I tossed the hand mirror into the air before me, and it immediately shook itself out to the size of a door, hovering just above the grass. The Regent and his agents made pleased and impressed noises, but I had a suspicion they were just being polite. Where the mirror reflection should have been, the Glass was now showing a blank, colourless emptiness that actually hurt the eye if you looked at it too long.
“I thought…it was supposed to show a silvery tunnel or passage,” said the Armourer Patrick. “That’s the usual sign of an interdimensional interface. Not that there is a tunnel, of course, silver or otherwise; it’s just an image your brain supplies because the mind is too limited to cope with what’s actually there.”
“It’s not showing anything at the moment because it’s between settings,” I said, trying hard to sound like I knew what I was talking about. “I haven’t supplied the Glass with the correct arrival coordinates yet. And for that I need this: Crow Lee’s remote control.”
“Space…and time,” Molly said suddenly. “Hold on, go back, go previous. I’ve just had an idea.”
“Oh, that’s always dangerous,” I said.
“Hush, you. Could you set the Glass to send us back into the past? Then we could arrive in the other world, immediately after the Hall and your family arrive there!”
“I have thought about that,” I said. “But this is going to be a difficult enough jump as it is. I have no idea how this remote control works or even exactly what information it holds. So I really don’t want to add any unnecessary complications. Except for this.”
I showed them the Drood compass I’d acquired from the tomb in Egypt.
“A compass?” the Regent said, politely.
“Preprogrammed to point to Droods, wherever they might be,” I said. “This will point the way, and the remote will supply the exact arrival coordinates. Between the two of them, they should get us there.”
“Are you sure about that?” said the Regent.
I smiled as convincingly as I could. “The remote knows where the Hall is, so we follow the remote. And the compass. And if you know any good prayers or deities, now would be a good time to lean heavily on them.”
I hefted the control in my hand. Just a simple box with a whole bunch of coloured buttons, none of which I felt like messing with. I pitched the compass through the Merlin Glass, which swallowed it up immediately, and then the remote. The grey nothingness pulsed quickly in a way that made me feel oddly seasick for a moment, and then it became the standard silver tunnel. I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding and relaxed just a little. If that hadn’t worked…
At least now we had a destination. The Regent turned to Patrick and Diana and nodded briskly, and they both grinned widely. Suddenly they were both holding really big guns that had appeared out of nowhere. High-energy weapons clearly derived from alien tech.
“Where did you get weapons like those?” I said sharply to the Regent.
“Oh, you know how it is. Some of my chaps just picked them up,” the Regent said vaguely. “It’s amazing what some people leaving lying around. Behind locked doors in secret laboratories. They clearly didn’t appreciate them.…And whilst the Shadows, and now the Uncanny, are quite definitely mostly information-gathering organisations, sometimes, you just have to be ready to lay down the law.”
“Ready to rock and roll!” Patrick said cheerfully.
“Ready to kick bottom!” said Diana. She smiled suddenly at me. “You’re not the only one with access to pocket dimensions and really useful toys.”
“Told you,” the Regent said to Molly and me. “Let us go now, and let the bad guys beware.”
Patrick smiled fondly at Diana. “Just like old times, isn’t it, dear?”
“Ah, the good old days,” said Diana. “Was there always an evil mastermind to overcome in some secret lair, a monster to destroy and a conspiracy to put down, and still home in time for tea?”
I looked at them both for a long moment. Something in the way they smiled at each other, in the way they held themselves…
“Do I know you?” I said bluntly. “Have we met before? There is something very familiar about you.…”
“Time for the social chitchat later,” the Regent said firmly. “Concentrate on the mission. We have a family to rescue. Everything else can wait.”
“What about you?” said Molly. “Are you going to grab a really big gun out of midair, too?”
“I have a few tricks up my sleeve,” the Regent said modestly.
“It’s true,” said Patrick. “He does.”
“I’m often amazed he has room in there for his arms,” said Diana.
