Casino Infernale

  I really didn’t like the shadows at the end of the dining hall. There were too many of them, too deep and too dark. And I am not the sort who is usually bothered by shadows.

  Coll did most of the talking, often with his mouth full, dominating the conversation by the simple expedient of never letting anyone else get a word in edge-ways. The next generation were overawed enough to let him get away with that, and Molly seemed genuinely interested in everything he had to say. Perhaps because she was checking it all against her memories. Looking for contradictions, and loopholes. I watched everyone else, as they listened to Coll.

  “It was a different time then,” he said grandly, refilling his wine-glass with a flourish. “All those years ago . . . the big businesses and the corrupt politicians held all the big cards. And they owned the law. So all we had left to work with was violence, to force change for the better. And yes, that meant playing their game, but when it’s the only game in town . . . We were at war with vested interests, who were never going to be persuaded to change things by reason or logic. Not if it meant giving up power and money. Arguments got you nowhere, persuasion didn’t work, so all that left was hitting them where it hurt. It was all we had.

  “Now, things have changed. The Internet means that arguments and philosophies can shoot around the world in minutes, backed up by hard evidence. Information wants everyone to be free. If I’ve learned anything from my time with so many groups and organisations, it’s that you can’t get people to listen by shouting at them. You have to gang up on them, and drown out their lies with the truth.”

  He stopped abruptly, to look at Molly. She’d hardly touched her food or her wine, which wasn’t like her, and now she was leaning forward, scowling, and rubbing at her forehead as though bothered by some intrusive new pain. Or memory.

  “Are you all right, Molly?” said Coll. “Is something bothering you?”

  “I remember being here, before,” said Molly. Her voice sounded odd, strangely detached. “At this table. With the old White Horse Faction. Everyone was here, including my parents. And you, Hadrian. I can see them all, as clearly as I see you . . . sitting around this table. Talking, planning . . . something big. I’m here, excited to be included in their plans. I see my mother and my father, smiling at me. They don’t look that much older than I am now. Oh, God . . . it’s been such a long time, since I saw them smile at me . . . but now everyone’s talking at once, raising their voices, shouting at each other. Something’s changed. My parents aren’t smiling any more. No. No! They’re gone. . . . They’re all gone.”

  She raised her head, to look sharply at Coll. “What were they planning here, Hadrian? It was something much bigger, and far more dangerous, than they were usually involved in. Why did my parents look so sad then, at the end? And why did you look so worried?”

  “This isn’t what you really want to talk about,” said Coll. “You want to know how your parents died. All right, you’ve waited long enough. Look at this.”

  He produced something from his pocket, and held it up for all of us to see: a single brightly glowing jewel. Smooth and polished as a pearl, shining fiercely with some intense inner light. Almost too bright to look at directly. Like staring into the sun. Coll rolled the thing back and forth between his fingers, splashing unnatural light around the length of the dining hall. Enjoying the way he was holding everyone’s attention.

  “This . . . is a memory crystal. Supersaturated with condensed information. Future technology, of course . . . fell off the back of a Timeslip, in the Nightside. It contains a complete recording of what happened here, in this room, at the very last meeting of the original White Horse Faction. The night everybody died.”

  “What?” Molly sat bolt upright, glaring at him. “My parents died here? In Monkton Manse? Why didn’t I remember that?”

  “Because you were here when it happened,” said Coll. “Now hush. And watch.”

  He murmured some activating words over the memory crystal, and just like that a vision appeared, floating on the air before us. A deep and distinct image from the Past, showing exactly what happened, in this dining hall, ten years earlier.

