The Hounds of Avalon

Chapter Three

‘ We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come.’ Lord Shawcross

The Compound lay in the lower levels of Brasenose and Lincoln Colleges, which had been linked by new tunnels hacked out within days of the Government’s arrival in the city. In addition to housing Kirkham’s research facility, enemies of the state were incarcerated there: trouble-makers, traitors, anyone attempting to block the slow progress of a society getting up off its knees. Yet this low-level prison was only a small part of the Compound; larger by far was the high-security section, access to which had always been beyond Hal’s clearance. He’d heard rumours about who was imprisoned there, but since the Fall rumours were all anyone had and none of them could be trusted. It was a sign that events were coming to a head that he had been issued with a pass inside.

Yet Hal was too preoccupied to get excited about the General’s decision to ramp up his responsibilities. The call had come fifteen minutes earlier in the thin dawn light at the end of a long day and sleepless night of tearing himself apart over his confrontation with the Caretaker. At first he had considered reporting the manifestation — what the Caretaker had told him was surely of importance — but the more he vacillated, the more he pulled away from that route. Hal comforted himself with the thought that once he had decided what it all meant he would make a full disclosure at the Cabinet office. Yet he knew, quite powerfully, that the Caretaker’s message was meant for him alone, if he could ever decipher its meaning. And so he had sat quietly in his room, turning it over and over in his head. For a loyal public servant like Hal, his inaction felt like a grand betrayal and the guilt ate away at him constantly.

The guard at the main door checked Hal’s pass and directed him along a maze of corridors to a section sealed off with a steel gate. The guards here were hard-faced, clearly capable of shooting him in the blink of an eye and losing no sleep over it.

In the high-security section, the doors were thicker and lacked the small shuttered window usually provided for the warders to check on the inmates. Disturbing sounds emanated from the unseen inhabitants. From one cell came a howling like a wild animal’s cry, accompanied by frenzied clawing at the walls. And in another, something wet and sticky lashed back and forth.

Hal found Reid and Manning deep in conversation. Manning had a touch of glamour that belied her Home Office position, but Reid was always the perfect spy, ready to fade into the background at any moment. Beyond them, workmen were adding even greater electronic security to one of the cells. Manning and Reid stopped talking when they saw Hal.

‘The General sent this urgently.’ Hal handed over a sealed envelope to Reid. ‘Your eyes only.’

Reid opened it and gave a brief, triumphant smile. ‘We’re on our way.’

Manning was distracted by the work taking place in and around the nearby cell. Hal thought he sensed a touch of uneasiness about her.

‘Who’s in there?’ The words came out before Hal could stop them and he waited to be reprimanded for breaking the department’s rule of no questions, any time.

But Manning was oblivious to protocol. She continued to stare at the cell as she gave her distracted answer: ‘Prisoner Zero.’ Hal was not enough of a neophyte to probe further.

‘Tell the General we’ll both be around for the interrogation,’ Reid said to Hal. ‘We’ll do it in four-one-four — there’s a two-way mirror.’

‘Got it.’

As Hal turned to retrace his steps, a disturbance broke out just ahead. A guard staggered backwards out of an open cell door, his SA80 spraying bullets all around. He was wearing an ABC isolation suit, a red arterial spray gushing from a ragged tear down the front of it.

Suddenly the corridor was filled with the most terrible sounds: jungle shrieks, haunted moans, insectile chittering and a low, chilling susurration. The prisoners had smelled the blood.

Hal was rooted by the sight for a second too long. Just as he was about to run back up the corridor, a small black shape bounded from the cell on to the chest of the still-twitching guard. At first, Hal thought it was a spider the size of a small dog, then some kind of lizard. Finally, he realised he was looking at an imp that would not have been out of place in a medieval wood-carving. It was the glossy black of crude oil and covered in gleaming scales. Its body had human proportions, but its head was oversized, like a baby’s. A pointed tail lashed back and forth.

