Nigel Karabatsos and his wife shut their eyes and thought of fire.
“Rose dear,” said Gitamo. “Peek into those tiny minds.”
Rose Farrar caught fire and expanded. She grew into a nine-foot-tall column of living flame, with long limbs and a blazing skull-face. Though she was hard to look at and her radiant heat filled the room, she didn’t burn the ceiling or the carpet. She was Fire.
“Reverend Jago,” said Gitamo, “would you open the doors. Rose needs to go outside.”
The man in the dog-collar was astonished by what the apparent little girl had become. Anthony Jago didn’t know whether to bow down before a fiery angel of the Lord or cast out a demon from Hell. His already-peculiar belief system was horribly battered by this experience. Catriona feared no good would come of that.
But, if anything could hurt the Cold, it would be Fire Rose.
Louise Teazle reported that the snow outside was melting. Fire Rose was radiating, beyond the walls.
“No,” said Ariadne, snapping her fingers. “I think not.”
Fire Rose went out. Spent-match stink filled the room. The little girl, unburned and unburning, sat on the floor exactly as she had been. She was bewildered. No one had ever switched her off like a light before.
Jago was enraged. All the cups, saucers and cutlery on the table near him and all the books on the shelves behind him leaped at once into the air, and hovered like projectiles about to be slung. Catriona had known he was a telekinetic, but this was off the scale. In any other drawing room, parapsychologists like Cross and Lark would be thinking of the book deals and the lecture tour – though, after Fire Rose, this little display scarcely made the needle tick. Jago’s eyes smouldered.
Ariadne shook her head, and everything went neatly back to its place. Not a drop of tea spilled or a dust jacket torn. Jago knitted his brows, blood vessels pulsing, but not so much as a teaspoon responded.
Mr Zed took out a gun, caught Ariadne’s gaze, then pointed it at his own head. He stood still as a statue.
“If we’re not going off half-cocked,” said the Elder of the Kind, “let us review our plan of action. In dealing with the Cold, do we really want to do what Derek Leech says.”
Exactly. Ariadne had said what Catriona felt.
“You can’t win a Winter War with fire,” she said. “Fire consumes, leaves only ashes.”
“Then what?” said Maureen, frustrated, red-eyed. “If not Derek’s plan, what? I’d really like to know, ladies. I’m freezing my tits off here.”
“There there,” said Catriona, touching Maureen’s shoulder. “Have faith. He’ll be all right.”
Maureen didn’t ask who she meant.
“He’ll see us through,” Catriona said.
Richard.
XII
On some other path in life, an expert outdoorsman Keith had loads of survival training in extreme weather conditions. Probably, Keith had to weed out a couple of dozen plonkers who didn’t know how to tie their own shoelaces, but he’d found the useful life in seconds. Not a bad trick. While Jamie scanned for tracks or a human-shaped bump in the snow, Keith barked instructions – keep moving, breathe through your nose, turn your shoulder to the wind.
One good thing: in all this mucky weather, Richard Jeperson couldn’t have gone far.
Any footprints were filled by new snow. The marks they had made coming from the thicket to the buildings were already gone. Jamie looked for dark traces, the shadows of shadows. It was Dad’s game, and he wasn’t expert in it yet – but he could usually see shadow-ghosts, if he caught them in time.
He found a discarded fur boot. And another.
A shaggy clump a little past the boots turned out not to be the missing man, but an abandoned coat. A fold of dayglo green poking up from the snow was a cast-off balaclava. Leech had said Jeperson went out naked. That was not true. Jeperson had gone outside, then taken his clothes off. Leech wouldn’t have got that wrong unless he were deliberately lying. If Jeperson knocked Leech out and left him inside, Leech would not have known what Jeperson did next – but he had said Jeperson took his clothes off, went out and lay down in the show. Had Leech attacked Jeperson, stripped him, and left him to freeze to death, cooking up a story to exonerate himself? Jamie should have checked at once – tried to replay the shadows in the building. He had an inkling it wouldn’t have worked. There was something wrong with Leech’s shadow.
He hoped Gené and Susan could take care of themselves. Derek Leech was dangerous.
They were near Bugs, the mammoth snowman. It had lost human shape and become a mountain. Novelty insects still bobbed on its summit like the Union Flag on top of Everest.
