“What are you going to—” Pete is interrupted by another crash from the nave. A severed human head whizzes past his shoulder like a grisly cannonball, but he’s close enough to the exit to see that the doors are open. Sunlight spills into the lobby, bright as a magnesium flare. It leaves afterimage trails across his retinas. He pulls his scapular up and wraps it around his face, pulls his hands back into his sleeves (This is going to hurt, he realizes distantly), and ducks out into the killing light. The last thing he sees before he screws his eyes shut is the blocky silhouette of the Challenger 2 main battle tank parked across the square, turret traversed so that he’s staring straight down the barrel of its main gun.

  One step to the left, then two. During the third step he can smell his hair burning. It’s like walking in front of the open door of an electric arc furnace. OCCULUS Four is talking to someone else in his ear: “Main gun, three rounds rapid, shoot on my command—”

  Four, Pete thinks, and his hands and his face are on fire as he takes another step and falls sideways with his face to the wall, thinking, I’m not going to make it. Then his earpiece says “Shoot” and the world explodes.

  * * *

  All guns are loud, really, really loud: but modern tank guns are something else again. High velocity artillery is so loud that window panes shatter nearby, so loud that without active noise- canceling suppressors you’ll bleed from your ears. They’re so loud that half a city away they sound like a door slamming in your back yard. The tank now firing into the nave of Westminster Abbey makes my eyes water all the way down Whitehall. It’s firing APFSDS rounds, armor-piercing tungsten javelins that can punch through fifteen-centimeter-thick armor six kilometers away.

  The tank crew are using a smaller propellant charge (otherwise they could end up accidentally punching a hole right through the Abbey and several buildings on the other side), but they’re firing projectiles with a banishment circuit, which is a new twist. We have banishment rounds for pistol cartridges and rifles, but this is the first time I’ve heard of something that can banish a possessed battleship: I guess the powers that be wanted to have a solution ready for the next alfär invasion. One of those darts should put down even a high-end class four manifestation, by disrupting its summoning or by dumping as much energy into it as a shell from a First World War dreadnought, but—

  —And this is a big but—

  Gashadokuro King Arthur is not easily impressed.

  “Oh fuck me,” someone says over the radio. Meanwhile the tank recoils in a flare of smoke and flame, reloads and fires again, and the skeleton monster keeps on advancing. Stained glass rains down in all directions, followed by a trickle of slate roof tiles (the blast overpressure from twenty kilos of tungsten blowing through at Mach 5 doesn’t do an architectural heritage site any favors). But the banishment doesn’t work: whatever necromantic force animates that thing holds the bones together despite a shockwave that should liquidize it like a stick of chalk in a blender. Arthur is powered by the distilled mana of a dozen centuries of English monarchy, I realize: he’s not exactly a pushover.

  (It’s then that I notice a small black hump lying on the ground a short distance from the doorway, smoking slightly. A pair of silver-armored figures have ducked behind the nearest buttress, and are working their way toward him in preparation to rush in once the tank finishes firing. Good, I think, at least they’re trying. But it may be too little too late for Pete—)

  The tank takes another shot, and Arthur screams. It’s not sound as such, but a psychic blast of rage and hatred directed against everything that has come about since the fall of the Antonine Wall. He rises to his full height—he’s as tall as the tank is long—and marches toward the Challenger, which rumbles into reverse gear and backs away from the giant yokai. Its turret traverses to engage the target at point-blank range. Which is very bad, because APFSDS darts fired with a full propellant charge shed their enclosing sabots as they leave the gun barrel with enough force to kill somebody a hundred meters off-bore from the line of flight.

  “Blue One, pull back,” I hear over my headset. Evidently the tank commander isn’t going to argue because his driver hits the brakes, does the sort of funky turn-in-place you can do in a tank if you spin the tracks in opposite directions—the tank’s firing computer counter-rotates the turret at the same time, so it stays locked on the target, now directly behind it—then the driver floors the accelerator up Whitehall. He’s heading toward Parliament Square, which means the angry giant skeleton monster is now chasing a main battle tank toward me.

