Some Mortal Engines Art...

A letter arrived recently from Sam Cooke, who's a big Mortal Engines fan (and already a very good writer himself). He included some of his drawings of Mortal Engines characters, and of some lego constructions. I haven't had much cause to think about Mortal Engines recently, but it's great to see that it's still inspiring readers to make and draw things. Thanks, Sam!

Hester, Tom, Valentine ...and a nude Shrike : o

Mortal Engines at Blackawton

A few weeks ago I visited Blackawton Primary School in South Devon, where Class 5 have been doing a lot of project work themed around Mortal Engines. In fact, they've even built their own Traction City, in an alcove outside the classroom. It comes complete with circling airships and working turd-tanks...

London

A tour of the Turd Tanks

Those Turd Tanks in full...

Airships!

And here's me, having a quiet nap beside a life-size model of Mr Shrike.

The class had also been asked to come up with brochures that would persuade Londoners to move to Batmunkh Gompa. This one is by Charlie Benns.

It was a great example of how a book can be used to inspire work across the whole curriculum. Huge thanks to all the children for such hard work, and to Mr Pether, Mrs Rodwell-Lynn and all the rest of the staff at Blackawton for inviting me along to see it.

Back on the Moor

After a week spent running around Manchester and London like a blue-lipsticked fly, it was nice to get back to Dartmoor. Sometimes it's easy to forget that the main reason I started illustrating and writing books was so that I could live here...

Back in the early '90s when Sarah and I still lived in Brighton, we only used to get one week per year on the moor. It was usually the third or fourth week in September, and we always used to stay in the same place, at Wooder Manor, just outside Widecombe, where farmers William and Angela Bell have converted some of their outbuildings into cosy holiday lets. (If you ever think of exploring Dartmoor for yourself, Wooder is an excellent base.)

Photo: woodermanor.com

We were staying there when I started writing Mortal Engines, and when I needed a family name for my hero I just looked out of the window, and called him after nearby Natsworthy*, where a line of grand old beech trees comes down to the road.

But eventually we got tired of going home after our holidays, so I started illustrating full-time so that we could move here (I can't drive, so if I was going to live in the country, I had to have a job that I could do from home)**. We've lived on the moor for almost sixteen years now, and for the past seven we've been William and Angela's neighbours, just across the valley from Wooder.

Last night Sam was on a sleepover with some friends, so Sarah and I had the rare chance to go for an evening walk together.  We left the car at Natsworthy and walked up over Hameldown to the ancient settlement at Grimspound. Here are a few pictures which I snapped on my phone...

Someone had pitched a tent in the circle of the old wall at Grimpsound, which must be a wonderful place to camp, but in this picture I've carefully positioned Sarah to block it out.

Hookney Tor catching some low evening sunbeams.

Not a menhir, I think, just an old gatepost in a fallen wall.

...and here's a rather better one which Sarah took with her camera (she's a proper photographer). 

Photo: Sarah Reeve

*Actually, now I know the lie of the land a bit better, I don't think you can see Natsworthy from Wooder Manor - it must have been some other line of trees that I was looking at. But I thought it was Natsworthy.

** Or I could have LEARNED TO DRIVE, I suppose - for some reason I never thought of that.

Wargaming the Traction Era

A few weeks ago, while I was looking for some images of Mortal Engines online to illustrate an upcoming event, I happened across this blog by Xander Warren, in which he muses about how the Mortal Engines and Fever Crumb books could be used as a scenario for wargames. I've mentioned elsewhere that some of the first stories I ever wrote were wargames scenarios, and the big set-piece battle in Scrivener's Moon certainly owes something to fond memories of laying out Napoleonic armies all over my bedroom floor, so it's nice to see it all coming full circle! Apparently Xander's project never got off the ground, but is still on his 'to do' list. I hope to be able to post more links and photos here if it ever gets up and running. In the meantime, there is plenty of reading (and some nicely painted figures) here.

