The Senior Auditor has inscribed a great ward around the perimeter, loaded with power so concentrated that it makes Mo’s skin crawl. The magic circle is guarded by a dozen Harries stationed around its perimeter, their chromed exoskeletons gleaming in the multicolored light from the windows. They bear an unsettling resemblance to gibbets, if gibbet cages were equipped with loudspeakers and marched around in public to proclaim the king’s anger. And in the middle of the great circle Dr. Armstrong has installed a steel containment grid, much like the one around the royal sarcophagus in the nave.

  “I suppose you’re wondering what the big plan is, what I’m trying to achieve,” he says. He looks slightly embarrassed, like a sixty-year-old schoolboy caught with his hand in the sweet jar. As he talks he crosses the room to stand behind the magic circle, next to a mobile equipment rack that is wired to the grid. Its blinkenlights are aflicker with the network activity of a cluster of computers harnessed to run his summoning firmware. “I honestly didn’t bring you here to listen to me deliver a villain monologue. But I don’t expect to survive long enough to explain myself to the inevitable board of inquiry and somebody needs to bear witness, so it might as well be you, Dominque.”

  “I suppose you know this is all going to end in tears? And it’s no good telling you there’s still time to repent?” Mo side-eyes the corners of the room, the hungry eaters trapped in their motorized steel cages, the carnage outside: “He’ll call it treason, you know.”

  “Of course He will. And He’d be absolutely right.” Dr. Armstrong smiles sadly. “I never expected the New Management to get this far when I cut the deal. Was it only last year? No, year before…? Well, time flies. I only activated GOD GAME INDIGO and PLAN TITANIC because we were in desperate straits, the Sleeper’s cult followers had got their teeth into the cabinet, we had been purged and the survivors were being hounded—”

  “I was there, Michael,” she interrupts him. “Why don’t you get to the—”

  “No, I need you to listen.” Dr. Armstrong is never irate and seldom does vehement, but he’s perilously close to both right now. “Bear witness to my testimony, all right? Please?”

  Mo ostentatiously checks her watch. “I suppose so,” she says through gritted teeth.

  “We had Fabian on ice, thanks to you. We had Iris and most of his leading clergy in Camp Sunshine and other detention centers. But when you’re fighting a war on multiple fronts you only have to lose a battle on one of them to eventually lose the entire war. And that’s what happened in Leeds. Can’t sweep losing a major city under the rug, so then the elected government got involved and thought they were in charge of things, and Schiller’s mob moved in and you know the rest. Most of it, anyway.”

  Mo nods. Keep talking, she thinks, not daring to raise her violin or try to stiff him with a subtle geas—Mike is, or was, stronger than she is, Mike was the best of the best, and he probably still is, and he was always a planner with a counter-move at the ready—

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks. “I mean, you can still shut this down and let me arrange a deal.”

  “I don’t think I can,” he says sadly. “Once you let the camel’s nose inside the tent it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the camel follows. And we let the whole dromedary in. It’s an institutional failure going all the way back to the 1920s. Over in the States the Nazgûl went the whole hog, enslaving nonhuman entities and using them as proxies for large-scale occult operations, but then they succumbed to regulatory capture. If you employ demons eventually you can’t operate without them, and it’s a short step to being run by them. We tried to avoid that—told ourselves we weren’t that stupid—but we were kidding ourselves. Dr. Angleton, the previous Eater of Souls, should have been a red flag, but nobody upstairs was listening. What could one alien intelligence do? So we starved it and kept it chained up in the basement—and now look at us.”

  “Michael, you don’t need to—”

  “Oh, but I do.” He rolls his shoulders as if shedding the weight of ages. “What do you think I’m trying to do here?” he asks, changing direction.

  “You’re trying to rug-pull the New Management,” she says. “Obviously.”

  “Ah, but how am I going to rug-pull an elder god?”

  “You—” Her eyes narrow as she adjusts her grip on the violin, her fingers slippery with fear-sweat. “You planned for this. Sooner or later N’yar Lat-Hotep was bound to make a move against the royal family, wasn’t He? I mean, the Prime Minister is not the ultimate power in the kingdom, and He wouldn’t put up with playing second string forever. He’d want to add the Crown’s power to His own, use it to reunite with His greater avatar and become the first of the Elder Gods to successfully immanentize in our world. So you set up a plan to derail Him when the time came. Hence retrieving Lecter and feeding him the royal mana in return for … for what?”