  The tank fires once more, a thunderclap so loud it rattles my helmet. That’s the third shot, and it doesn’t work. Gashadokuro King Arthur has a teeny-tiny pen knife clutched in his monstrous eighteen-fingered right hand and I realize what it is just as the self-propelled ossuary leaps forward and chops at the arse end of the tank with another copy of BAe Systems’ Excalibur. A large lump of composite armor falls off, and through the ringing in my ears I hear a grinding sound as the tank sheds its left track and rolls to a standstill, turned diagonally across Whitehall.

  “OCCULUS Four to Blue One, your target is King Arthur and he’s armed with an Excalibur which means he cannot be defeated in battle—”

  Someone else talks over them: “SCORPION STARE is going hot.” Things are now clearly going pear-shaped. The Challenger crew are immobilized, but they can’t bail out even if someone else captures the monster’s fancy. Then the snowdrifts of bodies along either side of the street catch fire and blaze like magnesium flares. While I’m blinking away the afterimages, Arthur casually walks toward the stricken tank (the turret of which is still traversing to keep a bead on him, although fuck knows what use it is if the heavy-duty banishment artillery isn’t working) and raises his sword. It’s sparkling with pinprick flashes as its high-carbon steel degrades, but that doesn’t stop him bringing the blade down on the barrel of the Challenger’s L30A1. Whereupon Excalibur slices through what is essentially a two-tonne pipe made of the same grade of steel as a nuclear reactor pressure vessel like it’s a stick of butter.

  “Fuck me,” someone says over the radio in a slack-jawed tone of terror as the Gashadokuro bends down, grabs hold of the tank’s hull, and lifts one-handed. Seventy-five tons of British Steel creaks and squeals, then crashes over onto its turret. An upside-down tank baking in the desert sun while a giant skeleton whacks on it with a magic sword is a sad and pathetic sight, and there’s nobody waiting in the wings to give this Voight-Kampff tortoise a happy ending. And now a thin trail of smoke rises from the rear of the tank because—yes, Arthur has penetrated one of the fuel tanks, exposing over a ton of diesel fuel to SCORPION STARE, so that a couple of seconds later it explodes violently.

  My view of what happens next is obscured for a few seconds because, firstly, the shockwave knocked me on my back and, secondly, Mhari’s merry men—or women, it’s hard to be sure when they’re all wearing head-to-toe titanium plate—are rushing past me like infantry racing to storm an enemy strongpoint. (Which I suppose they are.) One of them pauses in passing to pick me up one-handed and puts me back on my feet like I’m a tin soldier that’s toppled over. Then they race off to rejoin their team.

  Everything around me—the pavement, the buildings, the curled-up incinerated bodies with protruding bones to either side—glitters with Cerenkov-blue speckles of light. (Turns out there are trace amounts of carbon in pretty much everything: Who knew? I remember to keep my sword in its scabbard until it’s absolutely necessary to draw it.) My skin crawls from the thaum flux as I feel an awful hunger take hold.

  I notice a couple of alfär suits taking up positions behind an infantry fighting vehicle that’s clanked up from the direction of Scotland Yard and parked side-on to give them some cover. I can feel them doing something profoundly unpleasant and necromantic, but it’s directed at Art so I’m okay with that. An Apache gunship hovers over the South Bank, across the river, then unleashes a white contrail that swoops and dives toward the slavering revenant and impacts in a cloud of smoke and fire. The Gashadokuro emerges basically unscathed. And that’s the last of the artillery for now, because we’re trying to defend the heart of government from the Matter of Britain, and if Art’s proof against tank guns and Hellfire missiles it’s not immediately obvious how to escalate without blowing up London.

  Arthur rises to his full height and stretches. Judging by the wreckage of the tank, he’s got to be eight to ten meters tall. A steady stream of decrepit skeletal resupply elements emerge from St. Margaret’s Churchyard and lurch toward him. He keeps growing as he absorbs them. When he screams again I see that something glitters upon his frontmost skull—a crown, no, fuck, that’s the Imperial State Crown (and why the hell none of its nearly three thousand diamonds have exploded is a mystery: personally I blame Excalibur and its mystical Invulnerability Shield), and of course the bastard has pulled off the first successful theft of the British crown jewels since Colonel Blood three hundred and fifty years ago. Which is just the icing on the cake, isn’t it?

