The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

Prologue

In the mid-nineteenth century, Mycroft Holmes and others as yet unidentified found the Diogenes Club, ostensibly a club for the most unsociable men in London. It is actually a cover for a body charged with handling delicate and often supernatural matters of state. Among its most notable operatives are Charles Beauregard, who succeeds Mycroft as Chair of the Club's Ruling Cabal, and Genevieve Dieudonne, a long-lived vampire lady; in another continuum (the Anno Dracula series), they are lovers — here, they are unaware of each other until the 1930s (for that story, see "Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch" in Marvin Kaye's forthcoming A Book of Wizards).

The Club serves Britain's interests — and, often, humanity's — in a series of crises kept out of the history books: including an incursion from faerie in the 1890s ("The Gypsies in the Wood"), a rise of the Deep Ones in the 1940s ("The Big Fish"), a railway disaster which threatens the world in the 1950s ("The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train"), a timeslip on the South Coast caused by the psychic dreamer Paulette Michaelsmith in the 1970s ("End of the Pier Show") and the centuries-spanning "Duel of the Seven Stars" (Seven Stars).

In 1903, an ab-human entity comes close to committing the most colossal crime ever contemplated — the murder of space and time. No fewer than fifteen of the world's premier magicians, occult detectives, psychic adventurers, criminal geniuses and visionary scientists set aside profound differences and work under Mycroft's direction to avert the rending-asunder of the universe. Yet the only allusion to the affair in the public record is an aside by the biographer of Mycroft's more-famous, frankly less perspicacious brother, concerning the "duellist and journalist" Isidore Persano, found "stark staring mad with a match box in front of him which contained a remarkable worm said to be unknown to science."

In the 1920s, Diogenes Club members Edwin Winthrop and Catriona Kaye encounter a shape-shifting creature who takes the default form of Rose Farrar, a long-missing little girl. It is taken into custody by the Undertaking, a rival organization to the Club who maintain the Mausoleum, a prison/storehouse for unique and dangerous individuals and objects. (See: "Angel Down, Sussex".)

Later, Catriona conducts a murder investigation, which prompts Charles Beauregard, the Chair of the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club, to take covert steps to end the careers of the Splendid Six, a collection of arrogant and self-involved aristocratic adventurers whose number includes Richard Cleaver (aka "Clever Dick"), a child prodigy. (See: "Clubland Heroes".)

In the 1960s, the position of Great Enchanter — loosely, the commander of forces arrayed against goodness and decency — passes from Colonel Zenf, who had succeeded Isidore Persano, to Derek Leech, an entrepreneurial, Mephistophelean fellow who springs out of the mud of Swinging London and amasses a great deal of temporal power. Leech's history can be found, between the lines, in "Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch", "Another Fish Story", "Organ Donors" and The Quorum.

A foundling of the World War II, Richard Jeperson is raised by the men and women of the Diogenes Club to become the successor to Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop. With his allies Fred Regent, a former policeman, and Vanessa, a mystery woman, he has fought evil and investigated strangenesses throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their adventures are recounted in The Man from the Diogenes Club.

A legacy is passed down among the Chambers family — who have certain abilities after nightfall, and have waged their own night-time wars. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Jonathan Chambers wore goggles and a slouch hat and operated as the scientific vigilante "Dr Shade" in partnership with the ladylike "Kentish Glory", while his sister Jennifer practised unorthodox medicine. Jonathan's son Jamie is, as yet, unsure of his inheritance.

Now, it's the summer of 1976. Great Britain swelters under the Heat Wave of the Century…

I

"Nice motor," said Richard Jeperson, casting an appreciative eye over Derek Leech's Rolls Royce ShadowShark.

"I could say the same of yours," responded Leech, gloved fingertips lightly polishing his red-eyed Spirit of Ecstasy. Richard's car was almost identical, though his bonnet ornament didn't have the inset rubies.

"I've kept the old girl in good nick," said Richard.

"Mine has a horn which plays the theme from Jaws," said Leech.

"Mine, I'm glad to say, doesn't."

That was the pleasantries over.

It was the longest, hottest, driest summer of the 1970s. Thanks to a strict hosepipe ban, lawns turned to desert. Neighbours informed on each other over suspiciously verdant patches. Bored regional television crews shot fillers about eggs frying on dustbin lids and sunburn specialists earning consultancy fees in naturist colonies. If they'd been allowed anywhere near here, a considerably more unusual summer weather story was to be had. A news blackout was in effect, and discreet roadblocks limited traffic onto this stretch of the Somerset Levels.

The near-twin cars were parked in a lay-by, equidistant from the seemingly Mediterranean beaches of Burnham-on-Sea and Lyme Regis. While the nation sweltered in bermuda shorts and flip-flops, Richard and Leech shivered in arctic survival gear. Richard wore layers of bearskin, furry knee-length boots with claw-toes, and a lime green balaclava surmounted by a scarlet Andean bobble hat with chinchilla earmuffs — plus the wraparound anti-glare visor recommended by Jean-Claude Killy. Leech wore a snow-white, fur-hooded parka and baggy leggings, ready to lead an Alpine covert assault troop. If not for his black Foster Grants, he could stand against a whitewashed wall and impersonate the Invisible Man.

Around them was a landscape from a malicious Christmas card. They stood in a Cold Spot. Technically, a patch of permafrost, four miles across. From the air, it looked like a rough circle of white stitched onto a brown quilt. Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone… snow had fallen, snow had fallen, snow on snow. The epicentre was Sutton Mallet, a hamlet consisting of a few farmhouses, New Chapel (which replaced the old one in 1829) and the Derek Leech International weather research facility.

Leech professed innocence, but this was his fault. Most bad things were.

Bernard Levin said on Late Night Line-Up that Leech papers had turned Fleet Street into a Circle of Hell by boasting fewer words and more semi-naked girls than anything else on the news-stands. Charles Shaar Murray insisted in IT that the multi-media tycoon was revealed as the Devil Incarnate when he invented the "folk rock cantata" triple LP. The Diogenes Club had seen Derek Leech coming for a long time, and Richard knew exactly what he was dealing with.

Their wonderful cars could go no further, so they had to walk.

After several inconclusive, remote engagements, this was their first face-to-face (or visor-to-sunglasses) meeting. The Most Valued Member of the Diogenes Club and the Great Enchanter were expected to be the antagonists of the age, but the titles meant less than they had in the days of Mycroft Holmes, Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop or Leo Dare, Isidore Persano and Colonel Zenf. Lately, both camps had other things to worry about.

From two official world wars, great nations had learned to conduct their vast duels without all-out armed conflict. Similarly, the Weird Wars of 1903 and 1932 had changed the shadow strategies of the Diogenes Club and its opponents. In the Worm War, there had almost been battle-lines. It had only been won when a significant number of Persano's allies and acolytes switched sides, appalled at the scope of the crime ("the murder of time and space") planned by the wriggling mastermind ("a worm unknown to science") the Great Enchanter kept in a match-box in his waistcoat pocket. The Wizard War, when Beauregard faced Zenf, was a more traditional game of good and evil, though nipped in the bud by stealth, leaving the Club to cope with the ab-human threat of the Deep Ones ("the Water War") and the mundane business of "licking Hitler". Now, in what secret historians were already calling the Winter War, no one knew who to fight.

So, strangely, this was a truce.

As a sensitive — a Talent, as the parapsychology bods had it — Richard was used to trusting his impressions of people and places. He knew in his water when things or folks were out of true. If he squinted, he saw their real faces. If he cocked an ear, he heard what they were thinking. Derek Leech seemed perfectly sincere, and elaborately blameless. No matter how furiously Richard blinked behind his visor, he saw no red horns, no forked beard, no extra mouths. Only a tightness in the man's jaw gave away the effort it took to present himself like this. Leech had to be mindful of a tendency to grind his teeth.

They had driven west — windows rolled down in the futile hope of a cool breeze — through parched, sun-baked countryside. Now, despite thermals and furs, they shivered. Richard saw Leech's breath frosting.

"Snow in July," said Leech. "Worse. Snow in this July."

"It's not snow, it's rime. Snow is frozen rain. Precipitation. Rime is frozen dew. The moisture in the air, in the ground."

"Don't be such an arse, Jeperson."

"As a newspaperman, you appreciate accuracy."

"As a newspaper publisher, I know elitist vocabulary alienates readers. If it looks like snow, tastes like snow and gives you a white Christmas, then…"

Leech had devised So What Do You Know? an ITV quiz show where prizes were awarded not for correct answers, but for matching whatever was decided — right or wrong — by the majority vote of a "randomly-selected panel of ordinary Britons". Contestants had taken home fridge-freezers and fondue sets by identifying Sydney as the capital of Australia or categorizing whales as fish. Richard could imagine what Bernard Levin and Charles Shaar Murray thought of that.

Richard opened the boot of his Rolls and hefted out a holdall which contained stout wicker snowshoes, extensible aluminium ski-poles and packs of survival rations. Leech had similar equipment, though his boot-attachments were spiked black metal and his rucksack could have contained a jet propulsion unit.

"I'd have thought DLI could supply a Sno-Cat."

"Have you any idea how hard it is to come by one in July?"

"As it happens, yes."

They both laughed, bitterly. Fred Regent, one of the Club's best men, had spent most of yesterday learning that the few places in Great Britain which leased or sold snow-ploughs, caterpillar tractor bikes or jet-skis had either sent their equipment out to be serviced, shut up shop for the summer or gone out of business in despair at unending sunshine. Heather Wilding, Leech's Executive Assistant, had been on the same fruitless mission — she and Fred kept running into each other outside lock-ups with COME BACK IN NOVEMBER posted on them.

Beyond this point, the road to Sutton Mallet — a tricky proposition at the best of times — was impassable. The hamlet was just visible a mile off, black roofs stuck out of white drifts. The fields were usually low-lying, marshy and divided by shallow ditches called rhynes. In the last months, the marsh had set like concrete. The rhynes had turned into stinking runnels, with the barest threads of mud where water usually ran. Now, almost overnight, everything was deep-frozen and heavily frosted. The sun still shone, making a thousand glints, twinkles and refractions. But there was no heat.

Trees, already dead from dutch elm disease or roots loosened from the dry dirt, had fallen under the weight of what only Richard wasn't calling snow, and lay like giant blackened corpses on field-sized shrouds. Telephone poles were down too. No word had been heard from Sutton Mallet in two days. A hardy postman had tried to get through on his bicycle, but not come back. A farmer set off to milk his cows was also been swallowed in the whiteness. A helicopter flew over, but the rotor blades slowed as heavy ice-sheaths grew on them. The pilot had barely made it back to Yeovilton Air Field.

Word had spread through «channels». Unnatural phenomena were Diogenes Club business, but Leech had to take an interest too — if only to prove that he wasn't behind the cold snap. Heather Wilding had made a call to Pall Mall, and officially requested the Club's assistance. That didn't happen often or, come to think of it, ever.

Leech looked across the white fields towards Sutton Mallet.

"So we walk," he said.

"It's safest to follow the ditches," advised Richard.

Neither bothered to lock their cars.

They clambered — as bulky and awkward as astronauts going EVA — over a stile to get into the field. The white carpet was virginal. As they tramped on, in the slight trough that marked the rime-filled rhyne, Richard kept looking sidewise at Leech. The man was breathing heavily inside his polar gear. Being incarnate involved certain frailties. But it would not do to underestimate a Great Enchanter.

Derek Leech had popped up apparently out of nowhere in 1961. A day after Colonel Zenf finally died in custody, he first appeared on the radar, making a freak run of successful long-shot bets at a dog track. Since then, he had made several interlocking empires. He was a close friend of Harold Wilson, Brian Epstein, Lord Leaves of Leng, Enoch Powell, Roman Polanski, Mary Millington and Jimmy Saville. He was into everything — newspapers (the down-market tabloid Daily Comet and the reactionary broadsheet Sunday Facet), pop records, telly, a film studio, book publishing, frozen foods, football, road-building, anti-depressants, famine relief, contraception, cross-channel hovercraft, draught lager, touring opera productions, market research, low-cost fashions, educational playthings. He had poked his head out of a trapdoor on Batman and expected to be recognized by Adam West — "it's not the Clock King, Robin, it's the English Pop King, Derek Leech". He appeared in his own adverts, varying his catch-phrase — "if I didn't love it, I wouldn't…" eat it, drink it, watch it, groove it, use it, wear it, bare it, shop it, stop it, make it, take it, kiss it, miss it, phone it, own it. He employed "radical visionary architect" Constant Drache to create "ultra-moderne work-place environments" for DLI premises and the ranks upon ranks of "affordable homes for hard-working families" cropping up at the edges of conurbations throughout the land. It was whispered there were private graveyards under many a "Derek Leech Close" or "Derek Leech Drive". Few had tangled with Derek Leech and managed better than a draw. Richard counted himself among the few, but also suspected their occasional path-crossings hadn't been serious.

They made fresh, ragged footprints across the empty fields. They were the only moving things in sight. It was quiet too. Richard saw birds frozen in mid-tweet on boughs, trapped in globules of ice. No smoke rose from the chimneys of Sutton Mallet. Of course, what with the heat wave, even the canniest country folk might have put off getting in a store of fuel for next winter.

"Refresh my memory," said Richard. "How many people are at your weather research station?"

"Five. The director, two junior meteorologists, one general dogsbody and a public relations-security consultant."

Richard had gone over what little the Club could dig up on them. Oddly, a DLI press release provided details of only four of the staff.

"Who's the director again?" he asked.

"We've kept that quiet, as you know," said Leech. "It's Professor Cleaver. Another Dick, which is to say a Richard."

"Might have been useful to be told that," said Richard, testily.

"I'm telling you now."

Professor Richard Cleaver, a former time-server at the Meteorological Office, had authored The Coming Ice Age, an alarmist paperback propounding the terrifying theory of World Cooling. According to Cleaver, natural thickening of the ozone layer in the high atmosphere would, if unchecked, lead to the expansion of the polar icecaps and a global climate much like the one currently obtaining in Sutton Mallet. Now, the man was in the middle of his own prediction, which was troubling. There were recorded cases of individuals who worried so much about things that they made them happen. The Professor could be such a Talent.

They huffed into Sutton Mallet, past the chapel, and went through a small copse. On the other side was the research station, a low-lying cinderblock building with temporary cabins attached. There were sentinels in the front yard.

"Are you in the habit of employing frivolous people, Mr Leech?"

"Only in my frivolous endeavours. I take the weather very seriously."

"I thought as much. Then who made those snowmen?"

They emerged from the rhyne and stood on hard-packed ice over the gravel forecourt of the DLI weather research facility. Outside the main doors stood four classic snowmen: three spheres piled one upon another as legs, torso and head, with twigs for arms, carrots for noses and coals for eyes, buttons and mouths. They were individualized by scarves and headgear — top hat, tarn o'shanter, pith helmet and two toy bumblebees on springs attached to an Alice band.

Leech looked at the row. "Rime-men, surely?" he said, pointedly. "As a busybody, you appreciate accuracy."

There were no footprints around the snowmen. No scraped bare patches or scooped-out drifts. As if they had been grown rather than made.

"A frosty welcoming committee?" suggested Leech.

Before anything happened, Richard knew. It was one of the annoyances of his sensitivity — premonitions that come just too late to do anything about.

Top Hat's headball shifted: it spat out a coal, which cracked against Richard's visor. He threw himself down, to avoid further missiles. Top Hat's head was packed with coals, which it could sick up and aim with deadly force.

Leech was as frozen in one spot as the snowmen weren't. This sort of thing happened to others, but not to him.

Pith Helmet, who had a cardboard handlebar moustache like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout, rose on ice-column legs and stalked towards Leech, burly white arms sprouting to displace feeble sticks, wicked icicles extruding from powdery fists.

Tarn and Bee-Alice circled round, making as if to trap Richard and Leech in the line of fire.

Richard got up, grabbed Leech's arm, and pulled him away from Pith Helmet. It was hard to run in polar gear, but they stumped past Tarn and Bee-Alice before the circle closed, and legged it around the main building.