‘Take that,’ the devil said with a swipe of razor-sharp talons, ‘for presumption. And that for stupidity. And this simply because it is my nature.’ The talons became a blur of rending and tearing.

And then the imp stopped, sniffed the air and turned its head in an oddly mechanical way towards Hal. Hal’s blood ran cold as the devil’s red eyes fell on him.

‘Aha!’ the imp said with jubilation. It sounded like a throaty old man. ‘Fresh meat.’

It leaped from the seeping corpse so fast that Hal couldn’t keep it in his vision. Bouncing off the walls and ceiling, it hit Hal full force in the stomach. He fell to the floor, winded, as the imp did a little mocking dance around him. Before Hal could lever himself up, the devil jumped to squat on his chest with surprising weight.

‘Now, now,’ it said, with a malicious grin, ‘no running before we exchange pleasantries.’ It hooked one talon in the corner of Hal’s mouth and pulled his lips into a grimace. The finger tasted gritty and vinegary. ‘A thin covering on fragile bone,’ the imp continued. ‘What a strange and ineffective design.’ But then it paused, puzzled, and sniffed the air over Hal’s face. ‘What is this?’ The imp grew oddly uneasy. ‘The stink of righteousness? The rank odour of life?’ It pressed its face close to Hal’s so that its burning red eyes filled Hal’s entire vision, its spoiled-meat breath nearly making him retch. ‘The Pendragon Spirit?’

Hal was too terrified to read anything in the imp’s manner at that moment, but later, on reflection, he would believe that he had seen a hint of fear.

A second later, the creature was wrenched off his chest. Four guards in ABC suits lifted the imp into the air before clamping around its neck a metal collar with an attached chain. The imp let out a high-pitched, agonised scream, thrashing wildly as if the very touch of the collar burned it.

As the guards dragged the imp back to its cell, the cacophony from the other cells grew even louder, the cumulative noise now tinged with fury and hatred. Hal pressed his hands over his ears and staggered to his feet to catch his breath. The imp’s cell door clanged shut, followed by several resounding thuds as the creature threw itself at the door.

The other occupants continued to rage until a strange sound reverberated from the far end of the corridor where Manning and Reid were being protected by other guards. It had the organic tone of a voice, but sounded to Hal something like a tolling bell. Immediately, whatever creatures lay behind the closed doors fell silent, and the quiet that followed was infinitely more disturbing.

Breathless and frightened, Hal stumbled out of Brasenose and into the High Street where two men were grunting and sweating as they attempted to fix the wheel of a cart. He was instantly hit by a wind sharp with the bite of winter. A flurry of snow stung his face. Puzzled, he looked up to see grey clouds now obscuring a sky that had been blue when he had entered the building. Snow in June? Even the final few things they had been counting on were fading away. Fastening his jacket, he turned into the icy gale and hurried towards Queen’s College.

Just after 6 a.m., he found Samantha buried behind a mound of paperwork in her tiny office in the Ministry of Intelligence. No one kept regular hours any more. Her repeated complaints about deadlines and a possible sacking fell on deaf ears and eventually Hal convinced her to take an early breakfast.

Shivering, they made their way to one of the pubs that opened before dawn for the market workers. At that time they’d be able to find a quiet corner away from the usual gossiping cliques from the Government offices.

‘I can’t believe this weather.’ Samantha sipped a herbal infusion, which everyone now drank instead of tea. ‘Everything’s gone mad.’

‘Everything went mad a long time ago,’ Hal replied.

Samantha caught his flat delivery and asked him what was wrong. Hal enjoyed the concern in her eyes. Cautiously, he related his meeting with the Caretaker and the mysterious transformation of Oxford.

‘I will report it,’ he said. ‘Soon.’

Samantha wasn’t listening. ‘“Something is coming”?’ she repeated hesitantly.