“Oh, hush, children,” said the Regent.
He strode towards the Merlin Glass and its waiting silver tunnel, and Patrick and Diana fell quickly into step behind him, guns at the ready. Molly and I hurried after them, and I made a point of taking the lead. It was my Merlin Glass, my plan, and whatever we’d be facing, I was determined to face it first. Even if I didn’t have my armour anymore. I hefted Oath Breaker in my hand. The long ironwood staff still felt unnaturally solid and heavy, and I found that reassuring. I stepped carefully through the hovering Glass and into the silver tunnel, and there were the compass and the remote control, hovering on the air ahead. I moved forward and they drifted on before me, and step-by-step they led me through the silver tunnel between the worlds. Molly stuck close to my side, and the others stuck close behind us. This wasn’t somewhere you wanted to get lost.
As the compass and remote moved on, worlds flashed and flickered into existence before and around us, come and gone in a moment, like walking through a pack of shuffled playing cards, giving brief glimpses of other dimensions, other Earths, other Halls.
There was Big Hall, an immense single structure that covered the entire grounds. Acres of stone walls under miles of roof with thousands of windows. The whole place just hummed with activity, with an army of people coming and going, hurrying about their unknown missions. They all wore golden armour. All kinds of flying machines filled the skies over Big Hall, landing and taking off from dozens of busy landing pads, scattered across the vast roof. They flashed back and forth in carefully conceived patterns, often coming within inches of one another but never once colliding, moving like the very best regulated clockwork. There was a real sense of purpose to it all, of everyone playing their part in some grand important scheme.
Next came Small Hall. Drood Hall as it had once been back before the family grew so big we had to add on four more wings. Small Hall was just the original central building from Tudor times, with its black-and-white boarded frontage, heavy leaded-glass windows and jutting gabled roof. The grounds stretched away around the Hall, open and empty. No lake, no hedge Maze, no unicorns or gryphons, and no sign of Droods anywhere.
Two small suns burnt hotly in a deep purple sky over Alien Hall. The air was unbearably hot and humid, dragging in the lungs, even for the few moments it took us to walk through it. Alien Hall was a huge, organic structure, seemingly as much grown as constructed, a strange shape made up of unnatural curves and shadowy hollows, its angles forming patterns that made no sense at all to human eyes. All over the smooth, shiny exterior swarmed golden-armoured creatures, almost human in shape but not in nature or in movement, as they darted in and out of hollow mouths in the side of the Hall. There was something of the insect in their behaviour, and the whole place had more the air of a hive than a home.
A dim red sun in a grey sky shed a murky bloodred glare over Machine Hall. A massive steel cube with no doors or windows, just sharp projections and waving antennae, strange undulating patterns and endless flashing lights. Vehicles in solid primary shapes moved smoothly all around Machine Hall, in a single complex pattern. The few golden figures to be seen were quite clearly mechanical. The grounds were just empty stone flats stretching away; empty and without shape or purpose.
And then there was Magic Hall. In this version, this Earth, Drood Hall was a castle in the grand old
style, complete with towers and turrets and crenulated battlements. Flags and pennants flapped bravely in the gusting wind under a perfect cloudless summer sky. Great open lawns surrounding the castle were covered with gleaming white tents and colourful pavilions, and the golden figures strolling back and forth had the aspect of knights from medieval legends. Winged unicorns flew back and forth above the castle, and golden-armoured figures waltzed happily on the air among them.
“The Hall as Camelot,” I said, pausing for a longer look. “The best of us, perhaps…”
“The Pendragon, King Arthur, has returned to Castle Inconnu and the London Knights,” said the Regent. “I shall be most interested to see what happens next.”
“Boys and their knights,” said Molly. “I’ll never be a maid-in-waiting.”
“Camelot lasted only a few decades,” I said. “The Droods have endured for centuries. We might wear armour, but we were never chivalric.”
I followed the compass and the remote, which had waited obligingly, and Magic Hall disappeared, lost in the shuffle of so many realities, so many variations on the Drood family.
