The Ninth Nightmare

TWELVE Night Flight

By midnight, David was snoring softly with his green mask over his eyes. Katie eased herself out of bed and went through to her dressing room. She opened up her white satin-covered jewelry box and took out the folded slip of paper that Springer had given her. Before she opened it, she looked at herself in her dressing-table mirror.

‘You don’t have to do this, Katie,’ she told herself. ‘If you’d rather take a rain check, what can he do to you? He’s just a young guy who happens to look a whole lot like Mr Flight, that’s all.’

Actually, she wasn’t so sure about that. If Springer was capable of showing her what she looked like when she was all dressed up in her Night Warriors suit, maybe he was capable of making sure that she wore it, and that she went out hunting for this Gordon Veitch character, and Brother Albrecht’s carnival, whether she wanted to or not.

She held up the piece of paper. To her surprise, the words on it seemed to be written in her own handwriting. Very softly, she read them out.

‘“Now, when the face of the world is hidden in darkness, let us be conveyed to the place of our meeting, armed and armored; and let us be nourished by the power that is dedicated to the cleaving of darkness, the settling of all black matters, and the dissipation of all evil. So be it.”’

Katie thought that the words sounded rather pompous and medieval, but in spite of that she still found them stirring, and she particularly liked the phrase about ‘the place of our meeting, armed and armored’, which reassured her that she was not going to be alone, but part of a fighting force with other Night Warriors.

She crept back into the bedroom and slid herself under the covers. David was lying on his right side now, and talking to himself. As far as she could make out, he was giving a lecture, but it all sounded like nonsense. ‘Not psychotic, no. Umbrellas. And everybody has to go now.’

He was talking so loudly that she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, but somehow the words that Springer had given her to read had affected her as if she had taken a strong sedative, and after only a few minutes her eyes began to close. The illuminated clock on the nightstand beside her read twelve twenty-seven.

Darkness flooded into her mind; and at the same time she began to feel lighter and lighter. With the abrupt buoyancy of a helium balloon caught by a gust of wind, she bobbed up from her bed and floated upward, toward the ceiling. Startled, she rolled around in mid air, and as she did so she looked down and there she was, her own sleeping self. Her short brunette hair was already tousled, and she was touching her cheek with one hand as if she were making sure that she was real.

She rolled around again, so that she was facing upward, just as she reached the ceiling. She held up both hands to prevent herself from being pressed up against it, but her hands disappeared right into the plaster as if it were nothing but the softest of fine white sand. The rest of her followed, with a thick shushing sound, and she found that she was rising through the attic, where all of their suitcases and their books and their old furniture was stored. She saw the carved pine headboard from Daisy’s bed, the bed in which poor little Daisy had died, and somehow that gave her all the more determination to carry on. Even if she hadn’t been able to save Daisy, she could save other innocent children.

She kept on rising, and passed through the attic ceiling as easily as she had passed through the bedroom ceiling; and then the roof shingles; and in a few seconds she was high above the house. To the south she could see the glittering lights of Miami Beach, and to the west she could see clear across Biscayne Bay to Morningside Park. To the north, on the far side of the Surprise Waterway, she could see La Gorce Country Club, and an endless red stream of tail lights on Collins Avenue, like blood corpuscles flowing through the darkness.

Now she hung suspended for a few moments. At first she could feel the breeze from the ocean blowing against her face and ruffling her hair, but then her helmet began to take shape, and her head was soon enclosed in the distinctive falcon-shaped helmet of An-Gryferai. The lenses that protected her eyes were tinted amber, but her night-vision was stunning. She could clearly see all the way to the Golden Glades interchange, which was nearly twelve and a half miles to the north-west. All she had to do was lightly touch the side of her helmet with her fingertips, and she could see even further, with just as much clarity. She could even read the traffic sign on I-95 for Fort Lauderdale Airport, and see a small plane taking off, with the lights on its wing tips flashing.

She looked down and saw that she was now dressed all over in the soft brown-feathered plumage of An-Gryferia, with white feathers across her breasts. On each forearm her powerful mechanical claws had materialized, with all of the rods and ratchets and pulleys that operated them. She squeezed them open and shut, and rotated them, and each movement was accompanied by a satisfying series of whirrs and clicks.

Her wings had developed, too. They were strapped to her back and her upper arms with a soft leather harness, which allowed her to open them by flexing her shoulders. At first they were folded, and very heavy, but An-Gryferai soon discovered that when she opened them up, they were caught at once by the warm updraft from the ground. With a rumble of windblown feathers, she was carried even higher up into the air, until she could see the sparkling curve of the Florida Keys, all the way south to Plantation Key, and that was over seventy-five miles away.