‘That’s what he said. But what I don’t get is, why did he tell me? It was as if he thought I could do something about it.’

‘Maybe you can.’

‘I’m a glorified librarian, Samantha. I’m barely any use in the job I do do. I’m not like Hunter-’

‘Stop going on about Hunter,’ Samantha said sharply.

‘The Caretaker was talking about the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons as if I had some way of contacting them. They need to be brought together, he said. But one of them has already fallen.’

‘Brothers and Sisters of what?’

‘You know — the Five who fought at the Fall.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘They’ve been in all the recent intelligence reports. You should know that — it’s your department.’

‘You don’t think they actually let me read the files, do you? I have to look the other way while I stick them in a drawer.’

‘You’ve not heard Reid say anything?’ Hal drank his herbal brew, but wished he’d ordered a beer; he felt the urge to get completely drunk.

‘No, but then I’ve not been listening.’ She paused, stared at him curiously. ‘Do you want me to?’

‘You could lose your job-’

‘Do you want me to?’ she repeated.

Hal took a deep breath, then jumped straight in. ‘Only if you can find anything out without putting yourself at risk. I can’t believe I’m asking you to do this. Hunter doesn’t reckon I’ve broken a rule in my life-’

Samantha smacked his thigh so hard it stung, then laughed at his startled expression.

‘Sorry,’ he said, abashed.

‘Don’t make me do it again.’ She finished her drink. ‘I’d better get back. I’ll do what I can. Just don’t expect miracles.’

‘I never expect those,’ he said morosely. Then another thought struck him. ‘There was something else. You know all those cells in the high-security wing under Brasenose?’

‘Where they keep the prisoners?’

‘So they say.’

‘No prisoners?’

‘No human ones. I think they’ve captured a whole load of the things that came with the Fall. And they didn’t sound very happy.’

Samantha blanched. ‘God, if they got out…’

‘One of them did while I was there. Nearly killed me. But that’s not the point. It spoke to me. It said it could smell the Pendragon Spirit on me — does that mean anything to you?’

Samantha shook her head blankly.

‘I don’t know what’s going on any more,’ he said. ‘The only thing I can think of is King Arthur’s surname in the legends.’

‘King Arthur,’ she mused, before adding hesitantly, ‘Yesterday, Mister Reid asked me to pull some files. They all began with the codename Grail…’ Her voice trailed off.

‘Arthur Pendragon.’ Hal turned the words over thoughtfully. Then: ‘King Arthur… the Grail. It’s got to be a coincidence.’

‘In this day and age, you can’t rule anything out, Hal,’ Samantha said.

Halfway back from Somerset, Hunter had to order one of the men to render Mallory unconscious. The knight was as strong and potentially lethal as the General had intimated during the briefing. Once he’d fought his way past the pain from his broken ribs and realised that his girlfriend had been killed, he took out two men in as many seconds, one with a chop to the larynx, another with a punch that sent his victim the length of the helicopter. The blows were delivered with a cool equanimity, but Hunter could see the familiar ice in Mallory’s eyes. Every raw emotion the knight felt had been bound up and battened down to fuel his single-minded response. It was a look Hunter had seen in many a soldier in difficult circumstances. There would be no dealing with Mallory now; the knight would be like a bear-trap — get too close and you’d lose a limb, maybe an eye, possibly your life. And he’d never be satiated. He wouldn’t deal, wouldn’t help; they might as well just lock him up until it was all over.

‘Not so smart now, is he?’ the acne-scarred Grieg said. Hunter could see that he was considering giving Mallory’s prone form a kick.

‘You won’t be so smart when I give my report to the General.’ Hunter stared out of the window, past the blizzard of white towards the glittering lights of Oxford in the sea of darkness below.

‘I had no choice-’

‘There’s always a choice. One of the targets is dead. The other is next to useless now. You’ve ruined the mission.’

‘What use is he, anyway?’

