She smiled brightly at me and hit the clicker. I called my armour and it came, sweeping over me from head to foot in a moment. Miss Mitchell looked blankly into my featureless golden face mask and hit the clicker again and again. It had clearly been programmed to affect my old strange-matter armour; not the new rogue armour. Miss Mitchell fired her gun at me, shooting me at point-blank range again and again, and the bullets just ricocheted away harmlessly.
“It’s not fair,” said Miss Mitchell. “It’s not fair! Cheater!”
I took a step towards her. She fell back a step and then raised the Luger and pressed it against her head. She looked at me defiantly.
“Crow Lee loves me!”
She shot herself, and the Luger blew half her head away. She crumbled bonelessly to the floor. I armoured down, and looked at Molly.
“You could have stopped her,” said Molly. “You could have slapped that gun right out of her hand, with your speed, before she could have pulled the trigger.”
“You could have stopped her,” I said. “You could have made her gun disappear or turned it into a flower. But you didn’t.”
“She was a traitor,” said Molly. “And neither of us have ever had any time for traitors.”
“She killed my grandfather,” I said. “And she would have killed me.”
Molly moved forward and put her hands on my chest. “Oh, Eddie. I’m so sorry about your grandfather. You’d only just found him again.…”
“I will avenge him,” I said flatly. “I will kill Crow Lee and everyone who stands with him. I’ve always been able to do that much for my family.”
“No need for that, thank you,” said the Regent, getting stiffly back onto his feet again. He brushed vaguely at his clothes and then shook himself briskly. Molly and I looked at him blankly, and he grinned.
“But…you don’t have Drood armour anymore!” I said. “You said…”
“I don’t,” said the Regent. “So I had to improvise. I knew all kinds of people would be gunning for me once I’d left Drood Hall, so I made…other arrangements.” He undid the top few buttons of his shirt and pulled it open to reveal a large glowing amulet on his chest, apparently fused directly to his skin. There was a large golden eye in the centre of the amulet, and it glared at me unblinkingly. I stirred uneasily. It could see me. I could tell. The Regent tapped the amulet proudly, and then buttoned up his shirt again. “Kayleigh’s Eye, a very old and very potent thing from Somewhere Else. Absolutely guaranteed to protect the wearer from any and all forms of attack. You wouldn’t believe what I had to give the previous owner in exchange.”
“Hold everything,” said Molly. “Last I heard, Kayleigh’s Eye was in the Nightside, very firmly owned by the Salvation Army Sisterhood.”
The Regent just smiled at her. “Kayleigh had more than one eye.” He moved over to look down at the dead woman lying on his carpet in a widening pool of blood. He shook his head sadly. “Poor Miss Mitchell. Crow Lee lied to you, dear. He didn’t love you. He doesn’t love anyone. But I do have to wonder: If he could get to you, who else in Uncanny might he have got his hooks into? Hello. What’s this?”
I was there before him, picking up the clicker Miss Mitchell had dropped, and tucking it carefully away in my pocket.
“Just a weapon that didn’t work,” I said.
The Regent looked at me thoughtfully. And then we all looked round sharply as the office door banged open and Ankani burst into the room, sari swirling around her, a large gun in each hand, ready for trouble. She checked that the Regent was safe, and only then looked at Molly and me before finally looking down at the body on the floor. I stood very still, ready to call on my armour, while Molly’s hands moved slowly and subtly in dangerous ways. Ankani knelt down to study what was left of Miss Mitchell’s head, and then shrugged and lowered her guns. She straightened up, stepped back a pace to avoid the spreading blood and looked to the Regent for orders.
“Nice reaction time, my dear,” the Regent said briskly, “but right now I’m more interested in how Miss Mitchell was able to smuggle a bloody big handgun past all our supposedly top-rank security measures. Find out, Ankani. You are authorised to use severe language and excessive force. I’m also authorising a complete lockdown; no one gets in or out until they’ve been thoroughly checked. I want a full investigation into how Crow Lee was able to use his mind games on one of my most trusted people. Have the body removed. I want a full autopsy. See if she was under any outside influence. I doubt it, to be honest, but I do feel I should give the poor old thing the benefit of the doubt. Oh, and I’ll need a new carpet.”
