Tales of the Hidden World (4 page)

He’d got there too late. Millennia too late.

The Armourer stirred restlessly in his chair. He had a strong feeling he should be somewhere else, doing something else, but he couldn’t think what. He seemed to have spent most of his life feeling that way. When he was out in the field, he couldn’t wait to get home. When he was stuck in the hall, he quickly got bored. And when he finally left the field and settled down in the Armory . . . he pined for the adventures he’d left behind.

Which might well be why he so often went truant, on a little walkabout, to places he knew he shouldn’t be. Places like the Nightside, where he knew the family wouldn’t come looking for him. It was only small disobediences like that, he often thought, that kept him sane.

It had been different, at first. When he had a family of his own. A wife and a child. Both of them gone now. He brought Natasha back to the Hall so they could be together, but it didn’t last. All too soon she was taken from him and he was left alone, with nothing left but his job, and his duty. There had been . . . affairs, dalliances, down the years. Mostly with pretty young lab assistants, with daddy issues. The Armourer smiled, briefly. James might be the one with the reputation as a lady-killer, but Jack had done all right for himself. In his own quiet way. And he hadn’t always been alone. He’d had a dog once. Until it exploded. Poor little Scraps.

Jack remembered his wife, Natasha. He met her in Moscow while he was working a mission there, alongside the resident Drood agent. So long ago now . . .

He punched a masked man in the face, kneed him briskly in the nuts, and then threw him off the edge of the building. The masked man screamed all the way down, but Jack was already moving on to his next target. There had to be twenty or more of the enemy, clattering over the steeply sloping tiled roof, with only Jack and Natasha to stand against them. The Moscow field agent, Erin Drood, was down below, defusing the bomb. Jack ducked a flailing fist and punched the masked man savagely in the side. He felt ribs break under his fist. He knocked the man down, and then braced himself as he turned and found another masked man pointing a gun at his head. Natasha stepped in and kicked the man’s legs out from under him, with one broad sweep of her leg. She waited till he hit the roof, hard, and then stamped on his hand till he let go of the gun. And then she stamped on his head. Jack and Natasha exchanged a grin and moved on to new targets. Slipping and sliding across the steep uneven roof, far above the Moscow streets.

The masked men called themselves the Children of Vodyanoi. A small but very determined group that wanted to make mankind over into something better. The Russian authorities thought they were just another suppressed religious sect, but Drood intelligence knew better. Which was why Jack had been sent to help the resident field agent, Erin Drood, stop the Children of Vodyanoi, before they did something that couldn’t be undone. Natasha was their local contact, but she insisted on getting involved. And seeing her fight overwhelming odds with just spiked brass knuckles and a cheerful smile, Jack was glad she was there. He couldn’t armor up for fear of setting off the bomb, so he was having to rely on old Drood fighting techniques. He thought he was doing okay. The Children of Vodyanoi all had the strength of fanatics, but they hadn’t a clue how to fight on a professional level.

Jack and Natasha fought their way from one side of the roof to the other, and when they finally stopped and looked back, there was no one else left standing. Jack and Natasha leaned on each other, companionably, breathing hard.

“Explain to me again, please,” Natasha said finally. “Just what the hell these idiots thought they were doing?”

“They wanted to transform Humanity,” said Jack. “Make us all superhuman. Using alien DNA stripped from the dead crew of a crashed starship. Unfortunately, they didn’t know the DNA acted like a virus. It infected them and changed their thinking, so they would want to infect others. With alien DNA programmed to override any other DNA, so we would end up like them. Invasion and colonization, by proxy.”

Natasha looked around the roof, counting quietly. “This is it. This is all of them. A very small group.”

“Then all that’s left is to burn the bodies,” said Jack. “With these very special incendiaries provided by the family Armourer. Burns right down to the genetic level, or so I’m told.”

“What about the bomb?” said Natasha.

“I defused that ages ago,” said a cheerful voice behind them. “I just enjoyed watching you fight.”

“Piss off, Erin,” said Jack. “Just for that, you can carry the bomb out of here.”

Erin laughed and disappeared. Jack and Natasha looked at each other.