Hunter turned to him. ‘If you had a brain, Grieg, you’d be halfway to being dangerous. As it is, you’re just a psycho who shouldn’t be let near loaded weapons. You were tooled up and ready to kill something the moment you came out of the briefing.’

‘He just wanted to hit back at something, Chief.’ Porter, the one Mallory had knocked down the helicopter, sat nursing an aching jaw. ‘You can understand that, after all the losses we took during the Fall.’

Hunter nodded to Mallory. ‘He might be the only chance we’ve got to hit back. At the Fall, we lost every battle we engaged in — we didn’t even have the weapons to make it a competition. That means we have to be especially clever now, use whatever resources really work. Fight back with the new rules, not the ones we impose on ourselves. The attitude of this idiot here-’ Hunter jerked a thumb at Grieg ‘-is just going to mark us up for extinction. The new dinosaurs, lumbering around till we’re just fossils.’

Hunter turned back to the window. At times like this he was ready to quit. He’d never felt as if he really fitted in, couldn’t remember how he had ended up in the job in the first place. All his performance reviews noted his attitude problem, inability to follow orders and blatant disregard for authority. Yet somehow he kept rising through the ranks. Before the Fall it had been bad enough, with every request for a transfer refused. Now he couldn’t get out if he wanted to.

The helicopter came down in the Deer Park. Hunter climbed out beneath the thundering blades, with his men carrying Mallory on a stretcher behind. A cluster of people were silhouetted against the bright lights of Magdalen.

He motioned for the men to take Mallory straight down to a holding cell where the medics could check him over and then sauntered as nonchalantly as he could manage in the direction of the crowd. The snow was already starting to settle on the grass.

Running to meet him was Reid and two of the shifty, faceless men who populated his department. He stopped the stretcher and briefly searched Mallory before hurrying up to Hunter.

‘Weapon?’ he barked.

‘What’s this? A word-association game? If so, I’ll say “penis”. A big one.’

‘Did he have a weapon?’ There was a flush of excitement in Reid’s cheeks that made him oblivious to Hunter’s attempt to rile him. Hunter didn’t like the look of it.

‘A sword. In the chopper. There we go again with the word association. That Freud bloke really had it sorted, didn’t he?’

‘I’m taking it down to my department for tests, if you want to mark that in your report.’

‘There’s a stone in there, too. Makes pretty pictures in the air.’

Reid had dived into the chopper before Hunter had time to say anything else.

The General came up next, accompanied by a small coterie of serious-faced advisors. ‘What does he want?’ he asked suspiciously, peering after Reid.

‘Typical spook-looting.’

The General nodded. ‘Leave the chopper here. You’ve got forty-five minutes for debriefing and to grab a bite and then we’re off again.’

‘Trouble?’

‘We’ll see.’ The General marched away into the snowstorm with his coterie hurrying behind him like a gaggle of geese. Hunter watched them go, strangely unnerved; and his instincts never let him down.

When he turned back to the helicopter, Hal was standing beside him. ‘Bloody hell, will you stop creeping up on me?’

‘We need to talk,’ Hal said.

Hunter walked quickly, forcing Hal to skip to keep up; it was a game Hunter liked to play. ‘You’re like a bloody ghost. Natural stealth abilities. You should be doing this job instead of pushing paper around an in-tray or whatever it is you do to waste your time.’

‘Something’s up.’

‘There’s always something up.’ Hunter noted the concerned tone in Hal’s voice and relented. ‘What’s wrong?’ It was the first time he had looked his friend full in the face and he was surprised to see the depth of the worry there. ‘All right,’ Hunter said. ‘If you don’t mind watching me shovel food into my face, you can talk while I eat.’

Hunter and Hal sat alone in a corner of a sprawling refectory once used by students. Hunter listlessly played with a plate of cold lamb and mashed potatoes while he listened to Hal relate the pieces of the information he had started to put together.

