Everything is wrong. The helicopters have left. There’s a plume of smoke rising from the South Bank, just visible over the gothic roofline of parliament. There were crowds lining the temporary barriers along the side of the road but they’re taking a dirt nap. A skin-crawling sensation of being watched tells me all I need to know. I tap my earpiece again—and now that Mike isn’t jamming it, it works. “Howard here, sitrep anybody.”

  “Sir? OCCULUS FOUR, Blue Three here—I have eyes on you. Sir, you need to get out of sight now, there’s a General Activation Alert for SCORPION STARE on Whitehall and Westminster Abbey, three-minute warning. Uh, two minutes, forty-second warning and mark.”

  The rise and fall of air raid sirens bleeds through my earpiece. SCORPION STARE is the network of basilisk cameras that protects the center of our larger cities against incursions by Kaiju, Shoggoths, unicorns, and other legendary nightmares; also anti-N’yar Lat-Hotep demonstrations and attempts to overthrow the New Management by force. It’s only been activated once before, during the alfär invasion that leveled the center of Leeds and killed twenty thousand civilians. Firing it up in Central London is a very bad sign: it means mass casualties are acceptable collateral damage in the face of whatever’s about to hit us.

  “Did the PM come this way?” I ask, with a catch in my breath—I’m not used to jogging.

  “Principal was evac’d to Downing Street five minutes ago. You are six hundred meters away.”

  “Can you”—gasp—“notify SCORPION Commander that I’m on my way and need rolling cover?”

  “On it.”

  The bodies behind the barriers to either side of Whitehall are stirring. A quick side-eye tells me that they’re possessed. Behind me something unspeakable is awakening in Westminster Abbey, preparing to emerge into the daylight for the first time in over a thousand years. I pass a windrow of dead civilians, then I’m about halfway to Downing Street when a big red incident command truck rumbles up beside me and somebody throws the door open. “Agent HOWARD, your ride’s here,” says my earpiece.

  I grab the proffered hand gratefully and a soldier in everything-old-is-new-again steel plate armor lifts me bodily into the front passenger seat. “Rolling,” says the voice in my ear and we lurch into motion before I can grab my seat belt.

  Less than a minute later we screech to a halt outside the security gates. I fumble the door open and jump down. “How long have I got?”

  “SCORPION STARE goes live in thirty seconds but you are now outside the automatic engagement zone.”

  Thank fuck, I think. “Where is that?”

  “Westminster Abbey, Parliament Square, and everything within a two-hundred-meter radius of the Abbey. It’s all going to be a permissive fire area in … twenty seconds.”

  “Right, well I’ll just”—the police on gate duty are opening the barrier and waving—“talk to the—” Fuck. And the gate is closing again. It only opened to allow a short figure clad from toe to helm in polished steel armor to step out in front of me. “What?”

  “Bob.” I still do a slight reflexive cringe at her more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone.

  “Mhari? Sitrep?”

  Mhari—my last ex, before I met Mo—is now Baroness Karnstein, chair of the House of Lords Select Committee on Sanguinary Affairs, vampire-in-chief to the New Management. And she clatters ominously as she walks. She’s clad head to toe in new pattern fluted gothic plate armor (titanium is protective against basilisk weapons, unlike high-carbon steel). Worn over a silicone body stocking it’s enough to keep a PHANG from cooking off in full daylight. Mind you, she’s got to be melting in all that metal, even though it’s a mild spring morning with a London overcast. “I’m Gold Commander today.” She walks past me and opens the side door of the OCCULUS truck. “Get in the truck, His Majesty says this is the big one.”

  She gestures toward the park at the far end of the road and I hear a clattering and rattling as a couple of platoons of Harries do their herky-jerky march toward us, like a macabre reenactment of one of the Terminator movies. Behind them there’s a rumble of diesel engines as a couple of Challenger 2s grind into position, tank crews buttoned up inside as their turrets traverse to enfilade Whitehall.