She spun slowly around and around, marveling at the way she could fly, and how far she could see. She flapped her wings cautiously, only three or four flaps, and she was lifted over fifty feet higher into the air. Then she stretched them as wide as she could, and angled them into the wind. She swooped down, and then up, and then she dared to plummet head first toward the ground, breaking out of her dive less than twenty feet from the seventh hole at La Gorce Country Club. She flew the length of the lake on the right-hand side of the hole, so that she could see her reflection flashing over the surface of the water. An-Gryferai, in her falcon helmet, the Avenging Claw.

When she reached the far end of the lake, she was about to soar up into the air again when she saw a solitary figure standing beside the trees. Her eyesight was so sharp that she could identify him at once as Springer. She tilted to the left, and then feathered her wings so that she landed only a few yards away from him, although she nearly lost her balance as her feet touched the ground, and finished up her flight with a scurrying little run.

As she stood there panting, Springer circled around her, nodding his head in admiration. An-Gryferai thought he looked different — darker, taller, more intense — less like Mr Flight and more like her first boyfriend Gideon, who had been seventeen years older than her. Very attractive, but domineering.

‘You look wonderful,’ said Springer. ‘Your grandmother would be very proud of you.’

‘Thanks, it’s amazing. I could see all the way down to the Keys.’

‘You’ll have to travel far and fast tonight,’ Springer told her. ‘We’ve noticed that the president of a meat-packing company in Chicago is dreaming about Brother Albrecht’s carnival. He lives in the Drake Tower, on Lake Shore Drive. Dom Magator and the rest of your team will be waiting for you right outside.’

‘Chicago? But that’s over a thousand miles! It’s going to take me all night to get there!’

Springer smiled. ‘You’re forgetting, An-Gryferai. You’re dreaming. You’re not bound by the laws of the physical world. You’re a Night Warrior. Katie’s asleep in her bed, but you can go anyplace you want, as fast as you want.’

‘But how?’

‘Use your natural instincts. An-Gryferai has all the natural sense of direction of a migratory bird. She uses the Earth’s magnetic field to guide her, just as migrating birds do. The only difference between An-Gryferai and a migratory bird is that a bird has to fly to its destination by flapping its wings — whereas you can fly there just by thinking about it.’

‘But—’

Springer laid his hand on her shoulder, and for a moment she felt the same sense of being controlled as she had with Gideon. But then he said, ‘You know where Chicago is. You know where Lake Shore Drive is. Have confidence in yourself, An-Gryferai. Inside your mind you have a map of everywhere, and you have the ability to use it. Compared to your navigational skills, a satnav is a clumsy toy.’

He took his hand away. He was nothing like Gideon, not at all, because Gideon always used to make her feel that she was useless and stupid, whereas Springer made her feel that she could do whatever she put her mind to.

‘Close your eyes,’ Springer told her. ‘Now visualize the coordinates of Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, and be there.’

Katie closed her eyes. In her mind’s eye, she could see an extraordinary illuminated map of the entire United States, a tracery of fine shining filaments set against a seamless black background, like the sky at night. Instinctively, she steered her mind north-north-westward, and the map began to rotate. Far beneath her, she saw spatterings of light that she recognized as Orlando, Gainesville, Atlanta, Louisville and Indianapolis. She felt no sensation that she was moving. There was no slipstream blowing through her feathers. She felt only that her consciousness was carrying her to the western shore of Lake Michigan, and the glittering conurbation of Chicago and all of its suburbs.

It took her only seconds. She had seen Stargate SG1 on TV, where squads of soldiers were transported through a wormhole in space from one planet to another, almost instantaneously, in a roller-coaster rush of colored lights. But that was nothing compared to the silent, effortless way in which she had simply thought herself from one city to another.

As she approached East Lake Shore Drive, she opened up her eyes and opened up her wings, too, so that she could fly down the last thousand feet. She didn’t have far to go. The Drake Tower was directly beneath her, a red-brick apartment block in the beaux-arts style — thirty stories and nearly three hundred fifty feet high.

Suddenly she could hear noise, too — of honking traffic and the wind whipping off the lake, and a helicopter thump-thump-thumping over Cicero.