“Of course, sir,” said Ankani. “I’ll have a full report on your desk by morning.”
“You’ll have it here by end of day,” growled the Regent. “No one goes home till we’ve got this sorted.”
“Yes, sir,” said Ankani.
She made her guns disappear somewhere about her person, and then bent down and picked up Miss Mitchell without any obvious effort. She slung the body over one shoulder, smiled winningly at all of us, and then left, pulling the door quietly shut behind her.
“Given that your tea lady turned out to be an assassin, are you sure you trust her any better?” Molly said sweetly.
“Ankani? Of course!” said the Regent. “Been with me for years. One of my best agents. Trust her implicitly.”
“You trusted Miss Mitchell,” I said, looking at the large bloody stain on the carpet. There were quite a few bits of bone and brains, too. Miss Mitchell had meant business. Crow Lee’s business.
“Yes, well,” said the Regent. “There’s trust, and then there’s trust.”
“That’s a real Drood answer for you,” said Molly.
“The apple never falls far from the tree,” the Regent said vaguely.
“If Crow Lee had a traitor inside your organisation,” I said thoughtfully, “who’s to say he didn’t have someone inside the Droods? I mean, how else could he have known about Alpha Red Alpha? Most of our family didn’t know it was down there, underneath the Hall, on the grounds that if they had, they’d probably have left the Hall en masse and set up tents on the grounds rather than live over such a dangerous thing. Hold it…hold everything. Go previous. Drop anchors.…Grandfather, has anyone ever talked to you about the Original Traitor?”
“No,” said the Regent. “And it does sound like something I ought to know about. Tell me about this Original Traitor, Eddie. Tell me everything.”
So we all sat down again, and I filled him in on the latest conspiracy theory within the Droods that there was a traitor inside the family who went back years, maybe decades, maybe even centuries. Subtly sabotaging us, working from within to undermine everything we did for his own hidden purposes.
“I’ve been away too long,” said the Regent. “Far too many things I don’t know…Why the Original Traitor?”
“Because we don’t know how far back he goes,” I said. “There is some evidence to suggest he goes way, way back.…”
“Given how many of your family’s more important secrets have been forced out into the light recently,” said Molly, “maybe the Original Traitor feels you’re closing in on him at last. He must be getting a bit desperate.”
“We’re pretty sure he murdered Sebastian,” I said.
“Good God!” said the Regent. “Really? He worked for us, you know.”
“Sebastian worked for everyone,” I said. “He was murdered during the Hungry Gods affair, while he was being held inside one of our supposedly secure holding cells. Which is supposed to be impossible.”
“And Freddie went missing around the same time,” said Molly. “He’s been declared missing, presumed dead.”
“Both of them rogues,” said the Regent. “Are we assuming a connection?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we need to track down the remaining rogues and make contact with them. Apart from you and me, they’re the only Droods left in this world. A world that probably wouldn’t be too unhappy if we w
ere to become extinct…I did make contact with some of them when I was declared rogue by Martha.…But most of them have disappeared. The Mole has gone deep underground, and no one’s seen Mad Frankie Phantasm or Harriet Hatchet in ages. Of course, it could just be that the rogues don’t want to talk to me because I killed one of them. Arnold Drood, the Bloody Man.”
“I did hear about that,” said the Regent, nodding slowly. “It was a righteous kill, Eddie. If ever a man needed killing, he did.”
“And Tiger Tim,” I said. “He needed killing, too.”
The Regent looked at me sharply. “Timothy? Jack’s boy? That was you? I’d heard he’d been killed, but I didn’t want to believe it. He was Jack’s only child.”
“I know,” I said.
