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Ned and family walked through the door and out on to a balcony, one of more than a dozen that circled several floors all looking down over a large indoor training ground. Far below, hundreds of grey-tracksuited men were being barked at by a severe-looking Frenchman and a rotund, slightly ageing Italian who had great curling horns protruding from his head.
“Special Forces, don’t give me no-a rubbish. You couldn’t climb your-a way out of a can!”
Several deflated-looking operatives were struggling their way up an admittedly treacherous wall that the ancient half-satyr was playfully skipping across. To one side the Frenchman was demonstrating the easiest way to neutralise a nightmonger. The terrifying creature was a blur of blade-like fingers, but was soon made quite harmless when the instructor launched two weighted nets from a gas-powered machine that looked very much as though it had been designed on this side of the Veil.
“Couteau and Grandpa Tortellini!” exclaimed Ned with the first truly genuine smile he’d given in months.
“The greys are coming along nicely under their tutelage and Tinks has been having a whale of a time mixing our tech with theirs – fascinating results.”
“Tinks?!” grinned Ned. “Where is he?”
“Looking after your mouse, I should think. About half of the old troupe has joined us. The rest are still MIA, I’m afraid.”
“MIA?”
“Missing in action, Ned. You know as well as I do how bad things are out there.”
A horrible thought struck Ned: What about Lucy and George? If they were here, Lucy would have sensed him by now and George would have been hot on her heels, knocking down any number of walls or grey-suits to see his old ward. He didn’t need to ask – Benissimo spotted the look on his face immediately.
“George and Lucy are with the Viceroy. They’ve been delivering one of the old troupe, and I can’t tell you more than that, I’m afraid. Don’t worry – word’s been sent and I should think they’ll have threatened the nearest pilot by now and demanded passage back to the Nest.”
“Delivering one of the troupe? Who?”
“All I can tell you is that he’s a vital part of the plan – as are you, of course, Ned. And we have been trying to bring you in for a while now, as we have new intel that you need to hear. I needn’t mince my words, especially not with you three. The Darkening King is growing stronger by the day. George, Lucy, all of us are scrambling to work with our allies, and telling friend from foe has never been harder. Come on, let’s go to see the boffin – he’ll explain our situation in more detail.”
***
The boffin, known to Benissimo’s old troupe as “Tinks”, had been given a new laboratory to work in and it was to there that Benissimo and Mr Fox led the Armstrongs now. As Ned and his dad entered, they both went a little misty-eyed at what they saw. Ned and his father, both being Engineers – who had the power (when it was working, that is) to bend and manipulate atoms – had a different relationship with all things mechanical than most other people. Their powers hinged on understanding the structure of things, how they came together and worked, so that they could reimagine them into another form. And within these brightly lit walls were the most advanced examples of what modern-day science and technology had to offer, fused together with just a pinch or two of the Hidden’s own magic.
The lab was big enough to house an entire circus troupe along with its cars and lorries. It was also teeming with smartly dressed scientists in matching grey lab coats. They were all building and testing equipment, and all of the equipment was designed, from the ground up, to fight Darklings.
Traps, snares, laser-guided harpoons, listening devices, scanning equipment … and data. Lots and lots of data, pouring out of printers, to be pointed at and argued over incessantly by teams of bespectacled analysts. They weren’t all jossers, either. A good number of them were waist-height minutians, just like the Tinker, and no doubt, Ned guessed, refugees from the ill-fated city of Gearnish, now under the control of Barbarossa’s ghastly machine-mind, the Central Intelligence.
Ned gawped in wonder at a man clicking a device on his belt that made him turn invisible and visible again, with varying results. At one point his head disappeared while the rest of him stayed visible; at another he appeared to be floating off the ground with no legs. His dad, meanwhile, was mesmerised by an aged minutian who was talking to a flea. He wore a large trumpet-ended device on his ear, while the flea responded by hopping up and down on a minuscule sensor at its feet.
Everything had the touch of the Tinker to it, but the Tinker himself was nowhere to be seen.
“Where is he?” asked Ned’s mum, who, unlike her two “boys”, found the gadgets on display extraordinarily dull.
