And perhaps enjoying herself just a little too much. Not everyone was armoured. I shot her a hard look from behind my featureless golden mask, realised that wasn’t going to help much, and raised my voice to be heard clearly over the howling sirens and alarm bells.
“Take it easy, Molly! These people are family!”
“I know,” said Molly.
“My family!”
“Not mine.”
“They could be,” I said. “One day.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing.”
“Molly . . .”
“Sometimes you want too much, Eddie,” said Molly. Not even looking at me. We pressed on, into the heart of Drood Hall.
* * *
The Serjeant-at-Arms appeared suddenly before us, wearing his traditional formal outfit of stark black and white. He would have looked very like a traditional old-fashioned butler if it hadn’t been for the two extremely nasty-looking guns in his hands. The Serjeant is the first hard line of defence against any hostile intruders, and I was pleasantly surprised that we’d got this far before he turned up to stop us. He immediately recognised both Molly and me, but the guns he had trained on us didn’t waver at all. I knew he’d have no hesitation in shooting if he thought it necessary. But I also knew he was so confident in his own abilities, it would never even occur to him that he needed to armour up to protect himself.
So I gave the nod to Molly, and she jabbed a specially prepared aboriginal pointing bone at the Serjeant. And just like that, he was gone. Teleported right out of the Hall and onto the grounds outside. Quite a long way off, to be exact—on the far side of the ornamental lake. By the time he could make his way back to the Hall, this should all be over. One way or another. Molly looked at the pointing bone in her hand. The sheer strain of what it had been asked to do had charred and cracked it from end to end. It’s not easy, making a Drood go somewhere he doesn’t want to go. Molly shrugged, tossed the bone aside, and we moved on.
We strode quickly through open halls and wide corridors, blasting our way through what little opposition there was. They say you can’t go home again, but you can if you carry a big enough stick. The alarms and bells and sirens were deafeningly loud, yet I could still hear armoured feet hammering on polished wooden floors as people headed towards us from all directions. But so far we were still keeping well ahead of them.
The Hall’s interior security systems kicked in automatically once we passed a certain point, and all the doors ahead and around us slammed shut and locked themselves to try to contain the problem. With anyone else, that might actually have worked. Molly snapped her fingers at each door we came to, and it leapt open to let us pass. Until the anti-magic protocols activated and that stopped working. So instead I just lowered my armoured shoulder again and hit each closed door like a battering ram, smashing my way through. The heavy wood cracked and broke apart; sometimes the entire door was thrown right off its hinges. The world can be a very fragile place when you’re wearing Drood armour.
Concealed trap-doors suddenly fell away in the floor before us, revealing dark, bottomless depths. I knew where they were, so I just stepped around them. Molly walked straight forward across the open spaces, not even deigning to look down, defying gravity as she defied everything else that argued with her. The trap-doors closed behind us with quiet, defeated sounds.
“I have to say, I was expecting your family to put up more of a showing,” said Molly. “Something more impressive, like energy weapons or force shields . . . high explosives. That sort of thing.”
“My family will be very reluctant to use anything that destructive inside the Hall,” I said. “For fear of damaging all the expensive paintings and sculptures we’ve accumulated down the centuries. Tribute from a grateful and rather scared world. That’s what I was counting on. Luckily I don’t have that problem. I’ve never liked the Hall.”
“Even though it’s where you were brought up?”
“Especially because it’s where I was brought up.”
I said that very loudly, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening and still planning on stopping us. I wanted them to believe I didn’t care how much damage I did. And to be fair, Molly probably really didn’t. But I was being careful