“And my only other grandson. Did you really have to… ?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You were there,” said the Regent. “It was your decision to make.” But he still didn’t want to look at me. “Poor Jack. Life…has not been kind to him.”
“What about James’s children?” said Molly. “They’d be your grandchildren, too.”
“The Grey Bastards?” said the Regent, not quite turning up his nose. “I know all about them.…I think not. They’re not Droods, you see. Just half-breeds. I know it shouldn’t matter that they’re all illegitimate, but it does. I think I’m old enough to be allowed to be old-fashioned about some things.”
“There’s still Gerard Drood, Grendel Rex, the Unforgiven God,” said Molly, just a bit mischievously, and perhaps showing off a little. “Still securely bound and buried, sleeping deep beneath the Siberian permafrost.”
“We don’t talk about him!” the Regent said sternly. And we all managed some sort of smile.
“Do you know of any rogue Droods I might not have heard of?” I said. “Any who might be willing to help us against Crow Lee, or even any who might be working with him?”
“I know of thirty-seven other rogues scattered across the world,” said the Regent. I sat up straight in my chair.
“Thirty-seven?” I said, not even trying to hide my disbelief. “I never knew there were that many still alive, running loose in the world!”
“I told you,” said the Regent, smiling easily. “It’s my job to know everything and anything that matters. Because you never know when it might come in handy…Can’t hold out much hope for contacting most of them. Too busy with their own little schemes, which my people are, of course, keeping a careful eye on…And I really don’t see how Crow Lee could have suborned any of them without my agents knowing.”
“You didn’t know about Miss Mitchell,” said Molly. “And she was right under your nose.”
“True,” said the Regent. “Very true. I’ll have my people reach out to the rogues, Eddie, but…”
“Yes,” I said. “But.”
“Some of them might talk to my people, where they wouldn’t talk to you,” said the Regent. “And I’ll approach the more cautious ones through a series of cutouts, so they won’t know who’s asking. Might learn something useful…Anything else I can do for you while you’re here?”
“Yes,” Molly said bluntly. “Do you know where my sisters are?”
The Regent blinked a few times at the sudden turn in the conversation, but he recovered quickly. “Isabella and Louisa? Can’t you just contact them yourself?”
“Normally, yes,” said Molly. “We’re very close. But for the moment they’ve both got their auras turned off.”
The Regent looked at me. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Not a thing,” I said. “And I know better than to ask.”
“Oh, good,” said the Regent. “It’s not just me, then.” He looked at Molly. “The last I heard, which I’ll admit is some time back, because it’s never easy keeping up with any of the infamous Metcalf sisters…Isabella was busy investigating an ancient set of stone catacombs deep underneath the Sahara Desert, while Louisa had brought something interesting back from her investigation of the Martian Tombs.”
“Really?” I said.
“As far as we can tell, yes,” said the Regent. “If you ever find out how she got there and back, please tell me. We’d really love to know. It seems she took whatever it was she found down to the Black Heir Headquarters, down in Cornwall. They specialise in the study of things left behind after alien contact: bodies, tech, altered people…the usual. Louisa wanted her big find studied by the big man himself, Professor Nightshade. A very impressive mind, by all accounts. Haven’t heard anything about Louisa since. I can put in a request for information direct from Uncanny to Black Heir, but they’ve never been big on sharing. If Louisa brought them something important or valuable enough, they’d never even admit they’d seen her. She could be sitting right there in their office when the call came in, and they’d still deny they’d even heard of her.”
“And Louisa would just go along,” said Molly, nodding grimly. “She’d think it was funny.…”
The Regent looked at her thoughtfully. “To be honest, my dear, if your sisters don’t want you to know where they are, there’s probably a good reason for it. Good for them, anyway.”
“Are you getting worried about them?” I said to Molly.
“Just a bit,” she said, frowning. “This isn’t like them. We never avoid each other just because we’re doing something we think the others wouldn’t approve of. Hell, usually we’d insist on bragging about it, just to make it clear we won’t be told what to do.”