  “The big what, exactly?” I follow Mhari to the back of the command truck, which is full of PHANGs in armor instead of the normal SAS headbangers. Hell, maybe the Artists Rifles are vampires these days, I mean, why not? They’re all suited and booted in white plate, armed to the teeth and ready to rip arms and legs off whoever we’re waiting for. The only reassuring thing is that they’re not wearing alfär-pattern plate—and on second thought that’s not very reassuring either. The alfär host are mostly posted overseas these days, but the New Management’s pointy-eared version of the Wagner Group are all about occult firepower, and I would find a squadron of heavy equoid cavalry kind of reassuring right now.

  “Off with the monkey suit, Bob.” I shrug out of my jacket, pull off my tie, and a team of unarmored PHANGs in black silicone gimp suits close in and strip me down like a pit crew attacking a Formula One car during a tire stop.

  “The big nemesis.” Mhari shrugs—it’s amazing how much expressive mobility there is in a well-fitted suit of armor. “We’re up against a resurrected state level actor. Lecter bled the Queen’s mana and spilled a load, thinning the walls of the world with a royal sacrifice, and it’s given the oldest king in the crypt a jump start. Our job is to stop him biting the heads off what’s left of the royal family and Parliament, while the boss gets on the hotline to his greater avatar, who is still stuck in the land of the dead, and diff-merges him so that he can adopt his final form.”

  “Whu—” I nearly swallow my tongue. “I thought this was a double cross op? By Mike?”

  “Leave it for the after-action report.” Someone hands me a great big sword with a squared-off point, sheathed in a fiberglass scabbard embossed with the portcullis-and-crown symbol of Parliament. “Sign there, Bob.” Mhari points to a very official-looking form on a clipboard. “Not every day someone hands you a national treasure.”

  “The fuck.” I sign. “It says this is Excalibur 2.0. But I thought that’s what the Leader of the House was carrying? That giant skeleton-thing grabbed it—”

  “Miracle of modern metallurgy.” I swear I can hear Mhari grimace inside her tin can. “There wasn’t enough of the original left uncorroded to forge a new sword so they melted it down and made two or three, or maybe a dozen, replacement Excaliburs. There’s enough iron from the original in it to make a Minimum Viable Product—they’re all entangled, so as long as only one is being wielded at a time it works, kind of like a preemptively multitasking magic sword—unlike the one in the Abbey this one is ultra-low carbon, made from high-grade maraging steel.”

  The penny drops as I take the sword. “The risen dead are proof against SCORPION STARE but Arthur’s sword isn’t…”

  “Listen to me, Bob.” Mhari briefs me while one of the other vampires shoves me legs-first into what feels like a wetsuit. There’s a dress stand with a suit of armor waiting behind them and I’ll bet it’s my size. “The psychic shock would kill a human or a PHANG so you’re our best shot at decapitating Arthur, King of the Britons. The rest of us are just along for the ride. And to hold off the rampaging horde of eaters, of course, we don’t have time for you to deal with them first.”

  “You want me to chop King Arthur’s head off. With Excalibur.”

  “Yes, Bob, it’s traditional. That is not dead which can eternal lie, and he’s been down for more than a thousand years at this point. There’s a linear feeding circuit embedded in the blade, you can suck his soul out through it like a blood smoothie. It’s an executioner’s sword, after all. Once you’re armored up we’ll get you into position outside the Banqueting House, then lure him along Whitehall so you can get the job done.”

  I shake my head and lift my other leg so they can get me strapped in. They beheaded Charles I outside the Banqueting House on Whitehall (it was part of the Palace of Whitehall, before it burned), so I suppose this is optimal for sorcerous sympathetic amplification. Best place to end a royal threat to Parliament. There’s probably a summoning diagram buried under the tarmac, configured as a strange attractor for dead kings. The irony keeps me absorbed while my support crew strap on greaves and pauldrons and cuirass and gauntlets and a whole bunch of other bits with names I haven’t learned. The helmet is opaque but once I get my head inside it one of my attendants switches on the high-resolution displays for each eye. “Testing, testing, can you hear me?” says Mhari.

  “You’re loud and clear.”

  “Okay, then we’re good to go.” I look round and Mhari gives me a thumbs-up as my attendant hooks Excalibur’s scabbard to the back shell of my cuirass, and we move off down Whitehall for a minute or two. Then the truck stops and the door opens onto a scene from hell.