Afterwards, Hunter said, ‘The mission I’ve just been on was to Cadbury Hill. Old stories say it was the site of Camelot. All rubbish of course, but…’ He took a mouthful of potatoes and grimaced as he swallowed. ‘They can never get the bloody lumps out. But… it’s a hell of a coincidence,’ he finished.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t bloody know, mate, but I’ll tell you this: that Caretaker bloke didn’t choose you at random.’

Hal put his head in his hands and thought for a long moment. ‘I don’t want this. I went straight from university into the MoD for a quiet life — shuffle a few files, eventually carry the odd ministerial briefcase.’ When he raised his head, the look Hunter had seen earlier had grown even more intense. ‘You can sum up my life in two words: nothing happened. And that’s just the way I like it. Safe. Secure. No risks attached. What’s gone wrong?’

‘You know what they say: if you’re not living, you’re dying. Maybe this is just what you need.’

‘Like hell.’ Hal thought for another moment and then said, ‘What do I do? Go to the General-’

‘No chance,’ Hunter said vehemently. ‘Never trust anyone in power. Haven’t you learned anything while you’ve been working here? They’ll either lock you up in one of their little cells while they investigate you — for three or four years — or they’ll bang you up for being a potential traitor.’

‘Well, I’m not supposed to deal with this myself, am I? I’m not you, the man who’s seen every country in the world-’

‘And shagged all the women and drunk all the booze.’ He tapped his belly. ‘Getting close to eating all the pies, too. Listen, you can do anything you want. You’re in charge of your life.’

Hal shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Look, you’re not in this alone. I’m here. We can figure this out together. When I get back from my little jaunt with the General, we’ll have a chin-wag, put two and two together… there’s an answer somewhere.’

‘The Caretaker said something was coming. That we’d been noticed. I’m worried something really bad is going to happen.’

‘Me, too, mate.’ Hunter shoved his plate away from him. ‘Me, too.’

Sophie felt as if she was at the bottom of a deep, dark well. In the tiny circle of sky visible high overhead, she could just make out the morning sun behind clouds. But she couldn’t feel her body at all. Floating in the water, she thought. She could float there for ever-

‘Sister of Dragons! You must hear me!’ The voice was insistent, but mellifluous and soothing.

Despite her desire to continue drifting, Sophie found herself rising up the well until she was looking into a woman’s face. At first, the features appeared to run like oil; Sophie thought that she was in the presence of some famous artist whose name she couldn’t quite recall, then a wise woman from a camp she had once passed through. As her perception cleared, the sense of familiarity faded. The woman was beautiful and sensitive, her dark eyes flashing in a pale face surrounded by long black hair that shone in the light of the moon.

‘Who are you?’ Sophie was surprised by the weakness of her voice.

‘Your kind once called me Ceridwen, amongst many other names,’ the woman replied. Her gaze left Sophie to dart around the dark hillside with apprehension.

Sophie wondered briefly if she was dreaming, for it appeared to be snowing. It was only when she attempted to move that she realised how numb her body had been; pain shot through her as if she had been stabbed. She looked down to see blood staining the whitening grass.

‘Do not move, Sister of Dragons. Your light burns low,’ Ceridwen said. ‘You have little time left for the Fixed Lands unless your wound can be staunched.’

Sophie let her head flop back, her vision swimming. ‘Mallory,’ she whispered.

Ceridwen was doing something at her side, from where the pain emanated. On the edge of her vision, Sophie saw a soothing blue glow and the pain eased a little. ‘There,’ Ceridwen said, ‘that will hold for a while. But you need to rest and heal.’

‘I was shot-’

‘Hush. We need to leave this place. Something terrible is happening. The Lament-Brood are here, only a few of them, but if they find us, they will corrupt us both. Yes, even I, even a Golden One.’

Ceridwen lifted Sophie as if she weighed nothing at all.

‘Where are you taking me?’ Sophie said weakly.

