Dark Earth: 1947

Notes on Chapter 8:

Murder on the Orient Express
- Sam Chandler's reference to Aztec gold and cursed cows come from some early episodes of The A-Team
- Fieldern = Renfield
- Red bandits in Bulgaria are Soviet sponsored guerrillas.
- Surviving aurochs
- The Fallen Madonnais from 'Allo, 'Allo, but has already been mentioned in the Byzantine factfile; there are many, many copies.
- The finale weaves together several different storylines

Flash in the Tanks

- Flashman is as much of a cad and a bounder as his grandfather
- Tamsin Brown is a descendant of Tom Brown
- Major Gowen is a reference to Fawlty Towers
- The Oriental air raid warden is Mr. Wu from the works of George Formby
- Flashman knew Hogan during the war, before he was shot down
- The nice fellow he knew in Vienna was Harry Lime of The Third Man
- Flashman had requisitioned Sigmund Freud's flat and, upon the latter's return from exile, reacted rather violently due to not understanding what psychoanalysis referred to
- Christopher Ratcliffe is a relative of another character we'll meet eventually
- Grayson is the School Bully played by Ian Ogilvy in Ripping Yarns
- Sir Henry Rawlinson is from the Vivian Stanshall character
- Colonel Mustard is from Cluedo and Richard Hannay has already appeared
- John Drake = Danger Man
- General Kevin Darling is from Blackadder
- Arnold Robinson is the Cabinet Secretary from Yes Minister

Singapore Sling
- There are plenty of characters in this one: Frank Burnside (The Bill), Bulldog Drummond, Doctor Who, Captain Hurricane, Fu Manchu, Karla (Le Carre), Miyamoto Usagi (Usagi Yojimbo) and the Paedofinder General (Monkey Dust)
- The Guns of Singapore were put in place in the 1930s and were the largest British coastal artillery of the war along with the well-known Dover Guns of a similar calibre. Hitler was quite upset when the latter went into action; the circumstances came down not to espionage but Vickers, Armstrong-Whitworth and Krupp coming to the same conclusion. The Singers Guns had a maximum range of up to 125 miles with some rather nasty arcane tricks for accuracy of fire; sabot shells go out to 250 miles and provided the Japanese with some nasty problems in 1942 when they tried to outflank the main Commonwealth defensive line. Back up was provided by 24" howitzers, 15", 9.2" and 6" guns.
- The Imperial Police are something of a cross between the Indian Imperial Police and the Palestine Police, serving as an 'all-Empire' law-enforcement agency in the manner of the FBI in the United States, along with a certain paramilitary role. They came out of the 1870s mania for Imperial Federation, which never got off the ground in the precise form its proponents sought; that would be too much of a convenient cliche in a tale that tries to be realistic yet fantastical. Personnel total around 32,000 in 1947, rising during the Cold War. It has an interesting relationship with Scotland Yard.
- The 'rings of the Empire' are Africa, India, the Middle East, the Americas and the Far East, an expanded version of the Wolseley and Roberts rings.
- The Royal Constabulary is modeled on the Royal Irish Constabulary, but based across Britain and deployed to different parts of the Empire as needed; it is controlled by the Home Office and Colonial Office in those respective circumstances. At home, they fill the role of a central reserve force, riot police, border guards, honourary protection duties, patrol of airports and Royal Highways and paramilitary aid to the civil power. Whilst Britain is still firmly in the camp of policing by consent and isn't a society that requires a full gendarmerie in the manner of the Europeans, the Royal Constabulary are capable of filling that role should the need arise. 154,000 personnel as of 1947, capable of operating in a light, mounted or motorised role.
- The British Armed Forces, those of the Dominions and colonial units all operate under a unified command structure in wartime or in situations such as the Malayan Emergency. The Royal Space Force recruits from across the Empire, being funded by both Britain and the Dominions.

Saharan Sojourn

- Direct references to Atlantis and hints as to the background of a green Sahara within folk memory.
- The US forward deployment in Casablanca is one of the earlier moves that shows that there will be a residual postwar presence in Europe.
- Mercenary companies play a role in Central and South America similar to the 1950s-1970s in Africa and are sometimes employed for plausibly deniable operations.
- The East India Company still has its own limited (para)military forces and armed merchant ships, which are used as an arm of British policy; Air America would be a parallel in some ways.
- The Alsatians, Swiss, Ruritanians and Liechtensteiners are of course Germans; the burn scars should be simple to interpret.
- Wozzeau: A reference to the bizarre director of 'The Room'; Joakim: Lead singer of Sabaton and tank lover; Ben Hawkins: Main character of the sadly-cancelled Carnivale; Luck: Luck of the Legion from The Eagle; LeBlanc: Stewart Grainger's character from Commando/The Legion's Last Patrol; Ilya Drago: inspired by the big Russian bloke in March or Die; MacLeod: Highlander
- Hawkins' tale of a man without a face refers to one of Nick Stahl's earlier films
- Mr. Carrington = Blake Carrington from Dynasty
- When Luck informs LeBlanc of the presence of Bedouin, the voice is supplied by Nigel Green from Zulu
- The battle scene was inspired by the climax of 'March or Die'.
- The dark elves are trying to summon Yog Sothoth. Do not try this at home.

1947 Part 9b: Reds! - The Soviet Union in 1947

Proud, enormous, bloodied yet indomitable it stood, the colossus of the East, spanning two continents yet truly being part of neither. It was a riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma. Born of the fires of revolution under a crimson banner, forged through the flames of devastation and invasion and tempered by glorious victory, the Soviet Union in 1947 was poised at the crossroads of history. Though still wracked by shadows and tempests, it shone forth with ever-growing power and influence from behind the fell curtains of iron that stretched forth to the very centres of Europe and Asia alike. Stalin’s land and people had paid a great price for its triumph over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War and bore this burden with both pride and sorrow. The motherland had called, her sons had answered and now the world was changed forever.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had now ascended above the seried ranks of great states to the new category of superpower, being possessed of the combination of vast lands and population, a huge and powerful military machine and an economic and industrial capacity that, whilst sorely harried by the destruction and vileness of the Hitlerite hordes, was bested only by the United States and Great Britain. The Red Army, already the largest land force in the world before the war, had reached its extraordinary peak strength of 16,432,589 men and 684 divisions in early 1945 as it rolled through Poland and Eastern Germany to reach the Oder, ably supported by the 3,879,426 men and 32,567 planes of the Red Air Force. The gigantic closed industrial cities and vast underground factories of the Urals and Siberia turned out millions of tons of iron and steel and thousands of the world’s most powerful tanks and weapons, including the formidable T-34s and the IS heavy tanks. The Soviet Navy flew the red flag over half the world’s oceans and extended Russian influence far beyond its frozen and battered shores.

War had scarred the land and people almost beyond comprehension. Almost 21 million Soviet civilians had lost their lives and tens of millions were left homeless. Over 1600 cities and towns and more than 70,000 villages had been partly or completely destroyed, mines, factories, power plants and huge dams had been wrecked and great swathes of its most productive agricultural land had been ravaged. The poisonous damage of Nazi chemical warfare and foul black magic would leave a terrible legacy for long years to come and the spectre of famine once again stalked the land. Yet throughout their immense suffering, the spirit of the ordinary workers and peasants of the Soviet Union was unbroken. Beyond the ruin and tribulation of war beckoned the red dawn of a new world.

At the centre of the state sat arguably the single most powerful man on the planet, Iosef Vissarionivich Dzughashvili, better known to the world as Stalin. He had ruled the Soviet Union with an iron hand since the death of Lenin in 1924 and now extended that control over much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the aftermath of the war. Trained as a arcanist monk, he had developed his knowledge of many obscure dweomers over his career as a revolutionist, allowing him to escape many dangerous situations during his many captures and exiles. An all-encompassing cult of personality was centred upon Stalin, who was portrayed as the wise and benevolent father of his people and the genius architect of victory over Hitler. This was reinforced by the cruel and feared secret police of the NKVD and the horrific Gulag prison camps that awaited the enemies of the state. The only one of the ‘Big Three’ leaders of the wartime allies to remain alive and in power in 1947, Stalin continued to weave his long-term plans for Soviet power and the world domination of communism from deep inside the red walls of the Kremlin. He wielded the power of the Comintern across the world, directing thousands of agents and millions of sympathizers along the paths of hundreds of schemes, all of them dedicated towards the triumph of international socialism and the global dominance of the Soviet Union, objectives that Stalin regarded as one and the same. During the Second World War, he had been lauded as ‘Good Old Uncle Joe’ by the people and press of the United States and Britain and this avuncular image had not yet been tempered by the bitter tears of reality for too many.

The Soviet Union was the largest country in the world by area, covering one sixth of the Earth’s surface, or an area comparable to the entire landmass of North America. It stretched over 6000 miles from the gentle beaches of the Baltic Sea in Latvia in the west to the rocky shores of the Pacific Ocean on the rugged Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east and more than 4000 miles from the frozen wastes of the Arctic in the north to the vast deserts of Central Asia in the south. West of the soaring Urals lay the densely populated republics of European Russia, dominated by three great rivers – the Dneiper, the Don and the mighty Volga. Their waters were rich with fish and served as broad arteries of commerce and transport uniting the lands. About them, the fertile black soil of the Ukraine stood as one of the great breadbaskets of mankind, rich with wheat, corn, barley and cotton, while the mighty Donbass held immense seams thick with black coal and many ores. The immense taiga or forests of Siberia were one of the world’s treasure houses of natural resources, containing huge deposits of gold, diamonds, oil, gas and the world’s greatest reserves of timber. It was a hard land of freezing winters and scorching summers, but for those strong enough, it was a land of potential.