  Some twenty-odd people sat around the long table, talking heatedly with each other. We couldn’t hear their voices, couldn’t hear what they were saying, but none of them looked happy. Hadrian Coll was there, looking a lot more than ten years younger. He wasn’t talking. Just sat there, watching the others. Beside him sat a man and a woman I immediately recognised as Molly’s parents. A good-looking pair, strong and noble, arguing with passion and intensity. And sitting beside them a teenage Molly Metcalf. Obviously upset by all the raised voices and arguments. She looked so young, so vulnerable. Unmarked by all the harsh pain and anger to come, that would scar her so deeply. I wanted to reach out to her, to hold her and protect her; to save her from what I knew was coming. But I couldn’t.

  All I could do was watch.

  Everyone at the table looked round, startled, as the door at the far end of the dining hall slammed open, to reveal a dark and shadowy figure. And before anyone at the table could properly react, the shadowy figure produced a gun and opened fire. Those nearest him died first, blood flying from gaping wounds and shattered heads. Bodies crashed to the floor. People started to their feet, reaching for weapons or magical protections, but bullets found them first. They all died, one after another; the entire White Horse Faction wiped out, in just a few moments.

  Molly’s mother and father were among the last to die. Jake Metcalf put himself between his wife and his daughter and the bullets of the shadowy gunman, trying to push his wife away from the line of fire. A row of bullets stitched across his chest, throwing him backwards into his wife’s arms. And then a bullet hit her, in the side of the head, blasting half her face away. The blood splashed across Molly’s face as she stood there at the table, horrified. She screamed and screamed, silently, like she would never stop.

  The last few remaining members of the White Horse Faction opened up on the shadowy gunman with everything they had. Energy guns, enhanced weapons, shaped curses and pointing bones. But none of it had any effect. The shadowy man stood his ground in the doorway, and nothing touched him. Molly turned and ran for the door nearest her. By the time she reached it, everyone else who’d been sitting at the table was dead.

  The vision snapped off, and Coll put the memory crystal down on the table. Molly was on her feet, staring down the long table at the far door, where the gunman had been. Her eyes were wide, wild, lost. I was on my feet beside her, but she didn’t even know I was there. The next generation stared at Coll as though seeing him for the first time, and not liking what they saw. He sat calmly in his chair, giving all his attention to the wine in his glass. I glared at him.

  “You didn’t have to show her everything at once! You didn’t have to throw her in the deep end like that, you bastard!”

  Coll shrugged, entirely unmoved by the anger in my voice, or Molly’s condition.

  “Watch your mouth, Shaman. I gave her what she wanted. Sometimes you have to just rip the scab right off. Less painful, that way.”

  I leaned in close to Molly, careful not to touch her, just yet. “Is that . . . how it was, Molly? Is that how it really was? Do you remember now?”

  “Yes,” said Molly. “My mum and dad died right here, in this room, right in front of me. I only remembered flashes before, and it never occurred to me to look too closely. People told me it happened somewhere else, so often, that I believed them. And forgot all this . . . I was so sure it was a Drood who killed them, like everyone said . . .” She turned her head slowly to look at Coll. “Why was the killer just a shadow, when everything else was so clear?”

  “Because you’re not ready to see who it was, just yet,” said Coll. “And because I feel the need . . . to keep a little something in reserve. In case I need something to bargain with.”

  “This, all of this, is why I became t
he wild witch,” said Molly. “Why I made so many deals, with so many Courts, for power. So I’d never be helpless again.”

  “And to avenge your parents,” I said. I looked at Coll, and he stirred uncomfortably in his chair, at something he saw in my face. “That shadowy figure,” I said. “He definitely wasn’t wearing Drood armour, despite his . . . untouchability. So he wasn’t a Drood. You’ve known that, all these years, but you never said anything to Molly. Why?”

  Molly looked at me. “You thought the killer was a Drood . . .”

  “Because that’s what it says in the Drood files,” I said.

  “What?” said Troy. “How would you know something like that?”

  “Because I’m Shaman Bond!” I snapped. “I get around, everyone knows that. I know things I’m not supposed to know. Take it from me: the original White Horse Faction was quite definitely wiped out on the orders of the Droods, supposedly to prevent them from doing something quite extraordinarily dangerous. I always believed it was a Drood field agent who did the job; but now it’s starting to look like the Droods contracted out for the hit. I have to wonder why . . .”

