negative. He noticed Hal and held up a hand. The others came to a sudden halt. All eyes fell upon Hal.
‘What are you doing here?’ Hal said. It sounded as though his voice was coming from somewhere else.
‘What are you doing here?’ The little man’s voice had a deep, echoing quality.
‘I live here,’ Hal replied. He realised that he felt drunk or drugged, for he was responding to something that was inherently absurd, yet it all made the clearest sense to him in a way that things only did when you were intoxicated.
‘These are not the Fixed Lands,’ the little man said, puzzled. ‘These are the Far Lands. You are in Faerie, Son of Adam. Take care.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Hal replied. The little man’s face darkened and Hal decided it would be best to change the subject. ‘Where are you going?’
‘From here to there. And probably back again.’
‘Your song is very… pleasant.’
This compliment pleased the little man immeasurably. ‘We sing the Winnowing as we walk the boundaries of our dreams,’ he said proudly. ‘It is a song that came from the days when the worlds were new and we have learned it so deeply that it sings in our hearts, even when we sleep.’
‘Why are you singing? Are you celebrating something?’
The little man grew horrified at this. ‘Celebrating? Celebrating?’ he roared so loudly that Hal took a step back. ‘We sing to save the worlds! We sing to bind the weft! To keep all Existence from unravelling! For if we did not, who would? I ask you that, Son of Adam! Who would, in these dark and desperate times when all is falling apart?’
‘Oh. I see,’ Hal said, not seeing at all.
The little man leaned forward to peer at Hal curiously. ‘Is it…? Do my eyes deceive me? A Brother of Dragons?’
Hal grew instantly tense. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, edging backwards.
‘A Brother of Dragons!’ The little man turned to his fellows and clapped his hands excitedly before returning his attention to Hal. ‘Then you join us in the defence of the worlds. You stand on the edge of the Great Gulf to hold back the night.’
The words filled Hal with a terrible dread. ‘I can’t do any of that.’
The little man looked puzzled at first, and then increasingly disturbed. ‘But you are a Brother of Dragons.’
‘Stop saying that!’ Hal snapped. ‘I don’t know what any of this means!’
With his heart thumping so hard that his pulse filled his head and drove out all thoughts, Hal ran from the side street, slipping and sliding through the snow, desperately searching for the life he knew.
The General sat in his office in Magdalen’s president’s lodgings surrounded by books describing military victories in minute detail, and sketches and paintings by war artists from down the years: the Crimean, the heat and dust of the South African veldt in the Boer War, the swamping mud of Flanders, the march into Berlin, the Belgrano going down, Kuwait with the burning oil fields in the background, Baghdad broken by cruise missiles. And there, at the end of the room facing his desk so that he would always see it, a painting of the Battle of London, four Fabulous Beasts circling, belching fire at a black tower while the capital burned in the background. The greatest defeat in a campaign of many defeats. A whole platoon wiped out by shape-shifting creatures in Scotland. The retreat from the Lake District. The Battle of Newcastle, during which the city was razed to the ground and the entire RAF obliterated.
And now this latest assault. He would defend his country with every whit at his disposal, but he couldn’t help thinking that he would be the one in the long, unbroken line of British military leaders who would preside over the complete destruction of the island nation.
On his desk were photographs of his wife and daughter taken before the Fall. These days they barely knew him, their presences passing like ghosts at irregular meals, or during the occasional function when he never even got time to speak to them. Would his sacrifice ever be recognised?
There was a knock at the door and the Ministry of Defence ministerial advisor admitted Manning, Reid and the few other members of the Cabinet who were not dealing with the immediate crisis. The General didn’t trust Manning — he had always been convinced that she didn’t have the backbone to go the extra mile. Sooner or later she would let them all down, most likely at the worst possible time. Reid was a thoroughly dislikeable human being, but at least he was a perfect security officer. The other Cabinet members he could take or leave; weak men and women not up to the job, desperate to be somewhere else, knowing no one else would do the job if they departed. They gathered in the assembled chairs and waited silently.
‘I wanted to give you the opportunity to see the available intelligence before we go into the full Cabinet meeting to brief the PM,’ the General said. ‘There is a lot to take in.’
‘It’s all gone pear-shaped,’ the foreign secretary intoned.
The General set his jaw; there was a man without a job as a result of their inability to contact any other country since the Fall, and he was already preaching defeat.
‘We have a situation,’ the General corrected. ‘An attack has been launched in the Scottish Borders. The enemy is establishing a beachhead, with the intention, we can only assume, of preparing for a full-scale invasion of the country.’
The ministerial advisor drew the curtains and took up a position at a digital projector. The General nodded and the screen hanging on the opposite wall came to life.
‘This film was taken by a reconnaissance unit and transmitted back shortly before the men were wiped out.’
It was difficult to make out what was going on. Smoke billowed back and forth across the screen. It was night and there were trees all around. Occasional bursts of fire flashed here and there, and to all intents and purposes, the image looked like a vision of hell. Sharp blasts of static blared out intermittently, making some of the Cabinet members clutch their ears, and every now and then the picture was disrupted by jagged rips of white.
‘What’s up with the sound?’ Reid asked.
‘The digital signal is repeatedly interrupted whenever the main enemy is near,’ the General replied. ‘The research team suggests that their physical make-up may interfere in some way with technology.’
Every person in the room jumped as a figure lurched into view. Its shiny black skin looked like polished latex, flecked here and there with red, but as it approached the camera the skin ran away like oil to reveal a form constructed out of bone. But this was not its skeleton in any traditional sense. There were cow bones, a pig’s jaw, human tibiae, fibulae and a rib cage, tiny bones that might have come from mice and birds, plus more indistinguishable items of animal and human origin, all topped by a horse’s skull. It looked like a human figure built by a conceptual artist, but it moved swiftly and with a reptilian vitality, a purple light glowing in its empty eye sockets.
‘Jesus Christ,’ the chancellor said in a hushed, sickened tone.
The bone-creature moved like a rattlesnake to grab a soldier standing off-camera. There was a roar like rocks falling on metal and the soldier was whisked aloft as though he weighed nothing. Bony protuberances rose mysteriously from the creature’s body before shooting out rapidly to impale the soldier. The screams were worse than the deafening bouts of static. The camera wavered, but the operator remained true to his mission.
Once the soldier was dead, the creature pulled his body close. It looked like a hug for a departed but respected enemy, yet within seconds it was clear what was really happening. The soldier’s bones gradually burst through his skin to be absorbed into the body of the thing that had killed him, drawn, almost magnetically, into the depths of the form. What remained was tossed aside with a soft, squishing sound that the camera picked up with sickening detail.
The audience was rooted in horror. The General, who had viewed the footage twenty-seven times, searched their faces, seeing the same emotions he had felt himself with each subsequent viewing.
A hand with long, unnaturally thin fingers appeared in the middle of the screen. It was apparent to everyone that it was made of insects and other small, wriggling creatures. A honey bee crawled near the wrist. Beetles and flies, brown and amber centipedes, wasps and midges, all together in one seething morass.
The hand moved forward rapidly towards the camera lens; a jagged flash of white, then black.
Silence fell on the room for a long moment, then Manning asked, ‘What kind of a defence can you mount against something like that?’ Her question was followed by supportive mutterings.
