Chapter 1

Nikola, as he ran, wished many things.

He wished he was faster. He wished he had wings. Above all he wished he had never strayed beyond the fence. They had warned him against it. Everyone had. Countless times. The fence, they had told him, is there for a reason. Not to keep us in. To keep them out. So do not go over it. Stay this side. It is dangerous out there for our kind.

Nikola had listened. But he hadn’t listened. He’d seen little of London since arriving on the ferry from mainland Europe. In fact, once he’d been discovered stowed away in the back of the articulated goods lorry, all he’d seen was a detention centre, the inside of a van, then the housing estate. He was sixteen, and he did not care for being confined.

So tonight he had scaled the fence. All but vaulted over it, in fact. It was not that high, four metres or thereabouts. The barbed wire had scraped his hands but drawn no blood. An easy escape. Everyone was right: the fence was a deterrent to the rest of the world, not to those inside it.

Tentatively, curiously, Nikola had begun to explore.

In the immediate vicinity of the estate there was nothing much. Dead shops, hollow houses, pavements latticed with weeds. Nobody wanted to live here, so close to a Sunless Residential Area. Local Londoners had decanted themselves elsewhere.

Nikola startled a stray cat, which yowled and spat at him like a demented thing before scurrying away. A short while later he had to hide as a SHADE patrol car rolled by, sweeping its searchlight. Emerging from the basement stairwell down which he’d ducked, he carried on his voyage of discovery warily. He hugged the street shadows, of which there were plenty, as he moved out towards where the city was alive and humming.

He only wanted to take a look, that was all. Just to see what it was like, this English capital, this fabled metropolis that was now, by default, his home. He was certainly not on the prowl, hunting for victims. He could smell them from afar, and the smell was unbelievably exotic and intoxicating, but he had no intention of taking one of them for himself. He knew how insanely unwise that would be, how it could have dire repercussions for his whole community. A little curiosity, though, a little sightseeing—that was allowed, wasn’t it?

His attackers came out of nowhere. There was no warning. They were quick, and they were wrapped head to toe in thick clothing, which masked their scent. This, more than anything, told Nikola that they were specialists. They’d been lying in ambush, hoping for precisely this opportunity, waiting for someone like him to happen along. Someone rash. Someone reckless.

There were four of them, all in motorcycle helmets with leather neck guards. Two were on rollerblades, leading the attack, hurtling unexpectedly around a corner, keeping low as they kick-thrusted themselves towards Nikola, arms pumping. He started to move, but they were on him in no time. A blow from a chainmail-gloved fist caught him on the side of the head and sent him reeling.

Nikola staggered to his feet, only to see the two rollerbladers arc around each other in the middle of the street and veer at him again. As he turned to run, he came face to face with the other two members of the gang. They stood with their legs apart, braced, each carrying an ash-wood stake.

Nikola felt fear then like he had never felt before and had believed he would never feel again. The stakes’ sharpened points were bright white in the darkness. The visors on the helmets of the men wielding them were implacably black and blank.

He sprang sideways. It was all he could do. He collided with a set of railings, which he hurdled clumsily. Within seconds he was scaling the face of a three-storey terraced house. He heard shouts behind him, below him. He scuttled up the brickwork as fast as he could, finding finger purchase in the narrowest of crevices. Height. If he gained height, surely he would be safe. These men could not follow him up onto the rooftops, could they?

But they could. While the two rollerbladers raced off in opposite directions, heading for the ends of the terrace to cut off Nikola’s escape that way, the other two men lodged their stakes in their belts and went in pursuit of him on foot, propelling themselves up the front of the house much as he had, if not quite so straightforwardly. Drainpipe, window ledge, door lintel, anything that projected outwards, however slightly, was of use to them. They were free runners. Vertical, horizontal, diagonal, it made no difference—it was just a surface to be negotiated, just a series of handholds and toeholds they could employ to get to where they were going.

Nikola reached the roof, moments ahead of his pursuers. He darted along the vertex, doing his best to keep his balance on the rounded tiles. The two men thundered after him. Nikola swung round a chimney stack. A second afterwards, so did they. Only a couple of houses lay between him and the end of the street. One of the rollerbladers was waiting for him there, at the corner. Nikola jinked right and slithered down the angle of the roof towards the houses’ backyards and the alley that furrowed in between. He leapt off the gutter, landing lightly on a wall below. Then he was in the alley, skirting overturned dustbins and upended shopping trolleys. The pair of free runners weren’t far behind.

The rollerblader intercepted him at the alley’s mouth. Nikola, however, sprinting with all his might, barged straight into the man, his shoulder low. The rollerblader was shunted backwards, went scooting across the street, and whacked into a lamppost, letting out a loud grunt of pain. He recovered and joined the two runners in chasing after Nikola; soon all three of them were at Nikola’s heels. Nikola pounded on, praying that he was going the right way. The tower blocks of the Residential Area loomed ahead, but the street he was on seemed to be curving away from them. He had no idea whether to take a right or a left at the next junction. If he could get to the Residential Area he would surely be okay. The men would not dare follow him over the fence. But he felt that he was in a maze, and any wrong turn he made would be the end of him. He was strong, stronger than any of the four men, but they outnumbered him, and they had weapons.

Then Nikola slammed face first into the ground. He didn’t know how it had happened. Had he tripped? He tried to get up but couldn’t. His legs were stuck fast together. Ropes entwined his ankles, attached to weighted steel spheres. A bolas. Frantically Nikola began to unpick the ropes, but the three attackers now had him surrounded. The other rollerblader appeared, skidding to a halt. Nikola looked up at them all, baring his teeth and hissing in rage. He swiped at the nearest of them, raking talons across the man’s leg, but his trousers were made of Kevlar or something. Some fabric that talons couldn’t penetrate.

Knees pinned Nikola’s wrists roughly to the road. He struggled with all his might, but the men bore down, holding him in place. A stake was brandished. Nikola writhed and spat. All he could think of, even as he lay there helpless and apparently doomed, was tearing open the throats of his four attackers and feasting on the delicious warmth within. His thirst, spurred by anger, was a feral thing. He despised them all. They were nothing but cattle. Prey. Given the chance, he would drain every last drop of life from them.

The stake hovered, poised above his chest. The fist around it tightened its grip.

“Drop it.”

The voice was deep, calm. Its tone did not expect refusal.

“I’ll give you to the count of three. Drop it, or I drop you.”

Nikola’s English was not good, but he knew enough to tell that the person speaking was threatening his four attackers, not him. He twisted his head round on the tarmac to look. He saw boots, a long overcoat, a tall man with moon-white hair and a face as craggy and imperturbable as a chalk cliff. He saw, too, a high shirt collar like a priest’s, one that went all the way up to the jawline, and a gun, a weighty, long-barrelled handweapon of the type he knew was called a Cindermaker.

Which meant SHADE. The Night Brigade.

Which in turn meant Nikola was no less doomed than he had been a few seconds ago.

 *   *   *

 “One last chance,” said the SHADE officer. “Put down the stake or be put down. A bullet’s a bullet. Wooden or not, it’ll still put a damn great hole in you.”

“Fuck off, fangbanger,” said one of Nikola’s attackers. “This here’s a vamp and it’s out of its nest. If we weren’t about to dust it, you’d be doing the same yourself.”

“Maybe,” came the reply. “The difference is that I’m a servant of the law. You, you’re nothing but vigilantes. Stokers, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So, drop the stake and move away from the Sunless.” The SHADE officer advanced, Cindermaker to the fore. “One. Two…”

“Wait,” said another of the Stokers, one of the rollerbladers. “Wait just a second. Let us poke a hole in the bloodsucker”—he gestured at Nikola—“and we’ll be gone. No one will know we were ever here, and you can claim the dusting as your own. Come on, what do you say, shady? That’s reasonable, isn’t it? Everybody wins.”

“Do you know who I am?”

The Stokers shook their heads.

“The name John Redlaw ring a bell?”

Not with three of them, but the fourth man stiffened. “Yeah, I’ve heard of this geezer all right. Tough bastard, they say.”

As for Nikola, he was truly terrified. He might not have been in this country long but even he had heard of John Redlaw. The man was spoken of among his kind often and only ever in hushed tones, the name rarely uttered louder than a whisper.

“Then,” said Redlaw to the man, “you’ll know I can’t be dissuaded and I can’t be bargained with.” He halted less than five paces from the Stokers and Nikola. “I’ll happily blow each and every one of you out of your socks, and to hell with the paperwork. The ’Less is mine. Leave now, and you leave intact. My best and final offer.”

The Stokers looked at one another. Then the one with the stake said, “Fuck it,” and flung it at Redlaw. As Redlaw twisted to evade it, the Stoker pounced on him. He punched Redlaw’s gun hand, sending the Cindermaker flying, then he punched Redlaw himself, full in the face. Blood spurted from the SHADE officer’s nose.

“Fuck’s sake, come on!” the Stoker yelled to his cohorts as Redlaw went down. “There’s just one of him, and he’s old. Let’s have some fun here.”

The other three needed little encouragement. They relinquished Nikola and dived in to beat up Redlaw.

“Wave a gun at us, will you?” one cried.

“Ash-wood fucking bullets?” snarled another. “Ash-wood? On people?”

Kicks and punches flew. Nikola could not see Redlaw any more. The SHADE officer was buried beneath the Stokers, the hidden eye of a storm of violence. He didn’t appear to be fighting back. Why not? Was he really not so fearsome as his reputation suggested? Was he, in fact, nothing without a gun in his hand?

Then there was a loud crunch, and one of the rollerblader Stokers whirled to the ground, clutching a broken knee.

A snap, and a second Stoker sank down, shrieking, his left arm skewed hideously at the elbow.

Suddenly Redlaw was on his feet, and he was gripping the other rollerblader by the jacket, swinging him into the fourth Stoker, and sending them both crashing onto the road in a heap. Redlaw straddled them, grabbed the uppermost by his neck guard, and began pounding his head against the man below’s. The helmet visors shattered; splinters of black polycarbonate were hammered into skin. Redlaw didn’t relent until both Stokers were half senseless and their features were like bloody maps of hell. Then he went over to the rollerblader Stoker with the crippled knee and, almost clinically, stamped on his good knee until it was crippled too. Finally he turned to the man with the broken arm, who was hobbling away, whimpering. He yanked the man’s helmet off, exposing a pain-wracked, tear-streaked face.

“If there’s one thing lower than vampires,” he said, “it’s people who prey on vampires. I want you to carry a message to your cronies, all those other Stokers who think they’re so self-righteous and clever. A personal message from me. Will you do that for me?”

Desperately the Stoker nodded.

“Tell them this, from Captain John Redlaw of the Sunless Housing And Disclosure Executive…”

Headbutt.

The Stoker toppled backwards with a ghastly yelp. His skull cracked on the road surface, and he lay still.

Redlaw straightened out his shirt collar, smoothed down his overcoat, and went to retrieve his Cindermaker.

  *   *   *

Throughout the fight Nikola did nothing but gawp. He knew he should flee while Redlaw was busy with the Stokers, but he was still badly shaken from the attack. He’d been moments away from getting staked, his immortality over almost as soon as it had begun. He was hollowed with fear, and besides, once the tide of the fight turned and Redlaw started taking the four men apart, he wanted to watch. It was an awesome sight, Redlaw despatching the Stokers with such ruthless, savage precision. Gratifying, too, to Nikola. They deserved what they were getting. Every bit of it and more.

In hindsight, he realised he had made something of an error. For now Redlaw was striding towards him, Cindermaker in hand, its barrel levelled at Nikola’s heart. Nikola started scrabbling to free himself from the bolas ropes.

“Bună seara.” Redlaw said. “Labvakar. Blaho večer. Jó estét.”

The last one, Nikola recognised. “Jó estét,” he replied. Good evening.

“Ah,” said Redlaw. “Hungarian. Magyar?”

Nikola nodded. “Igen.”

“You speak English?”

“A little. Please, not shoot.”

Redlaw glanced at his gun, then back at Nikola. “Don’t give me a reason to shoot and I won’t. You understand?”

Nikola did, just about. The SHADE officer’s expression was, if not gentle, then marginally less severe than when he’d been addressing the Stokers. His face’s solidity had softened just a fraction, though his eyes remained hard and watchful.

“It would help if you stopped staring at the blood from my nose.”

Nikola averted his gaze guiltily. The fresh blood sang to him. Its sweet ferrous smell was unbearably enticing. As a boy—a human boy—back in Miskolc, the most wonderful aroma he’d ever known was his grandmother’s hot chocolate, warming on the stove, and the most wonderful flavour he’d ever known was the drink itself, laced with spices and a dash of apricot palinka. But blood was a hundred, a thousand times more wonderful than even that.

Redlaw dabbed at his upper lip with a linen handkerchief. “Lucky shot. I should never have let the idiot catch me unawares like that, or get so close. Old man. Losing my edge. Although, having said that, I did fancy a bit of a scrap. Listen, sonny.”

Dark eyes bored into Nikola’s.

“From the looks of you—incompletely emerged fangs, still a trace of pink in your complexion, only the faintest reddening of the sclera—it wasn’t so long ago that you were turned. My guess is you don’t just look young, you are young. So I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s not something I often do. Ever do, actually. But I’m prepared to make an exception. You wanted to see the outside world. I get that. Don’t. Don’t ever want that. You can see why.” He indicated the four Stokers strewn in their various poses of agony and semi-consciousness. “You don’t belong out here. No one wants you out here. The Sunless Residential Area is your home. Your only home. Forever. Clear?”

More or less. His tone, if not his words. Nikola nodded.

“Then go. Get back behind the fence. Before I change my mind.”

The Cindermaker continued to point, unwaveringly, at Nikola’s beatless heart.

Ropes loosened, Nikola ran no longer in an ecstasy of dread, but suffused with relief and joy.

  *   *   *

 Learned his lesson, thought Redlaw as the boy vanished from view.

The four Stokers had doubtless learned theirs too.

Redlaw pulled out the crucifix that hung round his neck. The wood was warm against his lips as he kissed it briefly. He murmured a prayer of thanks—for victory, for deliverance from his enemies. The prayer was perfunctory and low, so much so that even the Almighty might have missed it.

As he was returning the crucifix to its rightful place next to his sternum, Redlaw’s phone sounded. His ringtone was the opening chords of “Jerusalem” played on a thunderous cathedral organ.

“John.” The throaty, no-nonsense tones of Commodore Gail Macarthur.

“What can I do for you, Commodore?”

“GPS puts you down Mile End way.”

“That I am.”

“But your car’s not moving and you’re not in it.”

“How do you know I’m not in it?”

“Well, if you were you’d have heard the bulletin from dispatch and be en route already. There’s a disturbance at the Hackney SRA.”

“What a surprise.”

“Local units have responded, but they need backup. Someone with some seniority.”

“Me.”

“Anything better to be doing?”

Redlaw scanned the street; eyed the Stokers. “Not much, marm.”

“Right, then. Off you go.”

Redlaw pressed End Call with a sigh.

It was going to be a long night.

But then weren’t they all?

1

 So there I was, driving through the worst snow storm I’d ever seen, in a crappy rental Vauxhall Astra, with Abortion in the passenger seat offering useless advice and trying to get the stereo to work and, when he wasn’t doing that, rolling up joint after joint and smogging the car up with skunk fumes. Our rate of progress was roughly ten miles an hour. It was getting dark. We didn’t know exactly where we were going.

          At what point, I asked myself, was I going to accept the fact that this was the worst plan in the entire history of mankind?

          Knowing me, never. Stubborn, I was. Pigheaded, Gen used to say. “Except,” she would add, “that’s an insult to pigs. Compared to you, they’re quite reasonable animals.”

          The snow filled the windscreen like static on an untuned TV. The Astra kept slewing and lurching, its wheels somehow finding every slippery patch on the road, despite my best efforts. Every half mile or so we’d pass another abandoned vehicle whose driver had had the common sense to admit defeat and dump their ride by the roadside and head off for shelter on foot rather than blunder on. This storm wasn’t letting up any time soon. The forecasters predicted it’d last at least another twenty-four hours and maybe longer. Blizzard conditions. Batten down the hatches, Britain. The future’s white. No one with any brains is going anywhere.

