Live and Let Drood

to put down, and still home in time for tea?”
    I looked at them both for a long moment. Something in the way they smiled at each other, in the way they held themselves…
    “Do I know you?” I said bluntly. “Have we met before? There is something very familiar about you.…”
    “Time for the social chitchat later,” the Regent said firmly. “Concentrate on the mission. We have a family to rescue. Everything else can wait.”
    “What about you?” said Molly. “Are you going to grab a really big gun out of midair, too?”
    “I have a few tricks up my sleeve,” the Regent said modestly.
    “It’s true,” said Patrick. “He does.”
    “I’m often amazed he has room in there for his arms,” said Diana.
    “Oh, hush, children,” said the Regent.
    He strode towards the Merlin Glass and its waiting silver tunnel, and Patrick and Diana fell quickly into step behind him, guns at the ready. Molly and I hurried after them, and I made a point of taking the lead. It was my Merlin Glass, my plan, and whatever we’d be facing, I was determined to face it first. Even if I didn’t have my armour anymore. I hefted Oath Breaker in my hand. The long ironwood staff still felt unnaturally solid and heavy, and I found that reassuring. I stepped carefully through the hovering Glass and into the silver tunnel, and there were the compass and the remote control, hovering on the air ahead. I moved forward and they drifted on before me, and step-by-step they led me through the silver tunnel between the worlds. Molly stuck close to my side, and the others stuck close behind us. This wasn’t somewhere you wanted to get lost.
    As the compass and remote moved on, worlds flashed and flickered into existence before and around us, come and gone in a moment, likewalking through a pack of shuffled playing cards, giving brief glimpses of other dimensions, other Earths, other Halls.
    There was Big Hall, an immense single structure that covered the entire grounds. Acres of stone walls under miles of roof with thousands of windows. The whole place just hummed with activity, with an army of people coming and going, hurrying about their unknown missions. They all wore golden armour. All kinds of flying machines filled the skies over Big Hall, landing and taking off from dozens of busy landing pads, scattered across the vast roof. They flashed back and forth in carefully conceived patterns, often coming within inches of one another but never once colliding, moving like the very best regulated clockwork. There was a real sense of purpose to it all, of everyone playing their part in some grand important scheme.
    Next came Small Hall. Drood Hall as it had once been back before the family grew so big we had to add on four more wings. Small Hall was just the original central building from Tudor times, with its black-and-white boarded frontage, heavy leaded-glass windows and jutting gabled roof. The grounds stretched away around the Hall, open and empty. No lake, no hedge Maze, no unicorns or gryphons, and no sign of Droods anywhere.
    Two small suns burnt hotly in a deep purple sky over Alien Hall. The air was unbearably hot and humid, dragging in the lungs, even for the few moments it took us to walk through it. Alien Hall was a huge, organic structure, seemingly as much grown as constructed, a strange shape made up of unnatural curves and shadowy hollows, its angles forming patterns that made no sense at all to human eyes. All over the smooth, shiny exterior swarmed golden-armoured creatures, almost human in shape but not in nature or in movement, as they darted in and out of hollow mouths in the side of the Hall. There was something of the insect in their behaviour, and the whole place had more the air of a hive than a home.
    A dim red sun in a grey sky shed a murky bloodred glare over Machine Hall. A massive steel cube with no doors or windows, just sharp projections and waving antennae, strange undulating patternsand endless flashing lights. Vehicles in solid primary shapes moved smoothly all around Machine Hall, in a single complex pattern. The few golden figures to be seen were quite clearly mechanical. The grounds were just empty stone flats stretching away; empty and without shape or purpose.
    And then there was Magic Hall. In this version, this Earth, Drood Hall was a castle in the grand old style, complete with towers and turrets and crenulated battlements. Flags and pennants flapped bravely in the gusting wind under a perfect