The regicide report, p.33
The Regicide Report,
p.33
The survey expedition found no sign whatsoever of the Archpriestess, the Professor, and the Countess. Nor did it find the clockwork band, the crystal coffins, Phibes’s Wurlitzer, or the boat that sails the River of Life. One can only assume that they made themselves scarce out of fear that the Black Pharaoh would hold them responsible for allowing themselves to be deceived by Mike Armstrong. They’ve got the means to check out for a few decades: I imagine we’ll hear from them again … eventually.
We returned home to find London in absolute chaos. Half the royal family and cabinet have been transformed into zombies (some would call this an improvement). King Arthur ran rampaging through Whitehall, tens of thousands of bystanders died—so of course the PM invoked the less well-exercised sections of the Civil Contingencies Act and effectively imposed martial law. He seconded all former SOE personnel to DEAT and required us to swear our oath of allegiance immediately. This had the handy side effect of putting him at the top of our chain of command (DEAT is part of the Prime Ministerial portfolio, after all) and flushed the last remaining members of Continuity Operations out of hiding. The row of skulls on the Tzompantli is expanding, and I know a good third of them by name. I make a point of saying “Hi” whenever I go past: do as you would be done by, is my new watch word.
Spoiler time:
Pete survived. He was badly burned when he ran outside the Abbey, but he’s a PHANG—they can heal from almost anything that doesn’t kill them outright if they have enough victims to drain. Needless to say, he’s not terribly chill about that—but Elinor still has her daddy, so I suspect he’ll come around eventually.
Derek and the OCCULUS crew all survived, mainly by not getting trodden on by Gashadokuro Arthur. Unfortunately some of the police and soldiers deployed on Whitehall and defending Downing Street were less lucky.
Iris also survived, to my intense regret.
The Black Pharaoh … didn’t I already imply He survived? Well yes, He did, and He was in an absolutely foul temper when He got home to Downing Street. When He gets mad He’s terrifying. He doesn’t foam at the mouth, scream, cry, and chew the carpet: He just goes very quiet and starts scribbling a little list of enemies while the sun turns black and a headsman’s wind blows through the corridors of power. (Memo to self: try to avoid ever appearing on the PM’s enemies list. Life insurance underwriters consider it grounds for denial of coverage.)
Mo recovered from her scorched fingertips, concussion, and borderline case of Krantzberg syndrome. (Eventually she cleared herself of eaters the same way I did, by digesting them before they could digest her.) But rather than transferring her to DEAT as a Senior Auditor, the PM put her on indefinite furlough and sent her to Birkbeck College, where she currently lectures on Arcane Musicology three days a week.
As for me …
The PM did assign me to DEAT, but I’ve been derated from active ops ever since we got home. I’ve been given two related jobs: to index and transcribe the contents of Angleton’s Memex, and to compile a classified history of the Laundry, using my predecessor’s and co-workers’ journals.
Which is what you’re reading right now.
Compiling a history of the former agency is a measuring-the-coastline-of-Great-Britain assignment. It’s fractal, and the closer you look at it the more details come into view. The Laundry has roots all the way back to the time of Gloriana. I’m not a trained historian although I’m playing catch-up, and it could easily take me the rest of my working career. Which, thanks to the whole Eater of Souls lark, could be a very long time indeed. But I’m not discontent, because I’m out of the firing line for the time being—maybe forever. Besides, in the course of studying part-time for a degree in the field I’ve been reading a lot of history lately—my secret goal is to gain an understanding of how autocracies develop—and it seems to me that a quiet archival job where I’m no threat to anybody is a really good thing to have right now.
The PM owns me but He doesn’t trust me. And the PM lives by the aphorism that one should keep one’s friends close and one’s enemies closer.