          “Can’t be much further now,” said Abortion. His eyes were pink and glassy from the weed.

          “How can you be so sure, if the place isn’t even on the map and all you’ve got to go on is a bunch of written directions?”

          “Dunno, just am. Call it a feeling.” He offered me a pull on the joint he’d just sparked up. Abortion’s joints were unique. To save on Rizlas, he used segments of pages from a Bible he’d been given by a maiden aunt for his confirmation, so each one had little lines of text running round it. He’d started doing this when he left school. The paper was thin and slick and could be sealed with a lick – just right for the job. Now his Bible had about a hundred pages left in it. He was nearly through the New Testament and coming up to the Book of Revelation.

          “Bit of herbal mood elevation?” he asked.

          “No ta.”

          “Come on, Gid, one little toke won’t hurt.”

          “I’ve got to concentrate. Need a clear head.”

          “This clears your head,” Abortion insisted through a blur of exhaled smoke.

          I was tempted. But those days were gone. The booze, the spliff, the hazy mornings, the lost nights… They belonged in the past, with the pain. I’d taught myself to live in the present, not to do everything I could to escape it. It had been a hard-learned lesson.

          I was probably half high anyway just from breathing in Abortion’s second-hand smoke.

          We ploughed on. Literally, almost. Drifts were building up across the road. I could just about make out the tramline indentations where other traffic had gone before us, but they were becoming silted up with snow. The Astra was carving a fresh furrow, as best its underpowered engine and poxy front wheel drive could manage. Not for the first time I found myself wishing we’d sprung for a 4×4, something decent like a Range Rover or a Shogun. But fourbies were at a premium these days, and the rental companies were charging more for them than Abortion and I could hope to afford. With the cash we’d been able to scrape together between us, this fucking heap-of-shit hatchback was the best we could do.

          Then the heater packed in.

          “Oh fuck me rigid,” I sighed once it became clear that the vents were blowing nothing at us but freezing cold air. “Does this cunt of a car hate me or what?”

          Not that it made much difference because the heating hadn’t exactly been doing sterling work beforehand. Abortion and I both had put anoraks, hats and gloves on shortly after setting off, having sussed that the Astra itself wasn’t going to be much help in the keeping warm department.

          By now the sky was so dark grey it might as well have been night-time, although it was barely four in the afternoon. I hit the headlights. The snow flurries became a bright swirl of stars, galaxies in fast motion.

          Another three miles on, something under the bonnet began to hiccup and whine.

          “Ever get the impression someone up there’s got it in for you?” I wondered.

          “Nothing in the universe doesn’t happen for a reason,” Abortion replied.

          “Sorry, didn’t quite catch that,” I said, cupping my left ear, the one that was genuinely hard of hearing. “Did you just say, ‘Hippy bullshit, blather blather, hey wow man bollocks’?”

          “Just don’t stress. We’ll get where we’re going to, if that’s where we’re meant to be.”

          “Thank you, Mr Dalai bloody Lama. In the meantime, I’ll be busy making sure we don’t stall and break down in the middle of fucking nowhere in subzero fucking conditions, if that’s all right with you.”

          Definitely a problem with the motor. I could feel it through the accelerator pedal, all misfiring and stuttering, struggling like an asthmatic donkey. We were still going forwards, but the power kept sagging. I was no expert, but the car wasn’t going to take us much further unless we stopped and had a look under the bonnet. Stopping, though, was bonkers in a storm like this. Driving in snow, as I knew from doing arctic-weather training in Alberta, you had to keep going, slow and steady. It was the only way. Stop, and you might not be able to regain traction when you started up again, even if you stuck the car in high gear. “You park,” as our instructor so bluntly put it, “you’re screwed.”

          So we hobbled on, and I was hoping against hope that the engine trouble would just somehow sort itself, and I was mentally composing the extraordinarily sweary letter of complaint I would be sending the rental company if and when we ever got out of this situation, and of course the engine trouble didn’t sort itself, it just got worse. The periods of power lag became longer and more frequent, and I started scanning around for signs of human habitation, the lights of a distant farmhouse, the glow of a far-off town, something to indicate there was somewhere we could take refuge if need be, but there was nothing, fuck all, just blackening sky and the endless thickly spinning snowflakes and the road that was disappearing, becoming buried, merging into the countourless whiteness all around.

          We were out in far-flung hilly countryside, north of most of the cities I knew of, the furthest north I’d ever been without ending up in Och-aye-the-noo-land – where they painted their faces blue and called chips salad – and there was nothing like civilisation any more, not here. We’d left that behind us in this half-arsed venture of ours. Half-arsed venture of Abortion’s, to be precise. It was all his idea, and I’d just gone along with it for lack of anything better to do, any other viable option, and honestly, a bloke whose nickname was Abortion… He’d been christened that by a sergeant major on his very first day of basic (because, apparently, he looked like a foetus – and he did, to some extent, in certain lights, all bulging-eyed and big-foreheaded) and he hadn’t been able to shake it off since, and why the hell had I listened to him, of all people? A man who measured out his life in quarter-ounce wraps. Which of us was the bigger fool for embarking on this journey, this wild goose chase, in the face of the worst bout of weather anyone could remember?

          And then, a miracle, hallelujah, out of the blue, a petrol station appeared. A BP garage. Lights on. Open. With a covered forecourt that was more or less free of snow. The sign even promised a café, just above the orange digits displaying the eye-wateringly high prices for a litre of diesel or unleaded.

          “See?” said Abortion, stubbing out his J in the ashtray, which could be found just below the This is a No Smoking car sticker. “All that flapping for nothing. The universe is telling us it’s on our side, it wants us to make it.”

          I held up two fingers in a peace sign, then flipped them round.

          “Make war not love, man,” I said.

 * * *

At the BP, I had a squint under the bonnet. The spark plugs were all carbonised. When was the last time someone serviced this fucking banger? I gave the plug heads a clean with some paper towel. Fingers crossed this had been the source of the problem, but for good measure I fiddled with the distributor and wiggled various vacuum hoses, checked the oil, made sure the battery connections were secure. The full extent of my auto mechanic expertise. Just because I watched Top Gear religiously it didn’t make me Jeremy Clarkson. After that I topped up the fuel tank, then joined Abortion indoors. He’d gone in for a slash, and now he was sitting at one of the tables in the tiny café, watching telly in the warm, huddled over a hot drink.

          “What’s that? Coffee?”

          He nodded.

          “And you didn’t get me anything.”

          “Didn’t know what you wanted.”

          “Tea. Never go anywhere without a brew inside me. How can you not know that? Some friend you are.”

          He frowned, distracted. The news was on.

          I credit-carded the petrol, then paid cash for a tea and a jam doughnut. I had a dig at the girl behind the café counter about the price. “Three quid for a cuppa? And three ruddy fifty for a doughnut? I know petrol station mark-ups are a rip-off, but…”

          She looked blank, like she just didn’t care. She was a scrawny young thing, with her hair scrunched tight back in a Croydon facelift and a jewel stud in the dimple of her nose. Okay-looking, but just not my type.

          “It’s the grain shortages, en’t it?” she replied.

          “Even so. I can remember a time when doughnuts were, like, thirty pee.”

          She looked me up and down. “Yeah, I bet you can.”

          Thoroughly put in my place, I handed her the money and moseyed on over to the seat opposite Abortion. The room was empty apart from the two of us, the girl at the counter and another sales clerk, an Asian kid with a sorry excuse for a moustache, working the main till. He looked as stupefied with boredom as she did, and there was a forlorn air about them both as well, the way they kept throwing glances towards the window. They weren’t sure they were getting home tonight and the prospect of kipping down in some backroom here was not an appetising one.

          I drank the extortionate tea and savoured every last overpriced morsel of the doughnut. On the TV, the weather was making the headlines. Again. What a surprise. The weather had been making the headlines for months on end. The telly news people never tired of telling us about it, as if we didn’t already know. Three of the coldest years ever, in a row. Three of the longest, fiercest, snowiest winters since they first started keeping records about such things. With cooler than usual seasons in between – chilly springs, lukewarm summers, quick autumns – a brief bloom of green soon turning brown, then over and done, the white returning. And not just in the upper latitudes of the northern hemisphere but everywhere, all over the world. Wintry around the equator. Arctic in Africa. Little black kids chucking snowballs at one another, still enjoying the novelty while the tribal elders, wrapped up in every item of clothing they owned, muttered darkly and stamped their sandalled feet. Snowfall in the rainforests. Frost on the palms in Saudi Arabia. Ice floes on Lake Victoria. The Panama Canal frozen and impassable for half the year. Groves of Caribbean pineapples festooned with icicles. Kangaroos in the Outback letting out huffs of misty breath.

          Three years of this, and still the climatologists could only shrug their shoulders and say, “We haven’t a clue what’s happening or why.”

          Some blamed global warming, stating that this freak cold snap proved somehow that our carbon footprints had fucked the ecosystem, things would be steaming up again soon but we could expect to see a continual seesawing between extremes, higher hot peaks, deeper cold troughs, the planet not knowing what to do with itself, fiddling with its own thermostat in a desperate effort to balance things out.

          Others claimed it was obviously the onset of a new ice age. Ice ages came along every eleven thousand years, and seeing as the last one was eleven thousand years ago, the next was due, even overdue.

          Most, though, were pointing the finger at the recent spate of volcanic eruptions worldwide. Etna, Mount St Helens, Stromboli, Kilauea, Piton de la Fournaise on La Réunion, Eyjafjallajökull and its bum-chum Katla – all of them had blown their tops big-time during the past decade, shoving up billions of tons of soot and ash into the atmosphere and increasing the earth’s albedo, whatever that was, creating a haze of cloud that reflected away the sun’s rays. Result: bit of a nip in the air.

          Whatever the cause, people were worried, no two ways about it. Not only had the crop harvests had been consistently poor three years running, meaning food shortages, but the old folk were dropping off their perches by the thousand. Most hospitals, you couldn’t move for the sick and dying elderly that were clogging up the corridors, stricken with pneumonia and hypothermia, rattling their last. Everywhere, the wheels of industry were grinding slower and slower. Economies were suffering. Not to mention the infrastructure of certain nations, including our dear own United Kingdom, was falling to pieces.

          Prime Minister Clasen had been trying to keep a lid on it all and failing significantly. The more the plummy-voiced, baby-faced buffoon insisted in his cod-statesmanlike way that everything was under control, the less anyone believed him. All those floggings, fagging and buggery at public school hadn’t moulded a man capable of coping with a nation in crisis. Daddy couldn’t open the chequebook and get him out of this one. He was going to have to handle it himself. Or not, as the case may be.

          Clasen said how much he was looking forward to putting heads together with America’s President Keener in a few weeks’ time and having a full and frank exchange of ideas about the crisis, and it just so happened that the very next item on the programme featured the luscious Mrs Keener herself. It was coverage of her State of the Union address which she’d given the previous evening and which she claimed was directed not just at Congress or even the American people but at “all the citizens of the world”.

          What it boiled down to was some guff about not panicking, digging in and seeing this through. The usual bromides from the First Lady, delivered in that honeydew Deep South accent of hers.

          God, though, she could always make it sound good. Plausible. Like there was no reason why you shouldn’t trust every word she said. No reason to doubt her.

          Helped that she was so fit, too.

          “I’m from the state of Georgia,” Mrs Keener said, “where we normally know it’s winter ’cause I see my grandmother maybe wearing an extra sweater. Before I came to Washington, I had no idea what cold was. But I got used to it once I was here, and learned to bundle up on those days when the Potomac turned white. And if Ican do that, we all can. This ain’t no ice age, that’s just fool talk. No global warming neither. This is just some funny old weather cycle, a little jape the Good Lord has seen fit to play on us, and it’ll pass. Long as we wrap up warm and look out for each other, we’ll be fine.”

          “I would,” said Abortion, gesturing at the screen.

          “Her?”

          “Absolutely. Wouldn’t you?”

          I looked again at Keener. Those cheekbones. Those lips. That voice. That figure, which her tailored suit did nothing to disguise and everything to emphasise.

          “Yeah,” I admitted. “If she wasn’t a happily married mother of two.”

          “Even then,” said Abortion. “Especially then. Happily married mothers of two don’t get any at home. She’d be gagging for it.”

          “The first ever PILF,” I said.

          “PILF?”

          “Politician I’d Like to Fuck.”

          Abortion chortled. “PILF.” He chortled again. “I’m going to remember that one. For use later.”

 * * *

 As we headed back out to the car a massive yawn ripped through me like an earth tremor. I was knackered. Been driving all day, without let-up, and on my mettle every inch of the way.

          I didn’t want to ask him – it went against every instinct I had – but I couldn’t see a way out of it.

          “Abortion, will you drive?”

          “You sure?”

          “No, but I don’t think I can go on without catching some rest.”

          “You said you didn’t trust me behind the wheel.”

          “Fucked-up as you are, I still don’t. But I need to get my head down, and we need to get back on the road while there’s still a road to get back on. Just be careful, don’t go fast, don’t get fancy. Half an hour’s shuteye, that’s all I want, then we’ll swap back over.”

          Abortion snatched the keys from my hand and bounded over to the Astra.

          Honestly, it was like being with a kid, not a grown man the wrong side of thirty.

          Which reminded me.

          As Abortion got the car in motion, I fished out my mobile. Shouldn’t be calling Gen’s but wanted to. Wanted to speak to Cody, just hear his voice, make contact before Abortion and I disappeared into whatever it was we were about to disappear into.

          One bar of signal, flickering. I gave it a shot.

          “Gid.”

          “Gen. How you doing?”

          “You’re very faint.”

          “Reception out here’s being knackered by the snow, like everything else.”

          “Out here? Where are you?”

          “Fuck knows, frankly. Somewhere way north. Just passed a sign saying ‘Beware – Wild Haggises Ahead.’”

          “You’re travelling? Are you mad? Have you not heard the Met Office warnings? It’s going to hit minus twenty in some parts tonight.”

          “Since when have I ever paid attention to warnings?”

          “Seriously, they’re saying people could die out there.”

          “It sounds like you almost care,” I shouldn’t have said but did.

          Gen’s voice went rigid. I could imagine her eyebrows puckering, that way they did when she was annoyed. “Would you like me to put Cody on?”

          “Go on then.”

          Some clattering, feet on stairs, Gen saying “Your father,” and Cody groaning, which broke my heart.

          “Yes?”

          “Hey, boy. What’s up?”

          “Not much.”

          “School today?”

          “No.”

          “Snow day.”

          “Yeah.”

          “Did you get outdoors? Make a snowman?”

          “No.” Like: Why would I do something so lame? I’m twelve, you know.

          “Sledging?”

          “Stayed in with my Xbox. Roz bought me this awesome new game. Bushido Midnight. Roz’s cool. She played it with me for hours. She’s better at being a samurai but I kick her arse when I’m playing as a good vampire.”

          “Don’t swear.”

          “What’s that? Dad, I can hardly hear you.”

          “I said don’t… Never mind. It’s great that you had a nice time with Roz. She’s a good bloke.”

          “Da-a-ad,” he sighed.

          But I’d meant it as a compliment. Sort of. “Anyway, look, Codes, you take –”

          “Dad?”

          “You take care, and –”

          “Dad? You there?”

          “And do your homework –”

          “Mum, I think he’s gone.”

          “And –”

          Nothing. Silence. Disconnected.

          “And,” I said into the ether, “tell your mum and that butch bitch girlfriend of hers to stop making me out to be some sort of idiot monster you should forget about. Just because I don’t ever see you doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I’m still your dad, for fuck’s sake.”

          I slapped the phone shut. Slumped disconsolately into my seat.

          “That’s got to suck,” said Abortion, bent over the steering wheel. “Your wife’s turned into a rug muncher and your kid barely knows who you are. Bummer.”