‘Far away from this place of sorrow.’ The words caught in Ceridwen’s throat. ‘Though in these bitter times, even the Far Lands are tainted with misery.’

Before she could utter another word, the soft, unnerving whispering of the Lament-Brood rolled across the hillside. Sophie raised her head enough to see the riders on their reptilian mounts emerging from the trees.

‘What are they?’ Sophie asked.

‘Agents of the Void,’ Ceridwen replied. ‘The abyss has beckoned.’

Sophie began to slip back into the well. Ceridwen backed away from the approaching riders, but there was the sound of others approaching to close off their retreat.

‘There’s nowhere we can go,’ Sophie muttered. ‘They’ve got us.’

When Ceridwen didn’t reply, Sophie knew she was right. The last thing she heard before she slipped into darkness was the sound of the horses’ hooves thundering across the hillside towards them.

Hal walked with Hunter along the empty, ringing corridors and out to the Deer Park where the helicopter waited. Neither of them felt like speaking.

The snow gleamed crisp and even across the grass in the morning light, with only one trail of multiple footprints leading to the waiting chopper; the General and his men were already on board.

‘He’s keen,’ Hal said.

‘What the bloody hell is up with this weather?’ Hunter snapped. ‘I hate snow. I hate it!’ He turned to Hal and his familiar rakish grin had returned. ‘Keep the home fires burning. And don’t talk to anybody, all right? Don’t do anything dangerous like thinking for yourself. Do what I say.’

‘I will.’

Nodding his goodbye, Hunter ran towards the helicopter, ducking low beneath the blades that had just started to whirr. Hal waited until it had disappeared and then turned back to Magdalen with a heavy heart.

Inside the ancient buildings it was unusually deserted. Most of the staff was in the New Library, which had been converted to an operations room for whatever the General had been planning. Hal was to report there later for a briefing.

As he made his way to his room for a rest, he heard footsteps approaching. For some reason he couldn’t quite explain, Hal felt the urge to step out of view. He slipped into one of the darkened offices and waited with the door ajar.

A few seconds later, Catherine Manning marched forcefully by, the echoes of her heels clack-clacking off the walls. She was talking to herself.

‘If I can get close to the PM, I think I can turn things around,’ she said.

Although Hal could see no sign of a radio or mobile phone, Manning acted as if she was having a conversation with someone unseen.

‘All it takes is a little-’ Manning paused suddenly a few feet past the door behind which Hal was hiding and then turned to look back. Hal slipped away from the door before she saw him.

‘Where?’ she snapped.

Hal’s blood ran cold. He backed further into the room, banging against a desk top, stifling an instinctive cry and grabbing the edge to stop the desk from grinding across the floor. Quickly, he ducked underneath it.

He was just in time, for the door swung open silently at the touch of Manning’s fingertips. Hal could see her legs as she stood there silently for an unbearable few seconds. Then: ‘There’s no one here.’

Hal only breathed again when he heard her heels disappear up the corridor. The troubling questions came thick and fast. To whom had she been talking? How had she known that he was hiding there? Why had she mentioned the PM, who was ensconced in his war bunker at Balliol and rarely seen by anyone outside the Cabinet? It left him with the feeling that some deep, dark plot was being put in motion.

And overriding it all was the sense that Hal could no longer trust anyone.

Strong winds buffeted the helicopter from side to side as they flew over the Scottish Border counties. They’d already been forced to put down for several hours to avoid bad weather and the mood on board was strained. Snow encrusted the edges of the windows, making it difficult to see more than a few feet out, though there was nothing at all visible in the night-dark countryside below.

Hunter stared out into the snowstorm, lost in thought. The General had refused to say what they were going to see, but his demeanour suggested it was not good.

In the days since the Fall, electric lights had been missing from much of the countryside at night, so Hunter at first assumed the glimmer he saw on the horizon to be just an illusion caused by the snow. But as they moved closer, he realised it was fire, and closer still the reality became apparent: it was an enormous fire.