Another snowman loomed up in front of them. In a postman's cap, with a mailbag slung over its shoulder. It was a larger and looser thing than the others, more hastily made, with no face coals or carrot. They barrelled into the shape, which came apart, and sprawled in a tangle on the cold, cold ground — Richard felt the bite of black ice through his gauntlets as the heel of his hand jammed against grit. Under him was a dead but loose-limbed postman, grey-blue in the face, crackly frost in his hair. He had been inside the snowman.

The others were marching around the corner. Were there people inside them too? Somehow, they were frowning — perhaps it was in the angle of their headgear, as if brows were narrowed — and malice burned cold in their eye-coals.

Leech was on his feet first, hauling Richard upright.

Snow crawled around the postman again, forming a thick carapace. The corpse stood like a puppet, dutifully taking up its bag and cap, insistent on retaining its identity.

They were trapped between the snowmen. The five walking, hat-topped heaps had them penned.

Richard was tense, expecting ice-daggers to rip through his furs and into his heart. Leech reached into his snowsuit as if searching for his wallet — in this situation, money wasn't going to be a help. A proper Devil would have some hellfire about his person. Or at least a blowtorch. Leech — who had recorded a series of anti-smoking adverts — managed to produce a flip-top cigarette lighter. He made a flame, which didn't seem to phase the snowmen, and wheeled around, looking for the one to negotiate with. Leech was big on making deals.

"Try Top Hat," suggested Richard. "In cartoon terms, he's obviously the leader."

Leech held the flame near Top Hat's face. Water trickled, but froze again, giving Top Hat a tear streaked, semi-transparent appearance. A slack face showed inside the ice.

"Who's in there?" asked Leech. "Cleaver?"

Top Hat made no motion.

A door opened, and a small, elderly man leaned out of the research station. He wore a striped scarf and a blue knit cap.

"No, Mr Leech," said Professor Richard Cleaver, "I'm in here. You lot, let them in, now. You've had your fun. For the moment."

The snowmen stood back, leaving a path to the back door. Cleaver beckoned, impatient.

"Do come on," he said. "It's fweezing out."

Richard looked at Leech and shrugged. The gesture was matched. They walked towards the back door.

The last snowman was Bee-Alice. As they passed, it reared up like a kid pretending to be a monster, and stuck out yard-long pseudo-pods of gleaming ice, barbed with jagged claws. Then it retracted its arms and silently chortled at the shivering humans.

"That one's a comedian," said Cleaver. "You have to watch out."

Leech squeezed past the Professor, into the building. Richard looked at the five snowmen, now immobile and innocent-seeming.

"Come on, whoever you are," urged Cleaver. "What are you waiting for? Chwistmas?"

Richard slipped off his sun-visor, then followed Leech.

II

"You in the van, wakey wakey," shouted someone, who was also hammering on the rear doors. "The world needs saving…"

"Again?" mumbled Jamie Chambers, waking up with another heat-headache and no idea of the time. Blackout shields on the windows kept out the daylight. Living in gloom was part of the Shade Legacy. He didn't even need Dad's night-vision goggles — which were around here somewhere — to see well enough in the dark.

He sorted through stiff black T-shirts for the freshest, then lay on his back and stuck his legs in the air to wriggle into skinny jeans. Getting dressed in the back of the van without doing himself an injury was a challenge. Sharp metal flanges underlay the carpet of sleeping bags, and any number of dangerous items were haphazardly hung on hooks or stuffed into cardboard boxes. When Bongo Foxe, the drummer in Transhumance, miraculously gained a girlfriend, he'd tactfully kicked Jamie out of the squat in Portobello Road. The keys and codes to Dad's old lair inside Big Ben were around somewhere, but Jamie could never get used to the constant ticking. Mum hated that too. Between addresses, the Black Van was his best option.

"Ground Control to Major Shade," called the hammerer, insistent and bored at the same time. Must be a copper.

"Hang on a mo," said Jamie, "I'm not decent."

"Hear that, Ness?" said the hammerer to a (female?) colleague. "Shall I pop the lock and give you a cheap thrill?"

One of the few pluses of van living, supposedly, was that gits like this couldn't find you. Jamie guessed he was being rousted by gits who could find anybody. For the second time this week. He'd already listened to Leech's twist, Heather Wilding. This'd be the other shower, the Diogenes Club. One of the things Jamie agreed with his father about was that it made sense to stay out of either camp and make your own way in the night.

Even parked in eternal shadow under railway arches, the van was like a bread oven with central heating. The punishing summer continued. After seconds, his T-shirt was damp. Within minutes, it'd be soaked and dried. This last six weeks, he'd sweated off pounds. Vron was freaked by how much his skeleton was showing.

He ran fingers through his crispy shock of raven hair (natural), checked a shaving mirror for blackheads (absent), undid special locks the hammerer oughtn't have been able to pop, and threw open the doors.

A warrant card was held in his face. Frederick Regent, New Scotland Yard (Detached). He was in plainclothes — blue jeans, red Fred Perry (with crimson sweat patches), short hair, surly look. He couldn't have been more like a pig if he'd been oinking and had a curly tail. The girlfriend was a surprise — a red-haired bird with a Vogue face and a Men Only figure. She wore tennis gear — white plimsolls, knee-socks, shorts cut to look like a skirt, bikini top, Cardin cardigan — with matching floppy hat, milk-blank sunglasses (could she see through those?) and white lipstick.

"I'm Fred, this is Vanessa," said the Detached man. "You are James Christopher Chambers?"

"Jamie," he said.

Vanessa nodded, taking in his preference. She was the sympathetic one. Fred went for brusque. It was an approach, if tired.

"Jamie," said Fred, "we understand you've come into a doctorate?"

"Don't use it," he said, shaking his head. "It was my old man's game."

"But you have the gear," said Vanessa. She reached into the van and took Dad's slouch hat off a hook. "This is a vintage 'Dr Shade' item."

"Give that back," said Jamie, annoyed.

Vanessa handed it over meekly. He stroked the hat as if it were a kitten, and hung it up again. There was family history in the old titfer.

"At his age, he can't really be a doctor," said Fred. "Has there ever been an Intern Shade?"

"I'm not a student," he protested.

"No, you're one of those dropouts. Had a place at Manchester University, but left after a term. Couldn't hack the accents oop North?"

"The band was taking off. All our gigs are in London."

"Don't have to justify your life choices to us, mate. Except one."

Fred wasn't being quite so jokey.

"I think you should listen," said Vanessa, close to his ear. "The world really does need saving."

Jamie knew as much from Heather Wilding. She'd been more businesslike, drenched in Charlie, her cream suit almost-invisibly damp under the arms, two blouse buttons deliberately left unfastened to show an armoured white lace foundation garment.

"The other lot offered a retainer," he said. "Enough for a new amp."

"We heard you'd been approached," said Vanessa. "And were reluctant. Very wise."

Wilding hinted Transhumance might be signed to a Derek Leech label. They didn't only put out moaning hippie box sets and collected bubblegum hits.

"You won't need an amp in the ice age," said Fred. "They'll be burning pop groups to keep going for a few more days."

"Yeah, I'm already shivering," said Jamie, unpicking wet cotton from his breastbone. "Chills up my spine."

"All this heat is a sign of the cold, they say."

"You what?"

Fred cracked a laugh. "Trust us, there could be a cold spell coming."

"Roll on winter, mate."

"Careful what you wish for, Jamie," said Vanessa.

She found his Dad's goggles in a box of eight-track tapes, and slipped them over his head. He saw clearly through the old, tinted glass.

"Saddle up and ride, cowboy," she said. "We're putting together a posse. Just for this round-up. No long-term contract involved."

"Why do you need me?" he asked.

"We need everybody," said Fred, laying a palm on the van and wincing — it was like touching a griddle. "Especially you, shadow-boy. You've got a licence to drive and your own transport. Besides standing on the front lines for democracy and decent grub, you can give some of your new comrades a lift to the front. And I don't mean Brighton."

Jamie didn't like the sound of this. "What?" he protested.

"Congratulations, Junior Shade. You've got a new backing group. Are you ready to rock and — indeed — roll?"

Jamie felt that a trap had snapped around him. He was going into the family business after all.

He was going to be a doctor.

III

Inside the research station, crystals crunched underfoot and granulated on every surface. White stalactites hung from doorframes and the ceiling. Windows were iced over and stunted pot-plants frostbitten solid. Even light bulbs had petals of ice.

Powdery banks of frost (indoor rime? snow, even?) drifted against cabinets of computers. Trudged pathways of clear, deep footprints ran close to the walls, and they kept to them — leaving most of the soft, white, glistening carpet untouched. Richard saw little trails had been blazed into the rooms, keeping mainly to the edges and corners with rare, nimbler tracks to desks or workbenches. The prints had been used over again, as if their maker (Professor Cleaver?) were leery of trampling virgin white and trod carefully on the paths he had made when the cold first set in.

The Professor led them through the cafeteria, where trestle tables and chairs were folded and stacked away to clear the greatest space possible. Here, someone had been playing — making snow-angels, by lying down on the thick frost and moving their arms to make wing-shapes. Richard admired the care that had been taken. The silhouettes — three of them, with different wings, as if writing something in semaphore — matched Cleaver's tubby frame, but Richard couldn't imagine why he had worked so hard on something so childish. Leech had said he didn't employ frivolous people.

If anything, it was colder indoors than out. Richard felt sharp little chest-pains when he inhaled as if he were flash-freezing his alveoli. His exposed face was numb. He worried that if he were to touch his moustache, half would snap off.

They were admitted to the main laboratory. A coffee percolator was frosted up, its jug full of frothy brown solid. On a shelf stood a goldfish bowl, ice bulging over the rim. A startled fish was trapped in the miniature arctic. Richard wondered if it was still alive — like those dinosaurs they found in the 1950s. Here, the floor had been walked over many times, turned to orange slush and frozen again, giving it a rough moon-surface texture. Evidently, this was where the Professor lived.

Richard idly fumbled open a ringbinder that lay on a desk, and pressed his mitten to brittle blue paper.

"Paws off," snapped Cleaver, snatching the file away and hugging it. "That's tip-top secwet."

"Not from me," insisted Leech, holding out his hand. "I sign the cheques, remember. You work for me."

If Derek Leech signed his own cheques, Richard would be surprised.

"My letter of wesignation is in the post," said Cleaver. He blinked furiously when he spoke, as if simultaneously translating in Morse. Rhotacism made him sound childish. How cruel was it to give a speech impediment a technical name that sufferers couldn't properly pronounce? "I handed it to the postman personally. I think he twied to deliver it to you outside. Vewy dedicated, the Post Office. Not snow, nor hail, and so on and so forth."

Leech looked sternly at the babbling little man.

"In that case, you'd better hand over all your materials and leave this facility. Under the circumstances, the severance package will not be generous."

Cleaver wagged a shaking hand at his former employer, not looking him in the eye. His blinks and twitches shook his whole body. He was laughing.

"In my letter," he continued, "I explain fully that this facility has declared independence from your organization. Indeed, fwom all Earthly authowity. There are pwecedents. I've also witten to the Pwime Minister and the Met Office."

Leech wasn't used to this sort of talk from minions. Normally, Richard would have relished the Great Enchanter's discomfort. But it wasn't clear where his own — or, indeed, anybody's — best interests were in Ice Station Sutton Mallet.

"Mr Leech, I know," said Cleaver, "not that we've ever met. I imagine you thought you had more important things to be bothewing with than poor old Clever Dick Cleaver's weather wesearch. Jive music and porn and so forth. I hear you've started a holiday company. Fun in the sun and all that. Jolly good show. Soon you'll be able to open bobsled runs on the Costa Bwava. I'm not surprised you've shown your face now. I expected it and I'm glad you're here. You, I had planned for. No, the face I don't know… don't know at all… is yours."

Cleaver turned to Richard.

"Richard Jeperson," he introduced himself. "I'm from…"

"… the Diogenes Club!" said Cleaver, viciously. "Yes, yes, yes, of course. I see the gleam. The wighteous gleam. Know it of old. The insuffewability. Is that fwightful Miss Cathewina Kaye still alive?"

"Catriona," corrected Richard. "Yes."

Currently, Catriona Kaye was Acting Chairman of the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club. She had not sought the position. After the death of Edwin Winthrop, her partner in many things, no one else had been qualified. Richard was not yet ready to leave active service, and had a nagging feeling he wouldn't be suited to the Ruling Cabal anyway. There was talk of reorganizing — «modernizing» — the Club and some of their rivals in Whitehall were bleating about «accountability» and "payment by results". If it weren't arcanely self-financing, the Club would have been dissolved or absorbed long ago.

"If it weren't for Cathewina Kaye, and a disservice she did me many many years ago, I might have taken a diffewent path. You know about this, Mr Jeperson?"

A penny, long-teetering at the lip of a precipice, dropped — in slow motion, setting memory mechanisms ticking with each turn.

"Richard Cleaver? Clever Dick. You called yourself Clever Dick. That's who you are!"

"That's who I was… until that w-woman came along. She hates people like me… like both of you, pwobably… she only likes people who are n-normal. People who can't do anything. You know what I mean. Normal."

He drew out the word, with contempt. Richard remembered a time — at school, as a young man — when he might have given the word such a knife-twist. Like Dick Cleaver, he had manifested a Talent early. While Cleaver demonstrated excess brain capacity, Richard showed excess feeling. Insights did not always make him happy. Ironically, it was Catriona — not his father or Edwin Winthrop — who most helped him cope with his Talent, to connect with people rather than become estranged. Without her, he might be a stuttering, r-dropping maniac.

"It was never about who you were, Cleaver," said Richard, trying to be kind. "It was about what you did."

Fury boiled behind Cleaver's eyes.

"I didn't do anything! We were the Splendid Six, and she took us apart, one by one, working in secwet with your dwatted Diogenes Club. We were heroes… Blackfist, Lord Piltdown, the Blue Stweak… and sh-she made us small, twied to make us normal. I'm the last of us, you know. The Splendid One. The Bwightest Boy in the World. The others are all dead."

Cleaver was coming up to pensionable age, but he was as frozen inside as his goldfish — still eleven, and poisonous.

"If I suffered a speech impediment like yours, I'd avoid words like 'dratted'," commented Leech. "All this ancient history is fascinating, I'm sure. I know who you used to be, Professor. I don't hire anyone without knowing everything about them first. But I don't see what it has to do with all this… this cold business."

A sly look crept into Cleaver's eye. An I-know-a-secret-you're-not-going-to-like look.

"I wather think I've pwoved my point, Mr Leech. You've wead my book, The Coming Ice AgeV

"I had someone read it and summarize the findings for me," said Leech, offhandedly. "Very convincing, very alarming. It's why you were head-hunted — at a salary three times what you got at the Met — to head my weather research program."

What exactly had Derek Leech been doing here? Scientific weather control? For reasons which were now all too plain, Richard did not like the notion of a Great Enchanter with command over the elements.

"I employ the best, and you were the best man for this job. What you did as a schoolboy was irrelevant. I didn't even care that you were mad."

Clever Dick Cleaver sputtered.

"Sorry to be blunt, pal, but you are. I can show you the psych reports. Your insanity should not have hindered your ability to fulfil your contract. Quite the contrary. Derek Leech International has a policy of easing the lot of the mentally ill by finding them suitable positions. We consider it our social service remit, repaying a community that has given us so much."

Richard knew all about that. Myra Lark, acknowledged leader in field of shaping minds to suit the requirements of government and industry, was on Leech's staff. Some jobs you really had to be mad to take. Dr Lark's, for instance.

"Your book convinced me it could happen. World Cooling. And only drastic action can forestall the catastrophe. With the full resources of DLI at your disposal, I was expecting happier results. Not this… this big fridge."

Cleaver smiled again.

"If you'd actually wead my book, you wouldn't be so surprised. Tell him, Jeperson."

Leech looked at Richard, awaiting enlightenment.

"Professor Cleaver writes that an imminent ice age will lead to world-wide societal collapse and, in all probability, the extinction of the human race."

"Yes, and…?"

"He does not write that this would be a bad thing."

Realization dawned in Leech's eyes. Cleaver grinned broadly, showing white dentures with odd, cheap blue settings.

Derek Leech had given his weather control project to someone who wanted winter to come and freeze everything solid. Isidore Persano and his worm would be proud.