Its population of 263 million was the third largest in the world and included dozens of ethnicities and races speaking hundreds of different tongues and dialects, ranging from the Slavic Russians and Ukrainians, who made up over 60% of the populace, to fair Circassians and swarthy Tatars and from Kazakhs, Georgians and Khazars to Mongols, Gypsies and Manchus. Russification efforts had intensified over the last two decades and more disparate cultural identities were increasingly subsumed by Russian dominance. The long and terrible years of war had sorely pressed their great capacity for suffering and taken the lives of millions of their menfolk, but theirs was still a young people with expansive hopes for the future, albeit hopes constrained by the oppressive rule of the communist state. The hardy Northman barbarians were now fully under the control of Moscow and the Goths, Rugians, Jadrians, Utlyr and Cimmerians alike only enjoyed a modicum of their ancestral freedom. Small numbers of elves still resided in the depths of the great forests and great numbers of dwarves and goblinkind dwelt in their ancient homelands in the soaring Urals and Caucasus, most bowing to Soviet suzerainty as subjects of their various semi-autonomous oblasts, voivodeships and krais after the bloody repressions of the 1930s.

The modern condition of the Soviet Union cannot be fully understood without a comprehension of its position in the broader picture of Russian history. The Slavic peoples had dwelt in the cold northern forests since time immemorial, fighting their endless wars against orcs, dragons, giants and the terrors of the wild, interspersed with the rise and fall of dozens of ephemeral steppe empires now forgotten to the memory of man. Out of the epoch of struggle grew Kievan ‘Rus, founded by Rurik the Varangian, first of the Russian realms of the Middle Ages and a bastion against the horselords of the east. Pagan beginnings gave way to Orthodox Christianity, which is the first great pillar of Russian identity, as even the Soviet people of today hold hard to their old faith. No other institution has been as closely intertwined with the nature of Russia and it has enjoyed a new epoch of tolerance in the aftermath of the German invasion.

Rus rose, prospered and then gradually fell apart into a fractured collection of successor states over the course of the 12th century and were ill prepared for the arrival of the Scourge of God. Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde came down upon the Rus like a wolf upon the fold, doing great slaughter at the Battles of Kalka River and Sit River and destroying no less than two dozen great cities in an orgy of unparalleled savagery. There seemed to be no answer to his gargantuan army of over 250,000 horse archers, the terrible witchery of his bloody shamans or the devastating firepower of his ingenious siege engines and the Mongols swept forth over the broad rivers of the Russian land, leaving ruin in their wake. They swept onward into Europe, aiming to conquer all the lands to the Great Sea for their banner. It took the combined might of Christendom’s hosts and the flower of its chivalry to halt the Mongol tide at the Battle of Krakow, where Genghis Khan fell beneath the magic sword of King Richard I of England. Yet this was to provide no respite for the Russians, who would remain under the Mongol yoke for the next two centuries.

Long was the age of oppression under the Golden Horde, although the overt devastation inflicted by the initial Mongol invasion was never quite matched. The deprivations inflicted by the Tatar rulers were great and terrible tribute was exacted from the long-suffering peasantry and nobility alike. The policy of the Mongol khans was to divide and rule, playing one Russian ruler off against another, ensuring that no sense of unity could be restored. In the subsequent centuries, the enduring legacies of the Mongol invasions and the domination of the Golden Horde were to establish the place of oriental despotism into the Russian body politic and to create a burning fear of invasion by the teeming masses of the Far East. The Black Death shook Mongol suzerainty to the core, wrecking the economy of the region and decimating its population as it did to the rest of Europe and Asia. First to challenge their rule after this was Dmitry Ivanovich Donskoy, Grand Prince of Moscow and builder of the Kremlin, whose decisive victory at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380 fatally damaged the power of the Horde in Russia. Muscovy’s fortunes waxed greatly over the next century, gradually absorbing the Novgorod Republic, the Grand Duchy of Tver and Ryazan after protracted civil war and ending the overlordship of the Mongols once and for all at the Great Stand on the Ugra River in 1480 under Ivan the Great.

His consolidation of the lands of the Rus under Muscovite leadership set the scene for one of Russia’s greatest and most fearsome monarchs, the first Tsar of all the Russias –the man known to history as Ivan Grozny, or Ivan the Terrible. Religiously devout, diplomatically astute and highly intelligent, Ivan was also acutely paranoid, ruthlessly cruel and possessed of a furious rage that once lead him to kill his own son. Under his rule, the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and Sibir were subjugated, paving the way for the Russian conquest of Siberia, but his many wars thoroughly wrecked the national economy through ruinous taxation. He was the primary architect of the system of Tsarist autocracy, concentrating all power and wealth in his hands and enforcing his will through the oprichniki, his ten thousand strong black-clad secret police. Ivan the Terrible can be seen as the forerunner of many later Russian rulers, including Stalin. By the time of his death in 1584, he had unquestionably transformed Russia from a medieval backwater into a continental empire and made it a genuine Great Power on the stage of Europe.

Ivan’s son Feodor was the last of the Rurikid rulers of Russia and spent much of his reign engaged in pious worship and contemplation of the deeper spiritual mysteries. His people looked upon him as saintly and blessed compared with his father, but he eschewed political machinations and left most of the day-to-day business of his rule to his wife’s brother, Boris Godunov. He succeeded Feodor in 1595 and enjoyed a prosperous and peaceful decade on the throne, cultivating foreign relations and seeking to modernize Russia so it could catch up with the more advanced European states, but failed in the key dynastic task of securing the succession with a strong heir. He harried the rival Romanov family mercilessly and drove them into exile in Siberia. It was under his reign that the Conclave of Imperial Wizards began the gradual modernization of Russian magic and established the first of the great many-coloured towers that would be emblematic of their order until their fall.

Godunov’s death and the murder of his widow and son were followed the Time of Troubles, a bitter civil war sparked by a succession of usurpers claiming to by Prince Dmitri, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible. These struggles were exacerbated by a terrible famine that killed a third of Russia’s population, a plague of undead abominations haunting the night and an invasion by the Poles. Russia stood on the brink of collapse, until the forces of the Motherland rallied under the leadership of Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitri Pozharsky, paving the way for Mikhail Romanov to be elected Tsar by the Zemsky Sobor, or Grand National Assembly. His accession began the 304 year reign of the Romanov dynasty, when Russia would rise to unparalleled greatness. The second half of the century saw tremendous victories in the east, where the power of the orc realms of the Urals was shattered and the bogatyr Sergey Vladimirov slew the ancient wyrm Zhamban Straculius atop Mount Yamantau after heeding the counsel of Baba Yaga, and setbacks in the west, as the power of the Swedish Empire waxed to its summit.

Rising above the ranks of the other Romanov rulers were two Tsars who dominated the 18th Century, both given the sobriquet of ‘Great’ by history – Peter and Catherine. Tsar Peter lead a Grand Embassy to Western Europe and relentlessly modernized his realm against concerted opposition from conservative boyars and the Streltsy guards, who he ruthlessly destroyed. He defeated the Ottoman Turks and the Crimean Khans at Azov, opening up the first significant Russian naval access to the Black Sea and was victorious over his implacable rival, Charles XII the Great of Sweden in the Great Northern War, seizing Ingria, Estonia, Livonia and large stretches of Karelia. He founded the grand city of St. Petersburg, his imperial capital, on the shores of the Baltic Sea in 1712 and formally established the Empire of Russia nine years later. Peter combined a drive to reform and strengthen Russia’s governance with the long traditions of absolutism with his execution of his eldest son Alexei in 1718 being among the foremost examples of the latter tendency.

He was followed by a succession of lesser rulers, although the reputation of the Russian Imperial Court ascended to new heights under Empress Elizabeth in the 1750s. After her early death came the rise of Catherine and the golden age of the Russian Empire, when the Crimea and Caucasus were finally conquered and annexed, once-mighty Poland partitioned, the Mongols subdued and her influence extended even across the far seas to North America. A patron of the arts and culture, she built glorious palaces and wrote celebrated works which attracted the admiring approval of Voltaire and other notable figures of the Enlightenment, although her taste for new ideas was somewhat tempered by the French Revolution. Once again, Russia’s engagement with the ideas and beliefs of the rest of Europe was truncated by suspicion and autocracy. Upon her death in 1800, Russia passed from an age of expansion and success into a century of conflict and change.

Great suffering and loss came from the Napoleonic Wars, where the armies of Tsar Alexander I were defeated at Austerlitz and beaten back beyond the very gates of Moscow itself by Bonaparte’s seemingly unstoppable Grande Armee. At this hour of trial, the Russian winter came once again to its aid, strengthened by the powerful spellcraft of the Conclave and the enchanted Zimneye Serdtse. It would be the Cossacks of Alexander who were the first of the Allied armies to enter Paris in 1814. The Congress of Vienna secured the power of reaction over Europe for a generation and this consensus was cemented in the Holy Alliance between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Nicholas I (1825-1855) held even stronger to conservatism and autocracy, quashing the troubles of his domains and foreign lands alike with an iron hand and iron will and leading to him being dubbed ‘the gendarme of Europe’ for his obdurate opposition to the fires of revolution. Encouraging the development of Russian and Slavic nationalism, he stoked the fires of future strife. He expanded Russia’s borders with successful campaigns against the Persians and the Turks, but his aggressive policies were to lead to disaster. Nicholas was met with a resounding rebuff in the Crimean War, when the forces of Britain and France inflicted defeat up defeat around the world on land, sea and air upon the hosts of Russia and laid low its reputation of strength and power. Alexander II responded to this hour of trial with policies of peace abroad and wide-sweeping measures of progress at home, including the abolition of serfdom, but Russia’s lack of modernity and growing internal contradictions could not be easily swept aside by reform and a revolutionist bomb laid the Tsar low in 1881. His son Alexander III reversed the domestic liberality of his father and tried to keep the general peace in Europe, despite growing rivalry with the ascendant German Empire that lead to the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1892. The scourge of the Red Death wrecked havoc across all of Eastern Europe between 1887 and 1890 and Russia was the worst hit by its terrible effects, now known to be the working of Dracula himself. A new Tsar, the brave yet ill-fated Nicholas II, was crowned in 1896, and his vision for the improvement of the land and its people gave new hope, albeit on unsteady grounds. The Russian Empire stood on the brink of a new century in troubled health with substantial troubles lying on every horizon and unseen enemies looming within.