A contained explosion in a room off to the far corner was to be her clue. The closer they got, the less josser and more “Tinker” their surroundings became – reams of paper and blueprints stuck to the walls, shelves weighed down to breaking point, and a trail of spinning, whirring and bubbling devices on every single surface. Through a door they came to a great sprawling mess and at its centre was the genius who had made it.
“Well, bless my toolbox, if it isn’t the Armstrongs!”
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Tinks (#ulink_873b5505-2ef5-5b3b-8b6c-f2b1ceedcb7a)
e had the same unkempt whiskers, the same old lab coat heaving with screwdrivers, and he was the same old Tinker, though as far as Ned could tell he was in unusually high spirits, despite the burning something he was putting out on his desk.
“Hello, Tinks. Nice little set-up,” started Ned’s dad.
“Oh, indeed, Mr Armstrong, indeed. You never told me the jossers had such fantastic tech!”
“They’re a clever bunch, once you get used to them,” grinned Ned’s dad.
A now teary-eyed Tinker proceeded to shake Ned’s hand heartily and then gave his mum a rather elegant bow.
“The Armstrongs together – and here in our little home from home! You wait till the others hear about this. On second thoughts, I think I’ll tell them.”
Mr Fox patiently raised his eyes to the ceiling as the Tinker spoke into a watch on his wrist.
“Channel Alpha-niner, this is the big boff, over!” The little scientist was beaming now, though Ned sensed it had more to do with his watch than their arrival. “This thing is brilliant – so much quicker than a wind-modulator!”
“Big boff, over, this is the Beard. Can you please stop using this channel, Tinks. It’s for mission-only comms and Scraggs is fed up with being asked to bring you biscuits – OVER.”
Ned’s ears pricked excitedly. “The Beard” had to be Abigail, surely – the wonderful bearded lady of the old Circus of Marvels troupe. And if she was there, then her lump of a troll husband, Rocky, couldn’t be far away. How he’d missed them!
“This is a channel-wide announcement, over. That means you too, Tusky. The Arm—”
Before he could get to “strongs”, Benissimo clamped a hand over his mouth and brought down the full weight of a moustachioed twitch.
“Later, Tinks! They need to be brought up to speed.”
“Ah, right you are, boss.” Undeterred, the little man broke into another enthusiastic grin. “We’ll be wanting to fire up ‘Big Brother’ then.”
“Yes, gnome. Nowget on with it.”
“‘Blinking Incredible Gateway’, or ‘BIG’ brother (named it myself, as it happens), was devised to replace the Twelve’s ticker network that Barba stole.” Tinks was relishing the chance to show off to Ned and his dad, and pressed a button on his desk. A large monitor came down from the ceiling. “Live satellite feeds courtesy of Mr Fox here, and more than a hundred Farseers keep round-the-clock surveillance on just about everything. They’re neurologically, metaphysically and outright magically connected, through a network that spans the globe. We use ‘satter-light’ and the ‘interweb’ – josser tech, you know – to send and receive the data. It really is clever stuff. In some ways it’s an even better system, though I do miss the—”
“Hell’s teeth, Tinks! Just show them Russia, would you?”
A second later and they were greeted by a satellite image of Siberia in Russia, which was when Mr Fox took over.
“Our eyes in the sky monitor everything, and had been doing so for a good while before the Tinker’s ‘Hidden’ enhancements. We immediately noticed a sharp spike in activity around the same time your tickers went missing. Though of course back then we didn’t know what it was. The truth is …” At this Mr Fox paused, clearly uncomfortable with what he was about to admit. “Well, the truth is, back then we didn’t really know anything.”
A few button presses later and they saw countless orange lines leading to Siberia with a web of dots at its centre that covered hundreds of miles.
“The Darklings – they’re converging in the Siberian reserve,” breathed Ned’s mum.
“Indeed, ma’am. But why? You have other reserves – in the Americas, Asia and as far off as Australia – so why here? Why this one place?”
At the centre of the map, deep in the Siberian forest, was a large circular spot in black.