"What about the snowmen?" Leech asked.

"I was wondewing when you'd get to them. The snowmen. Yes. I'm not alone in this. I have fwiends. One fwiend, mainly. One big fwiend. I call her the Cold. You can call her the End."

IV

He was supposed to park outside the Post Office Tower and wait for the other recruits. One of the group would have further instructions and, he was promised, petrol money. Jamie was off to the Winter War.

Now he'd (provisionally) taken the Queen's Shilling, he wondered whether the Diogenes Club just wanted him as a handy, unpaid chauffeur, ferrying cannon fodder about. Dad wouldn't have thought a lot of that. Still, Jamie only wanted to dip a toe in the waters. He was leery about the shadow life. The Shade Legacy hadn't always been happy, as Mum would tell him at the drop of a black fedora with razors in the brim. At the moment, he was more interested in Transhumance — especially if they could find a better, preferably celibate drummer… and a new bass-player, a decent PA and enough songs to bump up their set to an hour without reprises. Vron had been promising new lyrics for weeks, but said the bloody heat made it hard to get into the proper mood. Perhaps he should scrub Transhumance and look for a new band.

The GPO Tower, a needle bristling with dish-arrays, looked like a leftover design from Stingray. The revolving restaurant at the summit, opened by Wedgy Benn and Billy Butlin, stopped turning in 1971, after an explosion the public thought was down to the Angry Brigade. Jamie knew the truth. His father's last «exploit» before enforced retirement had been the final defeat of his long-time enemies, the Dynamite Boys. The Tower was taken over by the now-octogenarian Boys, who planned to use the transmitters to send a coded signal to activate the lizard stems of every human brain in the Greater London area and turn folks into enraged animals. Dad stopped them by setting off their own bombs.

Jamie found a parking space in the thin shadow of the tower, which shifted within minutes. Inside the van, stale air began to boil again. Even with the windows down, there was no relief.

"Gather, darkness," he muttered. He hadn't Dad's knack with shadows, but he could at least whip up some healthy gloom. The sky was cloudless, but a meagre cloud shadow formed around the van. It was too much effort to maintain, and he let it go. In revenge, the sun got hotter.

"Jamie Chambers," said a girl.

He looked out at her. She was dressed for veldt or desert: leather open-toe sandals, fawn culottes, baggy safari jacket, utility belt with pouches, burnt orange sunglasses the size of saucers, leopard-pattern headscarf, Australian bush hat. In a summer when Zenith the Albino sported a nut-brown suntan, her exposed lower face, forearms and calves were pale to the point of colourlessness. People always said Jamie — as instinctively nocturnal as his father — should get out in the sun more, but this girl made him look like an advert for Air Malta. He would have guessed she was about his own age.

"Call me Gene," she said. "I know your aunt Jenny. And your mother, a bit. We worked together a long time ago, when she was Kentish Glory."

Mum had stopped wearing a moth-mask and film-winged leotards decades before Jamie was born. Gene was much older than nineteen.

He got out of the van, and found he was several inches taller than her.

"I'm from the Diogenes Club," she said, holding up an envelope. "You're our ride to Somerset. I've got maps and money here. And the rest of the new bugs."

Three assorted types, all less noticeable than Gene, were loitering.

"Keith, Susan and… Sewell, isn't it?"

A middle-aged, bald-headed man stepped forward and nodded. He wore an old, multi stained overcoat, fingerless Albert Steptoe gloves and a tightly wound woolly scarf as if he expected a sudden winter. His face was unlined, as if he rarely used it, but sticky marks around his mouth marked him as a sweet-addict. He held a paper bag, and was chain-chewing liquorice allsorts.

"Sewell Head," said Gene, tapping her temple. "He's one of the clever ones. And one of theirs. Derek Leech fetched him out of a sweet shop. Ask him anything, and he'll know."

"What's Transhumance?" asked Jamie.

"A form of vertical livestock rotation, practised especially in Switzerland," said Sewell Head, popping a pink coconut wheel into his mouth. "Also a London-based popular music group that has never released a record or played to an audience of more than fifty people."

"Fifty is a record for some venues, pal."

"I told you he'd know," said Gene. "Does he look evil to you? Or is Hannah Arendt right about banality. He's behaved himself so far. No decapitated kittens. The others are undecideds, not ours, not theirs. Wavering."

"I'm not wavering," said the other girl, Susan. "I'm neutral."

She wore jeans and a purple T-shirt, and hid behind her long brown hair. She tanned like most other people and had pinkish sunburn scabs on her arms. Jamie wondered if he'd seen her before. She must be a year or two older than him, but gave off a studenty vibe.

"Susan Rodway," explained Gene. "You might remember her from a few years ago. She was on television, and there was a book about her. She was a spoon bender. Until she stopped."

"It wore off," said the girl, shrugging.

"That's her story, and she's sticking to it. According to tests, she's off the ESP charts. Psychokinesis, pyrokinesis, psychometry, telepathy, levitation, clairvoyance, clairaudience. She has senses they don't even have Latin names for yet. Can hard-boil an egg with a nasty look."

Susan waved her hands comically, and nothing happened.

"She's pretending to be normal," said Gene. "Probably reading your mind right now."

Irritated, Susan snapped. "One mind I can't read, Gene, is yours. So we'll have to fall back on the fount of all factoids. Mr Head… what can you tell us about Genevieve Dieudonne?"

Sewell Head paused in mid-chew, as if collecting a ledger from a shelf in his mental attic, took a deep breath, and began "Born in 1416, in the Duchy of Burgundy, Genevieve Dieudonne is mentioned in…"

"That's quite enough of that," said Gene, shutting him off.

Jamie couldn't help noticing how sharp the woman's teeth were. Did she have the ghost of a French accent?

"I'm Keith Marion," said the kid in the group, smiling nervously. It didn't take ESP to see he was trying to smooth over an awkward moment. "Undecided."

He stuck out his hand, which Jamie shook. He had a plastic tag around his wrist. Even looking straight at Keith, Jamie couldn't fix a face in his mind. The tag was the only thing about him he could remember.

"We have Keith on day-release," said Gene, proudly. He has a condition. It's named after him. Keith Marion Syndrome."

Jamie let go of the boy's hand.

"I don't mind being out," said Keith. "I was sitting around waiting for my O Level results. Or CSEs. Or call-up papers. Or…"

He shrugged, and shut up.

"We make decisions all the time, which send us on varying paths," said Gene. "Keith can see his other paths. The ones he might have taken. Apparently, it's like being haunted by ghosts of yourself. All those doppelgangers."

"If I concentrate, I can anchor myself here," said Keith. "Assuming this is the real here. It might not be. Other heres feel just as real. And they bleed through more than I'd like."

Sewell Head was interested for a moment, as if filing some fact nugget away for a future Brain of Britain quiz. Then he was chewing Bertie Bassett's licorice cud again.

"He's seen two other entirely different lives for me," said Gene.

"I'm having enough trouble with just this one," commented Susan.

"So's everybody," said the pale girl. "That's why we've been called — the good, the bad and the undecided."

She opened her envelope and gave Jamie a map.

"We're heading West. Keith knows the territory. He was born in Somerset."

Jamie opened the rear doors of the van. He had tidied up a bit, and distributed cushions to make the space marginally more comfortable.

Susan borrowed a fifty pence coin from him and the foursome tossed to see who got to sit up front with the driver. Keith called «owl», then admitted to Gene his mind had slipped into a reality with different coins. Head droned statistics and probabilities but couldn't decide what to call, and lost to Susan by default. In the final, Gene called tails. The seven-edged coin spun surprisingly high — and slower than usual — then landed heads-up in Susan's palm.

"Should have known not to toss up with a telekinetic," said Gene, in good humour. "It's into the back of the van with the boys for me."

She clambered in and pulled the door shut. There was some kicking and complaining as they got sorted out.

Susan gave the coin back to Jamie. It was bent at a right angle.

"Oops," she said, arching her thick eyebrows attractively.

"You said it wore off."

"It did. Mostly."

They got into the front of the van. Jamie gave Susan the map and appointed her navigator.

"She can do it with her eyes closed," said Gene, poking her head through between the high-backed front seats.

"Just follow the Roman road," said Keith.

Susan held the map up the wrong way, and chewed a strand of her hair. "I hate to break it to you, but I'm not that good at orienteering. I can tell you about the three people — no, four — who have owned this map since it was printed. Including some interesting details about Little Miss Burgundy. But I don't know if we're best off with the A303."

Gene took the map away and playfully swatted Susan with it.

"Mr Head," she began, "what's the best route from the Post Office Tower, in London, to Alder, in Somerset?"

"Shortest or quickest?"

"Quickest."

Sewell Head swallowed an allsort and recited directions off the top of his head.

"I hope someone's writing this down."

"No need, Jamie," said Gene. "Tell him, Susan."

"It's called eidetic memory," said Susan. "Like photographic, but for sounds and the spoken word. I can replay what he said in snippets over the next few hours. I don't even need to understand what he means. Now, 'turn left into New Cavendish Street, and drive towards Marylebone High Street…'"

Relaying Sewell Head's directions, Susan imitated his monotone. She sounded like a machine.

"One day all cars will have gadgets that do this," said Keith.

Jamie doubted that, but started driving anyway.

V

An hour or so into Professor Cleaver's rhotacist monologue, Richard began tuning out. Was hypothermia setting in? Despite thermals and furs, he was freezing. His upper arms ached as if they'd been hit with hammers. His jaws hurt from clenching to prevent teeth-chattering. He no longer had feeling in his fingers and toes. Frozen exhalation made ice droplets in his moustache.

Cold didn't bother Clever Dick. He was one of those mad geniuses who never outgrew a need for an audience. Being clever didn't count unless the people who he was cleverer than knew it. The Professor walked around the room, excited, impassioned, frankly barking. He touched ice-coated surfaces with bare hands Richard assumed were freezer-burned to nervelessness. He puffed out clouds of frost and delighted in tiny falls of indoor hail. He constantly fiddled with his specs — taking them off to scrape away thin film of iced condensation with bitten-to-the-quick thumbnails, putting them back on until they misted up and froze over again. And he kept talking. Talking, talking, talking.

As a child, Dick Cleaver had been indulged — and listened to — far too often. He'd been an adventurer, in the company of immature grownups who didn't take the trouble to teach him how to be a real boy. When that career ended, it had been a mind-breaking shock for Clever Dick. Richard had read Catriona Kaye's notes on the Case of the Splendid Six. Her pity for the little boy was plain as purple ink, though she also loathed him. An addendum (initialled by Edwin Winthrop) wickedly noted that Clever Dick suffered such extreme adolescent acne that he'd become known as "Spotted Dick". Angry pockmarks still marred the Professor's chubby cheeks. As an adult, he had become a champion among bores and deliberately entered a profession that required talking at length about the most tedious (yet inescapable) subject in Great British conversation — the weather. Turned out nice again, eh what? Lovely weather for ducks. Bit nippy round the allotments. Cleaver's bestselling book was impossible to read to the end, which was why many took The Coming Ice Age for a warning. It was actually a threat, a plan of action, a promise. To Professor Cleaver, the grip of glaciation was a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Behind his glasses, Cleaver's eyes gleamed. He might as well have traced hearts on frozen glass with a fingertip. He was a man in love. Perhaps for the first time. A late, great, literally all-consuming love.

Derek Leech, who rarely made the mistake of explaining his evil plans at length, had missed the point when he funded Cleaver's research. That alarmed Richard — Leech might be many things, but he was not easily fooled. Cleaver came across as a ranting, immature idiot with a freak IQ, but had serious connections. If anything could trump a Great Enchanter, it was the Cold.

"The Cold was here first," continued Cleaver. "Before the dawn of man, she weigned over evewything. She was the planet's first evolved intelligence, a giant bwain consisting of a near-infinite number of ice cwystals. A gweat white blanket, sewene and undying. When the glaciers weceded, she went to her west. She hid in a place out of weach until now. Humanity is just a blip. She'd have come back eventually, even without me. She was not dead, but only sleeping."

"Lot of that about," said Leech. "King Arthur, Barbarossa, Great Cthulhu, the terracotta warriors, Gary Glitter. They'll all be back."

Cleaver sputtered with anger. He didn't like being interrupted when he was rhapsodizing.

"You won't laugh when blood fweezes in your veins, Mr Leech. When your eyes pop out on ice-stalks."

Leech flapped his arms and contorted his face in mock panic.

"How many apocalypses have come and gone and fizzled in this century, Jeperson?" Leech asked, airily. "Four? Five? Worm War, Wizard War, Water War, Weird War, World War… and that's not counting Princess Cuckoo of Faerie, Little Rosie Farrar as the Whore of Babylon, the Scotch Streak and the Go-Codes, the Seamouth Warp, six alien invasions counting two the Diogenes Club doesn't think I know about, two of my youthful indiscretions you don't think I know you know about, and the ongoing Duel of the Seven Stars."

"Don't the Water War, the Scotch Streak and the Egyptian Stars count as alien invasions?" asked Richard. "I mean, technically, the Deep Ones are terrestrial, but your Great Squidhead Person is from outer outer space. And the other two bothers were down to unwelcome meteorites."

"You've a point. Make that eight alien invasions. The Water War was a local skirmish, though. Extra-dimensional, rather than extraterrestrial…"

Cleaver hopped from one foot to the other. The little boy in him was furious that grown-ups were talking over his head. If he hadn't been chucked off his course in life — by Catriona, as he saw it — he might have been in on the Secret History. The Mystic Maharajah, oldest of the Splendid Six, had carried a spear (well, an athane) in the Worm War. Captain Rattray (Blackfist), another Splendid, emerged from disgrace to play a minor role in the Wizard War. Teenage Clever Dick was too busy squeezing pus-filled blemishes to get involved in that set-to. Child sleuths, like child actors, seldom grew up to be stars. Richard was named after Richard Riddle, the famous Boy Detective of the turn of the century (so was Cleaver, probably). Few knew what, if anything, happened to Riddle in later life.

"You won't listen, you won't listen!"

"Have you considered that the Cold might be extra-dimensional rather than antediluvian?" asked Leech, offhandedly. "Seems to me a bright young man of my acquaintance reported something similar in a continuum several path-forks away from our own. It cropped up there in 1963 or so, during the Big Freeze. Didn't do much harm."

"You can't say anything about her," insisted Cleaver, almost squeaking.

"Interesting that you see the Cold as a her," continued Leech. "Then again, I suppose women have been 'cold' to you all your life. You made a poor impression on Miss Kaye, from all accounts. And she's always been generous in her feelings."

Cleaver's face tried to burn. Blood rose in his blueing cheeks, forming purplish patches. He might break out again.

"I know what you're twying to do, you wotter!"

Leech laughed out loud. Richard couldn't help but join in.

"I'm a 'wotter', am I? A wotten wetched wight woyal wascally wotter, perhaps?"

"You're twying to get me angwy!"

"Angwy? Are you succumbing to woawing wed wage?"

Cleaver couldn't help sounding like a toffee-nosed Elmer Fudd. It was cruel of Leech to taunt him Fourth Form fashion. Richard remembered bullies at his schools. With him, it had been his darker skin, his literal lack of background, the numbers tattooed on his wrist, his longer-than-regulation hair, his eyelashes for heaven's sake. He had learned early on to control his temper. If he didn't, people got hurt.

"You missed one off your list of apocalypses," said Cleaver, trying to be sly again. "Perfidious Albion. That was an extwa-dimensional thweat. An entire weality out to oblitewate the world. And we stopped it. In 1926! Not your Diogenes Club or those Undertaker fellows, but us! The Splendid Six! Clever Dick, yes. They first called me that to poke fun, but I pwoved it was a wightful name. I stood with the gwown-ups. Blackfist and Lord Piltdown and the Blue Stweak…"

"… and Aviatrix and the Mystic Maharajah," footnoted Richard.

"Should never have let girls and foreigners in," muttered Cleaver. "That's where the wot started."

"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 minus four hundwed and fifty-nine point seven thwee degwees Fahwenheit!"

Richard felt a chill wafting from the ice-slopes of Hell.

"We're supposed to be impressed?" said Leech.

"You can't get colder than absolute zero," said Richard. "That's minus four hundred and fifty-nine point six seven Fahrenheit."