“Is there any chance that you or I could be infected with alien DNA?” said Natasha. “After all, we did come into close contact with those idiots. Briefly.”

“The injections we took earlier will protect us,” said Jack. “My family has antidotes for everything.”

“I’d still feel safer if you were to look me over,” said Natasha. “Personally.”

Jack grinned. “I can do that.”

They weren’t supposed to fall in love, but they did anyway. Jack brought Natasha back to Drood Hall and married her. Natasha became pregnant within a year and gave birth to a fine baby boy. And they were so happy together . . . for a while.

Natasha died some two years after Timothy was born. Nothing special, or out of the ordinary, her kidneys just stopped working, and she died while the Drood doctors were still trying to figure out why. Things like that happen, even to Droods. By the time Jack got back from his latest mission, it was all over. He stood looking down at her grave, holding his confused young son by the hand, and swore he would never leave the Hall again. Because he hadn’t been there for his wife and son when they needed him. He would stay, because his son needed him.

Though of course by then, it was already too late.

Jack took up a position in the Armory. He’d always been fascinated by the weapons and devices he’d been supplied with as a field agent, and had come up with a few useful things himself. He was a bit old to be a lab assistant, but the Armory was happy to have someone with firsthand experience of how their various creations actually operated under field conditions. Jack just wanted something to occupy his mind. To keep him from thinking about the happy life he used to have.

He trained under the previous Armourer, his aunt Eloise, sister to the Matriarch. Eloise had been Armourer for decades. She was a real terror, working everyone hard, always shouting and swearing and carrying on, not prepared to let anyone get away with anything. Or take the credit for anything she could take the credit for. And God help you if you didn’t keep all your paperwork strictly up-to-date. Jack wasn’t sure anyone actually liked her, but everyone did good work under her unwavering glare. They didn’t dare do anything else.

Eloise was a great believer in weaponizing unnatural forces, an idea that had been all the rage back in the 1920s and 1930s. But definitely starting to feel a bit old hat by the time Jack joined the Armory. He tried to steer the work in a more scientific direction, but Eloise would have none of it. She was getting old and slow and past it, but wouldn’t admit it. The quality of the work coming out of the Armory started to suffer, though Eloise made sure the blame fell everywhere except with her. Until she blew herself up. Jack was then promoted to Armourer. So he could put in place all the changes he’d been advocating for so long. Things improved immediately.

Did she fall or was she pushed? The Armourer smiled. He’d never tell. Anything, for the family.

He looked at the chair opposite him, and smiled at Natasha. She smiled sweetly back at him. She was sitting very straight and upright, as she always did, with her hands folded neatly in her lap. Still wearing her usual long black leather coat and her knee-length boots. Long, dark hair fell out from under her fur cap. She sighed and shook her head.

“What are you still doing here, Jack? This was only ever supposed to be a temporary position.”

“I came back to the Hall to look after Timothy,” said Jack. “So he wouldn’t be alone. I did mean to leave here, move on, as soon as he was old enough to look after himself. But everyone knows how that worked out. After he went rogue, I didn’t want to leave the hall and the family. They were very supportive. And they were all I had left.”

“You should have gone back out into the world again,” said Natasha. “Back where you belonged.”

“I was busy,” said the Armourer. “There was always so much work to do. And besides, if you weren’t in the world, I wasn’t interested in it anymore.”

“So you stayed here and got old,” said Natasha.

“Yes,” said the Armourer. “I miss you so much, Natasha.”

“I know. Why didn’t you marry again?”

“Because I never felt about anyone else, the way I felt about you.”

The Armourer looked away, thinking, remembering, and when he looked back, she wasn’t there anymore. And neither was the chair she’d been sitting on.

Timothy Drood . . . His son, his only child. Not like his brother, James, who had so many children by so many women, out in the field. You can’t go tomcatting around like James did and not expect there to be consequences. James produced so many illegitimate half-Droods they formed their own organization, the Gray Bastards. The Armourer tried to keep in touch with as many of them as he could, because they were his nephews and nieces, after all. But there were just so many of them. All determined to go their own way and make a name for themselves, like their illustrious father. So many of them died, trying to prove themselves worthy of the family name. Like Harry, and Roger, and . . .