Jamie saw the shadow lying at the foot of Mount Bugs. A man, stretched out. Jeperson was under here.
He pointed to the spot and told Keith, “Dig there, mate. There.”
“Where?”
Keith didn’t have the Shade-sight. Jamie knelt and began scooping snow away with gloved hands. Keith used a tray from the cafeteria as a spade, digging deep.
A face emerged, in a nest of long, frozen hair. Thin, blue, hollow-cheeked, jagged-moustached and open-eyed.
“Hello,” said Jeperson, smiling broadly. “You must be the new boys.”
XIII
Suddenly, Richard felt the cold. Not the Cold – he was disconnected, now. The little crystals were out of his brain. He hoped he had given the Cold something to think about.
“Would you happen to have seen some clothes in your travels?” he asked the two young men. One wore a long dark greatcoat and goggles, the other a red-lined magician’s cloak.
They dragged his fur coat along and tried to wrap him in it. What he could see of his skin was sky-blue.
“It’s stopped snowing,” he observed.
The wind was down too. And sun shone through, low in the West. It was late evening. Long shadows were red-edged.
The Cold was responding to his plea, drawing in its chill. It could live on in perpetuity as a sub-microscopic speck inside a rock, or confine itself to the poles, or go back to the void below absolute zero. Without Cleaver telling it what it wanted, it had its own choices. Richard hoped he had persuaded the Cold that other life on Earth was entertaining enough to be put up with.
Now, he would probably die.
He hoped he had done the right thing. He was sorry he’d never found out who his real parents had been. He wished he’d spent more time with Barbara, but – obviously – he’d been busy lately. His personal life hadn’t been a priority, and that was a regret. He could trust Fred and Vanessa to keep on, at least for a while. And, if these lads were anything to judge by, the Diogenes Club, or something like it, would continue to stand against Great Enchanters present and future, and all manner of other inexplicable threats to the public safety.
The boy in the goggles tried rubbing Richard’s hands, but his friend – who knew something about hypothermia treatment – told him not to. Friction just damages more blood vessels. Gradual, all-round warmth was needed. Not that there was an easy supply around here.
He tried to think of quotable last words.
Some people came out of the building. Leech, and two women. One flew to him. Geneviève. Good for her. They’d not worked together much, but the old girl was a long-standing Valued Member.
“Richard, you won’t die,” she said.
“I think I’ll need a second opinion,” he muttered. “A less optimistic one.”
“No, really,” she insisted.
Leech hung back, shiftily. Richard expected no more. Geneviève pulled the other woman – a brown-haired girl who kept herself to herself – to help, and got her to press her hands on Richard’s chest.
Warmth radiated from her touch.
“That’s very . . . nice,” he said. “Who are you?”
“This is Susan,” said Geneviève. “She’s a friend.”
Richard had heard of her. Susan Rodway. She was on Catriona’s list of possibles.
He felt as if h
e were sinking into a hot, perfumed bath. Feeling returned to his limbs. He heard hissing and tinkling, as snow and ice melted around them. A bubble of heat was forming. Susan took it slowly, not heating him too fast. His temperature came up like a diver hauled to the surface in stages to avoid the bends.
He tactfully rearranged a flap of fur to cover his loins. Susan’s magic warmth had reached there, with an unshrivelling effect he rarely cared to share on such brief acquaintance.
“What did you do?” asked Geneviève. “Are we saved?”
Richard tried to shrug. “I did what I could. I think the Cold is getting a sense of who we are, what we’re about and why we shouldn’t just be killed out of hand. Who knows what something like that can really feel, think or do? You have to call off the blitzkrieg, though. Any smiting with fire and sword is liable to undo the work of diplomacy and land us back in the big fridge.”
Leech was expressionless. Richard wondered how things would be if he’d had his way.
Geneviève looked back and said, “Make the call, Derek.”
He made no move. Geneviève stood. Leech nodded, once, and walked back to the building.
“I see you’ve met Dr Shade and Conjurer Keith,” said Geneviève. “They’ve done all right too.”
Susan took her hands away. Richard regretted it, but knew her touch couldn’t last. Everyone looked at the huge, liquefying snowgiant as he stood up and got dressed as best he could. Sharon Kellett would be inside that glacier. The others would be strewn around the fields.
