Moonbreaker

  And while the creatures were only concerned with their Doors, and Gerard was concerned only with the creatures, I went for Edmund. He armoured up at last to face me, golden armour closing over him in a moment. I saw my own reflection in his featureless golden mask, and I looked like death. Then the two of us slammed together, striking at each other with fists that could have shattered mountains, driven on by hate and rage without limit, and our armour took it. The impacts from our fists sounded like tolling bells, but neither my armour nor his cracked or dented. They’d grown accustomed to each other. We raged back and forth across the chamber, knocking creatures down and trampling them underfoot. And still the broken things crawled and heaved themselves towards their waiting Doors.

  “Why don’t you just die and get it over with?” said Edmund.

  “Why don’t you?” I said.

  I grabbed hold of him, lifted him off his feet, and threw him the length of the chamber. He smashed through a line of shuffling creatures, slammed into a closed Door, rebounded, and hit the floor hard. And while he was struggling to get back onto his feet, I took a moment to see how Gerard and Molly were doing. Gerard’s will was still driving the intruders back through their Doors. The thing made up of sticks broke free and went for Molly, twiggy hands reaching for her face. She gestured briefly and the creature blew apart, hundreds of sticks flying in all directions. The moment they hit the floor, they started humping back to the Door they came through.

  Edmund charged straight at me, making sounds so full of rage they weren’t even words. I held my ground. This was what I’d been waiting for: Edmund so mad he wouldn’t see what I was planning until it was too late. I waited till the very last moment and then sidestepped neatly. Edmund staggered on, caught off balance, and I punched him in the side of the head so hard his knees buckled. I kicked his feet out from under him and he sprawled on the floor on his back. I dropped on top of him, kneeling astride his chest, holding him down. Edmund tried to throw me off and found he couldn’t. With no leverage to help him, my weight held him in place where my strength alone might not have. He bucked and struggled, slamming vicious blows into my sides. I didn’t feel them.

  Edmund should have been stronger than me. He was fit and powerful, while I was dying. But he was fighting for himself, while I was fighting for my family and my world.

  I locked my golden hands around his golden throat, took a savage hold, and bore down with everything I had. Remembering what I’d done to the Angelic Drood outside Drood Hall. Where my superior armour had briefly overwhelmed the old Heart-derived armour. I also remembered how my Merlin Glass had joined and melded with the Glass from Edmund’s world. Two similar objects, becoming one. I grinned under my mask. I’d been thinking about how to take Edmund down for a long time.

  I concentrated, and my hands passed through my armour and his until they fastened onto Edmund’s bare neck. I made my armour return feeling to my hands, so I could feel Edmund’s throat convulse and close under my grip. My hands hurt horribly, but it was worth it to feel the breath stop in Edmund’s throat. He panicked, thrashing wildly underneath me, striking out hysterically with both fists. And then he grabbed my golden wrists with his golden hands and tried to break my hold. But I had come too far to be stopped now. I was ready to kill Edmund for all the things he’d done. I was ready to die, to keep Edmund from Moonbreaker.

  Unless . . . my plan worked.

  My armour was more powerful than Edmund’s, which meant the torc Ethel gave me should be more powerful than the fake torc the Immortals made for Edmund. And if the Merlin Glass could join with another Merlin Glass . . . And if Edmund and I really were the same person, with two different minds . . . I laughed as it all came together, finally. One last plan to deal with everything.

  It might not have worked anywhere else. But in this place, at this time, in a chamber saturated with unnatural energies from so many different worlds . . . I reached out through my torc and took control of Edmund’s. And then I used both torcs to switch my consciousness with that of Edmund’s, putting my mind in his body and trapping his mind in what used to be my body. I took my torc with me, snapping it around my new throat, and put the fake torc on Edmund’s.