  (She’s desperately afraid she knows the answer already, but she has to hear it from the horse’s mouth.)

  “Lecter is no friend of the Black Pharaoh,” Dr. Armstrong comments. “Meanwhile, since he drained the Queen and the Church popped her in a warded box to save her, nobody in the agency is bound by their oath of allegiance to the Crown right now. Not me, not you, not Harry over there, not Bob—how does it feel to have free will again?”

  “I don’t feel any different, but then I’m not planning on bringing down the government!” she scolds him. “I mean, why are you doing this? You must have killed thousands! It goes against everything you stood for!”

  He shakes his head. “We’re at war. Worse, we already nearly lost the war: you just didn’t notice. Look at the roster of Active Ops, never mind External Assets, and tell me, how many of us are still human?”

  “Brains—”

  “Doesn’t count, he was badly injured two years ago and is sight-impaired: also, he was tech support.”

  “Derek? Pete? Mhari?” She racks her brain: “Yarisol? Vik?”

  Dr. Armstrong gives her a slow clap: “Congratulations! Vikram Choudhury is still human. Only he isn’t engaged in Active Ops, is he? For the rest, you just named four PHANGs, and one of them is an alfär battle mage at that. You”—he points at her—“I’m afraid you don’t count. You and your husband both remember being human, but you banish demons and turn invisible at will, and Bob is bound to the Eater of Souls the way Fabian Everyman is bound to the Black Pharaoh. The organization is the problem now, not the solution. We lost control the same way the Black Chamber lost control—one tiny and perfectly reasonable step at a time.”

  He gestures at the equipment rack, and Mo notices that his right hand is shaking slightly. “As of last month, 70 percent of Active Ops personnel had lost their humanity, one way or another. Even if you don’t count Residual Human Resources, the figure is over 50 percent. If you include those alfär who we’ve bound to service then it’s over 85 percent. Thanks to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN thinning the walls, thaumic resonance is so much more efficient that it’s trivial to accidentally wreak summoning algorithms or cast spells, as the ignorant put it, in the privacy of your skull. So more and more people are coming down with K syndrome, or metahuman associated dementia—same thing, different label. Those who don’t generally go PHANG, with a handful of gorgons on the side: there’s no coming back to humanity from that. Anyway, the writing has been crawling up the wall in flaming runes for months.

  “If His Ghastliness succeeds in merging with His greater self, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN will run to completion and humanity is doomed. We’ve got to put a stop to it in order to save humanity. But the PM will absolutely not allow that to happen if He can prevent it because it’ll cripple Him.”

  Armstrong rests his hand, palm down, on the instrument rack. “So you see, it comes down to a matter of priorities: humanity, or duty? And I choose humanity.”

  Mo sends him a hard stare. “Even though you’re dying of K syndrome?”

  The Senior Auditor nods convulsively. “Correct! Especially now, because when better? As Dr. Johnson put it, if a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Speaking from experience, he was absolutely right. If the progression isn’t stopped, if we arrive at the magical singularity, nobody’s going to survive. Everyone will be infested with eaters, K syndrome parasites or V-symbionts or worse—rarer and deadlier species of extradimensional brain worm. Even the non-adept, the ignorant, the innumerate, the muggles as the young kids call them these days. We’re facing a species-level extinction threat, and so”—he snaps the fingers of his left hand, twice—“it’s time to dance or die.”

  He walks toward the summoning grid in the middle of the room, and Mo instinctively raises her borrowed violin. The eight Harries turn their skulls toward her, green-glowing spirals visible in their eye sockets. She should disengage, she knows, but her former director has just delivered a classic villain set-piece monologue. It’s clearly a setup—he’s setting her up to play her part in some scenario he hasn’t fully briefed her on, which is infuriating. And while he’s not completely wrong, he’s misguided and possibly cognitively impaired from the eaters chewing on his gray matter. He seems to be ignoring the risk that the Black Pharaoh will take a grisly revenge on humanity if they foil His ascent to full godhood, or to the other threats from outside the UK—from the Mouthpiece of Cthulhu in the west, to the Servants of Chernobog in the east, the King in Yellow in lost Carcosa, and the other, more liminal horrors from which the Elder Gods themselves are fleeing.

