“What, exactly, are we talking about here?” said Molly.
“A particularly useful item that my family put to one side and hid somewhere very remote and very safe, for just such an occasion as this,” I said. “You have to understand, Molly; my family has plans drawn up for every conceivable emergency that might ever arise.”
“You’re saying your family even had a plan in place for something like this?”
“Oh, especially for something like this. Even when everything seems lost and all hope gone, you can be sure the Droods still have something in hand to fall back on. When a family has been around as long as ours has, we have time to consider all the possibilities. So we always have one last ace up our sleeve to confound our many enemies. A hidden weapon, one last dirty trick, or an unexpected ally waiting in the wings. Or in this case, a very useful item, hidden away.”
“I might have known,” said Molly. “Your family is too sneaky and underhanded for words. But even assuming this hidden item can help us, why do we have to go to Egypt, of all places?”
““Because that’s where it is.”
“I hate it when you go all cryptic,” said Molly severely. “You’re never more smug than when you’re being cryptic.”
“The item in question is tucked away safe and secure in Egypt,” I said patiently. “So that even if the entire family was abducted, snatched away, disappeared without trace or fell through some hole in space and time…as long as one of us remained, there would still be a chance to get the family back. A way to locate them, wherever they were.”
Molly sniffed loudly. She didn’t seem particularly convinced. “How are we supposed to get to Egypt, with every bad guy and his dog out looking for us? We can’t just book a weekend in Cairo in some backstreet bucket shop and just hop on the nearest plane. We should go to Brighton and talk to my friend. See if she can get us in to see the Regent of Shadows.”
“The Regent can wait,” I said. “What good will it do to have the Regent’s support if we’ve no way of finding my family? Besides, who needs a plane when we have the Merlin Glass?”
I retrieved the hand mirror from the pocket dimension I kept it in and held it out before me. The silver frame shone almost supernaturally bright in the sunshine. Molly looked at the Glass and then back at me, and if anything, looked even more dubious.
“I don’t know, Eddie. That’s not our Merlin Glass. It’s from a whole different place. You really think we can trust it?”
“I’m still not convinced we could trust the original,” I said. “But it’s not like we have much choice in the matter. Unless your teleport capabilities have improved a hell of a lot since the last time we had to use them…”
“My teleport capabilities are deliberately limited,” Molly said sternly. “You’ve never understood the risks involved in travelling through the spaces that connect spaces. The farther the trip, the more you open yourself up to all kinds of dangers. Physical and spiritual. There are things that live in the places between places, and they’re hungry. You have no idea how powerful the Merlin Glass must be to keep you safe as it transports you back and forth.”
“We have to go to Egypt,” I said patiently. “To pick up the special little something my family hid there. We need it, Molly. Think of it as a form of insurance, put aside for a very rainy day. And before you ask again, Why Egypt?…my family wanted it hidden as far from the Hall as possible, where no one would ever think to look for it.”
“You have moved beyond cryptic into seriously annoying,” said Molly. “What is it? A weapon of some kind?”
“Something far more useful,” I said.
“Something useful, hidden in Egypt,” said Molly, thoughtfully. “I used to be so good at crossword puzzles.…Is it contained in a mummy’s sarcophagus? Or perhaps an old oil lamp that needs cleaning? An ancient flame that bestows eternal youth? Tana leaves?”
“You’re just being silly now,” I said.
“Wait, wait—don’t tell me. I’ll get it! Is it a special kind of torc connected to all the other torcs?”
“Nice try, but no. We changed all our torcs—remember?—when we replaced the Heart with Ethel. My ancestors always knew that might be a possibility someday. Even if they were very careful never to mention such a thing anywhere, the Heart might overhear them. No. My family decided, quite rightly, that we needed something more…basic.”
“Other families have skeletons in their closets,” said Molly. “Your family has whole boneyards. All right. Say we go to Egypt and pick up this…thing. Will it enable us to go get your family?”
“Think of it more as a compass,” I said. “Something to point us in the right direction.”
“It’s not strong enough to get us there on its own?” Molly considered the question for longer than I was comfortable with. “Is there anyone else that you know of who has anything like Alpha Red Alpha? A dimensional engine powerful enough to take us where Alpha Red Alpha took your family?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “There are all kinds of dimensional doors and hellgates scattered around that can give you access to all kinds of other worlds and far-off realms…some of them in the hands of friends, like the London Knights, some in the hands of enemies, like the Crimson Brotherhood of Peng Tang, and a hell of a lot more in the hands of private individuals with more money than sense. But we can’t approach any of them without revealing why we want them, and we can’t have the whole world finding out what’s happened to the Droods. Looters would be just the start of it. And, anyway, I doubt very much anything out there would be as powerful as Alpha Red Alpha. It’s always been thought of as unique, because no one else would be crazy enough to build something that dangerous. And then live over it. Alpha Red Alpha was designed to send you beyond space and time, into dimensions and realities we don’t even have proper names for. That’s why we never used the damned thing until I persuaded my family we needed it.
