“I should have cancelled the Ball,” said the Lady Faire. “My horoscope said it was going to be a bad day.”
“I do not believe in the stars,” I said.
“They believe in you.”
I took a deep breath and headed for the open entrance. Some conversations you just know aren’t going to go anywhere useful.
• • •
When we finally crashed through the door and into the Ballroom, we found there was a riot going on. Security people, in their white uniforms and masks, were pouring into the great ice cavern through all the entrances at once, and going head to head with any number of blood-red men. The security people had all kinds of really nasty weapons, but the blood-red men had numbers, unnatural strength, and their awful unstoppability. Guns could damage them, but not kill them. Even the most terrible wounds healed almost immediately. And one by one they were wearing the security people down; when one of them fell, with blood staining their white uniforms, they didn’t get up again.
The voices in my earpiece were going out, one by one. I wanted to shout at them, to warn them, but what could I tell them that they couldn’t already see for themselves? They weren’t my people, weren’t even really on my side, but I was still proud of them. They could have run and saved themselves. But they stood their ground and fought on, to protect the guests. Because that was their job.
The guests were mostly hanging back, sticking to the far walls and the farthest reaches of the ice cavern. Keeping well out of the way, and basically treating the whole bloody struggle as just more free entertainment. Some were cheering one side, some the other. Many were placing bets. They hadn’t realised yet the danger they were in. They thought they were exempt. The Lady Faire glared at the bloody debacle her Ball had degenerated into, and then turned abruptly to glare at me.
“Do something!”
“I’m open to suggestions!”
I looked around, and spotted a surprisingly familiar face standing alone. Unnoticed by the other guests, the security people, and the blood-red men . . . because he wasn’t really there. And since I couldn’t do anything about the blood-red men, I thought I might as well check out the one thing that stood out. I gestured for the Lady Faire to stay put by the doorway, and moved cautiously forward. For the moment both sides in the fight seemed too busy to notice I’d arrived, and I wanted to keep it that way until I’d figured out something useful to do. I quietly approached the shimmering figure by the wall, and its head came slowly round to look at me. The Phantom Berserker nodded slowly, and waited for me to join him.
For a ghost, he looked surprisingly solid, but then, my armour gives me amplified Sight on many levels. To everyone else he was probably just a shadowy figure, unclear and insubstantial, unless you looked at him directly. To me, he was a tall, bulky Viking figure with the traditional horned helmet and a bear-skin cloak. His deathly pale face was drawn and gaunt. He had haunted eyes. Word was, agents from the Department of Uncanny had dug him up out of some ancient burial mound in Norway, back in the Sixties, and he’d followed them home. They didn’t have the heart to kick him out, so they made him an honorary agent, and he’d been with them ever since.
“Hello!” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the general bedlam. “Eddie Drood, remember me? The Regent’s grandson. I thought you were dead? I saw your body lying among all the others, at the massacre at the Department of Uncanny.”
“I was dead,” said the Phantom Berserker. His voice was hollow, and strangely distant, as though it had to travel a long way to reach me. “For a while I was alive again. But it didn’t last. Now I’m a ghost again. I’m surprised you can see me; no one else here can. But then, you’re a Drood, and the rules don’t apply to you, do they? It was all my fault, you know. What happened at Uncanny. All those deaths. All my fault.”
“Talk to me,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
“I was the traitor inside the Department,” said the Phantom Berserker. “I opened the door, to let them in. This Voice came to me, out of nowhere, and it promised me things. Said it could provide me with flesh and blood, in a new body, so that I could breathe and move and feel again. A real live body, after so long as only a drifting spirit from another age. And I wanted that so very badly. I could materialise, from time to time, just long enough to be useful to the Department. But not for long. Never for long. And those brief flashes of feeling, of simple sensation, just made it so much worse when I had to go back to being immaterial again. My people knew what they were doing, all those centuries ago, when they cursed me to be the Phantom Berserker. I was so desperate to feel again, to live again, that I said I’d do whatever the Voice wanted. In return for a body.”
“Whose Voice was it?” I said. “Who did you make a deal with?”
“I don’t know,” said the Phantom Berserker. “The Voice put me to sleep, and when I woke up again, I was alive. I had a heart that beat and lungs that moved, and blood that coursed through my veins. I had hands that could touch, and a mouth that could taste. I think I went a little crazy then, for a while, indulging all my senses. After all the years of just watching people enjoy life and take it for granted. But it didn’t last. I’d been alive less than a day when the Voice came to me, inside the Department of Uncanny. And told me it was time to pay the price for what I’d been given. All I had to do was shut down the Department’s security systems and unlock the doors, and my debt would be paid. It didn’t seem like much to ask. Just an information grab, I thought. Such a small thing, to pay for this new body, and all its pleasures. I wish I could say I hesitated. I opened the door and let them in. I didn’t know what they were going to do. How could I?
“The bloody men swarmed in, an army of them. And the first thing they did was kill me, standing at the door. They struck me down with their bare hands, and just like that I was a ghost again. So weakened there was nothing I could do but watch . . . as they killed everyone in the Department. Everyone who’d been so kind to me . . . I watched them kill your grandfather. Watched them rip Kayleigh’s Eye right out of his chest. There was nothing I could do. Nothing.”
“Why are you here?” I said.
“Because the Voice still has power over me. Because I said yes to it, I have to serve it. Even though I swore to serve and protect your grandfather all my days. Do you know what it means, for a Norseman to betray his oath? I am in Hel, Eddie Drood. Still under the control of the man who ruined me.”
“You don’t have to serve him,” I said. “Death breaks all oaths, all bonds.”
“If only that were true,” said the Phantom Berserker.
“I think I know a way out of Hel,” I said. “Wait, and watch for your chance. And when you see an opportunity, take it. Whoever’s behind the Voice, I don’t think he’ll be able to resist turning up here, in person. And then . . .”
“And then?” said the Phantom Berserker.
“That’s up to you,” I said.
The Phantom Berserker turned away from me, not saying anything. And I couldn’t give him any more time, because I’d just seen Molly Metcalf, fighting fiercely in the middle of the crowd. I went to join her.
She’d conjured up a long sword of vivid blazing energies, and was using it to cut off heads as fast as she could get to them. Headless bodies of blood-red men went staggering this way and that, in pursuit of their lopped-off heads. No blood spurted from their necks. The heads went rolling here and there along the floor, kicked around like footballs. Now and then a body would find a head and clap it back into place, whereupon the wound would seal and fuse immediately. I wasn’t sure the right bodies were finding the right heads, but since the blood-red men were all identical, I didn’t suppose it mattered. All this was keeping a lot of blood-red men occupied, and taking them out of the fight, but not for long. And more of the blood-red figures were pouring into the Ballroom through all the entrances and exits. Dozens and dozens of them. They already far outnumbered the remaining security people, because all of the white-uniformed security staff who were coming had already arrived, and there seemed no end to the numbers of blood-red men.