“Help me up.” Pete grabs my hand and lifts effortlessly until I’m on my feet again.

  “Where’s—”

  (The angry violin is receding: I distantly notice another violin banging inside its case on the floor. Victoria kicked it under a chair but she’s not here anymore. I cast around and spot the Countess frog-marching her toward the organist’s bench, where Phibes hammers the manuals like a man possessed. He’s pulled out all the stops and the thunder of the pipes washes over me in a deafening cascade.)

  “—Mo?”

  Pete gestures down the aisle and I see her hand waving and then I feel her in my head, incanting something terrible in a voice like thunder. She issues orders to the undead, an injunction to cease and desist, or maybe decease: this is an Auditor in the fullness of her power, tapping into the wellspring of mana under Mahogany Row. The entire front rank of the undead lies down and stops moving with terrible finality, but that doesn’t even put a dent in their numbers. There must be two thousand people in the audience this morning, a smaller body count than the catastrophe at the Albert Hall: but this one is fueled by almost all the accumulated mana of the past sixty years of monarchy. If I leave Mo to handle this on her own she’ll be overwhelmed sooner or later. And in the meantime, a dead king stole Excalibur.

  I roll up my mental sleeves and get to work, thinning the swarm of eaters gathered to celebrate the passing of the monarchy with an alfresco buffet of Burke’s Peerage. I’m the Eater of Souls, the skin-suit of the Hungry Ghost from Dansey House, and individual eaters are like deep-fried scampi to me these days: tasty but not very filling. You can’t swallow just one of them, and I don’t pause between morsels as their dying wails dwindle down my throat. But something huge and ugly is waking underground, groaning and rolling over in the darkness, and I’m pretty sure it’s too big to swallow at a single bite. It may be too big for the likes of me full stop, something even the avatar of the Black Pharaoh might find troublesome.

  Mo is still tackling possessed bodies piecemeal, touching foreheads or faces or exposed hands so that the green glow vanishes from their eyes and they fall to the floor. It’s the normal outcome when an unshielded member of the public is possessed and then banished: forget The Exorcist, this stuff is invariably fatal. But there are more zombies crowding her from behind—and then there’s me. I push toward her, leaving a wake of corpses. (Don’t look at me like that: they were already dead before I got here.)

  I finally catch up with her. “We’ve got to go!” I shout: “Follow Lecter—”

  “I know what I’m doing!” Mo is angry and uptight. She turns her back, but then she adds, “Cover my six?” And this is no time for a domestic argument. So I go back-to-back with her and together we work to put down the undead. They gravitate toward us like lemmings performing for a particularly ruthless wildlife documentary faker. There’s no point feeling sorry for them—they’re not even alive, strictly speaking—but it’s as unsporting as shooting grouse on the 12th of August with a machine gun, and the outcome is just as predictable. Eventually the flood begins to recede, and Mo and I stumble toward the crystal coffin.

  The lid is down and the containment grid is powered up. An infinite darkness fills the coffin, shrouding the Queen in robes of midnight. Pete stands beside it, looking unaccountably guilty for someone who just saved the monarchy. “She’ll keep for the time being,” I tell him, trying for a reassuring tone. (The truth is less palatable. She’s suspended between death and dying as long as the coffin is sealed, but there’s no coming back from PHANG syndrome. She’s not dying anymore, but her sunbathing days are over. Pretty soon someone’s going to have to wake her up and explain the facts of vampirism to her, and I do not expect her to be amused. Worse: her descendants have been hit hard, like everyone else in the church—the lesser royals lie unmoving between their seats. Although a quick count suggests several of Lizzie’s brood escaped before the situation became non-survivable, or weren’t here in the first place—it’s not a toddler-friendly ceremony.) “What does this do to the binding oath…” I shake my head.

  “Nothing good,” Mo mutters. She leans on me unsteadily. Unlike me she can’t extract any mana from the eaters she’s put down: she must be exhausted.

