4.

'Shadwell,' she said.

'No time to enjoy it,' Hamel remarked grimly. 'We've got to get back before they start to move out.'

'Move out?' she said. 'No, we mustn't do that. The Scourge is still here. It's in the hill.'

'No choice,' Hamel replied. 'The raptures are almost used up. See?'

They were within a few yards of the trees now, and there was indeed a smoky presence in the air; a hint of what was concealed behind the screen.

'No strength left,' Hamel said.

'Any sign of Cal?' she asked. 'Or Nimrod?'

He gave a short, dismissive shake of the head. They were gone, his look said, and not worth fretting for.

She glanced back at the hill, hoping for some sign that contradicted him, but there was no movement. Fog still held court at the summit; the upturned earth around it was still.

'Are you coming?' he wanted to know.

She followed him, her head throbbing, the first step taken through snow, the second through thicket. There was a child crying in the depths of the hideaway, its sobs inconsolable.

'See if you can keep her quiet, Hamel,' she said. 'But gently.'

'Are we going or aren't we?' he said.

'Yes,' she conceded. 'We have to. I just want to see Cal back first.'

There's no time,' he insisted.

'All right,' she said. 'I heard you. We'll go.' He grunted, and turned away from her. 'Hamel?' she called after him.

'What?'

Thank you for coming after me.'

'I want to be out of here,' he said plainly, and went in search of the sobbing, leaving her to return to the lookout post that offered the best view of the hill.

There were several Kind keeping watch there.

'Anything?' she asked one of them.

He didn't need to answer. A murmur amongst them drew her gaze to the hill.

The fog cloud was stirring. It was as if something in its midst had taken a vast breath, for the cloud folded upon itself, growing smaller and smaller, until the force that haunted it became visible.

Uriel had found the Salesman. Though it was Shadwell's body that stood in the mud of Rayment's Hill, the eyes burned with a seraphic light. From the purposeful way it surveyed the field there could be little doubt that the distraction which had made it mild had passed. The Angel was no longer lost in a remembered void. It knew both where it was and why. 'We've got to move!' she said. The children first.'

The order came not an instant too soon, for even as the message ran through the trees, and the fugitives began their last dash for safety, Uriel turned its murderous eyes on the field below Rayment's Hill, and the snow began to burn.

IV.

SYMMETRY.

1.

No trace of the route Cal had described across the field behind the hill was visible when he and Nimrod reached there; the blizzard had erased it. All they could do was guess at the path he would have followed, and dig in the vicinity in the hope of chancing upon the lost package. But it was nearly hopeless. His route to the hill had been far from direct - fatigue had made him reel and wander like a drunkard; and since then the wind had re-arranged the drifts so that in some places they were deep enough to bury a man upright.

The driving snow obscured the hill-top most of the time, so Cal could only guess at what was happening up there. What chance did anyone have of survival against Shadwell, and the Scourge?: little or none, probably. But then Suzanna had brought him out of the Gyre alive, hadn't she?, against all the odds. The thought of her on the hill, distracting Uriel's fatal gaze, made him dig with greater devotion to the task, without really believing they had a hope in hell of finding the jacket. Their digging steadily took he and Nimrod further apart, until Cal could no longer see his fellow searcher through the veil of snow. But at one point he heard the man cry out in alarm, and turned to see a flickering brightness in the wastes behind him. Something was burning on the hill. He started back towards it, but sense prevailed over heroics. If Suzanna was alive, then she was alive. If she was dead, he was wasting her sacrifice turning his back on the search.

As he began again, any pretence to a system in the work forgotten, the roaring in the hill began, climaxing in the din of erupting earth. This time he didn't look back, didn't try to pierce the veil for news of love; he simply dug, and dug, turning his grief into fuel for the task.

In his haste he almost lost the treasure in the act of finding it, his hands already covering the glimpse of paper before his distracted brain had registered what it was. When it did he began to dig like a terrier, shovelling snow behind him, not quite daring to believe he'd found the package. As he dug the wind brought a voice to him, then whipped it away again, a cry for help, somewhere in the wilderness. It wasn't Nimrod, so he kept digging. The voice came back. He looked up, narrowing his eyes against the onslaught. Was there somebody wading through the snow some way off from him? Like the voice, the sight came and went.

The package was just as evasive. But even as he was thinking he'd been mistaken, and there was nothing to find, his frozen fingers closed on the thing. As he pulled it from the drift the paper, which was almost mush, tore, and the contents fell in the snow. A box of cigars; some trinkets; and the jacket. He picked it up. If it had looked unremarkable at Gluck's house it looked more so now. He hoped somebody in the wood had a clue as to how to unleash its powers, because he certainly didn't.

He looked around for Nimrod, to give him the news, and saw two figures trudging towards him, one holding the other up. The bearer was Nimrod; the man he was helping - the same Cal had heard and glimpsed presumably - so swathed in protective clothing he was unrecognizable. Nimrod had seen the prize Cal had lifted up to show him, however, and was coaxing the man to pick up his speed, yelling something to Cal as he approached. The wind stole the words away, but he yelled them again as he came closer.

'Is this a friend of yours?'

The man he was all but carrying lifted his snow-encrusted face, and fumbled with the scarf that was wrapped around its lower half. Before he'd pulled it down, however, Cal said:

'Virgil?'

The scarf came away, and Gluck was looking up at him with a mixture of shame and triumph on his face in equal measure.

'Forgive me,' he said. 'I had to be here. I had to see.'

'If there's anything left to see,' Nimrod shouted over the din of the wind.

Cal looked back towards Rayment's Hill. Between the gusts it was apparent that the top of the hill had been entirely blown open. Over it a pall of smoke was rising, its underbelly lit by flames.

The wood...' he said. Forgetting Nimrod and Gluck, he began to plough through the snow, back towards the hill and what lay beyond.

2.

There was nothing arbitrary in the Scourge's attack. It was systematically destroying the field and the surrounding region in the knowledge that sooner or later its eyes would find the creatures whose proximity it smelt. In the trees there was an organized retreat; the children, accompanied by either guardians or parents, moving through to the rear of the wood and out into the open air. Few others moved, but stayed at their stations, preserving the integrity of their hiding place. Suzanna wasn't certain if this was defiance or fatalism; perhaps a little of both. But however deep they dug, their store of raptures was all but exhausted. It was a matter of seconds rather than minutes now before Uriel-in-Shadwell's glance reached the trees. When it did so the woods would burn, invisible or no.

Hamel was at Suzanna's side as she watched the Angel's approach.

'Are you coming?' he said.

'In a moment.'

'It's now or never.'

Maybe it would be never, then. She was so transfixed by the formidable power being unleashed in front of her, she couldn't avert her astonished gaze. It fascinated her that strength of this magnitude should be turned to the sordid business of atrocity; something was wrong with a reality that made that possible, and offered no cure for it, nor hope of cure.

'We have to go,' said Hamel.