Of these, the most pressing problems were the most obvious ones. To the west lay the dual threat of Germany and Austria-Hungary and the restive Poles, to the south lay the long cherished Russian goals of a warm water port and resolution of the Eastern Question and a concomitant clash of interests with the British Empire and to the east lay the rising sun of Japan; the dangers of the north were at this time but ancient rumour and legend. Inside Russia’s borders, the great issues of nationalism, agrarian and industrial reform and growing discontent at autocracy festered and burbled. It was on the Russian Empire’s farthest shore that disaster first struck, as the fires of war flared in the hills of Manchuria and the cold waters of the Pacific. Defeat on land at the siege of Port Arthur and the decisive Battle of Mukden were followed by the calamitous destruction of the Baltic Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima on October 27th 1904 by Admiral Togo and the Imperial Japanese Navy. This combined with naval mutinies, most notably aboard the battleship Potemkin, industrial strikes and the massacre of petitioners on Bloody Sunday to spark a revolution against the rule of the Tsar.

The Army remained generally loyal and proved a bastion of the Imperial regime during the perilous months in the first half of 1905, when peasant revolts, a Polish uprising and a general strike threatened a collapse not seen since the Time of Troubles. Under intense pressure from his advisors, Tsar Nicholas finally signed the July Manifesto authored by Count Sergei Witte, granting widesweeping civil rights, promising a constitution and establishing a representative parliament or Imperial Duma. Liberal opinion was satiated by this gesture and the disparate forces of the workers and peasants were crushed in piecemeal fashion by the Army and Okhrana, crushing the dreams of anarchist and socialist revolutionists. The dawn of constitutional reform in Imperial Russia was to prove to be a false one, as increasingly strident repression replaced the promise of modernization, yet the quickening pace of industrial progress and economic growth temporarily obscured the rot within the state.

Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra now came under the dark spell of one of the strangest and most mysterious figures in Russian history, the mystic mad monk Rasputin. He boasted of both mastery of the arcane arts and an apparent talent for healing and swiftly became involved in all manner of intrigues and power struggles within the Imperial Court. By virtue of his deliverance of Tsarevich Alexei from a baffling blood disease, he became the closest counselor of the Tsar and many whispered of otherworldly hypnotic powers being used to manipulate the very fates of empires and nations for unknown malign ends. Several strange incidents involving Rasputin and hallowed ground and direct sunlight were the cause of further rumour and innuendo, encouraged by the agents of certain foreign powers and organizations.

War would prove to be the harbinger of the next Russian Revolution, this time more bloody and more terrible than any that had come before. Russian entry into the Great War was initially welcomed across the Empire, being seen as a means to a final reckoning with the Germanic foe and a swift means of uniting the disparate Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe under the rule and protection of the Tsar. St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in the early wave of anti-German patriotism. Early successes in the Galician Campaign of 1914 were bought to a shuddering halt by the resounding defeats inflicted by Hindenburg at the Battles of Tannenburg and Masurian Lakes and the Imperial Russian Army, under Grand Duke Nicholas, the Tsar’s cousin, was forced to conduct a Great Retreat from Poland in 1915 to avoid destruction. The success of the Gallipoli Campaign reduced some of the immediate pressure upon Russia with the ease of the supply situation, but losses were mounting and the strategic initiative lay firmly in the hands of the Central Powers.

Tsar Nicholas II himself took personal command of the army at the front, a mistake that was to prove fatal for his rule. His grasp of military strategy was decidedly lacking and his absence left the Tsarina in control in St. Petersburg, where she fell even further under the spell of Rasputin. The last gasp of the Russian Empire came with the Brusilov Offensive of 1916, a massive attack in Galicia against Austro-Hungarian lines aimed at relieving pressure on Britain, France and Italy and possibly knocking Austria-Hungary out of the war. Launched on June 4th 1916, it was to be tremendous success by the standards of the Great War, smashing through to the Carpathians by late August and forcing the movement of German troops away from Verdun and the Somme to stem the tide in the east. The coordination of artillery, infantry and cavalry allowed repeated breakthroughs and only the limits of Russian logistics prevented a far greater triumph. Yet even in this hour of victory, there was to be defeat, as Romania was swiftly overrun and Russian losses continued to mount; the blood price of Brusilov’s blow was no less than 1 million dead and wounded of the Tsar’s soldiery. The German and Austro-Hungarian counterstroke over winter proved to be the final spark that set off the February Revolution.

Years of terrible casualties, desertion, shortages of goods, skyrocketing inflation and the stubborn refusal of the Tsar to contemplate any constitutional reforms created an explosive environment where Nicholas II lacked the support of the nobility, the Duma, the armed forces and large parts of the general populace. Crushing strikes and protests in Petrograd paralysed the railway system and the delivery of war materials and bread. A group of nobles tried to assassinate Rasputin to remove his malign influence, but he somehow survived repeated poisoning, shooting, stabbing and a fall from a third story window onto a spiked fence and was seen to fly off into the night. The downfall of the Tsar was immediately triggered by a strike by the workers of the Putilov Plant on
International Woman’s Day that sent hundreds of thousands of protestors into the streets calling for an end to the war and autocracy. Efforts by the garrison to suppress the uprising were in vain and mass mutinies broke out, preventing the return of the Tsar to Petrograd. A Provisional Committee of the State Duma was established and sent a delegation to urge the Tsar to introduce a constitutional system, but he remained intransigent. The leadership Petrograd Soviet, a revolutionary socialist council of workers and soldiers, was freed from the Peter and Paul Fortress by an armed mob and pushed for more radical action. On March 12th, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne on behalf of himself and Tsarevich Alexei and a Provisional Government was formed under Prince Georgy Lvov, a liberal autocrat. Repeated clashes with the Petrograd Soviet lead to his downfall and replacement by Alexander Kerensky, a minister of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The Tsar and the Imperial Family left for exile in Britain aboard a Royal Navy cruiser from Murmansk on March 20th.

Then entered the man of the hour, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. He had devoted himself to the cause of radical revolution after the execution of his elder brother in 1887 for the attempted assassination of Alexander III and rapidly rose through the ranks of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He was exiled to Siberia in 1897 and fled three years later to Western Europe, where he became the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP after the 1903 split with Julius Martov’s Mensheviks and tirelessly worked for the cause of communist revolution. Lenin became one of the most notable voices opposing the Great War and called for it to be used as a means of bringing about a general proletarian uprising across Europe. He was transported from Switzerland across Germany in a sealed train with other Bolsheviks and made a triumphant return to the Finland Station in Petrograd on April 16th 1917, where he made a rousing speech to the assembled masses of workers, soldiers and sailors on the need for a further revolution to overthrow the Provisional Government and establish a true socialist state. Lenin set immediately to work, issuing his April Theses, outlining his radical revolutionary programme and arguing for an end to Russian participation in the war. Chief among his lieutenants were the brilliant and fiery Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin.

Kerensky and the Provisional Government faced a succession of crises as they tried to control the revolutionary situation and keep Russia in the Great War. They secured the passage of significant progressive legislation, but the Petrograd Soviet was increasingly taking on the role of an alternate government. A new push against the Central Powers, dubbed the Kerensky Offensive, proved to be a bloody failure and broke the back of the morale of the armed forces. A series of spontaneous demonstrations by workers and soldiers in Petrograd in July were repressed by forces loyal to the Provisional Government and Lenin went into hiding, while Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders were rounded up and imprisoned; this was to be a short-lived setback, as they were released and their forces rearmed in response to the attempted coup d’etat of the Kornilov Affair in August. By the end of September, preparations for insurrection were largely complete and, at 2145 on the 25th of October 1917, a single shot from the cruiser Aurora provided the signal for the storming of the Winter Palace and the establishment of a Bolshevik regime. The next day, the Congress of the Soviets passed a decree announcing that all power had been transferred into the hands of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. All private property was nationalized, all foreign debts and treaties annulled and all landed estates of the nobility and Church expropriated for the control of the peasants.

Moscow was seized on October 31st after protracted street battles, but the various counter-revolutionary opponents of the Bolsheviks, armed and aided by the Western Allies, launched a series of offensives even as a ceasefire was established between the Central Powers and Soviet Russia. Finland broke away from Russian control in early 1918 and White armies made significant advances in the Caucasus and Siberia. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed over control of Poland, the Baltic States and the Ukraine to the control of Germany and Austria-Hungary in return for peace even as British, American, French and Japanese forces occupied Russian territory in overt intervention into what was now the Russian Civil War. 1918 and 1919 saw bitter fighting on all of the borders of Russia as the newly established Red Army barely managed to hold off their collected foes under the leadership of Leon Trotsky and supported by the harsh necessities of War Communism and the bloody Red Terror. Grain, iron, steel, coal, textile and armaments production collapsed under the burden of conflict and millions died or fled the cities and countryside alike. A series of pitched battles along the Siberian front began to turn the tide of war in the latter part of 1919 and Allied forces pulled back from Central Asia, Siberia, the Caucasus and Northern Russia as the White Army retreated. It would take almost three years for the final victory to be achieved by the Red Army at the cost of over 10 million civilian and military casualties. The Soviet invasion of the restablished Kingdom of Poland, intended to spark a general advance into Europe to bring about the victory of world communism, was beaten back at the Battle of Warsaw in 1920 in the Miracle at the Vistula and Bolshevik ambitions for spreading the revolution abroad were sharply halted.