"I have bwoken the Cold Bawwier," announced Cleaver, proudly.

"Not using physics, you haven't."

"So what was it, magic?"

Richard wasn't going to argue the point. There weren't instruments capable of measuring theoretically impossible temperatures, but Richard suspected the Professor wasn't making an idle boast. Within his Box, reality had broken down. Quantum mechanics gave up, packed its bags and went to Marbella, and the supernatural house-sat for a while.

"It's where I found the Cold. Minus point zewo six. She was sleeping there. A basic hexagon. I almost missed her. Bweaking so-called absolute zewo was so much of an achievement. McKendwick saw her first. The little lab assistant took her for pwoof we had failed. There shouldn't be ordinawy cwystals at minus point zewo six. And she wasn't ordinawy. McKendwick found that out."

Richard assumed McKendrick was the snowman with the tam o'shanter. The others must be the rest of Cleaver's staff. Kellett, Bakhtinin, Pouncey. And whoever the postman was. What about the few other residents of Sutton Mallet? Frozen in their homes? Ready to join the snow army?

"Fwom a hexagon, she gwew, into a dendwitic star, with more stars on each bwanch. A hexagon squared. A hexagon cubed."

"Six to the power of six to the power of six?"

"That's wight, Mr Leech. Amusing, eh what? Then, she became a cluster of cwystals. A snowflake. Then… whoosh. The Box burst. The power went out. But she was fwee. She came fwom beyond the zewo bawwier. A pinpoint speck. Woom tempewature plummeted. The walls iced over, and the fweeze spwead out of the building. She took the village in hours. She took McKendwick and the others. Soon, she'll be evewywhere."

"What about you?" asked Leech. "Will you be the Snow Queen's 'Pwime Minister'?"

"Oh no, I'm going to die. Just like you. When the Cold spweads, over the whole planet, I'll be happy to die with the west of the failed expewiment, humanity. It's quite inevitable. Hadn't you noticed… when you were coming here… hadn't you noticed she's gwowing? I think we'll be done in thwee months or so, give or take an afternoon."

Richard whistled.

"At least now we know the deadline," he told Leech, slipping the hypodermic out of his hairy sleeve.

Cleaver frowned, wondering if he should have given so much away. It was too late to consider the advisability of ranting.

Leech took hold of the Professor and slammed his forehead against the older man's, smashing his spectacles. A coconut shy crack resounded. Cleaver staggered, smearing his flowing moustache of blood.

"Yhou bwoke mhy nhose!"

Richard slid the needle into Cleaver's neck. He tensed and went limp.

"One down," said Leech. "One to go."

"Yes, but she's a big girl. What are the snowmen doing?"

Leech looked out of the window, and said, "most have wandered off, but the postman's still there, behaving himself."

"While Cleaver's out, they shouldn't move," Richard said, unsure of himself. "Unless the Cold gets angry."

Richard plopped the Professor in a swivel chair and wheeled him into a corner, out of the way. Leech unslung his giant backpack and undid white canvas flaps to reveal a metal box studded with dials and switches like an old-time wireless receiver. He unwound an electrical cord and plugged it into a socket that wasn't iced over. His bulky gadget lit up and began to hum. He opened a hatch and pulled out a trimphone handset, then cranked a handle and asked for an operator.

"Who else would want a telephone you have to carry around?" asked Richard.

Leech gave a feral, humourless smile and muttered, "Wouldn't you like to know?" before getting through.

"This is DL 001," he said. "Yes, yes, Angela, it's Derek. I'd like to speak with Miss Catriona Kaye, at the Manor House, Alder."

Leech held the trimphone against his chest while he was connected.

"Let's see if Madam Chairman has gathered her Talents," he said.

Richard certainly hoped she had.

VI

They were on the road to Mangle Wurzel Country because some paranormal crisis was out of hand. Jamie had a fair idea what that meant.

Growing up as the son of the current Dr Shade and the former Kentish Glory, it had taken several playground spats and uncomfortable parent-teacher meetings to realize that other kids (and grown-ups) didn't know these things happened regularly and — what's more — really didn't want to know. After getting kicked out of a third school, he learned to answer the question "what does your Daddy do?" with "he's a doctor" rather than "he fights diabolical masterminds". Since leaving home, he'd seen how surre-ally out-of-the-ordinary his childhood had been. No one ever said he was expected to take over his father's practice, but Dad taught him about the Shade Legacy: how to summon shadows and travel the night-paths, how to touch people inside with tendrils of velvet black, how to use the get-up and the gadgets. Jamie was the only pupil in his class who botched his mock O Levels because he'd spent most of his revision time on the basics of flying an autogyro.

Jamie thought Mum was pleased he was using the darkness in the band rather than on the streets. He was carrying on the Shade line, but in a different way. His father could drop through a skylight and make terror blossom in a dozen wicked souls; Jamie could float onto a tiny stage in a pokey venue and fill a dark room with a deeper shadow that enveloped audiences and seeped into their hearts. When Jamie sang about long, dreadful nights, a certain type of teenager knew he was singing about them. Because of Transhumance, they knew — if only for the forty-five minutes of the set — that they weren't alone, that they had friends and lovers in the dark, that tiny pinpoints of starlight were worth striving for. They were kids who only liked purple lollipops because of the colour they stained their lips, wore swathes of black even in this baking summer, would drink vinegar and lie in a bath of ice cubes to be as pale as Gene, lit their squats with black candles bought in head shops, and read thick paperback novels "from the vampire's point of view". Teenagers like Vron — who, come to think of it, he was supposed to be seeing this evening. If the world survived the week, she'd make him pay for standing her up.

Gene had found Vron's dog-eared Interview with the Vampire under a cushion in the back of the van, and was performing dramatic passages. Read out with a trace of (sexy) French accent, it sounded sillier than it did when Vron quoted bits of Anne Rice's «philosophy» at him. Vron wrote Transhumance's lyrics, and everyone said — not to her face — the lyrics needed more work. Bongo said, "You can't rhyme 'caverns of despair' with 'kicking o'er a chair' and expect folk not to laugh their kecks off." About the only thing the band could agree on was that they didn't want to be funny.

So what was he doing on the road? In a van with four weird strangers — weird, even by his standards.

Gatherings of disparate talents like this little lot were unusual. Fred had said they needed "everybody". Jamie wondered how far down the list the likes of Sewell Head came — though he knew enough not to underestimate anyone. According to Gene, the Diogenes Club was calling this particular brouhaha "the Winter War". That didn't sound so bad. After the last few months, a little winter in July would be welcome.

Beyond Yeovil, they came to a roadblock manned by squaddies who were turning other drivers away from a "military exercise" barrier. The van was waved out of the queue by a NCO and — with no explanation needed — the barrier lifted for them. A riot of envious hooting came from motorists who shut up as soon as a rifle or two was accidentally pointed in their direction. Even Gene kept mum once they were in bandit country — where they were the only moving thing.

As they drove along eerily empty roads, Susan continued to relay Head's directions. "Follow Tapmoor Road for two and a half miles, and turn right, drive half a mile, go through Sutton Mallet, then three miles on, to Alder — and we're there."

Jamie spotted the signpost, which was almost smothered by the lower branches of a dying tree, and took the Sutton Mallet turn-off. It should have been a short cut to Alder, the village where they were supposed to rendezvous with the rest of the draftees in the Winter War. The van ploughed to a halt in a four-foot-deep snowdrift.

The temperature plunged — an oven became a fridge in seconds. Gooseflesh raised on Jamie's bare arms. Keith and Sewell Head wrapped themselves in sleeping bags. Susan's teeth chattered, interrupting her travel directions — which were academic anyway. The road was impassable.

Only Gene didn't instantly and obviously feel the cold.

Jamie shifted gears, and reversed. Wheels spun, making a hideous grinding noise for half a minute or so, then the van freed itself from the grip of ice and backed out of the drift. A few yards away, and the temperature climbed again. They were all shocked quiet for a moment, then started talking at once.

"Hush," said Gene, who was elected Head Girl, "look."

The cold front was advancing, visibly — a frozen river. Hedges, half-dead from lack of rain, were swallowed by swells of ice and snow.

They all got out of the van. It was as hot as it had been, though Jamie's skin didn't readjust. He still had gooseflesh.

"It'll be here soon and swallow us again," said Keith.

"At the current rate, in sixteen minutes forty-five seconds," said Sewell Head.

It wasn't just a glacier creeping down a country lane, it was an entire wave advancing across the countryside. Jamie had no doubt Head knew his sums — in just over a quarter of an hour, an arctic climate would reach the road, and sweep around the van, stranding them.

"We have to go ahead on foot," said Gene. "It's only a couple of miles down that lane."

"Three and a half," corrected Head.

"A walk in the park," said Gene.

"Thank you, Captain Scott," said Susan. "We're not exactly equipped."

"You were told to bring warm clothes."

"Naturally, I didn't believe it," said Susan. "We should have been shouted at."

Jamie hadn't been told. He'd take that up with Fred and Vanessa.

"Fifteen minutes," said Head, unconcerned.

"There's gear in the back of the van," said Jamie. "It'll have to do."

"I'm fine as I am," said Gene. "Happy in all weathers."

Jamie dug out one of his father's black greatcoats for Susan. It hung long on her, edges trailing on the ground. Head kept the sleeping bag wrapped around him, and looked even more like a tramp. He must be glad he came out with his scarf and gloves. Keith found a black opera cloak with red-silk lining, and settled it around his shoulders.

"Careful with that, Keith," Jamie cautioned. "It was the Great Edmondo's. There are hidden pockets. You might find a dead canary or two."

Jamie pulled on a ragged black-dyed pullover and gauntlets. He fetched out a hold-all with some useful items from the Legacy, and — as an afterthought — slung the Shade goggles around his neck and put on one of his Dad's wide-brimmed black slouch hats.

"Natty," commented Gene. "It's the Return of Dr Shade!"

"Sod off, Frenchy," he said, smiling.

"Burgundina, remember?"

The cold front was nearly at the mouth of the lane, crawling up around the signpost. He rolled up the van windows, and locked the doors.

Gene climbed onto the snowdrift, and stamped on the powder. It was packed enough to support her. Bare-legged and — armed, she still looked comfortable amid the frozen wastes. She held out a hand and helped haul Susan up beside her. Even in the coat, Susan began shivering. Her nose reddened. She hugged herself, sliding hands into loose sleeves like a mandarin.

"Come on up, lads, the water's 1-lovely," she said.

Jamie, Keith and Head managed, with helping hands and a certain amount of swearing, to clamber up beside the girls.

Ahead was a snowscape — thickly carpeted white, trees weighed down by ice, a few roofs poking up where cottages were trapped. Snow wasn't falling, but was whipped up from the ground by cold winds and swirled viciously. Jamie put on his goggles, protecting his eyes from the spits of snow. The flakes were like a million tiny fragments of ice shrapnel.

Gene pointed across the frozen moor, at a tower.

"That's Sutton Mallet chapel. And, see, beyond that, where the hill rises… that's Alder."

It ought to have been an hour's stroll. Very pleasant, if you liked walking in the country. Which Jamie didn't, much. Now, it seemed horribly like a Death March.

Susan, he noticed, stopped shivering and chattering. She was padding, carefully across the powder, leaving deep footprints.

Gene applauded. "Now that's thinking," she said.

Jamie didn't know what she meant.

"She's a pyrokinetic, remember?" explained Gene. "That's not just setting fire to things with your mind. It's control over temperature. She's made her own cocoon of warmth, inside her coat. Look, she's steaming."

Susan turned, smiling wide. Hot fog rose from her shoulders, and snowflakes hissed when they got near her as if falling onto a griddle.

"Are my ears burning?" she asked.

"Never mind your ears," said Keith. "What about everything else?"

Susan's footprints were shallow puddles, which froze a few seconds after she had made them.

"I'm not a proper pyro," she said. "I don't set fires. I just have a thing with warmth. Saves on coins for the meter. Otherwise, it's useless — like wiggling your ears. It takes me an hour to boil enough water for a cup of tea, and by then I'm so fagged out I have to lie down and it's cold again when I wake up. That's the trouble with most of my so-called Talents. Party pieces, but little else. I mean, who needs a drawer full of bent spoons?"

"I think it's amazing," commented Keith. "Mind over matter. You could be on the telly. Or fight crime."

"I'll leave that to the professionals, like Jamie's Dad. You're not seeing me in a union jack bikini and one of those eye-masks which aren't really disguises."

"You'd be surprised how well those masks work," said Jamie. "When she was Kentish Glory, Mum wore this moth-wing domino. Even people she knew really well didn't clock it was her."

"I like a quiet life," said Susan. "So, enough about me being a freak. Gene, what's your secret?"

The blonde shrugged, teasing. "Diet and lots of sleep."

"Come on, slowcoaches," said Susan, who was getting the hang of it. "Last one there's a rotten…"

The snow collapsed under her and she sank waist deep, coat-skirts spreading out around her.

"Shit," she said. "Pardon my Burgundian."

"Didn't Gene say you could levitate?" said Keith, going to help her.

"She's not the one who knows everything," said Susan. "That was only once, and I was six. I've put on weight since then."

Keith took her hands — "she's all warm!" — and hauled her out of her hole.

"Abracadabra," he said, flapping the cloak.

"It doesn't do to get overconfident," cautioned Gene.

Susan made a rude gesture behind the other girl's back.

Jamie felt something. Deeper than the cold. He looked around. The whirling blizzard was thickening. And something was different.

"Hey, gang," he said. "Who made the snowmen?"

VII

"I know the Cold is spreading," Catriona Kaye told Derek Leech. "It's here, in Alder. We're three miles from you. Now put Richard on, would you?"

In the Manor House, the telephone was on a stand near the front door. She had to leave her guests in the drawing room to take Leech's call. The hallway was still cluttered from Edwin's days as Lord of this Manor: hats and umbrellas (and Charles Beauregard's old sword-stick) in a hideous Victorian stand, coats on hooks (she liked to use Edwin's flying jacket — still smelling of tobacco and motor-oil — for gardening), framed playbills from the 1920s, shotguns (and less commonplace armaments) in a locked case. Since Edwin's death, she'd tidied away or passed on most of his things, but here she let his ghost linger. Upstairs, on the landing, his shadow was etched permanently into the floorboards. After a lifetime in service to the Diogenes Club, it was all he had for a grave. She supposed she should throw a carpet over it or something.

As she waited for Leech to pass the phone to Richard, Catriona caught sight of herself in the tall, thin art deco mirror from the Bloomsbury flat she had shared with Edwin. At a glance, she was the girl she recognized — she had the same silhouette as she had in her, and the century's, twenties. If she looked for more than a few seconds, she saw her bobbed hair was ash-grey, and even that was dyed. Her wrists and neck were unmistakably a seventy-six-year-old's. Once, certain Valued Members had been grumpily set against even admitting her to the building in Pall Mall, never mind putting her on the rolls. Now, she was practically all that was left of the Diogenes Club as Mycroft Holmes would have recognized it. Even in the Secret World, things were changing.

"Catriona," said Richard, tinny and distorted as if bounced off a relay station in the rings of Saturn. "How are you? Is the Cold…?"

"In the village? Yes. A bother? No. We've enough lively minds in the house to hold it back. Indeed, the cool is misleadingly pleasant. What little of the garden survived the heat-wave has been killed by snow, though — which is really rather tiresome."

Richard succinctly explained the situation.

" 'The planet's first evolved intelligence'?" she queried. "That has a familiar ring to it. I shall put the problem to our little Council of War."

"Watch out for snowmen."

"I shall take care to."

She hung up and had a moment's thought, ticking off her long string of black pearls as if they were rosary beads. The general assumption was that they had been dealing with an unnatural phenomenon, perhaps a bleed-through from some parallel wintery world. Now, it seemed there was an entity in the picture. Something to be coped with, accommodated or eliminated.

The drawing room was crowded. Extra chairs had been brought in.

Constant Drache, the visionary architect, wanted news of Derek Leech. Catriona assured him that his patron was perfectly well. Drache wasn't a Talent, just a high-ranking minion. He was here with the watchful Dr Lark, corralling the persons Leech had contributed to the Council and making mental notes on the others for use after the truce was ended. That showed a certain optimism, which Catriona found mildly cheering. She had told Richard's team not to call Leech's people "the villains", but the label was hard to avoid. Fred and Vanessa were still in London, liaising with the Minister.

