Chapter 14 : Calm Before the Storm

The faint sounds of "Slash and Burn" cut through the air to reach the Temple Of November bringing with them the first faint hopes of rescue to Peter and Cerylia. It had been a terrible night. With the Christmas Passage acting as a full time Gateway for Winter's Laws of Form the interior of the temple had become unbearably cold. The Proton King's agents now preferred to camp outside and had established a new base where the road reached the top of Claremont Crag. Of course, Colonel Frost and his ice warriors had no problem with the weather and positively relished the sub-zero conditions and frigid air which flowed into the Realm along with a steady stream of pale blue reinforcements.

The prisoners were left to endure the temple as best they could, the only consideration for their welfare being a rough horsehair blanket which Eryndra tossed in their general direction before leaving them to freeze. As the darkness fell and the temperature plummeted, Peter seriously wondered if they would survive the night.

Fortunately, the blanket was big enough to wrap around them both so that it provided some insulation from the frozen stone and the frosty air. Peter knew that they would lose a lot of heat through the ground and it was important to try and prevent it leaking away into the pitiless architecture of the temple. They huddled together for warmth and comfort, conserving their meagre supplies of mutual body heat and trying to trap an additional layer of air inside the blanket.

Under other circumstances Peter would have welcomed this intimacy with the woman he had fallen in love with, but the knowledge that they might die of exposure in the night, coupled with the fact that Kark was waiting for them in the morning did rather spoil it…

Still, for all that, it could have been worse. After all his threats, Kark seemed to have lost interest in them for the moment and since no interest from Kark was always to be preferred to any kind of interest at all, that was a small mercy. Peter still had a nagging feeling at the back of his mind that he had met Kark before and that there was something important he should remember about him. But he had no idea what it was.

The daylight was bright and sharp as it bounced off the icy surfaces inside the temple and it had all the harsh quality of Winter about it. No one had come to visit the prisoners and they'd had no food now since the scrambled rations they'd hurried to consume on the move yesterday lunch time. A couple of missed meals might not be too much of a problem normally but when you've been attacked by an ice warrior, beaten up by an experienced thug and thrown in a deep freezer all night it starts to seem more serious. Peter knew that the cold was the main thing preventing repeated pangs of hunger from getting a message through to the beleaguered crisis processing centres of his brain. That and the pain from his left leg which had flared up again this morning. It wasn't just that food would be nice. Soon it would be essential fuel to keep their body temperature up, whether the brain received the messages of hunger or not…

Peter wondered whether he should try to break the chain or the hook again but he got the feeling Jepson's threat to tie them up was a serious one. It was too risky to be caught trying that again when one of the Agents might come into the temple at any minute.

He was worried about Cerylia, too. They were sitting upright trying to keep their backs away from the wall because it was another source of heat loss. Cerylia was withdrawn and pale and she'd hardly said a word since waking. She was shivering badly although she did manage to control her breathing a little when he put his arm round her for sympathy and warmth.

"How's your arm?" he asked her.

"I don’t know," she replied with a faint spark of humour. "It’s hard to tell when the rest of me feels so rotten. I can still feel it though. That has to be a good sign, doesn’t it?"

"The Count will get us out of here," Peter said more confidently than he felt.

"Yeah, sure," Cerylia said distractedly, but he could tell she didn’t believe him.

The reason why Kark had 'lost interest' in the prisoners was simply that Colonel Frost had other tasks for him, for Tarragon and indeed for all the Proton King's supporters in this Realm. He wanted them to direct parts of his ice army. Despite the Colonel's outward confidence there was a problem with the invasion. The problem was that in the last two days, parts of the Winter Realm had themselves come under threat from a mysterious black force which had established a foothold on the Great Bleak Plain. As yet, he was the only one in the Autumn Country to be aware of this worrying development and he had no intention of revealing it to these dubious Agent allies whom he frankly despised as fickle and untrustworthy. No one seemed to understand the nature of the force attacking the Winter County, and that included the Proton King who usually had a shrewd grasp of politics. The Generals in the Winter Army saw the defence of their own Realm as a priority over any invasion. All the best officers had been diverted into this defence, leaving Colonel Frost unexpectedly short of support. Now he was trying to run the invasion almost single handed and against an enemy who should have been caught unawares but had turned out to be ready for him. Fortunately there was no shortage of ice warriors. The Proton King was personally ensuring that he received a continuous stream of deadly shock troops. The problem was that the ice warriors were only basic automata without a good guiding intelligence. Oh, they could manage to defend themselves and recognise friend and foe and perhaps follow a few simple programs but they couldn't cope with the complexities of a decent military strategy. The accepted way of dealing with this was to feed the orders through the ice captains who would relay it on to their warriors. The ice captains were a little taller, a little colder and a little smarter than the ordinary warriors. Still not smart enough to run a campaign but smart enough to co-ordinate a few of their subordinates. When each ice captain was in turn controlled by a proper sentient officer the Winter Army was ferociously effective. Without that degree of control it was a mindless mechanical monster which could thrash about in a nasty enough way but which would be easily defeated by any opposing general who had a jot of tactical intelligence.

Colonel Frost needed to pour some basic intelligence into his army and he was in no position to dictate where it came from. The Agents would have to do. So he'd begin to train them in the techniques for establishing mental links with the ice captains. He hated the idea but of course he'd put the best face on it that he could and he tried to make it sound like it had always been a part of his plans. He didn’t want to show any signs of weakness in front of these double-dealing scum.

Kark had already shown considerable aptitude for the task and the Colonel was pleased with the way he'd used ice warriors to capture Peter and Cerylia. But handling a five way link with five ice captains to direct a company of twenty or more warriors in battle was a whole order of magnitude more difficult than instructing two warriors to retrieve a couple of fleeing Agents. And that was the level of skill which Colonel Frost needed all his conscripted officers to be able to achieve.

There were more than two hundred ice warriors at his disposal now. Properly controlled they should be able to annihilate the rabble of gnomes and men who were gathering to oppose him. He alone was capable of directing more than a hundred warriors through twenty captains, but that was an ability which could only be achieved by a native of the Winter Country after many stanzas in the service of the army. He only needed the Agents to direct twenty warriors each - that was all - but he knew it would be at the limits of their ability. So he kept his forces close at hand under the Claremont Crag, although he had hoped to be forging forward by this stage. And he spent hours at a time drilling the Agents in controlling the ice army. Ultimately, he made it clear, they would be under his authority and they would answer to him if they failed. He expected obedience and intelligence in the direction of the warriors. He expected them to manage basic manoeuvres flawlessly. Even Kark and Eryndra was a little cowed by the Colonel's authority because they knew it came directly from the Proton King and the Proton King was not a Power to offend. So they worked away, practising at the difficult discipline of telepresence until Tarragon (who had the worst time of it) thought the blood would burst from his temples.

They were still practising when Count Arcturus attacked.