Lenin now controlled a vast nation devastated by years of war and privation and introduced a New Economic Policy that instituted a mixed economy to reinvigorate national agricultural and industrial production. His initiative was opposed by Trotsky on the left and Stalin on the right, but proved successful in initiating reconstruction and the rebuilding of the state. He pushed for modernization of the economy, declaring famously that ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’. Internationally, the Comintern encouraged the spread of communist revolutionary movements around the world, although Lenin took a measured view of the situation following the defeat of insurrections in Germany, Austria-Hungary and France and supported the entry of socialist parties into national parliaments. Central to Lenin’s control of the state was the apparatus of the secret police or Cheka, lead by the fanatical Feliks Dzerzhinsky and responsible for unspeakably bestial tortures and massacres of hundreds of thousands in an extended regime of terror. The captain of the Soviet ship of state increasingly suffered from poor health and after two debilitating strokes, took steps to clarify the succession of power in his final testament, where he dissected the abilities and flaws of the two major contenders, Trotsky and Stalin, at considerable length. In August 1923, he suffered a third stroke, incapacitating him until his death on the 25th of January 1924, leaving behind his wife Nadezdha Krupskaya, five children and a thoroughly transformed Russia.

Control of the state passed to a troika of Stalin, Grigoriy Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who maneuvered themselves to marginalize the popular Trotsky and neutralize the more inflammatory portions of Lenin’s Testament. Stalin consolidated his power base and secured the dismissal of Trotsky from his position as War Commissar, aided by his argument for securing ‘Socialism in One Country’ against his rival’s emphasis on ‘Permanent Revolution’. Between 1926 and 1928, Stalin defeated and expelled all of his opponents from the Central Committee and then from the Communist Party itself, gathering about him loyal supporters such as Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, Sasha Petrov, Lazar Kaganovich and Arkady Smirnov and increasing his mastery of the secret arts. He managed to ride the tides of the abortive conflict with the British Empire in this time and ascribed many of the setbacks and reverses encountered down to internal opposition and sabotage in order to further cement his position. Upon securing power and effective control of the Soviet Union, he reversed his previous support of the NEP launched into a campaign of collectivization of agriculture and accompanying repression of wealthier peasants or kulaks, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 2.4 million people. An ambitious programme of rapid industrialization in the First Five Year Plan called for massive increases in heavy industrial production and these were achieved at great cost within only four years; coal production rose from 42 million to 120 million tons, iron ore output increased from 9.8 million to 32 million tons, electricity generation from 6500 million kilowatts to 20 million kilowatts and oil production from 4 million tons to 17 million tons. The living standards of workers dropped under the heavy demands of the plan and agricultural production declined by a third as a result of forced collectivization.

The urban population of the Soviet Union had swelled by over forty million in the latter half of the 1920s and the provision of consumer goods rose gradually in the early 1930s. Education and general health improved as a result of mass campaigns by the Soviet government and women enjoyed new rights and social freedoms. All workers were encouraged to emulate the example of Aleksei Stakhanov, who had mined 125 tons of coal in 6 hours in 1935, and general industrial labour productivity rose over the first two Five Year Plans. The growing industrialization of the Soviet Union was most evident in the development of the aircraft and automotive industries and the construction of huge new manufacturing complexes in the Urals and Siberia and the Dneprostroi Hydroelectric Power Station, the second-largest in Europe at the time. Yet this economic progress came at a significant human cost, as a man-made famine in the Ukraine killed over 8 million in 1932 and 1933 and 2.5 million kulaks were killed or exiled to the Gulag prison camps in the drive to collectivize Soviet agriculture.

These terrible tribulations were but the first part of the suffering of the Soviet people in the 1930s, with the second coming in the form of Stalin’s Great Purge, which inflicted a new Reign of Terror that dwarfed the bloodshed of Revolutionary France. The suspicious murder of Sergei Kirov was used as a pretext by Stalin to ruthlessly purge all of his enemies from the Communist Party and Soviet state, firstly focusing upon the remaining acolytes of Trotsky and thence upon the former Left Opposition lead by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Sixteen major Bolshevik leaders were arrested, tortured into confession by the NKVD, convicted at a high profile show trial in Moscow in 1936 and executed in the cellars of the Lubyanka. More was to follow as Stalin turned upon the Rightists and the ranks of the secret police themselves, with the sole exception to the procession of death being the mysterious escape of Nikolai Bukharin through the rumoured intervention of foreign agents, before devastating the high command of the Red Army. Marshals Tukhachevsky, Blyucker and Yegorov were tried and shot, along with 14 out of 16 army commanders, 8 out of 10 admirals, 60 out of 69 corps commanders, 187 out of 219 divisional commanders and all high level army and corps commissars, which inflicted a terrific blow upon the institutional experience and capability of the Red Army officer corps and played a significant part in its poor performance in the first years of the wars to come. Across broader Soviet society, none were safe from accusations, arrest and death and large numbers of the intelligentsia, clergy and former servants of the Tsarist regime perished in the process. The true death toll of the Great Terror is as yet unclear, but some have estimated that upwards of a million and a half people were slain on the altar of Stalin’s paranoia and vengeance. It slowly came to an end in the middle of 1938, as NKVD Chairman Yezhov himself was purged and his successor Lavrentiy Beria progressively cancelled the various mass operations of the secret police.

The Great Purges significantly lowered Soviet prestige among the the Western powers and drove Stalin towards an unlikely rapprochement with Adolf Hitler. One of the great causes of Stalin’s increasing paranoia regarding external threats to the Soviet Union was the increasing threat of remilitarized Nazi Germany and its ally Kronist Austro-Hungary under Rudolf Eisen. Ongoing border disputes with the Empire of Japan boiled over into outright conflict in 1938, culminating in a Japanese invasion of Soviet-aligned Mongolia in May 1938. This limited offensive was gradually contained and then repulsed by eight Red Army divisions and four allied Mongolian cavalry tumens commanded by General Georgy Zhukov at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in August 1939. The victory was followed by confirmation of the failure to transform the Anti-Comintern Pact into a military alliance, providing some temporary relief from the traditional Russian fear of invasion from East Asia and allowed the shift of some concentration upon strengthening the western Soviet frontier. Economic agreements between Germany and the Soviet Union As the world descended towards war over the Polish Crisis, a surprise neutrality pact was secured between Foreign Ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop in Moscow which included secret provisions for the division of Eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence, with the former consisting of Eastern Poland Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Eastern Poland and Bessarabia. The Soviet invasion of Poland and its infamous partition seemed to pave the way for the successful absorbtion of their subject territories and only the miraculous Finnish victory in the Winter War halting the march of Stalin’s expansionism as first the Baltic States and then Bessarabia were absorbed into the growing empire.

On May 12th 1941, over 4.5 million German and allied troops in 236 divisions launched Operation Barbarossa, the titanic invasion of the Soviet Union. The ensuing Great Patriotic War would be the most massive campaign in the history of mankind and would cost the Red Army an estimated 12.6 million dead before victory was achieved. Initial disasters in the summer and spring of 1941 gave way to the glorious defence of Moscow as the old Russian ally of ‘General Winter’ came to their aid. Hitler’s attempted strike towards the oil of Baku and the Caucasus was blunted and held at Stalingrad and, in one of the largest battles of all time, the entire German 6th Army was encircled and besieged. The eventual capture of 170,000 starving and frozen survivors was the final blow in the greatest defeat inflicted on the Nazi war machine in the entire of the Second World War and marked the turning point of the conflict. In 1943, the Red Army ground through the Panther-Wotan Line, broke the Siege of Leningrad and won famous victories at Kiev and Smolensk. 1944 saw Stalin’s Six Blows, a series of coordinated campaigns that liberated the Ukraine and the Crimea from the Nazi yoke before the decisive destruction of German Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration. In the final months of the war, the Red Army overran East Prussia, Poland and Romania and occupied the eastern reaches of the German Reich up to the very gates of Berlin itself on the Oder River, bringing it under the fire of their long range 640mm M1942 S-16 superheavy guns, nicknamed 'Stalin's Sledgehammers'. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 was the final body blow to the Empire of Japan and the 2.5 million-strong Far East Command of the Red Army destroyed its largest field formation, the much-vaunted Kwantung Army in a lightning campaign of under two weeks.

Soviet military prowess and victory in the Great Patriotic War was not limited to the rightly-lauded deeds of the Red Army. In the air, MiG-6 jet fighters flown by the elite aces of the Red Air Force had proven the equal of the Luftwaffe’s finest experten and the enormous Kalinin K-10 and Petlyakov Pe-12 superheavy bombers of Long Range Aviation had pounded German cities by night in conjunction with their American and British allies throughout 1944 and 1945. In the last two years of the war, Frontal Aviation Yak-9s had won the air battle against their German and Austro-Hungarian enemies, Tu-2 and Pe-2 light bombers performed admirably across the front and the ubiquitous Ilyushin Il-2 Sturmovik attack fighter cemented reputation as one of the deadliest weapons of the war. At sea, the Red Fleet was now the third largest fleet in the world behind those of the United States and Britain and fielded a growing carrier force in the Black Sea, Pacific and Northern Fleets. Its potent submarine arm had turned the Baltic Sea into the graveyard of the Kriegsmarine and contained a number of huge long range boats that had proved their mettle in the Pacific. The presence of the Soviet Mediterranean Squadron marked the first time a Russian fleet had operated in those waters since before the Crimean War and Soviet destroyers had done their share of grim duty on the hard convoys in the Arctic and North Atlantic.