Anthony Jago, wearing a dog-collar the Church of England said he was no longer entitled to, was Leech's prime specimen — an untapped Talent, reputed to be able to overwrite reality on a large scale. The former clergyman said he was looking for property in the West Country and had taken a covetous liking to the Manor House. The man had an understandable streak of self-regarding megalomania, and Lark was evidently trying to keep him unaware of the full extent of his abilities. Catriona would have been terrified of Jago if he weren't completely trumped by Ariadne ("just Ariadne"). The white-haired, utterly beautiful creature had made her way unbidden to the Club and offered her services in the present emergency. She was an Elder of the Kind. Even the Secret Files had almost nothing on them. The Elders hadn't taken an interest in anything in Genevieve Dieu-donne's lifetime, though some of their young — the Kith — had occasionally been problematic.

Apart from Jago, none of Leech's soldiers were in the world-changing (or threatening) class. The unnaturally thin, bald, haggard Nigel Karabatsos — along with his unnaturally small, plump, clinging wife — represented a pompous Neo-Satanic sect called the Thirteen. Typically, there weren't thirteen of them. Maureen Mountmain was heiress to a dynasty of Irish mystics who'd been skirmishing with the Club for over eighty years. Catriona would gladly not have seen the red-headed, big-hipped, big-busted Amazon in this house again (she'd been here when the shadows took Edwin). Maureen and Richard had one of those complicated young persons' things, which neither cared to talk of and — Catriona hoped — would not be resumed. There were enough «undercurrents» in this Council for several West End plays as it was. Jago and Maureen, comparatively youthful and obnoxiously vital, pumped out more pheromones than a beehive. They took an interest in each other which Dr Lark did her best to frustrate by interposing her body. Leech obviously had separate plans for those two.

The mysterious Mr Sewell Head, the other side's last recruit for the Winter War Effort, was out in a snowfield somewhere with Gene-vieve's party. Catriona suspected they'd have a hard time getting through. Fair enough. If this council failed, someone needed to be left alive to regroup and try a second wave. Genevieve had Young Dr Shade and the interesting Rodway Girl with her — they had the potential to become Valued Talents, and the Cold Crisis should bring them on. Still, it didn't do to think too far ahead. In the long run, there's always an unhappy outcome — except, just possibly, for Ariadne.

Watching Jago and Maureen flex and flutter, attracting like magnets, Catriona worried that the Club's Talents were relics. Swami Anand Gitamo, formerly Harry Cutley, was only here for moral support. He had been Most Valued Member once, but had lately taken a more spiritual role. Still, it was good to see Harry again. His chanted mantras irritated Jago, a point in his favour. Paulette Michaelsmith had even more obviously been hauled out of retirement. She could only use her Talent (under the direction of others) when asleep and dreaming, and was permanently huddled in a bath chair. Catriona noted Dr Lark wasn't too busy playing gooseberry to take an interest in poor, dozy Paulette. Dr Cross, the old woman's minder, was instructed toward the witch off if she made any sudden moves. Louise Magellan Teazle, one of Catriona's oldest friends, always brought the sunshine with her — a somewhat undervalued Talent this summer, though currently more useful than all Karabatsos' dark summonings or Jago's reality-warping. It was thanks to Louise that the Cold was shut out of the Manor House. She was an author of children's books, and a near neighbour. In her house out on the moor, she'd been first to notice a change in the weather.

While Catriona relayed what Leech and Richard had told her, Louise served high tea. Paulette woke up for fruitcake and was fully alert for whole minutes at a time.

"This Cold," Drache declared. "Can it be killed?"

"Anything can be killed," said Karabatsos.

"Yes, dear, anything," echoed his wife.

"We know very little about the creature," admitted Catriona. "The world's leading expert is Professor Cleaver, and his perceptive is — shall we say — distorted."

"All life is sacred," said Anand Gitamo.

"Especially ours," said Maureen. "I'm a mum. I don't want my girl growing up to freeze in an apocalypse of ice and frost."

Catriona had a minor twinge of concern at the prospect of more Mountmains.

"How can all life be sacrosanct when some life-forms are inimical, being! said Drache. "Snake and mongoose. Lion and gazelle. Humanity and the Cold."

"Tom and Jerry," said Paulette, out of nowhere.

"I did not say 'sacrosanct'", pointed out Anand Gitamo.

"The Cold can die," said Ariadne. Everyone listened to her, even Jago. "But it should not be killed. It can kill you and live, as you would shrug off a virus. You cannot kill it and expect to survive, as you cannot murder the seas, the soil or the great forests. The crime would be too great. You could not abide the consequences."

"But we do not matter?" asked Drache.

"I should miss you," admitted Ariadne, gently. "As you cannot do without the trees, who make the air breathable, the Kind cannot do without you, without your dreams. If the Cold spreads, we would outlive you — but eventually, starved, we would fade. The Cold has mind, but no memory. It would retain nothing of you."

"The world doesn't end in ice, but fire," said Jago. "This, I have seen."

"The Old Ones will return," said Karabatsos.

"Yes, dear, Old," echoed his wife.

It seemed to Catriona that everyone in this business expected a personal, tailor-made apocalypse. They enlisted in the Winter War out of jealousy — a pettish wish to forestall every other prophet's vision, to keep the stage clear for their own variety of Doom. The Cold was Professor Cleaver's End of the World, and the others wanted to shut him down. Derek Leech, at least, needed the planet to stay open for business — which was why Catriona had listened when he called a truce with the Diogenes Club.

The doorbell rang. Catriona would have hurried back to the hall, but David Cross gallantly went for her. Louise poured more tea.

It was not Genevieve and her party, but Mr Zed, last of the Undertakers. He brought another old acquaintance from the Mausoleum, their collection of oddities (frankly, a prison).

Mr Zed, eyes permanently hidden behind dark glasses, stood in the drawing room doorway. Everyone looked at him. The brim of his top hat and the shoulders of his black frock coat were lightly powdered with snow. Many of the Council — and not only those on Derek Leech's side of the room — might once have had cause to fear immurement in the Mausoleum, but the Undertaking was not what it had been. Mr Zed politely took off his hat and stood aside.

Behind him was a little girl who could have stepped out of an illustration from one of Louise's earliest books. She had an indian braid tied with a silver ribbon, and wore a neat pinafore with a kangaroo pouch pocket. She looked like Rose Farrar, who disappeared from a field in Sussex in 1872, "taken by the fairies". This creature had turned up on the same spot in 1925, and come close to delivering an apocalypse that might have suited Jago's biblical tastes. At least she wasn't playing Harlot of Babylon any more.

"Good afternoon, Rose."

Catriona had not seen the girl-shaped creature since the Undertaking took her off. She still had a smooth, pale patch on her hand — where Rose had spat venom at her.

The creature curtseyed. When she looked up, she wore another face — Catriona's, as it had been fifty years ago. She used the face to smile, and aged rapidly — presenting Catriona with what she looked like now. Then, she laughed innocently and was Rose Farrar again.

The procedure was like a slap.

The thing that looked like Rose was on their side, for the moment. But, unlike everyone else in the room — good, bad or undecided — she didn't come from here. If the Cold won, Rose wouldn't necessarily lose a home, or a life, or anything she put value on.

Catriona wasn't sure what Rose could contribute, even if she was of a mind to help. Ariadne, Louise and, perhaps, the Rodway girl were Talents — they could alter reality through sheer willpower. Jago and Paulette were "effective dreamers" — they could alter reality on an even larger scale, but at the whim of their unconscious minds. Rose was a living mirror — she could only change herself, by plucking notions from the heads of anyone within reach. She resembled the original Rose because that's who the people who found her in Angel Field expected her to be. She had been kept captive all these years by confining her with people (wardens and convicts) who believed the Mausoleum to be an inescapable prison — which wasn't strictly true.

"What a dear little thing," said Ariadne. "Come here and have some of Miss Teazle's delicious cake."

Rose meekly trotted over to the Elder's side and presented her head to be stroked. Jago turned away from Maureen, and was fascinated. Until today, he hadn't known there were other Talents in the world. Paulette perked up again, momentarily — the most powerful dreamer on record, now in a room with at least two creatures who fed on dreams.

End of the World or not, Catriona wondered whether bringing all these big beasts together was entirely a bright idea.

"More tea, Cat," suggested Louise, who had just given a steaming cup to the Undertaker.

Catriona nodded.

VIII

Jamie wasn't surprised when the snowmen attacked. It wouldn't be a war if there weren't an enemy.

The frosties waited until the five had tramped a hundred difficult yards or so past them, committing to the path ahead and an uncertain footing. They were in Sutton Mallet. It wasn't much of a place. Two Rolls Royces were parked by the path, almost buried, icicles dripping from the bonnet ornaments. Nice machines. His Dad drove one like them.

"What's that thing called again?" he muttered, nodding at the dancers.

"The Spirit of Ecstasy," said Sewell Head. "Originally, the Spirit of Speed. Designed by Charles Sykes for the Rolls-Royce Company in 1911. The model is Eleanor Velasco Thornton."

"Eleanor. That explains it. Dad always called the little figure "Nellie in Her Nightie". I used to think she had wings, but it's supposed to be her dress, streaming in the wind."

Everyone had fallen over more than once. It stopped being remotely funny. Each step was an uncertain adventure that only Gene was nimble enough to enjoy. Then, even she skidded on a frozen puddle and took a tumble into a drift.

She looked up, and saw the four snowy sentinels.

"What are you laughing at?" she shouted.

At that, the snowmen upped stumps and came in a rush. When they moved, they were localized, roughly human shaped blizzards. They had no problem with their footing, and charged like touchy rhinos whose mothers had just been insulted by howler monkeys.

"There are people inside," yelled Keith. "I think they're dead."

"They better hope they're dead," said Gene, flipping herself upright and standing her ground, adopting a fighting stance.

The first and biggest of the frosties — who wore a top hat — barrelled towards the Burgundian girl, growing into a creature that seemed all shoulders. She met it with an ear-piercing "ki-yaaa" and a Bruce Lee-approved power-kick to the midriff. The topper fell off and the frosty stopped in its tracks, shedding great chunks of packed ice to reveal a well-dressed gent with a deeply-cut throat and a slack mouth. He had bled out before freezing. The snow crawled back up around the corpse, cocooning it with white powder, building layers of icy muscle, growing icicle spines and teeth. It reached down with an extensible arm, picked up its hat, and set it back on its head at a jaunty angle. The coals of its mouth rearranged themselves into a fierce grin.

And the other three — who wore a tartan cap, a jungle hat and two bugs on springs — caught up with their leader. They were swollen to the size of big bruisers.

Jamie looked down at his hands. His gauntlets were mittened with black clouds, containing violet electrical arcs. Out in the open, with snow all around and cold sunlight, there was too little shade. Night was far off. He cast darkstuff at the Scotch Snowman, who was nearest, and sheared away a couple of icicles. They instantly grew back.

He would have to do better.

Fred Astaire Snowman patted its healed-over tummy, and shot out a big fist which clenched around Gene's throat. Astaire lifted Gene off the ground. She kicked, but floundered with nothing to brace against. Jamie saw she had longer, sharper nails than normal — but any tears she made in the snow-hand were healed over instantly. She gurgled, unable to talk.

Comical Bugs Snowman and Jungle Explorer Snowman shifted, in opposite directions. They were forming a circle. A killing circle.

Astaire grew a yard-long javelin of solid ice from its shoulder, and snapped it off to make a stake. It pressed the ice-spear against Gene's ribs, ready to hoist her up like a victim of Frosty the Impaler.

Susan had her eyes shut, and radiated warmth — but not heat. Sewell Head was chattering about snowmen in fact and fiction, citing pagan precedents, Christmas cake decorations and the Ronettes. Keith wrapped himself in his magician's cape, and rolled his eyes up so that only the whites showed. Jamie supposed he was having a fit.

Gene squeaked a scream out through her crushed throat. Scarlet blood showed on her safari jacket.

He tried to gather more darkness, from inside.

Suddenly, Keith's eyes snapped back — but they were different.

"Don't waste your energy, Shade," he said, in a commanding tone. "Use this."

From the depths of the cloak, Keith produced a thin, diamond shaped, black object. It was Dennis Rattray's Fang of Night. Jamie had wondered where Dad had put it after taking it from Blackfist. Keith tossed the jewel to Jamie, who caught it and staggered back. The Fang was the size of a gob-stopper, but weighed as much as a cannonball. He held it in both hands. It was like sticking his fingers into a live electric socket.

"Sue," Keith said, "cover Shade's — Jamie's — back. Imagine a wall of heat, and concentrate. Swellhead, give me some dark refraction indices, considering available light, the Blackfist gem and whatever these snow-things are. Today would be a help."

Astonished, Head scrawled sums in the snow with his forefinger.

"Gene, hang on," said Keith. Gene even tried to nod, though her face was screwed up in agony and spatters of her blood stained the snow under her kicking feet.

"Can you feel it, Shade?"

Jamie was seeing a different Keith Marion. And the jewel didn't seem so heavy once he'd worked out how to hold it. Rattray had tapped into its energy by making a fist around it, but Dad said that was what had killed him in the end. There were other ways of using the Fang of Night.

Head put his hand up, and pointed to a formula he had traced.

"Well played, Swellhead," said Keith, patting Head's bald bonce. "Shade, hold the Fang up to your forehead and focus. Aim for the hat!"

Behind him, Susan grunted, and he heard slushing, melting sounds.

"Ugh, disgusting," she said.

Jamie fought an urge to turn and find out what had happened.

"Concentrate, man," insisted Keith. "Gene can't hold out much longer."

Head began to give a figure in seconds, but Keith shut him up.

Jamie held the stone to his forehead. It seemed to fit into the V above his goggles. The dark matter was sucked in through the gauntlets, thrilling into his palms, surging through his veins and nerves, and gathered in his forebrain, giving him a sudden ice-cream migraine. Then, it was set free.

He saw a flash of dark purple. Astaire's top hat exploded in flames that burned black, and the snowman fell apart. Gene was dropped, and pulled out the ice-shard in her chest before she sprawled in the snow. She crab-walked away from the well-dressed, still-standing corpse that had been inside Astaire. Its knees kinked, and it pitched forward.

"Now, turn," ordered Keith. "The others."

Jamie wheeled about. Susan was on her knees, with her arms held out, fingers wide. Scotch Snowman and Explorer Snowman loomed over her, melt-water raining from their arms and chests and faces — the trapped corpses showing through. Susan was running out of charge, though. A slug of blood crawled out of her nose. Angry weals rose around her fingernails.

This time, it was like blinking. He zapped the tartan cap and the solar topee to fragments, and the snowmen were downed. Susan swooned, and Keith was there to catch her, wrapping her in his cloak, wiping away the blood, squeezing her fingers. She woke up, and he kissed her like someone who'd known her longer and better than few hours.

"Excuse me," said Gene, "but I nearly had an icicle through my heart."

Keith looked at her and asked brusquely "you all right?"

Gene eased her bloody jacket out of the way. Her scrape was already healing.

"Seem to be," she admitted.

"Good, now help Shade with the last of them. It's the most dangerous."

Gene saluted.

"Sue," whispered Keith.

"Do I know you?" she asked, frankly irritated. He let her go, and stood up, stiffly. In his cloak, he looked like the commander of a victorious Roman legion. Jamie didn't know where the kid had got it from.

Bugs had either legged it or melted into the ground.

Jamie had purple vision. It was like night-sight, but in the daytime. With the Fang of Night, he could think faster. He didn't feel the cold. He could take anyone, any day of the week. He could only imagine what he would sound like if he used this onstage.

Keith plucked the jewel from his grasp, holding it between thumb and forefinger as if it were radioactive, then magicked it away with a conjurer's flourish.

"You of all people should know to treat those things carefully," said Keith.

For an instant, Jamie wanted to batter the kid's face and take back the jewel. Then, he understood. Use it, but don't let it get its hooks in you. Dad had said that all the time.