  “Talk to me, Hadrian,” said Molly, and she didn’t sound like an old friend, any more. “Explain to me what happened here. What did you talk the Faction into? What did you get my parents involved in that was so bad they all had to be murdered on Drood orders?”

  “And why weren’t you killed, along with all the others?” I said.

  Coll looked at Molly and me, and then at Troy and Adams and Morrison, and saw he didn’t have a single ally in the room any more. He smiled.

  “Well. I see it’s finally time . . . to tell the tale. The truth, the whole truth, and everything in between. I suppose I’m the only one left now who knows everything. Very well. The truth is that the Drood’s agent got here too late. The bad thing had already happened. The White Horse Faction had already carried out their greatest mission, and their most terrible failure. We performed a great magical Working, and it all went horribly wrong. That’s why we ran all the way back here, to Trammell Island and Monkton Manse; not to plot and plan but to hide away from prying eyes . . . and from the awful thing we’d let loose in the world.

  “The Faction discovered, while looking for something else entirely—and isn’t that always the way—that a nuclear power plant down in the south-west of England had been constructed over an ancient Celtic barrow mound. A very magical, and significant, burial mound. The owners and builders of the power plant were horrified when the mound was discovered during the early stages of construction. They knew bringing in architects and historians would bring construction to a halt, costing them millions. They might even be required to stop building and move the plant somewhere else, and God alone knew how much that would cost them! So the owners just paid everyone off, and kept building. The nuclear power plant went online, on time, and the truth never came out.

  “Except—someone wrote it all down. A complete record. Just in case it ever came back to bite them on the arse. And someone who supported the White Horse Faction got hold of this document, and passed it on. The Faction investigated, and found this particular barrow mound was built to contain Something so powerful it had to be put down into the earth and left there, to sleep the sleep of ages. And that’s when the Faction all came up with this great idea.

  “We would wake the Sleeper, raise it up and take control of it through a great Working. We would use the Sleeper’s power to blow up the nuclear power plant, and then channel all that released energy into a second, even greater Working. One that would rewrite Reality itself, according to our needs and wishes, to remake England and the world in our preferred image.

  “It seemed so perfect: to use the hated power of the enemy to create a new and magical world that would have no need and no use for nuclear power plants.”

  “What the hell made you think you could control something that powerful?” I said.

  “More blind luck,” said Coll. “We’d managed to get our hands on all kinds of useful Objects of Power, courtesy of various fellow-travellers and well-wishers . . . who didn’t have the balls to use the things themselves. And one new item in particular made the whole scheme seem possible. Or so we thought. We really did think we could bring this off; it’s important that you understand that. We thought we were saving the world. But we had no idea just how powerful the Sleeper under the mound was. We didn’t know what we were dealing with . . .

  “We had the Red King’s Ruby, you see. And we thought that with that, we could do anything.” He saw the look of horror in my face, and the blank incomprehension in everyone else, so he sighed heavily, and paused to explain himself. “The Red King’s Ruby is a magical artefact that originally existed only in dreams. A purely conceptual item, and therefore unlimited in its power. Someone found a way to bring it forward, out of dreams and into reality. Once it was made manifest, and material, it was supposed to be powerful enough to give its wielder control over everything. How could we resist?”

  “Who gave you the Ruby?” said Molly. Her voice was very cold.

  “The Most Evil Man In The World: Crow Lee. He didn’t tell us how he got his hands on it, and we didn’t ask. We didn’t even have to pay him for it! His only requirement was that we use it. I think . . . he was scared to try it out himself. He wanted someone else to do it for him, first. And I believe it amused him to think of something like the Red King’s Ruby in hands like ours. I did wonder, afterwards, whether he knew what we were planning . . . and knew that it would never work.”