  Suddenly I felt well and healthy, better than I had in ages. Sensations blasted through me, all the feelings I’d been cut off from, and it felt good, so good. I’d never felt so alive. Edmund cried out, shrieking in shock and horror, as everything I’d been enduring hit him all at once. His hands fell away from my throat as his whole body convulsed from the poison raging unchecked through his system. I put one hand on his chest and pushed, and he fell backwards onto the stone floor, thrashing violently. He tried to get up and couldn’t.

  “What have you done?” he screamed. “What have you done to me?”

  I waited a moment. My throat was still sore from where I’d strangled it, and I wanted to be sure I could speak clearly. I wanted Edmund to understand me.

  “You took my body away from me,” I said finally. “So I’ve taken yours. Seems only fair. Justice and revenge, in one neat package.”

  Edmund tried to say something, but his voice fell apart into incoherent screams as the agonies of his new home raged through him. I’d trapped him in a dying, decaying body with no way out. I turned my back on him and looked round the chamber. The last of the creatures disappeared back through their various Doors, which then closed and locked themselves. Molly looked exhausted, but she still made herself check that every Door was properly locked and sealed.

  She finally finished and looked round, to see two golden armoured figures. One standing tall and easy, the other thrashing in agony on the floor. Her face hardened. She thought the Drood on the floor was me. She raised one hand, and her gaze was a killing thing. I raised my hand.

  “It’s all right, Molly! It’s me.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Well, I could tell you where you’re ticklish,” I said. “Or name your favourite Hawkwind album. But what would be the point? You know it’s me, Molly. You know.”

  She smiled and lowered her hand. “Yes, I do. But you sound fine. What’s happened?”

  “I swapped minds with Edmund,” I said. “And locked him up in my old body. So now I’m alive and well, and he’s dying. I do love a happy ending, don’t you?”

  Molly laughed delightedly. “I knew you’d pull off some kind of miracle cure at the very last moment! It’s what you do.”

  Somehow, Edmund fought back his pain and called out to Gerard.

  “I still command you, old god! Kill them! Kill them both!”

  Molly and I moved quickly to stand side by side, facing Gerard. Facing Grendel Rex, the Unforgiven God.

  “Okay,” said Molly. “How do we stop him?”

  “I already used up every idea I had,” I said. “Don’t you have any ideas?”

  “Ideas are your department. I just hit things. What are we going to do, Eddie?”

  “I’m thinking!”

  “Think faster!”

  Gerard looked at us, and then at the golden figure convulsing on the floor. A slow animation returned to his face and his eyes came alive again.

  “No,” he said to Edmund. “You don’t command me. I am myself again.”

  Molly glanced at me. “Is that good?”

  “Hard to tell,” I said.

  Edmund’s golden head turned jerkily to face the Merlin Glass still standing on the other side of the chamber.

  “Help me! You have to help me! Come out and take control of Grendel Rex!”

  But whoever was in the Glass either didn’t recognise Edmund in his new body or knew a lost cause when they saw one. Edmund rolled slowly onto his side and reached out a shaking golden hand to Moonbreaker’s control console . . . but it was well out of his reach.

  I nodded to Molly to keep an eye on Edmund and Gerard, while I moved quickly over to the Merlin Glass. Its Door stoo
d a good head taller than me, but the mirror was just a mirror. All it showed me was my own reflection: a Drood in his armour. I considered the Glass thoughtfully. I had to know: Who could be in there, powerful enough to control Grendel Rex? I pressed the golden fingertips of one hand against the mirror and then extended a series of golden tendrils, the way I do when I want my armour to hack a computer. The tendrils tapped across the reflective surface, unable to find or force a way in, and then they were sucked suddenly forward into the Glass, diving into the mirror as though it was a bottomless pool. I was about to jerk my hand back when the tendrils came flying out again, as though they’d burned themselves. I backed quickly away from the Merlin Glass, the tendrils snapping back into my glove. Through my armoured mask I could see all the old locks in the Glass opening. All the protections put in place by Merlin Satanspawn himself were disappearing, one by one. And finally, after so many centuries of solitary confinement, the prisoner in the Merlin Glass stepped out into the light.

