The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  Agent First finds all of these concepts profoundly disorienting. There is a fetish called money that the urük are obsessed with, for they collect and exchange it at every opportunity. They use money to pay for goods and services, as if they have no clear way of understanding hierarchy and obligations, that which is demanded by those to whom submission is due. Worse: they have social axioms like love and friendship that denote circumstances in which the normal traffic of obligation is suspended for purely emotional reasons. Their family groups are incoherent and preposterous, their relationships chaotic and insecure, no vassals owing allegiance to their betters, no nobles owing—

  Well, there is a queen. Cassie has memories of seeing her on television, waving and smiling. Waving and smiling, not smiting. It’s a mystery. How does this ancient and undoubtedly powerful sorceress compel the obedience of so many millions of subjects, if she refrains from smiting?

  The part of Agent First which is Cassiopeia Brewer accepts with equanimity the apparent randomness and chaos of the urük empire (which is not, it appears, one end of a continental peninsula, but merely a large island off the coast of the continent, isolated by some ancient deluge). To Cassie, this is simply the way things are. Cassie is cheerful, happy-go-lucky, and so totally uninterested in politics, diplomacy, geography, war, history, or necromancy—the key areas Agent First has been tasked with reporting on—that for Agent First’s purposes Cassie might as well be an illiterate serf. Her head is cluttered with nonsensical lies, legends, fashions, and folklore: stories told for entertainment, not enlightenment. Indeed, Agent First ruefully wonders whether it might be better to set aside Cassiopeia Brewer’s mask and steal another face. If only she had enough stored mana to perform the ritual again! And if only being Cassie wasn’t so much more fun than being Agent First.

  Cassie walks home in a light-headed daze, marveling at her surroundings. Things that she was taught to be afraid of (dark alleyways, damaged streetlights, drunken strangers) pose no threat to her now: Agent First can deal with situations that would leave the original Cassie puking in terror. Meanwhile, Agent First is reveling in Cassie’s alien aesthetics, memories that paint the space around her with a wash of comforting familiarity. That is a bus; this is a taxi; you cross a road safely like so.

  Eventually she finds her way back to her digs. Rather than one of the system-built student flats, Cassie has a room in a shared Victorian terrace house in Headingley, on the edge of Woodhouse Moor. She lets herself in silently (for along with Cassie’s face and memories she took her handbag, purse, keys, and phone), pads upstairs to her room (a part of her sniffs irritably at the sink full of dishes and the empty pizza boxes on the kitchen table), and falls into bed. Then she spends the next six hours in a dream-wracked, uneasy slumber, as the two halves of her raveled memories knit themselves together.

  Agent First awakens to a dilemma, brought about by her appreciation of the full extent of Cassiopeia Brewer’s ignorance. To be honest, Cassiopeia Brewer was not merely a poor choice of identity to steal, but a terrible one. If she is true to her mission, Agent First should rectify this oversight as soon as possible. But it takes a lot of mana to steal the face and memories of an unwilling victim: mana that Agent First does not have.

  The Host is desperately low on supplies and equipment—and, indeed, on spies—thanks to the war that smashed the moons, invited in the Ancient Ones, and destroyed most of the Morningstar Empire and all its rivals. The Host is also low on mana, the stored form of thaum power, thanks to All-Highest’s attempt to conserve his force by out-hibernating their foes. Agent First was sent forth with a barely energized mace (doubtless the consequence of her stepmother’s machinations) and she will have to scrabble for what power sources she can find by herself. She is proficient in the grand patternings that can draw mana from the land, but to perform such a rite will draw the attention of any magi within a hundred leagues.