This patch of Somerset would be better irrigated than the rest of Britain – for a few days.
“Who else turned up for the ice age?” Richard asked.
“There’s a knowledgeable little fellow you don’t need to meet just now,” said Geneviève. “He didn’t even waver, like some folks. Went straight to Leech. He’s inside the weather station. At the Manor House, Catriona has a whole tea party. Old friends and new. Including a strong contingent from the Other Side.”
“I can imagine.”
“Maureen Mountmain’s here,” she said, pointedly.
Richard was glad to be warned of that potential complication. Geneviève let the point stick with a needling glance.
“It was a ritual,” said Richard, knowing how weak the excuse was.
“It was still . . .” she mouthed the word “sex”.
Richard knew he was being ribbed. Now they were less doomed, they could start squabbling, gossiping and teasing again.
Leech came back.
“We’re invited to supper at the Manor House,” he said. “It’s only nine o’clock, would you believe it? You’ll have to make my excuses, I’m afraid. I have to get back to London. Things to do, people to buy. Give my best to Miss Kaye. Oh, Cleaver’s dead. Choked on his false teeth. Pity.”
The blotch on his forehead was already gone. Leech recovered quickly.
“See you soon,” he said, and walked away.
Richard knew an autopsy wouldn’t show anything conclusive. Professor Cleaver would be listed as another incidental casualty.
“I feel much warmer now he’s gone,” said Geneviève. “Didn’t he say something about supper?”
XIV
Most of the company had scurried back to their holes. Catriona was relieved to have them out of the house.
She sat in her drawing room. Paulette Michaelsmith was upstairs, tucked up and dreaming safely. Louise Teazle had walked home to the Hollow, her house on the moor. Geneviève was outside in the garden, with the young people. She was the last of the old ladies.
Ariadne had taken Rose with her. Mr Zed, round weal on his temple, didn’t even complain. The Undertakers were a spent force, but even in their prime they couldn’t have stood against an Elder of the Kind. Rose would be safe with Ariadne, and – more to the point – the world would be safe from her. Catriona assumed that Ariadne could pack Rose off to where she came from, just as – eighty years ago – Charles Beauregard sent Princess Cuckoo home. However, the Elder might choose to raise the creature who usually looked like a little girl as her own. At this stage of her life, Catriona doubted she’d live to find out. Charles wasn’t here. Edwin wasn’t here. At times, Catriona wondered if she were really here. She knew more ghosts than living people, and regretted the rasher statements made about spirits of the unquiet dead in books she had published in her long-ago youth. Occasionally, she welcomed the odd clanking chain or floating bed-sheet.
Maureen Mountmain, clearly torn, had wanted to stay and see Richard – she babbled a bit about having something to tell him – but Leech had ordered her to rally a party of Mr and Mrs Karabatsos, Myra Lark, Jago and leave. Jago, well on the way to replacing Rose as Catriona’s idea of the most frightening person on the planet, took a last look around the Manor House, as if thinking of moving in, and slid off into the evening with Maureen’s group. They wouldn’t be able to keep him for long. Jago had his own plans. Leech had picked up Sewell Head, too – though Catriona had looked over his file, and concluded it would take a lot to lure him out of his sweet shop and away from his books of quiz questions.
On the plus side, the Club had tentative gains. Susan Rodway and Jamie Chambers – the new Dr Shade! – were hardly clubbable in the old-fashioned sense, but Mycroft Holmes had founded the Diogenes Club as a club for the unclubbable. Even Keith Marion, in a reasonable percentage of his might-have-been selves, was inclined to the good – though finding a place for him was even more of a challenge. Geneviève reported that the Chambers Boy showed his father’s dark spark, tempered with a little more sympathy than habitually displayed by Jonathan Chambers. Derek Leech must want to sign up Dr Shade. The Shades wavered, leaning towards one side or the other according to circumstance or their various personalities. The boy could not be forced or wooed too strongly, for fear of driving him to the bad. Leech would not give up on such a potent Talent. There might even be a percentage in letting Jamie get close to Leech, putting the lad in the other camp for a while. Susan was reluctant to become a laboratory rat for David Cross or Myra Lark, but was too prodigious to let slip. Without her warm hands, Richard would not have lived through this cold spell. Susan needed help coping with her Talent, and had taken Catriona’s card. If Jamie could be a counter for Leech, Susan was possibly their best hope of matching Jago. It chilled Catriona that she could even consider sending a girl barely in her twenties up against an Effective Talent like Anthony Jago, but no one else was left to make the decisions.
