The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  In the meantime, however, Alex—whose contract of employment stipulates that he is not required to go out in daylight at any time unless under exceptional circumstances meriting hazard pay—has just racked up four hours of stumbling about in overcast daylight. To PHANG senses this is as searing as high noon in the Sahara desert. He’s in a profoundly bad mood as he trudges across the Playhouse car park towards the side entrance to Quarry House. It occurs to him to wonder whether he has grounds to file a formal complaint against the idiots who assigned him a daylight task that could perfectly well have been carried out after midnight. It’s ableist at a minimum, displaying a lack of sensitivity for diversity in the workplace—

  “Hey, Quincey! I mean, Alex! What are you doing here?”

  Alex’s train of thought derails instantly under the impact of a sparkling smile framed by verdigris hair. The owner of the smile is wearing a black biker’s jacket over a polka-dot dress, black leggings that terminate in giant Doc Martens laced almost up to her knees, and electric blue bootlaces. Her hair is the color of church bells left out in the rain, tied up in pigtails that reveal multiply pierced ears rising to adorable little points. For a moment he can’t work out why she looks familiar: then he flashes back to Whitby, the Brides of Dracula, and his borrowed jacket.

  “You’re, uh—” He racks his brain, aghast at how easily his traitor memory let slip her name.

  “Cassie?” she says, still smiling brilliantly.

  His throat clenches. It feels as if his ward is burning—but that’s obviously psychosomatic because the back of his brain is shrieking Help! A girl is smiling at me! I don’t know what to do, and he seems to have forgotten how to breathe. But after a second he manages to say, “Hi, Cassie,” and then he contorts his face at her, almost like a normal human being grinning or baring his teeth or something. Oh God don’t show her your teeth. “I work in that office. What are you doing here?”

  “I work”—a toss of her head indicates the squat windowless block to the left of Quarry House, a Mini-Me to the government building’s Dr. Evil—“there! At least right now, I mean, I’m enrolled in a course in theatrical design and management and we’re doing practical work backstage at the Playhouse.”

  They stand in the half-empty car park and smile at each other like amnesiac star-crossed lovers who know they’re supposed to say something but who have both lost the script. But what is going through their heads in those few seconds couldn’t be more different:

  For Alex, it is as if the gray heavens have briefly parted to admit a single perfect sunbeam, focussing on the patch of pavement in front of him where Cassie is standing. She’s a girl, and she’s smiling at him, and she remembered his name from a brief encounter more than two weeks ago, and if his brain was a computer it’d be throwing segmentation faults and dumping core because this is so utterly outside Alex’s lived experience that he doesn’t know what to do next. Unlike the late and unlamented Evan—the PHANG pickup artist—Alex is somewhat introverted, timid, and under-socialized. Cassie is out of his league: but she’s being friendly. And, truth be told, standing in a car park smiling at her like an idiot is the most fun that he’s had for days. Even though it’s beginning to rain, and the ward around his neck feels like it’s choking him.

  For Cassie, it’s as if the dark and turbid mists of destiny have blown away to reveal a coruscating finger of prophetic brilliance, lighting up the asphalt car park around her. The oracular stone of power at the base of her throat is shrieking in the back of her head, This is the one, as she smiles, awestruck, at the young magus standing before her with a puzzled smile on his face. Agent First is attuned to mana, and Alex is full of it. She sensed it briefly along the cliffside path in Whitby, but she’d been unsure: she’d left the stone back in her room in Leeds, unwilling to risk it as part of her stage costume. She’d invited him to the party in hope of getting a closer look but he never showed up, and she’d gradually persuaded herself that she’d been wrong, jumping at shadows after so long alone in the field. But now she can see him with the oracle stone against her skin, and her toes and fingertips are on fire with his power. Alex is clearly a practitioner of considerable power. The refrain of one of Cassie’s dad’s favorite songs runs through her head—bait the line, set the trap, catch the man—and her knees weaken, an outcome bred in the bone by five hundred generations of selection for deference to power. But she forces herself to face him down, keeping her smile-mask intact, showing no sign of terror or adoration.