          “Abortion…”

          “Just saying, bad enough you put Gen off men for life, but now you don’t even get to visit the child you fathered with her and he’s being brought up in a household of dykes, which is surely going to warp him for life. Can you imagine what it’s like when the pair of them are on the blob? A normal household, the dad’s there to balance things out and take the flak when it’s rag week, but –”

          “Abortion,” I growled, “shut the fuck up.”

          “Okay.”

          “Just drive.”

          “Okay.”

          I folded my arms, leant my head against the side window, and closed my eyes. At least the Astra was chugging along all right now. We had plenty of petrol, and according to the directions Abortion had downloaded we weren’t a million miles from our destination. I felt the vibration of the engine through the cold window glass. The muffled crunch of snow under our tyres was oddly soothing. One thing I knew how to do, one really useful trick I’d picked up in the army, was being able to nod off in any circumstances. In the belly of a roaring Chinook, in the back of a jolting troop transport, in a bivvy bag, basha or bedroll, on bare ground under starry skies, it didn’t matter, I was never bothered by insomnia, never lay awake wishing I was asleep. I could just shut myself down like switching off a computer.

          Blip.

          Gone.

 * * *

 “Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!”

          Abortion, all but screeching.

          And then a tremendous bounce, a brief throat-filling sensation of weightlessness, followed by an immense thundering kerrrump that shook the entire car.

          My eyes snapped open in time to see landscape veering in the windscreen, then bands of white and black switching places, ground and sky pivoting over each other like tumbling clowns, and glass shattered, shards sprayed, and Abortion was pleading-screaming, and there was a series of awesome concussions as though the Astra was a drum someone kept beating, and then we were upside down, and there was snow coming in through holes, and I was aware of blood trickling from my brow up into my hairline, and white faded to black.

Finally the monster was at bay.

          It had been flushed out of the forest.  It had been hounded downhill, bullets smacking at its heels and whanging into the trunks of oaks and other mountain broadleafs on either side of it.  It had been shepherded by gunfire into the village and driven along the streets.  At last it had been corralled in a cul-de-sac with high, ancient walls on either side.

          Cornered, panting, torso lathered in sweat, the monster turned.

          Two of its pursuers were approaching from the open end of the cul-de-sac.  Above, in the upper storeys of the stone-built houses, shutters opened a crack and villagers peeped out.  Their faces were fearful but hopeful.  The monster had been terrorising the Corsican interior for months, killing at random.  Now it itself was the one being terrorised.  The villagers were eager to see the monster get its comeuppance.  It was long overdue.

          But the monster was still dangerous.  Just because it was trapped, that didn’t mean it was helpless.  It was, after all, the Minotaur – seven feet tall and 400lbs of hyperdeveloped muscle and skin-straining sinew, with the strength of several oxen.  Lowering its head, the Minotaur fixed its blood-red eyes on its foes and pawed the ground with one foot.  Breath snorted from its nostrils in short, thick gusts.

          “Tethys, Hyperion.  What is your status?”

          Sam did not take her gaze off the Minotaur – specifically, not off the pair of huge horns that were now pointing towards her like two ivory spears.

          “Hyperion, Tethys.  Mnemosyne and I are in range of target.  It’s about to charge.”

          “Do you have line of sight?”

          “Roger.”

          “Do you have a clear shot?”

          “Roger.”

          “Then what are you dicking about for?  Take it.”

          Sam raised her recoilless .45mm submachine gun.  It was boxy and lightweight, a skeletal weapon.  Blisteringly effective nonetheless.

          The Minotaur saw it, understood its purpose.  It was familiar with guns.  It knew what they did.

          In those red eyes Sam saw the flash of comprehension, and something else.  She couldn’t be sure, but she thought it looked like resignation.

          Which was impossible.  The Minotaur was an unthinking creature, a mindless force of destruction.  There was nothing in that bull head but malevolence and the basic animal cunning needed to survive.

          Or so she’d been given to believe.

          The Minotaur couldn’t know that it was about to die.

          Could it?

          “Tethys?”  Hyperion’s voice.  “Do you copy?  I said take the shot.”

          Sam’s finger curled round the trigger.

          The Minotaur bent low, tensing.  It would charge, for all the good that would do.  These armour-clad enemies were like nothing it had come up against before.  It knew it was outclassed.  For the first time in its life the Minotaur was staring defeat in the eye, and defeat’s shadow, death.  But it would not give in meekly.  That was not in the nature of this beast.

          “Tethys?” said Mnemosyne.  She had her coilgun aimed at the monster’s centre of body mass.  “Sam?  What are you waiting for?  This is our chance.”

          “Tethys!” barked Hyperion over the comms net.  “Why am I not hearing a kill-shot?”

          The Minotaur was ready, Sam could tell by its posture.  One last attack, a final act of defiance against the inevitable.

          “Mnemosyne,” she said, “I want to try and take it alive, if I can.”

          “What?” said Mnemosyne.

          “Wha-a-at!?” exclaimed Hyperion.  Sam’s GPS transponder sensor was registering his presence nearby, lower in the village, 200m southeast and closing.  She had to do this before he got here.  Hyperion – Ramsay – would have no qualms about making the kill.  This was not any kind of retrieval op.  This was supposed to be an execution.

          “I’ll use the stun-dusters,” she said to Mnemosyne.

          “You’re crazy.  Why?”

          Sam couldn’t say why.  She wasn’t totally sure herself.  “Trust me.  Please?”

          Mnemosyne left a moment of silence to convey doubt.  Then she said, “All right.  Go on.”  She firmed her grip on the coilgun.  “But I’m keeping this trained on it at all times.”

          “Cronus gave us nonlethal offensive capability for a reason,” Sam said, fitting a pair of ridged metal knuckledusters onto her gauntlets.

          “Let’s hope the reason wasn’t to kill ourselves,” Mnemosyne replied.

          Sam grunted.  Already, a little over a month after the commencement of operations, two Titans were dead.  Today at least one more could be about to join them, and this time it would be their own fault.  Her fault, to be exact.

          Abruptly, the Minotaur charged.

          Sam braced herself.  Mnemosyne, meanwhile, stepped back and took aim.

          Hyperion was yelling, “Don’t be stupid.  Kill-shot!  Motherfucking kill-shot!”

          The beast came fast – so fast – barrelling at them like a runaway goods van.

          Sam knew that if she fucked this up, it was all over.

          Then don’t fuck it up, she told herself, and ran to meet the monster.

Amazon UK:

• The Age Of Zeus [Solaris pbk, April 2010] – ISBN 978-1906735685

The sun went down like a tin duck at a shooting gallery. Night stretched itself over the eastern Arabian desert, the light from a clear full moon creating a finely filigreed landscape of silver and black.

At an altitude of 1,000 feet a twin-engine Griffon-3 transporter plane released a stick of paratroopers in alternating door technique, ten on either side. Canopies flared immediately. The twenty men turned into the wind and dropped to the desert floor as silently as thistle seeds, each making a perfect five-point landing. Within minutes their chutes were buried and they were jogging towards Mount Hor and the dead city that nestled in its shadow, Petra.

They filed through the Siq, Petra’s eastern gateway, a sheer-sided gorge hacked out by a long-ago earthquake and smoothed by water erosion. In places it was so narrow they could barely walk two abreast. Above, the sky was a distant strip of starshine, a glittering river meandering between black banks. The paratroopers moved carefully, wide-eyed in the near-total darkness of the gorge. The path sloped steeply, uneven underfoot. Each man held his ibis-headed ba lance at the ready, reassured by the warmth he could feel through the handgrips, the charge of divine essence that glowed within the weapon.

The Siq opened out onto a valley. Directly ahead lay the rendezvous point, a Romanesque temple hewn out of the face of a sandstone cliff and known as Al Khazneh, “the Treasury”. Its colonnaded and porticoed entrance towered before the soldiers. Essentially a decorated cave mouth, it exuded a dusty silence, the breath of the ancient darkness within.

On the steps of the Treasury, Lieutenant David Westwynter lowered his lance and checked his watch. Precisely 8pm.

“Bang on time,” he muttered. “At least, we are.”

He gave the order to his men to fan out in a defensive formation. Sergeant Mal McAllister, his number two, relayed the order. The paratroopers broke off into small units and found what cover they could in this smooth-bottomed natural amphitheatre. They aimed their weapons in the direction an attack was most likely to come from, should one come: above.

“This can’t be a trap,” David said to Sergeant McAllister.

“Aye, but if it is,” McAllister said, finishing his sentence, “they have us the ideal spot for an ambush.”

“That’s just what I’m trying not to think.”

They waited. And waited. The cold desert wind sidled through the crags and canyons of the abandoned city, never louder than a sigh. In centuries past, Petra had been home to thousands. It had been a trading post, selling its principal resource, fresh water, whic h came from frequent flash floods and was husbanded in a network of dams and cisterns. The cave-dwelling citizens had worshipped deities who had been vanquished long ago, their names now forgotten, their effigies defaced. Christianity had briefly gained a toehold here, as had Islam. But in time those religions, too, had evaporated, leaving nothing but ruined monuments behind.

Petra, like so many other places, was a museum to the world’s fallen gods. A museum and a mausoleum. Here lay their legacy, such as it was — a few broken idols and abandoned buildings, sacred to no one. Here were the sparse, scratched traces they had left behind, the only tangible proof that somewhere on earth they had once held sway. Now mankind belonged to the One True Pantheon, and the wind blowing through Petra sounded, to David Westwynter’s ears, like a faint, mournful sob, the despair of defeated rivals. He was comforted by that.

“Sir.”

A whispered warning from McAllister.

David turned.

Men were approaching from the far end of the valley. He counted at least a dozen. They were spread out in a line, and the moonlight showed them to be clothed in ragged camouflage fatigues, with turbans around their heads and scarves across their faces, so that just their eyes were visible. Only the falcon-head nozzles on their ba lances and the maces that hung by their sides marked them out as Horusites.

David drew himself up to his full height, which at 5′10″ was a shade shorter than he might have liked.

The leader of the Horusite commandos halted in front of him and unveiled his face, revealing himself to be a broad-nosed black man with finely pitted skin. He stood an inch or so taller than David.

“Colonel Henry D. Wilkins, Eighth Infantry Division out of Cairo, Illinois,” he said, snapping off a salute. “Cobra Force.”

David returned the salute. “Lieutenant David Westwynter of His Pharaonic Majesty’s Second Paratroop Regiment, stationed on Cyprus.”

“By the light of Khons we have met… ” said Wilkins.

“… by the wisdom of Thoth may we assist one another,” David said, completing the password sequence.

It was a kind of verbal handshake. Wilkins stuck out his hand for the real thing.

“Pleasure to meet you, Loot’ Westwynter.”

“You too, sir. Related to Pastor-President Wilkins, I take it?”

Wilkins chuckled, amused. “How’d you guess? We don’t talk about him much. White sheep of the family.”

“The resemblance is marked,” said David, also chuckling.

“Mind if I call you Dave?”

“David, preferably. I’ve only ever let one person call me Dave.”

“Sure. Whatever.” This was said with a slightly dismissive air. You Brits and your formality.

“And you’re late,” David pointed out.

Wilkins bristled. You Brits…!

“Listen, Lieutenant,” he said. “It so happens we’ve been tramping around the desert for three months. Hiding from enemy patrols and Saqqara Birds. Living like animals. So we arrive a few minutes later’n we’re supposed to. Cut us some goddamn slack!”

David frowned. The encounter had begun well, but things were deteriorating fast. He said, “You have some information for me regarding a concentration of enemy forces outside Amman and Damascus.”

“Straight to business, huh?” said Wilkins. “Yep, we’ve got some good shit for you all right. Long-lens photos of Nephthysian infantry and heavy armour being marshalled. Major, major build-up. Ask me, it looks like the start of a push northward into the Ottoman Empire to take on the Osirisiac Hegemony’s south-eastern flank.”

David’s eyes narrowed. “That’ll be for the desk jockeys in Intelligence to decide. Our job isn’t t o speculate. It’s to get the information back to them.”

“Looks pretty cut and dried to me,” replied Wilkins, adding sardonically, “But then what do I know? I’m just a dumb grunt on the ground who risks his life doing recon in hostile territory all day long. I sure as shit can’t imagine what else the Nephs would be gathering their forces there for, but hey, let’s do as you say and leave it to the big-brains. Ten’ll get you one they agree with me.”

“Where are they then?” said David. “The photos.”

“Back that-a-ways.” Wilkins gestured along the valley in the direction he and his Cobra Force cohorts had come from. “We’re holed up in this place that’s all towers and tombs. Ain’t far, no more than a quarter-mile. You can come alone or bring your guys with you if you like.”

David looked at Sergeant McAllister. “Let’s all go. We’ll be home by midnight.”

McAllister nodded, his lip down-curling. “Men! Fall in. Home by midnight.”

Wilkins had already walked off a few paces to rejoin his group. Now he stopped abruptly. His shoulders slumped. Not turning round, he cursed softly in a language that was not English. “Khara.” Arabic for shit.

David levelled his ba lance, training it on Wilkins’s back.

“Who are you really, Colonel Wilkins?” he demanded softly.

“‘Home by midnight’,” said Wilkins. “That’s your abort code. Mission compromised. Right?”

The paratroopers closed in on him and his men.

“I’ll ask again,” said David. “You’re not Cobra Force. You’re not even Americans. Are you Nephthysians? Setics?”

“The answer to that is fuck you, Dave.”

“Brave talk, but you’re surrounded and outnumbered. You have twenty fully charged god rods aimed at you. I suggest you try and be co-operative.”

“What was it?” Wilkins said. “Where did I slip up? How did you rumble me?”

“The accent’s pretty good,” said David, “but you pronounced the name of your base ‘Ky-ro’, not ‘Kay-ro’ as the Yanks do. And you said the Osirisiac Hegemony, when most Horusites call it the Parent Hegemony. Either of those, on its own, I’d have passed off as harmless. An idiosyncrasy. But together… ” He shrugged.

“Well, don’t I just feel like the big shit-eating idiot. All those years at the Baghdad Special Ops Academy watching crappy Hollywood movies, and I blew it with a couple of careless mistakes. Thing is, Dave, I’m not the only one who’s been careless.”

“What?” said David.

“Look up,” said Wilkins, adding, “sucker.”

The rim of the valley was fringed with soldiers. They stood silhouetted against the stars. David could make out the distinctive jutting rectangle-and-semicircle insignia on their helmets and the baboon heads that capped their lances. Well, that settled that. Nephthysians. They were all fucking Nephthysians.

Wilkins’s grin was bright and sickle-shaped in the gloom.

“You’re surrounded and outnumbered,” he said in a passable imitation of David’s English accent. “You have forty fully charged god rods aimed at you. I suggest you try and be co-operative, or else we’ll zap you all to the Field of Reeds.”

David’s response was to fire his lance at Wilkins.

Wilkins, however, had anticipated this and sprang out of the way. A beam of green ba light, pure godly essence, crackled out from the lance’s mouth, striking the man who was standing behind Wilkins. It seared a hole through his chest and he fell to the ground, shuddering in death.

Wilkins rolled and came up firing. Golden light blazed from his Horusite lance, but it was a wild shot and missed its target, scorching the step at David s feet instead. David leapt back and took cover behind a column. McAllister joined him, firing as he went.

The Nephthysians started shooting from above, strafing the valley floor with purple beams. The paratroopers scattered, loosing off retaliatory shots. Wilkins’s bogus Horusites also scattered. Shafts of light crisscrossed the valley at all angles, a cat’s cradle of lethal, coruscating power. Men were shouting and screaming, their faces lit up by the rippling exchange of fire.

David took aim upward and shot at the origin points of the purple beams. His vision was laced with multicoloured afterimages, like slashes across his retinas. A ba lance fire-fight in darkness was inevitably short-lived. After a while your eyes became dazzled and you were firing more or less blind. It would come down to hand-to-hand soon. He was prepared for that.

He scored a hit. A Nephthysian shrieked and plummeted from his vantage point, hitting the ground two seconds later with a crunch. David then winged another, whose own blaster shot went astray and lanced throug h one of his colleagues in the valley. Enemy fire came David’s way but struck the column harmlessly. At this range, the blaster beams could not penetrate solid stone.