An intense blue light flashed from the roof garden of the Drake Tower, and as she see-sawed downward with her wings outstretched, she saw Dom Magator and Zebenjo’Yyx and Xyrena and the twins Jekkalon and Jemexxa, already gathered together and waiting for her. To her surprise, Springer was there, too, in the same form in which he had appeared to her on the golf course at La Gorce Country Club.

Zebenjo’Yyx was busy marveling at his outfit. Lincoln lifted his right arm, and then his left. Attached by straps to the upper side of each forearm, all the way from his elbows to his wrists, there was an elaborate mechanism which looked like the workings of a crossbow, with tightened cords and a system of cogs and ratchets. Each mechanism was loaded with three arrows, with viciously-barbed heads on them, six arrows altogether. But when he turned his head further and looked at his upper arms, he saw that there were three further arrows on each of those, too. He reached behind him, and realized that he was carrying even more arrows on his back, in a herringbone pattern, and that he had an extraordinary kind of quiver rising out of his back, like a scorpion’s tail. In all, he reckoned he must have been carrying more than a hundred arrows, and they were all connected to hooks and pulleys, so that when one arrow was fired, another arrow would immediately tilt over his shoulder and slide along his arm to replace it.

When An-Gryferai touched lightly down on the roof, Springer came over and took hold of her arm. ‘Everybody, this is the last member of our team, the Avenging Claw.’

He led her across to the other Night Warriors, and introduced her. Dom Magator said, ‘Very pleased to meet you, little bird-lady. I have to say that I ate a chicken bigger than you once, spit-roasted, at Pluckers Restaurant in Baton Rouge.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment. I’ve been trying to lose weight.’

An-Gryferai was slightly taken aback by Xyrena, with her high golden crown and her billowing golden cloak and her naked-look breastplate. It was more than just her appearance — her shiny golden breasts and her shiny golden genitalia. When she took hold of An-Gryferai’s hands to welcome her, An-Gryferai felt a strange electrifying sensation, as if Xyrena had slyly drawn her fingertips up the inside of her thighs, and intimately touched her.

Springer noticed her quick, involuntary shiver. ‘Xyrena is the Passion Warrior,’ he explained. ‘She has the same effect on everybody, man or woman. It’s her principal weapon.’

‘Same as it is for most women, wouldn’t you say?’ Xyrena put in.

Now Zebenjo’Yyx came forward. His wooden arrow-launchers clattered as he walked. ‘Good to have you here, Avengin’ Claw. Some fancy-dress party, don’t you think? If I hadn’t nearly been killed by this Gordon Veitch guy, I would have thought this was some kind of seriously bad joke.’

‘I still can’t believe any of it,’ said An-Gryferai. ‘I keep thinking that it’s all a dream, but then it is.’

Jekkalon and Jemexxa introduced themselves — Jekkalon in his gleaming black suit and Jemexxa in her dazzling silver suit. They both nodded their helmets and said, ‘Hi, pleased to meet you,’ but An-Gryferai thought that they seemed diffident and edgy and not very happy to be here. She didn’t know that earlier that evening, three-and-a-half thousand disgruntled fans had almost caused a full-scale riot at the State Theater in Cleveland when they realized that the Kaiser Twins were not going to be making their promised appearance.

‘All right,’ said Springer. ‘We don’t know how much longer this gentleman’s dream is going to last, so we have to make this quick. His name is George Roussos and he’s the president of ABR Foods, which is one of the major meat-packers in Chicago. He’s asleep in his apartment on the twenty-seventh floor, along with his wife Margarita.’

‘How do we get in there?’ asked Jekkalon. ‘This has to be a high-security building, right?’

‘You flew here from Cleveland, didn’t you?’ said Springer. ‘You’re insubstantial. You’re a dream, just like the rest of us. You can pass through the walls as easily as you passed through the ceiling of the Griffin House Hotel.’

‘Come on,’ said Dom Magator. ‘Let’s do it, before this meat-packer starts dreaming about something else, like short ribs or navel pastrami pieces.’

Springer arranged the six of them so that they were standing together in a tight circle, almost too close for comfort. ‘OK?’ he said. ‘Now think sink.’

They sank through the floor of the roof garden with the same soft shushing sound that Katie had felt when she had risen through the attic of her house in Nautilus. Then they descended through the master bedroom of the penthouse apartment on the thirtieth floor, which was unoccupied, stuffy and airless, with its blinds drawn; and then through the master bedroom of the apartment below. Here, a middle-aged couple lay dozing in front of a huge flickering TV which took up most of the opposite wall, their eyes closed and their mouths wide open.

