Winter

by William Horwood

  But fratricide and ice inside twist a man’s mind so much that one day he breaks and the poison spews. It all caught up with Reece that day in Birmingham, England, when a little bastard hydden, dwarf filth he didn’t even see, crawled round him and blew up his Huey. Even that he might have held in control but for something more. As the Huey blew up behind him, a bolt from a crossbow fired from one side of them passed straight through the neck of the marine at his side, the last one he had, and he fell at Reece’s feet, spouting blood, gurgling in death.

  So Reece was suddenly alone, with no way out, and it was beginning to snow, and that was the moment he felt he was right back there in Montana, intent on his first human prey.

  These latest kills he had in mind were going to be his last and he intended to make them good – very good.

  He had all he wanted to do the job right: his favoured AMW sniper rifle, enough .338 Lapua Magnums, no one to answer to, or for, any more . . . and prey. Because they were going to come back and this time he was going to finally take them out.

  ‘Bastards,’ he murmured as he threw a grenade to kill the shooter of the bolt and readied himself to roll away with the explosion.

  Bang!

  Then he was off, unseen, running so fast, swerving so low, turning just where he needed to be to get the one who got his Huey.

  Which, to his astonishment, he failed to do. Found the tracks, traced them to a canal and there lost them for good.

  Clever bastard had climbed in and waded away.

  No matter. Reece retreated to take up a new position. As soon as he went he felt he might as well have been one of the shadows themselves, or the landscape, or the ground and the concrete and the filth and the rising ruins of the world and the blizzard wind. He felt he was all of it. That was the way it was done.

  Then he slowed, stopped, lay down, put his eye to his night ’scope, swept the terrain, saw nothing, and began his wait.

  He gathered enough snow and ice to put in his mouth to reduce its temperature and take away the giveaway condensation of his out-breath.

  Then he breathed easy, breathed good, knowing one way or another he was going to die but not until he had got them all.

  The blizzard drove high above his head, across the open space he had made his killing ground, the place they had made the fire and had been seen and most likely would be again. They used the building nearby and that was where one of his men swore they had seen Bohr, or the runt-version of him, so far as anyone normal could see hydden at all. Still, that’s where Reece counted on them coming back to. If he saw dwarf-Bohr he’d take him out with pleasure. He lay very still, which he knew how to do, breathed his icy breath and very soon he looked like nothing more than another undulation on the frosty ground.

  Jack hurried them away from the Duck, up through Digbeth to Deritend, past the bombed-out stores, through the lanes off New Canal Street, on and on.

  The sky above the wharves and old factories around the Duck had been clear earlier on, the stars showing. Now, when it was still lit by the occasional rocket and fireworks from the wedding, they saw it was livid and that the clouds raced by like an angry, muddy stream filled with ice.

  But at ground level the air was unearthly still, the wind’s roar being high above their heads, above the highest buildings. The lights of the festivities faded further behind them, the air grew ever colder and the night darker. Yet the sky above and the clouds there made their presence felt: ominous, raging, a growing threat.

  Suddenly the air was sharp with flecks of ice that pricked their cheeks and forehead and which sometimes shone as a brief wink of sharp light.

  The lanes north from Old Brum were criss-crossed with waterways, on which the Bilgesnipe had moored their crafts.

  Katherine was surprised to see that they were not the only ones hurrying. Here and there, down along the waterways, silent as they themselves, whole families of Bilgesnipe hurried too, with but a single light to show the way. They climbed in boats and poled off fast into the darkness, the icy water crackling as they went. The helms, standing tall, sometimes knocked icicles, which fell and skittered onto their crafts’ cold sterns.

  ‘They’re trying to get away to more open water,’ said Jack when they paused briefly for a rest, ‘or to where the waterways run underground.’

  ‘Explain what’s happening,’ said Katherine, ‘Jack . . .’

  ‘Come on,’ was his reply, ‘we’ve little time.’

