“They must be filming a movie or something,” Piglet rationalizes. “They do that early in the morning on weekends, don’t they? When nobody’s about. They stop the traffic —”

  Smoke rises in the distance. Somewhere out towards the edge of town a building is burning, but the breeze is carrying the smell and smoke away from them. The drumming underfoot isn’t going away, it’s getting more intense, as if they’re trespassing on the tracks and an express train is hurtling towards them.

  “I don’t like this,” Ami’s voice catches in her throat. “Something is wrong and I am going back to bed until it’s over.” She starts to turn towards the hotel doors, now almost sixty meters behind them, and pauses.

  A torrent of magic has crested the top of Vicar Lane and is flooding downhill on a thunder of hooves.

  Nightmarish knots of light writhe and glow around the column of mounted knights in silvery armor, who sit astride giant chargers with mad-eyed blue stares and vicious spiral horns. They ride five abreast down the four-lane-wide high street, holding maces with green-glowing heads that spit sparks of lethal lightning.

  Ami freezes. An idiot lyric from her granddad’s CD collection repeats in her head: Guided by the beauty of our weapons, guided by this birthmark on our skin —

  Around her people are screaming and falling, some of them writhing in tetanic spasms, others doubled-over and projectile vomiting. Ami is one of the few unaffected, blessed by an accident of heredity with some natural resistance to the Host’s glamour. All she can see is the terrible beauty of the onrushing nemeses, and the instinctive apprehension that it would be a really bad idea to be standing here when they arrive, to be standing anywhere in sight while all around her are dying —

  She grabs for Jan’s hand. “Run!” she shouts. Jan is rooted to the spot, shuddering and gaping as if she’s touched a live wire. Ami tugs and tugs: finally Jan stumbles and nearly falls, then begins to limp alongside her, dull-eyed and panting.

  Ami looks over her shoulder, then forward at the hotel doorway, which is clear. Forty meters to go. The nearest riders are between a hundred and two hundred meters away, slowing and diffusing into the side streets as they face off towards the hill with the big government building and the Playhouse on it. At the top of the hill, smoke begins to pour from the roof of the Odeon, and to either side of the riders the shops lining the street erupt in pale flames. She can feel the heat on her face as she turns back towards the hotel. “Let go,” Jan whines, tugging her hand free, “I’m going to be sick —”

  Ami feels her friend’s fingers slide through her grip. She hesitates for a moment, then cold terror grips her and she breaks into a run. The CCTV camera under the awning over the hotel door is rotating towards the high street. She reaches the doorway and darts inside, then turns to shout encouragement to Jan: “It’s only ten meters and there’s a toilet in the lobby, silly —”

  Galadriel flashes quicksilver-bright and explodes before her eyes: an echoing flicker like flashbulbs going off saturates the lobby with the terrible light of a hundred human candles, until a patchwork of retinal purple blocks her vision completely. All across the death ground around the foot of Quarry Hill bodies are bursting into flame: from the spearhead squadron led by Sixth of Second Battalion to hungover stag-night tourists and pointy-eared anime fans. SCORPION STARE’s targeting neural network has given up discriminating friend from foe, and decided to kill them all and leave it to whatever gods machines have faith in to sort them out.

  The world flashes black around Alex as he leaps at Cassie. Her expression is frozen in shock, gradually twisting into indignation – the obvious misinterpretation of his move – as he ploughs into her shoulder-first. He manages to curl an arm around her head as they fall and, falling, he mumbles his final trigger word. A ring on Cassie’s left hand flares crimson with a laser-speckle of coherent light, building up a spike of energy. His blindsight tells him that behind them Highest Liege is raising a mace which is carrying a monstrous charge, an aviation canon to Cassie’s handgun. The alfär are stupidly wasteful, throwing raw thaum currents at each other as if they don’t understand the elegant mathematical underpinnings of magic: How inelegant, his inner detached observer thinks scornfully as the new macro he triggered begins to count up from zero.

  “Get off —” Cassie begins to struggle. She’s strong, but Alex is a PHANG and he’s on top and he’s not afraid to push back, locking his knee and elbow joints and using his weight to hold her down.