“This one area, large as it is, is also completely impenetrable to both our cameras and your Farseers. Apparently the tickers that Barbarossa has obtained not only keep a watchful eye but also scramble our signals. Benissimo and I – well, all of us – believe that that is where the creature is gathering himself. We have you and Ned to thank for that.”
“Excuse me?” said Ned’s dad defensively.
“You hurt the Darkening King, Terry, you and your son – when you broke Barba’s machine,” rumbled Benissimo.
Ned had dared to believe, in all their months of searching, that the Darkening King was wounded, that in some way when they’d set it free they’d also managed to hurt it. If Benissimo and Mr Fox were right, maybe there was still a chance, still a way to undo what Ned and his dad had put into motion.
“If what we believe to be the case is true,” continued Mr Fox, “Barbarossa won’t need an army when the creature rises. And yet huge quantities of metal and machinery have been flooding into the area from Gearnish. A great part of those consignments has been the ticker soldiers we’ve heard reports of. Which means that we will be facing not one army but two.”
Mr Fox paused for effect and the Tinker’s face turned red. His people had unwittingly created a machine in the Central Intelligence that had not just strengthened Barbarossa and his Demons’ forces but also doubled their ranks. Ned had only had to face one at the circus encampment and he shuddered at the memory of it.
“In any case, the Darklings that have managed to break free from their own reservations have for the first time let the world sleep soundly. Sticking to the shadows and dark places, they’ve quietly, slowly made their way to Siberia and the dark zone you see now.”
“But why? Why any army at all? Surely Barba and that creature don’t need them?” puzzled Ned.
Benissimo’s face lit up.
“And that is exactly the point, pup! Why? Because they do need those armies, desperately – isn’t it obvious? Until the Darkening King is fully restored there is still a weakness, a chink, a nook, a cranny that we can use to burrow through and defeat him!”
“Well then, what are you waiting for?!” said Ned’s dad. “If he’s weak and you know where he is, why wait? Why give him the chance?”
“Tinks, dig up the reports,” ordered Benissimo.
The screen filled with a stream of photos – by the looks of it, of mostly military personnel.
“Andrei Galkin, thirty-two. Spetsnaz and best in class, only survivor of a mission into the Siberian taiga. Currently on leave due to emotional trauma,” explained Mr Fox. “When we questioned him, all he could mutter was ‘magic and monsters’. The poor man was scared out of his wits. Not long after, we sent in a team of our greys. This time there were no survivors, though one of our operative’s bodies was discovered some weeks later on the outskirts of the forest. This footage was retrieved from his headcam.”
Ned and his family watched in ashen-faced silence. Even in low light, the video was shocking. At the centre of a clearing and towering over the forest’s canopy was a fortress. At its foot and along its parapets and walkways were hundreds, if not thousands, of Darklings. As poor as the picture was, the multitude of creatures made the metal structure look as if it was alive, a living breathing “thing”, and when its main gate opened, they saw them, bright and shimmering with reflections – an army of metallic tickers, man-sized and cold, pouring out and into the forest.
“I could go on, but I think the images are clear enough. Barbarossa has built his creature a castle and surrounded himself with an army to protect it while it grows strong. There is no clear way in, not without incurring extreme casualties.”
“Bene, if there’s a battle to be fought, surely we must fight it?” urged Ned’s dad.
As horrific as the idea was, Ned couldn’t help but agree. Surely any price was worth paying if it could stop the creature from rising.
“The battle will be fought, Terry, but we aren’t ready,” explained Benissimo. “At-lan was originally devised to rid us of the Darkening King and, as involved as you were in the latter part of its construction, Terry, we haven’t the resources or time to rebuild it. Barba had been making its components in secret for months before he took you. We believe there are but weeks now till he rises.”
“H-how do you know?!” stammered Ned.
“Sur-jan, the Demon you went to see – he’s one of several. There are those amongst them that fear the creature’s return as much as we do, maybe more. After all, they know what he’s actually capable of.”
And at this Ned’s dad became visibly ruffled.
“Well, if your new pals here hadn’t stormed in when they did, we’d know a lot more than we do now!”
