The armoury is always coming up with new weapons devised, constructed, and tested right here in the labs. Which is why the place is always so appallingly noisy. I stood by the closed blast-proof doors awhile, waiting for my ears to adjust to the din. Men and women with earnest, preoccupied faces bustled back and forth, giving their whole attention to the latest generation of deadly devices they were producing for agents to use in the field. And hopefully getting all the bugs out in advance. I could still remember the explosive whoopee cushion, which didn’t, and the utterly impenetrable arm-mounted force shield, which wasn’t. No one paid me any attention at all, but I was getting used to that.
Lights flared brightly, shadows danced, and lightning crawled all over one wall like electric ivy. Sharp chemical stinks fought it out with the gentler aromas of crushed herbs, while molten metal flowed sluggishly into ceramic moulds, and smoke drifted gently on the air from the latest unfortunate incident. The armoury didn’t have a first-aid box; it had its own adjoining hospital ward. A hell of a lot of people crowded around test benches and futuristic lab equipment, alchemical retorts and silver-bullet moulds, and of course the ubiquitous computers and chalked pentagrams. Most of these very busy people were cursing loudly and emphatically as they tried to persuade their latest projects to do what they were supposed to without exploding, melting down, or turning the experimenter into something small and fluffy. Somebody close to me reached for a handy lump hammer, and I decided to go somewhere else.
I strolled through the labs, keeping an eye out for the Armourer. Doorways opened in midair, giving brief glimpses of faraway places, and a test animal imploded. A desperate young intern chased through the labs, flailing away with a butterfly net, trying to catch an oversized eyeball with its own fluttering bat wings. I’m sure it had looked perfectly reasonable at the drafting stage. No one paid any attention to these little disruptions, except to jump just a little, absentmindedly, at the latest bang. Just another day, in the armoury. When you’re working at the cutting edges of devious thinking, you have to expect and allow for the occasional setback, along with regular stinks, spatial inversions, and the odd unexpected transformation. Everyone who worked in the armoury was a volunteer drawn from a long list of applications, carefully selected from those in the family who had clearly demonstrated they had far more brains than was good for them. (Often accompanied by an unhealthy curiosity and a complete lack of self-preservation instincts.)
(The really dangerous thinkers were either rapidly promoted to purely theoretical projects or sent to alternate dimensions and told not to come back till they’d calmed down.)
The current crop of interns looked like science nerds everywhere, all heavy spectacles and plastic pocket protectors, except that some of them wore pointy wizard’s hats as well. A lot of them were wearing T-shirts under their lab coats, bearing the legend I Blow Things Up, Therefore I Am, Even If Someone Else Suddenly Isn’t. Science nerd humour. They all looked very earnest and very committed, and if they survived long enough would eventually be promoted to the somewhat safer environs of the research and development labs. It did seem to me though, as I wandered through the chaos in search of the Armourer, that the old place held a lot more people and projects, along with a greater general sense of urgency, than I remembered from my last visit, ten years ago.
Two of the more brawny types were sparring with electrified brass knuckles, sparks crackling and spitting fiercely on the air as they swung and parried. One girl had her head stuck deep in a fish tank, proving she could now breathe underwater. Impressive, but I couldn’t help thinking the gaping rows of gills on her neck would be a bit of a giveaway in polite society. Not far away, an unfortunate young man had stopped proving he could now breathe fire, because it had given him hiccoughs. Unpredictable and highly inflammable hiccoughs. Someone led him away to put an asbestos bag over his head. I didn’t see why they couldn’t just stick his head in the fish tank, next to the girl.
And someone had blown up the firing range again. There’s always someone trying to break the record for biggest and most powerful handgun.
I finally spotted the Armourer up ahead, striding back and forth through the caverns, keeping a stern eye on everyone and everything. He paused here and there to dispense advice, encouragement, and the occasional clip on the ear, where necessary. The Armourer was strict but fair. I waited until he came back and settled at his usual testing bench, and then I slipped in beside him. He glanced briefly at me, sniffed loudly, and went back to what he was working on. It takes a lot to surprise the Armourer.
A tall, middle-aged man with far too much nervous energy, he wore a permanently stained white lab coat over a T-shirt saying Guns Don’t Kill People; I Kill People. Two shocks of tufty white hair jutted out over his ears below a bulging bald pate, and under bushy white eyebrows his eyes were a steely gray. His expression rarely changed from an habitual scowl, and while he had once been tall and imposing, he was now bent over by a pronounced stoop, legacy of so many years spent leaning over workbenches and lab projects that always needed fixing in a hurry. Or maybe just from ducking a lot. I sat beside him for a while, waiting for him to say something, but as always it was up to me to tear his attention away from his latest project.
"Hello, Armourer. Good to see you again. The old place seems very busy, just at the moment. Are we preparing for a war?"
He sniffed loudly again. "Always, boy. Always."
He plugged a thick electrical cable into a socket, tripped half a dozen switches, and then looked expectantly at a computer monitor wrapped in mistletoe and strings of garlic. Nothing happened. The Armourer hit the computer with a hammer, and I quickly took it away from him.
"Give that back!" he said, scowling fiercely. "That’s my lucky hammer!"
"Lucky?" I said, holding it carefully out of reach.
"I’m still here, aren’t I?"
I put the hammer down at the opposite end of the bench. "What’s the problem, Armourer?"
He sighed as he realised he was going to have to talk to me after all.
"Seems like everyone in the Hall is trying to draw power from the Heart, all at the same time. Every damned department at once. I’m supposed to have priority, but it’s all I can do to elbow my way into the queue. If I have to go upstairs and complain, there’ll be tear gas and shrapnel flying through the common rooms…"
"Why is there so much demand for power?"
"Don’t ask me. Ask bloody Alistair!"
I recognised the tone. "All right; what’s Alistair done now?"
The Armourer gave me his best put-upon expression. "First the Matriarch increases my budget, and my workload, and tells me my projects have top priority until further notice; and then bloody Alistair comes poncing in here and announces he’s chosen the armoury as the best place to start his latest efficiency drive. So now not only has my workload gone through the roof, but I have to account for everything we do and use, in triplicate! If I’d wanted to spend half my life up to my elbows in paperwork, I’d have shot myself in the head. Better yet, I’d have shot bloody Alistair in the head, and it may yet come to that. So far I’ve taken to just ignoring the paperwork and using his increasingly distraught memos as toilet paper. And then sending them back to him."
I couldn’t help smiling and nodding. Typical Alistair: penny wise and pound foolish. Always trying to be useful in the worst possible way. Someone once suggested, well out of Grandmother’s hearing, that the best way to bring down our enemies would be to send them Alistair as a gift. I suddenly stopped smiling. Someone in the family was a traitor…and what better way to handicap the family than by undermining and disrupting the work in the armoury? I shook my head reluctantly. I really liked the idea of nailing Alistair as the traitor, but I knew for a fact he’d had to go through all kinds of security checks before the family would allow Martha to marry him. If there’d been even a hint of anything suspicious about him, they’d have found it. I looked around abruptly as the Armourer jabbed me warningly in the ribs, and there was Alexandra Drood, bearing down on me like a heat-seeking missile.