Daemons Are Forever

Fang and claw were no match for golden armour, and the Droods’ enhanced strength and speed made them a match for any monster. Harry wore the gold and fought alongside his people, striking down his enemies with brutal efficiency. Roger hung back from the main fighting, watching carefully. He was waiting. And when the first drones appeared with glowing swords clutched awkwardly in malformed hands, he was ready for them. He pointed a finger, and they exploded. He looked at them in a certain way, and blood burst from their mouths and eyes and ears. He spoke certain Words, and their rotting flesh melted and ran away down their bodies. Roger Morningstar wore his Infernal aspect openly, and even Harry couldn’t bear to look at him directly anymore.

For all the drones’ overwhelming numbers, without the radioactive swords they were no match for Drood armour and Hell magic. Harry and Roger took the point, and slowly but inexorably they fought their way out of the open square and headed for the tower. Every drone in the nest came ru

Harry stayed right at the head of his people, proving himself a magnificent fighter. The golden blades in his hands swept back and forth with supernatural speed, too fast for the unaided human eye to follow. Blood gushed over his gleaming chest and sprayed across his golden face mask, and just ran away, unable to get a grip. Drones attacked him singly and en masse, and never even slowed his advance. He had learned everything the Deathstalker could teach him about fighting with blades, and nothing could stop him now.

Roger strode along beside him, embracing his Infernal aspect, and the drones fell dead just for getting too close to him. Roger looked at last what he really was; a thing from the Pit walking arrogant and unleashed in the world of men, and poisoning it just by his presence. Wherever he looked, bodies exploded or burst into flames. Some he turned inside out and left to lie in the gutters. When he spoke, drones turned on themselves and tore each other apart.

He smiled a devilish smile; home at last.

The Droods forced their way along behind their leaders and killed everything that came within reach. The tower loomed up before them, a door opened at the base, and a whole new army of drones came staggering and lurching out, bearing hundreds of the glowing swords. Roger spoke a single dreadful Word, and they all exploded into flames, bright crimson fires that stank of blood and brimstone, and consumed the drones as fast as they could appear.

Harry put the bomb in place, set the timer for a comfortable margin, and then he and Roger led the way back through the ghoulville to the Merlin Glass. They all trooped through into the War Room, and I shut down the gateway. The bomb went off, X37 was destroyed, and everyone in the room went mad all over again. Harry and Roger hugged each other, Roger’s aspect now safely suppressed again. The Droods armoured down and clapped each other on the shoulder and on the back, and there were even some tears and kisses.

Victory can feel oh so fine. While it lasts.

Mr. Stab and the Sarjeant-at-Arms led their strike force into the Punjab, in India. A narrow fertile valley surrounded by mountains, supporting a small population; a perfect target for the Loathly Ones. The quiet settlement became a ghoulville and no one noticed. It was, after all, the kind of place where one tribe wouldn’t lower themselves to speak to another, and none of them would speak to outsiders because authority was never to be trusted. They might want you to pay taxes.

When the strike force passed through the Merlin Glass, the ghoulville turned out to be a collection of squat stone houses, half overgrown with slowly stirring vegetation, strangely mutated by the town’s other-dimensional energies. There were cracks in the bare stone ground that seemed to fall away forever, and the light was so bright it seemed to wash all the details out of everything.

It was a scene out of some bare, abstract hell, and Mr. Stab seemed quite at home there.

The drones were waiting again, but this time when they came surging forward to attack the invading force, the crowd seemed to split apart at the last moment, broken in two by an immovable object. They surged around this object, and did their best not to touch it, though they fell on the Sarjeant-at-Arms and the other Droods with all their usual ferocity. But they couldn’t touch Mr. Stab. Something about his no-longer-human nature actively appalled them. They couldn’t bear to be close to him.

So he just walked straight forward into the roiling mob and began killing with an elegant grace, using a long, shiny knife that just appeared in his hand out of nowhere. He walked unopposed through the surging drones and did awful, terrible things to them, and they couldn’t even touch him. Mr. Stab smiled slightly, possibly remembering other times…

The Sarjeant-at-Arms moved quickly in behind Mr. Stab, backing him up, and the strike force followed. The Sarjeant had never been one for swords and blades; he preferred to use the aspect granted him by the family to summon weapons into his waiting hands. All he had to do was gesture in a certain way, and a gun would pop into his hand, fully loaded. And the Sarjeant used these guns to shoot down any drone who showed up with a glowing sword, long before they could get close enough to do any damage. When a gun ran out of bullets, he just tossed it aside and summoned another. The rejected gun would disappear in midair, and there was never any shortage of replacements.

Mr. Stab sliced up the drones, and the Sarjeant mowed them down, and the strike force moved inexorably forward, towards the tower on the horizon. They almost made it look easy. Mr. Stab danced through the slaughter, killing with a touch, the Sarjeant emptied gun after gun, and the armoured Droods struck down anything that came within reach. They soon came to the base of the tower, and more drones appeared from within, bearing an assortment of entirely unfamiliar weapons. The Sarjeant-at-Arms took no chances and shot them all down from a distance. The few that couldn’t be stopped by bullets, protected by strange, glowing armours or energy fields, proved no problem for the smiling Mr. Stab.

The Sarjeant planted the bomb, set the timer, and then led his people safely back home. Another nest destroyed, another tower gone, with no losses or casualties. I started to relax. We’d just had a bad begi

Callan and the Blue Fairy took their strike force into a small settlement just north of San Francisco. Officially, the Blue Fairy was there as a volunteer to support Callan and watch his back. In practice, I’d had a quiet word with Callan and told him to watch the Blue Fairy. I still wasn’t ready to trust Blue yet.

Their ghoulville had once been an integral part of the Summer of Love in the sixties; a central point for more sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll magic than any reality could comfortably bear. In these more hard-headed, materialistic days, the small town of Lud’s Drum was just a haven for shaggy old hippy types, burnt-out casualties of the drugs war, and a whole industry had grown up devoted to trading on the town’s disreputable past. Only people like us still kept a watchful eye on Lud’s Drum, because dimensional barriers in and around the town had been dangerously weak ever since Timothy Leary dropped a heroic dose of LSD and peyote there and tried to perform a remote exorcism on the Pentagon. As a result, the Loathly Ones took the town with hardly an effort. Lud’s Drum was one of the few places where drones could walk around openly without being suspected. Now Lud’s Drum was a ghoulville, and one of the last remnants of the sixties dream was now a living nightmare.