And while we're on the subject, over at the Lead Adventure Forum, someone called MuddyPaw has been painting 28mm figures based on Hester Shaw and Anna Fang...

The same trawl of Google Images also threw up a Fever Crumb illustration which I've never seen before, by an artist called Erysium. It's a picture of my favourite part of Scrivener's Moon; the journey that Fever, Cluny and Marten make by mammoth down the Longshore. I love the golden light in this, and the strange, feather-like plants. (And the mammoths, of course!)

Lego Cities on the Move

Here's a blog I've been meaning to write for ages, but haven't found the time.  Three completely separate Mortal Engines inspired Lego designs.  Here's one by Thomas Knight. It's 'Grimy and nasty to live on for the people working at the bottom, but decadent for the literal upper class. They even have a full ballroom.' Which sounds about right. Further details here.

Thomas Knight

And here's a detailed design for an entire Traction London by 'KDRCG'  (who did get in touch via Twitter to tell me about it, but I'm afraid I can't find their message - sorry KDRCG: if you'd like to be credited by another name here, leave a comment below and I'll change this). Many more pictures and a full explanation at the link.

KDRCG

And finally, Kirstine Roberts also Tweeted me with this array of Lego cities (and an entire, bijou Lego 'America or Canida'!) I'm not sure who the builder is, but the World of Mortal Engines salutes you!

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Whatever Happened to Arlo Thursday?

Artwork: David Wyatt

I'd still love to write a fourth Fever Crumb book some day - I always intended that her adventures would form a quartet to balance the Mortal Engines books. I did scribble a few chapters down back in 2011, as soon as I'd finished Scrivener's Moon.

My idea then was that 'Fever 4 'would interweave three different plots. One would be about Fever's ongoing trials and travels in the north (where the Oakwall settlement won't last another winter, and the motorisation of London has led to all sorts of upheavals among the nomad armoured columns). The second would be about London itself, and the resistible rise of Charley Shallow. The third would be set in South America, and explore the origins of the Air Trade.  Presumably these strands would have to join together somehow in the middle part of the book, but I don't like to plan books too far ahead, and I never wrote that far.

What follows is the rough opening chapter of Fever 4. Whether it will still be the opening chapter if the book is ever completed, I have no idea - I tend to abandon a lot of material as I go along. It might change a lot, or I might decide to lose it all together and convey the same information in a few lines of dialogue instead.

It's taken straight from the notebook, not properly edited, and proof-read only by me (readers of this blog will have realised by now that I'm a useless proof-reader). But I thought it was worth posting because it does answer one question that I'm asked by people who have read A Web of Air - what became of Arlo Thursday, and will he ever return?

Artwork: David Wyatt

Arlo on the Beach

“Arlo!” Arlo!” called the birds, soaring over the surf.  Reflections of their white wings rushed across the mirrors of the beach, the shining low-tide sand.  Wing-shadows flicked over Arlo where he lay at the sea’s edge, the fine lacework of the breaking waves washing around him and over him, sand in his hair and his open mouth.  Each wave heaped more sand over him, then washed it away, rushing back to deeper water where the bigger breakers played with spars and barrels and the pale shattered planks that had been his cutter, the Jenny Haniver. 

“Arlo!” called the white birds.  “Arlo!”  

Some had landed on the sand, a little further up the beach, where tide-wrack lay strewn in long lines like turned swath.  They pecked at the sand, unearthing shells and insects, eating thoughtfully, trying to see if the snacks in this new land tasted as good as the snacks they’d left behind.  Arlo was their friend, but they were hungry. If he did not wake soon they would feel no guilt about snacking on him, too.

A few hopped closer, eyeing up Arlo's eyes.  The tide had retreated now. The little worn-out fans of surf which made it far enough up the beach to reach Arlo were no longer powerful enough to stir his limbs and give him the semblance of life.  One of the birds perched on his face and pecked at his earlobe, and still he did not stir.  