  “Who set this up?” I ask, looking at the organ. The bench is empty, the Phibes ménage having disappeared. Knowing his predilection for underground escape routes they’re probably fleeing via the sewers to the buried River Tyburn which flows under Regents Park. He’ll have a punt or rowing boat moored there, waiting. It’s the fastest way out of the church: there’s still a crush near the exits, as the panicked survivors try to escape.

  “Mike.” Mo’s voice is rough, her throat sore from chanting words of banishment in Old Enochian. “He set this up. He’d know exactly how to summon Lecter. How to trick Vulnavia into trying to play him. How to corrupt your oath of office.” Her anger is incendiary, building toward a thermite-flare of rage.

  “Fuck.” It’s shorthand for Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will watch the watchmen? Very much fuck indeed: Mike was the backstop, the Senior Auditor, but he has form—after all, he’s the one who ran Iris as a double agent for a decade, then made a deal with the devil to install the Black Pharaoh in Number Ten. The worm turns, and turns again, and it looks like Mike engineered most of this mess specifically to free all of us in the Laundry from our oath of office while he cheerfully backstabs the New Management. “Where is he?”

  “It’s a double fake-out. Mike was in the passage to the Chapter House.” Pete gestures from behind a pile of bishops: “But the PM was also here, he knew the Archbishop wanted me to raise Her Majesty as a last resort, he told me to go right ahead. He’s been one jump ahead of the rest of us all along. Let me just lower her into the crypt and we can get out of here.” He turns toward the glass coffin again, leaning over a hip-deep pile of dead choirboys.

  “Are you with—” I pause: Mo has picked up the violin case that the Countess shoved her other violin in. I can hear it keening in the back of my head, *** Let me out, let me out. *** “Never mind, I’m with Mo. Love, are you going to unleash—”

  “Yes. This isn’t Lecter.” She doesn’t look at me as she unlatches the case and yanks out a carved bone instrument with glowing blue strings. I swear the thing is quivering in fear. “Right. You,” she glares at the lesser instrument, “will do exactly what I say, or it’s the log chipper for you.”

  *** Put me back, *** whines the fiddle, but she ignores it and picks up its bow instead. She plays an experimental note, then adjusts a peg minutely. “Let’s go,” she says, and leads us past a windrow of dead ambassadors and emissaries.

  Priorities, we have them: the thing in the crypt is still slurping up the spilled mana in the chapels around us, and it will rise sooner or later. Meanwhile Dr. Armstrong may be escaping and if we can arrest him there’s still some hope of regaining control of the situation. My earpiece is still dead, so I can’t check in with our support units and confirm that the Black Pharaoh has escaped. If he hasn’t, and the flood of eaters gets loose in Central London, there’s going to be carnage on an unimaginable scale. But the first law of any summoning is don’t raise what you can’t put down, and Mike’s not stupid: he’ll have set up a kill switch this time, even if he fucked up when he invited N’yar Lat-Hotep into the tent in the first place.

  “Cover me again,” Mo tells me, as she hangs a left toward the imposing doors at the back of ambassador alley. The doors are blocked by a handful of shamblers—cops in dress uniform, their eyes glowing and their protective wards burned out—which for some reason don’t want to let us past. Sucks to be them: while Mo is busy intimidating her borrowed instrument I open my imaginary maw and go snicker-snack. The eaters in vacant possession of their bodies are thin and flimsy eating, but they’re out of the way.

  When Mo glances over her shoulder I shrug: “After you.”

  Beyond the doors we find the abandoned temporary command post. A handful of bodies are sprawled on the floor and slumped at their stations, some of them still twitching. At the far end of the corridor the doors to the Chapter House stand ajar. Mo makes straight for them, a flat note of horror movie menace rising from her fiddle. It makes my hackles rise. She’s the final girl stalking the monster in the horror movie, only it’s all wrong: the monster is her mentor and department head, we’re doing this to protect an ancient evil that has successfully usurped the Crown (or at least taken it in check), the dead Kings of England are coming out to play and they don’t like modernity, and—

  My earpiece crackles just as I see Mike Armstrong step into view between the doors. “Hello, Bob,” he says through my earpiece, his tone apologetic. “Ruby—Seminole—Kriegspiel—Hatchet—execute Untergang.”