  There are ley lines in every world that connect power points and deliver a trickle to anyone who has the wherewithal to capture it stealthily. And she has the mace by way of a storage vessel. So when she awakens on her first day as Cassie—careful not to disturb her flatmates, who are either attending lectures or still abed—she follows her instincts and the number 93 bus route to the city ring road and beyond. A tree-lined main road leads out of town towards Bramhope and Golden Acre Park. There is an upwelling here, and she walks some distance into the park. The daffodils are just beginning to unfold their golden trumpets beneath the still-skeletal branches of the oaks and birches as she follows the prickling in her fingertips towards the strongest flux. She’s almost dancing on the tips of her toes: it’s a lovely cold spring day, a good day to be alive. The sky above her is reassuringly stable, not lit by the summer lightning of meteors, the in-falling bones of the murdered moon beyond the horizon. Laughter wells up at the back of her throat as she looks around in delight. Her fingers and toes lead her to one side of a muddy path, where a bed of crocuses flower. Here, after quickly checking that nobody is watching her, she bends and plants the stem of her mace among the bulbs soaking up the life and power of this new world. Then she squats and meditates, pushing her awareness into the amethyst she wears at the base of her throat.

  The oracular charm is hazy, distanced from her awareness as if shrouded by gauze. But there is a sense of rightness to her presence here. She is in the correct place, the stone appears to indicate. She is in the right body. Or at least not in a body inimical to her future. She is still capable of making progress, of obeying the geasa she is controlled by, if only she can see how—but Cassie’s memories are infuriatingly vague. She knows nothing of the powers that rule this realm, let alone their true names. Oddly, she does know some legends that, stripped of their more nonsensical accretions, might reflect folk-memory myths of captives released by the People—but Agent First is reassured to note that they are so garbled as to be worse than valueless.

  Cassie was scheduled to attend a lecture and a tutorial this afternoon, so as a test of how well she has internalized her new identity, Agent First goes to college. She joins in the idle gossip and amiable chatter of her fellow students, sits through an hour-long talk on the subject of theatrical accounting—she finds it unexpectedly riveting and makes copious notes as she tries to understand what these alien concepts mean—while around her Cassie’s classmates fight to stay awake by making snarky comments on Snapchat. Her head is spinning pleasantly afterwards (money: oh yes, it’s a concretized form of accounting for obligations, but how does it compel you to obey your owner? Does it carry some sort of geas of its own?), but there’s no time to work it all out. Instead she has a tutorial with Ronnie (basic blonde but too sweet to call a bitch) and Tiger (male, shaggy, queer as a three-bob note, rowwr) and a couple of other cast members from the am. dram. group they’re setting up to do Dracula at the goth festival. They’re meeting with their facilitator, Dr. Chesley, to go over the plans for the dress rehearsal in Whitby next weekend. There are a ton of jobs to finish before then: costumes, timing, the route between scenes, what to do in event of bad weather. And while listening to her castmates discuss these things, Agent First has her epiphany.

  Cassiopeia Brewer’s memories and training are useless for Agent First’s purposes, and her identity and role do not lend themselves to infiltration. In many respects she’s a complete liability. But Cassie is good at people. What’s more, in this strangely childish culture where people are allowed to like one another and be best friends forever instead of competing to avoid punishment, Cassie is bubbly and popular and likeable. She may not have enough mana to steal another face, or enough local knowledge to even know whose face is worth stealing, but all Agent First needs to do is ensure that Cassie meets as many people as possible. Sooner or later, she will meet someone useful and important. And when that happens, she’ll make them like her.

  * * *

  “Listen, this is weird,” Alex is telling Pete as Jez Wilson pauses in the office doorway.
They’re peering into the murky depths of a desktop monitor that is displaying a map with topographic overlays. “I swear I didn’t spot anything when I was doing the walk-through the day before yesterday but this”—he points at an indistinct blob on the screen—“should be showing up like a . . .” He trails off uncertainly as he notices Jez waiting for him to notice her. “Hi,” he says, as nervously as a schoolboy caught with his hand in a sweet jar.

  “Hi yourself.” She nods at Pete. “How’s it going?”

  “I think Alex has found something.” Pete sounds uncharacteristically self-satisfied.

  “Found what?”

  “A new ley line,” Alex mumbles.

  Jez leans close to the screen, squinting. “Tell me,” she says. She’s in Leeds for three days this week to check up on the security ward extension survey and to meet with the site security planners. Alex is walking the streets around and just south of the river, checking for residual thaum eddies and abandoned invocations. The area around the River Aire has been settled for centuries, and many generations of hedge witches have left their mark on the landscape.