This is not a work of fiction, but a journeyman’s work of history assembled from firsthand accounts. There are loose ends and ambiguities and contradictions because unlike fiction, reality is under no obligation to make sense. Reality doesn’t deliver a sense of closure until everyone is dead and civilization has fallen. In fact, reality doesn’t have an end state that can be encompassed within the human perception of time. So I can’t tell you what happens next, or that everyone lives happily ever after (or dies unhappily ever after, for that matter) because it isn’t over yet.
What I can say is that this is how SOE Q-Division ended: not with a bang but a crisis followed by a reorg and too many committee meetings.
And here I sit, working from home with a cat snoring on my lap as I beat up a manual typewriter on the kitchen table and write these closing remarks. (By decree of the Prime Minister I am specifically forbidden from using any Turing-complete computing appliance, with the dubious exception of the Memex and a very old-fashioned cellphone: I think it’s meant to be some sort of punishment, but I’m really not feeling the pain.)
I may be out of favor and untrusted, but I’m still here and so is Mo, and nothing is trying to eat us, which is very important. He never discards a tool which, having once been useful, may prove useful in the future. So, with regards to my retirement from active ops:
Never say never.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book marks the end of a twenty-five-year-long project. The Laundry Files (a name pinned on it by editorial fiat once it passed three books) was only ever intended to be a single short comedy novel back in 1999. During that time, innumerable people have worked on it, starting with Paul Fraser, whose magazine of Scottish science fiction, Spectrum SF, serialized that first short novel in 2002–2003. He was followed by Marty Halpern, of American small press publisher Golden Gryphon, who acquired an extended version of The Atrocity Archives—and a sequel, The Jennifer Morgue—and who has stayed on as copy editor ever since (lending invaluable continuity to the project). Subsequent editors have included Ginjer Buchanan at Ace, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Tordotcom, and in the UK, Darren Nash, Bella Pagan, and Jenni Hill at Orbit—and their highly competent assistants. The entire series has been repped since the beginning by my agent, Caitlin Blasdell of Liza Dawson Associates. There have also been a host of test readers (too many to credit by name here)—and this doesn’t even scratch the surface of spin-off projects like the tabletop role-playing games and the various translations.
All errors, typos, continuity bloopers, and inconsistencies are of course mine—although I blame Bob for getting it wrong a lot of the time in the earlier books!
Thank you for reading.
ALSO BY CHARLES STROSS
Singularity Sky
Iron Sunrise
Accelerando
Glasshouse
Halting State
Saturn’s Children
Rule 34
Scratch Monkey
The Rapture of the Nerds (with Cory Doctorow)
Neptune’s Brood
THE MERCHANT PRINCES
The Bloodline Feud (comprising The Family Trade and The Hidden Family)
The Traders’ War (comprising The Clan Corporate and The Merchants’ War)
The Revolution Trade (comprising The Revolution Business and The Trade of Queens)
Empire Games
Dark State
Invisible Sun
THE LAUNDRY FILES
The Atrocity Archives
The Jennifer Morgue
The Fuller Memorandum
The Apocalypse Codex
The Rhesus Chart
The Annihilation Score
The Nightmare Stacks
The Delirium Brief
The Labyrinth Index
Dead Lies Dreaming
Escape from Yokai Land
Quantum of Nightmares
Season of Skulls
A Conventional Boy
STORY COLLECTIONS
Toast
Wireless
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLES STROSS is the author of the bestselling Merchant Princes series; the Laundry Files series; and several standalone novels, including Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Saturn’s Children. He has won three Hugo Awards, including one for the Laundry Files novella Equoid, published by Reactor. Born and raised in Leeds, England, he lives with his spouse in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a flat that is slightly older than the state of Texas. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Part One
Prologue
Death By Bureaucracy
Don’t Call Harry
All Good Dogs Go To Heaven
Part Two
Terminal Prognosis
Dead Queen Walking
A Coffin Built for Two
Eve of Destruction
Glass Coffin
Part Three
An Elder God Did It and Ran Away
Sword and Specter
The Matter of Britain
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Charles Stross
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE REGICIDE REPORT
Copyright © 2025 by Charles Stross
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Mike Heath
Cover design by Jess Kiley
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates / Tor Publishing Group
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-37386-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-37387-8 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250373878
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First Edition: 2026
1. To alfär eyes Leeds was the obvious capital of the British Empire: it’s right there in the middle of England, where else would you put a capital city?