A few of the paratroopers had retreated to the mouth of the Siq and were putting up a strong resistance from there. They took it in turns. One would shoot, eliciting return fire from the Nephthysians. Then the next paratrooper would aim a blast at where the enemy shot had come from.

The air was alive with the lightning-smell of ozone, along with a tang of burnt flesh. David sensed a lull was coming. The shooting was getting more sporadic. He slung his lance back over his shoulder on its strap and unhooked his hand weapons from his belt. Sergeant McAllister followed suit.

Colonel Wilkins, or whatever his name was, barked an order to his men in Arabic. All lance fire ceased. Then David heard the slithering sound of ropes being dropped, uncoiling as they fell. The Nephthysians on the valley rim were about to come down. This was his and his men’s chance. They had to take out the handful of Horusit es and flee down the valley before the additional Nephthysian soldiers weighed in with their greater numbers. It was the only hope they had of getting out of this clusterfuck alive.

“Crook and flail!” he called out. “Crook and flail!”

He and McAllister launched themselves from behind the column, hand weapons raised. The crook was a baton tipped with a crescent-shaped titanium blade. The flail was two lengths of ash wood linked by a short chain. Brandishing the one, whirling the other, David and McAllister made for the Horusite impostors. The other paratroopers were close behind, howling a war cry.

Colonel Wilkins and company rose to meet them, maces aloft. As the two groups engaged, David was appalled to see that they were more evenly matched than he had hoped. Only about half of his stick had survived the blaster fight. He knew they had taken casualties but not so many.

Then there was no time to think about any of that. There was only the immediacy of close-quarters combat, the brutal intimacy of standing toe to toe with an opponent and trying to kill him and not be killed, two people as physically near to each other as embracing lovers yet with the very opposite intention. David clinched with one of the Horusite commandos and let his training take over. The flail provided a diversion, preventing the man from swinging his mace properly. The crook meanwhile raked and slashed. Blood jetted, oil-black in the moonlight. The man went down, throat sliced open, gargling and drowning.

David spun to his left. One of his men, Private Langley, was being beleaguered by a pair of mace-wielding foes. Langley had lost his crook. A mace crashed into his chest and David heard ribs crack like far-off fireworks. He wrapped his flail around the attacker’s forearm and tugged him off-balance. His crook blade sank into the man’s eyeball and plucked it out like a plum from a pudding. A second, sideways jab with the crook cut short his scream.

Langley was on the ground, hissing with pain, struggling to get up. The other fake Horusite straddled him and lifted his mace with both hands to bring it down on Langley’s head. Had he been a true Horusite soldier, more experienced with the weapon, he would have gone for a shorter-range blow to stun his victim first and then delivered the skull-crushing coup de grâce. As it was, he left David with a split-second window of opportunity.

David came in from behind the man and snapped the flail up between his legs. As the man collapsed to his knees, whimpering, David hooked the crook through his turban into the side of his head and yanked. The man’s head jerked back. Most of his ear came away, along with a tangle of unravelling turban cloth. In an agonised frenzy the man aimed a backwards blow with the mace, which David was able to evade. Then Langley coshed him with his flail, knocking him sideways and concussing him.

David’s blood was up. His heartbeat was pure pounding timpani. He looked around for Colonel Wilkins. The bastard needed to get what was coming to him, from one commanding officer to another. Wilkins was clashing with McAllister, warding off the sergeant’s dual-weapon assault with deft use of the mace. He, at least, knew how to wield one. Something else he’d learned at the Baghdad Special Ops Academy no doubt.

Then David saw that the other Nephthysians had arrived. Some were already in the valley and rushing to join in the mêlée; the rest were on their way, abseiling down.

Now he and what was left of his stick didn’t have a prayer. Their only option was a tactical withdrawal.

“Retreat!” he yelled, stowing his hand weapons. “That way! Down the valley!”

He lunged past McAllister, barging Wilkins aside with his shoulder. McAllister came with him, running full tilt. The remaining paratroopers followed.

David had considered making an exit via the Siq, but it was too narrow, with too many potential bottlenecks. Wilkins might anyway have posted guards at the far end, and the paratroopers would be sitting ducks, coming up the gorge two by two.

Instead, all they could do was plunge deeper into the dead city and hope to find another way out.

Golden and purple beams of ba sizzled blisteringly around them. Private Robbins took one full in the spine. He arched backwards, slumping bottom-first onto the ground. Gasping and mewling, he groped for the hole in his back where several vertebrae had been fused together in a twisted mass of melted bone. His legs were splayed in front of him, useless. A second beam penetrated his skull from their rear. Briefly Robbins’s head was lit up from the inside, like a crimson lantern, before his eyes burst and his teeth exploded from their gums and he keeled over, smoke pouring from his mouth and nostrils.

Colonel Wilkins was shouting again, giving more orders in Arabic.

It was just David now, and McAllister, and four other men, versus some thirty or so enemy soldiers.

They ran on.

Then, ahead, like dark ghosts, yet more of the enemy appeared. They emerged from behind rocks, from cave mouths, from ledges on the valley wall. They moved slowly, stiffly, shufflingly, as though every step was an arthritic effort.

David’s breath caught.

Mummies.

He and his paratroopers skidded to a halt. The dead creatures in front of them advanced with a grim, swaying purposefulness, arms outstretched. They were wrapped from head to foot in cerecloths and linen bandages, which rustled as they walked. Their joints creaked, and their jaws worked, opening and closing with a terrible, empty clicking sound.

David felt nothing but a weary dread.

Mummies. He loathed mummies.

is men began firing. Fear — the innate, visceral fear of the undead — disrupted their aim. Shots went wild or else only clipped their targets. The mummies lumbered closer, little perturbed to have small chunks blown off them. Even the occasional direct hit in the body didn’t faze them. They staggered, then resumed their advance, lacy fireglow chasing across the singed parts of bandage.

“Knees!” David yelled. It was elementary tactics. “Wide beam setting! Cut them off at the knees!”

He demonstrated with a blast that sheared a mummy’s leg in two. The creature toppled onto its face. Even downed, it kept going, crawling along with its arms and one good leg.

The nearest of the m ummies reached the paratroopers. It lunged for Private Carey, enfolding him in an embrace of hideous strength. Carey barely had time to cry out as the mummy crushed him to its chest, shattering his ribs and spine and bursting his heart.

Then Wilkins’s voice rang out. A one-word command in Arabic halted the mummies in their tracks. Then, in English, he said, “Put down your weapons, Osirisiacs. Surrender. There’s no way out of this. We have you pinned down. Surrender, or go to meet Anubis like dogs.”

David glanced at McAllister and the other three.

He saw in their eyes. They didn’t want to die here, now, like this. They would if he asked them to. If that was his decision. But they didn’t want to.

Neither did he. He laid down his lance and raised his hands.

Within moments, he and his men were having their wrists bound tightly behind them. Colonel Wilkins strode up and looked David in the eye.

“Interesting,” he said smugly. “I had you pegged as the go-down-fighting type. Clearly there’s a streak of cowardice in the supposedly fearless British soldier.”

“No,” David replied. “It’s just that, as long as I’m alive, I can still kill you.”

“Ah,” said Wilkins, as if musing on this. “Ah ha.”

He gut-punched David, then kicked his legs out from under him.

“Kill me?” he spat, as David writhed in the dust. “I doubt it, Lieutenant Westwynter. But I’ll tell you this. By the time I’m done with you, you’ll be begging me to kill you.”

Amazon UK:

• The Age Of Ra [Solaris pbk, August 2009] – ISBN 978-1844167463

She was addressing her two daughters, Gratitude, the elder, and Extravagance, the younger. Both girls were dressed in billowing shot-silk gowns, both sported half-face masks with large noses that hid their only-somewhat-less-large real noses, and both wore wigs so ludicrously high-piled and heavy that they had to be supported by steel rods attached to purpose-built, truss-like undergarments. This arrangement restricted movement considerably, and Gratitude and Extravagance had spent much of the past week practising how to walk in their party get-up. What they had come up with was an oddly stately, swanlike gait which gave the impression of being effortless but was anything but. For the most part, so as not to exhaust themselves, they kept still.

Cynthia herself had opted for an equally fabulous gown – hers beaded with freshwater pearls and fitted with saucily revealing organdie panels – but she had decided against a wig, preferring a teeteringly tall tiara set atop her own hair. She was no longer young and did not think her spine would accept the weight of an enormous wig, truss or no truss. (Her daughters, she predicted, would be suffering for their vanity for days to come.) Like them, she did have a mask, but hers was a basic black domino framed an array of glossy blue-black magpie feathers and set, lorgnette-style, on the end of a wand so that she could cover her face if she wanted to but also reveal it if she wanted to. Cynthia knew she was still beautiful at fifty-three. She knew, too, that she devoted a great deal of money and effort to remaining beautiful at fifty-three. Why hide what was so hard-won?

Gratitude, in response to her mother’s query, gave as much of a shrug as her outfit allowed. ‘Haven’t seen him.’

Extravagance assayed a nod. ‘Me either. Not since lunchtime.’

Cynthia sighed again. Really, that son of hers…

‘Bet he’s still in his room,’ said Gratitude.

‘Moping,’ said Extravagance.

‘Probably not even in costume yet.’

‘He’s such a miserable sod.’

‘And a party-pooper.’

‘Sometimes, you know, I can’t believe we share the same DNA.’

‘Now, girls,’ warned Cynthia, although it was hard to contradict anything they had said. ‘None of that. Anyway, till your uncle Fortune arrives, strictly speaking the party hasn’t started. So Provender’s not late. Not yet.’

‘Wonder what Uncle Fortune will do for an entrance this year,’ said Gratitude. ‘He won’t arrive by elephant again. Not after last year, when he fell out of the howdah and nearly broke his neck.’

‘Besides, the theme was maharajahs then,’ said Extravagance. ‘Do you think possibly he’ll abseil from a helicopter again? Not very Venetian, I know…’

‘Doubt it. And I’m certain the bungee jump from a hot-air balloon isn’t going to get a repeat performance. Remember? They got the cord length wrong. An inch lower and he’d have smashed his skull open.’

‘Uncle Fortune,’ said their mother, ‘will try and top himself. Not literally, but you know what I mean. Outdo himself. Uncle Fortune always does.’ She brisked her palms together. ‘Now then, we can’t stand around nattering to each other. We must go and mingle.’

Obediently, Gratitude and Extravagance turned and, grimacing with exertion, glided off. Cynthia herself turned and surveyed the party.

So far, an hour in, things had gone swimmingly. There had been no upsets – nothing, at any rate, that she had been told about or observed. If there were crises happening behind the scenes, they clearly hadn’t been so severe that the domestic and catering staff couldn’t sort them out. Cynthia was all set to step in if summoned and straighten out any kinks in the smooth delivery of hospitality to her guests. She had, however, spent hundreds of hours organising the ball and drilling various employees on their roles and tasks, precisely in order to ensure that nothing went wrong that could be foreseen to go wrong.

All that hard work paid off here, at this moment, as she looked upon the replica of Venice which had been erected in her back garden. A team of set-builders from Pinewood Studios had come in and worked for a month re-creating all of La Serenissima‘s architectural features and landmarks. This second Venice of polystyrene, plywood and custom board, covering the equivalent of three football fields, was thronged now with the great and the good of Britain and a fair selection of the great and the good from other countries as well.

Cynthia was standing at one corner of the Piazza San Marco. To her right was the Basilica, wherein a sprung dancefloor had been installed and an orchestra waited to play later on in the evening. To her left rose the Campanile, thirty yards tall and, as in the real Venice, crowned with a Golden Angel. The party’s version of the Grand Canal ran alongside the piazza’s far edge, winding through the rest of the ‘city’ on a circuitous loop, passing beneath a Bridge of Sighs and a Ponte de Rialto along the way. Gondolas and a couple of vaporetti were plying the waterway, ferrying guests on round-trips or between different ‘boroughs’ of the party site, perhaps to San Polo where the revellers could try their luck at the gambling tables on the Rialto itself or else to Castello where, at an ersatz Arsenale, they could shoot twelve-bores at luminous clay pigeons. There was a Lido (swimsuits, towels and changing rooms were supplied, although there would be few takers, few guests willing to unpick their elaborate costumes and hairdos just for a brief dip) and near that there was a stage where a troupe of circus performers were putting on a continuous programme of juggling, fire-eating, unicycling, and high-wire walking, some of them doing all four things simultaneously. Food, naturally, was in plentiful supply – nowhere were you out of sight of a buffet table – and waiting staff dressed as Harlequins and Columbines circulated bearing salvers of drinks.

Nothing had been left to chance. Many millions of pounds had gone to ensure no guest could claim, by the night’s end, that he or she had not been thoroughly, amply, unstintingly, repletely entertained.

To judge by the faces Cynthia could see, lit up by the myriad strings of lightbulbs festooned across the piazza, the ball was well on its way to achieving that aim. There were smiles everywhere she looked, and where there weren’t, there were frowns of the mildest sort – the frown of someone forced to choose between a dozen different kinds of stuffed olive, the frown of someone listening avidly to another’s words, the frown of someone unable to decide which of the many amusements on offer to partake of next.

Her eye then alighted, however, on one disgruntled face which didn’t have a mitigating excuse for its expression, a face which was genuinely, miserably frowning.

Great, parked halfway along the piazza’s west side in his wheelchair, glared at the partygoers who flocked to and fro in front of him. The Gleed patriarch, oldest living member of the Family, was not happy.

But then, when was he ever?

Feeling a tug of reluctant obligation, Cynthia went over to him. Fluffing out her skirt and petticoats, she crouched in front of him like a deflating hovercraft, so that he and she were eye-level with each other. His glittering blue gaze settled on her and took a moment to place her. When it did, his scowl eased, if only slightly. The horizontal lines thinned but remained put, looking like a musical stave on which the many liver spots that dotted his brow (and the rest of his pate) resembled so many crotchets and minims.

Great tried to open his mouth, but all the action achieved was a drooping of one corner of his lower lip which exposed a couple of slanting brown teeth. At the same time, the only part of his anatomy other than his face that was not paralysed began to move. His left hand started to beat sideways against the wheelchair’s armrest, his signet ring hitting the tubular-steel frame with a sharp, resonant tap.

‘Hello, Great,’ said Cynthia. ‘You’re having a nice time I trust.’

The rhythm of Great’s taps increased, becoming irregular.

‘How many summer balls does this make it?’ Cynthia went on. ‘A hundred and seven? Something like that.’

Great’s head jiggled in such a way that he could either have been nodding or shaking it.

‘I hope it meets with your satisfaction. We’ve gone all-out this year, haven’t we. No expense spared. After all, what use is it being Family if we can’t show off the fact that we’re Family?’

Cynthia fancied she saw agreement in his eyes. Great’s eyes were the one feature of him that remained truly expressive. Usually baleful, sometimes they seemed to register approval of what they saw, as now. But that, Cynthia thought, might just be her own imagining. Eyes, when the face around them was slack and all but immobile, gave away very little.

‘Carver’s got another forty minutes or so till he’s done with his announcing duties. I expect you’ll be needing him by then.’

Carver not only attended to all of Great’s physical requirements, such as feeding him and changing his incontinence pants; he also had an uncanny, almost supernatural ability to interpret Great’s thoughts and wishes. Having served Great for many a decade, first as batman, then as personal valet, Carver had developed an understanding of his master that went beyond intimacy and bordered on the psychic. Since the old man’s paralysis had set in, Carver had become his mouthpiece, his messenger, his intermediary. When you spoke to Great in Carver’s presence, you actually spoke to Carver, and when Carver replied, that was Great replying.

Which was why Cynthia liked to talk to Great when Carver was not around. It might not be a dialogue as such, but at least she felt she was communicating with Great himself rather than with his glowering dragoman.

‘Well, anyway,’ she said, rising. ‘Nice chatting with you, Great. I must go and grin at a few more guests.’

Great’s head jiggled again. The leathery wattle that hung below his jaw quivered.

‘And,’ she added, with a speculative glance around the piazza, ‘if Provender doesn’t show soon, I may have to go and roust him out from wherever he’s hiding.’