  “Here.” Alex points at a street map of the surrounding square kilometer or so south of Quarry Hill. It’s centered on a complex of buildings alongside a lock used by canal boats traversing the river. “We expect ley lines to join major prehistoric sacrificial sites and to track the local geophysics model, don’t we? And we’ve got a complex cluster here on the hill, connecting us northwest to the Yorkshire Dales, northeast to York, and south to the cluster around Doncaster—”

  “Yes.” Jez nods. “Well?”

  “Well, this morning I was logging an outer perimeter walk, out towards the Hunslet Road, when I got an anomalous thaum spike. So I walked Black Bull Street and Carlisle Road and picked it up again, and when I plot it, I get this.” He points to the map on the screen. Three points show up in red along a line running due south of the government offices on Quarry Hill. “What’s interesting is I didn’t get a reading on East Street or Duke Street. If it’s a ley line, it’s a new one since the last survey, and it terminates somewhere around here.” His finger hovers over Clarence Dock, a small rectangular harbor a couple hundred meters south of the office. “Near the museum.”

  Jez frowns. “Yeah, it’s a new one. Any ideas?” she asks, looking at Pete.

  Pete shrugs. “Anomalous readings, but it doesn’t look like faulty equipment to me,” he says. “The river’s been used for transport since the Norman invasion. Could that be something to do with it?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe a geophysical shift somewhere else has opened up a new fault line. Can’t remember hearing about any earthquakes, though.” Jez shoves back a stray lock of hair and glances at the clock on Alex’s computer desktop. It’s nearly lunchtime. The weather is overcast and cloudy, threatening rain this afternoon. She’s acutely aware that Alex’s pancake of sunblock conceals reddened and peeling skin. “Do you want to check it out this evening, after sunset?” she asks.

  “I’ve got an idea it’s something to do with the museum,” Alex volunteers.

  “Really?”

  “Ley lines are associated with graves and sacrificial sites as well as topography. When they’re not emergent geological phenomena they’re usually necromantically powered,” Alex points out. Pete’s face freezes, but he holds his peace. “The museum is, uh, it’s the Royal Armouries, right? It’s full of swords and stuff, much of which has been used. If there’s a strong concentration of blooded weapons under one roof, close to an existing nexus—like the hill, here—wouldn’t that maybe tend to set up a secondary resonance? Could that have attracted some wandering power source and given it a route to ground?”

  “Huh.” Jez runs a hand through her hair, shoving it back from her face. “Yes, that’s possible. You ought to talk to Vik Choudhury about secondary sites, and maybe email Mr. Howard”—Alex twitches at the name—“in case there’s something about it in the nonclassified wiki. Hmm. The museum covers quite an area, doesn’t it? How would you like to nip round there after lunch and take some informal readings? If it is a local secondary resonance, rather than something to do with the river, that’ll give us something to work with. We need to know if it goes anywhere useful.”

  The museum is indoors and mostly windowless. Jez can send him there with a clean conscience and a good chance of answering the question. He’s right: weapons that have drunk deep of human blood are a good bet for a ley line disturbance. Just as the sites of unquiet deaths tend to be associated with ghosts and hauntings, the paraphernalia and tools of torment can generate occult resonances. “Do you have anything else you’re working on that’s a higher priority?”

  “I’ve got plenty of training courseware to keep me busy in the background,” Alex admits. “And a meeting about internal marketization of outsourced technical support services at four.” He rolls his eyes.

  “Then you ought to get out of the office for a couple of hours after lunch.” Jez smiles wearily. “Go on, go visit the museum. It can’t do any harm, can it?”

  And so it comes to pass that, instead of lunching in one of the Quarry House canteens and then slaving over a stack of training worksheets for a couple of hours, Alex scuttles out beneath a rain-heavy sky and spends the first half of the afternoon taking discreet thaum flux measurements on his smartphone while gaping at one of the largest collections of murder cutlery in the entire world.