‘Murder, She Wrote,’ said Dom Magator. ‘That’s enough to send anybody to the land of Nod.’

But without hesitation, the Night Warriors continued to sink through the thick cream carpet, and the ceiling below, down to the twenty-eighth floor. In this bedroom, the king-sized bed was empty, but the sheets had been dragged halfway on to the floor, and a couple were having a shouting match in the brightly-lit en-suite bathroom.

‘You were making eyes at that whore all evening!’ the woman was screaming. ‘Don’t tell me you weren’t!’

‘That whore as you call her could help us to land a multimillion-dollar contract, you lamebrain!’

But before they could hear any more of their argument, the Night Warriors’ descent continued, down through the patterned carpet to the twenty-eighth floor apartment below. With a faint shush, they alighted as softly and silently as parachutists in George Roussos’ bedroom. Here, they stopped, and looked around.

Xyrena said, ‘Jesus! Whore’s boudoir, or what?’ but Dom Magator held up his finger to indicate that they should stay quiet. All the same, Katie had to agree with her. The bedroom was decorated in a style which she could only have described as Greek Billionaire Bombastic, with a gilded four-poster bed, and purple velvet drapes, and bow-fronted Regency nightstands. On either side of the window stood two life-size statues of Greek muses, Urania the goddess of astronomy and Thalia the goddess of comedy.

Dom Magator beckoned to them, and the Night Warriors gathered around the right-hand side of the bed, where George Roussos was sleeping. He was lying on his back in purple silk pajamas which matched the purple velvet drapes. His comb-over had strayed across the pillow like seaweed, and the bottom two buttons of his pajama jacket were unfastened, revealing a huge furry stomach.

His wife Margarita lay with her back to him, a pink chiffon scarf tied over her head to protect her platinum-blonde pleat.

George Roussos was twitching and muttering in his sleep, and every now and then his left elbow would jerk up, as if he were trying to push somebody away.

‘He’s still having the carnival dream,’ said Springer. ‘Go on, Dom Magator. You know what to do. But let’s do it quick.’

Dom Magator said, ‘OK. Everybody ready for this? Here goes nothing.’

He raised both arms and pointed his fingers upward. There was a few seconds’ pause, and then a sharp crackle. Two narrow streams of sapphire-blue light jumped out of the ends of his fingers and joined together in an apex next to George Roussos’ sleeping body. A strong smell of ozone filled the air, and the two streams of light jerked and twitched like electrocuted snakes.

Slowly and evenly, Dom Magator lowered his arms, using the twin streams of light to describe a shimmering octagonal figure in the air, close to the side of the bed.

‘This is the portal which will take you into this gentleman’s dream,’ said Springer. ‘All you have to do is to step through it, and you will find yourself right inside his mind.’

Zebenjo’Yyx bent down and tried to peer into the center of the octagon, shielding his eyes against its intense sapphire-blue brightness. ‘I can’t see nothing inside of there, only pitchy-black dark.’

‘Our friend here is dreaming about someplace dark, that’s why,’ said Dom Magator. ‘Don’t worry, I have plenty of night-vision goggles and gunsights if we need them. Let’s just hit the bricks, shall we?’

‘We can really step through here?’ asked Zebenjo’Yyx.

‘We really can,’ Dom Magator assured him. ‘And just to prove it to yourself, you can go first.’

Zebenjo’Yyx shook his head and lifted up both hands in mock surrender. ‘That’s OK, man, you’ve done this before. You go first. I’ll stand back and watch how you do it.’

‘Will you please just go?’ said Dom Magator. ‘I need to have somebody on the other side to cover the girls when they come through. It’s called, like, chivalry. It’s also called good tactical sense. We don’t know what the hell might be waiting for us through there, do we?’

‘Yeah, precisely, man. That’s what concerns me.’

Xyrena linked arms with him and said, ‘Come on, big boy! Don’t tell me you’re chicken!’

‘Who said anything about chicken?’ Zebenjo’Yyx protested. ‘There’s a whole world of difference between “chicken” and “circumspect”.’

All the same, he cocked the arrow launchers on each of his forearms, turned to the rest of the Night Warriors, and said, ‘This is it, then. Like my grandfather used to say, you can’t make no omelets without breakin’ no legs.’

‘Eggs,’ Xyrena corrected him.

‘My grandfather wasn’t just a cook. I know that now. He was Zebenjo the Arrow-Storm. So when he said “legs” I think he maybe meant legs.’

George Roussos let out a loud grunt and shifted his bulk sideways. At the same time, inside the octagonal portal, the Night Warriors saw lightning flicker, and they distinctly heard the rumbling of distant thunder.