Before it could peck again a noise arose out of the line of dark trees behind the beach.  A jabbering and cackling that the birds had never heard before.  Panicked, they scrambled back into the sky, the beat of their big wings sounding like scattered applause above the steady thunder of the surf.  Arlo opened his eyes to see white feathers falling all around him.

He peeled his head out of the wet sand, raised one hand to finger his pecked ear.  For a little while he could not remember anything. Then, in a rush, the memory of the storm returned; the three-day blow he had struggled against while sails ripped and white water foamed across the deck, cursing his own folly at setting out to cross an ocean all alone in his small cutter.  When the mast went by the board and that last great wave broke over him he had assumed that he was dead, and had been too tired to care much.  But it seemed he had been closer to land by that time than he’d thought.  Unless he was a ghost and this the Sunless Country, he had survived - and this was not the Sunless Country, for the sun itself came up at that moment, rising out of the sea that he had crossed.  The noise from the treeline swelled to greet it; a chorus of parakeets and monkeys and the Mae Abaixo knew what else. They were all hooting and squawking and jibbering to welcome the new day as it dawned upon the shores of Nuevo Maya.

It was the birds, not Arlo, that drew the beachcombers down past the tideline that morning.  They had not seen birds like those before; ungainly birds with raggedy wings and too-big heads, whose cries sounded almost like words as they swooped and circled above that thing upon the sand.  Arlo, lying half asleep there, heard the voices drawing closer.  He felt their shadows fall across him. The beachcombers spoke a language that he did not know, but that was close enough to the language of his home for him to understand.

“It is driftwood, that’s all.”

“It’s not!  It’s a man!”

“It's a dead man!’

Arlo turned his head and opened his eyes.  “Ai!” cried the beachcombers, skittering backwards, semaphoring complex signs to ward off evil.  They were mostly children; half naked, copper coloured.  There was one older than the rest; a short, stocky young woman, who seemed to be in charge.  Arlo did his best to smile at her, salt and sand flaking from the creases of his face.  He did his best to rise, but he was too weak; too battered; he could barely move.

The young woman was called Ixchel, and she was as frightened as the children, although for their sake she was determined not to let it show.  The birds unnerved her, swooping and circling with their strange, half-human cries.  The low sun made rainbows on the spray that was blowing across the beach, and Ixchel remembered how, in the stories, there was a paradise in the eastern sea where the sun god Kinich Ahua lived as a beautiful young man, with magical birds as his messengers.  For a trembly moment she imagined that this was Him, cast ashore by last night’s storm.  Then she shook herself, and told herself not to be so foolish; Kinich Ahua would not let himself get shipwrecked; he could just ask the storm-god Hu’raqun to calm the winds and waves.  Anyway, Ixchel lived among boatbuilders, and she knew that the wreckage strewn along the beach that morning had been some old ship, not the sun god’s magical canoe.

“He is not driftwood, and he is not dead,” she said, speaking to the children behind her without taking her eyes from the young castaway’s.  “He is nothing to be afraid of.  We must help him.” 

The children made a game of it.  They scrambled up the beach to fetch big branches from the tideline, tough green leaves the size of coffin lids from the trees beyond.  They laughed and chattered as they worked, making a sort of stretcher, and when it was finished they argued about who was to have the honour of carrying the driftwood man.

In the end they all did, rolling him onto the stretcher and lifting him onto their small shoulders, up the beach and along paths which snaked between the enormous, brooding trees.  Arlo’s home island had no forests, so he was not sure what to make of this one. With its green light and towering trunks it reminded him of nothing so much as the Temple of the Mae Abaixo back in Mayda.  Slipping into uneasy sleeps, he half imagined that he was under the sea: he had drowned after all, and this was the Garden of the Mother Below.  But the girl Ixchel was too plain and sturdy to be a sea-nymph, and she kept waking him, holding his hand and talking loudly to him, sometimes in the language he half-understood which sounded so much like Old Maydan, and sometimes in another that he did not know, all hard cracking ‘k’s and strange shushing noises; dry twigs in a stream.