  She was tall and stately and supernaturally beautiful, the kind of woman you dream of during really bad fevers. She smiled at me, sweet as cyanide, attractive and seductive as every impulse you just know is going to get you into trouble. She wore long, sweeping scarlet silks and a towering jewelled headdress to show off her tumbling flame-red hair. She smiled at me and at Molly, and Molly flinched.

  “Oh shit,” she said.

  I looked at her. “It’s never good when you say that. How bad is this?”

  “You don’t know who that is?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “How can you not know who that is?” said Molly, not taking her eyes off the newcomer for a moment.

  “Well, pardon me for being a bit slow,” I said. “But I was dying until just a moment ago. Who are we looking at?”

  “All witches know her,” said Molly. “All witches know Morgana La Fae.”

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  “Right,” said Molly. “The only magic user ever to be the equal of Merlin Satanspawn. Half-sister to King Arthur, and mother to his son, Mordred. The destroyer of Camelot.”

  “The original woman of mystery,” I said. “The power behind thrones . . . Heaven and Hell, wrapped up in one beautiful vision.”

  “She’s dangerous, Eddie,” said Molly.

  “I know,” I said.

  I took a step forward to face Morgana, and her deep green eyes fixed me with a slow, thoughtful look that hit me with an almost physical impact.

  “A Drood,” she said, in a voice rich as poisoned honey. “I always knew there’d be a Drood waiting when I finally got out.”

  “We didn’t imprison you,” I said.

  “You didn’t do anything to free me either,” said Morgana.

  “We didn’t know you were in there,” I said.

  “How did you get out of the Glass, after all this time?” said Molly.

  “You made it possible, little witch,” said Morgana. “Edmund wedged the Door open when he called on my power to subdue Gerard Drood. But then you broke the seals on all the Doors, letting loose all kinds of interesting energies for me to make use of.”

  “How are you still alive?” I said. “According to legend, Merlin killed you. For your part in Camelot’s fall.”

  “Legends are just stories people tell to fill in the holes in history,” said Morgana. “Only those of us who were there can tell you what really happened. Merlin did try to kill me for putting an end to all his fun and games, but ultimately he just couldn’t do it. Not because he wasn’t powerful enough, or because I fought him off, but because he decided . . . we were simply too alike. He said killing me would have been like killing himself. He always was a sentimental old fool. But he couldn’t let me go, not after everything I’d done. So he fashioned the Glass to be a prison for me, as a punishment and a fail-safe. Just in case the Droods ever lost their way and needed someone to take them down.”

  “That’s why Merlin gave the Glass to my family,” I said. “He always had a plan within a plan . . . and he never did trust anyone.”

  “I could have told you that,” said Molly.

  “Why did you agree to help Edmund, Morgana?” I said.

  “Because he said he could free me.” Morgana looked dispassionately at the golden figure writhing on the floor. “You were never my ally, Edmund; just a means to an end. And now . . . I don’t need you. I am free at last. And after all this time plotting my revenges, I think I’ll start with you.”

  She gestured sharply, and Edmund was suddenly hanging helplessly on the air before her. For a moment I felt like I should intervene, or at least say something, but the moment passed. I didn’t have any mercy left in me for Edmund or Dr DOA, who killed so many people just because he could. Morgana gestured again, and Edmund’s armour disappeared. I made a sound, and so did Molly, as we saw what had become of my old body. What Edmund’s poison had done to it.

  He was just a horrid cancerous mass now, devastated and distorted by the poison raging unchecked through his system. He looked like he was made out of malignant growths, like sickness and death made solid. His flesh was scarlet and purple, glistening wetly and shot through with dark, bulging veins. Without the armour to hold it back, his body swelled up to more than human size, driven beyond human limitations by the sheer power of the poison. Rows of human eyes stared out of the pulpy mass that had once been my face. The body continued to grow in sudden jerks and convulsions as the cancers ran wild, multiplying beyond sense or reason, until what had been the thing’s head slammed up against the crystal ceiling. New limbs burst out of the central mass, as though reaching out for help that would never come.

