“Brace yourself,” said Molly. “The energies are changing. The Gateway’s opening. Looks like the show’s about to start.”
“I wonder if they’ve got a T. rex,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to have a go at a T. rex.”
“You go right ahead,” said Molly. “I’ll stand way over there, and watch.”
The Gateway hung on the air, halfway down the street, like a hole in reality itself. Strange lights flickered in and around it, while even stranger energies radiated away from the razor-sharp perimeter. Odd emanations pulsed and flared as the Gateway stabilised, enforcing and embedding itself in the world. Weird things began to happen in the street-other-dimensional fallout, warped probabilities. Half a dozen soldiers at the far end of the street turned suddenly inside out, flowering in bloody messes. Others melted, running away like candle wax. A few simply exploded. More disappeared, forced out of reality by the Gateway’s overpowering presence.
Birds fell dead out of the sky, and it briefly rained blood.
Buildings on either side of the street began to slump, bulging out as though tugged forward by some strange new gravity. Windows exploded, under too much pressure. The ground shook and then cracked beneath our feet, and deep booming voices issued up from far below. The sky turned strange colours, and the air suddenly tasted sickly sweet. And then the Gateway firmed, a perfect circle, cut out of reality. Not as big as I’d feared-maybe thirty, forty feet in diameter . . . But just its presence here was seriously bad news. At least the world had stabilised around it now. Everything seemed back to normal, apart from the damage already caused. And of course the dead soldiers were still dead. I wondered if Diment’s bosses thought their losses were worth it. Or if they even cared.
I tried to see what was going on beyond the Gateway, but that was too much, even for my mask. It was like looking at a different kind of Space, where the most basic rules were utterly different. Like one of those pictures that were all the rage a while back, where if you focused your eyes just right, you could see another image inside the picture. Three dimensions, hidden inside two. What was inside the Gateway was simply too complicated, or perhaps too real, for me to make sense of, even with my armour’s help. Time has substance, but not any kind Humanity can comprehend. And then something stepped through the Gateway and into our world, and I stopped worrying about theoretical stuff.
I knew a real and present danger when I saw one.
“What the hell is that?” breathed Molly, pressing in close beside me.
“A blast from the past,” I said. “From the Droods’ past.”
“I should have known,” said Molly. “It’s always about your family, isn’t it?”
The new arrival was a man in full armour. Medieval plate armour, with strange curves and angles, gleaming bitter yellow like diseased candlelight. The figure was completely enclosed from head to toe, and carried a long sword on one hip and a battleaxe on the other. Its helm had a countenance as blank and featureless as mine. Nothing to give any indication of a human face behind it. The figure stood inhumanly still, but I had no doubt it was looking at me, and a terrible chill ran down my spine.
“I know what that is,” I said. “I’ve never seen one personally, just pictures in a very old book, but . . .”
“It looks old,” said Molly. “Or at least old-fashioned. Is it one of the London Knights?”
“No,” I said. “Arthur would never have suffered a thing like that to sit at his round table. I never actually thought they were real, just a cautionary tale, to scare impressionable young Droods . . .”
“Eddie! What is that thing?”
“That is a False Knight,” I said. “Magical armour-a living thing in its own right, permanently bound to its wearer. Metal forged from the pits of Hell, they say. Once put on, of your own free will, it can never be taken off. The wearer gives up being a man to become something more and less than a man. Made over, into a new and powerful thing. Unbeatable, untouchable. A False Knight.
“The armour feeds on blood and death and suffering. Everything it kills makes it stronger. It lives to kill, and kills to live. The False Knights were created centuries after Arthur’s fall at Logres, intended as an answer to the Droods. There’s a reason they call that period the Dark Ages. This was the last desperate gamble of the Order of Steel-bad guys, who believed Might Made Right and they were the mightiest of all. Only the Droods stood between them and a reign of blood and horror. To destroy the armoured Droods, the Order of Steel made a deal with the darkest force of the Dark Ages and gave themselves up, to be False Knights. A whole army of them.
“We destroyed them all, in one great battle. Over a thousand years ago, in Tintagel, in Cornwall.”
Molly looked at me uncertainly. “You can take a False Knight, can’t you?”
“One, probably,” I said. “But there was more to the story . . .”
And that was when a great company of False Knights came striding through the Gateway, from out of the Past and one of my family’s darkest legends. Row upon row and rank upon rank, filling the whole end of the street with their sickly gleaming armour. They marched in perfect lockstep, with inhuman timing and precision. The sound of their metal boots hammering down in unison filled the air, and echoed back from the surrounding buildings. Their arms swung heavily at their sides, their hands clenched into metal fists, and not one of them had a face on the front of his bitter yellow helmet. I’d never understood before just how disturbing that could be, even though I’d used the same trick myself, for so long. To look at something you know can see you, even though it doesn’t have any eyes . . . The False Knights crashed to a halt as the last of them emerged from the Gateway. Standing so still, in their ranks, looking straight at me, and Molly.
The surviving MI 13 soldiers at that end of the street turned to run. One look at the False Knights was all it took to persuade them they wanted nothing more to do with any of this. Even their officers couldn’t bully or threaten them into holding their ground. I couldn’t see Diment anywhere, or his secret masters. No doubt they were watching, from somewhere they thought was safe. But nothing and no one was safe now, not with False Knights in the world.
“I was afraid of that,” I said, as steadily as I could. My mouth was dry, my lips numb. I had to swallow hard a few times before I could continue. My skin was crawling under my armour, and I could feel my heart hammering painfully fast. “At the battle there was one company of False Knights who just vanished. My family never did find out what happened to them. Well, I guess we know now, don’t we? Those damned fools running MI 13 opened up a Time Gate and brought them here. They have no idea what they’ve unleashed on this world . . .”
The Gateway disappeared behind the False Knights. Gone in a moment. Presumably whatever MI 13 had been using to generate the Gate had just run out of power.
“Damn,” I said. “There goes one solution to the problem I was counting on . . .”
“Forcing them back through the Gateway and into the Past?” said Molly. “That was never going to work. You said yourself the company of False Knights vanished from the battle and your family never saw them again.”
“I can’t believe MI 13 thought they could control something like this!” I said.
“After what happened at the Wulfshead, and what they think happened at Uncanny, they probably panicked,” said Molly. “They must have thought we’d be coming after them next. Eddie, we have been set up, big time. So what are we going to do? Get the hell out of here, and let your family deal with the False Knights when they turn up?”
“You’d do that?” I said.
“I know my limitations,” said Molly. “And I am looking at a whole army of them right now.”