If the Armourer had a son now, he supposed it would have to be his nephew, Eddie. A good man, a better field agent, and a credit to his family. Eddie Drood, the man responsible for the death of the Armourer’s beloved brother, James, and his estranged son, Timothy. There was no one in the family the Armourer felt closer to than Eddie, but there was no denying that closeness came with a cost.

Timothy Drood . . . or Tiger Tim, the name he took for himself when he went rogue, and disappeared into the African jungles. What they used to call a bad seed. Bad to the bone. Or could it all have been the Armourer’s fault, did Timothy Drood become Tiger Tim because of parental neglect? The Armourer thought he’d done his best, but he’d never known what to make of his odd, unruly son. A strange child, even from an early age. The Armourer never knew how to be a father to him. Timothy had always been resistant to every form of authority, or affection. And so more and more the Armourer just left him to his own devices and buried himself in his work. Because he understood his work. Was it because of that turning away, that his son had gone to the bad?

“Still blaming yourself, after all these years?” said Timothy. He sounded pleased at the idea. “Hello, Daddy. Here I am, back again, like the traditional bad penny. You’re looking old.”

He sat in the chair opposite the Armourer, where his mother had been, lounging bonelessly, almost arrogantly relaxed. A man heading into middle age and fighting it all the way. He had that kind of aesthetic musculature that only comes from regular workouts with professional equipment in expensive private gyms, and the skin on his face, especially just around the eyes, looked suggestively taut. He was wearing a rich cream safari suit, topped off with a white snap-brimmed hat, complete with tiger-skin band. He looked very inch the Great White Hunter and gloried in it. He smiled a lot, but it never reached his cold blue eyes.

“Why did you always prefer the jungles, boy?” said the Armourer. “Dangerous places, jungles.”

“Not for me,” said Tiger Tim, smiling easily. “When I walk through a jungle, you can always be sure that I am the most dangerous thing in it.”

“Well?” said the Armourer. “Tell me, was it my fault that you turned out bad? Did I let you down?”

“Typical you,” said Tiger Tim. “Everything has to be your responsibility. It’s a form of arrogance, really.”

“Answer me!”

“I never thought of myself as bad. . . . I just wanted to have fun.”

“Did you ever love me, son?” said the Armourer. “I tried to love you. I really did.”

“Love . . .” said Tiger Tim. “Sorry. Never really got the hang of love.”

“You nearly killed me,” said the Armourer. “Trying to force me to open the family’s Armageddon Codex for you.”

“So I did,” said Tiger Tim, nodding cheerfully. “Now that one was your fault. You didn’t have to fight me.”

The Drood family keeps its most secret depository of its most dangerous weapons, the Armageddon Codex, locked away in a pocket dimension only loosely linked to the Armory. For security reasons. Only the Armourer can even approach it, let alone enter it, without setting off all kinds of alarms. But Timothy Drood, not yet Tiger Tim, wanted in. So he lured his father off to a private place, with an urgent message, and beat the crap out of him. Timothy had laid his plans well, found all the right loopholes in the security measures that would let him access the pocket dimension, but he still couldn’t open the Codex without the knowledge locked away in his father’s head.

Timothy kicked his father in the ribs, again and again, and then knelt down beside him. “Come on, Daddy dearest! I’m on a deadline here! Give me the secret! Tell me how to unlock the Lion’s Jaws!”

The Armourer lay curled up in a ball on the cold stone floor. He ached all over from the beating he’d taken. He spat out a thick mouthful of blood and glared up at his son. Above and behind the two of them stood the Lion’s Jaws, a great stone carving of a lion’s head, complete with mane, perfect in every detail. Twenty feet tall and almost as wide, it towered over them, carved out of a dark blue-veined stone that made the head seem eerily alive. Timothy drew back his foot to kick his father again, and the Armourer flinched despite himself. Timothy laughed breathily.

“I know I need a brass key, Daddy,” said Timothy. “The key opens the Jaws, but everyone knows that. I need to know how to open the Jaws so I can pass though them safely! Just give me the key and tell me how to use it, and I’ll stop hurting you. Won’t that be nice? Why do you always have to fight me, Daddy? You don’t think I’m enjoying this, do you?”