Mention of Provender’s name appeared to excite further agreement (or perhaps disagreement) from Great. His head jiggled more agitatedly. His wattle quivered so much it almost vibrated.

Cynthia strode across the piazza. She had just spied her husband, whom she recognised without difficulty even though his features were almost entirely hidden beneath a larva mask. Her husband was busy chatting up an attractive young woman. Cynthia made a beeline for him.

En route, she was accosted by: one of the most successful movie directors in the world; a Saudi princeling; the editor of the UK’s most Family-friendly broadsheet newspaper and his tabloid counterpart; a Texan oil baron; Greta von Wäldchenlieb, wife of the head of the premier Teutonic Family; a pop star whose name Cynthia did not know but whose face she did because he had been given Gleed patronage and was riding high in the charts on the back of that; a duchess tangentially related to the British royals; and a peer of the realm who had done the Gleeds several favours in the House of Lords. While Cynthia could have happily stopped and made small talk with any of these, and indeed should have in order both to play the gracious hostess and to reinforce her and her Family’s superiority over them, instead she bypassed them all with a wave and an airy smile. Her husband was her target and she could not afford to be diverted from reaching him. Just a few moments’ delay, and next thing she knew, he would no longer be on the piazza and neither would the attractive young woman.

‘Prosper!’ she cried, pulling up alongside him. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you.’ She placed a hand gently but proprietorially on his elbow. ‘We must talk. Oh, but who’s this lovely young creature?’

Prosper Gleed shot his wife the fiercest of glares before composing himself and introducing her to… ‘Ahh. Awfully sorry. I don’t think I caught your name.’

The attractive young woman was not amused. ‘Sophie,’ she said, in such a way that it was clear she had already told him, perhaps more than once. ‘Sophie Kilverton.’

‘Oh yes, that’s right!’ said Prosper. ‘And you’re one of our artistic protégées, aren’t you. A poet.’

‘A novelist.’

‘Yes, that’s what I meant, a novelist.’

Cynthia grinned at Sophie Kilverton – ostensibly a grin of greeting, really a grin of victory. She had been almost certain her husband would not have remembered the girl’s name. Prosper was nothing if not predictable – predictably drawn to nubile females, predictably unmindful of such minor details as what they were called and what their occupations were.

‘Well, Sophie,’ she said, ‘if you’ve no objection, I shall just drag my husband away.’

‘No objection,’ said Sophie Kilverton, frostily. ‘None at all.’

‘Cyn, honest, it wasn’t how it looked,’ said Prosper, when they were out of the girl’s earshot.

‘Prosper, you know as well as I do that it was exactly how it looked. And while I couldn’t give two hoots about your infidelities, attempted or otherwise – I’m way past caring about those – don’t you think you could give it a rest, just for one evening? It is our party, after all. People are watching us.’

‘They wouldn’t necessarily know it was me,’ Prosper said, touching his mask. The larva was made of fine waxed cloth, with large eyeholes. Undoubtedly it disguised Prosper but it also left enough of his physiognomy visible that you could still tell he was good-looking, in an ageing, roguish, roué way. There were those grey eyes, in their charming beds of wrinkles. There was that bifurcated chin with its small underflap of skin that spoke of a man well-preserved for his age but displaying just an enticing hint of dissipation.

‘Of course they’d know it’s you,’ Cynthia said. ‘They’d know it’s you by the puddle of drool around your feet. And anyway, why were you bothering with her?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s English. You’ve done England already. You’ve done all the major countries. It’s only the smaller nations left on your checklist now. Djibouti, Tajikistan, Sao Tome and Principe, Vanuatu…’

Prosper had made it goal in life to commit adultery with at least one representative of every known country. He had never actually admitted as much to Cynthia but she had heard about it from reliable second-hand sources and indeed read about it in the Family column of one of the more scurrilous tabloid dailies. Prosper Gleed would, it seemed, not rest until he had philandered his way across the entire globe. Rather in the manner of the great empire builders of old, he hoped to see the map of the world coloured red with his conquests.

‘Well, yes, but… You can’t blame a chap for trying. Besides, I think she may have had some Welsh ancestry.’

‘But you’ve done Wales too.’

‘Wales. Ah yes, Wales.’ Prosper’s eyes took on a wistful, faraway look. ‘There was certainly a welcome in her valleys.’

Cynthia ignored the remark. ‘So you’re adding hybrids to the list now, is that it?’

‘Actually, that’s not a bad idea.’

‘Prosper…’

‘No, dear. No, I’m not. Just kidding.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘So, what did you have to talk to me about?’ Prosper snatched a flute of champagne from the tray of a passing Columbine, giving the girl the once-over as he did so. Sheer force of habit. ‘Something important? Or was it just a pretext to sabotage my chances with the delectable what’s-her-name – Sophie?’

‘Both. But mainly I was wondering if you’d seen Provender yet.’

‘Here? Can’t say I have. Why, should he be here?’

‘Of course he should. Apart from anything else, it’s only polite. His absence will be noticed.’

‘Well, I’m sure he’ll make it.’

‘I’m not.’

‘And I suppose the reason you want him here is you have some fine, marriageable little filly lined up for him to meet.’

‘Naturally. Two of them, in fact. You may recall my mentioning them at breakfast just this morning.’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ said Prosper, evidently having no memory of the conversation in any way, shape or form. About which Cynthia was not surprised. Half the time, things she said to her husband simply did not register. He might nod and go ‘Hmph’, as though he were listening, but she knew the information was pouring down some bottomless hole in his brain as fast as it arrived there.

‘You may also recall my saying that I have a good feeling about these two,’ Cynthia went on. ‘Neither’s Family, but they’re both well-born, interesting, intelligent, attractive…’

‘Attractive?’ Prosper perked up. ‘Don’t suppose I ought to meet them, eh? You know, check them out beforehand. Vet them. Just to be on the safe side.’

‘Dearest husband, I am not letting you anywhere near those girls.’

‘Not even just a look?’

‘Not even that.’

‘Spoilsport.’

‘Prosper.’ Cynthia was becoming annoyed now. ‘This may all seem terribly funny and trivial to you, but it’s no laughing matter. We’re talking about your son. We’re talking about the last and only male on the primogeniture line. The only branch left on the trunk of the Family tree. The future of the Gleeds. Provender must marry. He must produce an heir. If he doesn’t – if, God forbid, he dies without leaving a son – then we’re sunk. We fade into obscurity. We lose continuity and status and all that makes us a Family. You know this as well as I do, and yet you still can’t seem to take it seriously. And here I am, doing my best to get our son paired off, going to all this effort on the Gleeds’ behalf, and I’m not even a born Gleed, I just married into your damn ––’

She broke off, interrupted by a salutation from a guest, some jowly non-Family plutocrat whose name temporarily escaped her but whose obeisant overtures could not go unacknowledged. By the time she and her husband had finished assuring the plutocrat that yes, he was ‘in’ with the Gleeds – and she had consented to the man’s request of the honour of a dance later – Cynthia had lost the head of steam she had built up. She was still angry with Prosper, still incensed that she alone was bearing the burden of finding a mate for their son, but the moment had passed. Continuing to remonstrate with her husband was not going to get her anywhere. Tonight was not the time for it; the party was not the place.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I realise how you like to appear frivolous, Prosper. I realise how important it is to you to be the playboy, the rake, the frequenter of casinos and racetracks. It’s all very lovely and beguiling, believe me. It’s why I fell for you, and even as I married you I hoped I might be able to change you while knowing I never would. The point is, deep down I know you care about this Family as much as I do and I know you’re keen to see Provender settled down and I know you wouldn’t exactly hate the idea of a grandson – never mind the continuity a grandson represents – simply because you’d love to play grandfather to one. So just… help me, that’s all. Support me. That’s all I ask.’

Prosper looked chastened, though not for long. Contrition wasn’t really in his repertoire. ‘Whatever you say, Cyn,’ he said. ‘Point taken. You’re the boss. No argument here. Et cetera, blah blah blah.’

Cynthia, for the third time in the space of quarter of an hour, heaved a sigh. She wheeled away from her husband and took herself to the waterside end of the piazza, where she rested her elbows on the balustrade and peered out over the Grand Canal. The sky was twilight purple and the canal was dark, though its surface glittered intermittently with reflected light. The water itself came from the mains but had been dyed to an authentically green Venetian murk. A gondolier paddled past, yodelling an operatic aria. He was one of several dozen tenors from the Gleed Academy of Music, Drama and Dance who had undergone a fortnight’s intensive coaching, courtesy of genuine Venetian gondoliers, in the art of propelling and steering that particular mode of transport. The genuine gondoliers had grumbled that no amateur should be piloting a gondola, even around a fake Venice. None of them, however, could sing opera, and that was the main criterion for the job at the ball. Besides, they had been well paid for sharing their expertise with the tenors, so the grumbling had been perfunctory, more for form’s sake than anything. It allowed them to go home with their consciences clear, the Gleed money that stuffed their wallets rinsed satisfactorily of the taint of professional compromise.

Cynthia thought of this and all the other snags she had had to deal with on the way to making the ball a reality. It was the same every year – a horde of obstacles to overcome, pitfalls to anticipate, wounded egos to soothe – and no sooner was one ball over than she had to begin making plans for the next. She gave this Family her all. She did everything for them. She dedicated herself, sacrificed herself, for the greater good of the Gleeds, and asked little in return. And yet for all her efforts she was still unable to furnish them with the one thing they needed most. And this was becoming more and more anguishing to her.

Oh Provender.

Cynthia glanced up at the sky. When it was fully dark… No, when Uncle Fortune came. Then Provender would be joining the party, whether he liked it or not.

Amazon UK:

• Provender Gleed [Gollancz hbk, September 2005] – ISBN 978-0575076839
• Provender Gleed [Gollancz tpbk, September 2005] – ISBN 978-0575076846
• Provender Gleed [Gollancz pbk, August 2006] – ISBN 978-0575077768

On the previous day Gregory had been with Willem in the garden. Their tutoring was done for the day, Professor Olgarne had gone home, and they had a couple of hours in which to amuse themselves before dinner time. Willem was experimenting with fire, as he often did, and Gregory was looking on, as he often did, because there was little he enjoyed more than watching his older brother practise the incendiary skills that he himself would, for certain, command one day. It was a foretaste of his own future.

At first Willem experimented with shapes. It was no longer an effort for him to conjure fire out of nothing. He could do it with just a frown (and sometimes a snap of his fingers, to show his brother how simple it was). After two years of pupillage under master trainer Sardon Drake, Willem had also become reasonably proficient at manipulating the flames he created. He could mould them into basic geometrical forms – sphere, cube, pyramid, cylinder, hourglass – which he could float back and forth through the air and make dart and dance. He was just beginning to be able to generate more complex objects and also greater quantities of fire.

Gregory had a very clear recollection of the moments leading up to the accident, and he appreciated that what had happened was largely his fault. Had he not been so thrilled at what Willem was up to, and so generally in awe of his big brother, he would not have urged him to attempt larger and more intricate designs and would not have strayed closer and closer to them. Willem was not entirely free of blame, of course. He should have admitted that he was getting tired, and thus losing concentration, and he should have warned Gregory to move back. He was, though, relishing Gregory’s delighted attention and was keen to keep impressing him.

And so he fashioned a cat, as Gregory requested, and then a dog, although it was a lumpy, malformed kind of dog and when Willem tried to get it to wag its tail the whole thing lost cohesion and collapsed into an elongated, fluctuating lambent mass, which he chose to claim was a representation of a giant dog turd, to Gregory’s immense amusement. Next he attempted a horse, but he couldn’t quite make it full-size. He lacked the strength yet to summon up that much flame, and anyway had over-exerted himself already. He settled for something that was closer in dimensions to a foal, and with an intense amount of concentration succeeded in animating its forelegs, so that it sort of seemed to be rearing up, almost prancing.

By this stage Gregory, who had had it drummed into him that he should keep his distance while Willem was practising, had sidled up to within a few feet of his brother, the better to appreciate the fiery display. Willem, although he knew he ought to call it a day, asked Gregory what he would like to see next, and Gregory decided he would like to see a snake.

A snake was made – a narrow crackling tube of fire with a tapered tail at one end and a flattened, triangular head at the other. Willem, pale from mental exertion, forged eyes and a mouth for the creature and got it to coil and wriggle in a suitably serpentine manner. He even managed to furnish it with a set of fangs and made it bare them menacingly. Gregory chortled, fear mixed in with the glee, as the snake flexed and lashed, golden and beautiful and surprisingly lifelike.

“Make it bigger,” he said, and Willem obliged. Soon the snake was as thick as a man’s arm and twice as long.

Then Willem said, “Put your hand up.”

“My hand?”

“Go on. I’ll get it to pretend to bite you.”

Gregory gave him a dubious look.

“It’ll be all right,” Willem said. “Promise. I’ll just get it to snap at you and you can snatch your hand away and make out as if it got you. Tell you what, if we get this right, we can do it for Mum and Dad at supper. Put on a little show for them. I’ll make the snake, you can walk up to it, I’ll make it seem to bite you, and you can fall down on the floor and pretend you’re poisoned and die.”

That clinched it. Gregory liked the idea of acting out the role of a snakebite victim, with all the melodramatic writhing and screaming that it would entail. He thought his parents would find his and Willem’s little playlet funny. Without further ado, he held out his hand.

Willem got the snake to rear back, drawing his inspiration from an image Professor Olgarne had projected into his and Gregory’s minds during a natural history lesson. Along with the telepathic vision had come feelings of mesmerised panic, as if the snake were being viewed from the perspective of some little furry mammal that was its intended prey. Gregory was suffused with these feelings again as Willem’s flame snake tensed itself to pounce. It occurred to him – almost a premonition of what was to come – that he should drop his hand. But he trusted his brother, and he put his faith in that trust over any misgivings he might be feeling, which were, anyway, nothing more than a memory of illusory impressions installed in his brain by an Air-Inclined private tutor.

The snake lunged forward like a partly-coiled length of rope being snapped straight, and Gregory’s fingers were suddenly, oddly cold, as if he had dipped them in icy water, and then just as suddenly they were hot, very hot, and hurting, really hurting, and he pulled them back reflexively to escape the source of the pain, but the pain came with them. Part of the snake was still attached to his hand. The ends of his fingers were enveloped in flames. He was burning! He felt disbelief, and he shook his hand to put out the flames, but they were no ordinary flames, they had life, and the person who had given them life, Willem, was staring at them and at Gregory’s hand, shocked, stupefied, not yet understanding what was going on, and now Gregory was screaming, not fake-screaming as he had imagined he would be just a few moments ago, truly screaming, and still he flagged his hand up and down but he could not shake off the grip of the fire, it was as if the snake’s fangs were embedded in him, and he could smell himself, he could smell his own skin and flesh cooking…

Now, finally, Willem recovered his wits, and with a frantic, focused effort of will he snuffed out the flames that were burning Gregory. He also at the same time snuffed out the remains of the snake, which was hanging headless in the air. Everything fire-related winked out of existence, leaving just the two brothers in the garden, the one alarmed, the other howling.

Willem knew what to do. Before a young incendiary learned anything else in training, he learned about burns – treatment of, what to do in the event of. He grabbed Gregory and hustled him over to the nearest source of water, which was the ornamental pond where a school of large, mottled-orange fish spent their days placidly revolving and swirling. Kneeling on the paving at the pond’s rim, he made Gregory stick his hand in the water. The fish, under the impression that it was feeding time, clustered near Gregory’s fingertips and gaped and nibbled expectantly at the roof of their world.

“Listen, Gregory,” Willem said. “Are you listening to me?”

Gregory, through the pain, nodded.

“Mum’s going to kill me when she finds out about this. She’s going to kill you too, but she’s going to kill me more. So what we’re going to have to say is that I was practising my fire, just like now, only what happened is you were somewhere else but then you saw me and you came running over and – and I didn’t see you and you startled me and that’s how you got burned. It was a complete accident. OK? That way we both of us get off not so badly. Because otherwise we’re both deep in the smut. Do you understand that?” Willem’s gaze was hard. “Both of us.”