  * * *

  A stone door opens beneath a lintel of grinning skulls, framed by Doric columns of carefully bundled human femurs to either side. Their binding mortar is decorated with tiny, polished babies’ teeth.

  A face peers out from behind the door, flashlight raised: then the Archpriestess steps aside to make room for the Countess, who coughs delicately. Evidently nobody has dusted down here for decades.

  “What is it?” buzzes the Professor, catching up from the rear.

  “It appears to be”—Mrożek coughs again—“a dream of catacombs.”

  Behind her, a walking skeleton (which has no throat to clear) taps her shoulder for attention.

  “What is—oh.” It proffers a locked violin case; another skeleton offers her a bow. Their payloads delivered, both skeletons collapse. “Yes, all right.”

  “After me,” Phibes grates, hunching past his two ladies. He enters the darkened tunnel and raises a hand to spill eldritch corpse-light across walls and floor.

  The tunnel is dry and musty. Its roof is barrel-vaulted, rising just above head height at its middle; the walls consist of interlocking stacked bones, neatly organized by size. Anton’s clockwork bandsmen wait to one side, their papier-mâché faces glowing faintly from the lich-light of the eaters that control them. Faint screams and wails of terror echo down the stairwell and through the crypts, attenuated by distance, but the charnel passageway itself is silent as a long-undisturbed grave.

  “Our lord summons us yonder,” Victoria intones, a trifle too portentously to be entirely serious (although as His Archpriestess it is her duty to issue overblown exhortations to the faithful). “Let us hasten to join Him!”

  “Yes, let us!” Vulnavia rapturously assents, hamming it up a trifle excessively.

  “Forward,” buzzes the Professor. And together they hasten down the corridor of bones, the jazz band from hell marching behind: never looking back, inattentive to the rolling fogbank of unreality that laps at their heels.

  (It is a good thing for the Phibes gang that they are traveling through the ghost roads—having entered via a summoning circle Phibes furtively inscribed inside one of the pipe cases of the Abbey’s main organ and energized with mana bled from the souls of the congregation. Behind them the Abbey has descended into what disaster responders call a “non-survivable situation.” Even practitioners of their caliber would be hard-pressed to escape the feral ghosts of the pre-Tudor kings that stalk the nave above them, but the energized circle enabled Phibes to punch a hole through the walls of the world and slither behind the scenes. So now they follow Victoria’s inexorable draw toward the object of her veneration, the god who restored her to life nearly a century ago.)

  They walk along the charnel passage for a subjective eternity, although in truth the journey takes less than a quarter of an hour. Vulnavia cradles the violin case nervously: it’s lined with protective wards and thoroughly grounded with cold iron bands, but she can still feel the thing inside it banging against the walls like an angry hornet, eager to escape and sting the souls of any survivors. Doubtless Lecter will blame her for his confinement when he is released at their destination; she can only hope that the one who summons them is strong enough to restrain him. Ahead of her, Victoria hurries like a woman enthralled, eager to meet the Prime Minister again.

  They pass side tunnels branching off into darkness and mist that seems to smoke as if reality itself is on fire.

  They cross the floor of a great cavern overlaid in curiously rounded white cobbles that, after a minute, Vulnavia realizes are skulls; the pillars of long bones that support the ceiling are sheathed in rib cages. If she were more modern media literate she would draw comparisons to the work of H. R. Giger, but as things stand she merely sees it as gauche and excessively florid necromantic wealth signaling, using bones instead of gold plate.

  The tunnel continues, then widens and arches over an underground river for a while. Its waters are turbid and barely seem to move. A punt is tied up alongside the wharf, its pole neatly laid atop it, and Vulnavia thinks she has seen its like before. “Our onward travel is assured,” blats Anton, “for our appointment in Samarra.”

  Victoria chuckles mordantly. “None of us is going to die today, dear.”

  “Of course not.” Professor Phibes pats her hand proprietorially, setting Vulnavia’s teeth on edge with jealousy: “You already got that out of the way a century ago, my love.”

  The Countess holds her counsel. Lecter, imprisoned within her violin case, bangs against the interior in some agitation: perhaps his food coma is waning, or he apprehends what awaits him (if a necromantic instrument possessed by the hungry ghost of a monster can be said to apprehend much of anything except blood and pain).

