CHAPTER SIX

Dangerous Lab Interns

So I went off to pay a visit to the family Armourer. Bit of a dry old stick, but there’s nothing he doesn’t know about weapons, devices, and things that go boom, whether scientific or magical in nature. In the more than likely event of something going horribly wrong on my new mission, it was clear I was going to need all the serious weaponry I could get my hands on, if I was to protect the Soul of Albion from all comers.

I wanted a new gun. A big gun. A really, really big gun. With atomic bullets.

The family armoury is situated a decent distance beneath the west wing, set even deeper in the bedrock than the War Room. That way when (rather than if) the whole armoury finally blows itself to hell, it won’t take the rest of the Hall with it. The Armourer and his staff, geniuses one and all though they may be, and enthusiastic to a fault, have always had a tendency towards the kick it and see what happens school of scientific enquiry. They also have unlimited access to guns, grimoires, and unstable chemicals. I’m amazed this part of England is still here.

The present armoury is set up in what used to be the old wine cellars, behind vast and heavy blast-proof doors. Designed to keep things in, rather than out. The cellars are basically a long series of connected stone chambers, with bare plastered walls and curving ceilings, all but buried under a multicoloured spaghetti of tacked-up electrical wiring. The fluorescent lighting was a sometime thing, and the huge air-conditioning system grumbled constantly to itself. The stone chambers were full to bursting with the Armourer’s extended staff: researchers, expediters, mechanics, weaponeers, and human guinea pigs. (Someone had to test each new device. This was decided by a lottery among the staff, and the loser was the one who wasn’t smart enough to fix the outcome in advance.)

The armoury is always coming up with new weapons devised, constructed, and tested right here in the labs. Which is why the place is always so appallingly noisy. I stood by the closed blast-proof doors awhile, waiting for my ears to adjust to the din. Men and women with earnest, preoccupied faces bustled back and forth, giving their whole attention to the latest generation of deadly devices they were producing for agents to use in the field. And hopefully getting all the bugs out in advance. I could still remember the explosive whoopee cushion, which didn’t, and the utterly impenetrable arm-mounted force shield, which wasn’t. No one paid me any attention at all, but I was getting used to that.

Lights flared brightly, shadows danced, and lightning crawled all over one wall like electric ivy. Sharp chemical stinks fought it out with the gentler aromas of crushed herbs, while molten metal flowed sluggishly into ceramic moulds, and smoke drifted gently on the air from the latest unfortunate incident. The armoury didn’t have a first-aid box; it had its own adjoining hospital ward. A hell of a lot of people crowded around test benches and futuristic lab equipment, alchemical retorts and silver-bullet moulds, and of course the ubiquitous computers and chalked pentagrams. Most of these very busy people were cursing loudly and emphatically as they tried to persuade their latest projects to do what they were supposed to without exploding, melting down, or turning the experimenter into something small and fluffy. Somebody close to me reached for a handy lump hammer, and I decided to go somewhere else.

I strolled through the labs, keeping an eye out for the Armourer. Doorways opened in midair, giving brief glimpses of faraway places, and a test animal imploded. A desperate young intern chased through the labs, flailing away with a butterfly net, trying to catch an oversized eyeball with its own fluttering bat wings. I’m sure it had looked perfectly reasonable at the drafting stage. No one paid any attention to these little disruptions, except to jump just a little, absentmindedly, at the latest bang. Just another day, in the armoury. When you’re working at the cutting edges of devious thinking, you have to expect and allow for the occasional setback, along with regular stinks, spatial inversions, and the odd unexpected transformation. Everyone who worked in the armoury was a volunteer drawn from a long list of applications, carefully selected from those in the family who had clearly demonstrated they had far more brains than was good for them. (Often accompanied by an unhealthy curiosity and a complete lack of self-preservation instincts.)

(The really dangerous thinkers were either rapidly promoted to purely theoretical projects or sent to alternate dimensions and told not to come back till they’d calmed down.)

The current crop of interns looked like science nerds everywhere, all heavy spectacles and plastic pocket protectors, except that some of them wore pointy wizard’s hats as well. A lot of them were wearing T-shirts under their lab coats, bearing the legend I Blow Things Up, Therefore I Am, Even If Someone Else Suddenly Isn’t. Science nerd humour. They all looked very earnest and very committed, and if they survived long enough would eventually be promoted to the somewhat safer environs of the research and development labs. It did seem to me though, as I wandered through the chaos in search of the Armourer, that the old place held a lot more people and projects, along with a greater general sense of urgency, than I remembered from my last visit, ten years ago.

Two of the more brawny types were sparring with electrified brass knuckles, sparks crackling and spitting fiercely on the air as they swung and parried. One girl had her head stuck deep in a fish tank, proving she could now breathe underwater. Impressive, but I couldn’t help thinking the gaping rows of gills on her neck would be a bit of a giveaway in polite society. Not far away, an unfortunate young man had stopped proving he could now breathe fire, because it had given him hiccoughs. Unpredictable and highly inflammable hiccoughs. Someone led him away to put an asbestos bag over his head. I didn’t see why they couldn’t just stick his head in the fish tank, next to the girl.

And someone had blown up the firing range again. There’s always someone trying to break the record for biggest and most powerful handgun.

I finally spotted the Armourer up ahead, striding back and forth through the caverns, keeping a stern eye on everyone and everything. He paused here and there to dispense advice, encouragement, and the occasional clip on the ear, where necessary. The Armourer was strict but fair. I waited until he came back and settled at his usual testing bench, and then I slipped in beside him. He glanced briefly at me, sniffed loudly, and went back to what he was working on. It takes a lot to surprise the Armourer.

A tall, middle-aged man with far too much nervous energy, he wore a permanently stained white lab coat over a T-shirt saying Guns Don’t Kill People; I Kill People. Two shocks of tufty white hair jutted out over his ears below a bulging bald pate, and under bushy white eyebrows his eyes were a steely gray. His expression rarely changed from an habitual scowl, and while he had once been tall and imposing, he was now bent over by a pronounced stoop, legacy of so many years spent leaning over workbenches and lab projects that always needed fixing in a hurry. Or maybe just from ducking a lot. I sat beside him for a while, waiting for him to say something, but as always it was up to me to tear his attention away from his latest project.

"Hello, Armourer. Good to see you again. The old place seems very busy, just at the moment. Are we preparing for a war?"

He sniffed loudly again. "Always, boy. Always."

He plugged a thick electrical cable into a socket, tripped half a dozen switches, and then looked expectantly at a computer monitor wrapped in mistletoe and strings of garlic. Nothing happened. The Armourer hit the computer with a hammer, and I quickly took it away from him.