Gregory nodded again, but by that point he was barely listening to Willem any more. Something else was happening. Something he didn’t quite understand.

There was no pain.

He looked down at his hand in the pond’s murk. Was this common? When you were burned, the pain abruptly faded away?

“Look,” he said, frowning.

Willem followed Gregory’s gaze but it was obvious that he could not see what his brother found so weirdly fascinating.

Gregory tugged against Willem’s hand, which was still grasping his wrist to keep his fingers in the pond. Willem allowed Gregory to lift his hand out, and up it came, dripping, and the fish moved in on the spot where it had been and bit disappointedly at the foodless water.

“Look,” Gregory said again. “My fingers.”

Willem stared at the fingers. When they had gone into the water they had been reddened and blistered, skin peeling away from them in ragged loops. This was not the case any more. The fingers were perhaps slightly pinker than they would ordinarily have been, but they were to all intents and purposes undamaged. The skin was smooth, but not even in that waxy way that results from burns.

Willem could make out the whorls and fine ridges of Gregory’s fingerprints.

He glanced back at the pond, as if its water or perhaps the fish were somehow responsible for the healing that had occurred. It was clear, however, that the source of the healing lay nowhere but with Gregory.

“You’re a recuperator?” Willem breathed.

“No,” Gregory replied, and the whole thing seemed distant and incomprehensible at that moment, like a dream. “No, I don’t think so. Recuperators can’t fix themselves, can they? They have to get others to do it for them.”

“Then what are you?”

“I don’t know. I think ––”

It was at that point that their mother appeared. She told their father later that when she heard the screaming, she wasn’t too concerned. It could simply have been horseplay. When there was no laughter immediately afterwards, however, she knew then that it was time to go outdoors and investigate. Finding her sons kneeling by the pond, both apparently unhurt, she was finally able to let out the breath which, she said, she had been holding all the way from the living room.

Gregory recalled her striding up to them and halting, hand on hips. She fixed her face into one of her stern interrogative looks and said, “All right, what’s going on?”

Both boys started talking at once.

“One of you,” said their mother.

“It’s Gregory,” Willem said, pointing. “He’s manifested.”

Gregory held up his wet, intact hand, as if this in itself might account for everything.

“Did you spark a flame?” his mother asked. “Did you singe yourself?”

Slowly, Gregory shook his head.

“What, then?”

The full, true story came out – not Willem’s amended version of it, because that was no longer valid – and the first thing their mother did was tell Willem to go to his room, adding that he was in deep trouble and would be dealt with later. The next thing she did was take Gregory into town to see the family recuperator, despite Gregory’s insistence that he was fine and nothing hurt. There was a queue in the waiting room at Dr Callentropp’s surgery, but an injured Brazier was more important than anyone else, as the receptionist was only too aware, and in no time Gregory was supine on Dr Callentropp’s leather examination couch and the doctor was wafting his hands over the singed fingers, assessing the damage. There was no damage, he pronounced, and Gregory dared to flash his mother a quick, haughty I-told-you-so look.

“But he was burned,” his mother said. “Willem burned him. Try again.”

Dr Callentropp did her the courtesy of trying again. No heat radiated from his palms. There was nothing for him to cure.

“The affected area shows no sign of trauma, Mrs Brazier,” he said, sitting back down behind his desk. On the wall behind him, bracketing his head, were a pair of framed licence certificates stamped with the seal of his profession, a hand with wavy lines emanating from it. The certificates were starting to show their age, not unlike Dr Callentropp himself. On another wall there was a full-colour engraving of a human figure, life-size, one half with the skin peeled away to reveal the musculature, the other half flensed more deeply to expose bones and inner organs. Gregory, who had received treatment in this room for every single ache, sniffle and graze, never failed to find the picture gruesome.

“If this incident occurred, Mrs Brazier,” Dr Callentropp continued, “and I do not for one moment question your word that it did, I can only assume Gregory somehow repaired the damaged tissue himself. Which would seem to indicate that…”

His voice trailed off as he realised the full implication of the sentence he had been about to finish. He steepled his long, elegant fingers and placed them against his lips, as if to prevent any further potentially tactless remarks escaping. His eyes were knowing and just that little bit alight.

“There will be no need,” Gregory’s mother told Dr Callentropp huskily, “to mention this matter to anyone else until Mr Brazier and I have had time to confer about it and decide on an appropriate course of action.”

“Discretion, madam, is a recuperator’s watchword.”

“Nonetheless…”

Gregory watched his mother reach into her purse and hand over twice as much money as she would normally have paid for an appointment with Dr Callentropp – twenty leaves instead of the usual ten. He sensed that more was being bought than merely a professional service, and it was then that he began to glimpse the full implication of all that had taken place. Events had moved quickly and confusingly, but the shape of them was finally becoming clear, the possible consequences becoming clear too.

Amazon UK:

• Worldstorm [Gollancz hbk, September 2004] – ISBN 978-0575073876
• Worldstorm [Gollancz tpbk, September 2004] – ISBN 978-0575073883
• Worldstorm [Gollancz pbk, September 2005] – ISBN 978-0575076563

It was the Early Beatlemaniacs who started it. Or so said the Late Beatlemaniacs, although inevitably the Early Beatlemaniacs took an opposing view. The Lateys had been pushing them for a while, they said. Taunts in the coffee bars. Mocking yells of “moptop” across the street. The late-night beating-up of a Ringo which had left him with a badly broken nose (and thus, ironically, a closer facial resemblance to the real thing).

All this, the Late Beatlemaniacs argued, was merely retaliation for the smashing of the window of a head shop run by one of their members, and an attack on another member—several sharp-suited Earlies against a lone Latey—which had put the fellow in hospital and, perhaps worse, resulted in the utter ruin of his blue satin fusilier’s uniform, which was the very one that Paul wore on the cover of Sergeant Pepper and hence one of a kind, irreplaceable.

Claims and counter-claims, and none of them containing a whole lot of truth (not least the bit about the blue fusilier’s uniform). Yeltley’s rival Beatle-fan factions had been bristling with such rumours and accusations for days, their antagonism slowly growing and with it the enormity of the misdeeds purportedly perpetrated by the other side. Conflict seemed unavoidable. A delegation of Pink Floydians had intervened in the hope of preventing such an outcome, but they had bored everyone with their talk of the senselessness of war and the stupidity of the herd mentality, and so had failed. An attempt at peace-mongering by some Dylanistas had met with a similar lack of success, largely because no one could understand a word they were saying. Meanwhile, the hardcore Hendrixers were urging the Late Beatlemaniacs on from the sidelines, while the Merseybeat Boys, a broad church that included Pacemakers and Dreamers and even a few Monkee-men, sided very much with the Earlies. Various clans of punks, mods and rockers simply rubbed their hands, gleeful at the prospect of a scrap, even if it was one they themselves wouldn’t be personally involved in.

Thus the battle lines were drawn. The two sets of enemies—each vehement in its belief that it embodied the true spirit of the Fab Four—were spoiling for a fight. All that was needed was a catalyst, a spark to set this combustible mix alight, and it came in the form of a conversation about God Dog, of all things. At the same time as Kim was meeting Dr Awkward at Room Seven, three early Beatlemaniacs had been ruminating in the street on the matter of the hundred God Dog fans who had camped out all night on the roof of the terminal building at Rotor City airport, waiting for the arrival of the band’s tour plane. Discussion of this event, which all three agreed was a pale shadow of the massive airport vigils that had occurred at the height of the Beatles’popularity, segued into a discussion of the debt owed by God Dog lead guitarist Lee Braithwaite to the jangling brilliance of Harrison and Lennon. Again, the comparison was unfavourable. No modern band, of course, could hold a candle to the Beatles.

“Pre nineteen sixty-six,” one of the Earlies added. Not that, in this company, it needed saying, but he was a fairly recent addition to the ranks and keen to show his devotion.

It was a harmless enough remark, not intended for the ears of anyone but his two companions. However, at the time the three Earlies happened to be passing a meditation shop inside which there happened to be a pair of moustachioed, kaftan-wearing Lateys, perusing mandalas. At the words “Pre nineteen sixty-six” the Lateys’ears pricked up. They glanced out at the Earlies going by, saw that they were young and rather puny, and decided they needed to be taught a lesson.

Ten minutes later the three Earlies stumbled into a coffee bar called No! Sirrah Harrison, where they knew they would find at least a dozen of their peers. They were bleeding, their suits were ripped, and one of them had lost a precious chunk of his pudding-bowl hair. Outrage and consternation flooded through the coffee bar. There were cries of “Yoko oh no!” and “O-bla-di hell!”. Espressos were ordered all round, and thus fortified and energised, a posse of the Earlies went off in search of opposition, while the injured trio made their way to various other Early haunts in order to drum up reinforcements.

The posse of Earlies homed in on an ashram, which was located next door to a foreign-language school where a special rate was being advertised for a course of evening classes in Malayalam. They formed a phalanx on the pavement in front of the ashram and demanded, in none too polite terms, that everyone in the building step outside. Out came a score of Johns and Pauls and Georges, swathed in beads and white robes and sporting Jesus-length hair and beards. They accused the Earlies of ruining their vibe and said that, although all you needed was love, in this instance the Earlies merited something a bit more drastic, in other words a good kicking.

And so it came to pass.

* * *

All this Kim remained blissfully unaware of as she traversed Yeltley, tracing a dog-legging diagonal course through the grid-pattern streets. The first she knew of the fighting was a distant commotion—voices braying, bellowing, yelping. She had an inkling of what this sound signified, and her suspicion was confirmed as every shopkeeper on the street she was on suddenly pulled down the window blinds, flipped the signs in their doors from OPEN to CLOSED, and shot the bolts. She looked back. She looked forwards. She couldn’t tell which way the hullabaloo was coming from and hence which way she should run. She hurried to the nearest shop door—which belonged to a retailer of macramé handicrafts, Straw Arts—and hammered on it. No response. No one came. She tried the next shop, a vinyl LP specialist’s called Minim, whose window displayed copies of the Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa and Rush’s 2112 and a couple of albums by Abba and A-Ha. No luck there either. At a third shop—which was a fishing tackle supplier’s with ideas above its station, name of Rod D’Or—an apprehensive face peeked out from behind the blinds and a hand waved Kim angrily away. She continued on along the pavement, not trying shops any more, keeping close to the side of the buildings. She wasn’t the only one stranded out in the open. Other pedestrians were skulking or scurrying. No one quite seemed to know in which direction to go. A mother with a pushchair had taken herself and her infant into the shelter of a doorway. Someone else was hunkered down between two parked cars. A very old man ambled on his way with a dignified air, as if nothing was happening, which suggested that he was either deaf, senile, or a war veteran who had experienced battle on a far greater scale and refused to be intimidated by the antics of a few street louts. Whatever its cause, Kim wished she shared his blitheness.

Her footsteps brought her to the end of the street and an intersection. She had a choice of three routes and no idea which of them might lead her away from the fighting, wherever it was. She decided to head right, but after a hundred yards the sound of fighting seemed to be getting louder and she doubled back. At the intersection, she crossed straight over. Again, the sound of fighting got louder as she progressed along the street. It seemed to be coming from two different directions at once. She turned to head back once again to the intersection and caught sight of running people at the far end of the first street she had ventured down. She spun round. More running people at the far end of this street. She started running herself. Within seconds she had reached the intersection, and she took herself down the third street. This was a mainly residential road, and the houses on one side all had small front gardens, yard areas basically, large enough for dustbins and maybe a bicycle or a motorbike. She took refuge in one of these areas, crouching down behind the low brick wall, hugging her knees to her chest and hoping to make herself very small and innocuous. This being Yeltley, she knew that, whoever was fighting, she herself was not dressed in such a way as to resemble a combatant on either side. That might give her immunity, but equally, in the heat of battle mistakes were made. There was really no such thing as an innocent bystander. Best to be hidden.

By now she could hear footfalls as well as voices—shoe soles clattering on tarmac. When she dared to raise her head above the wall, she saw a couple of dozen men at the intersection, laying into one another with fists and feet. With no trouble she identified them as Early and Late Beatlemaniacs, and a part of her sighed quietly. It was the very similarity between the two fan groups’likes, the fact that they idolised the same four musicians, that aroused friction between them. Schisms were never fiercer or more extreme than between factions who actually had more in common than dividing them. Kim only had to think of the differences between God Dog fans like her, who continued to keep up with the band, and Doom Rats, who refused to acknowledge any albums other than the two early ones released on Rotator Records, Doom Rat and Notton: Your Life, and attended God Dog gigs solely to hear the old stuff, remaining stalwartly mute during the new stuff. It was from Doom Rats that she received the most grief. Insults from other sources ranged from good-natured ribbing to out-and-out bile, but could be dismissed as the work of fools and ignoramuses. The animosity and invective that Doom Rats directed her way was somehow sharper and more stinging, perhaps because it came from a clique to which she had once belonged and from people who should have known better. Doom Rats, too, were more likely than anyone to threaten Kim physically, and she had lost count of the number of fights and near-fights she had got into, defending herself, the way she dressed, and, ultimately, the good name of Mik Dyer, after some snidey black-clad stick-in-the-mud had grabbed her or jostled her or contemptuously rubbed her hairdo.

From the looks of things, the two groups of Beatlemaniacs were evenly matched. Neither side carried weapons of any sort that might tip the balance, although Kim did see one Latey attempting to throttle an Early using his meditation beads. It was predominantly ruck-and-maul at the intersection, that graceless ballet of grabbing and yanking and flailing and buffeting and cuffing. Only one in every ten punches or kicks connected with anything like a forceful impact. The rest missed, skimmed, or were baffled by clothing. A lot of posturing went on as well, participants reeling back from the carnage, jeering at one another, taunting, gesticulating, challenging, and doing an awful lot to promote violence without actively engaging in it. Nevertheless, wounds were inflicted and blood flowed. Kim saw at least two individuals go down under a hail of blows, curling into foetal position on the ground and screaming for help. One Latey staggered away, his kaftan stained deep crimson down the front, his beard dripping darkly, his teeth red. Another retired from the field of combat nursing an arm that was twisted at a hideous angle.

Gradually, as more and more punishment was meted out, the fury of the fighting dwindled, until at last its force was spent. The two sides limped off in opposite directions, muttering threats and dire warnings of future action over their shoulders. Once the intersection was clear of Beatlemaniacs of either description, Kim felt it was safe to emerge from hiding. Silence hung over the streets as she tentatively resumed her journey, Yeltley holding its breath, waiting to see what, if anything, would happen next.

She had travelled perhaps three hundred yards when, abruptly, violence returned. This time there was no warning, no hubbub to alert her and give her a chance to take evasive action. All at once, out of nowhere, a half-dozen Lateys came charging towards her, hotly pursued by a similar number of Earlies. Kim leapt aside out of the oncomers’path, but the Earlies caught up with the Lateys just alongside her, and she was caught up in the ensuing imbroglio. Punches flew all around her. She glimpsed bared teeth, furious grimaces, fists brandished in the air. Then someone collided with her and she tumbled away, fetching up against a set of railings.

Her hand went to her shoulder without her realising it. She grabbed the backpack strap, swung the backpack off, brought it round, unzipped it, all in a flurry of instinct. Her self-preservation mechanisms had gone into override. Outnumbered, surrounded—how else to level the playing field? It was just at this moment that one of the Earlies spotted her, as she huddled against the railings with her back to him. His blood up, the adrenaline fizzing, it was easy for him to take her for a foe. The fact was, she wasn’t kitted out like him. Ergo, she must be one of them.

And at the same moment, a Latey caught sight of Kim and came to the same conclusion. Both Beatlemaniacs moved in on her, not able to see what she clutched in front of her in one hand nor understanding why she might be fumbling in her trouser pocket with her other hand. All they perceived was somebody frightened, trembling. Somebody dressed in a manner they themselves did not dress in. Somebody who needed to be, deserved to be, beaten up.