"So, which Keith is this?" said Gene, tugging on the kid's wrist-tag. "What school do you go to?"

"School? There hasn't been any school since the Spiders came. Good job too. They don't teach you anything useful. You have to learn survival, and resistance, on the job."

This Keith had a firmer jaw, healed-over scars, and a steady, manly, confident gaze. People snapped in line when he spoke and threw themselves under trains if there was a tactical advantage in it.

"He told us about this before we met you," Gene explained. "Some other Keith lives on an Earth overrun by arachnoid aliens. He's a guerrilla leader. He also plays opening bat for Somerset and has three girlfriends. Opinion is split as to whether it's a viable alternate timeline or some sort of Dungeons and Dragons wish-fulfilment fantasy. At the moment, I don't really care."

She kissed Keith on the mouth. He took it as if it were his right, and then started struggling.

"What happened?" he asked, shaking free of Gene. "Who was here?"

Gene let the familiar — the original? — Keith go, and edged away from him. He still looked confused. The other Keith had been useful in a pinch, but Jamie couldn't say he missed him.

IX

Putting Professor Cleaver to sleep hadn't brought back the summer, but did shut him up — which was a relief.

Richard looked through the heavily-frosted window. There was proper snow, now. Precipitation. It dropped like the gentle rain from Heaven, fluttering down picturesquely before being caught in erratic, spiralling winds and dashed hither and yon. The Cold's sphere of influence scraped the upper atmosphere, where it found clouds to freeze.

According to Catriona, the white blanket was gaining pace, spreading across the moors and fields. Soon, the perimeter of exclusion would be breached. So far, three villages had been evacuated on a flimsy cover story. When the Cold gripped fair-sized towns like Yeovil and Sedgwater, the domesticated feline would be well and truly liberated from the portable container.

Cleaver snorted in his sleep, honking through his broken nose. Not content with tying the Professor to a swivel chair, Leech had shoved a sock in his mouth and bound a scarf around his jaws. Richard loosened the gag, so he wouldn't asphyxiate on bri-nylon and his own false teeth.

Leech shot him a pitiful look. He was picking through Clever Dick's papers.

"The man couldn't maintain an orderly file if his soul depended on it," he said, in exasperation. "From now on, every scientist or researcher who works for me gets shadowed by two form-fillers and a pen-pusher. What's the use of results if you can't find them?"

"He wasn't working for you," said Richard.

"Oh yes he was," insisted Leech. "He drew his pay-packet and he signed his contract. Derek Leech International owns his results. If this Cold creature is real, then we own her. The Comet has exclusive rights to her story. I could put her in a zoo, hunt her for sport, license her image for T-shirts, or dissect her crystal by crystal to advance the progress of science and be entirely within my legal rights."

"Tell her that."

Leech turned a page and found something. "I just might," he said.

He tore out a sheaf of papers covered in neat little diagrams. Richard thought it might be some form of cipher, then recognized the hexagonal designs as snow crystals. Under each was a scrawl — mirror-written words, not in English.

"Backwards in Latin," mused Leech. "Paranoid little boffin, wouldn't you say? This is Cleaver's Rosetta Stone. Not many words, no subtleties, no syntax at all. But he received instructions. He made and used his Box. He broke the Zero Barrier, and violated the laws of physics."

"All because he could grow snowflakes?"

"Yes, and now I own the process. There might not be applications yet, but things get smaller. Transistorization won't stop at the visible. Imagine: trademarked weather, logos on bacteria, microscopic art, micro-miniaturized assassins…"

"Let's ensure the future of mankind on the planet before you start pestering the patent office, shall we?"

Leech bit down, grinding his teeth hard. Richard thought something had snapped in his mouth.

"You should watch that," he advised.

Leech smiled, showing even, white, perfect gnashers. Richard suspected he had rows of them, eternally renewed — like a shark.

All rooms have ghosts. Acts and feelings and ideas all have residue, sometimes with a half-life of centuries. Richard took his gauntlets off and began to touch things, feeling for the most recent impressions. His fingertips were so numb that the cold shocks were welcome. His sensitivity was more attuned to living people than dead objects, but he could usually read something if he focused. He scraped a brown stain on the wall, and had a hideous flash: Cleaver, with a knife, smiling; a red-haired man in a white coat, gouting from an open throat.

"What is it?" Leech asked.

Richard forced himself to disconnect from the murder. "The staff," he said. "I saw what happened before they were snowmen."

"Where are they, by the way?" asked Leech.

"Wandered off. Didn't seem to be the sorts to listen to reason. I doubt if you can negotiate with them."

The memory flashes floated in his mind, like neon after images. He blinked, and they began to dispel. Cleaver had made four sacrifices to the Cold. McKendrick, Kellett, Bakhtinin, Pouncey.

"Were the staff dead before or after they got snow-coated?" asked Leech.

"Does it matter?"

"If the Professor killed them to give the Cold raw material to make cat's paws, they were just unused machines when she got them. If they were alive when the Cold wrapped them up, she might have interfaced with minds other than Clever Dick's."

Richard didn't approve of Leech's use of «interfaced» as a verb-form, but saw where he was going.

"He killed them first," he confirmed- Leech didn't ask him how he knew. "They aren't even zombies. The dead people are more like armatures. The only traces of personality they have…"

"The hats."

"… were imposed by Professor Cleaver. I think he was trying to be funny. He's not very good at humour. Few solipsists are."

Richard proceeded to the remains of the Box. The Cold had come through this doorway. He doubted it could be used to send her back, even if it were repaired. Banishing was never as easy as conjuring. Sometimes performing a ritual backwards worked, but not in a language with six planes of symmetry. You would always get hexagonal palindromes.

Pressing his palm to a frost patch on the surface of a workbench, he felt the slight bite of the crystals, the pull on skin as he took his hand away. He didn't sense an entity, not even the life he would feel if he put his naked hand against the bark of a giant redwood. Yet the Cold was here.

"When the Cold broke through the Zero Barrier," said Leech, "the Professor's Box blew up. After that, he couldn't make his little tiny ice sculptures, but they still talked. She turned the others into snowmen, but spared him. How could he make her understand he was a sympathizer?"

Richard thought about that. "He persuaded the Cold he was her High Priest," he said. "And she let him live… for a while."

"Cleaver said the Cold was an intelligent form of life," said Leech. "He did not say she was clever. Imagine: you're utterly unique, near-omnipotent and have endured millennia upon millennia. You wake up and the only person who talks to you — the only person you have ever talked to — is Clever Dick Cleaver. What does that give you?"

"A grossly distorted picture of the world?"

"Exactly. Perhaps it's time our Cold Lady heard another voice."

"Voices," said Richard, firmly.

"Yes, of course," said Leech, not meaning it.

Derek Leech was excited, fathoming possibilities, figuring out angles. Letting the Great Enchanter cut a separate deal with the Cold would be a terrible idea. He was entirely too good at negotiating contracts.

"Now," Leech thought out loud, "how did he talk with her?"

Richard remembered the snow angels. He wandered out of the laboratory. Not caring to maintain Cleaver's obsessive little paths, he waded through snow. It drifted over his ankles. From the cafeteria doorway, he looked again at the three angels. They had reminded him of semaphore signals.

"This is how," he said.

Leech had tagged along with him. He saw it at once too.

"See the feet," said Leech. "Not heel-marks, but toe-marks. When kids make snow angels, they lie on their backs. Cleaver lies on his front. You can see where his face fits, like a mould for a mask."

A muffled screech sounded. Back in the laboratory, the Professor was awake.

Richard stepped into the room and knelt by an angel, touching the negative impression of Cleaver's face. He felt nothing. If this had been the connection, it was dead now. The Cold had moved on.

He would have to try outside.

"Leech," he said, "get on your back-pack blower and ring Catriona again. We have to tell her what we're doing, in case it doesn't work. No sense in the next lot making the same mistakes…"

A chill rolled down the corridor.

The doorway was empty. Richard saw a white tangle on the floor. Leech's parka. And another further away. His leggings.

Richard's stomach turned over. He was feeling things now.

"Leech!" he shouted.

Only the Professor responded, rattling his chair and yelling around his gag.

Richard jogged down the corridor, past more of Leech's discarded arctic gear. He turned a corner. The main doors were open. One flapped in the blizzard.

He made it to the doors and took the full force of the wind in his face.

Leech — in a lightweight salmon suit — had walked a few yards away from the building. He stood in the middle of whirling snow, casually undoing his wide orange knit tie.

One of the snowmen was back. It was Bee-Alice, swollen to mammoth size, twelve or fourteen feet tall, body-bulbs bulging as if pregnant with a litter of snow-babies. Queen Bee-Alice stood over Leech like a Hollywood pagan idol, greedy for human sacrifice.

It should be a summer evening. Daylight lasting past ten o'clock. Plagues of midges and supper in the garden. A welcome cool after another punishingly blazing drought day. Any sunlight was blocked by the Cold, and premature gloom — not even honest night — had fallen.

Leech popped his cat's-eye cufflinks and began unbuttoning his chocolate-brown ruffle shirt. He exposed his almost-hairless chest, clenching his jaws firmly to keep from chattering. He wasn't quite human, but Richard had known that.

This was not going to happen on Richard's watch. Bad enough that the Cold's wake-up call had come from an embittered lunatic whose emotional age was arrested at eleven. If her next suitor were Derek Leech, the death by freezing of all life on Earth might seem a happier outcome.

Richard tried to stride towards Leech, but wind held him back. He forced himself, inch by inch, out into the open, struggling against pellets of ice to take the few crucial steps.

Queen Bee-Alice creaked, head turning like the world before the BBC-TV news. The novelty bumblebees bounced over her, a crown or a halo. She had giant, wrecking-ball fists. Sharon Kellett, junior meteorologist. Two years out of a polytechnic, with a boyfriend in the Navy and a plan to be national weather girl on the television station Derek Leech wanted to start up. She was among the first casualties of the Winter War. Dead, but not yet fallen. Richard ached at the life lost.

Leech shucked his snug-at-the-crotch, flappy-at-the-ankles trousers. He wore mint-green Y-fronts with electric blue piping.

Richard got to the Great Enchanter and crooked an arm around his neck.

"I won't let you do this," he shouted in his ear.

"You don't understand, Jeperson," he shouted back. At this volume, attempted sincerity sounded just like whining. "7 have to. For the greater good. I'm willing to sacrifice my — or anyone's — life to end this."

Richard was taken aback, then laughed.

"Nice try, Derek," he said. "But it won't wash."

"It won't, will it?" replied Leech, laughing too.

"Not on your nellie."

"I still have to go through with this, though. You understand, Jeperson? I can't pass up the opportunity!"

Leech twisted as if greased in Richard's grip, and shot a tight, knuckled fist into his stomach. Even through layers of protective gear, Richard felt the pile-driver blow. He lost his hold on Leech and the Great Enchanter followed the sucker-punch with a solid right to the jaw, a kick to the knee, and another to the goolies. Richard went down, and took an extra kick — for luck — in his side.

" 'You ream now, Grasshopper,'" said Leech, fingers pulling the corners of his eyes, " 'not to charrenge master of ancient and noble art of dirty fighting!'"

Leech couldn't help gloating. Stripped to his underpants, whipped by sleet, skin scaled by gooseflesh, his expression was a mask of ugly victory. His exultant, grin showed at least 168 teeth. Was this the Great Enchanter's true face?

"Really think you can make a deal with the Cold?"

Leech wagged his finger. "You're not getting me like that, Grasshopper. I'm no Clever Dick. I'm not going to explain my wicked plan and give you a chance to get in the way. I'm just going to do what I'm going to do."

Richard had a lump in his fist, an ice-chunk embedded with frozen gravel. His eyes held Leech's gaze, but his hand was busy with the chunk, which he rolled in the snow.

"You didn't go to public school, did you, Derek?"

"No, why?"

"You might have missed a trick."

Richard sat up and, with practised accuracy, threw the heavy-cored snowball at Leech's forehead. The collision made a satisfying sound. Richard's heart surged with immature glee and he recalled earlier victories: as an untried Third Form bowler, smashing the centre-stump and putting out the astonished Captain of the First Eleven; on an autumn playground, wielding a horse chestnut fresh from the branch to split the vinegar-hardened champion conker of the odious Weems-Deverell II.

A third eye of blood opened above Leech's raised brows. His regular eyes showed white and he collapsed, stunned. He lay, twitching, on the snow.

Queen Bee-Alice made no move. Richard hoped she was impartial.

Unable to leave even Derek Leech to freeze, Richard picked him up in a fireman's lift and tossed him inside the building — slamming the doors after him. He didn't know how much time he had before Leech's wits crept back.

He took off his furs. Cold bit, deeper with each layer removed. He went further than Leech, and eventually stood naked in the blizzard. Everything that could shrivel, turn blue or catch frost did so. When the shivering stopped, when sub-zero (if not sub-absolute zero) windblast seemed slightly warm, he recognized the beginnings of hypothermia. There was no more pain, just a faint pricking all over his body. Snow packed his ears and deafened him. He was calm, light-headed. Flashes popped in his vision, as the cold did something to his optic nerves he didn't want to think about. He shut his eyes, not needing the distraction. There were still flashes, but easier to ignore.

He knelt before Queen Bee-Alice. Some feeling came from his shins as they sank into the snow — like mild acid, burning gently to the bone. His extremities were far distant countries, sending only the occasional report, always bad news. Cleaver had lain face down, but indoors — with no snowfall. Richard lay back, face up, flakes landing on his cheeks and forehead, knowing his whole body was gradually being covered by layer after layer. His hands were swollen and useless. With his arms he shovelled snow over himself. Snow didn't melt on his skin — anybody warmth was gone. He fought the urge to sit up and struggle free, and he fought the disorienting effects that came with a lowering of the temperature of his brain. He was buried quickly, as the Cold made a special effort to clump around him, form a drift, smooth over the bump, swallow him.

As his body temperature lowered, he had to avoid surrendering to the sleep that presaged clinical death. His blood slowed, and his heartbeats became less and less frequent. He was using a meagre repertoire of yogic techniques, but couldn't be distracted by the business of keeping the meat machine running.

He opened up, physically, mentally, spiritually.

In the darkness, he was not alone.

Richard felt the Cold. It was hugely alive, and more alien than the few extra-terrestrials he'd come across. Newly-awake, it stretched out, irritated by moving things and tiny obstructions. It could barely distinguish between piles of stone and people. Both were against the nature it had known. It had an impulse to clean itself by covering these imperfections. It preferred people wrapped in snow, not moving by themselves. But was this its genuine preference, or something learned from Clever Dick Cleaver?

"Hello," shouted Richard, with his mind. "Permit me to introduce myself. I am Richard, and I speak for Mankind."

Snow pressed around his face, like ice-fingers on his eyes.

He felt tiny crystals forming inside his brain — not a killing flash-freeze, but the barest pinheads. The Cold was inside him.

"You are not Man."

It wasn't a voice. It wasn't even words. Just snowflake hexagons in the dark of his skull, accompanied by a whisper of arctic winds. But he understood. Meaning was imprinted directly into his brain.

To talk with the Cold, it had to become part of him. This was an interior monologue.

"I am Richard," he tried to reply. It was awkward. He was losing his sense of self, of the concept of Richard. "I am not Man." Man was what the Cold called Cleaver. "I am another Man."

To the Cold, the idea of «other» was still fresh, a shock which had come with its awakening. It had only just got used to Man/Cleaver. It was not yet ready for the independent existence of three billion more unique and individual intelligences. As Richard had guessed, it hadn't previously had use for numbers beyond than One/Self. The corpse-cores of its snowmen weren't like Man/Cleaver. They were tools, empty of consciousness. Had Cleaver killed his staff because he knew more voices would confuse his ice mistress? Probably.

What would Leech have said to the Cold? He would try to make a deal, to his own best advantage. Richard couldn't even blame him. It was what he did. In this position, the Great Enchanter might become a senior partner, stifle the Cold's rudimentary mind and colonize it, use it. Leech/Cold would grip the world, in a different, ultimately crueller way. He wanted slaves, not corpses; a treadmill to the inferno, not peace and quiet.

What should Richard say?

"Please," he projected. "Please don't k- us."