And then the world turned, there was a blinding flash of light and the compass and remote dropped out of the air to land at my feet. I quickly stooped down to pick them up and stuff them in my pocket. And only then looked around me. The Merlin Glass had already shut itself down, zipping back to hide in my pocket dimension, as though it didn’t care for its new surroundings. I didn’t blame it.
“Can the remote get us out of here?” said Molly.
“Almost certainly not,” I said. “All it possessed were the arrival coordinates. We need the Hall and Alpha Red Alpha to get home again.”
“Now you tell me,” said Molly.
She armoured up, taking on the exaggeratedly feminine aspect of Moxton’s Mistake. And the more I looked around me, the more I missed my armour. Patrick and Diana were already standing back-to-back, guns tracking this way and that in search of a target. The Regent of Shadows just beamed happily around him as though he were on holiday and determined to enjoy every moment of it. I took a firm hold on Oath Breaker.
We were standing in the middle of what I decided to call a jungle, because I had to call it something. There were no trees, no vegetation; instead, massive gnarled and whorled growths erupted out of the ground, rising, twisting and turning as though they had been forced molten from the ground and then hardened in the air. They rose high above us, hundreds of feet tall, sprouting branches here and there, twisted and knotted things that thrust out to challenge and interlock with one another. A tiny sun shone fiercely in what we could see of a sick green sky, the light forcing its way down through the canopy overhead. The gravity was distinctly heavier than I was used to and the light had a strained, sour quality. The air was so thick and wet I had to struggle to breathe the stuff. There were things moving in the shadows surrounding us on all sides, and none of them looked pleased to see us.
It took me only a few moments to realise there were loud noises, roars and screams and explosions, off to one side, and not far off at all. We all looked in that direction.
“I say we go that way,” said Molly.
“It does sound like my family,” I admitted.
Molly strode off in the direction of the destructive noises, smashing her way through the alien growths in her rogue armour. She didn’t look for a path or an opening, just forced her way through with brute strength. The gnarled and knotty growths were no match for Moxton’s Mistake. I knew how it felt to wear armour—like you’re walking through a world made of paper—so why go around when it’s so much easier to go through? You have to learn to treat the world with respect, because it can always surprise you. Molly hadn’t had the armour long. I just hoped it hadn’t gone to her head. Molly was dangerous enough in her own right.
I made a point of walking right behind her in the trail she’d opened up. Ready to watch her back, because in her current mood she probably thought she didn’t need to. Patrick and Diana hurried close behind, guns constantly moving, ready to target anything that looked threatening or even overcurious. And the Regent just strolled along behind like a retired gentleman on his day out, enjoying the sights.
We’d barely been moving a few minutes before really unpleasant-looking creatures emerged from the alien jungle to attack us. Hopping insectoid things came first, with glowing green carapaces and dark faces with clacking, complex mouth parts. They sprang all around us, bounding and leaping with horrid speed high into the air before plunging down at us with clawed hands extended. Many-legged crawling things shot out of the shadows, curling and coiling and doing their best to snake around our legs and drag us down. They had great sucking mouths with needle teeth. And squirming blobby things just fell on us from the lower branches. One dropped right onto Molly’s golden shoulder and tried to cling to her neck. It scrabbled and skittered there for a moment, unable to get a hold, and then Molly grabbed it in one hand and squeezed till the living pulp shot out between her golden fingers.
Patrick and Diana blew away the hoppy things with great speed and enthusiasm, and the air was soon full of flying innards. We all stamped on the long-legged things, and they made high wailing sounds as they burst messily underfoot. Anything that got too close I smashed out of the air with my ironwood staff, and whatever Oath Breaker touched exploded. It didn’t take long for the alien wildlife to get the message, and we went the rest of the way observed but unmolested.
The Regent was still strolling along quite happily, hands in his pockets, taking a great interest in everything, and I couldn’t help noticing that none of the alien life went anywhere near him. I pointed this out to Patrick, who just nodded solemnly.
