Tales of the Hidden World Read Online Free PDF

the poor little secretary, but he hadn’t known her long enough. Nobody told her to play with fire.
    Jack drove on through the empty East Berlin night, roaring through the deserted streets. No one was chasing him anymore. They’d all stopped to check the body. Jack hoped they’d be properly appreciative that he’d cleaned up for them, but he rather doubted it. He drove on, heading for Checkpoint Charlie and home, and he never looked back once.
    Jack went walking in solitary silence, on the gray dusty surface of the Moon, surrounded by mountains and craters, snug and secure inside his golden armor. The dimensional Door had dropped him off exactly where he was supposed to be. He was there to retrieve Professor Cavor’s last mooncraft, crash-landed back in Victorian times, so its presence wouldn’t embarrass the Americans when they landed their ship in a few years’ time. Jack took his time, looking around him, grinning broadly behind his featureless mask. Enjoying the magnificent scenery by Earthlight.
    He found the crashed vehicle easily enough, right where it was supposed to be. He peered through the porthole at the mummified body inside, and then dragged the craft back to the Door, great clouds of dust billowing up around him, and then falling slowly back again. He forced the craft through the expanded Door, and then turned away, and walked back across the gray land to one particular crater, mentioned in Cavor’s last communication. He found the stone stairway, cut into the interior side of the crater, and proceded carefully down the rough steps, following them around and around and down and down, until finally he came to the abandoned ruins of the Selenite city. They were all long gone, of course. All that remained of Selenite civilization was rot and ruin. He walked cautiously on through the great stone galleries, past massive crystal installations, feeling very small against the sheer scale of the surrounding structures. He had hoped to find some last remnants of their unearthly science, but everything he touched crumbled to dust under his golden fingers.
    He’d got there too late. Millennia too late.
    The Armourer stirred restlessly in his chair. He had a strong feeling he should be somewhere else, doing something else, but he couldn’t think what. He seemed to have spent most of his life feeling that way. When he was out in the field, he couldn’t wait to get home. When he was stuck in the hall, he quickly got bored. And when he finally left the field and settled down in the Armory . . . he pined for the adventures he’d left behind.
    Which might well be why he so often went truant, on a little walkabout, to places he knew he shouldn’t be. Places like the Nightside, where he knew the family wouldn’t come looking for him. It was only small disobediences like that, he often thought, that kept him sane.
    It had been different, at first. When he had a family of his own. A wife and a child. Both of them gone now. He brought Natasha back to the Hall so they could be together, but it didn’t last. All too soon she was taken from him and he was left alone, with nothing left but his job, and his duty. There had been . . . affairs, dalliances, down the years. Mostly with pretty young lab assistants, with daddy issues. The Armourer smiled, briefly. James might be the one with the reputation as a lady-killer, but Jack had done all right for himself. In his own quiet way. And he hadn’t always been alone. He’d had a dog once. Until it exploded. Poor little Scraps.
    Jack remembered his wife, Natasha. He met her in Moscow while he was working a mission there, alongside the resident Drood agent. So long ago now . . .
    He punched a masked man in the face, kneed him briskly in the nuts, and then threw him off the edge of the building. The masked man screamed all the way down, but Jack was already moving on to his next target. There had to be twenty or more of the enemy, clattering over the steeply sloping tiled roof,