There, said Molly, relaxing just a little.
I ve put some temporary shields in place: a No See zone over the Hall and serious avoidance spells around the perimeter. Low-level stuff, easily broken by anyone who knows what they re looking for, but enough to buy us some time, so we can make a proper investigation. Where do you want to start, Eddie?
I didn t thank her. It would only have embarrassed her.
I looked up and down the gloomy hallway. It was all so still, so quiet. The only sounds had been our careful footsteps and the quiet shifting noises of broken stone and brickwork. The ceiling made constant ominous noises as the collapsed upper floors settled and pressed down. There was still a little smoke, farther in, curling unhurriedly on the still air, and the odd cloud of soot and ashes drifting this way and that. Molly sneezed explosively, and I jumped despite myself. I looked at her reproachfully, and she stared haughtily down her nose at me, as though she d meant to do it. She raised one hand and snapped her fingers imperiously. A sharp breeze blew in from the open doors and rushed down the hallway, dispersing the smoke and blowing away the soot and ashes. The breeze died away quickly, before it could disturb anything precarious.
Most of the interior walls had been riddled with gunfire and then smashed and burnt and blown apart. There were great holes in the old stonework, and the wood panelling had been almost completely burnt away by fierce heat. It was hard to find anything I recognised. The great statues and important works of art, the wall hangings and the family portraits: gone, all gone. I realised Molly had stopped to look up at the ceiling, and I followed her gaze, checking it quickly for spreading cracks.
No, she said, without looking round. It s just our room was up there, on the top floor. Is it possible?
No, I said. All the upper floors have fallen in on themselves. There s not a few feet of roof left intact anywhere. Everything we had up there is gone.
Everything you had, said Molly. I kept most of my stuff in the woods. Oh, Eddie I m so sorry.
It s just things, I said. You can always get more things. What matters is I still have you.
Forever and a day, my love, said Molly, slipping her arm through mine again and briefly resting her head on my shoulder.
We moved on into the gloom and the shadows. The sounds of our slow progress seemed to move ahead of us, as though to give warning we were coming. All the great paintings that used to line the walls, portraits and scenes of the family by all the great masters, were gone forever. Generations of Droods, great works of art preserved by the family for generations, reduced to ash, and less than ash. Even the frames were destroyed. Someone had swept the walls clean with incandescent fires, probably laughing as they did. I crouched down as I spotted a scrap of canvas caught between two pieces of rubble from a shattered statue. Molly peered over my shoulder.
What is it, sweetie?
I think this was a Botticelli, I said.
Just a few splashes of colour now, crumbling in my hand. I let it drop to the floor, and straightened up again.
Why would the enemy take time out from fighting the Droods to destroy so many important works of art? These paintings were priceless, irreplaceable. Why not take them and sell them?
Because whoever did this was only interested in destruction and revenge, said Molly. I used to be like that. I would have torched every painting in every museum in the world to get back at your family for killing my parents. The Droods have angered a lot of people in their time, Eddie. Sometimes hurting the one you hate can be far more important than profiting from them.
Are you saying we deserved this? That we had it coming? That we brought all this on ourselves?
Of course not! I m just making the point that really angry people often don t stop to think logically.
I liked the paintings, I said. And there were photographs, too, towards the end of the corridor. A whole history of my family. And the only photograph I ever saw of my mother and my father How am I ever going to remember what they looked like, with the only photo destroyed?
I don t have any photos of my parents, said Molly. But I still think of them every day. You ll remember them.
We moved on. All the statues and sculptures had been blown apart or just smashed to pieces. So much concentrated rage I couldn t even tell which piece was which from just looking at the scattered parts, though here and there I d glimpse some familiar detail. The rich carpet that had stretched the whole length of the hallway was gone; just a charred and blackened mess that crunched under our feet.
It was like walking through the tomb of some lost civilisation and trying to re-create its original glory and grandeur from what small broken pieces remained.
This wasn t just the side effects of fighting, I said, finally. It isn t even vandalism, smashing things up for the fun of it. This was the complete destruction of everything we believed in and cared for. They wanted to rip out every memory, every meaning of Drood Hall. To spit in the face of our long tradition, and wipe it from the memory of the world. Our enemy wanted to make sure there would be nothing left to remember us by.
We moved on, out of the hallway and into what remained of the ground floor through ragged spaces where doors or walls should have been, through wreckage and destruction, through what had been my home and refuge from the world moving deeper and deeper into the Hall. Into my past. It didn t get any better. The destroyers had been very thorough. Finally I just stopped, weighed down by guilt and responsibility and the burden of memories. I d spent so much of my younger life trying to escape from Drood Hall and my family and their hold over me, but I d never wanted this. I might have dreamed it a few times, but I never really wanted it. Molly looked at me impatiently.
Where are we, Eddie? I don t recognise anything here.
I don t know, I said. I can t tell. I lived most of my life in this place. I knew all its rooms and corridors, all its nooks and crannies and secret hiding places, like the back of my hand, but now I think we re in one of the open auditoriums where people could come to just sit and think, or drink tea and chat or simply rest their troubled souls for a while. Look at it now.
Sunlight streamed in through holes in the outer wall like slanting spotlights, full of listlessly turning dust motes. Ruin and rubble; shadows and darkness. Not one scrap or stick of furniture left intact. As though the enemy had taken time out from bloodshed and slaughter to go through here with sledgehammers, smashing everything that might have been useful or valuable or just pleasant to look at. Or even just fondly remembered by my family. Who could hate us this much? Even the wooden floor had been torn up and split apart, with jagged splinters sprouting up everywhere, as though some great vicious animal had chewed on it.
What do you see, Eddie? Molly said softly.
I see scorch marks on the walls from energy blasts, I said steadily. And a hell of a lot of bullet holes. A lot of fighting went on here, before they blew the place up and set fire to it. I wonder how much blood there is under all this mess. From all those who fell here I don t see any armoured bodies or enemy dead. Did they take them all with them when they left? I can see the enemy taking their own fallen, so as not to leave any clues as to their identity. But why take the Drood dead? I ve seen only one golden body so far. The place should be littered with them. And why was the armour melted like that? As though it had been hit by a nuclear blast?
Molly didn t say anything. She knew I wasn t talking to her.
I turned and went quickly back the way we d come, hurrying back to the front doorway and the armoured body lying there. I crouched down beside it, studying the gleaming golden surface thoughtfully. It was covered with great spiderwebs of cracks, as though from a series of unimaginable impacts. The golden metal had become scored and distorted in places, touched by some incredible heat. The arms were fused to the torso, the legs fused together. And yet the armour, as a whole, was still intact. They hadn t broken through to reach the man inside. I tapped the blank featureless mask with a single knuckle, and the sound was soft, flat, dead.