With the armour on I look like a living statue, golden and glorious, with no joints or moving parts and not a weak spot anywhere in its whole smooth, gleaming surface. There aren’t even any eye or breathing holes in the golden mask that covers my face. I don’t need them. While I wear it, the armour is me. It’s a second skin, insulating me from a dangerous world.

Looking through the mask, I could now clearly see the huge demon dog guarding the back door to Dr. Dee’s. Night dark, big as a bus, and bulging with muscles, it sprawled across the cobbled square, glaring suspiciously about it with a flat brutal face and flaring hellfire eyes. It was gnawing lazily on a human thighbone that still had some meat left on it. More bones lay scattered before the dog, broken open to get at the marrow. I had a fleeting but very real temptation to grab one of the bones, throw it, and shout Fetch! just to see what would happen. But I rose above it. I am, after all, a professional.

I walked right up to the demon dog, and it couldn’t see or hear or smell me. Which was just as well, really. I wasn’t looking for a fight. Not with anything that big and infernally nasty, anyway. I eased past the dog, careful not to touch it. The armour does have its limitations. I studied the locked back door. Very old, very intricate, very secure. Piece of cake. I reached through my golden side with my golden hand, easy as plunging my hand into water, and took out the Hand of Glory I’d been sent by the family Armourer, just for this mission. The Hand of Glory is a human hand cut off a hanged man right after he’s died, and then treated in certain unpleasant ways so that the fingers become candles. Light these candles, in the right way and with the right Words, and the Hand of Glory can open any lock, reveal any secret. The family makes these awful things out of the bodies of our fallen enemies. We do other things with the bodies too, really quite appalling things. Just another reason not to get us mad at you.

I lit the candles and subvocalised the Words, and the demon dog raised its blunt head and sniffed suspiciously at the still air. I froze, and the dog slowly lowered its brutal head again. The lock had already opened itself, so I pushed the door gently inwards. The dog didn’t even look around. I eased inside and pulled the door softly shut behind me. It locked itself again, and I relaxed a little. I could probably take a demon dog, with my armour, but I didn’t feel like testing that probably unless I absolutely had to. Demon dogs are trained to go for the soul.

I tucked the Hand of Glory away and studied my new surroundings. Dr. Dee’s was dark and gloomy, and the bare stone walls of the hallway ran with damp and other fluids. There were rusted iron grilles in the bare stone floor, to carry them away. I headed forward, and it was like walking into a slaughterhouse of the soul. This was a place where bad things happened on a regular basis. A place where really bad things happening was just business as usual.

I moved silently down the long stone hallway, reached the blunt corner at the end, and emerged into a cavernous hall filled with row upon row of boxlike cages, each just big enough to hold one man, or woman, or child. The bars of the cages were solid silver, as were the heavy shackles that held their prisoners secure. The only light came from a great iron brazier at the far end of the hall, glowing bloodred in the gloom around the long-handled instruments of instruction that the brazier was heating. I moved steadily down the narrow central aisle between the two rows of cages, carefully not looking to the left or to the right. There were no innocents here. These were the possessed, Hell’s playthings, brought here to be freed of their burden. One way or another.

Most of them couldn’t see me, so they didn’t bother to put on an act. But one dark hulking figure raised its mutilated head and stared right at me with eyes that glowed as golden as my armour. It spoke to me, and I shuddered at the sound. Its voice was like an angel with syphilis, like a rose with a cancer, like a bride with teeth in her vagina. It promised me things, wonderful awful things, if only I would set it free. I kept on walking. It laughed softly in the darkness behind me, like a small child.

Following the layout I’d memorised earlier, I moved on up a floor into the residential part of the building, where recovering patients were coaxed back to sanity. Everywhere I looked I could see ghost images of hidden defence systems, ready to spring into action at just the hint of an intruder. Only my armour prevented Dr. Dee’s security from setting off any number of alarms and retributions. There were cameras everywhere, of course, including infrared, and they were tied into the holy-water sprinkler system, but my armour redefines the word stealth. No one sees me unless I want them to.

Soon enough I came to the wall connecting Dr. Dee’s to Saint Baphomet’s, and all I had to do was take out the portable door the Armourer had sent me and slap it against the wall. It spread quickly out to form a perfectly normal-looking door complete with brass handle. I opened it, stepped through into the next building, and then peeled the door off the wall. It shrank quickly back into a small rubbery ball of something far too complicated for me to understand, and I put it back in my pocket. My family has the best toys. All I had to do then was follow the layout of Saint Baphomet’s I’d memorised to take me straight to Mr. President’s room.

(No, not the one you’re thinking of. Definitely not. You must trust me when I tell you these things.)

The hospice was all bright lights and walls painted in cheerful colours, but the magical protections were just as strong as Dr. Dee’s. There were cameras everywhere, whirring officiously to themselves as they turned back and forth, and motion detectors blinked redly at ankle height. But I was walking unseen, the ghost in the machine. No one sees us—unless we want them to. The air smelt of disinfectant and something rotten not quite buried under expensive flowery scent.

I made my way unchallenged up to the ward on the top floor, where they kept all the really interesting patients, and padded silently down the starkly lit corridor, pausing now and again to peek in through some of the windows in the doors I passed, just out of curiosity. Well, wouldn’t you? I’d already been briefed on what everyone was in here for, and I just had to take a quick look.

A celebrity chef with his own television show was in to have a tattoo removed the hard way. Seems the tattooist’s hand had slipped at just the wrong moment while inking an ancient Chinese phrase, turning a simple invocation for good luck into an open invocation for really bad luck. As a result, the chef’s famous West End restaurant had burned down during an outbreak of food poisoning. He’d had explosive diarrhea during his live show, all his best recipes had turned up on the Net, and he’d been struck by lightning seventeen times. In his own kitchen. You don’t shift a tattoo like that with just a laser, so they were flaying his back an inch at a time to get rid of it. The famous chef was currently lying facedown on his bed, sobbing like a baby. Next time he’d settle for Mom, or his favourite football team.

Next door to him, a woman was suffering from a severe lack of gravity. The staff had had to strap her to the bed to keep her from floating away. Her long hair streamed upwards. The next room held some poor unfortunate who’d made the mistake of walking into a séance with a really open mind, and now he was possessed by a thousand and one demons. He ricocheted around his room in his straitjacket, screaming in tongues as he bounced off the rubber walls, while the demons fought it out for dominance. They didn’t seem to care that they were making a right mess of their host in the process. He really should have gone to Dr. Dee’s. You get what you pay for.