“Do you want to take off on your own?” I said quietly. “Go look for them, make sure they’re okay? I don’t mind.”
“No,” Molly said immediately. “That’s sweet of you, Eddie, but I won’t leave you. Not when you’ve so many enemies around you. You need someone close you can depend on.”
She didn’t look at the Regent when she said that, but I knew what she meant. Molly has never trusted anyone in the family except me. And maybe Uncle Jack. I looked at the Regent, who was politely pretending he hadn’t understood anything he’d just heard.
“How long do you think Crow Lee has been planning these attacks against the Droods?” I said.
“He’s always been one for taking the long view,” the Regent said judiciously. “Miss Mitchell being a very good example. How long did he invest in turning her, just for the one day when she might be useful? God alone knows how long he’s waited for the whole Drood family to be vulnerable.…”
“So it is possible…that he could have made contact with the Original Traitor,” I said. “Who could have sold the family out for any number of reasons that made sense only to him…Uncle Jack told me it was the Matriarch before Martha, Sarah, who gave the order to let the Loathly Ones into our reality, to support the Allies in World War Two. Thus setting things up for the Hungry Gods invasion farther down the line…And that she only did that because she was strongly advised to. By someone close to her…”
“Sarah was responsible for a lot of bad decisions in her time as Matriarch,” said the Regent. “And it was her dying so suddenly and unexpectedly that made my Martha the Matriarch at such an unusually young age.”
Molly leaned forward, suddenly fascinated. “How, exactly, did Sarah die? You said an accident, earlier. What kind of accident?”
“She fell down some stairs,” said the Regent. And then he stopped abruptly and we all looked at one another. The Regent looked genuinely upset. “There was no one around. She just fell. She was found dead at the foot of a flight of stairs. Broke her neck. Even Drood armour can’t protect you from accidents if they’re sudden enough. As far as I know, it never occurred to anyone to check if her death was anything other than an unfortunate accident. But now I have to wonder…”
“If her neck was broken before she fell,” I said. “How far does all this go back?”
“It’s getting so you can’t trust anyone,” said Molly.
“The Original Traitor is supposed to have killed other Droods and taken over their identities, in the Past,” I said.
>
“Like an Immortal?” the Regent said immediately.
“Except that this is one Drood being replaced by another,” I said. “I have to ask, Grandfather: Did you have any Shadow or Uncanny agents inside the Hall just before it disappeared? People inside the family who reported to you?”
“No,” said the Regent.
“But then, you would say that. Wouldn’t you?” said Molly.
“You’ve already admitted you had contact with Uncle James and Uncle Jack,” I said. “So you could keep an eye on me.”
The Regent grinned at me, entirely unabashed. “Good to see you’re paying attention, Eddie. There are…certain high-up individuals within the family, who are still willing to talk to me. But only from a distance, and only on personal matters. No one in the family would share family secrets with a rogue Drood. No matter who I used to be.”
“Can you assist us against Crow Lee?” I said bluntly.
“Not officially,” said the Regent. “Uncanny can’t be seen to move openly against such a…man of substance. Not while he’s still connected to so many important people in the government. And especially not when there’s a Funding Review in the wind.”
“That’s what happens when you get in bed with the Establishment,” Molly said sweetly. “Someone always gets screwed.…”
“You have to give some to get some,” the Regent said vaguely. “Can’t afford to rock the boat just at the moment. But I’m certainly not going to get in your way. And I can tell you where to find him. He’s currently taking his ease just down the road at his Very Private, Very Members Only club. The Establishment Club. He also has a country manor house down in Surrey. I can provide you with a map. And directions. And full details on all the hidden traps and pitfalls surrounding his extensive private grounds. Once you’re inside, I’m afraid you’re on your own. I’ve been trying to get one of my agents inside for years without success. I can’t be seen to assist you publicly, Eddie, but I can cheer you on from the sidelines.”