2. The original Excalibur was gifted to the Kingdom of Sicily by Richard the Lionheart in the twelfth century. Its badly rusted remnants were recovered last year by a crack team of combat archaeologists from the British Museum. Subsequently it was melted down for scrap and remanufactured as a thaumically active component of several execution swords by BAe Systems under contract to the Post Office and Fujitsu. The Prime Minister is a fan of Henry VIII …
3. Photophobic Hemophagic Anagathic Neurotrophic Goons. I think. I can’t give you a hard and fast definition of the acronym because it’s classified.
1. Living avatar of N’yar Lat-Hotep, the Black Pharaoh, His Dread Majesty, Supreme Lord of Chaos, etc.
2. Let me give you an example:
Back in May 1982, during the Falklands Conflict (a few years before I was born), a Royal Navy nuclear submarine, HMS Conqueror, became the first (and hopefully only) nuclear-powered attack submarine to engage another warship with torpedoes. It fired on and sank the Argentinian heavy cruiser General Belgrano, which might or might not have been steaming toward the Falkland Islands (it was changing course hourly at the time). More than three hundred sailors died in the incident, and it made a big stink because if the General Belgrano had been outside the UK’s maritime exclusion zone around the islands at the time of the sinking, which had been ordered by Margaret Thatcher herself, that would have been illegal.
Anyway, one thing led to another and in due course a conspiracy theory emerged: that the Belgrano had not been heading into the exclusion zone at the time of the sinking, and that the relevant pages in the log book of HMS Conqueror had been destroyed to cover up a PM ordering the navy to commit a war crime.
To this day there are people who believe the conspiracy theory about the Iron Lady deliberately ordering a mass murder and then a coverup involving the murder of anti-nuclear activist Hilda Murrell, even though the truth was declassified thirty years after the event and is much stranger.
It turns out that the log book of the Conqueror was censored to cover up an entirely different incident two months after the Belgrano sinking! HMS Conqueror had been assigned to Operation BARMAID, a cold war spy caper in which the submarine snatched a Soviet-towed sonar array right off the back of a Polish spy trawler in Soviet territorial waters, using a top-secret cable-cutting device. The logbook was censored right afterward just in case a Soviet mole in the Civil Service found it in the archives. And this real explanation only came to light when Operation BARMAID was declassified thirty years later.
3. mana—occult power in a form that can be stored and used by a ritual practitioner—is a side effect of belief.
1. There are over 600 clocks in the building, some of them very fragile and valuable.
1. A unit of thaum flux named after Jack Parsons, American rocket scientist and noted Thelemite.
2. This being the UK, a snipe hunt would most likely result in Bob collecting a cage of pissed-off birds.
1. All while maintaining a perfect resting Botox face, possibly because, according to IMDb, it’s the actor’s only recorded appearance on celluloid.
2. Vulnavia settled Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln’s account in Shanghai in ’43—his poisoning is widely believed to have been carried out by the Japanese Secret Police at Hitler’s request, but Vulnavia knows better—alas, Brother Zhào Kōng’s safe was already empty by the time she picked its lock.
3. Vulnavia has argued in favor of selling it many times, for it is worth some single-digit millions of pounds and would go a long way toward restoring Phibes’s fortune, but to no avail.
1. The Concordes fly at night, with a crew of thaumaturges and a rack of equipment in the back. The job of the sorcerers is to open the gate for the plane to fly through; the mission is to provide photographic proof that the Sleeper has not yet awakened.
Charles Stross, The Regicide Report