  Mo has witnessed an Ice Giant eating another version of Earth, orbited by a moon engraved with the likeness of Adolf Hitler. She’s heard Bob’s description of a temple on a pyramid on a dead planet in a galaxy where the stars are dying. She has no doubt that there are worse things than the Black Pharaoh; things like the entity at Nether Stowe House that threw down with Him and lost; like the Host, and the dreaming eggs, and the Sleeper in the Pyramid. And it’s clear to her in this moment that the PM represents a ghastly, but lesser, evil.

  So as Dr. Armstrong’s grid opens a dream road to who-knows-where, and the Harries start advancing, Mo throws herself forward—and the chase is on.

  * * *

  The Reverend Peter Russell is having a very bad day.

  This isn’t the first time he’s been dragged into a combat situation, but he’s not really an active operations kind of guy. He’s terrified half out of his skin—so scared, in fact, that his incisors keep dropping and retracting, alternately aroused by the scent of blood and so frightened they’re crawling back into his skull. He’s a vicar first and a vampire second, and he’s so far outside his comfort zone right now that he’ll need a passport stamp and a cavity search to get back in.

  The choir are all dead or unconscious, bleeding from ears and eyes. Corpses clad in mostly decayed cerements clambered out of their graves and turned the nave into an undead mosh pit, but then Mo (who he has known since university, godmother to his daughter and so on) came over all uncanny and eldritch. He felt the wind of her malice pass him by, like a predatory tiger that has for some reason decided he is not her prey and has instead focused its attention on the lesser eaters ahead. And then there’s Bob, who is not his normal amusingly cynical nerdish self but a grand beast out of Revelations, a full body Leatherface mask worn by some great and evil thing. Pete—a vampire, remember—feels very small and timid in their presence but does his best to conceal it. And then Bob and Mo make for the Chapter House.

  Pete, who is still shaking with terror at his old friends’ transformations, barely hesitates before he clambers over the bodies in the choir to check on the Queen’s chrome and crystal coffin. Which is sealed safely shut with Her Maj inside, awaiting a dubious revival, and is there enough air for her? Is she even still breathing? Will he have to donate blood for her, or is she going to need less willing donors? There’s no FAQ for this stuff and he’s desperately afraid he may have skipped over a few vital steps in the middle of the chaos. “Fuck,” he whispers under his breath, racking his brain for whatever he needs to remember about the protocol he’s supposed to follow if present at a monarch’s deathbed. It really calls for absolution, which is a job for the Archbishop, but if he’s in the Abbey he’s probably one of the walking dead by now. Pete may be the only ordained clergyman available to do the job.

  He’s trying to figure out how to work the controls on the coffin lift so that he can send Her Majesty down to the crypt when he feels a chill run up and down his spine. Without willing it, he turns to face the side door leading down to the catacombs. The door is open again, and something horrid is coming up the stairs.

  Skeletons aren’t just coat racks for flesh suits: in every human culture they serve as a symbol of mortality. They usually signify death (because duh), but are also frequently harbingers of doom, reapers of golden fields (black robe optional), and walking nightmares that portend starvation, war, horror, and revenge.

  The thing crawling out of the crypt is one of the latter persuasion—most clearly related to the Japanese yokai known as Gashadokuro, a gigantic skeletonoid assembled from the crumbling bones of two score tyrants. A king is a hereditary military dictator, entitled to rule by the law of bloody-handed conquest, and the monarchs who lie below Westminster Abbey are some of the most brutal mass murderers in British history. Their ancient bones are gray and mold-encrusted, half-rotten and porous with age, but they jostle and cling together with a restless parody of life, grinding and meshing in a necromantic gear train.