She was thinking like Edwin now, or even Mycroft. The Diogenes Club, or whatever stood in its stead, had to play a long game. She had been a girl younger than Susan or Jamie when this started for her. The rector’s daughter, not the lady of the manor. At eighteen, with Edwin away at the front, she had been escorted by Charles to Mycroft’s funeral. That had been a changing of the guard. Some of the famous names and faces of generations before her own seemed like dinosaurs and relics in her eyes. Even Mycroft’s famous brother was a bright-eyed old gaffer with a beaky nose, fingers bandaged from bee-stings and yellow teeth from decades of three-pipe problems. Richard Riddle had been there, with his uncle and aunt. In his RFC uniform and jaunty eye-patch, the former boy detective was impossibly glamorous to her. She had a better idea than most where he had flown to in 1934, and still expected him to turn up again, with his chums Vi and Ernie.
Charles had pointed out Inspector Henry Mist, Thomas Carnacki, Sir Henry Merrivale, Winston Churchill, General Hector Tarr, John Silence, Sir Michael Calme, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, Margery Device, the Keeper of the Ravens, and others. Now, Catriona knew Geneviève had been there too, spying through blue lenses from the edge of the crowd – Mycroft’s most secret secret agent and, contrary to the public record, the first Lady Member of the Diogenes Club. After all the fuss, Catriona turned out not to be the first of her sex to be admitted to the Inner Rooms – though she was the first woman to chair the Ruling Cabal.
It had been a busy sixty years. Angel Down, Irene Dobson, the Murder Mandarin, the
Seven Stars, the last flight of the Demon Ace, Spring-Heel’d Jack, Dien Ch’ing, the Splendid Six, Weezie’s Hauntings, the Rat Among the Ravens, the Crazy Gang, Parsifal le Gallois, the Water War, Adolf Hitler, Swastika Girl, the Malvern Mystery, the Scotch Streak, the Trouble with Titan, Castle De’ath, the Drache Development, Paulette’s dream, the Soho Golem, the Ghoul Crisis, the Missing Mythwrhn, and so many others. And now the Cold. There was more to come, she knew. Richard Jeperson’s work wasn’t done. Her work wasn’t done. The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club remained open.
She felt a whisper against her cheek.
XV
The garden was Disneyfied: white pools of melting ice, nightbirds singing. Light spilled onto the lawns from the upstairs windows of the Manor House. Glints reflected in dwindling icicles. Jamie saw activity streaks in the shadows. With the Cold drawn in, the land was healing.
No one had to worry about World Cooling any more.
Richard Jeperson, the Man from the Diogenes Club, tried to explain what he had done. It boiled down to getting the attention of a vast, unknowable creature and asking it very nicely not to wipe out all lifeforms that needed a temperature above freezing to survive. Jamie realized how lucky they had been. Only someone who could ask very politely and tactfully would have got a result. A few bumps the other way, along one of Keith’s paths, and it could have been Derek Leech under the snow . . .
Leech had left Jamie his card, and he hadn’t thrown it away.
Many of the people drawn to the Winter War had melted away like the ice. Some were sleeping over in the house. Jamie’s van was parked next to Richard’s ShadowShark in the drive.
He sat on a white filigree lawn-chair, drinking black coffee from an electric pot. The hostess, an elderly lady who had not joined them outside, provided a pretty fair scratch supper for the survivors and their hangers-on. Now, there were wafer-thin mints. Gené was in a lawn-swing, drinking something red and steaming that wasn’t tomato soup. Richard, still glowing with whatever Susan had fed into him, smoked a fat, hand-rolled cigarette that wasn’t a joint but wasn’t tobacco either. Considering what he’d done, Jamie reckoned he could demand that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister hand-deliver an ounce of Jamaican, the Crown Jewels and Princess Margaret dressed up in a St Trinian’s uniform to his room within the next half-hour and expect an answer of “right away, sir”.
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