The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

'Chandra Nguyen Seth turned out to be Sid Ramsbottom, from Stepney,' said Richard. 'As British as corned-beef fritters and London fog. Used boot polish on his face for years. He might have been Mystic, but he was no Maharajah.'

Cleaver didn't take this in — he was a ranter, not a listener. 'Seth and the girl helped,' he admitted. 'The Splendids saved the day. Beat back the Knights of Perfidious Albion. Saved evewyone and evewy-thing. Without us, you'd all be cwawling subjects of Queen Mor-gaine. I was given a medal, by the pwoper King. I was witten up in Bwitish Pluck, for months and months. I had an arch-nemesis. Wicked William, my own cousin. I bested the bounder time after time. Made him cwy and cwy and cwy. There was a Clever Dick Club, and ten thousand boys were members. No g-girls allowed! I was in the Lord Mayor's Show and invited to tea at the palace twice. I could have been in your wotten old wars. Won them, even. In half the time. Dark Ones, Deep Ones, Wet Ones, Weird Ones. I could have thwashed the lot of 'em and been home before bed-time. But you couldn't leave me alone, could you? No woom in the Gwown-Ups' Club for Clever Dick. Not for any of the Splendids. That w-w-woman had to bwing us down to her level.'

'He means your club now,' said Leech. 'In some circumstances, I'd agree with him.'

'You'd both have to climb a mountain to be on a level with Catriona Kaye.'

'Touche,' said Leech.

'You're both just twying to change the subject.'

'Oh dearie me,' said Leech. 'Let's talk about the weather again, shall we? It's an endless topic of fascination. I was getting bored with writing heatwave headlines…'

Leech's Daily Comet had been censured for running the headline SWEATY BETTY over a paparazzo shot of Queen Elizabeth II perspiring (in ladylike manner) at an official engagement.

'How do you think he's done it, Jeperson? Science or magic?'

'No such thing as magic,' said Cleaver, quickly.

'Says the boy whose best friend used a magic diamond to become hard as nails. What was his name again, Captain…?'

'Wattway!' shouted the Professor, duped into a using a double-r name. When he wasn't angry, he spoke carefully, avoiding the letter «r» if possible. Sadly, Cleaver was angry most of the time. 'Dennis Wattway! Blackfist!'

'Not a magic person, then?'

'The Fang of Night was imbued with an unknown form of wadioactivity. It altered Captain Wattway's physiology.'

'I could pull a hat out of the air and a rabbit out of the hat, and you'd say I accessed a pocket universe.'

'A tessewact, yes.'

'There's no 'weasoning' with you. So, Jeperson, what do you think?'

Richard wondered whether he should follow Leech's tactic, getting the Professor more and more flustered in the hope of breaking him down and finding a way to roll back the Cold. It was all very well unless Clever Dick decided to stop trying to impress his visitors and just had the snowmen stick icicles through their heads.

'I assume the phenomenon is localized,' said Richard. 'Deep under the levels. There must have been a pocket of the Cold. Once it was all over the world, a giant organism — a symbiote, drawing nourishment from the rock, from what vegetation it let live. When the Great Ice Age ended, it shrank, shedding most of its bulk into the seas or ordinary ice, but somewhere — maybe in several spots around the world — it left parcels of itself.'

'No, you're wong, wong, wong,' said Cleaver, nastily.

'Is that a Chinese laundry?' said Leech. 'Wong, Wong and Wong.'

' Wwong,' insisted Cleaver. 'Ewwoneous. Incowwect. Not wight.'

He sputtered, frustrated not to find an r-free synonym for 'wrong'.

'The Cold didn't hide below the gwound, but beyond the spect-wum of tempewature. Until I weached out for her.'

'I see,' continued Richard. 'With the equipment generously supplied by your former employer, you made contact with the Cold. You woke up Sleeping Beauty… with what? A kiss. No, a signal. An alarm-call. No, you had instructions. What common language could you have? Music, Movement and Mime? Doubtful. Mathematics? No, the Cold hasn't got that sort of a mind. A being on her scale has no use for any number other than 'one'.'

Richard looked about the room, at the thickening ice that coated everything, at the white dusting over the ice. Tiny, tiny jewels glittered in the powder. He made a leap — perhaps by himself, perhaps snatching from Cleaver's buzzing mind.

'Crystals,' he mused. ' 'A near-infinite number', you said. Each unique and distinctive. An endless alphabet of characters. Chinese cubed.'

Cleaver clapped his hands, delighted.

'Yes, snowflakes! I can wead them. It cost a gweat deal of Mr Leech's money to learn how. First, to wead them. Then to make them.'

'Your bird must think you're a right mug,' said Leech, sourly. 'She must have seen you coming for a million years.'

'Eighteen million years, at my best guess,' said Cleaver, smugness crumpling. He didn't like it when his goddess was disrespected.

'How do you make snowflakes?' Richard asked. 'I mean, snow is frozen rain…'

Cleaver was disgusted, as Richard knew he would be. 'You don't know anything! Fwozen rain is sleet!'

Leech laughed bitterly as Richard was paid back for his pedantry.

'Snow forms when clouds are fwozen,' said Cleaver, lecturing. 'You need humidity and cold. It's vapour to ice, not water to ice. Synthetic snow cwystals have been made in vapour diffusion chambers since 1963. But no one else has got beyond dendwitic stars. Janet and John cwystallogwaphy! The colder you get inside the box, the more complex the cwystals — hollow plates, columns on plates, multiply capped columns, isolated bullets, awwowhead twins, multiple cups, skeletal forms. Then combinations of forms. I can sculpt them, shape them, carve them. Finnegan's Wake cwystallogwaphy! You need extwemes of tempewature, and a gweat deal of electwicity. We dwained the national gwid. There was a black-out, wemember?'

A week or so ago, a massive power-cut had paralysed an already-sluggish nation. Officially, it was down to too many fans plugged in and fridge-doors left open.

'You knew about that?' Richard asked Leech.

The Great Enchanter shrugged.

'He authowised it!' crowed the Professor, in triumph. 'He had no idea what he was doing. None of the others did, either. Kellett and Bakhtinin. McKendwick. And certainly not your spy, Mr Pouncey!'

Leech had listed the other staff: 'two junior meteorologists, one general dogsbody and a public relations- security consultant'.

'McKendwick had an inkling. He knew I was welaying instwuc-tions. He made the Box — the vapour diffusion chamber — to my specifications. He kept asking why all the extwa conductors. Why the designs} But he cawwied out orders like a good little wesearch assistant.'

Cleaver stood by an odd apparatus that Richard had taken for a generator. It consisted of a lot of blackened electrical coils, bright copper slashes showing through shredded rubber. There was a cracked bakelite instrument panel, and — in the heart of the coils — a metal box the size of a cigarette packet, ripped open at one edge. It had exploded outward. The metal was covered with intricate, etched symbols. Line after line of branching, hexagonally symmetrical star-shapes. Representational snowflakes, but also symbols of power. Here, science shaded into magic. This was not only an experimental apparatus, but an incantation in copper-wire and steel-plate, a conjuring machine.

'It's burned out now,' he said, slapping it, 'but it did the twick. In the Box, I took the tempewature down to