  The fate Edmund had meant for me.

  “Seems almost a shame to kill you,” said Morgana. “You suffer so beautifully, Edmund. But I think I’d better. There’s always the chance you might pull off some last-minute miracle save, like your counterpart.”

  “Go ahead,” said Molly. “Put him out of everyone’s misery.”

  “Hold it,” I said. “I have a better idea.”

  Because I recognised the thing before me. I’d seen it once before long ago, and now I saw an opportunity for some real poetic justice, along with the final solution to a long-standing mystery. I told Morgana what I had in mind, and she laughed softly.

  “Trust a Drood to find a measure of revenge in justice and duty. Very well, Eddie. A favour, for old time’s sake. And because it amuses me.”

  She gestured dismissively at Edmund and sent him hurtling back through Time. To reappear back in Drood Hall at the moment I remembered all those years ago. When a hideous cancer monster had appeared out of nowhere in the Sanctity. We all thought it had come to attack the Heart, so we banded together and destroyed the thing. I remembered how it died, and I smiled. It seemed fitting that the man who’d killed one family of Droods should be killed by another. Justice and revenge, in one neat package.

  Gerard Drood, Grendel Rex, the Unforgiven God, stepped forward. Morgana La Fae turned unhurriedly to face him, and the two old monsters looked each other over. Molly and I stood side by side, bracing ourselves. Two of the most dangerous people the world had ever known considered each other with great interest, and I had absolutely no idea how to stop them from doing anything they felt like. And then I glanced back at Moonbreaker’s control column.

  There was still one thing I could do.

  “I know who you are,” Gerard said to Morgana.

  “I know you,” said Morgana.

  “We have so much in common,” said Gerard.

  “Two powers, imprisoned by the Droods,” said Morgana. “For daring to dream bigger dreams than they could stand.”

  “Our ambitions always were too great for them,” said Gerard.

  They moved closer, standing face-to-face, staring into each other’s eyes.

  “And now your thoughts are so clear to me,” said Morgana
. “You were so alone for so long.”

  “Even before I was imprisoned,” said Gerard. “And you . . . always looking for someone you could call your equal. And when you finally found him, he trapped you inside his Glass.”

  “Such a long journey for both of us,” said Morgana. “To find who we’ve been looking for, for so very long.”

  “Journeys end in lovers meeting,” said Gerard.

  They stood staring into each other’s eyes, smiling the same smile. Molly looked at me, but I shook my head quickly. Something was happening between the Unforgiven God and the greatest witch of all time . . . and I didn’t want it interrupted.

  “What interest could either of us have now in an Earth neither of us would even recognise?” said Gerard.

  “Why limit ourselves to the Past, when the Future seems so much more inviting?” said Morgana. “Consider all these Doors and the possibilities they offer.”

  Gerard laughed softly. “So many worlds and realities to explore.”

  “Together,” said Morgana.

  “Together, at last,” said Gerard.

  Morgana glanced at the Merlin Glass, and it opened to reveal a strange new world, full of a light so bright I couldn’t look at it. Gerard and Morgana walked into the light, hand in hand. At the last moment, Gerard paused to look back at me.

  “Just for the record,” he said, “it was never my face I carved into the Moon’s surface. It was Elspeth’s.”

  They disappeared into the light and were gone. The Merlin Glass slammed shut behind them, and disappeared after them. It was suddenly very quiet in the great open chamber.

  “How romantic,” said Molly.

  “As long as they keep going, yes,” I said.

  Molly whooped loudly. She punched the air and hugged me tightly. “You’re alive! You’re all right! You’re not going to die!”

  “Journey’s end,” I said. “Now, if you’ll let me go for just a moment, I have one last duty to take care of.”

  I pushed Molly gently away from me so I could turn to face Moonbreaker’s control column. And then I smashed it with one blow from my golden fist. It shattered into a thousand pieces, clattering quietly on the glowing floor.