There were no snowflakes for «kill» or «death» or «dead». He shuffled through the tiny vocabulary, and tried again. "Please don't stop/cover/freeze us."

The Cold's mind was changing: not in the sense of altering its intention, but of restructuring its internal architecture. So far, in millennia, it had only needed to make declarative statements, and — until the last few days — only to itself. It had been like a goldfish, memory wiped every few seconds, constantly reaffirming "this is me, this is my bowl, this is water, this is me, this is my bowl, this is water". Now, the Cold needed to keep track, to impose its will on others. It needed a more complicated thought process. It was on the point of inventing a crucial mode of address, of communication. It was about to ask its first question.

Richard had got his point over. The Cold now understood that its actions would lead to the ending of Man/Richard. It had a sense Man/Richard was merely one among unimagined and unimaginable numbers of others. For it, «three» was already equivalent to a schoolboy's "gajillion-quajillion-infinitillion to the power of forever". The Cold understood Man/Richard was asking to be allowed to continue. The life of others was in the Cold's gift.

"Please don't kill us," Richard repeated. There was a hexagram for "kill/end" now. "Please don't."

The Cold paused, and asked "Why not?"

X

It was getting dark, which didn't bother Jamie. He lifted his goggles and saw in more detail. He also felt the cold less. Most of his teammates were more spooked as shadows spread, but Gene was another nightbird. You'd never know she'd come close to having a dirty great icicle shoved all the way through her chest. Perhaps she had a little of the Shade in her. She'd said she knew Auntie Jenny.

Regular Keith was bewildered about what had happened while he was away, and Susan was trying to fill him in. Sewell Head was quoting weather statistics since before records began. It was snowing even harder, and the slog to Alder wasn't going to be possible without losing one or more of the happy little band. Finding shelter was a high priority. They were in the lee of Sutton Mallet church — which was small, but had a tower. The place was securely chained.

"Can't you break these?" Jamie asked Gene.

"Normal chains, yes. Chapel chains, I have a bit of a mental block about. Try the spoon bender."

Susan stepped up and laid hands on the metal. She frowned, and links began to buckle.

"Where's Head?" asked Keith.

Captain Cleverclogs wasn't with them. Jamie couldn't understand why anyone would wander off. Had the last snowman got him?

"Here are his tracks," said Gene.

"I can't see any," said Keith.

"Trust me."

Jamie saw them too. Sewell Head had gone into a thicket of trees, just beyond what passed for the centre of Suttoh Mallet. There were buildings on the other side.

"I'll fetch him back," he said.

"We're not being that stupid, Jamie," said Susan, dropping mangled but unbroken chains. "You go, we all go. No sense splitting up and getting picked off one by one."

She had a point. He was thinking like Dad, who preferred to work alone.

Beyond the trees were ugly buildings. A concrete shed, temporary cabins.

"This is Derek Leech's weather research station," said Gene. "Almost certainly where all the trouble started."

Derek Leech was in the public eye as a smiling businessman, but Jamie's Dad called him "a human void". Jamie had thought Dad a bit cracked on the subject of Derek Leech — like everyone else's parents were cracked about long hair or short hair or the Common Market or some other bloody thing. He was coming round to think more of what his old man said.

"Shouldn't we stay away from here?" cautioned Keith. "Aren't we supposed to join up with folks more qualified than us?"

"You mean grown-ups?" asked Jamie.

"Well, yes."

"Poor old Swellhead'll be an ice lolly by the time you fetch a teacher."

Beside the building was a towering snowman. Bugs, grown to Kitten Kong proportions. The front doors were blown inward and jammed open by snowdrifts. It was a fair guess Head had gone inside. If he could get past the snow-giant, they had a good chance.

"Susan," he said. "Can you concentrate on the snowman? At the first sign of hassle, melt the big bastard."

The woman snapped off a salute. "Since you ask so nicely," she said, "I'll give it a whirl."

"Okay, gang," he said. "Let's go inside."

They sprinted from the thicket to the doors. Bugs didn't make a move, but Keith tripped and Gene had to help him up and drag him.

Inside the building, which was an ice-palace, the wind was less of a problem, and they were protected from the worst of the snow. Overhead lights buzzed and flickered, bothering Jamie's eyes. He slipped his goggles back on.

They found Sewell Head in a room that might have been a mess hall. He was acting as a valet, helping a man dress in arctic gear. Jamie recognized the bloke from the telly. He was the one who said "If I didn't love it, I wouldn't own it." He must love lots of things, because he owned a shedload of them.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Derek. You must be the new Doctor Shade."

Yes, Jamie realized. He must be.

Leech's smile jangled his shadow senses. The dark in him was something more than night.

"I'm a big fan of your father's," said Leech. "I learned to read from tear-sheets of the newspaper strip they ran about his adventures. Ahh, 'the Whooping Horror', 'the Piccadilly Gestapo'. How I longed for my own autogyro! I have a car just like Dr Shade's. A Shadow-Shark."

Jamie remembered that there had been two Rollses in the snow. Whose was the other one?

"Leech," said Gene, acknowledging him.

"Genevieve Dieudonne," said Leech, cordially. "I thought you'd aged hundreds of years and died."

"I got better."

"Well done. Though live through the night before you pat yourself on the back too much. Where's the rest of the army? The heavy mob. Ariadne, Jago, Mrs Michaelsmith, Little Rose? The Cold's already got Jeperson. We need to go all-out on the attack if we're to have a chance of stopping it."

"We're it, right now," said Jamie.

"You'll have to do, then."

Jamie boiled inside at that. He didn't even know the people Leech had listed. Whoever they might be, he doubted they'd have done as well against the snowmen.

"Who might you be, my dear?" Leech said to Susan.

"I might be Susan Rodway. Or Susan Ames. Mum got remarried, and I have a choice."

"I know exactly who you are," said Leech. "Shade, why didn't you say you had her? She's not Rose Farrar or an Elder of the Kind, but she's a bloody good start."

Susan began primping a bit at the attention. Jamie couldn't believe she'd let this hand-kissing creep smarm her up like that. He'd never understand birds.

"Now, Sewell," said Leech, addressing his instant orderly. "Get on the blower and tell Miss Kaye to pull her finger out. The telephone kit is in the laboratory down the hall — the room with the tied-up-and-gagged idiot in it. It's simple to use. You'll have the specs for it in your head somewhere."

Head meekly trotted out of the room. He was taking orders without question.

Leech looked over the four of them — Jamie, Gene, Susan, Keith.

"Susan," he said, "can you do something about the room temperature?"

Susan, bizarrely, seemed smitten. "I can try," she said, and shut her eyes.

A little warmth radiated from her. Some icicles started dripping. Jamie felt his face pricking, as feeling returned.

"Good girl," said Leech. "You, young fellow-me-lad. Any chance of getting some tea going?"

"Give it a try, sir," said Keith, hunting a kettle.

Jamie already resented Derek Leech. For a start, he had released all those triple LPs of moaning woodwind hippies which got played over and over in student common rooms. Even if he weren't the literal Devil, that alone made him a man not to be trusted. But he was magnetic in person, and Jamie felt a terrible tug — it would be easier to go along with Leech, to take orders, to not be responsible for the others. Dad could be like that too, but he always drummed it into Jamie that he should become his own man. Dad didn't even disapprove of him being in a band rather than joining the night-wars — though he realized he'd done that anyway, as well. If he was the new Dr Shade, he was also a different Shade.

It was Leech's world too. If this big freeze was spreading, it was his interest to side with the angels. If everyone was dead, no one would make a deal with him. No one would buy his crappy music or read his raggy papers.

Jamie saw that Gene was sceptical of anything Leech-related, but Susan and Keith were sucked in. Keith had found his grownup, his teacher. Susan had found something she needed too. Jamie had been revising his impression of her all day. Leech saw at once that she was the most useful Talent in their crowd. Jamie hadn't even noticed her at first, and he had been around Talents all his life. Susan Rodway was not only Shade-level or better in her abilities, but extremely good at keeping it to herself. She kept talking about the things she couldn't do, or making light of the things she could.

Leech had been briefly interested in Jamie, in Dr Shade — but he had instantly passed over him, and latched onto Susan.

He realized — with a tiny shock — that he was jealous. But of whom? Susan, for going to the head of the class? Or Leech, for getting the girl's attention? There wasn't time for this.

"What did you say about Richard Jeperson?" Gene asked Leech.

Jamie knew Jeperson was Fred and Vanessa's guv'nor at the Diogenes Club. He tied in with Gene too.

"Mad, definitely," said Leech, with just a hint of pleasure. "Dead, probably. The Cold took him — it's a thinking thing, not just bad weather — and he went outside, naked. He lay down and let himself be buried. I tried to stop him, but he fought like a tiger, knocked me out… gave me this." Leech indicated a fresh wound on his forehead.

"Stone in a snowball," he said. "Playground trick."

Gene thought a few moments and said, "We've got to go out and find him. He might still be alive. He's not helpless. He's a Talent too. If he's buried, we can dig him up."

"I think that's a good idea," said Leech.

Anything Leech thought was a good idea was almost certainly good mostly or only for him. But Jamie couldn't see any alternative. He knew that Fred would give him a right belting if he let Jeperson die.

"Okay, I'll go," he said. "Gene, Susan, stay here. Give Mr Leech any help he needs…" That is, keep a bloody eye on him! Gene, though worried for her friend, picked that up.

Leech was bland, mild, innocent.

"Keith," said Jamie, at last. "Find a shovel or something, and come with me."

Keith, infuriatingly, looked to Leech — who gave him the nod.

"Come on, find someone useful inside you. Let's get this rescue party on the road!"

Keith gulped and said, "O-okay, Jamie."

XI

Derek Leech was on the telephone again. Really, the man had the most terrible manners. He had some minion bother Catriona, then brushed her aside because he wanted to talk with Maureen Mount-main, of all people. Catriona passed the receiver to the woman, who listened — to her master's voice? — and clucked. Yes, Mr Leech, no Mr Leech, three bags bloody full, Mr Leech… Catriona caught herself: this was no time to be a cranky old woman.

The Cold was getting into the Manor House, overwhelming Louise Teazle's bubble of summer. Frost grew on the insides of the windows. Sleet and snow rattled against the panes.

In the gloom of the gardens, drifts and banks shifted like beasts.

Catriona had pain in her joints, and was irritated. She could list other age-related aches and infirmities, exacerbated by the Cold.

Only Rose Farrar and Ariadne were immune. Rose skipped around the drawing room, exhaling white clouds. Ariadne stood by the fireplace — where the wood wouldn't light, and shivers of snow fell on tidy ashes — and smoked a cigarette in a long, elegant holder.

Paulette Michaelsmith shivered in her sleep, and Louise rearranged her day-blanket without any effect. Karabatsos and his wife huddled together. Mr Zed was white. Swami Anand Gitamo chanted mantras, but his nose was blue. Lark and Cross, the white-coats, passed the china teapot between them, pressing their hands against the last of its warmth. Even Anthony Jago, who feared not the ice and fire of Hell, had his hands in his armpits. The house itself creaked more than usual.

"Richard?" exclaimed Maureen. "Are you sure?"

Catriona, who had been trying not to listen, had a spasm of concern. Maureen had blurted out the name in shock. She and Richard had…

Maureen hung up, cutting off Catriona's train of thought. The room looked to Maureen for a report.

"Derek needs us all," she said. "He needs us to hurt the Cold."

A lot of people talked at once, then shut up.

"Catriona," said Maureen, fists pressed together under her impressive bosom, "your man Richard Jeperson is lost."

"Lost?"

"Probably dead. I'm sorry, truly. Derek says he tried to reach the Cold, and it took him. It's a monster, and wants to kill us all. We have to hit it with all we've got, now. All our big guns, he says. Maybe it can't be killed, but can be hurt. Driven back to its hole."

A tear dribbled from Maureen's eye.

"Reverend Jago, Lady Elder, Rose… you're our biggest guns. Just tear into the Cold. Miss Teazle, work on Mrs Michaelsmith — direct her. Think of the heat-wave. Karabatsos, clear a circle and make a summoning. A fire elemental. The rest of you, pray. That's not a figure of speech. The only way we can beat this thing is with an enormous spiritual attack."

The news about Richard was a terrible blow. Catriona let Maureen go on with her "to arms" speech, trying to take it in. She was not a sensitive in the way any of these Talents were, but she was not a closed mind. And Maureen had said Richard was only probably dead.

Mr and Mrs Karabatsos were the first to act. They rolled aside a carpet and began chalking a circle on the living room floor.

"Excuse me," said Catriona. "Is this your house?"

Karabatsos glared at her, nastily triumphant. Catriona would not be looked at like that in her home.

"No need to bother with that," said Anand Gitamo.

"Summoning a fire elemental requires a circle, and a ritual," said Karabatsos. "Blood must be spilled and burned."

"Yes dear, spilled and burned," echoed his wife.

"In normal company, maybe," said the Swami, sounding more like plain old Harry Cutley. "But we've got extraordinary guests. We can take short cuts. Now, you two sorcerers shut your eyes and think about your blessed fire elemental. Extra-hot and flaming from the Pits of Abaddon and Erebus and all that. Think hard, now think harder. Imagine more flames, more heat, more burning. Take your basic fire elemental, add the Japanese pikadon, the Norse Surtur, Graeco-Roman Haephaestus or Vulcan, the phoenix, the big bonfire at the end of The Wicker Man, that skyscraper from The Towering Inferno, the Great Fire of London in 1666, enough napalm to deforest the Republic of Vietnam and the eternal blue flame of the lost city of Kor…"

Nigel Karabatsos and his wife shut their eyes and thought of fire.

"Rose dear," said Gitamo. "Peek into those tiny minds."

Rose Farrar caught fire and expanded. She grew into a nine-foot-tall column of living flame, with long limbs and a blazing skull-face. Though she was hard to look at and her radiant heat filled the room, she didn't burn the ceiling or the carpet. She was Fire.

"Reverend Jago," said Gitamo, "would you open the doors. Rose needs to go outside."

The man in the dog-collar was astonished by what the apparent little girl had become. Anthony Jago didn't know whether to bow down before a fiery angel of the Lord or cast out a demon from Hell. His already-peculiar belief system was horribly battered by this experience. Catriona feared no good would come of that.

But, if anything could hurt the Cold, it would be Fire Rose.

Louise Teazle reported that the snow outside was melting. Fire Rose was radiating, beyond the walls.

"No," said Ariadne, snapping her fingers. "I think not."

Fire Rose went out. Spent-match stink filled the room. The little girl, unburned and unburning, sat on the floor exactly as she had been. She was bewildered. No one had ever switched her off like a light before.

Jago was enraged. All the cups, saucers and cutlery on the table near him and all the books on the shelves behind him leaped at once into the air, and hovered like projectiles about to be slung. Catriona had known he was a telekinetic, but this was off the scale. In any other drawing room, parapsychologists like Cross and Lark would be thinking of the book deals and the lecture tour — though, after Fire Rose, this little display scarcely made the needle tick. Jago's eyes smouldered.

Ariadne shook her head, and everything went neatly back to its place. Not a drop of tea spilled or a dust jacket torn. Jago knitted his brows, blood vessels pulsing, but not so much as a teaspoon responded.

Mr Zed took out a gun, caught Ariadne's gaze, then pointed it at his own head. He stood still as a statue.

"If we're not going off half-cocked," said the Elder of the Kind, "let us review our plan of action. In dealing with the Cold, do we really want to do what Derek Leech says."

Exactly. Ariadne had said what Catriona felt.

"You can't win a Winter War with fire," she said. "Fire consumes, leaves only ashes."

"Then what?" said Maureen, frustrated, red-eyed. "If not Derek's plan, what? I'd really like to know, ladies. I'm freezing my tits off here."

"There there," said Catriona, touching Maureen's shoulder. "Have faith. He'll be all right."

Maureen didn't ask who she meant.

"He'll see us through," Catriona said.

Richard.

XII

On some other path in life, an expert outdoorsman Keith had loads of survival training in extreme weather conditions. Probably, Keith had to weed out a couple of dozen plonkers who didn't know how to tie their own shoelaces, but he'd found the useful life in seconds. Not a bad trick. While Jamie scanned for tracks or a human shaped bump in the snow, Keith barked instructions — keep moving, breathe through your nose, turn your shoulder to the wind.