“It’s supposed to have been reverse-engineered from the stardrive of an alien ship that crashed in a field in Wiltshire in 1855. Personally, I’ve always thought that if you’re going to reverse-engineer alien tech, pick it from something that hasn’t actually plummeted from the sky and crashed. Doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence, does it? ‘We’re proposing to send you through unknown dimensions, using an engine derived from something that fell from the skies and we had to dig out of a field.…’ Yeah, right—after you.”
“Do you know which alien species the ship belonged to?” said Molly. “Your family is supposed to keep track of all the aliens currently playing tourist behind what they think are cunning disguises. Maybe you could contact them, and…”
“Rather worryingly, we have no idea who the ship belonged to,” I said. “No bodies anywhere on board, no record systems we could recognise or understand, and nothing in the tech that looked at all familiar. There are always a few Visitors who don’t want to play nice.…This particular starship was apparently like nothing we’d ever encountered before. Word is, just looking at the ship too long or studying the technology too closely was enough to drive unprepared human minds right over the edge. After we’d ripped out the stardrive, my family broke up the ship into small pieces and then dropped them in the deepest parts of the various oceans. Just to be on the safe side…”
“Could anyone else have gained access to this technology?” said Molly. “Through the traitor in the family, perhaps? Yes, I know you don’t like to talk about him, but think, Eddie.…Could someone else have their own version of Alpha Red Alpha that we could make use of?”
“Unlikely,” I said. “The family Armourer who designed Alpha Red Alpha was half-crazy when he started, and all crazy by the time he’d finished it. Supposedly the family had to lock him away for everyone’s safety. They left him alone to die, but there are stories that he didn’t die. Couldn’t die after what exposure to the stardrive had done to him. That he’s still locked up somewhere in the Hall…”
“None of this is filling me with confidence,
” said Molly. “Though I will take a moment to say Your family in a very disapproving voice. Eddie, if they were the only ones to possess a dimensional engine that powerful…how can we hope to go get them, even if we do get our hands on this compass of yours?”
“One step at a time, Molly,” I said. “You have to have faith.…”
“How long ago was this Egypt thing set up?” she said suddenly. “How far back are we talking about?”
“Oh, centuries,” I said. “At least. My family’s been around long enough to think up plans and responses for pretty much every situation you can think of. Everyone knows some of them, and I know more than most because I used to run this family. But I’d never heard anything about this particular backup plan until Uncle Jack took it upon himself to tell me.…Apparently not everyone else thought I needed to know. They didn’t think I’d be in command long enough for it to matter. And as it turned out…”
“Are you sure this thing is still there?” Molly said bluntly. “I mean, hidden in Egypt for all this time?”
“If it isn’t, we’re screwed,” I said. “So think positively.”
I held the Merlin Glass up before me, and Molly and I both regarded it thoughtfully. It looked very much like the hand mirror I remembered, but there was definitely something different, even…off, about it. I remembered my uncle Jack telling me he was half-convinced there was something, and perhaps even someone, trapped inside the mirror. And that whatever it was could be glimpsed sometimes in the background of a reflected image. An extra face in a group, or peering out from behind something…I looked carefully, but all I could see was Molly and me looking dubiously back at ourselves. So that…was a problem that could wait for another day.
Just as long as it didn’t turn out to be some blond-haired Victorian child called Alice. I’d already encountered a giant white talking rabbit in the Old Library.
I reached out cautiously to the Merlin Glass through my torc and told it where we needed to go. My torc now had rogue armour in it, and this wasn’t the Merlin Glass I was used to, so it did occur to me that all kinds of things could go wrong…but in the end the Glass jumped out of my hand just like always, and grew to the size of a door in a moment. It hung on the air before Molly and me, dangling unsupported above the grass. Our reflections were gone. Instead the Glass showed nothing but an impenetrable darkness. Molly edged closer very cautiously and peered into the dark.
“That…is not exactly promising,” said Molly. “Where, exactly, are we going in Egypt, Eddie?”
“To a very secret hiding place,” I said. “Which I don’t feel comfortable naming out loud.”
“Oh, come on!” said Molly. “Look around you! There’s no one here. We’re on our own, deep in the Drood grounds. Who could possibly be listening?”
“You heard the Road Rat,” I said. “All our shields and protections are down. So, theoretically, anyone at all could be remote viewing the Hall and its grounds and listening in on our every word. Very definitely including Crow Lee.”
“I think we should get going,” said Molly.
“After you,” I said.
“Through an unknown Glass, into complete darkness and a place you can’t even bring yourself to name? Do you ever want to see me naked again, Eddie?”
“I’ll go first,” I said.
I stepped briskly over the bottom frame and through the Merlin Glass into pitch-darkness, and then stepped quickly to one side so I wouldn’t be run over by Molly as she came storming through right after me. She liked to make her point, but she never wanted to be left out of anything. Immediately both of us began to cough and choke. The air was bad. It smelled strongly of spices and rot, and air that had been left undisturbed for far too long. I should have expected that. I called my golden face mask out of my torc, and the moment it slammed into place over my face, I could breathe again. I looked quickly round at Molly, but she’d already conjured up a bubble of fresh air around her head. The edges of the magical field shimmered in the gloom. She glared at me, and I shrugged apologetically.