They climbed a hill, and came out of the tree-shadow into hot morning sun.  Fields of maize, summer gold against the brooding darkness of the forests.  Houses perched on stilts, painted in gaudy colours: red, pink, blue, gold.  Pigs were grubbing in wattle pens.  Parrots perched on the roof-beams.  Wayside shrines were carved with the fearsome faces of strange gods and spirits.  The gods had long noses and big mouths and almond eyes, the same features as Ixchel and the children and the people who left off their work in the fields and came hurrying to stare at him as he was carried past; to stare, and then to ask questions and offer advice, a rising babble of voices, with Ixchel’s in the midst of it repeating, “Maa!  Maa!”

Ahead, above the painted houses, white against the trees , a pyramid rose in three high steps, with a stairway leading up it, and on its summit stains and streaks of something rusty, and the squabbling of carrion birds.  Arlo thought, I am in the empire of the Nuevo Maya, and they are going to cut out my heart and gift it to their gods.  And he did not feel afraid, but disappointed, because it seemed an awfully long to have come just for that. 

The Nuevo Maya had arisen many centuries before, when the world lay wrapped in night and winter after the dreadful happenings which people in Europa called The Downsizing and people on this continent thought of as The Day The Sky Collapsed.  Realising that the ways of the Ancients, with their cars and flying machines, had called down the anger of the gods upon poor humankind, the ancestors of the Nuevo Maya had looked back deeper into their past, to the old empires of the Aztec and the Inca, the Toltecs, Mixtecs and Maya.  Many of the lands which those empires had ruled were gone - the isthmus which had once joined North and South America had been obliterated when the sky fell - but, from the fragments of history and memory which survived, the Nuevo Maya were able to cobble together a new civilization, powerful enough that, by Arlo’s time, it had spread from the shores of the Caribbean all the way to the snows of Paraguay.   The old gods they worshipped had been good to them, which seemed like clear proof that they’d been right to resurrect them.  At first, it was true, the gods had demanded human sacrifice. Thousands of captives from the wars which broke out along the empire's ever-lengthening borders had been brought in chains to Nuevo Teoticuahuan to have their beating hearts cut out by priests with blast glass knives.  

But times change, and religions mellow.  Now only the Maize King went to meet the gods up the long stairway of the great ziggurat in Neo-Teo; a symbolic victim whose blood would keep the fields and mothers of the Nuevo Maya fertile for another year.  The people of Chiqana del Mar, the little harbour where Arlo Thursday had been cast ashore, did not welcome him into their town to become a sacrifice. They welcomed him because they were sailors and fisherfolk, and sailors and fisherfolk the world over look kindly on castaways. 

After all, they might become castaways themselves one day.

© Philip Reeve 2013

Artwork © David Wyatt, from his cover for A Web of Air, Scholastic, 2010

Airhaven

Here's some more splendidness from Jaekyung Jaguar Lee, who (if I have the time-zones right) has now graduated from his course at the Art Center School of Design in Pasadena.

One of the interesting things about Jaguar's Mortal Engines concept design project is that he has only read the first book, so he doesn't know any of the backstory and extra details which I developed in Predator's Gold, Infernal Devices, A Darkling Plain and the Fever Crumb series. His version of the development of Traction Cities, which I posted here a few days ago, isn't quite the same as my version, with the Nomad Empires and their motorised castles inspiring the development of London. And his version of Airhaven has a different history, too, which results in a rather different looking structure from the one I described in the book. Jaguar says that he imagined the people of Airhaven didn't have the technology to float their entire city, so they modularised it and got the various bits airborne one by one.

As with many of the images he's shown me, I don't mind admitting that his version is much more visually interesting than mine.

Here are three of his sketches and one big, breathtaking painting (which you can click to enlarge). The text is the 'official' history of Airhaven as recounted by Jeremy Levett and I in our patchily-available e-book The Traction Codex.