‘That’s it?’ he asked.

The General came to sit next to him. ‘I think so.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘While we were plotting our strike-back, the enemy decided to move first.’

Hunter gazed at the flickering flames. The smoke billowed up into the snow-filled clouds. ‘That’s a town?’

‘Lanark.’

‘It doesn’t make any sense. The gods have left us alone for so long because they know we’re no threat to them. They can pick us off as and when they like, so why would they be launching a full-scale assault now?’

‘Nevertheless, our intelligence says that’s what’s happening. And as you know, Hunter, in the absence of being able to do anything more effective, we have at least established a first-rate intelligence network. Probably better than the one we had before the Fall.’

‘Can we get closer?’

‘We’ll go as close as is safe.’ The General sat back. He was surprisingly at ease, and when he next spoke, Hunter understood why. ‘I’ve spent months arguing for a chance to repel the invader. Months. Manning was too cautious. Reid was always after more intelligence; more, more, more. He’ll never have enough. The others always sat on the fence because no one was big enough to take the really tough decisions, so the PM was always swayed by those two. Now the balance of power has to shift. We can’t sit around and do nothing. We need to mount a robust defence and then strike back with devastating force.’

‘Have we got any? I know I’m devastating in my own way, but I don’t think I’d be much use against that.’

‘We have things at our disposal.’ The General looked away, his body language suggesting that was not an avenue that should be pursued.

Hunter ignored the signals. ‘Conventional weapons? You know they’ve failed in the past. You tried to use a tactical nuke during the Fall, didn’t you?’ Hunter attempted to keep the loathing out of his voice, though he’d remonstrated loudly about the idiocy of his superiors down the pub at the time. ‘As I remember from the leaked report, the bomb became wrapped in trees that appeared to have a life of their own and then somehow turned into a flock of birds.’

‘Some of the backroom boys have finally managed to adapt to the new rules we find ourselves operating under,’ the General replied curtly. ‘Even Reid has made a few helpful suggestions in that area. Frankly, I’d attack them with a handful of magic beans if I thought it would work.’

Hunter’s attention was fixed on the destruction below. The pilot took the helicopter in from one flank to fly parallel to the wall of fire, just above the level of the treetops. Every building in Lanark was aflame, a field of devastation that stretched as far as the eye could see. But that was not what left him pressing tightly against the glass for a better look.

‘They’re establishing a beachhead,’ the General said.

The enemy moved out of the fire relentlessly, so thick on the ground that the white of the recent snowfall was almost obscured. It reminded Hunter of nothing so much as an ant hill he had disturbed as a boy.

‘How many of them are there?’ he said with hushed awe.

Some of the figures looked oddly human. Others were bestial, moving from upright to all fours and back again. A few resembled medieval siege machines, yet they were alive somehow, alien life forms clearly wearing their war-like purpose, every pounding of their enormous limbs like the beat of a drum. And all across the landscape a purple mist drifted, swathing the figures as they made their slow, purposeful progress across the land.

As the helicopter swooped nearer, Hunter made out a group of figures distinct from the others: four bulky shapes surrounding a tall, thin one; the only details he could pick out were random images illuminated by the lick of flame. Yet there was something about them that made him feel sick to the pit of his stomach. He felt instinctively that they were the ultimate threat.

‘They’re not like anything we’ve seen before,’ Hunter said. ‘What are they?’

The General’s eyes gleamed with a sickening light of anticipation. ‘Are you ready for a fight?’ he asked.

The helicopter shook briefly in a random gust of wind. Hunter grabbed on to the straps for support, shivering as the temperature dropped another degree. The pilot moved the helicopter away from the invading force, heading back towards Oxford. The snow, which was coming thicker and faster, soon obscured all signs of the threat.

Hunter shivered again, this time not from the cold.

Winter was coming in hard.