Live and Let Drood

not make my wishes clear and explicit? Let me sleep, sleep and dream, of better times.…
    “I need to know what happened here,” I said steadily. “I need to know what happened to the Hall and to my family and all the things that used to live here on the grounds.”
    They went away. A storm rose around the Hall, reaching out across the grounds…and when it was gone, so was everything else. Let me sleep, sleep and dream…till I forget.
    The last few gurgling sounds were almost unintelligible. Her body lost all shape and definition, washed away by falling waters, and her face sank back into the waterfall and was gone. The steam disappeared as the waters cooled, and the hazy mist slowly reestablished itself. Molly sniffed loudly.
    “Demon lady wailing for her human lover. Your family really does have a gift for messing up lives. Doesn’t it?”
    “You women always stick together,” I said.
    The conversation with the undine having proved rather less helpful than I’d hoped for, Molly and I walked on across the grounds, leaving the lake behind us and heading towards the small copse of beech trees. Not an area I’d ever approached by choice before. The grassy lawns blazed a brilliant green under our feet, and the sky was almost painfully blue. A perfect summer’s day. No clouds, no birds, not even the buzz of insects going about their business. The grounds were as still and silent as a graveyard. Someone or something had reached out and stripped the grounds of every living thing that should have been there.
    “Why didn’t our outer defences kick in automatically?” I said to distract myself. “I mean, this whole place is lousy with built-in protections. Robot guns, sonic weapons, nerve gasses, stroboscopic lights and hallucinogenic mists, and a whole bunch of things the Geneva Convention’snever even heard of. Not to mention all the magical protections, the shaped curses and invisible flying hexes…They couldn’t have been off-line; they weren’t linked to the other Hall’s Operations and War rooms.”
    “You’re not thinking it through,” said Molly. “The Hall, your Hall, disappeared the moment Alpha Red Alpha was activated. There was no detectable attack from outside, so your protections never knew anything was wrong till it was all over.”
    “All right, then, clever boots. What has happened to all the local wildlife? The gryphons and the unicorns? The birds and the bees?”
    “Your enemy must have boosted Alpha Red Alpha’s field when they activated it by remote control,” said Molly. “To make sure they didn’t miss any Droods who might be out and about in the grounds. So everything living here went…where the Hall went. It’s what I would have done.”
    I had to smile, just a little. “You don’t miss a trick, do you, when it comes to death and destruction?”
    “Years of practice,” Molly said blithely. “Eddie…why have we stopped here? I am looking around me and all I see is trees. Really quite boring trees.”
    I looked carefully around me. “We’re not alone here. It’s just…I haven’t called them yet. I’m going to have to ask you to trust me here, Molly. Trust me to know what I’m doing.”
    “Oh, that’s always dangerous,” said Molly. “Why are you looking so upset, Eddie?”
    “You don’t remember this part of the grounds, do you?” I said carefully. “We have been here before, in these trees.”
    “No,” said Molly, scowling around her. “Should I remember?”
    “Yes,” I said. “We came through here when we broke into the grounds together. This…is where the family keeps its scarecrows.”
    I called to them silently, reaching out through the authority still built into my torc, and one by one they materialised out of nowhere, appearing all around us. I knew some of them. Laura Lye, the water elemental assassin, also known as the Liquidator. She drowned threeDrood children before we brought her down. Mad Frankie Phantasm, who drifted through bedroom doors to murder innocents in their sleep. Roland the Headless Gunner, who should have stayed dead in Africa. And many more infamous names. One by one they blinked into existence, acknowledging the power I had over them as a Drood. Scarecrows, all of them, made from the bodies of our fallen enemies. Held back from the release of death to guard our grounds for us, forever and a day, or until they wore out.
    They formed circles and then rows around us, filling the copse of trees. They wore battered