  The skeleton monster stretches up as it emerges from the vault, then rises, first two, then three, then four meters, until only the nave of the church is tall enough to overtop it. It walks on femurs bundled together from the shanks of dead royalty, the stained glass windows casting bloodstained shadows across its many-bladed scapula. It has several arms of various lengths, some with as many as three elbows and two hands all tipped with yellowing talons, which it scrapes along the stone pillars, using them as a whetstone for its many claws.

  The royal Gashadokuro looks in every direction at once, using a capital cluster of crania. Four dead monarchs surveil the quarters of the Abbey with their green-glowing death gaze while a fifth skull, rotted almost to a featureless lichen-encrusted stub, stares down at the sarcophagus of Queen Elizabeth the Second. Skulls have no musculature with which to convey expressions, but Pete senses a vast and airy malevolence emanating from the frontmost skull. This ancient head of state is puissant and bears absolutely no affection for his successors. Before the Norman conquest England was another realm, and before England became a nation it was a handful of precursor kingdoms. It was Sussex, and Essex, and Wessex, and the Danelaw, and other realms beside. Before any of these, before the Normans and the Vikings and the Saxons and Angles, it was the Roman province of Britannia. And it was Britannia that Arthur sought to reunite and rule, and fuck all those barbarian invaders who came later.

  Pete finds himself staring up at the hostile personification of pre-Norman monarchy, illuminated by a malice so intense that it feels as if his skin is crisping in the noonday sun. The monster leans over the catafalque, extends a three-meter-long arm with talons like spearheads, pulls back momentarily, then stabs at him.

  But Pete isn’t there anymore. Pete has the reflexes and strength of a PHANG, unlike the undead tower of calcium that is still learning to coordinate its seven limbs and five heads. He leaps over the coffin, somersaults past the drooling revenant of a Lord Chief Justice, and dives under the cheap seats tapping his earpiece. “Dr. Russell here, Code Red, Code Red! A giant skeleton monster is loose in the Abbey! Help, anyone, what should I do?”

  Time seems to slow as the monster slams into the royal seats with a crash. It turns, searching for him. Pete’s hair is on end and emitting crackling blue sparks from the backwash of mana sloshing around in the Gashadokuro’s wake. His earpiece crackles: “Dr. Russell, please respond.”

  “Still alive,” he gasps, belly-crawling at speed beneath a row of seats occupied by corpses. “It came from the crypt where they store the royal bones and it’s hunting me—”

  There’s a deafening crash as an oak pew older than the United States goes flying overhead. King Arthur (or the thing wearing his skull as a crown) is taking out his ire on the occupants of this heretic church led by a foreign queen.

  “Still here,” Pete adds, rolling under the next row of seats. “Can’t go outside, it’s daylight and this thing’s between me and the crypt. Please advise—”

  A new voice cuts in. “OCCULUS Four here, can you lure it toward the main entrance in the west front? We can take it from there.”

  “I’ll try.” Pete grits his teeth and crawls rapidly until he comes to a tangle of fallen bodies, soul-sucked vessels ridden by now-banished eaters. There are skeletons in the nave—they were skeletons, he realizes: they were attacking the survivors as they fled, but now they’re fallen apart as piles of disarticulated bones, then joined together to form mounds and clumps that ooze toward Arthur’s enormous rib cage like slime molds migrating toward a collective fruiting body. Arthur, Pete realizes, is a skeleton Katamari—every time he comes into contact with a bone it’s absorbed into the growing Gashadokuro. God only knows what will happen if it gets out of the church and staggers across the burial ground outside.

  Pete is still terrified but now he has a goal and, truth be told, he’s more frightened of the thing with five heads than he is of the scorching daystar that waits outside. So he ducks out from beneath the chairs and dashes toward the columned vestibule.

  “If you’re wearing a robe or gown pull it over your head and hands as soon as you get outside, then turn left, take five steps, and crouch down facing the wall. Duck and cover like it’s a nuclear attack. We’ll get you out before you burn too badly to transfuse,” says OCCULUS Four. Telling a vampire to step out into the noonday sunlight is madness and it’s a symptom of how stressed Pete is that it doesn’t register with him: Truck-kun could roar up and banish him to Isekai heaven right now and he’d just be grateful it’s not the vengeful spirit of Arthur Pendragon, who is hot on his heels and gaining ground.