As an unsteady peace settled over the world, a new Soviet Empire had arisen in Eastern Europe and Poland, Romania, Prussia and the Baltic States lay under Stalin’s complete control; had the British advance through the Balkans the previous year been stalled even further, then it is quite likely that Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Bohemia and even Austria itself would have fallen under Moscow’s sway. As it stood, almost 100 million souls found themselves under the control of the Kremlin and a new frontier, soon to be dubbed the Iron Curtain, separated the shattered nations of Europe into communist and capitalist camps. The age-old Russian fear of invasion from the West was to be ended once and for all by a new buffer zone, just as the threat of the East had now waned with the emasculation of Japan. In 1946, Stalin moved to further expand his dominion by pressuring the Scandinavian states, in particular Finland, and Byzantine Greece and Ottoman Turkey into extensive concessions for Soviet bases and military cooperation, holding out the offer of protection and aid whilst the threat of the Red Army hung over their heads. These efforts were spurned by their subjects due to extensive Anglo-American counter-pressure and guarantees of security, contributing to the cooling international atmosphere. The first steps towards American financial aid for the nations of Europe were seen as a direct challenge and invitations for Soviet participation were coldly rejected.

At home, the main task confronting Soviet authorities was economic and industrial reconstruction. In four years, the Great Patriotic War had killed one in eight Soviet citizens, destroyed well over a quarter of the prewar Gross Domestic Product and sent per capita national wealth plummeting to the level of 1930. The failure of the 1946 harvest, which produced only 62.5 million tons or 40% of 1940’s total, was due in part due to the Nazi sorcerous backlash and the unnaturally cold winters following the war, lead to widespread famine and the deaths of up to 500,000 people. Limited credits for reconstruction had been obtained from Britain, Canada and Sweden and the main priority was focused upon the rebuilding of heavy industry. A significant proportion of former German industrial plants from Silesia and East Prussia were transported to the Soviet Union as recompense for the extensive war damage inflicted by the Hitlerites and contributed to solid postwar growth, but recovery even to 1938 levels was several years off into the future. Construction of heavy capital ships continued at the fastest pace possible, whatever the cost in lives and treasure as Stalin continued to plan for a grand ocean-going fleet second to none.

Thousands of those deemed to have suspect loyalties were deported to the vastness of Siberia in 1946 and 1947, joining those ethnic groups moved there en masse at the height of the war. Andrei Zhdanov lead a purge of dissident cultural elements that would have a great impact on the artistic and cultural life of the Soviet Union for some years to come. In wartime, repression of the Russian Orthodox Church had been greatly relaxed and the ravages of the undead, foul creatures and lycanthropes that plagued the land in its aftermath ensured that any return to the previous state of affairs would be somewhat delayed. Minority religions enjoyed no such fortune and official persecution of Moslems in the Central Asian republics and Jews in Khazaria resumed at a redoubled rate. Patriarch Alexey I of Moscow called on all Soviet Catholics to renounce allegiance to the Pope and return to the true church to no real effect. The wizards of the SKV (Soyuz Krasnyy Volshebnik) also enjoyed renewed prestige after their contribution to victory and several great projects of arcane artificery were initiated to further the development and power of the state. The influence of Trofim Lysenko and Semyon Azlanov over Soviet biology and alchemy reached new heights by 1947 under the patronage of Stalin and their alternative theories were seen as among the foremost keys to the development of a true New Soviet Man. The highest of all priorities was given to the development of an atomic bomb, jet engines and long range rockets in the light of the most notable developments of the war and the need to catch up to the achievements of the United States and the British Empire. Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK-47 assault rifle was accepted into Red Army test service in 1946 and general production began the next year, superceding wartime SKS carbines and submachine guns alike.

Soviet prestige and the global influence of the Comintern ensured that Moscow’s influence could extend across the world into Africa and Asia, where subversive ideas, communist propaganda and anti-colonial rhetoric found a ready audience in the restive subject peoples of the European empires. More success was encountered in the Far East than the Dark Continent, particularly in China, where the Communist faction won several key victories in the bitter civil war that raged there. Stalin regarded the international situation as ripe for exploitation – two of the USSR’s major capitalist rivals and security threats in Germany and Japan had been removed, France was substantially weakened and focused on internal reckoning and the United States and the British Empire were stretched taut around the world by their new and ongoing responsibilities. The one matter of vexation for the master of the Kremlin was the growing profile and strength of Trotsky and Bukharin in Brazil and several SMERSH assassination plots were exposed on a monthly basis by their loyal bodyguard corps. Their failure did not greatly irk Stalin, as his was a subtle and long term game, played with thousands of knowing and unknowing pieces around the world.

For deep beneath the Urals, in caverns measureless to man by the shores of a sunless sea, thousands of wretched prisoners and captive orcs continued on a handful of projects so secret and so terrible that scarcely half a dozen men in the Soviet Union knew the totality of them. It would be years before they would reach fruition, but when they did, the world would surely shake at their power and see that the red star was truly rising.

In 1947, though, a half-starved convict who dared look up while passing through certain deep chambers of the hidden city could look from beast to man and man to beast and beast to man again and find it impossible to say which was which.

1947 Part 9d: House of Hell

It was a dark and stormy night. The driving rain spattered upon the windscreen with a bitter venom, obscuring any vision of the bumpy road ahead. Tom shook his head regretfully at the thought of the silly old codger who had sent him off on this muddy excuse for a track at Methwold Hythe and this jolly strong storm. He squinted through the vain effort of his windscreen wipers, trying to pick out the turning up on the left, but there was nothing save the blackness of the night, the terrific downpour and the wisps of a strange gathering fog.

Out of nowhere, a wild-haired man appeared in front of his Wolseley, lit up by the twin beams of his headlamps. He wrenched at the wheel, desparately trying to avoid the seemingly inevitable collision, sending the car careening into a muddy, overgrown ditch on the side of the road and Tom smashing into the windscreen.

Blink

Tom shook his head groggily and wiped away a thin trail of blood from his brow. He had been extraordinarily lucky, it seemed, in escaping further injury. He forced open the door with a struggle and stumbled into the rain. The coldness of the night swiftly brought him to his senses and he remembered the old man. Scrabbling out of the ditch, he looked about in the darkness.

There was no body.

Tom pulled his entirely inadequate coat close about him and took stock of the situation. Perhaps it had been a trick of the light and the fog that was now rising ever more around him, but if not…He remembered the sight of the terrified face, mouth open in a soundless howl of shock and anguish. There was no way the man could have jumped out of the way in time. He checked the field beside the ditch to no avail. Somehow, he had disappeared.

The car was well and truly stuck and no amount of turning or beating could coax any life into the engine. He was miles from the nearest village and the weather was now getting worse. Tom had just resigned himself to an awful night huddling in his motor car when a light flickered on in the distance. Blinking away the rain, he looked closer. It appeared to be a large, old house only a few hundred yards away and, through a momentary clearing in the fog, there seemed to be a winding drive leading up to it. The choice was plain – a few minutes in the rain followed by a chance to dry off and telephone for help or six hours in soaking wet clothes in a freezing automobile.

Tom turned up his collar, thrust his trilby firmly down upon his wet head and trotted off through the mud towards the house. A sudden flash of lightning lit it up clearly before him, showing an old and decrepit two storey building with a flickering light shining forth from one of the upper windows. The cobblestone drive was rutted and filled with dank puddles and the dead branches of dark trees hung down over the overgrown bushes that lined it. The rotting wooden steps creaked as Tom climbed up onto the front porch and stood before the heavy, carved door. There appeared to be no lights on at all and a queer silence reigned as the sounds of rain and thunder ebbed away.

An owl hooted somewhere off in the trees nearby, sending a chill down Tom’s spine. He reached forth for the ornate door knocker, which appeared to be in the shape of the head of a goat, and wrapped thrice. For almost a minute, there was no response, then a light flickered on somewhere on the ground floor. The door handle turned slowly and the door opened, revealing a tall, balding, phlegmatic butler clad in a dark suit. He glowered at the intruder in a profoundly affronted manner.

“Yes?”

“So sorry to disturb you this late. My name is Tom Sahson. I was driving through to Downham when I had an accident just down the road from here. May I please trouble you to use your telephone and contact my friends to let them know where I am?”

The butler stared at him impassively. “Enter, sir. I am Jenkins. I shall take you to the Master. He is expecting you.”

This thoroughly confused Tom and the hair on the back of his neck prickled as he crossed the threshold at the beckoning direction of Jenkins. The walls of the entrance hall was covered in dark oak paneling and a thick blood-red carpet lay upon the floor. A midnight black grandfather clock stood up against one wall, ticking away just beyond the borders of easy perception. The very atmosphere of the house seemed…prickly…, as if it did not want him there. It was all probably just a trick of the night, a function of delayed stress and worry from the accident. Probably.

He was motioned into an opulent drawing room. Beautiful paintings of formally posed noblemen and women and intricate tapestries adorned the brocaded walls, while the tall windows were covered by heavy red velvet curtains. A roaring fire crackled in the ornate fireplace, filling the room with a reassuring warmth.

Standing beside it was a tall, distinguished man dressed in a red smoking jacket. His skin was pale yet weathered and he looked to be in the prime of his life, albeit a prime with a slight paunch. He had a strong aquiline nose and a pronounced widow’s peak of jet black hair coursed with strands of silver. His dark eyes twinkled with an imperceptible mirth and his full lips curled with a hint of cruelty. He inclined his head genially towards Tom.

“May I present the Lord Urdmer.” Jenkins intoned sonorously.

Lord Urdmer held out his hand and grasped Tom in an iron grip as he smiled pleasantly.

“Welcome to my house, Mr. Sahson. I see you have fallen afoul of this wretched storm. Come, sit by the fire with me and we shall see what can be done to assist you. Jenkins, have the cook send up some food for our guest; you are in luck, as I am about to dine.”