One good thing: in all this mucky weather, Richard Jeperson couldn't have gone far.

Any footprints were filled by new snow. The marks they had made coming from the thicket to the buildings were already gone. Jamie looked for dark traces, the shadows of shadows. It was Dad's game, and he wasn't expert in it yet — but he could usually see shadow-ghosts, if he caught them in time.

He found a discarded fur boot. And another.

A shaggy clump a little past the boots turned out not to be the missing man, but an abandoned coat. A fold of dayglo green poking up from the snow was a cast-off balaclava. Leech had said Jeperson went out naked. That was not true. Jeperson had gone outside, then taken his clothes off. Leech wouldn't have got that wrong unless he were deliberately lying. If Jeperson knocked Leech out and left him inside, Leech would not have known what Jeperson did next — but he had said Jeperson took his clothes off, went out and lay down in the show. Had Leech attacked Jeperson, stripped him, and left him to freeze to death, cooking up a story to exonerate himself? Jamie should have checked at once — tried to replay the shadows in the building. He had an inkling it wouldn't have worked. There was something wrong with Leech's shadow.

He hoped Gene and Susan could take care of themselves. Derek Leech was dangerous.

They were near Bugs, the mammoth snowman. It had lost human shape and become a mountain. Novelty insects still bobbed on its summit like the Union Flag on top of Everest.

Jamie saw the shadow lying at the foot of Mount Bugs. A man, stretched out. Jeperson was under here.

He pointed to the spot and told Keith, "Dig there, mate. There."

"Where?"

Keith didn't have the Shade-sight. Jamie knelt and began scooping snow away with gloved hands. Keith used a tray from the cafeteria as a spade, digging deep.

A face emerged, in a nest of long, frozen hair. Thin, blue, hollow-cheeked, jagged-moustached and open-eyed.

"Hello," said Jeperson, smiling broadly. "You must be the new boys."

XIII

Suddenly, Richard felt the cold. Not the Cold — he was disconnected, now. The little crystals were out of his brain. He hoped he had given the Cold something to think about.

"Would you happen to have seen some clothes in your travels?" he asked the two young men. One wore a long dark greatcoat and goggles, the other a red-lined magician's cloak.

They dragged his fur coat along and tried to wrap him in it. What he could see of his skin was sky-blue.

"It's stopped snowing," he observed.

The wind was down too. And sun shone through, low in the West. It was late evening. Long shadows were red-edged.

The Cold was responding to his plea, drawing in its chill. It could live on in perpetuity as a sub-microscopic speck inside a rock, or confine itself to the poles, or go back to the void below absolute zero. Without Cleaver telling it what it wanted, it had its own choices. Richard hoped he had persuaded the Cold that other life on Earth was entertaining enough to be put up with.

Now, he would probably die.

He hoped he had done the right thing. He was sorry he'd never found out who his real parents had been. He wished he'd spent more time with Barbara, but — obviously — he'd been busy lately. His personal life hadn't been a priority, and that was a regret. He could trust Fred and Vanessa to keep on, at least for a while. And, if these lads were anything to judge by, the Diogenes Club, or something like it, would continue to stand against Great Enchanters present and future, and all manner of other inexplicable threats to the public safety.

The boy in the goggles tried rubbing Richard's hands, but his friend — who knew something about hypothermia treatment — told him not to. Friction just damages more blood vessels. Gradual, all-round warmth was needed. Not that there was an easy supply around here.

He tried to think of quotable last words.

Some people came out of the building. Leech, and two women. One flew to him. Genevieve. Good for her. They'd not worked together much, but the old girl was a long-standing Valued Member.

"Richard, you won't die," she said.

"I think I'll need a second opinion," he muttered. "A less optimistic one."

"No, really," she insisted.

Leech hung back, shiftily. Richard expected no more. Genevieve pulled the other woman — a brown-haired girl who kept herself to herself — to help, and got her to press her hands on Richard's chest.

Warmth radiated from her touch.

"That's very… nice," he said. "Who are you?"

"This is Susan," said Genevieve. "She's a friend."

Richard had heard of her. Susan Rodway. She was on Catriona's list of possibles.

He felt as if he were sinking into a hot, perfumed bath. Feeling returned to his limbs. He heard hissing and tinkling, as snow and ice melted around them. A bubble of heat was forming. Susan took it slowly, not heating him too fast. His temperature came up like a diver hauled to the surface in stages to avoid the bends.

He tactfully rearranged a flap of fur to cover his loins. Susan's magic warmth had reached there, with an unshrivelling effect he rarely cared to share on such brief acquaintance.

"What did you do?" asked Genevieve. "Are we saved?"

Richard tried to shrug. "I did what I could. I think the Cold is getting a sense of who we are, what we're about and why we shouldn't just be killed out of hand. Who knows what something like that can really feel, think or do? You have to call off the blitzkrieg, though. Any smiting with fire and sword is liable to undo the work of diplomacy and land us back in the big fridge."

Leech was expressionless. Richard wondered how things would be if he'd had his way.

Genevieve looked back and said, "Make the call, Derek."

He made no move. Genevieve stood. Leech nodded, once, and walked back to the building.

"I see you've met Dr Shade and Conjurer Keith," said Genevieve. "They've done all right too."

Susan took her hands away. Richard regretted it, but knew her touch couldn't last. Everyone looked at the huge, liquefying snow-giant as he stood up and got dressed as best he could. Sharon Kellett would be inside that glacier. The others would be strewn around the fields.

This patch of Somerset would be better irrigated than the rest of Britain — for a few days.

"Who else turned up for the ice age?" Richard asked.

"There's a knowledgeable little fellow you don't need to meet just now," said Genevieve. "He didn't even waver, like some folks. Went straight to Leech. He's inside the weather station. At the Manor House, Catriona has a whole tea party. Old friends and new. Including a strong contingent from the Other Side."

"I can imagine."

"Maureen Mountmain's here," she said, pointedly.

Richard was glad to be warned of that potential complication. Genevieve let the point stick with a needling glance.

"It was a ritual," said Richard, knowing how weak the excuse was.

"It was still…" she mouthed the word "sex".

Richard knew he was being ribbed. Now they were less doomed, they could start squabbling, gossiping and teasing again.

Leech came back.

"We're invited to supper at the Manor House," he said. "It's only nine o'clock, would you believe it? You'll have to make my excuses, I'm afraid. I have to get back to London. Things to do, people to buy. Give my best to Miss Kaye. Oh, Cleaver's dead. Choked on his false teeth. Pity."

The blotch on his forehead was already gone. Leech recovered quickly.

"See you soon," he said, and walked away.

Richard knew an autopsy wouldn't show anything conclusive. Professor Cleaver would be listed as another incidental casualty.

"I feel much warmer now he's gone," said Genevieve. "Didn't he say something about supper?"

XIV

Most of the company had scurried back to their holes. Catriona was relieved to have them out of the house.

She sat in her drawing room. Paulette Michaelsmith was upstairs, tucked up and dreaming safely. Louise Teazle had walked home to the Hollow, her house on the moor. Genevieve was outside in the garden, with the young people. She was the last of the old ladies.

Ariadne had taken Rose with her. Mr Zed, round weal on his temple, didn't even complain. The Undertakers were a spent force, but even in their prime they couldn't have stood against an Elder of the Kind. Rose would be safe with Ariadne, and — more to the point — the world would be safe from her. Catriona assumed that Ariadne could pack Rose off to where she came from, just as — eighty years ago — Charles Beauregard sent Princess Cuckoo home. However, the Elder might choose to raise the creature who usually looked like a little girl as her own. At this stage of her life, Catriona doubted she'd live to find out. Charles wasn't here. Edwin wasn't here. At times, Catriona wondered if she were really here. She knew more ghosts than living people, and regretted the rasher statements made about spirits of the unquiet dead in books she had published in her long-ago youth. Occasionally, she welcomed the odd clanking chain or floating bed-sheet.

Maureen Mountmain, clearly torn, had wanted to stay and see Richard — she babbled a bit about having something to tell him — but Leech had ordered her to rally a party of Mr and Mrs Karabatsos, Myra Lark, Jago and leave. Jago, well on the way to replacing Rose as Catriona's idea of the most frightening person on the planet, took a last look around the Manor House, as if thinking of moving in, and slid off into the evening with Maureen's group. They wouldn't be able to keep him for long. Jago had his own plans. Leech had picked up Sewell Head, too — though Catriona had looked over his file, and concluded it would take a lot to lure him out of his sweet shop and away from his books of quiz questions.

On the plus side, the Club had tentative gains. Susan Rodway and Jamie Chambers — the new Dr Shade! — were hardly clubbable in the old-fashioned sense, but Mycroft Holmes had founded the Diogenes Club as a club for the unclubbable. Even Keith Marion, in a reasonable percentage of his might-have-been selves, was inclined to the good — though finding a place for him was even more of a challenge. Genevieve reported that the Chambers Boy showed his father's dark spark, tempered with a little more sympathy than habitually displayed by Jonathan Chambers. Derek Leech must want to sign up Dr Shade. The Shades wavered, leaning towards one side or the other according to circumstance or their various personalities. The boy could not be forced or wooed too strongly, for fear of driving him to the bad. Leech would not give up on such a potent Talent. There might even be a percentage in letting Jamie get close to Leech, putting the lad in the other camp for a while. Susan was reluctant to become a laboratory rat for David Cross or Myra Lark, but was too prodigious to let slip. Without her warm hands, Richard would not have lived through this cold spell. Susan needed help coping with her Talent, and had taken Catriona's card. If Jamie could be a counter for Leech, Susan was possibly their best hope of matching Jago. It chilled Catriona that she could even consider sending a girl barely in her twenties up against an Effective Talent like Anthony Jago, but no one else was left to make the decisions.

She was thinking like Edwin now, or even Mycroft. The Diogenes Club, or whatever stood in its stead, had to play a long game. She had been a girl younger than Susan or Jamie when this started for her. The rector's daughter, not the lady of the manor. At eighteen, with Edwin away at the front, she had been escorted by Charles to Mycroft's funeral. That had been a changing of the guard. Some of the famous names and faces of generations before her own seemed like dinosaurs and relics in her eyes. Even Mycroft's famous brother was a bright-eyed old gaffer with a beaky nose, fingers bandaged from bee-stings and yellow teeth from decades of three-pipe problems. Richard Riddle had been there, with his uncle and aunt. In his RFC uniform and jaunty eye-patch, the former boy detective was impossibly glamorous to her. She had a better idea than most where he had flown to in 1934, and still expected him to turn up again, with his chums Vi and Ernie.

Charles had pointed out Inspector Henry Mist, Thomas Carnacki, Sir Henry Merrivale, Winston Churchill, General Hector Tarr, John Silence, Sir Michael Calme, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, Margery Device, the Keeper of the Ravens, and others. Now, Catriona knew Genevieve had been there too, spying through blue lenses from the edge of the crowd — Mycroft's most secret secret agent and, contrary to the public record, the first Lady Member of the Diogenes Club. After all the fuss, Catriona turned out not to be the first of her sex to be admitted to the Inner Rooms — though she was the first woman to chair the Ruling Cabal.

It had been a busy sixty years. Angel Down, Irene Dobson, the Murder Mandarin, the Seven Stars, the last flight of the Demon Ace, Spring-Heel'd Jack, Dien Ch'ing, the Splendid Six, Weezie's Hauntings, the Rat Among the Ravens, the Crazy Gang, Parsifal le Gallois, the Water War, Adolf Hitler, Swastika Girl, the Malvern Mystery, the Scotch Streak, the Trouble with Titan, Castle De'ath, the Drache Development, Paulette's dream, the Soho Golem, the Ghoul Crisis, the Missing Mythwrhn, and so many others. And now the Cold. There was more to come, she knew. Richard Jeperson's work wasn't done. Her work wasn't done. The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club remained open.

She felt a whisper against her cheek.

XV

The garden was Disneyfied: white pools of melting ice, nightbirds singing. Light spilled onto the lawns from the upstairs windows of the Manor House. Glints reflected in dwindling icicles. Jamie saw activity streaks in the shadows. With the Cold drawn in, the land was healing.

No one had to worry about World Cooling any more.

Richard Jeperson, the Man from the Diogenes Club, tried to explain what he had done. It boiled down to getting the attention of a vast, unknowable creature and asking it very nicely not to wipe out all lifeforms that needed a temperature above freezing to survive. Jamie realized how lucky they had been. Only someone who could ask very politely and tactfully would have got a result. A few bumps the other way, along one of Keith's paths, and it could have been Derek Leech under the snow…

Leech had left Jamie his card, and he hadn't thrown it away.

Many of the people drawn to the Winter War had melted away like the ice. Some were sleeping over in the house. Jamie's van was parked next to Richard's ShadowShark in the drive.

He sat on a white filigree lawn-chair, drinking black coffee from an electric pot. The hostess, an elderly lady who had not joined them outside, provided a pretty fair scratch supper for the survivors and their hangers-on. Now, there were wafer-thin mints. Gene was in a lawn-swing, drinking something red and steaming that wasn't tomato soup. Richard, still glowing with whatever Susan had fed into him, smoked a fat, hand-rolled cigarette that wasn't a joint but wasn't tobacco either. Considering what he'd done, Jamie reckoned he could demand that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister hand-deliver an ounce of Jamaican, the Crown Jewels and Princess Margaret dressed up in a St Trinian's uniform to his room within the next half-hour and expect an answer of "right away, sir".

"How was your first day on the job?" Gene asked him.

"Job?"

"Your Dad called it a practice. Being Dr Shade."

"Not sure about the handle. I thought I'd just go with 'Shade' for a bit. 'Jamie Shade', maybe? I'd use it for the band, but it sounds too much like Slade."

"I quite like Slade," said Richard.

"You would," said Jamie. "What a year, eh?"

"It has had its meteorological anomalies."

"No, I mean the charts. Telly Savalas, Real Thing, The Brotherhood of Man, Abba, the Wurzels, J. J. Barrie, Demis Roussos… 'Brand New Combine Harvester', 'Save Your Kisses for Me', bloody 'No Charge'. It has to be the low-point in music since forever. It's like some great evil entity was sucking the guts out of our sounds. Some other great evil entity. You can't blame Leech for all of it. Even he wouldn't touch the Wurzels. Something's got to change. Maybe I'll stick with the band, leave monsters and magic to other folk. Kids are fed up, you know. They want to hear something new. And you lot are getting on."

"Do you feel 'long in the tooth', Genevieve?" Richard asked.

Gene bared teeth that Jamie could have sworn were longer than they had been earlier.

"It's not about how old you are," said Susan, who had been quietly sipping a drink with fruit in it. "It's about what you do."

"Here's to that," said Richard, clinking his glass to hers.

Keith was sitting quietly, not letting on which of his selves was home. The primary Keith had reluctantly given Jamie back the Great Edmondo's cloak and its hidden tricks. He had asked if Dr Shade needed an assistant, and started shuttling through selves when Jamie told him he really needed a new drummer. Now, despite what he'd said, he wasn't sure. Being Dr Shade meant something, and came with a lot of baggage. He half-thought Vron was only with him because of who his Dad was. These people kept calling him "Junior Shade", "Young Dr Shade" or "the New Dr Shade". Perhaps he should take them seriously. He was already a veteran of the Winter War, if something over inside two days counted as a war.

Like Dad, he wasn't much of a joiner. He couldn't see himself putting a tie on to get into some fusty old club. But he played well with others. How randomly had his vanload of raw recruits been assembled? Even Sewell Head, now lost to Leech, had come in handy. Maybe, he'd found his new band. Susan, Gene and Keith all had Talents. Perhaps the old hippie with the ringlets and the 'tache could take the odd guest guitar solo. One thing was for certain, they wouldn't sign with a Derek Leech label.

In the house, the lights went off, and the garden was dark. Jamie didn't mind the dark. From now on, he owned it.

"Catriona's gone to bed," said Richard.

Gene, another night person, stretched out on the grass, as if sunning herself in shadows.

"Some of us never sleep," she said. "Someone has to watch out for the world. Or we might lose it."

"We're not going to let that happen," said Richard.

THE END