  “OCCULUS Four to Howard, do you copy?”

  I yawn: not with my jaw and my lungs but with my internal body image, the one that doesn’t reflect anything human, the thing I became after the ritual in the chapel under Brookwood Cemetery. I work my imaginary mandible in preparation to masticate, and I take a step toward Arthur, then another. (Chances of him coming to meet me at the scaffold: negligible.) His crown of skulls is looking around, as if it can smell the aroma of filled underpants wafting up the mall from Downing Street.

  “Howard here, moving in now,” I say.

  The PHANGs and their alfär support sorcerers are shooting at Arthur with no obvious effect, although it serves to get his attention. He swipes at them, but he, too, is ineffectual. PHANGs can move very fast indeed and they’ve got the advantage of range thanks to their L85 rifles. Arthur seems infuriated by the pinprick bullets, but other than walking toward them he doesn’t seem to know what to do with these mayfly adversaries. An inkling comes to mind: He’s not very smart, is he? He’s acting more like a superpowered eater than one of the dangerously clever revenants we normally expect to find at the high end of the power spectrum. Maybe spending one and a half thousand years in a box rots your cognitive functioning. I mean, he was a war leader once upon a time, wasn’t he? But he’s not acting like one today. (As I walk forward I’m furiously second-guessing myself: if I were walking in his bones I’d be sending in all my other Harries first, a skeleton wave attack to divide my enemy’s attention…)

  “OCCULUS Four to Howard, head for the gates, we have you covered.”

  All of this has taken much longer to describe than it actually takes in real life. Arthur advances faster than I can run: he covers half the distance from Westminster Abbey to the Banqueting Hall in less than five minutes, despite being under fire from all directions. Meanwhile I walk toward him, sword in hand. You’d think they could have found someone better suited to carry this thing, I’ve never held one of these pig-stickers before in my life. I feel oddly light-headed in the pink haze of gorgon light. Is my time up at last? There’s some shit you don’t get to walk away from. Finding myself carrying a sword to protect the ancient evil in Downing Street from the one foretold to return in Albion’s hour of greatest need is so far beyond irony that you need to add a new row to the periodic table in order to see it.

  So I do what comes naturally: I submerge my will beneath the dark and rising tide of the Eater of Souls, and fully embrace what I have become.

  * * *

  Michael Armstrong throws himself into the nightmarish tunnel between worlds, as if the hounds of hell are chasing him—and indeed, his squad of Harries is hot on his heels, with Dr. O’Brien trailing some way behind.

  It has been more than two decades since the last time Mike took to the field on active duty. He was a lot younger and stupider—and fitter—back when he partnered with Bob’s predecessor, Angleton. He has tried to keep in shape, but sixty years wears on a body even if you don’t have any serious health problems: he’s not sure he’s fast enough to make it through this temporary ghost road before it dissolves into the chaos of the Other Side. It’s vital that he succeeds, just as it’s important that Mo also makes it—but he can’t let her catch him before the end. And it all hinges on the other players making it to the rendezvous through their own tunnel. Timing is everything, and if Mike has miscalculated then it might set in train a series of events that could lead to the extinction of the human species.

  (The trigger for this desperate gambit was the Black Pharaoh’s little joke: naming the replacement for SOE Q-Division the Department for Existential Anthropic Threats. We do not add the H, He’d said, with a grisly little chuckle: Don’t want to frighten the flock. Which is plausible. But equally plausible: it’s because it’s not about protecting Humanity at all. Humanity has run its course if CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN can’t be averted; the thaumaturgic singularity is unavoidable. The Black Chamber in D.C. was taken over by the monsters decades ago, and Laundry active ops are clearly going the same way. Worst of all, the dutiful workers refuse to notice the smoke leaking around the door, or that the handle is too hot to touch. Mike is under no illusions: he’d be one of them, too, if he hadn’t paid attention to the advancing tremors and the memory blackouts and forced himself to stop using his powers before it was too late. Sometimes he can hear V-symbionts in his dreams, pleading with him to let them in.)