  “Something so powerful that even Crow Lee never dared use it,” I said. “Didn’t that tell you something?”

  “I talked them into it,” said Coll. “That was my job. And this is where we get to the part of the story you know nothing about, Molly. The part that not even your parents suspected. I was a spy. A double agent, working for the Droods. It was my job to infiltrate dangerous underground groups, find out their plans and secrets, and pass that information back to the Droods. So they could decide what to do. That was why I kept moving, from one group to another. And, because the other part of my job was to act as an agent provocateur. Encourage these groups to act before they were ready, to perform violent acts that would discredit them in the eyes of the world, and sink them hip-deep in trouble. I, of course, was always long gone by then. That’s how I acquired my other name: Trickster Man. Though no one ever suspected the truth. I was . . . very good at my job.”

  “Why?” said Troy. And in that one word was all the shock and betrayal of a disappointed child. “Why would you do such a thing?”

  “For the money, of course! And because I’m a Drood bastard,” said Hadrian Coll. “Illegitimate child of James Drood, the legendary Grey Fox. He did put it about, you know. There’s a lot of us Grey Bastards out and about in the world, all of us desperate to ingratiate ourselves with the mighty Drood family. In the hope of earning a place among them. Of being invited home, to Drood Hall. Maybe even presented with a torc . . . Any of us would have done anything, for that.

  “I was sent into the White Horse Faction to do my usual number on them . . . but a funny thing happened. The more I listened to them, the more I found I agreed with them. Your mother and father were good people, Molly. I became a convert to their cause. I was the one who heard about the Red King’s Ruby, and used my Drood connections to put the White Horse Faction in touch with Crow Lee. So in a way, everything that happened afterwards was my fault. But I swear to you . . . I had no idea then what the Faction wanted it for. What they intended to do with it.

  “Once it was all explained to me, I was horrified. I knew it would never work. I tried to talk them out of it, but for once my famous powers of persuasion failed me. They’d suffered too many defeats, endured too many set-backs. They were desperate for one big win that would settle everything. And put an end to a war they were so tired of. I could see it all going horribly wrong in so many ways . .
. so I turned them in, to the Droods. I told them everything the White Horse Faction were planning, and they said they’d send a field agent to stop them. I was so relieved. I thought the agent would just walk in and take the Ruby away from them before anyone could get hurt.

  “But the Droods took too long making up their minds. By the time their chosen agent arrived, it was too late. We’d already awoken the Sleeper under the mound.

  “Do I really need to tell you how badly we’d misunderstood the situation? The Sleeper . . . wasn’t what we thought it was. I had to go along. They would have suspected the truth, otherwise. I was right there with them, on the hill overlooking the nuclear power plant. In the bright summer sunshine; still trying to talk them into setting up stronger safeguards . . . but they wouldn’t listen. They used the Red King’s Ruby to make contact with what had lain sleeping under the barrow for so many centuries. Used the Ruby’s power, to turn their dream into reality.”

  “Hold it,” I said. “Let me get this straight. You were close enough to see a nuclear power plant you were planning to blow up?”

  “I know!” said Coll. “We were young, we were stupid, and intoxicated with the possibilities for our cause. And we truly believed the Ruby would protect us. Perhaps fortunately, things never got that far. When the Sleeper awoke, and burst forth from its barrow mound, we saw at once that it wasn’t at all what we’d expected. It wasn’t some ancient Celtic chief, or magician, or some powerful remnant of Times Past. No. It was a Horse. A great White Horse. It came ghosting up through the nuclear power plant without even touching it, invisible to their scientific mindsets, growing larger and larger. Filling the sky. We only saw it because we were connected through the Red King’s Ruby. The White Horse was huge, massive, overwhelming to merely human senses. A brilliant, dazzling white too terrible to look at directly. The embodiment of all horses, and the power they gave the Celts over their enemies.