  The tunnel begins to slope upward, leaving behind the underground river. As it does so the floor evens out—it is now paved with close-set flags of limestone—and the curtain walls of bone disappear, replaced by mundane masonry. They finally come to an exit framed by stone pillars, doorless, beneath a nighttime sky dominated by a thin blue smoke-haze of stars.

  The air here is dry and thin, as if they stand atop an ancient plateau on a dying world. Ahead of them rises a monstrous step pyramid. The platform on top is dominated by a windowless stone temple, not dissimilar to the Parthenon of Athens, only scaled for the use of giants. Behind them a circle of stakes bearing grisly human sacrifices surrounds the pyramid: mummified corpses that will provide the eaters that guard this sacred space with physical bodies to use when they awaken to defend it from the unworthy.

  Victoria raises her left hand, rotates her wrist in a strange, circular motion, then utters a phrase in Old Enochian. The guardians show no sign of life, but Vulnavia feels their acknowledgment: they are recognized, and the Archpriestess and her retinue are permitted to approach the sanctuary unmolested.

  Anton, characteristically, can’t pass up an opportunity to hear his own voice. “Behold the temple of many doors, guarded by the Sleeper,” he buzzes. “Let us ascend, my loves, and meet our Lord within.”

  The temple has many doors, although only one is manifest at any time—it connects the dream roads, or it can be connected elsewhere, depending on the rite and the elder god in whose name it is invoked. It’s a giant gateway router serving nightmares as a service. They have been here before, when Phibes and Vulnavia ferried Victoria’s crystal coffin along the sacred River of Life. But back in the 1920s, the walls between the worlds had been impenetrable. A lower population, no computers, and determined efforts to suppress public belief in magic had effectively locked His Dread Majesty out of the human world. You can’t accommodate a tyrannosaur in a chicken coop, after all.

  Things are different today, and the walls are nearly down. A minor avatar of the Black Pharaoh has been awake and at large for a couple of centuries, but until quite recently He could have been mistaken for just another prestidigitator, a music hall conjuror and magical fraud. Now He’s the Prime Minister, gathering power to Himself in an exponentiating avalanche of necromantic puissance: but He’s still barely the smallest sliver of His Dark Majesty, the eldritch trickster-god who reigned over predynastic Upper Egypt millennia before the pyramid-building pharaohs. He and His ilk are the human-recognizable incarnations of much older patterns, egregores that parasitize sophont species and metabolize their faith. The instance of the Black Pharaoh who reigns here is not in contact with the one who rules modern London—but has the full complement of knowledge and power, lacking only the mana to fully transmigrate into the human world.

  It takes the soul-stuff reaped from millions of sacrifices to force open a dream road from this chilly plateau to the realm of human life of sufficient diameter to accommodate a god. And so Countess Mrożek cradles her unquiet instrument, engorged with the raw, distilled belief of sixty years of British monarchy, and walking between her wife and their sometime lover she makes her way up the staircase, nerving herself for the ritual to come.

  THE MATTER OF BRITAIN

  Mo is in the passage leading to the Cloisters when Dr. Armstrong touches his headset and utters a command that chills her to the bone: “Hello, Bob: Ruby—Seminole—Kriegspiel—Hatchet—execute Untergang.”

  When she glances round her husband is frozen in mid-stride, his mouth hanging gormlessly open, as if he was frozen in the act of speaking. A posse of breakdancing skeletons are also frozen in mid-caper behind him. They break apart for real as she channels her frustration through the borrowed violin and sucks the eaters right out of their bones. Then she turns back to the Senior Auditor: “What have you done?”

  “Nothing irreversible,” he says mildly. “We need to talk. In private.”

  He turns and walks through the doors of the Chapter House. Mo follows, warily.

  The Chapter House is a large octagonal room, with a vaulted stone roof fanning out from a central pillar. Stained glass windows fill the upper half of each gothic arch above wooden wall panels painted with scenes of the apocalypse. The King’s Great Council met here in the mid-thirteenth century, and a century later the House of Commons used it as a debating chamber. It is, to put it mildly, steeped in history.