  “Keep down,” Alex hisses in English.

  Behind them, First Liege chuckles. The skin in the small of his back tries to crawl right off his spine because he’s heard that kind of laughter before, from Basil a moment before the lights came up, and all bets are off if First Liege wants Cassie dead more than she wants to add another PHANG to her string —

  But the macro has now reached double digits and the voices in his head are beginning to react to a cacophony of incoming feeders and he knows it’s working.

  Cassie goes limp beneath him and he shoves his face against her neck and tries not to imagine what it would be like to bite his way through her sweet-smelling skin to the febrile, panic-juddery arterial pulse of blood. (Never mind what she says about high-caste People being immunized against V syndrome, he can imagine how it would feel, his lover’s blood entering his soul, filling the hole in his heart: and he shudders with need.)

  “Get off her, Magus.” First Liege uses the imperative-command case and Alex’s limbs jerk spasmodically despite his best efforts to control them —

  But the feeders are arriving, one by one, responding to the summoning wrapped in the counter macro that he just triggered. Calling a single eater is a trivial exercise, so minor that any CS undergraduate can master it in a couple of hours. (Surviving the summoning is a trickier matter.) Summoning up 65,535 of the fuckers is also trivial, if somewhat inadvisable: you just wrap your summon-an-eater macro in a loop counter, much like the loop you wrote earlier as a wrapper around the crowbar that unlatches your V-symbiotes’ attention from a pile of spilled sugar granules, one by one. It’s called automation, suckers. Surviving the attention of (216-1) eaters without first making sure you’re safely inside a well-prepared summoning grid is not an intern-ready task, and protecting your girlfriend at the same time raises it to do-not-try-this-at-home levels of inadvisability, or maybe a thesis defense: but Alex is not sanguine about either of their chances of surviving a psychotic dragon queen’s attentions. So he shoves his tongue against Cassie’s neck, seeking the closest contact he can get short of blood-to-blood, and prays that three different leave-me-alone macros and the presence of a bunch of hungry territorial V-parasites will keep the eaters away from her and that he’s got enough self-control not to lose his shit completely, because she’s the most delicious thing he’s ever smelled in his life, and, and, focus: friend not food, focus!

  There’s a fierce scream, cut off abruptly, and a flare of power behind him that feels like a giant oven door opening. The side of the tent in front of him disappears in blinding daylight. A deafening cicada chorus of mindless voices yelling hunger reverberates through his skull. Cassie tenses up, quivering with terror or fury or both. The edge of daylight burns closer and closer as the buzzing swarm of hunger descends. A couple of hoarse gasps come from First Liege’s body as she resists, her will-to-power straining to hold back the tide of the eaters. There are a couple of percussive bangs and something hot bounces off Alex’s back: it’s probably a protective charm or ward cooking off.

  In the corner of his vision, an hourglass full of salt grains trickles up, not down, as the eater-summoning macro counts its way through a busy loop that might take as long as ten seconds – Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it’s semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty – but then the hourglass inverts. Jagged shards of glass scream in Alex’s ears as the eaters are torn from their feast one by one and sent packing in reverse order of summoning.

  “What’s. Going. On,” Cassie hisses angrily, but Alex doesn’t dare break skin contact for long enough to tell her, not while there are more than 60,000 transient parasites passing through his focus, embodied in his mind’s eye as desiccating white crystals. She bucks and heaves under him, pushing his head dangerously close to the line of daylight. “What did you why hasn’t she killed us wait what’s this why do I feel so —”

  The eaters take longer to banish than to summon, but the last of them finally flicker out of his perception, buzzing and turgidly replete. Alex closes his eyes and forces himself to pull his tongue away from her throat. He’s weak-kneed with hunger, or desire, or a questionable titer of both. The mindless keening of the V-parasites is deafening and his limbs feel like lead as he pushes himself off her. “Eaters,” he gasps, rolling on his back and trying to sit up: “I had to keep skin contact to protect you.”

  What’s left of First Liege lies in the shadows of the back half of the pavilion, black and withered as a slug that has died in a dish of salt: wisps of smoke rise from her curled limbs.