“Why?” I said.
“Because they wouldn’t dare,” said Diana.
It didn’t take us long to reach the clearing and the Hall. From the look of it, the Hall’s sudden arrival in this world had blasted a massive clearing out of what I was still thinking of as the jungle. Broken and blasted parts of alien growths were scattered all around us, littering the perimeter of the clearing. I stopped at the very edge and looked the situation over carefully. The Hall, Drood Hall, that I had once been so sure was destroyed and lost forever, that part of me had still been sure I would never see again, stood there before me, solid and upright, in the middle of a half-mile-wide clearing. A shimmering barrier hung in the air surrounding the Hall, roughly halfway across the clearing.
The Hall was under siege from all sides by huge and monstrous creatures. They came slamming through the jungle, smashing through the twisting growths as though they weren’t even there. Overpoweringly huge, bigger than the Hall…like hills with eyes, and mouths big enough to swallow an underground train. Packed with hundreds of jagged teeth, each of them bigger than a man. The ground shook with every step the monsters took, and there were so many of them, the earth never stopped shaking, like an earthquake. Like it was afraid. The monsters roared and howled and screeched, as though someone had given horror a voice. And an insane voice at that. Vast muscles rolled under shiny skins like great slow waves. Monsters, big as houses and bigger, whose shapes made no sense, whose limbs just sprouted from scaly sides and leathery sockets with too many joints. Claws that gouged the earth and left deep trenches. Eyes that blazed like the sun, and swirling sets of things that might be sensory organs, whose nature I couldn’t even guess at.
I had to look up at them. They were so large they probably didn’t even know I was there. But they knew the Hall was there, and they hated it. They pressed constantly forward, screaming and crying out and slamming against one another in their eagerness to get at the Hall. They tore and clawed at one another, but their vast misshapen heads never turned aside from the Hall. Only the shimmering barrier held them back. They would not cross it, would not touch it. The last barrier between them and Drood Hall.
Dozens of golden-armoured figures defended the Hall. In armour covered with vicious spikes, with hands extended into long blades and heavy axe h
eads, Droods guarded the perimeter, standing just outside the shimmering barrier, cutting at everything that came close. Something in the cool, measured way they fought, preserving their strength, suggested to me that they’d been doing this for some time. Probably ever since the Hall first arrived here. Golden blades sheared through monstrous flesh and dark steaming blood flew in the air, but nothing they did seemed to make any real impression. The Droods were just so small in comparison to what they were fighting.
A huge distorted head slammed down and snapped up a Drood in its jaws. He was caught, half in and half out of that terrible mouth, the heavy teeth grinding fiercely but uselessly against his armour. The jaws opened and closed, trying to saw through the Drood, but all that happened was that several teeth shattered and broke off. The Drood used the extra space to get his feet under him, and then he walked backwards into the jaw and severed the muscles with his golden blade. The creature howled like a fire siren as its lower jaw just dropped down. The armoured man jumped. It took him some time to reach the ground, and when he hit, the sheer impact blasted out a crater and a cloud of dust. When the dust settled he was climbing out of the crater, entirely unharmed. I felt like applauding.
But the monsters were so big, so powerful, and there seemed no end to them. Armoured Droods cut at legs bigger than tree trunks and hardly made an impression.
More golden figures defended the Hall from inside, firing all kinds of weapons from every door and window. Everything from automatic rifles to energy weapons to steam-powered bazookas. Plus a whole bunch of cobbled-together-looking things, probably come straight from the Armoury for testing. The sheer firepower blasting from all sides of the Hall would have been enough to wipe out an army, but the colossal monsters of this world just soaked it up and kept pressing forward. They surrounded the Hall on all sides, looming over it, driven by sheer fury at this alien thing that had dared to enter their world. I wondered if they even knew it was the tiny golden figures that were their real enemy and not the Hall itself. Perhaps only the Hall was big enough to hold their attention.