Bright sunlight streamed through the open Merlin Glass behind us, summer sunshine falling through from the Drood grounds, illuminating an enclosed stone chamber no more than twenty feet square with no obvious door or other openings and an uncomfortably low ceiling. Dust thrown up by our sudden arrival swirled back and forth in the stream of light. I asked Molly to call up some witchlight, and she nodded quickly. A few muttered Words later and a warm and cheerful amber light radiated from her left hand, held up above her head. I immediately shut down the Merlin Glass. It fell back to its usual size, cutting off the sunlight, and I tucked the Glass away in my pocket. Molly’s witchlight illuminated the chamber well enough.
And I didn’t want something as powerful as the Merlin Glass announcing our presence to anyone who might be watching.
There was nothing in any way interesting about the stone chamber the Glass had delivered us to. Square, dusty, entirely enclosed. No obvious way in or out. Thick dust jumped up from the floor with every small movement Molly and I made, forming clouds in the air before falling sullenly back again. The four walls were completely bare, featureless; just basic blocks of dark stone put in place God alone knew how long ago. My family hadn’t made this place. We just took advantage of it.
“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” said Molly. “I’m not seeing anything useful. In fact, I’m not seeing anything worth looking at.”
“I gave the Glass the right coordinates,” I said. “The place isn’t important; it’s just a repository for what we’re looking for.”
“Then…where are we?” said Molly. Her voice, and mine, sounded very flat and very small in the ancient enclosed surroundings. “I am officially not impressed by any of this or the fact that I’ve got to maintain a goldfish bowl of fresh air around my face. So, tell me exactly where we are right now or I am divorcing you.”
“We’re not married.”
“Eddie!”
“We are in the Valley of the Kings, where ancient Egypt buried their most revered dead,” I said. “Or at least we are currently deep underground, underneath the Valley of the Kings. In a secret compartment of an undiscovered tomb. And, no, I don’t know whose. There are still quite a few undiscovered tombs buried deep under the shifting sands, ready to be dug up.…And given some of the things the old-time pharaohs had to bury or imprison—everything from djinn with bad attitudes to animal-headed gods that had got a bit above themselves—it’s probably just as well that no one’s found them.”
Molly looked at me for a while, realised that I’d said all I was going to say on the subject and gave me one of her looks.
“You really do get on my tits, sometimes, Eddie. You know that? We’re here somewhere, in someone’s tomb, looking for something.…I’ll bet my sister Isabella knows more about this place than you do. More than your whole family, probably.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” I said generously.
Molly sniffed and looked about her, trying to find something worth looking at. “Isabella would love this. Much more her thing than mine. Louisa; who can say? Wait a minute.…Did you say deep underneath the Valley of the Kings? How deep, exactly?”
“Probably best not to think about it,” I said.
I stepped up to one of the bare, featureless walls and studied it carefully. Molly moved in beside me, holding the witchlight up to give me better lighting. I moved quickly along the wall, searching for Drood sign. Dust was falling from the ceiling in slow steady streams. Almost certainly not a good sign.
“I still don’t see anything,” said Molly. “No hieroglyphics. No loweroglyphics. Not even any Egyptian graffiti, like Cleopatra does it with ducks. And I certainly don’t see any trace of a very useful Drood item. I don’t know what your family left here, Eddie, but it is clearly long gone. Somebody else got here first and beat you to it.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “According to what my uncle Jack told me, this chamber was deliberately left empty, to give j
ust the impression you’ve described. To discourage anyone who might have stumbled on our secret location. Now…if I remember correctly…”
I went over the whole wall, studying it from top to bottom, through the expanded and augmented Sight of my golden face mask. Top to bottom and side to side, and then on to the next wall. Where a brief flash of light finally caught my golden eye; a sign left for Droods to see. I leaned in closer and there, barely halfway up the wall, a small but very significant sign had been delicately carved into the rough stone. I gestured to Molly and she squeezed in beside me. She picked out the sign even faster than I had. Molly’s a first-class witch, and she’s always been able to See more than me when it comes to the hidden world.
“Is there a curse attached?” she said suddenly. “There ought to be a curse attached. You know, something like, ‘Death shall come on swift wings to all those who seek to steal that which belongs to Droods!’ That sort of thing…”
“Almost certainly not,” I said.
“Ought to be a curse,” said Molly, pouting. “It’s not proper tomb robbing unless there’s a curse involved.”
“We are not tomb robbing!” I said. “We are simply recovering something that my family happened to leave here long ago. For safekeeping. Now, there should be a second stone chamber, right next to this one. On the other side of this wall.”
I armoured up my right arm from shoulder to fingertip. The golden metal slipped down from my torc and encased my whole arm in just a moment. I was getting used to the cold. Hardly shuddered at all. I flexed the fingers of my golden gauntlet. I felt strong, capable, ready for anything. Like I could punch a hole through steel plate, never mind an old stone wall. Molly looked at me thoughtfully.
“Why aren’t you wearing your complete armour, Eddie? Normally, you can’t wait to slip the whole thing on and do your superhero thing. So why settle for just the one arm now? Eddie, are you afraid of your new armour?”