  There was something in his voice she had never heard before in all the years she had known him. It was not alarm or fear. It was a rising and terrible sense of panic, or helplessness, perhaps even of despair.

  ‘Jack . . .’

  Terce hurried them on from the front, a lantern in his hand, Jack followed behind with another.

  Only when they finally stopped, just before the entrance into the Main Square, and she saw his face in the dim and flickering light, pinched now with the bitter cold, as the others’ were, did she see what it was his voice expressed. Jack was a protector of others, it was what he did. He would overturn every obstacle to save any one of them, or lay down his life if he must. That was what defined Jack.

  But now, standing there, breathing heavily from the exertions of their flight, he looked like a parent who is beginning to lose faith that he can save his own children from harm. Jack, she guessed, was running out of options.

  But why?

  She did not have time to ask the question because he barked an order at them to stay together while he checked the Main Square.

  He gave his lantern to Katherine and crept forward and did so, as best he could. What he was looking for was a line of safe retreat into the Library.

  The fire they had lit outside the Library steps still smouldered, a red glow in the middle of an icy wasteland. The smoke drifted across the path and against the Library wall. Then it rose up, past the first floor and beyond the second, ruined one. Jack followed its passage and could just see that two floors up it was whipped violently away into the night by the icy river of air that drove over their heads.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Katherine of Barklice. ‘Have you ever seen the like?’

  ‘I’ve heard if it but never wanted to see it,’ he replied. ‘It’s a cold front of air overreaching itself, held back by its own power but getting lower all the time. Like a wave before it crashes down. When it reaches us at ground level it’ll be a killing kind of cold.’

  Jack returned.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We face two enemies, not one: the cold and the humans. You’ve seen the blizzard blowing above . . . ?’

  They nodded.

  ‘We heard today that it was coming our way.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘One of the officers sent north by Igor Brunte who returned yesterday. He had black hands.’

  They didn’t understand.

  ‘Frostbite,’ said Jack. ‘We tried to warm him up. He died. The bitter winter winds have devastated the refugees in the north, human and hydden alike and are coming our way.’

  As if in confirmation of this warning, a blast of icy wind drove down into them; the ice it carried like shards of glass in their eyes.

  ‘I’ll explain fully when we get into the Library. Barklice, you go first . . . and the rest follow at short intervals. I’ll touch your arm to indicate when to go. When you do, run fast but without panic.

  ‘My Lord Festoon will follow with me . . . Do not bunch together, it’s too dangerous. Use the smoke as cover as much as you can and then run up the steps and right through the doors. It’s that last bit where we’ll be most vulnerable if any humans with guns are watching . . .’

  ‘Now, go, Barklice . . . go.’

  ‘Is Bratfire in there?’

  ‘He may be,’ said Jack evasively. ‘Go!’

  Reece sensed their arrival moments before he saw their feet underneath the drifting smoke. He was tempted to fire in among where they were obviously standing but he did not do so. They would be heading for the do
ors of the Library and he liked the idea of having them in his sights on the steps, where they would be slow and pleasing targets.

  Even as these thoughts went through his mind the first started running and moments later cleared the smoke, ran the final yards and mounted the steps. Reece had him nicely in his sights and was about to fire when a second appeared, then a third . . .

  ‘Perfect,’ he murmured as, at last they continued to appear, before one by one disappearing inside the building, ‘once inside they’re trapped.’

  This appealed to his hunting instinct much more than simply shooting a few of them where they were. Instead, he decided to count them as they went . . . four . . . five . . .

  ‘Godammit, how many of the bastards are there?’

  The final count was nine and the last most interesting of all.

  The image in his ’scope was monochrome, like an X-ray, and heat sensitive. That made the smoke blowing across blur and double the image of the hydden. Reece thought he knew the final one from the jizz of him: stolid, head thrust forward, carrying a stick. He was that same bastard who escaped the net in Woolstone, the one he saw next on the footage from Woodhenge, shooting some of his men with a crossbow before dancing out of sight with Bohr. That one.