  The Royal Armouries collection was originally housed and stored at the Tower of London, where since time immemorial the monarchy (and subsequently the British armed forces) maintained a magpie’s nest of all things bright and stabby. But by the end of the twentieth century the collection was overflowing, and only a tiny fraction could be put on display. In the early years of the twenty-first century various national museum collections were moved away from London and its suburbs, on the not-unreasonable theory that improving the cultural life of the nation was a good thing. (In reality, the overheated property market in the capital meant that the Crown Estates could sell off central London sites, build and stock palatial new museums in outlying cities, and make a tidy profit at the same time.) The Royal Armouries were one of the collections that got the treatment. So a shiny new national museum was built in the Luftwaffe-flattened industrial wasteland of south Leeds, next to the Leeds Docks arts and cultural complex: a concrete invader from the War Dimension, with an entry corridor lined with heavy machine guns.*

  (At least, that’s the cover story.)

  Alex makes his way in, past signs advertising a huge animated film festival that’s coming to town later that month, then walks the main corridor. Ahead of him a circular staircase spirals up a five-story-high tower lined with porthole-like windows. As he approaches it the thaum flux display on his phone rises alarmingly. In the middle of the floor, right below the stairs, sits an odd display case. He sidles up to it cautiously—it’s uncomfortably well-lit by daylight streaming through the ports above—and he tugs his jacket cuffs down over his gloves as the skin around his wrists dries and tightens painfully. It’s not a display case, he realizes, with growing astonishment: it’s an octagonal array of polished mirrors, angled upwards to show the reflected walls of the tower, a tower lined with—

  “Holy shit,” he subvocalizes, awestruck. We’re going to need swords: lots of swords. The towering inner walls of the stairwell of the Hall of Steel are lined with cold iron. Halberds and spears and swords and arrows bristle at the sky, floral wreaths of death brandished triumphant at the ceiling. As he walks around the central reflector, peering into each mirror in turn, Alex sees two-thirds of a millennium of war hanging overhead. Almost without thinking, he invokes his counter cantrip: it reports three hundred and sixty-four blood-soaked items hanging on a wall. You can clean the stains off the metal, but you can’t erase the memories of souls swallowed: his V-parasites are excited, chittering in the back of his skull at their proximity to so much death. They’re not very
clear on the flow of time: he senses an edge of frustration to their noise, for the food in question is centuries past its use-by date.

  The thaum flux measured by the bluetooth widget in his pocket spikes as he stands in front of the reflector, then drops as he walks back towards the elevators. He rides up to the first floor in thoughtful silence, then through the darkened tunnel of Ancient and Medieval Warfare that leads to the War exhibition. The flux spikes again, and stays high, then the monitor begins to pick up the characteristic fingerprint of a ley line. His pocket dongle isn’t as sensitive and directional as a K-22, but it’s enough. I’ll have to come back here with Pete, Alex decides. As he walks past a display of horse armor through the centuries, the thaum flux continues to spike higher. Many of these pieces have seen blood spilled, he realizes. Some of those holes were not made by rust.

  It’s easy to lose track of time in the windowless maze of weapons, and Alex forgets the outside world for a while. He’s gazing, increasingly disturbed, at an exhibit on the horrors of trench warfare when his phone vibrates. Meeting in fifteen minutes, it reminds him. “Shit,” he mutters, and goes to hunt for the way out. I’ll come back later, he resolves, and not just to map out the local ley line endpoint and isolate whatever unquiet piece of bloodthirsty history is powering it. The museum is only a ten-minute walk from the new offices: he wonders vaguely if it’s the sort of place you could take a date.

  * * *

  It’s Tuesday afternoon and the sky is covered by a slate-gray slab of cloud, the vanguard of a frontal system blowing in across the Pennines. The canyonlike pavements on the south side of the city center smell of rain and dogshit, and Alex is footsore and irritated as he nears the end of his beat. He’s carried the K-22 scanner out past the Royal Armouries, around a chunk of the Inner Loop, and almost as far as the strip mall on the site of the old Tetley’s Brewery. Now he’s working his way back to Quarry House. His eyes ache, the skin on his face feels hot and dry beneath his factor-200 sunblock, and the logging app on his phone has barely budged the whole while. This part of Leeds is stubbornly dead. Yes, there was a spike in the car park at Staples—old breweries were often built on the site of springs—and there was another, stronger one on the side of the canal lock behind the Armouries, but the Armouries isn’t on his route today. Anyway, it’ll probably get assigned to someone else as soon as the team from Exorcism Services in Liverpool arrive on Wednesday.