  So he rushes headlong through a tunnel walled in kaleidoscope patterns, like the intro sequence to an early episode of Doctor Who. It takes a sustained effort of will to keep his feet on the ground because gravity twists and shifts between surfaces erratically. He manages somehow, and also manages to keep control of his rebellious stomach, but it’s hard to do all that and keep running. And the gang of robotic gibbet cages and their eater-possessed skeletons march in lockstep behind.

  Dr. O’Brien—or whatever is wearing her skin these days—pounds after the peloton. But she’s not a spring chicken either, and she has the added handicap of three-inch heels. (Mike swapped his Oxfords for trainers right before their little chat: he’d known what was coming.) Her eyes may not glow with eaters like extradimensional Leucochloridium parasites, and she’s still carrying the spare violin (which is important to Mike: if they’re both in time his plan might work), but she’s hardly his friend right now. Her outrage at his betrayal was palpable, as it should be. She’ll try to stop him unless she realizes what he’s trying to do in time—but he couldn’t tell her, lest the PM has implanted buried commands that will detonate like mines if something triggers them.

  That’s always been the problem with the Laundry’s system of binding oaths: like the alfär web of geases it’s a hierarchy of delegated authority, and Mahogany Row isn’t even at the top. Once installed as Prime Minister, Fabian Everyman, the Black Pharaoh’s flesh puppet, was very much in charge—senior enough to override the Auditors and the Board of Control, vulnerable only to the root authority wielded by an eighty-five-year-old woman with no understanding of necromantic bindings. Now that the monarchy is in an indeterminate state there’s nothing to stop Him from performing a god-in-the-middle attack and swiping all the power of the Crown for Himself, rebinding the entire civil service and military to Him by oath, and assuming personal control of the nation. Then it’s just a matter of acquiring enough mana to reconnect with His greater self, and bingo: job done. N’yar Lat-Hotep will be fully incarnate on Earth—and it’s springtime for Elder Gods, winter for Humanity and Hope.

  Time’s up: the floor of the liminal tunnel between realities rises and then the roof disappears and he’s wheezing up an incline on the floor of a desert plateau, ascending toward a picket fence of grisly crucifixes that circles an immense step pyramid.

  “Lift me,” he commands in Old Enochian, and just as his knees lock up Harry scoops him up in a bridal carry and jogs tirelessly toward the steps. Seven more undead soldiers in steel cages ring him as they pass between the crucified guardians, creaking and wheezing against their bonds as they struggle to reach him: long-dead soldiers, immobilized to watch over the temple of the Sleeper.

  “You and you,” he addresses the two rearmost Harries, “delay but do not kill her,” indicating Dr. O’Brien, who is doggedly limping up the incline behind them. He doesn’t expect the eaters to do more than mildly irritate Mo—he saw the video of what she did to Harry 61—but they might delay her for a minute. And meanwhile, he’s gaining on her.

  His bearers start up the steps to the top of the pyramid. If he’s lucky, he’ll find the Phibes gang waiting for him in the cella of the temple. Hopefully they’ll have bought Lecter, now fully engorged with as much mana as could be drained from a million human souls. Even after wastefully spilling so much of it in Westminster Abbey, there should be plenty for the task ahead.

  One more summoning, one more double cross, and his job will be over.

  * * *

  Ice-cold hunger descends on me, as tranquil as the grave and as inevitable as glaciers. And I remember.

  Past lives: most people don’t have ’em. You can usually expose people who say they can remember their previous incarnations as confidence tricksters or delusional by using this one logic trick called the principle of mediocrity. If reincarnation is real, then who you are a reincarnation of is essentially random: you don’t get to choose your past life. So we can dismiss out of hand anyone who says they were Julius Caesar or Cleopatra. Famous people whose names have survived from antiquity are rare. The principle of mediocrity—the iron rule of statistics—dictates that in your past life you were probably a faceless agricultural laborer, factory worker, or domestic servant, and probably lived in China, India, or Africa during the nineteenth or twentieth century.