  And so they stand and smile at one another, both unsure what to do next, until Alex’s “I’ve got to check in at the office—” collides with Cassie’s “Fancy a coffee?” And they stall.

  “Coffee?” Alex echoes.

  “Office?”

  “There.”

  “Where?”

  “Second floor, west wing, uh, I really need to drop this file off before I go home for the day but I can be out in fifteen minutes—”

  “That’s okay, why don’t we meet up in the Playhouse bar?”

  “Where—”

  “That door there.” Cassie points vaguely. She’s afire with his power. Alex burns by daylight, metaphysically, and although he dresses like an accountancy clerk and his skin’s a mess there’s a strength to him that makes her certain that everything Cassie thinks she knows about the urük empire’s masters is wrong. “I’ll wait around.”

  “Uh, okay. Yeah, be right back, don’t go ’way . . .”

  Alex nearly trips over his own feet as he stumbles hastily towards the side entrance to the government office complex. What, he wonders bewilderedly, is happening to me? He’s more used to summoning demons, drinking blood, and consorting with vicars than he is to being invited to join cute green-haired girls for coffee. But as he rushes back to room 424 to drop off the K-22 kit and download his readings, he can’t help feeling a strange, light-hearted hope that this chance encounter might mark the start of another stage in his life.

  * * *

  Oh, Father. Cassie waits at the Playhouse bar, trying not to tap her toes impatiently as the barista polishes glasses by the dishwasher and natters to one of his heavily tattooed buddies. Let me be right about this one. Just this once. She forces herself to stillness, calling upon resources that Agent First has learned over the course of a lifetime of deadly lessons. He must come! He must!

  In Whitby she’d expected him to follow her to the party, englamoured—she’d seen her own eagerness reflected in his eyes, the attraction of power towards its own reflection—but then he’d evaporated into the night, leaving her swearing, without even a hair or drop of blood for her to track him by.

  Now she’s let him go again—but at least she knows: second floor, west wing, Ministry of Truth. Alex works for the government. Which, as she now understands, is a proxy for the exercise of power by the unseen sorcerers who rule this nation from the shadows. They are curiously diffident, these magi, for ones who only a century ago ruled an empire upon which the sun never set. In recent years they seem to have stepped back behind a curtain of silence, making a pretense of delegating their power to a strange, toothless commonwealth and a queen of no particular magic. They leave the steel gauntlets of martial glory out for younger upstart nations to play with: but they are still here, lurking in the background. Of that much Agent First is utterly certain. If it were not so, Great Britain would have fallen long ago, wouldn’t it? In Agent First’s world, the ineluctable law of power is that you rule or you die.

  To Agent First, the puppet show of democracy that Cassie believes in is obviously a child’s tissue of attractive lies, set before the cattle to enable the secret rulers to dominate them without fear of uprisings. It obviates the need to instill geasa of binding upon every individual subject, making possible huge economies of scale in the application of force majeure. (Subjects whose mind-bogglingly vast numbers beggar Agent First’s imagination: it makes no sense, who needs that many slaves?) But
to rule effectively from behind the stage curtain, the unseen theatrical directors that call the tunes in this production must send actors out among the audience to work their will. Alex shows every sign of being such a person. Outwardly he wears the guise of a gray man—deliberately average and forgettable. But he is robed in tremendous power for those with an inner eye with which to see him—an inner eye which most of the urük appear to lack. And he works for the government. What else could he be, but an agent-magus serving the secret rulers?

  He’s got to come, he’s got to— The barista notices her. “Venti soy mocha with an extra shot, cream and cinnamon on top,” she rattles automatically—come, he’s got to—

  “Hi!” Alex squeaks behind her shoulder, his voice breaking bat-high with nerves.