AIRHAVEN

Airhaven was a flying town at which airships from all over the world could dock to trade, provision and refuel. It inhabited a curious middle-ground in the long feud between Traction and Anti-Traction, enjoying friendly relations with all both the League and the major towns and cities of the Hunting Ground; although very definitely a mobile city, it was not technically a Traction City and caused no damage; its existence was thus not an affront to Anti-Tractionists.

It began as one of many caravanserais built among the high passes of the Shatterlands to cater to airships making the journey from the Middle Sea to the Hunting Ground. As the air-trade developed, these competing caravanserais moved further and further up the mountainsides (air-traders always preferred to anchor at the highest ones rather than waste gas, fuel and time descending to those at lower levels). This stepping-stone contest of climbing hill-towns went on for many decades, and did not stop when the caravanserais eventually ran out of mountain; they attached gas-balloons and large tethers so that their establishments could actually hang in the sky above their mountaintops, to be hauled down to safety in poor weather. Airhaven was the first to take this process to its logical conclusion by attaching engines and cutting its tethers, becoming, in effect, a gigantic, slow-moving airship. 

 A number of other towns followed its lead, including Kipperhawk and Stratosphereham, but by 1000 TE Airhaven was the only one left, the others having variously drifted into volcanic ash-clouds, crashed or found themselves undone by the unfortunate combination of flammable gasbags and drunken Tractionist-versus-Anti-Tractionist gunfights.

All images © Jaekyung Jaguar Lee

In the Bleak Midwinter

I've not written much about Mortal Engines on the blog this year - mainly because I've been busy reinventing myself as one half of Reeve and McIntyre and trying to help Sarah McIntyre and our brilliant publishers at OUP to publicise our first book together, Oliver and the Seawigs (available at all good bookshops, and 'a fun-packed delight' according to the Daily Telegraph.)

But, inspired by the brilliant paintings which Jaguar Lee has been sending me (like these and these, and the one above), I've decided that this is officially MORTAL ENGINES WEEK.

There will be more Jaguar Lee tomorrow in a post about Airhaven, and on Saturday I'll post a little snippet from my notes for Fever Crumb 4.

But first, since it's Christmas, I thought I'd re-post the festive Mortal Engines story which I wrote, and Sarah McIntyre illustrated, two years ago...

Shrike was dead: to begin with.  Dead as a doornail.  The girl had known that since she first saw his stark, white, armoured face staring down at her.  But thanks to the machineries and miracles the old-time folk had stuffed his carcass with, he could still move faster than her. She had to trot to keep up with him as he strode up the steep western face of the bluff.  Snow lay deep there, scrunching and squeaking under her boot-heels as she stumbled along in the old Stalker’s tracks.  As long as she kept setting her feet down in the deep prints he’d left she could manage; each time she strayed off his path she found herself floundering thigh-deep in drifts.

They’d been on a long trip, Shrike and the girl.  They’d been hunting a fugitive named Lardy Ampersand who’d robbed a bank aboard the traction town of Twyne.  Ampersand had fled into the Out Country, and the mayor of Twyne hadn’t bothered sending good men after him.  He just called in Shrike, the best and most feared of all the bounty killers, and Shrike had tracked the robber half way to the Westersea, with the girl following.  Now they were heading back to Twyne with Lardy’s head in a bag slung from Shrike’s belt.  For the first few miles of their hike the bag had seeped and dripped, leaving red splotches like a trail of poppies on the snow.  The blood had long since dried or frozen, though.  Twyne had moved on, and Shrike and the girl had been following its wheel-marks for a week.

The day was fading now.  A lavender twilight lay over the snowfields, and the air was sharp.  Above the hill’s curve a big planet shone, or maybe it was one of those left-over space-castles from the olden times.  The girl had stopped feeling her feet a long way back, but deep in her pockets her clenched hands burned cold.  Her face hurt too, but then her face hurt always. It was barely a face at all, riven in two by some dreadful blow - she did not remember the circumstances - which had left her with one eye, no nose to speak of, and a twisted mouth which was having to learn new ways to eat, and drink, and make words.