Springer said, anxiously, ‘Hurry, Zebenjo’Yyx! If our friend here changes his dream, or if he wakes up, we could have wasted this entire night’s mission.’

Without any further hesitation, Zebenjo’Yyx ducked his head down and stepped through the portal. He vanished from the bedroom with a sharp snapping sound, like a high-voltage electrical short, as if he had never been there.

‘He’s gone,’ said Jemexxa. ‘That’s incredible.’

Dom Magator said, ‘Why don’t you and Jekkalon go next? Then An-Gryferai and Xyrena. I’ll bring up the rear.’

‘Well, nobody can say that you don’t have plenty of rear to bring up,’ said Xyrena.

Dom Magator said, ‘Good joke, Xyrena. But don’t let’s forget how dangerous this could be, and that some of us might get badly hurt, or even killed. So, you know, let’s get serious, shall we? And keep our eyes open. And our ordnance ready. If there’s any weapon you need apart from your natural allure — like a gun of any kind — you only have to ask.’

‘Oh, I’m serious, mister, believe you me,’ Xyrena retaliated. ‘Don’t let one or two wisecracks fool you. I’ve spent my whole life fighting and I can assure you that the skin underneath this armor is just as tough as the armor itself.’

Dom Magator looked at her through his green-tinted visor for a moment, and then he said, ‘OK. Let’s get hustling, shall we?’ He could have told her that talking tough wasn’t enough when you were fighting in the world of dreams, but he decided it was best if she found out for herself. Fighting in the world of dreams was terrifying, chaotic, and violently disorienting. Nothing and nobody ever stayed the same. The terrain could drastically alter right beneath your feet, from limestone butte into fever-ridden bayou, and the weather could change, too, from a summer heatwave to a midwinter’s blizzard, all without a moment’s warning.

Jekkalon stepped through the portal, followed closely by Jemexxa. An-Gryferai went next. She had no idea what to expect, and the sharp snap! as she passed from the real world into the dream world gave her a jolt. But immediately she felt rain pattering against her helmet, and when she stood up straight, she found herself on a hillside, under a black, lowering sky.

Lightning was stalking across the horizon on crooked stilts, as threatening as the Martian tripods in The War of the Worlds. Jekkalon and Jemexxa were standing only a few feet away to her left, while Zebenjo’Yyx had taken up a position on top of a low promontory off to her right, his right arm cocked up like a sentry holding a rifle.

An-Gryferai waded through the grass toward Jekkalon and Jemexxa. ‘Some dream for a meat-packer!’ she shouted.

Jemexxa tilted her helmeted head toward her and shouted back, ‘This is the same place that Kieran and me found ourselves, when we went through the door at the Griffin House Hotel! Except that the carnival was right at the top of the hill there, and now it’s not!’

‘It must have moved on!’ said An-Gryferai.

Behind them, Xyrena appeared, closely followed by Dom Magator, with all of his guns and his swords and his serried racks of knives.

An-Gryferai shouted at Dom Magator, ‘Jemexxa said that she and Jekkalon were here before, in this same exact place! She said that the carnival was up on top of the hill, but it’s gone now!’

Suddenly, in her ear, as clearly and as warmly as if he had been standing right beside her, Dom Magator said, ‘We don’t have to yell at each other, An-Gryferai. We all have a close-communications system inside of our helmets, except for Xyrena, who has an induction loop in her crown. This means that we can talk to each other in our natural voices, at any distance. Switch is on the left-hand side, under your ear protectors.’

‘Oh,’ said An-Gryferai. ‘I didn’t realize.’

Jekkalon hadn’t been listening. ‘Are they the same, then?’ he screamed. ‘Dream time and waking time?’

‘I can hear you, for Christ’s sake!’ said Dom Magator. ‘You don’t have to bust my goddamned eardrums!’

‘Sorry!’ said Jekkalon. ‘But it was only last night when Kiera and me saw the carnival here. So if dream time is the same as waking time, then they couldn’t have traveled too far since then, could they? For starters, they would have had to pack up all of their tents, and all of their equipment, and hitch up all of their trailers, and that would have taken them hours.’

‘Dream time is different, for sure,’ said Dom Magator. ‘But this carnival has more than dream people in it. It has real people, and you can’t mess around with time too much when you have real people involved. Real people have to live out their lives sequentially.’

‘So what does that mean?’ asked Xyrena.