  Cassie pushes herself to her feet, looking dazed and very angry. “If you ever do that to me again” – she bends over the body and deftly pulls the mace from a mummified claw – “I will —” She blinks, and bites back indignation. “WhatWhat?”

  “I’m hungry.” Alex takes a deep breath. Then another. “I need blood. Also cover. Then we need to run.”

  “Run?” In the sudden silence Cassie’s eyes widen. “What did you do?”

  “Your father took my phone.” Alex looks her in the eye. She’s lovely: I could gobble her right up, part of him thinks. “Do the People have GPS? Or drones?”

  “No, but the air defense —” Cassie blinks and finds her feet abruptly fascinating. “Let’s get you fed and clothed.”

  “Where is he?” Alex wraps his arms around his stomach, trying not to rock with the force of the hunger pangs.

  “He’ll be with the —” She stops and takes aim as two guards clatter around the back of the tent. “Halt and obey the Heir of the All-Highest,” she commands, in the same voice of authority that set Alex’s hair on end when her father used it. The guards freeze. “Oh my,” Cassie says in English for his benefit, her face slowly brightening into a luminous smile. “I could get used to this.” She points at the guards. “Step inside. Do not look at this magus – man. Remove your helmet.” The guards seem hesitant, stumbling as if drunk. “I order you to disarm and kneel!”

  The words batter at Alex’s ears like brass gongs, and he’s not even the subject of their terrible imperative. The soldier Cassie pointed at slumps slightly, knees going out from under him. The other turns as if to run and Cassie begins to raise her mace, but before she points it at him he collapses like a puppet with its strings cut. Blood trickles from his nose and ears, but Alex can tell instantly that it’s no good for him: V-parasites can’t eat the dead.

  He watches, woozy with hunger, as she pulls the kneeling soldier’s helmet off and pushes his head down towards the ground sheet in front of his feet. “Eat, dammit,” she snaps. Frustration rises in her voice: “Why are you standing there? What are you waiting for, why won’t you feed?”

  Alex watches himself as from a great distance while he shuffles over to the kneeling sacrifice and crouches close to the rushing, frightened pulse —

  I can’t do this, he thinks despairingly. The kneeling man is paralyzed like a mouse beneath a venomous snake. When you’re dying your whole life is supposed to flash before your eyes, but Alex finds that in this situation he stands witness to someone else’s life. Not a good life, perhaps, but not a life nearing its end in a hospice bed, riddled with cancer or dying of dementia: this is a healthy adult in his prime, with many years ahead, who kneels terrified before him with throat bared. I’m not a murderer —

  “Alex,” Cassie says, close to his ear, “if you won’t do this, we’re both going to die here. I can’t carry you.” There is a tiny quaver in her voice as she adds, “And I’m not leaving without you.”

  Shock rushes through him. Then disbelief. She’s bluffing. Isn’t she? Then embarrassment. It’s blackmail! Then pragmatism: He’s an enemy soldier and if he wasn’t under her geas he’d be trying to kill us both —

  “Just do it. Blame me. We can work it out later, YesYes? But I won’t let you die here —”

  Alex blanks. When he opens his eyes again, his mouth is full of warm wet love and he has a painfully sensitive erection: the V-parasites are crooning their satisfaction in his ears.

  “Oh God,” he says incoherently, and begins to weep over the body.

  “Shut up,” she says through gritted teeth. “Hold your arm out.” She’s sliding something over his right arm – a sleeve. “Left arm now.” It’s a padded leather jacket, tight in the shoulders. It laces together: she begins to tie him into it. “You keep invoking some God but I don’t think he’s listening right now,” she adds in a quiet singsong under her breath.

  “But I bit that man’s throat out, like I’m fucking Dracula…”

  “Shut up. Stand up. Put this on. That’s right… if you were the kind of man who found it easy to do that kind of thing do you think I’d bother with you?” Her question takes him by surprise, rattling his introspective daze.

  “How long has it been since your father left?” he asks as she snaps the breastplate into place around him. (It has cunning quick-release fasteners, more like the clips on a bulletproof jacket than the buckles and straps on the museum pieces in the Armouries.)