  He waited, ready to squeeze the trigger moments before he reached the last few steps.

  ‘No,’ murmured Reece unpleasantly, ‘I prefer to kill this one later, with my knife.’

  But the hydden paused, slowed by one in front, and Reece changed his mind. Stilling his breath, getting the cross-hairs of the sight plumb on the centre of the hydden’s back, he fired as sweet a shot as ever he had.

  And stared in amazement.

  The hydden continued running up the steps and pulling sideways as he did so as if he knew the shot was coming.

  Impossible, but it happened right before his eyes.

  He fired again, but this time at thin air.

  Jack passed through the smoke, into the relative light, and felt exposed. He also felt the urgent trembling of his stave, felt it wreak from out of its depths its shards of light, brighter than moon, brighter than sun, a terrible warning.

  ‘Run, Festoon,’ he shouted, rolling sideways, ‘run!’

  The stave’s glints and glitter brightened into a brief blinding flash and Jack fled up the steps after Festoon, heaving him onward through the door, following so fast that they tumbled inside together and landed before the others in a heap.

  A rifle shot whizzed in above their heads and glass broke, but they were all safe, every one of them.

  For now, thought Jack.

  41

  INTO THE BLIZZARD

  Bratfire saw it all and waited.

  He had watched the human for a full hour past, since he had tried to catch him after the explosion. Bratfire had stared up at his boots protruding over the canal edge, seen the hand that scooped water out and threw it on his coat and trews, heard the slight crunch of feet on ground as he left, heavy like the noise humans make even when they try to be quiet.

  Watched him go, watched him crawl, watched him secrete himself, hydden-like, until, lying still enough for the canal water he had thrown so oddly onto his garb to freeze and turn grey-white, he was harder to see. Clever!

  Then the puffs of breath fading, fading, after he put ice in his mouth.

  Oh yes, Bratfire told himself, he was clever, this human, but not as good as him and his pa. He had chosen the wrong spot to make his lair, for one thing, because from the place that Bratfire had finally reached, which was just thirty yards away, he could watch his every move. Three yards to the right and it would have been harder.

  But that didn’t matter. What did was the agony, the terrible decision Bratfire had to make, when his pa and Jack’s friends appeared one by one from the far corner of the square and the human had his rifle on them, moving it slightly, sighting them. That was agony.

  Bratfire had hoped that after the helicopter exploded the human would be long gone and he, Bratfire, free to go down to the Library to wait for them.

  Now, if he shouted a warning someone got shot for sure. And so did he. If he kept quiet then maybe the human would let them be. Maybe. Maybe his pa would get shot. Maybe. Bratfire didn’t know. He didn’t know what to do.

  It was then, for the first time since his pa began looking after him, a tear coursed down his cheek because he felt alone and wasn’t sure what to do. He wanted to stand up and shout, ‘Shoot me, just me not my pa!’

  But he didn’t have the courage and once the solitary tear froze common sense told him that wasn’t an option either.

  It was wyrd that saved them, Jack’s wyrd.

  When the shots began and Jack’s stave shone as bright as suns, blinding the human and him as well, Bratfire knew it was all right.

  Jack rolled and ran, straight up the steps, bashing into Lord Festoon so they crashed through the door together.

  That made Bratfire laugh, and as he did he knew what the human was going to do and why he hadn’t shot before; and what he was going to do. His eyes swivelled right, towards where the High Ealdor’s Residence had been, and beyond it in the direction of St Bartholomew’s Church. He would take them there.

  Meanwhile Bratfire shivered and waited for the human to get up. Which Reece did almost immediately, not entirely displeased. The shot had missed, maybe because he was momentarily blinded by the light that shone from the hydden’s whirling stick. But that Reece doubted, because his aim had been good and he had anticipated the hydden’s sideways roll. No, it was the light itself, it deflected the bullet.