‘It means that the carnival can’t travel backward and forward in time, the same way that we can, as Night Warriors. So the whole shebang has to carry on like a real carnival, hour by hour and minute by minute and day by day. And that’s to our advantage, now that we’re hunting for them. They can’t dream themselves back to nineteen thirty-six, for example, to get away from us.’

‘In that case, let’s go huntin’ for them,’ said Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘I’m just itchin’ to get my revenge on that freak who broke my frickin’ back!’

‘They won’t be far away,’ said Dom Magator. ‘This is where our meat-packing pal started his dream, right here, which is why we entered it here. Judging by his physical condition, he couldn’t have walked too far to catch up with them.’

He turned to Xyrena, as if he were challenging her to make some smart remark about his physical condition, but Xyrena simply shrugged. Then he said, ‘An-Gryferai, how about taking off and having a look around? Just be careful — it looks like it’s pretty damned blowy up there.’

An-Gryferai walked a few paces up the hill, with the wet grass lashing at her knees. Then she flexed her shoulders and spread her wings, and the wind immediately plucked her upward.

Dom Magator had been wrong; this weather was very much more than ‘pretty damned blowy’. This wasn’t at all like the warm, serene thermals in which she had floated so triumphantly over the Florida coastline. Here, the wind was harsh and cold and ill-tempered, constantly switching direction and velocity. Bursts of rain kept exploding against her helmet, and the lightning seemed to be crackling so close to her that she was afraid of being electrocuted.

She was buffeted by downdrafts again and again, and at one time she was almost beaten back down to the ground, and her boots actually kicked against the grass. But she struggled and dipped and spun, and tilted her wings to catch every rising gust of wind that she could, and at last she managed to fly up to the top of the hill.

She battled upward and looked around, repeatedly angling her wings to steady herself. It was clear that the carnival had been here, and only recently. The ground had been churned into glistening black mud by scores of criss-crossing tire tracks, and there was trash scattered everywhere — broken orange-crates, chicken carcasses, dirty diapers, worn-out tractor tires. Near the center of the site a wide oval area had been covered several inches deep with sawdust, which is where the big top must have been pitched. Over on the right, a large bonfire was still smoldering, filling the night with acrid smoke, and stray sheets of paper were dancing across the muddy furrows as if they were panicking that they had been left behind.

‘How’s it going?’ asked Dom Magator, inside her helmet.

‘Jekkalon and Jemexxa were right: the carnival was here. I’m just trying to work out which way it went.’

‘Maybe you’re going to need a little more altitude.’

An-Gryferai flapped her wings even harder. The wind was howling and screaming now, and she felt as if she were swimming the butterfly stroke through a mountainous sea. But gradually she managed to gain height, until she was nearly two hundred feet over the hilltop, and she could see more than ten miles in every direction. She adjusted the lenses in her helmet to improve her night vision and sharpen her focus. Two black crows tumbled past her, even more helpless in the wind than she was.

She could see now that the carnival had processed down the opposite side of the hill, like a vast Civil War army on the move. Its tractors and its wagons had crushed deep parallel tracks in the grass, and there were hundreds of hoof marks and footprints too, so she had no difficulty in working out which way it had headed. She adjusted her lenses yet again, turning her head slowly from side to side to sweep the distant horizon. Eventually, less than five miles away, half hidden by smoke and fog, she made out a cluster of houses and barns and workshops, close to the edge of a leafless birch wood. The carnival had assembled nearby, a collection of twenty or thirty trucks and trailers, as well as horse-drawn caravans and elderly automobiles. She recognized a huge black Packard Phaeton from the mid-nineteen-thirties, because her grandfather used to own one, although he had never driven it.

Refining her vision even more acutely, she saw dozens of carnival folk to-ing and fro-ing from the carnival wagons to the houses and workshops. Some of them looked like riggers and circus hands, because they were wearing plain gray coveralls and heavy-duty gloves, but others were dressed in far more fanciful costumes, with red-and-yellow striped tailcoats and long capes of faded velvet in oranges and greens and grays.

Several of them were hopping on crutches, or walking frames, and An-Gryferai saw at least two of them, legless like beggars from a Breughel painting, pushing themselves across the grass in little wooden boxes with wheels.

She spun around in the air, and gave the rest of the Night Warriors a furious wave.

‘It’s here!’ she told them. ‘Brother Albrecht’s carnival is here!’

‘Great,’ said Dom Magator. ‘Everybody ready for this? Everybody ready to kick some eight-hundred-year-old ass? Let’s go get ’em!’