Tom was ushered to an easy chair before the warm fire, his wet jacket liberated from him by the silent Jenkins and two snifters of fine brandy produced before he could even consider issuing a protest.

“I really don’t want to impose upon you, sir; this is far too much fuss on my behalf. I only need to use your telephone to contact my friends and arrange them to come and pick me up.”

“Nonsense, young man, nonsense! The pleasure is all mine, let me assure you. This house has always been known for its hospitality to strangers going back all these long years it has stood and it really is no trouble at all. Alas, I believe that the telephone line has come down in the storm and there is no means of contacting anyone beyond these comforting wals, even if they could all the way out here.” Urdmer smiled pleasantly, his silky words combining with the fire and the brandy to melt away any residual resistance that Tom could muster.

“Very well, sir. I shall avail myself of your most generous hospitality until the morning. You are too kind.”

“And you, Mr. Sahson, are most welcome. Tomorrow, I shall have Jenkins take you on to your destination. Sahson. That is a rather strange name. Where does it come from?”

“My grandfather was born in Germany as a Sachsen, but there was an accidental misspelling on my father’s birth certificate; the registrar was said to be an inveterate drunkard.”

“Oh dear! That would be most unfortunate.”

“Rather. I was able to find his home village when I was over there in the Army during the war. I was a clerk in the RASC.”

“A man of duty and service – I salute you.” Urdmer raised his brandy towards Tom with a hint of unpleasant mockery in his tone. “Now, tell me what brings a young fellow such as yourself out here into the wilds of Norfolk.”

Tom sipped his drink and settled back in his chair. “Since I was demobbed last year, I’m became a quantity surveyor for the Ministry of Housing for the most part, but my journey out here is more of a personal dalliance. I’m looking through some of the old villages and churchyards in this area as part of a book I’m working on.”

“A writer! How very interesting. What is the subject of this book of yours?”

“Unexplained disappearences and suspected murders in East Anglia. There are all types of wild tales for some of the older cases, as well as some of the new. I’m looking into some of the old folklore and local stories, to see what real facts underpin them and if they have any links to the disappearences in the last four or five years..”

“Fascinating. I have always had a great relish for such legends of the past, however fictional they may be.” Urdmer laughed deeply.

“Five young women disappearing in the same small rural area in ten years isn’t a legend, sir – it is a pattern.”

Urdmer seemed to bristle slightly. “Are you sure you aren’t a journalist, Mr. Sahson? Your inquisitiveness would seemed suited to such endeavours.”

Jenkins entered through a door behind them. “Dinner is served, Master.”

“Ah, excellent! Come with me, Mr. Sahson. A good hot meal will set the world to rights.”

Tom followed Lord Urdmer and Jenkins through to a sumptuously appointed dining chamber where a long table lay beneath a translucent chandelier set with silver cutlery, golden plates, elegant crystal decanters of ruby and golden liquids and a tremulously burning candelabra set with black candles. Urdmer sat in an ornately carved chair at the head of the table and motioned for Tom to sit beside him. From a mahogany sideboard shaped in the form of a spreading willow tree, the butler carried over a large silver serving platter and uncovered it to reveal a delicious looking roasted duck surrounded by delicately shaped potatoes and bright green peas. He carved several slices and laid them on his master’s plate, heaped on spoonfuls of vegetables and poured a large glass of red wine, before repeating the process for Tom.

“Red or white, sir?”

“White. Always white for me.”

Jenkins poured his wine and then, with a silent bow, he withdrew, leaving them alone.

“Please, eat. It will serve you well, young man.”

“You are too kind, my Lord. I must say this is most welcome; I had only anticipated a cheese sandwich upon my arrival when I set out this evening.”

“And where was your destination to be?

“Little Crowich. A small speck of a village in the midst of the woods. It has a curious history.”

“Indeed.” Urdmer took a thoughtful sip of his wine. “My library has many books on our local history. Do you know, many hundreds of years ago, in Norman times, it was known as Cruach? That comes from the name of an old, old Celtic deity of human sacrifice. There was some sort of coven there, before the Templars saw to it.” He fairly spat out the name of the military order, not bothering to conceal his venom.

“Now that is something I did not know. Has your family been here that long?”

“Oh, much longer than that, my dear boy, much longer! Ours is a long and noble history, even if we have fallen on unfortunate times. I am, alas, the last of the Urdmers.”

“Dear me, that is…unfortunate…” Tom was beginning to warm to his host, who, despite his stiff and formal exterior, seemed to be genuinely pleased to have company.

“Yes, unfortunate is one way of putting it. Just twenty years ago, this was one of the most prosperous estates in this part of Norfolk. Good soil and loyal, respectful tenants, you see, folk who knew their place. Then a young girl from one of the local farms went missing. She was found dead in some old Roman ruins by the river in Little Crowich. It was terrible. Murdered, you see. Her heart cut out and her throat ripped open”

“That is monstrous.”

Urdmer stared off into the fireplace and did not seem to notice Tom’s presence. “There were all sorts of wild and outlandish rumours. Witchcraft. Curses. Black Magic. Creatures of the night. All poppycock! Sheer superstitious nonsense of the highest order!
Another one of the local girls went missing, probably run away off to London. Then a third. After that point, things changed. First a fire, then a thefts from the house, then a strange pestilence in the very land. Soon, all of the tenants drifted away, leaving things as they are now – old and forgotten.” At this point, Tom thought for some strange imperceptible reason that his host seemed to be enjoying this.

It was quite surprising that he then rose sharply from the table and stalked over to yank at the velvet pull-rope and stand awkwardly by the door. “You must be extremely tired now, Mr. Sahson. Jenkins will see you to your room. I must bid you goodnight and farewell, as I fear my business will not allow me to send you off in the morning.” He nodded curtly and then strode out through the open door.

Jenkins appeared within seconds and motioned Tom up a magnificent broad staircase that lead onto a striking landing richly adorned with the trappings of wealth – gilt-edged portraits, an antique suit of armour and plush Persian rugs. Four doors lead off from the landing, each set with a pewter plaque inscribed with symbols of pentagrams, goat’s heads, crescent moons and skulls respectively. Tom was more than a little disturbed by them, but couldn’t really bring himself to focus on them. Perhaps it was the wine and the shock of the accident, but he wasn’t quite feeling himself.

“Through here is your room, sir. Good night.” Jenkins opened the door to the Sheol room and walked silently off downstairs. It was a moderately sized bedchamber dominated by a large mirror diagonally opposite the carved wooden bed. A comfortable fire crackling in the stone hearth seemed to beckon Tom into the room and a glowing gas lamp sat on the bedside table. He closed the door behind him and sat on the edge of the bed, whose sheets and blankets had already been folded back in readiness for him. His hat and coat lay on a chair beside him, now completely dry and unmarked. He surmised it was getting extremely late by now, but his watch had stopped and no amount of winding or coaxing could bring it back to life. A wave of extreme fatigue swept over him and he had to make a deliberate effort to not just fall down into a deep and refreshing sleep, but then something caught his eye across the room. It was just a flicker of movement in the mirror, from what seemed to be his shadow on the wall. Yet no ordinary shadow in the world that he knew of moved independently of its owner.

His heart racing, he leapt up and spun around, but when he looked behind him, there was nothing there and his shadow remained normal as ever. A chill ran down his spine. For all the comfort and warm welcome in this house, there was something very wrong about it all, like the cloying sweet smell of corruption. Even downstairs, it seemed as if the eyes of one of the portraits had followed him across the room, just beyond the edge of his perception. One of the curtains shifted slightly, once again causing his heart to leap into his mouth. Barely daring to breathe, he edged over and pulled it back, to reveal nothing more than a securely barred window. This was all getting too much. Perhaps he would be better off out in his car. He leapt up and strode over to the door, turning the knob very, very gently.

It was locked.

Tom shuffled back and sat down. He was trapped. Something altogether strange was going on here. He was beginning to find it difficult to remember simple details of where he was from and why he was here, as if a dense fog was falling over his subconscious. Even as it did, a very queer transformation began to come over him. For some reason, even as he became more and more frightened, a weird sense of calm was growing deep inside him and snippets of memory tantalizingly coursed just out of his reach. Steeled by whatever it was inside of himself, Tom lay down upon the bed and thought.

His situation was grim – trapped in a locked room in an isolated house without any means of communicating with the outside world. His host had something sinister in mind for him, of that he had no doubt. The very name of the rooms was a direct indicator that something evil was going on, coming as they did from the List Infernal. If he tried to break out of the room, it would only bring attention down on him and scuttle his hopes of escape. Yet as far as they knew, he was still ignorant of this. If he was to put out the light and give all the appearance of having retired, he could then steal out of bed and conceal himself behind the mirror, from where he could spring out in ambush upon Jenkins or whoever else came into the room to take him in the dead of night.

Looking around the room, he spied a poker next to the fireplace that would serve as a suitable weapon. Grasping it in his hand somehow gave him a reassuring measure of satisfaction; strange, he could never remember having used a sword during the war. With every minute, a weird change seemed to be coming over him, as if concealing topsoil was being blown away to reveal something else. He looked across into the mirror and, despite the situation, almost had to stifle a snort at the sheer incongruity of what stared back at him. There he was – a slightly built chap with mousy brown hair and scared hazel eyes brandishing a poker like he was Sir Galahad. He piled up his pillows under the sheets into a reasonable facsimile of a slumbering human body, snuffed out the lamp and slipped across the dark room, finding his way to his hiding spot by the swirling red tongues of flame flickering in the fireplace.

Once there, Tom settled in to wait.