The girl’s name was Hester.  Shrike had found her that summer, washed up with the weed and driftwood on some Westersea beach.  Nobody knew why he had taken her in, least of all Shrike himself, a stone-cold killer with weirdy old-tech whirring and glowing where his heart should be.  Something about that ruined, thrown-away child had touched him.  He’d untangled her from the sea-wrack and kept her with him ever since.

He reached the top of the bluff and stopped there.  Hester caught up with him.  She stood at his side and looked east, and there was Twyne, rumbling away from them across the frozen marshes with long black bundles of exhaust smoke blowing sideways from its stacks like lumpy pennants.  It was moving slow, but not so slow that Hester could catch it without running.  She sagged at the thought of running, the weariness of her long walk coming down on her like a weight.

Shrike sensed it.  He turned, and the green beams from his headlamp eyes lit up her face.  He was not used to thinking about anyone but himself.  He forgot sometimes the girl had muscles in her legs instead of pistons.  He reached out his metal hands and lifted her, setting her on his wide iron shoulders.  Hester grabbed hold of the ducts and flexes on his armoured skull as he set off again, striding along at an improbable pace which made the frozen head of Ampersand go bomp, bomp, bomp against his hip.  The chimneyed smudge of Twyne started to resolve itself into houses and factories; two decks, with the big, clawed, barrel wheels turning beneath.  Soon Hester made out individual windows, and in each window was a warm glow and pinprick points of light a-twinkling.  The glow and the lights put her in mind of something.  She could not say what it was because most of her memories had spilled when her face was broken, but she stared at those lights and felt the memories brushing past her like big fish circling in the sea’s depths, just out of sight.

Shrike caught up with the town and strode into the din and dark between its rumbling wheels.  No lights down here, unless you counted the slivers of furnace-glow showing through chinks in the deck-plates.  But the old Stalker could see in the dark, and knew his way around the underside of towns.  He found an access ladder, and Hester held on tight while he scrambled up it, punched open a locked hatch, and emerged into the streets of Twyne. 

It was quiet up there.  Just a few passers by to stare at the Stalker and his shadow as they went up and aft towards the Town Hall.  Singing came from taverns and the temple of Peripatetia.  In every window candles burned, and tinsel stars hung.  In the snowy square in front of the Town Hall a whole tall pine tree stood, fresh cut, held roughly upright by four creaking guy-ropes, swaying with the town’s movements.  Little electric lamps burned among its branches, and strands of glittering stuff were wrapped around it.

“Winter festival,” said Hester.

Shrike looked down at her.  She didn’t often say much, and he didn’t often listen, but something had stirred his memories too.  He’d been making his way among the towns and cities of the world since before towns and cities learned to move, and it hadn’t escaped his notice that some decked themselves in lights and greenery every twelvemonth.  It had just never occurred to him before to wonder why.

Hester wiped frost from a window and peered in.  She saw holly branches; paper chains; candles burning on a shrine to household gods.  She said, “I remember when I was little...  Every year...  Roast chestnuts and stories by the fire.  Presents too.  The old Winterdad in his red coat, carryin’ his sack of presents for good children...”

And somehow Shrike remembered those things too.  Snatches of memories from long ago; candles and stories, the excitement of children.  

Now he stood in the snow in front of Twyne Town Hall, his old dark coat flapping around him, the stained bag weighty in his steel hand. 

A door opened with a sudden crash, as if kicked.  Lamplight lapped at Shrike’s toes.  In the doorway stood Twyne’s mayor.  Two other men stood with him, goggled and body-armoured, clutching shiny guns.

Shrike upended his sack.  The robber’s head fell into the snow like a dropped cabbage.  The mayor of Twyne looked down at it, and nodded.

“Nice job,” he said.  

“He needs payin‘ now,” said Hester.  She’d noticed that Shrike didn’t always stay around to collect the bounty once a job was done.  To be fair, he hadn’t much to spend the blood-money on; he didn’t care about clothes or a place to live, and she’d never seen him eat.  She hungered though; she needed clothes on her back and a roof over her.  So she always made sure he got paid.  “Ten gold ones,” she said, tugging her scarf up to hide her face. “That’s what you promised, for Ampersand’s head.”

