They made their way up the thorny scarp, and entered a stretch of black-birch woodland. Thanks to the fog, the world had become a shrunken, myopic place. Unaided visibility was twenty metres. Stark and twisted black trees hemmed them in, gradually receding into the white vapour. The earth was hard, and groundcover leaves were brittle with frost. The obscured sun backlit the fog, turning the sky into a glowing white haze. Skoh spread the group into a wide line, but still close enough for every person to be visible at least to his immediate neighbour. Drusher stayed with Macks. There was an uncanny stillness, broken only by the sounds of their breathing and movement.

Drusher was bone-cold. Macks, wearing a quilted Arbites jacket, had lent him her fox-fur jacket, which he wore over his own weathercoat. His breath clouded the air.

‘Do you have a weapon?’ she asked.

He shook his head.

She slid a short-pattern autopistol out of an underarm rig, checked the load, and handed it to him grip first.

He looked at it uncertainly, as if it were some new specimen for collation. It had a brushed-matt finish and a black, rubberised grip.

‘The safety’s here, beside the trigger guard. If you have to fire it, hold it with both hands, and aim low because the kick lifts it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been a great one for guns.’

‘I’d feel better if you had something.’

‘You wouldn’t feel better if I shot you by accident, which is likely if you let me loose with something like that.’

She shrugged and put it away again.

‘Your funeral,’ she said.

‘I do hope not.’

They walked on another kilometre or two. Skoh and his hired hands had auspex units taped to their forearms, scanning for movement.

‘What was the time of death, do you reckon?’ Drusher asked.

Macks pursed her lips. ‘Four, four-thirty? The bodies had a residual core temperature.’

‘So three or four hours ago?’

The chance of anything still being around seemed very slim to Drusher. Given the Beast’s hit-and-run habits, it would be long gone by now. But the cold offered possibilities. It had set the soil hard and solid. Tracks might remain. Drusher kept his eyes on the ground.

They went across open fields, thick with rime, and along the basin of a wooded dell where the fallen leaves had frozen into a slippery mat. The fog was actually beginning to disperse, but down in the hollow it was as thick as smoke. Butcher birds, jet-black and armed with shiny hook-beaks, cawed, clacked and circled in the treetops.

Drusher suddenly heard an extraordinary noise. It sounded like an industrial riveter or a steam-powered loom. A puffing, pneumatic sputter interlaced with high-pitch squeals.

Macks started to run. Her vox-link crackled into life.

‘What is it?’ Drusher called, hurrying after her.