  Time stops. And when it restarts, Mo and Dr. Armstrong aren’t there.

  * * *

  “Something’s dashed wrong with our monarchy today, don’t you agree?” The Prime Minister is chillingly avuncular as a phalanx of police officers in gothic plate armor with raised basilisk guns screen his escape from Westminster Abbey.

  “Not my place to comment, sir.” Iris Carpenter speed-walks at his side, wincing slightly as her very expensive shoes pinch her toes. She’s desperate not to fall behind. A bolus of icy terror rises in her stomach, threatening to strangle what’s left of her sanity like a python. “What is that thing?”

  As a priestess of the Black Pharaoh, Iris has both the aptitude and training to feel the giant stack of bones watching them hungrily as it tries to claw its scattered body back together. It’s a self-assembling sculpture of charnel house matchsticks, nightmarish and ravenous from the passage of time.

  “The House of Windsor has been storing up mana for decades, and it’s finally overflowed its mortal container.” The PM sounds mildly irritated. “One possible low probability outcome, albeit regrettably damaging. Omelettes, cracked eggs, you know the proverb. Come along now.”

  He takes control of Iris’s peripheral nervous system and she finds herself a passenger in her own body, reaching out and involuntarily taking hold of his hand. Their police escort barely notices the curiously intimate gesture—He can block their perceptions at whim—but suddenly all the pains of middle age fall away and Iris can prance like an Olympic gymnast. (She’ll suffer in hospital afterward, might even end up in a wheelchair for life, but that’s better than being eaten by the nightmare clattering at their heels.)

  Her earpiece buzzes. She taps it with her free hand. “Yes?” She listens to a scared subordinate: “No, I’m with him right now, we’re on our way to Number Ten.” A red police SUV with PTU markings pulls up ahead and a guard holds the door open for them. Iris climbs in beside the PM and they move off with lights but no sirens. Whitehall, the main thoroughfare from Westminster Palace to Trafalgar Square, is empty of all traffic. It’s like a scene from a disaster movie, in the minutes before the bomb drops or the hours after the Z-virus escapes. There were crowds behind the barriers just two hours ago. They’re still here but they’re lying down motionless. Luminous green lights spiral hypnotically in their eyes like the colorful broodsacs of worm-parasitized snails. “Activate defense contingency red. Carpenter out.” She taps out of the call and sighs. “I hope that’s enough.”

  “SCORPION STARE won’t work against Arthur Pendragon, you know.”

  She looks at the PM, wide-eyed. He seems—she feels it in the angle of His head, the shape of the sucking void He wears in place of a face—almost amused. “Why ever not?” she demands, only slightly panicky.

  “The basilisk observer-effect transmutes carbon nuclei into silicon. It only affects a tiny fraction of them, and it plays fast and loose with the conservation of mass/energy—shortens the lifespan of this particular universe every time it happens, risking collapse of the false vacuum—but you see, there’s precious little carbon on the surface of a moldy old bone.” The void in the seat beside her grins like a skull. “Skeletons don’t burn.” The effect of transmuting a fraction of a percent of the carbon in a body to silicon is more like a bomb going off than fast fossilization. “It’ll clear the roadkill quite effectively, though.”

  This morning there were a third of a million spectators waiting alongside Whitehall for a last glimpse of their Queen. Then the eaters, attracted by the massive mana blowout when Lecter attacked her, moved in, looking for something to eat.

  The PM smacks His invisible lips, as if He, too, is hungry.

  “Isn’t that a rather extreme solution?”

  “Nonsense, you can never have too many human sacrifices.” The PM corrects Himself a moment later: “As long as one refrains from rendering the nutritive species extinct, of course.” The BMW pulls up outside the gates of Downing Street and the officers on duty leap to open the doors. “After you, my dear.”

  Iris stalks inside, the PM on her heels. “Where to?” she asks.

  “The back patio, I think.” His imaginary grin is toothy. “And thence to the Pyramid of the Sleeper.”

