At such low temperatures, time and space and physics are subject to terrible pressure—ten yards might as well be a mile, a minute could be an hour. Ironside listened. There was some kind of mechanical noise coming from within the structure, sprockets engaged, a low purring noise, and underlying that was an essential human murmur—coughing, low voices— a crowd. But it was ahead of him by some distance, and as his hearing grew more acute, he heard a cleft made in the hard-packed snow directly to his rear. A crack. It’s so cold, sir, you can hear your spit crack when it hits the ground.

He rolled downward and left, bringing his firing arm out of his pocket, and aiming behind his fur-bulked form, shooting twice directly into the chest of a boy holding a pitchfork. The boy toppled over backward, pitchfork bouncing once against his forehead. Then all was still.

Ironside continued to breathe. There was a kind of reverberation up his right arm, and he looked at his pistol in amazement. What had he done? He tromped through the snow toward the boy, who looked to be about twelve or thirteen, dressed in the layers of wool and fur and mohair of any peasant.

There was blood on the snow, the moon rendering it black. Ironside had killed a child. I was defending myself, he thought, without consolation. The pitchfork, he thought. He might have been coming after me with the pitchfork, and that his mind would pathetically generate this defense in his own internal court of inquiry made hot tears form and freeze in his eyes.

The boy had a pitchfork. Someone had shot his horse with a crossbow.

The snow was a fossil record of shoe prints. Dozens of people had been here. The whole village?

He looked again toward the building that the noises had been coming from. There was still smoke atop the roof, and the whirring of small machinery, but the crowd inside had stilled. There were no windows, but a pair of doors at one end, and a cross mounted overhead. It was a church.

He threw the pitchfork down. He walked carefully, boots crunching, following the trail of shoe prints.

Thirty feet away, at the top of the hill, was a dead soldier. His coat and uniform and shoes were gone; he was in his drawers. The face had frozen into a grimace. A single bolt stuck out of his chest. His arms and legs had frozen into a posture of self-defense, and there were tripartite sets of wounds all over his body, for, after being shot with the crossbow, he had also been stabbed repeatedly with a pitchfork.

Ironside tried to close the man’s eyes, but the vitreous had frozen, as had the lids. He found the dog tags, and snapped one off, and pocketed it. He glanced at the face again and saw, in profile, the beaked nose, the lack of dignity.