I took a step forward, and Solomon Krieg tensed. I leaned forward over Truman’s desk so he could see his own face reflected in my golden mask.
"If you want me on your side, tell me the truth, Truman. The whole truth. And don’t hold anything back. This close, the armour will tell me if you lie, even by omission. Tell me everything, or I walk out of here, right now."
I was bluffing about my armour being a lie detector, but he had no way of knowing that. When my armour can do so many amazing things, what’s one more? I was gambling that Truman was so desperate to get his hands on my secrets and my armour that he’d tell me things he wouldn’t tell anyone else. Truman smiled slowly, his eyes bright with the glee of someone who knows something you don’t know and can’t wait to impress you with it. Once again he spoke only to me, ignoring my allies.
"Why not?" he said. "I knew you’d be someone I could talk to. Someone I could trust with…everything. Science came from man’s mind. It is ours. We created it and we control it. Magic…is a wild thing, unnatural and uncontrollable, and it always has its own agenda. We make use of it when we must, but we can never trust it or those who use it. When we come to power, science will replace magic. It’s the only way man can be truly independent. The Droods are just our first and most important enemy. Once they have been thrown down, we will stamp out every other form of magic, and every magical creature, and mankind shall be free at last."
I glanced at Molly. She was shocked silent, her face drained of all colour. This was obviously all news to her. I laid a golden hand gently on her arm, signalling her to hold in her anger till we’d heard it all. I could tell from Truman’s face that there was more to come.
"Eliminate all undesirables?" I said. "That sounds like a huge undertaking."
"Oh, it is," said Truman, still smiling. "But we’ve made a good start. Would you like to see?"
"Yes," I said.
"Yes," said Molly.
Truman chuckled. "Why not? Let me show you the future, Molly. You’ll find it…educational. Come with me, all of you," he said, but looking only at me. "I’ve waited such a long time for someone I could share this with, Edwin. Someone who’d understand. Come with me, Edwin Drood, and see what Manifest Destiny is all about."
Solomon Krieg wasn’t at all happy about this, but Truman overruled him, speaking quite sharply in the end. So Krieg led us down into the levels below the bunkers into caverns they’d carved out of the bedrock themselves to hold Manifest Destiny’s most important secret. Something hidden from the rank and file. Krieg and Truman led the way, and I followed, with Molly and the others behind me. At last we were heading into the true heart of the labyrinth, where the final truth was waiting to be revealed.
We descended down bare stone stairwells, in single file, in silence. Whatever was ahead of us, we could all feel it drawing closer; and it felt very cold. Molly stuck close to me, her face a rigid mask. Truman breezed along, happily humming some tune under his breath that made sense only to him.
We finally emerged into a great stone cavern, much of it in darkness. The air was cold and damp, and the smell reminded me of the sewers. It was a sick, rotten smell, full of filth and pain and death. Even Mr. Stab wrinkled his nose. None of us said anything. We all knew we’d come to a bad place, where bad things happened. All except Truman, who was still humming his happy tune. He turned on all the lights at once with a grand gesture, and the cavern’s contents lay illuminated below us. We were standing on a narrow walkway halfway up the cavern wall, looking down on long rows of cells, each with its own beaten-down inhabitant. It reminded me of Dr. Dee’s establishment in Harley Street, except there were no cages here. Only long rows and blocks of concrete stalls, with bare concrete floors and cold iron gates. No beds or chairs, not even straw on the concrete floors; just iron grilles to carry away some of the wastes.
"I didn’t know about this," Molly whispered to me. "I swear I didn’t know about this."
"Come and see, come and see," Truman said happily, leading us down from the walkway. We followed him down, and he led us gaily along the central aisle, proudly showing off the contents of his cells. The first thing he showed us was a werewolf, in full wolf form. Seven feet from head to tail, with silver-gray fur, it had been spread-eagled on its back on the concrete floor, pinned down with silver spikes through all four limbs, like a specimen laid out on a dissecting board. It whined piteously as we looked in.
"We have to do that," Truman said. "Otherwise the brutes gnaw off their own limbs to escape. Animals. Still, they’re not here long enough to suffer much."
All I could see was the basic doggy suffering in the creature’s trapped eyes. I had no love for werewolves. I’d seen too many of his kind’s half-eaten kills in small towns and villages. But this…this was no way to treat even a hated enemy.
Farther down the row, vampires were nailed to the concrete walls by wooden stakes hammered through their arms and legs. They snapped and snarled at us feebly, all intelligence driven out of their minds by continuous suffering. Then there were elf lords, stripped naked of their usual finery, chained with heavy steel shackles. The cold iron burned their pale flesh terribly where it touched, charring right down to the bone, but not one of the elves would do anything but sneer at us when we looked in. They still had their pride. Gryphons with their eyes cut out whined pitifully in their cells. They might not be able to see the future anymore, but they all knew what was coming. There was a unicorn whose wings had been broken, her horn gouged roughly out of her forehead, her glory much diminished. And a water elemental who’d been frozen into an icy statue. Her solid eyes were still horribly aware.
Cold-eyed, cold gray lizard men from the silent subterranean ways under South London; smoke gray gargoyles snatched from the few churches and cathedrals they still haunted. A clay-skinned bogeyman with both its arms and legs broken, dragging itself back and forth across the concrete floor. And something with the stink of the Pit about it. A genuine half-breed, born of a demon’s lust. A succubus stores semen from a man she sleeps with, and then changes into its male form, an incubus, and deposits that stolen seed in a receptive woman. The result: a human body with a demon soul. Half of this world, and half of the world below. They fight for one side or the other, both and neither, and they’re not nearly as rare as they ought to be. This half-breed was held in check by a pentagram etched deeply into the concrete floor.
It inclined its head mockingly to Mr. Stab, as though acknowledging one of its own kind. It couldn’t speak. Someone had cut out its tongue, just in case.
Truman looked at me again and again, waiting for me to say something, but I held myself in check as he showed me horror after horror. Pretty much everything on display here was evil, or had done evil in their time; but nothing to match the cold-blooded evil of what had been done to them here. In my time as a Drood agent, I’d fought and killed many of the things imprisoned here, but that had always been in the heat of battle and the hottest of blood. I’d killed but I’d never tortured, never delighted in the agonies of my enemies. That wasn’t the Drood way. We fought the good fight to keep the world safe, and we took pride in doing that work well, but this…this was an abomination.
The last captive, in the last cell, was Subway Sue. Her ragged clothes were tattered and torn, and there was blood on them and on her face. Someone had beaten the crap out of her. She’d been blindfolded and shackled to the wall of her concrete pen. Molly moved in close to the bars, her face terribly cold, her eyes dangerously angry. I looked at Truman.
"This," he said proudly, "is just today’s batch. Arrogant magical creatures who prey on humanity, overpowered by the science and stealth of specially trained soldiers. My people are very busy these days, hunting these vermin down and bringing them here for elimination. We can’t kill in public, of course; that would draw too much attention. It’s better this magical filth don’t know we’re out there, on their trail…I wish we could take the time to deal with them properly, give them the kind of death they deserve. Make them suffer as they’ve made humanity suffer. But we can’t take the risk. So we bring them in until the cells are full, and then we kill them humanely and give their bodies to the cleansing flames. It’s a very efficient operation. The ovens never grow cold. Solomon sees to that. One by one, creature by creature, we’re winning our world back from the monsters who infect it."