  Can’t tell with these bastards, he told himself. They’re using technology real people have never heard of.

  So no, he was not displeased with what had happened so far. Getting them into the building meant that they would not come out again in a hurry for fear of him, which meant they were trapped inside.

  He got up and headed fast towards the side of the building, intending to go from there to the back, where, he knew from his own reconnaissance, he could get inside.

  Now he had them where he wanted he was going hunting again, but this time out of the cold. Buildings, half-derelict ones, had a certain charm. The challenge of several of them made it even better. Reece took pleasure in the prospect of herding them, frightening them, hurting them.

  Freaks, the whole lot of them!

  ‘Freaks . . .’ he muttered, licking his lips.

  When he was done and they were dead he was going to go outside to the fire again and pile on some of the surviving furniture he had seen, shelves and old doors that had been stacked and ready for that purpose. If the blizzard got bad, and it looked ready to come down finally, he could sneak back inside again.

  Reece laughed, happy to be alive, and began his fresh advance.

  ‘What happened, Jack?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘We thought we heard a shot.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  No point in frightening them.

  A shadow at the door, and a violent rattle, and they all turned in alarm. It was the wind. The blizzard had begun.

  ‘So now,’ said Katherine, ‘what happened before you came for us?’

  ‘We have to defend this place, we need . . .’ he began evasively.

  But this time they were doing nothing before they knew. His face said much, his silence more.

  ‘Where are Pike and the others who were with him, Jack?’

  He breathed deeply, moving a little inside to get away from the rush of the wind, the swirl-around of ice and dust. A filing card slid across the floor as if pushed by an unseen hand. Windows rattled. And the humans were still after them.

  ‘We made a mistake,’ said Jack, ‘a terrible mistake. We thought that the forces of Pike and Brunte combined would be enough to stop a solitary survivor, but . . . it was not. He was clever, almost as good as you, Barklice, but he had something you don’t have: a radio. He summoned help.’

  They stared at him in horror.

&nb
sp; ‘More came?’

  ‘Five more. With that number, staves and crossbows were no match for the weapons they deployed. They killed Brunte and three of his people just after Pike had begun to move in with his stavermen. It was as sudden and quick as breaking glass. I know, they died next to where I stood, without time even to know what hit them, or from where. A rattle of thunderous noise and they were gone.

  ‘We didn’t hear it. Maybe because of the fireworks.’

  Jack shook his head.

  ‘We were underground by then and this wind carries sound away from Old Brum.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘We heard Pike and his people move in, using all the knowledge and skills of a lifetime in this city. We didn’t know they were being herded towards the tricks and traps laid down earlier by the survivor. They were going to their deaths. But before that . . .’

  ‘Where is Bratfire . . . ?’ asked Barklice, the deepest of fears in his kind voice. ‘He isn’t here, is he?’

  ‘He set off round where the humans were, right round, intending to use explosives they had left.’

  ‘Explosives!’ cried Barklice most terribly.

  ‘His idea and he was not stoppable, Barklice. He was going to try to destroy their craft . . .’

  ‘But Jack, he’s only . . .’ whispered Katherine.

  ‘The Huey,’ whispered Bohr, ‘without which they wouldn’t be able to get away . . .’

  ‘They can use their damn feet,’ said Katherine. ‘This has got to stop. Why are we fighting them anyway?’

  ‘I shall go and find him,’ cried Barklice. ‘I must find him . . .’

  ‘He’ll get back,’ said Jack. ‘Like father, like son . . . Barklice. He said, “Glad Pa’s not here because he wouldn’t let me do it but I’m doing it anyway.” He said he’d find his own way back and there was something about him, the light in his eyes . . . something made me agree. Seconds later the real firefight began and where he had been standing, on my other side, took a direct hit. If he hadn’t gone he’d be dead. There is wyrd in this, Barklice, there is a purpose to it, though Mirror knows what it is . . .’