He had no idea how long he crouched there in the darkness of the strange room, yet it seemed only a few minutes before he heard a shuffling sound on the landing outside the door, punctuated by occasional wretched sniffling. He held his breath as, with a quiet rattle of keys, the door opened silently. A short figure shuffled into the room, carrying a tray set with a glass. Quick as a flash, Tom sprang out from behind the mirror and struck the intruder a solid blow in the back with his hip and shoulder. It slumped to the floor with a groan as he swiftly leapt over to the door, grabbed the vital key, and then returned to his stricken quarry. Poker still in hand, he turned on the light to examine whoever he had struck.

It was an incredibly ugly, misshapen little creature, whose greenish face was covered with warts, boils and cancres. The slight hunch in its back prevented it from rising to its full height, which was barely four and a half feet, as this was unmistakeably a goblin. Of all the hideous spectacles Tom had ever beheld, those perched at the end of this wretched creature’s nose were among the very worst in taste and craftsmanship. As it groggily raised its head, he clasped his hand across its maw and raised his poker menacingly.

“Now listen very carefully, goblin. If you even think about shouting for help, I’m going to spread your brains across this bedspread. I’m going to ask you some questions and I want completely truthful answers. If you cooperate, I promise that you will come to no harm. Do you understand?”

The petrified creature nodded, eyes wild with terror.

“Good. First of all, what is going on here? Why was my door locked?”

The goblin servant looked up with rheumy eyes. “Tonight? Why, tonight is the night, the time of the gathering of the Master and his friends. It is a very important time, oh yes, Sicari now that, I does.”

“A party?”

“Oh, yes, sirrah! Grenshus down in the kitchen said a new member is joining the circle, so there is to be a very special feast to be had before the main celebration. I know not of your door; I was only told to bring up a draft so that you would sleep soundly until it was time.” He gazed sadly at the upturned glass that lay in a pool of steaming wetness on the carpet.

Time for what? Tom swallowed hard. “How do I get out of here?”

“Why, through the front door, sir! None of the other doors has opened for years and year, none I knows of, leastways. The Master always has the key at night, he does, and none get out without his say. Things have to be ever so safe here, for good reason. We can’t have the Master’s guests and secrets being molested, can we?”

“No, of course we can’t. Well done, Sicari, you have passed the test.”

“What test, sir?” The confused goblin looked up with a vain, duck-like hope swimming through the red mud of his eyes.

“The test of being loyal to the Master, of course! I shall be sure to inform him that you are the best of his servants and did not give anything away.”

“Oh, thank you, kind sir! Sicari is loyal, so very loyal to his Master. He does not want to end up like his enemies down in the dungeons, no, he most certainly does not. Sicari does not want to be locked up and awaiting his fate, no he doesn’t.”

Tom did not wait to count his lucky stars that his bluff of the wretched creature had worked and pushed on to find out what else he could. “Indeed. You would not want to miss the feast, would you?”

“Well…Sicari would not mind if he did not have to. It is very cruel what they do to the food, you know?”

“Very well, Sicari. You are to remain in here until you are sent for, do you hear? I shall lock the door, as the Master wanted it locked, didn’t he?”

“Quite right, sir. Sicari shall not make a sound.” The goblin leapt up into the bed and drew up the sheets until they covered all but his bulging eyes and long, dripping nose. Tom almost felt sorry for the monstrous brute, just for moment. Then he remembered what he had to do. Taking up his hat and coat, he stalked out of the room.

After locking the door behind him, he took stock of his situation. Things were worse than he feared. There was some malign meeting on tonight and he had walked straight into it. He had to find a way out and bring down the authorities on this…whatever it was. So far, he had little tangible to go on other than the word of a goblin and a few feelings of unease. A quick inventory of his possessions gave him very little foundation for optimism - his trusty penknife, a cigarette lighter, a curiously shaped ball bearing whose origin he couldn’t remember for the life of him, two small pencils, his driving gloves and a fountain pen. Not much of an arsenal; no matter – what was important was escape. It would like be too dangerous to venture down to the ground floor, what with the talk of other servants and a great feast being prepared. Perhaps he could try to find the old man who Sicari had mentioned, if that would do any good…

His reverie was disturbed by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Not stopping to look or even to think, he darted around the end of the landing onto a long corridor and hurried up to the end, where there were three other doors. Frustratingly, none of them bore any label or plaque to indicate their purpose or contents, so he took pot luck and ducked into an anonymous chamber, pulling the door closed behind him.

Tom found himself in a dark and shadowed library, whose tall shelves were packed with leather bound volumes thick with dust. Even the thick plush carpet showed signs of not having been disturbed for some time. He leaned against a shelf and tried to get his breath back, panting heavily.

There was a moan across the other side of the library, a terrible sound like the rasp of tearing flesh or the last cry of a dying man. Shuffling forth from the shadows came a vision of pure horror. It was a rotting, green-gray corpse clad in a few ragged scraps of decayed cloth. Open wounds and holes on its torso dripped with a sickly black ichor and Tom released that it had been flayed of all its skin, revealing cord-like muscles and bone. It extended clawed hands towards him and its slavering jaw snapped open and closed as it came forward, giving off a carrion stench that turned his stomach.

Tom recoiled back as if he was about to flee, drawing the zombie in, then struck a lightning blow at the side of its head as he rolled past it to the left. The glancing blow did little to halt it and it shuffled about to move at him again. He let loose with a series of slashing strikes at its hands whilst darting about out of range of its terrible maw, smashing bones and tearing at the zombie’s dead flesh. Every time it lurched forward,
Tom would dance back and to the side, continuing to hammer at its wrists until eventually, his plan came to fruition and one clawed hand finally fell to the floor, where it scrabbled towards him like a demented insect. He kicked out at it, launching it over one of the book cases into the wall, where it impacted with a solid thud. He shifted his focus to the other wrist until that too was smashed asunder, leaving the zombie with only its fanged mouth to harm him.

Shifting to a two handed grip, he struck down upon the zombie’s temple, exploding the skull and sending rotting brain matter bursting out all over both himself and the library. Again and again he struck with a frenzy of crushing blows, smashing down deep as he caved in its skull. Finally, he pulled back as the zombie, its head now reduced to a sickly pulp of brain, black blood and shattered bone perched atop its still jaws, teetered and then fell to the floor, finally very much dead, this time for good. Tom wretched at the dreadful sight and even more awful grave stink and collapsed to his knees, coursing with adrenaline and drenched in battle sweat.

Yet even as he wanted to sob and collapse at the sheer terror of his ordeal, he felt himself changing. Rivulets of fire ripped through his veins and his very flesh itself rippled and pulsated as he writhed about on the ichor-sodden floor, stifling a scream of agony. Muscles swelled and grew and tendons stiffened as Tom’s body was pulled into a different shape like demented rubber. Flashes of memory raced through his mind, quicker than he could see or control. Eventually, the pain began to subside and, as the last convulsions left him, he now knew what had happened and who he was.

He began to chuckle silently then as he remembered the plan. It had been quite, quite brilliant. And so far, it was working.

Now he stood up and walked over to the grimy window, which was barred, of course. Next to it was a small mirror which he gazed into steadily, staring at a very different figure than the one who had entered the room. This Tom was just over six feet tall, broad of shoulder and thick of thew with close cropped blond hair and ice-blue eyes set with steely determination. A grim expression was set on his stern face as he nodded with approval. It was good to be back.

Fishing out his lighter, he held it up to the window and flicked the flame on and off several times, then put it away. Tom then painstakingly spread out his penknife, gloves, pencils, pen and ball bearing on the table and concentrated upon them as he whispered the words he had committed to memory the previous day.

“Anál nathrach, orth’bháis’s bethad, do chél dénmha. Ahmú rabeh, câhsumm lumöm.”

Over and over he repeated the words and, as he did so, the objects on the table began to warp and shift. They swelled and lengthened as they took on new, fell forms far removed from their previous mundanity. Finally, he had finished and once again afforded himself the smallest expression of satisfaction. Before him lay a pair of silver mesh gloves emblazoned with a red cross in a golden circle, a long sword in a plain black scabbard that seemed to suck away light from the room, two long-barrelled .577 Webley revolvers, a golden-coloured grenade and a fearsome looking pump-action shotgun which was etched with a variety of strange symbols. He pulled on the gauntlets and immediately felt a hot surge of strength coursing through his veins. Strapping the pistols and sword to his belt and placing the grenade in his coat pockets, he slung the shotgun over his shoulder and crossed himself.

Tom crept silently back through the hallway, checking carefully the back of his gauntlets at each door he came to. He heard many strange sounds, of scratching, shuffling and moaning, but they were all distractions from his true quarry. The storm raged away outside and he thought of the old man in the road and how he had disappeared so conveniently. He thought he knew now what had come to pass – a cunning ploy, certainly, but a transparent one nonetheless. It was a simple enough illusion of misdirection, luring the odd traveler down a road to nowhere and then bringing them to a halt with a phantasm. It was designed to lure him here, for the celebration.

He hadn’t been lying about his investigations into the paranormal and he knew for certain that Urdmer’s reference to Crom Cruac was merely meant to distract and confuse him. There had been no coven of Crowich nor any Roman ruins, folly or otherwise, either. The evil lay here, in this house, and it was of an entirely different origin. God willing, this would be the night that an end was put to it.

At last, the back of his gauntlets began to glow as he arrived next to a small cupboard. A squawking sound came from within. He flung open the door and pulled out the basket of chickens. If there had been any doubt as to the nature of this place, that dispelled it. He began to search inside, finding a tiny switch hidden behind a pile of old boxes. Flicking it, he pushed at the back of the cupboard and entered the hidden chamber he had been seeking. It was a cramped, dusty storeroom piled high with more boxes and chests. A terrible smell of rot and decay permeated the entire room, seeming to come from the far corner. Tom walked over and frowned when he saw what lay there. It was the twisted and desiccated corpse of a small child, cruelly shackled to the wall and seemingly abandoned to starve to death.

He bent down and whispered a silent benediction over the body and then held the hilt of his sword above the skull as he once again mouthed words of power. A glow began to grow around its head, which suddenly perked up and looked at him.