  Cassie jumps. He moves surprisingly silently: he’s close enough that she can feel his breath. “Hi!” She sparkles back, then forces herself to get a grip. She’s not sure whether to be embarrassed or terrified at the way he sneaked up on her, and the way her heart pounds in his presence. Her next words are a huge bluff: “What are you having?”

  “I’ll have a”—he hangs fire, stuttering silence for a few seconds—“a decaf latte?” Another pause. “I’m paying?”

  “You don’t need to.” She’s not short of spending money: one of the skills she mastered on her first day as Cassie was walking up to a man in a suit, pointing at the nearest bank machine, and saying: “Give me a hundred pounds.” Their eyes glaze as they push the buttons for her, completely defenseless before her will.

  “You’re a student, right?” He meets her eyes, but there’s no soulgaze there: just a wide-eyed smile. Either he isn’t trying (He suspects nothing! a reprehensibly dutiful part of Agent First howls triumphantly in the privacy of her mind) or she’s adequately shielded. “I’m working. Let me buy this one?”

  “Okay!” It’s a strain trying to stay bright the whole time, but she manages somehow. The part of her that’s Cassie is engaging in some weird etiquette negotiation that she doesn’t quite understand, about gendered social interactions and the relative status of scholars and sorcerer-lords, but he seems well-intentioned and it’s too transparent to be an attempt to trick her into a transfer of fealty. “Did you finish your work?”

  “Yeah, I’m done for the day.” As he says it a certain tension fades from his shoulders, and he relaxes very slightly.

  Oh look, he’s remembered to be human, Cassie’s shade remarks acidly. Seen through the eyes of the unenhanced Ms. Brewer, Alex is pretty much a dead loss in the charm stakes. It takes Agent First’s uncanny perceptions to see how much more there is to the boy than meets the eye. She studies Alex at close quarters. For an urük he’s not totally ugly, and his skin isn’t bad: but he’s wearing an implausible quantity of theatrical powder for some reason. Cassie’s memories suggest that this is not normal for a male office-worker in this place. Especially as the rest of him, apart from the mana that oozes from his every pore, seems determinedly mundane. “Huh,” she says, “I’ve finished work, too.” She pauses for a beat. “Are you in rep as well?”

  “In rep—” He freezes again. (Original Cassie would find his zoning out hopelessly uncool. Agent First thinks it fascinating, as if he’s pausing while he works out how much he’s allowed to tell her. Like a parasitic wasp larva moving under the skin of an unwilling caterpillar host, the real Alex is struggling not to emerge prematurely.) “Oh, you mean acting? Sorry, no: it’s just my skin, I burn really easily.”

  “You mean, sunburn?” She raises an eyebrow at that. “In this weather?”

  Two coffees appear on the bar behind her: Alex produces a banknote, somewhat rumpled and sweaty from spending time in his trouser pocket. As he pays she takes her cup and walks towards a table, putting a little primate-signaling jiggle in her stride, glancing over her shoulder to see if he’s paying attention. She doesn’t dare attempt to englamour a magus—she’s not suicidal—but the urük appear not to castrate their magi to render them tractable, which leaves them interestingly open to other forms of manipulation.

  “Sunburn.” Alex follows her as if hypnotized, but then sits opposite her and stares moodily down at his coffee. Then he glances up at her and his expression softens. “I came down with, with a medical condition about six months ago,” he admits. “I’m hypersensitive to sunlight, among other things.”

  “Like a vampire,” she jokes.

  He startles and nearly spills his coffee. “Vampires don’t exist!”

  She stares at him. “If you say so.” She picks up a sachet of sugar and pauses for a moment, frowns. “What about Dracula?”

  “Dracula’s a cultural archetype. A legend.”

  Cassie opens the sugar and pours most of it into her coffee. The last few grains she allows to scatter on the table between them. Alex freezes for a couple of seconds. Got you, she thinks triumphantly. But then he looks up, faster than should be possible.

  “Dracula’s not real. I mean, the turning into a flock of bats thing, or a mist, the aversion to crucifixes—it’s all rubbish.”