Thumbing the cylinder release catch, just as Rotten Ray had shown her. The cylinder flipping out sideways. All six chambers visible. A bullet, nose first, in it went. Snapping the cylinder shut. A hand seized her arm. Kim felt herself being hauled round.

“Ey, la’, wha’the fook’s this?” exclaimed the Early, peering at her.

“It’s no bloody Blue Meanie, that’s for sure,” quipped the Latey.

“‘If I had a gun,’” sang Kim, and up came the revolver, clutched in both hands, “‘I’d draw up a list.’”

The two Beatlemaniacs, as one, took a step backwards.

Kim curled her finger around the trigger. “‘If I had a gun, I wouldn’t waste any time.’”

The Early and the Latey looked at each other and intoned, simultaneously, “Revolver.”

“Help!” added the Early.

The Early being a George and the Latey a John, both were painfully aware (the latter the more so) of the danger presented by firearms. Fear left them physically paralysed, unable to move. Their companions were still battling away in the street, oblivious. No assistance would be coming from that quarter. The two Beatlemaniacs faced seconds of private, gut-clamping terror.

Kim, meanwhile, felt the exhilarating glee of the gun’s power. It was exactly as she had imagined on the bus. With Mik’s song still pouring forth from her lips, she relished the revolver’s cold, loaded weight, the way it bore down on her wrists and tightened her forearms, the ridge of the trigger beneath her index finger, sprung, ready. She wasn’t aiming at either Beatlemaniac and yet she had them both under her sway. Their eyes were white-wide with fright. Their jaws hung slack like—

BANG!

A thunderclap, obliterating all other sound. Eardrum-punchingly loud. The door of a parked car in front of Kim caved in. Window glass sparkled down. The car’s alarm let rip with a whooping shriek. The gun had seemed to come to life in her hands. It had wriggled and bucked and she didn’t remember pulling the trigger at all, the gun had gone off of its own accord. She stared down at it, half expecting it to fire again even though she knew it was now empty. When she looked up again, she registered the damage done to the car, which was still shrieking like crazy, a wounded metal beast. The bullet-hole in the door was the size of a golfball, with a silver medallion of missing paint around it, and around that a dent as deep as though it had been inflicted by a good hard kick with a good hard boot. Of the Beatlemaniacs, any of them, there was no immediate sign, but quick glances right and left revealed fleeing figures. They were scurrying away as fast as humanly possible. Olympic sprinters would have had trouble keeping up.

Kim peered down at the gun again, and all at once it dawned on her what she had done. Not merely loosed off a gun in a public place. That was bad enough, but worse, far worse, she had wasted a bullet. She had had only three of the damn things to start with, and now she had only two. How stupid, how fucking careless, was that? Of course, in theory she still needed just the one bullet, but she had had a decent margin for error and now, at a stroke, it had been halved. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Still chastising herself, Kim stowed the gun hurriedly away, shouldered her backpack, and got moving.

Soon the car alarm was just a far-off bleat, mingling with the wolf howl of a police siren. Head down, jaw set, Kim pounded on towards Dray Yard Wharf.

PS Publishing:

• Gig [slipcased hardback, June 2004] – ISBN 978-1902880846
• Gig [jacketed hardback, June 2004] – ISBN 978-1902880838

(The peaceful festivities of the town of Downbourne are shattered by the arrival of some very nasty interlopers

The van, a white Ford Transit with black-tinted windows, moved like some cruising predator, certain of itself, unnervingly unhurried. People coming to the festival along the high street scuttled out of its way, seeking the sanctuary of the pavement, there to stand and stare as it rumbled by. To them, and to those in the precinct, the van was an apparition of a kind they had not set eyes on in years, a ghost from the past, a once-familiar sight that had been made, by its abrupt recession from their lives, infinitely strange. Eyes were wide. Fingers pointed. Children pressed themselves against their parents.

Then a second van appeared, trailing in the wake of the first. A little Bedford, also white, also with tinted windows.

Simultaneously, at the other end of the precinct where the bonfire stood, a third white van, a lofty-sided Luton, drove up to the iron bollards that had once enforced the distinction between pedestrian and non-pedestrian territory. A fourth pulled up in swift succession.

And now another white van hove into view on the high street, and another, and yet another, an entire convoy of them, all makes and models, and more appeared beyond the bollards, and in no time both ends of the precinct were blocked off, the vans parking at angles to one another, interleaving, forming an almost impenetrable cordon.

It was only then, as the festival-goers in the precinct realised that the vans had trapped them in a pincer movement, cutting them off from the rest of town, that their murmurs mounted to a clamour and a sense of panic began to swell. Fen saw Gilbert Cruikshank turning his head this way and that, demanding that someone, anyone, tell him what was going on. On the podium, the Green Man appealed for calm. He had to shout to make himself heard.

The white vans sat there, motors idling, windscreens menacingly blank, radiator grilles grinning. No one seemed in any hurry to disembark from them.

Gradually the Green Man’s pleas began to take effect. It was either that or the puzzling reluctance of the vans’ occupants to emerge that led to voices petering out among the crowd and an anxious quiet prevailing. The vans’ engines growled on, the smell of diesel exhaust permeating the precinct, causing a number of people to cover their noses. The Green Man fixed his gaze on the vanguard van, the Transit. He waited. Everyone waited.

At last, the Transit’s engine cut out, its driver-side door opened, and a man climbed out onto the road.

He was short and stockily built, and his hair had been shaved to a fine down, a see-through cap of pelt. He had a lumpen nose, evidently once broken, and eyes that were set deep in their sockets, as though pushed into place with force. He was dressed in a polo shirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers, all of them adorned with trademark logos, and there were tattoos on his arms and neck, trademarks of another kind, blurry blue statements of oath and fealty. One was a monochrome Union Jack. Another, on his right biceps, was simply two words in Gothic script:

KING CUNT

The man stared, hard and contemptuously, at the crowd.

Then another van door opened and another man stepped out. He was almost the twin of the first – same close-cropped hair, similar clothing, tattoos. Slightly taller, slightly leaner, but from a distance the two of them could well have been brothers.

And then more such lookalikes were climbing out from all the vans, from their front-seat doors, from their rear doors, from their sliding side-doors. The vans rocking and jolting, out the men filed like paratroops, falling swiftly into position, forming a line across either end of the precinct, a dozen of them, two dozen, three, four. Sportswear was their uniform, close-cropped hair their chosen tonsorial style, tattoos their de rigueur body ornament, along with the occasional ear-stud or signet ring. Though of various sizes and shapes and complexions, they all of them conformed to a sartorial template, doing their best to resemble one another, or one particular exemplar, as closely as possible.

Still more of these men appeared, and the Downbourne residents began drawing together, moving towards the middle of the precinct, putting distance between them and the strangers. It was the instinctive response of the gazelle herd when the lions appear, gathering into a tight knot so that no single individual stands out and makes itself a target. Fen happily became a part of the communal merge. By his estimate, the Downbournians outnumbered the new arrivals three to one, but that made no difference. There were children here, and the new arrivals were true thugs. Violence professionals. It was written in their physiques, their stares, the stance that each of them adopted: head slightly cocked, feet apart at shoulder-width, muscle-corded arms folded or dangling down with cocky insouciance. Each was a match for any three Downbourne adults.

Only the Green Man was not cowed, or if he was, he gave no sign of it. Standing his ground on the podium, he eyed up the opposition, his gaze finally settling on the driver of the Transit, the first of the interlopers to have shown his face.

“You, sir,” he said, pointing to him. “Whatever you may want here, we do not have it. Please leave.”

The other man took the suggestion on board, seemed actually to consider it, and then smiled, displaying a glint of gold tooth. “You know what?” he said. “You don’t half look a twat.”

There was a churn of laughter from his near-identical cohorts. Shoulders pumped up and down.

The man with the gold tooth, pleased that his witticism had been so well received, decided to expand it into a full-blown comedy routine: “In fact, you look like a fucking human cabbage. Don’t he, lads? What, was your mum fucked by a cucumber? A fucking cucumber was your dad? Or was it the Jolly Green Giant? The Jolly Green Giant stuck his jolly green dick up your mum, and you were the result. And what’s that lawn doing stuck to your head? Oh yeah, it’s not a lawn, it’s hair.”

The Green Man bore the invective impassively, while Gold Tooth’s colleagues chortled and guffawed their appreciation.

Then, when Gold Tooth had run out of permutations on the theme of greenness, the Green Man said, “I’ve asked you to leave. Please do so. We are a poor, peaceful town, holding a small celebration. We have nothing for you, and we don’t want any trouble.”

“Ah now, that’s a shame, innit,” said Gold Tooth. “‘Cause we do, don’t we, lads?”

There was a lowing cheer of assent.

“‘Cause what are we?”

As one, the men from the white vans cried, “British Bulldogs!”

“And who’s our boss?”

“King Cunt!”

“And what does he like?”

“Havoc!”

This finely-turned example of strophe and antistrophe was evidently the British Bulldogs’ prearranged cue for attack, for no sooner had they uttered the word “Havoc!” than they launched themselves at the assembled Downbournians, laying into all and sundry.

Amazon UK:

• Untied Kingdom [Gollancz hbk, April 2003] – ISBN 978-0575073852
• Untied Kingdom [Gollancz tpbk, April 2003] – ISBN 978-0575073869
• Untied Kingdom [Gollancz pbk, January 2004] – ISBN 978-0575074484

Translated editions:

• Royaume Desuni [Bragelonne (French ed.) March 2008] – ISBN 9782352941552

She and I held each other’s gaze for what felt like for ever, although it could only have been as long as it took for her to slither back down onto the road. My foot was squashing the brake pedal and my hands were squeezing the life out of the steering wheel; Nora was spreadeagled and already dead. Yet, in spite of this, in that protracted moment of eye-contact sparks of recognition crackled between us, and I knew that our love was meant to be.

I was driving home from Janice’s house, where I had been told that it was over between us, whatever we had was over, all over; where I had been called ‘overbearing’, ‘too demanding’ and ‘an emotional cripple’, for which I instantly forgave her because I was none of those things; where I had been accused of trying to run her life for her, and vilified simply because I liked to know where she was when I wasn’t with her, as if that wasn’t a perfect expression of my love for her.

I had left her in tears. I was in tears, that is, not Janice. Her eyes were as dry as bones, and as white and as hard. I drove away from her house along blurred, stinging streets where neon lights shone like starbursts and houses glowed like images in stained-glass windows; and then Nora stepped out into the glare of my headlights, and I didn’t see her in time because I was blind with tears because Janice didn’t love me any more. From which I can only conclude that fate intended that Nora come and throw her arms out to me over the bonnet, gazing at me in her death as though I was the only one who could ever make her happy again, before tumbling floppily out of sight. From the timing of it, the serendipity of it, I can only believe that Nora was meant to be mine.

I don’t know how long I sat in the stalled car, hearing the engine tick as it cooled. I only know that when I opened the door and stepped out, I was as nervous as a virgin groom on his first night with his new bride.

I moved silently to where Nora’s crumpled form lay flat on the tarmac. She was wearing a creamy-white suit, and her skirt had rucked up an inch or so above her knees. Her head was thrown back to expose the curve of her neck, and a small trickle of blood was leaking from behind one ear.

I stood over her for a long time in the empty street, waiting for her to stir, moan, breathe, flutter her eyelashes, twitch one manicured fingertip. When I was quite sure she was dead, I bent down, slid my arms under her, picked her up and carried her to the car.

She weighed next to nothing, and her lightness, along with the perfect scarlet O of her lips and the resilient rubbery stiffness of her limbs, made me think of an inflatable doll – the kind you get from those blank-fronted shops in side streets, the kind that lie there without a life of their own until you inject your own animation into them.

No one saw me as I laid her across the back seat and drove her home with me. And no one saw me carry her, all dressed in white, across the threshold of my house. It was a private, special moment, marred only somewhat by the cracked-knuckles sound made by her head rolling around loosely on her shattered neck.

I took her upstairs and laid her out on the bed in the spare room. It was presumptuous of me to remove her clothes, but everyone hates to go to bed fully dressed, don’t they? And I performed the deed as civilly as circumstances allowed, leaving her almost decent in her simple white cotton underwear. I arranged her body carefully, made her head comfortable on the pillow and wiped the blood from her hair with a damp cloth.

I skimmed through her belongings for a name but found only a credit card with a surname and two initials, the first of which was N. So I called her Nora, after my mother.

I switched out the lights and spent the night in the armchair by her bedside, keeping vigil over my Nora till dawn came. She slept soundlessly, peacefully. In the glow of daybreak, I saw what I thought was a smile spreading across her face, but it turned out to be just a wand of light that the sun had inserted through the gap in the curtains and was slowly running over her lips.

I went over and drew the curtains fully open, then spent a happy half-hour examining the new woman in my life by the light of the rising sun. Her lips and eye-sockets had turned purple and the contours of her bare stomach and thighs, which I remembered from the night before as being tightly muscled and sharply delineated, had blurred, losing definition as her skin had thickened and grown floury. Her left arm jutted at an ungainly angle over the side of the bed, and her knees and elbows were swollen with large blue-black bruises. It was then that I noticed a certain ripeness to the air in the room – but then what bedroom doesn’t smell in the morning, of farts and the sleep-steam of bodies? Nevertheless I opened the window a crack before heading downstairs to make my breakfast.

I thought about Nora all day at work. I signed documents and attended meetings and made telephone calls and dictated letters and thought about nothing but Nora. At lunchtime in the canteen Montgomery from Accounts asked me how Janice was, and I actually had to remind myself whom he was talking about. “Janice,” I told him, with the look of a gladiator-in-love who has recovered from more wounds received in the ring than he can remember, “is ancient history.” He wanted to know more, because my tone implied that I wasn’t telling him everything, but I left him wriggling on the hook. It would have been premature of me to mention Nora when things weren’t completely established between us, when a proper commitment had not yet been made. I’m superstitious about these things.

Back home, I bounded upstairs to see how she was getting on. During the day she had swollen up as though someone had inserted an bicycle pump into her mouth and inflated her. Her fingers, once slender, now resembled pork sausages. Her flesh strained around the waistband of her panties and the wiring of her bra and, though it pained me to do so, I felt obliged to remove her undergarments, cutting the elastic with a pair of blunt-nosed nail-scissors. Naked on the counterpane, Nora was beautiful, Ophelian, delicately vulnerable. But she smelled worse than ever.

It was all right for a couple of days. I could bear the smell on account of her beauty and the fact that she made so few demands on me, and I would look in on her morning and evening without fail, but the duration of these visits shortened as the smell intensified. I bought a bottle of perfume from the chemist’s, the brand Janice preferred, and splashed it all over Nora and all over the room, but its sickly-sweet scent only added to Nora’s sweetly sick stench to create a nauseating blend of man-made and nature-made.

We could not go on like this, and I told Nora so, and with manly authority in my voice. The smell of her had pervaded the entire house. It was always there, always around me, in the atmosphere. Nowhere indoors could I get away from her. Even in the shower, lathering myself in shampoo and magnolia-fragrance soap, I could smell her amid the clouds of steam, and was reminded of earthy mist over early-morning moors.

Janice noticed the smell when she dropped round, unannounced, to – in her words – “see how you are”. She didn’t mention the smell directly, but she kept casting her head to the side while she talked to me, raising her nose to the air like a cat.

I behaved impeccably in her presence. Nothing I said or did gave her any impression that I was upset at the way she had treated me or that I was worried that she might discover that I had found myself another girl so quickly. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings and I didn’t want her to think me shallow, so we sipped tea and talked sensibly, like two grown adults, and as she was leaving Janice said, “I’m glad we can be sane and civilised about this, Gerald,” and I replied, “Janice, I’m as sane and civilised as they come.”

And when she was gone, I went around the house spraying pine-fragrance air-freshener into every corner of every room.

But the smell only grew stronger. It clung to me, to my skin, to my clothes. They began to notice it at work. Carver from the Legal Department asked me one day in the corridor if I’d trodden in something I shouldn’t have trodden in, and old Horace who runs the stationery cupboard couldn’t help wrinkling his nose when I came in for a ream of A4 and a ballpoint.

