forest was still there.
“I’d better put some tea on.”
Fairbold boiled water using an old electric kettle by the sink in the corner of the room while Gaston recounted his adventures. By the time he’d finished, Fairbold had two steaming mugs of tea.
“I’d offer you my arm, my dear, but I see you’ve already drunk something,” Fairbold said to Karla.
That was a fair assumption as her leather suit was covered in dried blood. Gaston finished his account. Fairbold hadn’t appeared to be listening but now he looked at Gaston with sharp eyes.
“It sounds to me that you’ve had an encounter with The Green Man and the wild hunt, young, er…”
“Gaston.”
“Gaston, thank you, but the spear is anomalous. I would have expected a bow. We need to know what we are up against before I can dispel it.”
The professor produced some dusty tomes and showed Gaston various pictures of Green Men of the Forest but none of them were quite right.
“Hang on. The daemon recognized her!” Gaston said, pointing at Karla.
“Yes,” Karla replied.
The two men looked at her but she said nothing more. It was at times like this, thought Gaston, that he realized exactly how alien Karla was.
“He called you something, deerugdo?” Gaston asked.
“Dearg Due,” she replied.
“Dearg Due,” Fairbold repeated. “Well, well, well, you really are so much older than you look, my dear.”
“What’s a Dearg Due?” Gaston asked suspiciously.
“A who rather than a what,” Fairbold replied, taking a sip of his tea. “An old Irish myth about a young woman who was forced into an arranged marriage with a brute who beat her. She committed suicide and was buried but arose from her grave at midnight to kill her husband and father.”
“Oh yes,” Gaston said.
“By drinking their blood,” Fairbold said. “It’s an old Irish vampire myth really.”
“It would be,” Gaston replied, with feeling. “A vampire myth, I mean.”
A loud hiss interrupted them. A black cat emerged from under a bench. It arched its back and spat at Karla.
“Now be nice to our guest, Mike,” Fairbold said. “Mike doesn’t like daemons in his Museum.”
“I understand your position, cat,” Gaston said.
He turned to Karla.
“If he knew you then you must know him?”
“What?”
“The stag-man. You must know who he is.”
“Oh, Nud. His name’s Nud,” Karla replied.
“Indeed,” Fairbold said.
He selected another volume and showed Gaston a drawing.
“Yes, that’s him,” Gaston said. The slanted eyes under the spread of horns were quite distinctive, and he held a spear. The legend under the picture said Nodens, not Nud.
“Of course, the Crow god, now we’re getting somewhere,” Fairbold said.
He fished around amongst a stack of books piled up against a desk leg until he located one bound in red leather cracked with age. He thumbed through until he found the right page, opened the room door onto the woodland and began to read out loud.
“Lord have mercy.
“Christ have mercy.
“From all evil, deliver us oh Lord, Christ have mercy, from all sin, from your wrath, from sudden and unprovided death, from the snares of the devil, from anger, hatred, and all ill will…”
Gaston gaped. He had the usual relaxed English attitude to attending church but his West Indian relatives were still fire and brimstone so he knew a prayer when he heard one. Fairbold continued until there was a snap, a discontinuity in reality and the woodland vanished as if it had never been. Outside was a basement corridor, all neon lit, dry dust, and peeling paint.
Fairbold closed the book of prayer with a thump that made Gaston jump. His nerve was going.
“What did you do?” Gaston asked.
“I exorcised Noden,” Fairbold replied. “He’s a Romano-British pagan God. Wheeler found the remains of a late Roman temple dedicated to him at Lydney Park in Gloucestershire back in the Twenties. Like all pagan shrines, it was slighted by Christians so Nodens is vulnerable to exorcism. Magic is forbidden to Museum staff but exorcism is a special case, classed under religion, don’t you know.”
Fairbold’s expression lost its normal smile.
“But someone has been performing forbidden magic from within the Museum’s wards. That much is clear. Someone here has broken The Regulations.”
Gaston could tell Fairbold pronounced the last two words in capital letters.
“And the target seems to have been you, Mr Gaston.”
“Me? Why would anyone want to stop me? I’m just the post boy here, which reminds me.”
Gaston held out Jameson’s package but Fairbold was staring at the ceiling, eyes unfocussed so he put it back in his pocket.
“Perhaps the right question at the moment is not why but who and h
ow. Who tried to stop you and how did they manage to create an Otherworld bubble inside the Museum. Find the how and I suspect it’ll point to the who.”
He looked at Karla.
“You must know something, my dear. You knew enough to turn up at a critical moment. You must have bypassed our wards by entering through the Otherworld bubble. Were you following Nodens? Hmmm?”
Karla was sat cross legged on the floor engaged in a staring contest with Mike the Museum Cat. Their frozen body poses suggested that they were both in for the long haul.
“She’ll only tell you what she wants you to know,” Gaston said. “Daemons are very like women in that respect.”
Fairbold sat at his desk and began flicking through volume after volume.
“Interesting chap, Nodens; he didn’t start as a Roman god, you know. He was a Celtic deity originally. The Romans had a habit of taking over the gods of their subject peoples. The Professor...”
Fairbold implied capital letters again.
“…associated his name with a Germanic root word meaning to entrap.”
“Karla called him Nud,” Gaston said.
“That’s the Welsh form for Nodens. It got into English as Lud, as in the name of the legendary British king who is supposed to be buried at Ludgate. There used to be a statue of him there. I believe it is now in the porch of the church of St. Dunstan-in-the-West in Fleet Street. Fleet Street, you know is where…”
“Yes, Professor but if we could get back to the attack on me,” Gaston said, somewhat desperately, before Fairbold could launch into a rambling one hour lecture down the byways of the mythological history of Britain.
“Well, the relevance is that according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, London is named after Lud so Nodens has a close connection to the city. Of course, Geoffrey is a bit dodgy as a source, I remember that…”
“But how does this help us?” Gaston asked, getting skilled at heading Fairbold off at the academic pass.
“Because of The Professor, my dear chap.”
“And he is?”
“Why J.R.R. Tolkien of course. Everyone knows of The Professor, surely, even in the Commission? The trouble that man has caused us over the years: brilliant scholar, of course, but no common sense.”