“Calm yourself, Terry. Another Demon of his kind has made contact with us. About two months ago messages started to arrive, though the informant won’t give us his name. We don’t know who he is or where he’s hiding, but he claims to be a Demon at any rate. If what he’s told us is true, there is a way to destroy the Darkening King but it must be done at the precise moment he forms.”
Mr Fox turned to the Armstrongs.
“The BBB represent just about every government body there is, whether said body knows it or not. We are preparing to launch a full-scale attack, with Benissimo and his allies’ help of course, but an outright assault is pointless unless we can actually destroy the creature once we get past its defences.”
“And how exactly, Mr Fox, do we do that?” asked Olivia Armstrong.
Mr Fox looked to the Tinker and then to Benissimo. Benissimo nodded.
“We have no idea, though if this informant is to be trusted, there is someone who might.”
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Who? What? Why? (#ulink_118d65b5-0e09-52d4-905b-4755f55b144e)
ell?” urged Ned’s mum.
“Yes, who? Who knows?” reiterated his dad.
Mr Fox looked rather awkward. It was clearly a state which he was not unaccustomed to being in.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”
At this point both of Ned’s parents, and in truth Ned himself, became more than a little irate.
“You don’t trust us?!” said Olivia Armstrong in a dangerously quiet voice. “Well, of all the … First of all, you blow our mission moments before it comes good, then you kidnap us, then you lead us round your base and show us all this intel and now – if I’m hearing you right – you aren’t going to actually tell us anything USEFUL!”
Olivia Armstrong was seething and Ned had no doubt that she was about to fly into another arm-bashing tirade.
“Madam, first of all I would like to remind you that, though Benissimo is indeed in charge of this operation, you are standing in the base that I built, and I am not one for emotional outbursts, unless coming directly from my superiors in the BBB, of which there are only two. More importantly, however, I am unable to tell you who holds the knowledge, because your unkillable friend here has not actually told me.”
Ned’s mum quietened. “Oh.”
Benissimo signalled to Tinks and the network’s screen turned black.
“It’s not ideal, but the more people that are kept in the dark, the wider the chink in my brother’s armour. Atticus is still trying to manipulate the Twelve and its pinstripes, though they’re beginning to see through his lies, and the Hidden are more vulnerable than ever. We are on a knife edge – everything, and I do mean everything, depends on the secrecy of our operation. Barbarossa’s arrogance is our best weapon, and the weaker he believes us to be, the better our chances. The Hidden have split into untrusting pockets, barely threaded together by their leaders. I’ve spent months reaching out to them in secret and few of them know what the plan of attack will be once they’re called.”
“Then who actually does know?” asked Ned.
“Me,” said Benissimo.
At that Mr Fox looked slightly, if not openly, irritated.
Benissimo continued, “I leave tonight, and if this informant of ours is right, we will have ourselves a route to victory.”
“And what are we supposed to do till you come back?” asked Ned’s dad.
“Nothing, old friend, for now. When I return, if I return, I will – and not for the first time – be asking you all for everything.”
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Little to Do about Nothing (#ulink_53a91dfd-fa5d-59d0-baa6-7b74d24f7e38)
s a young man Terrence Armstrong had dedicated his life to fighting evil, always by Benissimo’s side and always in the thick of the fight. And though fatherhood changes a man and Terry’s one true focus was now the safety of his family, the bond between him and the ancient Ringmaster was still as strong as it was deep. His wife had proved to be an equally capable fighter and the consummate spy. She had managed over the course of nearly all of Ned’s life to remain completely hidden from the “Hidden” and to outwit both Barbarossa and every friendly operative working for the Twelve that had been tasked with finding her.
It was fitting then that Benissimo should need to talk to them. He did not, however, appear to want or need to talk to Ned, which as it turned out made Ned feel both furious and useless in equal measure.
He sat alone in a stark room; it had a bed and a sidelight, a sink at one end and no windows. It was far more like a cell than anything else. The Tinker had returned Whiskers to him, with a small but extremely useful upgrade. A tracking device had been welded into his casing. From now on, no matter where Ned was, as long as his trusty mouse was with him, the Tinker could use his network’s “eyes in the sky” to locate him, which had the dual effect of making Ned feel both safe and irritated. What if he didn’t want to be found?