  “Three… no, four? Minutes. No more.” Alex shuffles uneasily: his trousers feel warm and wet, and when he looks down there’s a dark stain across his legs. Blood or urine, he can’t tell. Cassie hands him a helmet. He pulls it on, feels an unfamiliar tight headband, and adjusts it so that it doesn’t pinch his temples. “Quick!” she urges, then yanks the glass face-plate down, grabs his hand, and tugs him towards the open back of the tent.

  “Wait, my eyes —” But then he’s in daylight and his face isn’t on fire and he can see clearly through the tinted visor. “What are we doing?”

  “Act like you’re a guard and I’ll get us out of here as long as we can avoid my father. Where’s your rescue party?”

  “How should I —” Alex looks round. There’s a murmurous rumble and clatter from beyond the tents clustered between the pavilion and the edge of the cove. He can’t see the cause of the racket but from the snorting and snarling it sounds as if a cavalry troop is mounting up on Bengal tigers. He looks up, scanning the edge of the ridge above them, putting the picture together. Malham Tarn has been popular with school trips for decades, so much so that half the population of Yorkshire must have been here at one time or another, which means the walking path must be over there— “Wait, what’s that?”

  Something monstrous moves beyond the top of the cliff. Alex sees a neck like a tree trunk and the body of a giant elephant – no, it’s a big-ass dinosaur, a sauropod, like a brontosaurus. He squints. There’s something wrong with its head, an efflorescence of tentacles and iridescence —

  He looks away in time. The warded visor saves him, but he’s blinking rapidly and his eyes are stinging furiously as he draws breath to ask Cassie what they should do; which is why he hears, rather than sees, Pinky put his cunning plan into effect.

  A droning roar like a storm god unzipping his chain of lightning reverberates from the clifftops.

  Pete crouches down in Ilsa’s legwell, his shoulders hunched, as hot brass cartridge cases bounce off the limestone slabs embedded in the reverse slope of the hillside. Strays from the rain of hot brass ping and clatter off his shoulders. He can’t see what’s going on – this is a good thing – and he’s having difficulty even seeing the controls, which is perhaps less of a good thing. So he concentrates on keeping a tight grip on the mummified hand with the burning fingertips, tries not to think about where it came from or how its unfortunate owner met his end, or even why the Laundry’s armorer came to have it in the special stores room at the National Firearms Center. Obviously the government would have maintained a stockpile of Hands of Glory, the amputated appendages of hanged felons, even though they ended capital punishment in 1965. It’s all he can do to refrain from prayer. God probably doesn’t want to know what he’s doing here this morning, a borderline accomplice to evil in service to a greater cause. If you should find yourself on a slippery slope some questions are best left unasked, lest you find yourself already fallen from grace.

  Pinky stands on the bench seat behind Pete, methodically directing a roaring torrent of gunfire over the rise. He beats the ground around the trenches with a heavy steel-jacketed rain, working the minigun by dead reckoning, for he can barely see the ends of the spinning barrels – the Hand of Glory is doing its job, and Ilsa has become a numinous vision of cobwebs on the breeze, functionally invisible. So are the things in the enemy dugouts, of course, and in this battle if you can be seen you will die: but iron and steel have a way of slicing through enchantments, especially when they’re augmented with a banishment circuit embedded in the base of each and every round.

  A jaw-rattlingly loud detonation sends an oily fireball rising over the crest of the hill. Pinky releases the firing switch. In the sudden ear-ringing silence, the echoes of the burst bounce back and forth between the hills. A monster bellows a plaintive soloist’s refrain against a chorus of higher-pitched human screams.

  Pinky thumps Pete on the shoulder. “Back up ten meters!” he shouts in Pete’s ear.

  “What? But that’ll put us on the ridge!”

  “Yes! I need to see what’s back there. Let me finish this.”

  Pinky slides back down behind the gun. This is a really bad idea, Pete tells himself as he twists the throttle grip. Ilsa lurches and begins to slowly reverse up the ever-gentler hillside. Pete orients himself by looking sideways at the steps, guessing how far he’s come, and he’s still crawling backwards when Pinky hits the firing switch again, the rotary gun barrels spin up, and the jackhammer roar resumes bashing on his helmet earpieces.