  Ten Downing Street shares a garden with the Chancellor’s residence at Number 12, sheltered and concealed from public view by high walls and security fences. There is an incongruous patio at the rear of the building, and Iris leads the PM out onto the flagstones overlooking the lawn, where the staff have placed the furniture from the chapel He established in the former Admiralty Wine Cellar.

  The PM snaps His fingers. “Robe up.” Iris dons her black silk surplice, then holds the PM’s own robes for Him as he slides his arms through the sleeves of his cassock, like an eminent surgeon preparing for the operating theater.

  “May I ask,” she begins, then falls silent, her lips painfully dry.

  “You may.” His grin is cadaverous.

  “Wh-what just happened?”

  “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” The faceless eminence adjusts His surplice. “Which in this case is attempting to back out of a done deal, which would be My assumption of office.”

  “Who—” Iris’s mind snaps to a conclusion with leg-breaking force. “Dr. Armstrong.”

  “Indeed.” The Black Pharaoh nods with terrible gravity.

  “That’s treason.” She pauses. “I assume you planned for it.”

  “Of course.” The head without a face turns toward her. “He’s not the only person playing games today, of course, but they are mostly accounted for. Nothing like a dynastic rupture to flush out the false courtiers, what? Be not afraid: your loyalty is recognized. But you are not Our only priestess. I have other clergy, of considerable power but less reliability.” The PM raises His left wrist, where a Rolex Daytona gleams incongruously. “One in particular is running late, but she should arrive any time now.” He gestures at the far side of the summoning grid laid out before the altar. “If you would be so good as to anchor the southern axis? Only until our guests arrive.”

  Iris pauses. “Who is she?”

  “My archpriestess. Vicky is the last of the anointed bloodline, unfortunately. I’m expecting her, along with her consorts, wife and husband.” The PM turns to the altar. It’s a plain slab of stone bearing certain ritual objects: a silver cup and an ivory wand with gold end caps. These are placed around an inlaid metal grid with a ribbon cable trailing toward a laptop on a cart nearby. The altar is centered on the patio inside a circle of steel inscribed with writing in an alien syllabary. The PM places a canvas roll on the altar, releases the ties that hold it closed, and unwraps a filleting knife; then he removes a fiber-tip pen that paints with silver conductive ink, and uses it to draw a diagram around the periphery of the summoning grid. “It is time for a reckoning! And then I shall assume my final form.”

  * * *

  I’m off-balance, fighting my way back to awareness through a wall of brain fog. The corridor crackles with sorcerous static that sets my teeth on edge. I stumble forward, catch my balance, wondering where everybody went. Then I realize: Mike used my command code to trigger a buried macro, something he left in my head last time he activated my oath of office. I don’t know what it was supposed to do, but it was obviously nothing good. Now he and Mo are missing and time has passed. I glance at my watch and see it’s been three minutes, which is an eternity in a sorcerous firefight. I open my mind’s eye wide and see eaters clustering outside the corridor. There’s precious little left to feed on in here apart from me, and it’d be like minnows trying to take down a megalodon. But like calls to like.

  The PM. This is all about the PM, of that I can be certain. And Continuity Operations. CO was the plan to preserve the Laundry and continue its core mission in event of a disastrous government initiative. It was CO—in the person of Mike Armstrong—that made a Faustian pact with the Black Pharaoh. So, obviously there was also a contingency plan to get rid of His Dread Majesty if things go too far, equally obviously Mike has now activated it … and the wheels are falling off, we’re in the middle of a magical singularity, Pete is trying to raise the fucking Queen as a vampire because it’s the lesser evil, and I last saw the PM evacuating in the direction of—

  Oh shit.

  I make my way through the Chapter House (currently hosting an undead dance party) and escape from the Abbey through a back entrance. The paving stones and neatly manicured lawn of St. Margaret’s Churchyard are all churned up, graves gaping open like empty sockets in a mandible denuded by a demonic dentist. They all want to join in the danse macabre.

  I hotfoot it in the direction of the Palace of Westminster, then hang a left past Parliament Square Garden and jog down Whitehall.