  She’s said or done something wrong: an invisible barrier has risen between them. Was it the sugar? Did he notice? “Okay, so they’re fictional.” Or is it the narrative? She shrugs. “But they’re fun in films or to read about. Smoking hot and scary at the same time.”

  “There’s nothing hot about them,” he says with world-weary conviction; “it’s, if it existed it’d be a nasty disease, that’s all. One that kills most of its victims and makes life a misery for the survivors. One that prevents them having normal relationships and forces them to—” He stops dead, eyes bulging slightly as if he’s a sworn liegeman running up against the edge of his discretion and thinking better of what he was about to say. “Gack. Just joking.” He smiles weakly.

  Agent First narrows her eyes, exaggerating her natural suspicion: she knows that expression. Any remaining doubts she might have harbored evaporate. Yes, he’s a magus, master of blood magic and darkness and bound servant of power. Even if he’s resistant to the counting trap. “Forget it, I was being silly,” she says, and smiles back at him. “Are you in town for long?” He nods lugubriously. Her stomach churns. She’s perilously close to losing him: every time she tries to turn the conversation somewhere productive she accidentally says something that disturbs him. What am I doing wrong? she wails. “I, I wasn’t expecting to run into you,” she says haltingly. “But if you work so close”—she gestures through the far wall in the direction of the building he disappeared into—“why, we’re practically neighbors!”

  “I guess we are,” he says, and his expression slowly brightens. “I’m here on a temp assignment from London, but it seems likely they’ll make it permanent. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I suppose every cloud has a silver lining. How about you?”

  “Oh, I’m here for the rest of the year. And I guess next year, too”—a flashover oracular vision of next year tells her otherwise, flames roaring skyward, despairing screams from beneath wrecked buildings, the sky a roiling black vortex of smoke—“if nothing bad happens. We’re going to do Dracula at Whitby for real next week, and they’ve offered us a one-week matinee run at the Playhouse if it goes well, but Easter vac is coming up, only I’m not going home—”

  “Home?”

  “To Hull.”

  “Oh God.” His fingers are warm and dry against her hand, and at last she’s made a connection. “You have my deepest sympathies.”

  Got you . . . “Where are you from?” she asks, frantically trying to keep up with this unfamiliar game of empathic bridge-building. (It’s quite unlike anything she’s experienced among the People: nobody would dream of speaking so. It’s not merely undignified, it’s degrading and leaves one vulnerable.)

  “I’m from Leeds,” he admits glumly.

  Cassie can’t help herself: she giggles, shocked. “You should run away while there’s still time!”

>   “I tried. They sent me back. There is no escape.”

  “Listen, it could be worse.” Words rise from her stolen memories, an ancient prayer: “From Hell, Hull, and Halifax may the Good Lord preserve us, right?”

  “I guess Leeds wasn’t around in those days. Otherwise they’d have included it.” He realizes he’s holding her hand and twitches as if to pull back, but she tightens her grip.

  “You’re not getting away that easily,” she tells him, and she means it. (In her experience the truth is always better than a lie: the truth is unlikely to get your eyeballs melted in your head when it’s found out, unless your liege is having a particularly bad day.) Anyway, she has a feeling that she’d quite like to see him without his false skins, both the heavy makeup and the slowly dying caterpillar-caul of his Mister Normal disguise: she’s certain they conceal a spectacular butterfly, even though (she’s upset when she remembers this) she’s geas-bound to break it on her father’s wheel. “You stood me up at the after-party! I had to put up with that ass Jeremy droning on for hours about the Lair of the White Worm. It was no fun!”

  “Um, I’m sorry—”

  “How would you like to make up for it?” She smiles as she looks him in the eye and pushes just a tiny amount of willpower into her gaze. It’s enough, because he sits up. “It’s pretty fucking dull around here after hours, and my homies are all pissing off for a month in two weeks’ time—Easter vac, like I said—and I’m not going home to Hull!” She pouts, draws a deep breath, and pushes her chest out just a little.