“Oh sir, please help me! I’m so terribly hungry and thirsty. No-one has been in here to look after me for such a long time.” The warbling treble of a young boy came out of the mummified mouth as dead, empty eye sockets stared at Tom.

“What is your name, child?” He spoke with a gentle reverence.

“I’m Jamie, Jamie McKenzie. Please, please can you help me?”

“Yes, I can, Jamie, but not in the way you think. You’re already dead, you see.”

“Oh.” The boy revenant looked down and around him. “That explains why I’ve been alone, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Can you tell me about how you came here?”

“It was the bad men. They drove a big black car and bought me and my friends Alex and Michael here. They said it was for a big feast and they gave us sweets on the way here, but then I got very tired and fell asleep. When I woke up, we were locked up in the dungeon cells in the cellar.”

“Was there anyone else down there?”

“There was an older girl, I think. We could hear her crying next door to us. It was strange, really. I could have sworn it sounded like they were keeping goats down there as well. Then one day, the men in the black robes came and took away Alex and Michael, but left me.”

“Do you know why?”

“They said I was too skinny.”

Tom’s blood ran icy cold and then as hot as fire as he realized what had happened.

“Thank you, Jamie. I’m going to take care of the bad men and make sure they can never hurt anyone else again.”

“But…but…there are so many of them. How can one man deal with all of them?”

“The only way that I can – with all the strength the Almighty has given me. For I am Thomas Saxon, Knight Commander of the Order of the Templars. I never lie and I never fail.”

“You almost give me hope, sir. Can you…see that my body is taken home to my family?”

“Yes, Jamie, I promise. You will be able to rest.”

The revenant nodded in thanks and then collapsed back on the floor, the spell having worked its course. Thomas Saxon stood up, his face a stony mask of righteous wrath. It was clear that what was going on here was much, much worse than they feared. This was not mere wickedness, but black magic, devilry and sacrifice.

There would be a reckoning for this, the likes of which had not been seen for many a day.

It was time to make his way down to the dungeons that poor dead Jamie had spoken of and, putting together what evidence he had gathered from this hellish house, that path lay through the kitchens. Off he stalked down the hallway, fury growing within him by the minute. The landing was deserted as he descended the stairs to the main hallway and drew his sword, which glowed with an intense blue light all along its razor-sharp blade. He headed away from the front door and, upon turning a corner, began to smell the aroma of roasting meat. There were several voices coming from within.

Saxon wound up and kicked mightily at the door, sending it crashing inwards in a hail of splinters. Before him lay a large kitchen lined with cupboards, sinks and cast iron ranges and set with tables loaded with vegetables, foodstuffs and myriad jars. Four servants clad in white robes looked up at him in confused shock, pausing in their busy tasks. Behind them, slowly rotating on a spit above an open fire was what was unmistakeably the body of a young woman.

He leapt in with a snarl of rage, sweeping the head off the nearest man with a vicious slash and gutting another from shoulder to hip with the backhand stroke, sending him staggering backwards with blood spurting out from between his shattered ribs. The other pair scrabbled to escape him, but to no avail as he cut one clean in twain and delivered a mighty two-handed blow to the last man’s head, cleaving it asunder all the way down to the sternum. Finally, he stood still, sword at the ready, panting as he looked about wildly for any further target. Finding none, he moved on, towards the large dumbwaiter in the far corner.

Down he went, through a black stone shaft into an antechamber lit by ghastly torches flickering with blue flame. There, a naked blonde girl bound in chains struggled and screamed in the hands of five black robed cultists wearing goat-head masks, who sought to dawb her with ritualistic paints and force a chalice of steaming liquid to her mouth.

“Turn, hellhounds! Turn and look upon your doom.”

Saxon gave no further warning as he flew at the devil-worshippers, his blade singing through the air as he decapitated two in one blow. The others barely had time to unleash their barbed daggers before he was upon them, slashing off the arms of one man with a backhanded stroke possessed of far more than natural strength and piercing the last wretch through the middle of his black heart as he turned to flee. Once again, he had cut down his foes so fast that they had nary an opportunity to let loose with a cry for help. With two ringing swordblows, he smashed the girls manacles and fetters into dozens of fragments of smashed iron before he sheathed his blade and helped her to her feet.

“Go now, girl, and fear not. Go upstairs, for your deliverance is at hand.”

“Who are you?”

“Today I am become Death.”

Forth he walked, through an archway into a corridor that sloped upwards towards a room that hummed with the noise of rhythmic chanting and strange, otherworldly cries. He reached the doorway and looked forward onto the large chamber, which was crowded with dozens of masked cultists. Great black silk hangings inscribed in occult symbols and obscene runes hung from each wall, flanked by more torches burning with unholy fire, and at the head of the room lay a bloodstained altar on a raised dais. Behind it stood Lord Urdmer, clad in black and gold robes and with a ritualistic sword and carved staff in his raised arms.

His latest ululation was cut short by the thunder of a shotgun blast. He looked up to see the tall figure in hat and coat standing in the doorway, smoking gun in hand.

“Why…if it isn’t young Master Sahson! We weren’t due to see you until dessert. No matter. You have been expected. You see, this entire night has been arranged just so you could be lured here. Your innocent blood shall open the gate for the Goat of Mendes!”

He threw his head back and let loose with a maniacal peal of diabolical laughter.

Saxon grimaced. The girl in chains had seemed a little bit too convenient.

“Not quite, Urdmer. You shall have your just desserts alright. But you got my name slightly wrong. It is Thomas Saxon.”

Urdmer visibly blanched at the name and a murmur began to arise from the cultists. They had all heard of one of the most feared Templar paladins in the realm of England, a man who had destroyed dark wizards, slavering werebeasts and Nazi warlords alike, a man who the forces of evil rightly feared as a relentless scourge and the first man in four hundred years to be earn the title of Malleus Maleficarum.

“You may be powerful, Saxon, but do you really think that a single man, whoever he may be, can possibly defeat one hundred? We have the strength of hellfire itself on our side, you pathetic fool!”

Saxon lowered his shotgun, seemingly overcome by the inescapable logic of sheer weight of numbers. Then he reached into his pocket and drew out a golden object.

“And I have the Sacred Grenade of Ascalon.” He smoothly threw it up at the far corner of the room, where it exploded with a tremendous crash and whoosh of flame, throwing dozens of cultists to the ground and blasting open a huge hole into the night sky. Saxon then swung his shotgun back up and began firing devastasting blasts into the crowd of cultists, who now surged forward, howling in rage and fear as they were urged on from behind by the demented screams of Urdmer. As they fell, he joined in with his own battle cry as he drew his pistols.

“JERUSALEM!! DEUS VEULT!!”

Every shot Thomas Saxon fired struck home, smashing aside a cultist’s face or blasting a gaping hole in their chest, yet still the mass of the crowd came forward and forced him back. He killed dozens of them before holstering his pistols, drawing his sword and taking a mighty leap forwards that flattened yet more to the floor as he proceeded to cut his way forward towards Urdmer. Again and again, the devil worshippers lunged at him with the wickedly curved knives, the thick leather of his overcoat only turning aside some of their blows, yet he did not falter nor fail in his attack.

Finally, just as he closed to within ten yards of the Master, one planted a dagger square into the back of his knee and bought him crashing to the ground. Saxon whirled about, despite his agony, and stabbed his assailant clear through the mouth up into the brain before pulling out his blade and thrashing about him to keep the warily circling cultists at bay. Urdmer stepped down from the altar, smiling widely in diabolical triumph as he beckoned his thirteen remaning followers to close in for the kill.

Thomas coughed and blood spurted out from his mouth. “You may wish to surrender before we get serious with you.”

Urdmer scoffed and shook his head with a deep chuckle. “And who, pray tell, is we, Saxon?”

“We’re the Army of God.”

Before Urdmer could respond, the wild song of a dozen shofars and thundering hoofbeats suddenly broke into the room, followed by fully-armed and mounted knights crashing in through the shattered hole at the top of the room and slashing through the panicked diabolists. They all wore flowing white surcoats emblazoned with red crosses.

Saxon slumped back to the ground, grinning at the thought of all heaven breaking loose on hell.

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It was almost dawn when the last of the remaning cultists had been hauled away in chains, the full plate and surcoats of the silently watching Templars only looking slightly incongrous next to the blue uniforms of the local policemen, the ill-fitting suits of the Security Service men and the dark Puritan garb of the acolytes of the Office of the Witchfinder General. Three other fortunate prisoners locked in the depths of the house had been taken away in one of the two ambulances present, whilst great care was taken with two shrouded litters that were carried out under Saxon’s personal direction.

“A good night’s work, Thomas.” Marshal William said quietly, as they both stared at the house.

“Nay, sir. That would have been if we could have saved the other girl. This triumph is hollow.”

“That is where you are wrong, Thomas Saxon. We live in a world of terrible cruelty, of horrors unnumbered and of evil great, small and all in between. We walk the earth for only a brief time at His will, but each blow for right and each success for goodness is a victory, no matter how it seems. That is how the world is saved. That is how we all are saved.”

“What will happen?”

“To the foolish diabolists? They will all go to the stake and burn, each and every one, Urdmer chief among them. Black magic, torture, murder, cannibalism and attempted demonic summoning does guarantee it. But it will be secret. None shall know what happened here. There have been enough tales of horror in these past years, so that the good people of these sceptered isles and the world need no more.”

“And the house?”

The Seneschal said nothing, but simply handed Thomas a burning torch. He walked forward and threw it through one of the smashed front windows of the house. Within seconds, one of the curtains was ablaze and a few minutes later, the entire place was burning.

Thomas Saxon stared at it for a long while, then turned and walked away.

A fitting end for a house of hell.