But what could I do? I wasn’t prepared to ditch Nora. Our love was meant to be, and I would do anything to keep that love alive. (Isn’t it funny how the bland clichés from pop songs suddenly burst out vibrant and true when you’re in love, really in love?)

The smell permeated everything about me and everything I did, and no amount of soap or aftershave could shift it. My colleagues at work began shunning me in the canteen, and my secretary found every excuse to spend as little time as she could in my office, and I knew that the temps in the typing pool were whispering about me behind my back. The smell, in fact, was making me so unpopular that in the end I did the only thing I could: I handed in my notice. I quit. And when Mrs Haldane in Personnel asked me why I was quitting, I said it was because I wanted to spend more time with my loved one.

My loved one who was not so lovely any more, who was not at all the woman I had fallen in love with.

“Nora,” I told her, exactly a fortnight after we first met, “I love you, I care for you, I want to be with you. But…” I drew a fresh breath through my handkerchief, lowered it and continued: “There is something between us, something standing in our way, and I think it better that we clear the air now – spill our guts, so to speak – rather than bottle our feelings up, which only means that one or other of us will explode at a later date.”

I covered my mouth and nose quickly again, and raised the kitchen knife I had brought upstairs with me, tightening my rubber-gloved grip on the handle. I glanced at the copy of Gray’s Anatomy which I had propped open on the pillow beside Nora’s head, and using this as my guide, set about disembowelling her.

The illustrations in Gray’s, with their fine lines and delicate cross-hatching, did nothing to prepare me for the clotted, reeking mess that was Nora’s innards. Choking, I hacked and slashed and chopped with a singular lack of surgical precision, then plunged my hands in and sloshed fistful after revolting fistful of intestine and organ into a bin-liner.

Finally, when Nora was empty and the bag was full, I carried the bundle of viscera downstairs and dumped it in the dustbin out in the back yard. Immediately three interested cats appeared and began sniffing around the base of the bin, but I shooed them away and, just to be on the safe side, secured the bin lid down with a length of washing line.

Then I returned to the spare room to inspect my handiwork. The sag of Nora’s belly and the jagged slit running up her belly from mons veneris to solar plexus were – let’s be frank here – unattractive. And as I looked more closely at her, I saw now that her whole skin was a chromatograph of spreading bruises, not the smooth expanse of milky white I remembered at all. And even though I knew that the worst of her was sitting outside in the dustbin waiting for Tuesday’s collection, I realised that she wasn’t the same any more and would never be the same again. She had changed. The one remaining constant in our relationship was the one thing about her that I couldn’t stand: the smell.

I wondered what to do. How could I bring back the old Nora, the Nora who had only days ago thrown herself at me so openly, so blithely, so freely? How could I restore her to perfection?

I could not. But I could improvise.

I started by filling in the cavity in her belly with a tangled length of garden hose and giving her back her heart in the shape of my alarm clock, which I tucked inside her ribcage. It sat there snugly, ticking away the semi-seconds, beating perhaps a little too quickly for a healthy heart, but then that’s love for you.

Once I’d done this, once I’d begun making improvements to Nora, it seemed unchivalrous to stop, so straight away I set to hollowing out her throat and inserting in it a portable transistor radio. If I wanted her to talk to me, all I had to do was flip a switch and she would give me Radio 4 (her conversation was wide-ranging and knowledgeable, but not notably feminine, except during Woman’s Hour). If, on the other hand, I wanted her to sing, then she was only too happy to (and her repertoire was vast and the range of her voice was as broad as can be, from Classic FM to hardcore dance music). And if I grew tired of the sound of her, I always had the option of shutting her up at the touch of a button.

Her eyelids had peeled back to reveal milky-white orbs like ping-pong balls, so I substituted them with a pair of large paste diamonds. I would have given her the genuine article but, since I no longer had a job, money was tight. She didn’t seem to mind. Paste diamonds are a girl’s second-best friend.

Her left arm had to go. Stuck stiffly out over the edge of the bed, the hand would often butt against my crotch in an extremely crude and suggestive manner – perhaps this was deliberate on her part, I don’t know. I replaced it with a broomstick, anyway, to the end of which I taped five table-knives for fingers. I was careful to position her new arm alongside her torso so that there would be no risk to my private parts. Soon after, I replaced her right arm with the hose and nozzle of a vacuum cleaner, for reasons of symmetry and aesthetics.

I bought a device from one of the aforementioned blank-fronted shops as a substitute for Nora’s most intimate organ. I never did use it, although it was good to know that it was there; that I could make love with Nora any time I wanted to, if I wanted to.

Eventually her legs became so misshapen that it was a kindness when I replaced the left with a carpet roller and the right with a mop. I entertained fantasies of hoisting Nora upright and trundling her back and forth across the floor, her throat playing the theme tune from The Archers while she cleaned the carpet and the kitchen tiles. But I never dared. I never dared presume.

The drying rack from the sink drainer became her new ribcage. Unfortunately her breasts then sank in on themselves like badly-set jellies. My solution to the problem was – if I say so myself – a stroke of genius. I wrung the gel from a freezer bag into a pair of pink polythene plastic sacks, topped each with the teat from a baby’s dummy, and stuck these on top of the drying rack. Hey presto, a Hollywood starlet’s dream come true: a bosom that would never sag.

But I think the pièce de resistance was Nora’s brain. I scooped her cranial cavity clean, sawed off the top of her skull and fitted an electric blender there. With her hair glued around the blender’s perspex cylinder, it seemed to me that I had come up with the perfect symbol for the mind of Woman: nimble, utilitarian, deceptively easy to use, lethally sharp if you aren’t careful.

And all the off-cuts and left-over fleshy pieces I dutifully bagged and binned for collection.

Come Tuesday morning, when I heard the dustbin lorry rumble round, I felt profoundly sad to be losing so much of the old Nora, but drew comfort from the thought that the new Nora I had created would last for ever and would never need to be thrown away.

I heard the dustmen shouting agitatedly to one another. I didn’t hear what they said. I was lying beside my Nora and had no thought but for my Nora – Nora whom I had restored to beauty, whom I had returned to her rightful place in my affections, as was meant to be.

I was still lying beside her when, half an hour later, there came a knocking at the front door and a loud officious voice asked me to open up. Even when the knocking turned to hammering, and then to splintering, I didn’t so much as stir. There were footfalls on the stairs, but all I could think about was Nora and myself and our future together. I would want nothing from her and she would ask nothing from me (except, perhaps, a fresh bottle of perfume a week), and the longer we stayed together, the stronger our love would grow. We would stay together while our looks faded and our eyesight failed, and we would still be together long past the point when other couples lose interest in each other, when their love settles into complacency, when nothing the one does can satisfy the other. We would stay together until long past the expiration date of love’s warranty.

Amazon UK:

• Imagined Slights [Gollancz, June 2002] – ISBN 978-1857988017

Armed with hardcopies of a morgue-slab head-and-shoulders photograph of the dead Siren, Parry and Johansen cruised the sites where Sirens were wont to gather of an evening.

At the Medina Maroc, no one recognised the face in the picture, which Erraji had cleaned up and composed so that now the dead young man looked merely as if he were fast asleep.

Likewise at the Place des Fontaines, no one could be found who claimed acquaintance with the young man. Parry and Johansen showed the picture to Sirens who were sitting perched on the rims of the basins of the plaza’s eponymous fountains, where the air was cooled by the action of water tumbling and splashing in cascades and shallow rippling rills over inner-illuminated crystech boulders. One after another the Sirens denied having ever seen or met anyone even resembling the man in the photograph.

At St Cecilia’s Square the story was repeated. None of the occupants of the tables of the cafés and bars that lined the square’s periphery could help. Whenever there was a language barrier to be circumvented, Parry and Johansen had only to present the photograph and solicitously form the hand-symbol for ENTREATY. It made no difference. In reply, all they got was the silent Esperanto of shrugs and shaken heads.

At the Weillplatz, Johansen thought he had struck lucky when a fellow Scandinavian, a slim Swede of roughly the same age as the dead Siren, seemed convinced that the young man in the picture was a resident of the hotel at which he himself was staying. However, when the Swede fetched a friend and compatriot with whom he shared a room and showed him the picture, the other Swede said that he knew the man his room-mate was talking about and that he bore no more than a passing likeness to the person in the photograph. Shorter, fatter, broader – only the hair and the colouring were the same.

It was close to ten o’clock when Parry and Johansen pulled up alongside what they fully expected to be their last port of call that evening, the Esplanade of Glass. Sirensong was due to begin at any moment, and once it was under way they would have little chance of obtaining a useful response to their enquiries.

While Johansen tethered the launch to an FPP-only mooring post, Parry leapt nimbly ashore and climbed the steps to the esplanade. With Sirensong so close, the atmosphere here was one of jittery carnival, both festive and restive. People, many of them in costumes or in national dress (or a parody thereof), milled about, greeting, talking, laughing, but at the same time warily eyeing up the competition. Waiters scurried. Bottle necks clinked against the rims of tumblers and wineglasses. Cappuccino machines coughed and spluttered. The occasional aromatic waft of marijuana smoke reached Parry’s nostrils, and an old instinct, no longer valid, had to be suppressed. Here and there voices could be heard warming up, running through scales and arpeggios that sounded like rising and falling chants of self-assertion, egocentric mantras of me-me-me me-me-me meee. Taxi-gondolas thronged the canal, dropping off fare after fare, and a handful of FPP officers present were busy ushering tourists away from the scene. The tourists, hoping to capture Sirensong with their cameras and palmcorders, were reluctant to leave, but could not hold out long in the face of reason and reasonability, the two main weapons of the FPP.

Parry set to working his way through the crowd, accosting everyone he could, loners, pairs, groups, showing the photograph and asking over and over whether anyone knew the man in it. Johansen did the same, moving in the opposite direction from Parry so that they could cover as much ground as possible in the scant time that remained to them. None of the Sirens was so incautious or impolite as to shrink away when approached by an FPP officer, and each took an obligingly long and careful look at the picture, but it was obvious that their minds were on other things, and this, coupled with the habitual guardedness of many Sirens towards the FPP, meant that neither Parry nor Johansen believed they were going to have any more success here than they had had at their four previous destinations. Even if someone did recognise the dead man, it was unlikely that he or she was going to admit it, not now, not with Foreigners imminent. Who in their right mind was going to risk missing out on an evening’s work because they had been stuck talking to the Foreign Policy Police when the Foreigners showed up?

Still the two men persevered, feeling it was better to try and fail than simply not try at all. And in the end, much to Parry’s surprise, their persistence was rewarded.

The Esplanade of Glass took its name from the crystech sculptures positioned at intervals across its length and breadth. Modelled on the minimalist principle of reiterative musical motifs, the sculptures consisted of hexagonal columns of transparent crystal that were arranged in rows and tiers and, like the fountains of the Place des Fontaines, lit from beneath so that they glowed. Although all apparently identical, each of the rows of columns was subtly distinct. The gradations in height differed minutely from one to the next, and the stepped parabola each described was unique. Grown into shape by means of pure sound, crafted through tonality and frequency, the sculptures were proof of the versatility of crystech as an architectural material. Its applications could be immense and functional, as when it was providing foundations for construction or forging bridges between islands or fashioning mid-air walkways between the upper floors of buildings in waterlogged cities, but they could be small-scale and aesthetic, too.

It was a castrato standing next to one of these sculptures who at last put a name to the dead Siren’s face.

“That’s Daryl,” the castrato said. “Daryl … Anderson, I think his surname is. No, Henderson. That’s it. Daryl Henderson.”

“You’re sure?” said Parry.

The castrato nodded. He was a Scot, pale-skinned, shaven-scalped, soft with fat. A plethora of piercings glinted around his head. Mascara made black stars of his eyelashes. A tongue-stud flickered as he spoke. “Aye.” He squinted at the picture again. “Definitely him. He’s an Aussie. Nice fellow. I saw him just the other night, actually, over at St Cecilia’s.”

“The other night? Can you be a bit more specific? Might it have been last night by any chance?”

“No. No. Couple of nights ago at least. Maybe three.” The castrato flicked a glance over Parry’s shoulder. No Foreigners coming. “Aye, three nights ago.”

“And your name is?”

“Do I have to tell you?”

“No, but it would help me greatly if you did.”

“Only, I don’t want to end up on the Siren register just ’cause I was doing you a favour, you know, helping out.”

“You have my word that won’t happen.”

The castrato eyed Parry carefully. “Well, if you can’t trust the FPP…” he said finally. “Hamish Dillon. D-I-L-L-O-N.”

Parry had out a pencil and his small spiral-bound notebook, two items of stationery he had constantly carried with him since his early days as a junior constable in the Met. He had already jotted down the dead Siren’s name. Now he made a note of the castrato’s, adding after it “Falsetto?” He crossed the word out. Dillon’s speaking voice sounded authentically raspy and high-pitched, and genuine castrati did tend to run to fat. Not only that, but another, more irrefutable proof of surgical subtraction floated in formaldehyde in a hermetically-sealed glass jar that hung on a chain around Dillon’s neck. Falsetti trying to pass themselves off as castrati used skilfully-crafted rubber replicas, but the pallid, shrivelled, preserved testicles in Dillon’s jar looked real to Parry. All too wince-inducingly real.

“And you know this Henderson well?” he asked.

“I know him to talk to. We were at the Conservatorio together. Different classes, though. He was a bass-baritone.”

Parry wrote down “Conservatorio di Musica Straniera”.

“And when you met him the other night, how did he seem to you?”

“Seem?”

“His behaviour. His attitude.”

“Oh. Normal, I suppose. We didn’t have a chat as such. Just hello, how’s it going, that type of thing. That’s all.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know where he was staying in New Venice?”

“No idea.” Dillon checked over Parry’s shoulder again. Then a thought occurred to him. “Hang on a second. Shit.” He examined the picture, then peered up at Parry. “‘Was staying’. The poor wee bastard’s dead, isn’t he?”

Not all of the Sirens to whom Parry and Johansen had so far shown the photograph had spotted this. To the ones that had, the two FPP officers had given the explanation that Parry now gave to Dillon. “We found his body this morning. We believe he may have met with an accident. We couldn’t identify him, so that’s why we’ve been asking around.” A lie, yes, but Quesnel had stipulated that the incident at the Amadeus was to kept out of the public domain for the time being, and Parry could understand her reasoning. The prepenultimate of the nine measures of the Foreign Policy Constitution stated that Openness and accountability for all its actions shall be among the avowed aims of the Foreign Policy Police, and in all dealings with humans and Foreigners its officers shall be wholly honest and without evasion, except in those circumstances in which it is deemed either by a senior officer or by the Council that the public interest is better served by the suppression of certain information until such time as said information may safely be revealed without fear of causing prejudice or concern and regardless upon the expiry of a period of 60 (sixty) days after said information is originally discovered. In other words, a small white lie was permissible if it was for the greater good, which in this instance it surely was.

“An accident,” said Dillon morosely. “Christ. Poor Daryl.”

“I’m sorry to have had to break the bad news.”

“Not your fault. He wasn’t like a friend or anything. It’s just, well … someone you know, you know?”

“I understand. One last thing. Can you tell me where you’re staying? I don’t think it’s very likely but I may need to contact you again.”

“I’m at the…” Dillon hooked his thumbs together with his hands twisted away from each other, forming the S-like configuration for EXCELLENCE, which a certain Japanese megacorporation had co-opted as its company logo.

Parry wrote down “Shibata Excelsior” and connected the words with an arrow to Dillon’s name.

“Thank you very much for your help, Mr Dillon,” he said, shutting and stowing away the notebook.

“No problem. Glad to –”

Dillon broke off. A thrill was running through the crowd like an electric current. Conversations were petering out, joints and cigarettes were being stubbed out, cups and glasses drained. Everyone was looking towards the canal’s edge, craning their necks for a glimpse.

They were coming. Foreigners were coming.

Amazon UK:

• The Foreigners [Gollancz hbk, September 2000] – ISBN 978-0575068940
• The Foreigners [Gollancz pbk, August 2001] – ISBN 978-1857987911