“Ah...” said the mayor.  Pilbeam was his name, and he at least had the decency to look ashamed.  “Stuff’s changed, since I set you after Ampersand.  These gents...” (He indicated the men who stood on either side of him, the tree-lights starry in their goggles.) “They work for the Shkin Corporation; a big slaving company from down south.  Seems they provide fighters for the Nuevo Mayan circuses and they’re after new attractions.  They’d dearly love a Stalker, so they asked if they could have a word with you when you got back here, Mr Shrike, and I said...”

“I AM NOT AN ATTRACTION,” said Shrike, in a voice like a city changing its rusty gears.  His hands stayed at his sides, but his fingers all grew sharp, bright blades, like icicles. He said, “SHKIN’S MEN HAVE ASKED ME TO APPEAR IN THESE CIRCUSES BEFORE.  I TOLD THEM NO.”

“Well this time we ain’t asking,” said one of the slavers, and both together raised their silvery guns and pulled the triggers.

Lightning arced across the square and crackled against Shrike’s armour.  He stumbled backwards, tinselled with sparks, eyes flickering.  “Now!” shouted Mayor Pilbeam.  Hester looked up and saw that there were other men on the front of the town hall, perching like trainee gargoyles on ledges and gutterings.  A weighted net spread as it fell, settling over the Stalker where he struggled, wrapped in electricity.

Hester had grown so used to the idea of Shrike as unstoppable that it had never occurred to her that she might one day be called upon to help him.  She ran through the jerking blue light, the stuttering shadows.  She drew her knife and hacked through one of the lines which held the pine tree up.  The men ignored her, advancing towards Shrike, playing the blue fire of their strange guns over him.  She hacked another.  That was enough.  The tree teetered.  She pressed her small body against its outer branches and its scratchy clouds of needles; shoved.  

The falling tree swept a couple of men off the front of the Town Hall.  It came down hard on Mayor Pilbeam and the men with the electric guns: curses, a crackle of splintering branches, the great trunk smashing them flat.  One of the guns exploded with a shear of blue light.

Shrike was recovering.  He shook himself, like a wet dog shaking off water.  He tore his way out of the net.  One of his eyes was on the fritz, flickering and buzzing like faulty neon till he smacked himself hard on the side of the head and it righted itself.  He listened for a moment to the faint groans that came from underneath the tree.  He dragged out the remaining gun and crushed it.  He did not thank Hester, just went into the Town Hall with her following.  

The building was full of running footsteps, cries.  No one was sure what happened in the square, but they all knew that the Stalker had triumphed despite those fancy electric weapons, and nobody wanted to stay and face him.  As Shrike and Hester went from room to room they sometimes glimpsed people scrambling for the exits or squeezing out of windows.  They found a big, dim room where a fire was burning and plates heaped with food waited on a long table.  Hester tried some pie, a cake.  Shrike spiked a chestnut on each of his finger-blades and stood by the fire.  “ONCE UPON A TIME,” he said, “THERE WAS THIS...  IT WAS...  THERE WAS A GIRL WITH A DOG, AND THE DOG WAS CALLED NOODLE POODLE.  AND THERE WAS...  THERE WAS...  ONCE...”

He was trying to tell a midwinter story, Hester realised, but he wasn’t very good at it.  She crammed more pie awkwardly into her awkward mouth and said, “How about, ‘Once upon a time there was these two people, and it was a cold, hard world they lived in, so they went about together, for company.  And one midwinter they found a good snug place to stay, and stuff to eat, and they were warm enough for a bit.  And it was good.’”

Shrike looked at her, and the lamps of his eyes flickered ever so slightly, and from his outstretched hands there came wafting a smell of roasted chestnuts.  

THE END...

...and a Merry Midwinter to us, one and all!

Illustrations © Sarah McIntyre