Live and Let Drood

gathering. They’ll descend on us in their hordes to search for loot and overlooked secrets. But I can’t leave, Molly. Not yet. I have to know.…”
    “Of course you do,” said Molly. “Every clue the enemy left behind is ammunition we can use to identify and then nail the bastards who did this.”
    I had to smile at her. “There was a time the Droods were your enemies. Not that long ago, you would have been overjoyed by all this. You’d have danced on these ruins.…”
    “Danced, hell,” said Molly. “I’d have hiked up my skirts and pissed on them, singing hallelujah. But that was then; this is now. Everything changed when I met you. Now an attack on your family is an attack on you. And no one messes with my man and gets away with it.”
    She struck a witch’s pose, and her hands moved through a sinuous series of magical gestures. A slow presence gathered on the air around us and all the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. A sudden cold wind came gusting down the hallway, disturbing the ashes. Molly spokea single Word, almost too much for human vocal cords to bear, and the echoes of it trembled and shuddered all through the enclosed space.
    “There,” said Molly, relaxing just a little. “I’ve put some temporary shields in place: a No See zone over the Hall and serious avoidance spells around the perimeter. Low-level stuff, easily broken by anyone who knows what they’re looking for, but enough to buy us some time, so we can make a proper investigation. Where do you want to start, Eddie?”
    I didn’t thank her. It would only have embarrassed her.
    I looked up and down the gloomy hallway. It was all so still, so quiet. The only sounds had been our careful footsteps and the quiet shifting noises of broken stone and brickwork. The ceiling made constant ominous noises as the collapsed upper floors settled and pressed down. There was still a little smoke, farther in, curling unhurriedly on the still air, and the odd cloud of soot and ashes drifting this way and that. Molly sneezed explosively, and I jumped despite myself. I looked at her reproachfully, and she stared haughtily down her nose at me, as though she’d meant to do it. She raised one hand and snapped her fingers imperiously. A sharp breeze blew in from the open doors and rushed down the hallway, dispersing the smoke and blowing away the soot and ashes. The breeze died away quickly, before it could disturb anything precarious.
    Most of the interior walls had been riddled with gunfire and then smashed and burnt and blown apart. There were great holes in the old stonework, and the wood panelling had been almost completely burnt away by fierce heat. It was hard to find anything I recognised. The great statues and important works of art, the wall hangings and the family portraits: gone, all gone. I realised Molly had stopped to look up at the ceiling, and I followed her gaze, checking it quickly for spreading cracks.
    “No,” she said, without looking round. “It’s just…our room was up there, on the top floor. Is it possible… ?”
    “No,” I said. “All the upper floors have fallen in on themselves.There’s not a few feet of roof left intact anywhere. Everything we had up there is gone.”
    “Everything you had,” said Molly. “I kept most of my stuff in the woods. Oh, Eddie…I’m so sorry.”
    “It’s just things,” I said. “You can always get more things. What matters is I still have you.”
    “Forever and a day, my love,” said Molly, slipping her arm through mine again and briefly resting her head on my shoulder.
    We moved on into the gloom and the shadows. The sounds of our slow progress seemed to move ahead of us, as though to give warning we were coming. All the great paintings that used to line the walls, portraits and scenes of the family by all the great masters, were gone forever. Generations of Droods, great works of art preserved by the family for generations, reduced to ash, and less than ash. Even the frames were destroyed. Someone had swept the walls clean with incandescent fires, probably laughing as they did. I crouched down as I spotted a scrap of canvas caught between two pieces of rubble from a shattered statue. Molly peered over my shoulder.
    “What is it, sweetie?”
    “I think…this was a Botticelli,” I said. “Just a few splashes of colour now, crumbling in my hand.” I let it drop to the floor, and straightened up again. “Why would the enemy take time out from fighting the