He walked back along the river, back toward the busy road where he had left his van, trying not to look at the river as he went.

Behind him the man in white opened the parcel. In it was a crown ‑a circlet of white metal, set with diamonds. He gazed at it for some seconds, with satisfaction, then put it on. It glinted in the light of the rising sun. Then the tarnish, which had begun to suffuse its silver surface when his fingers touched it, spread to cover it completely; and the crown went black.

White stood up. There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises. It looked like someone had set fire to the sky.

And a careless match would have set fire to the river, but, alas, there was no time for that now. In his mind he knew where the Four Of Them would be meeting, and when, and he was going to have to hurry to be there by this afternoon.

Perhaps we will set fire to the sky, he thought. And he left that place, almost imperceptibly.

It was nearly time.

The delivery man had left his van on the grass verge by the dual carriageway. He walked around to the driver's side (carefully, because other cars and lorries were still rocketing around the bend), reached in through the open window, and took the schedule from the dashboard.

Only one more delivery to make, then.

He read the instructions on the delivery voucher carefully.

He read them again, paying particular attention to the address, and the message. The address was one word: Everywhere.

Then, with his leaking pen, he wrote a brief note to Maud, his wife. It read simply, I love you.

Then he put the schedule back on the dashboard, looked left, looked right, looked left again and began to walk purposefully across the road. He was halfway across when a German juggernaut came around the corner, its driver crazed on caffeine, little white pills, and EEC transport regulations.

He watched its receding bulk.

Cor, he thought, that one nearly had me.

Then he looked down at the gutter.

Oh, he thought.

YES, agreed a voice from behind his left shoulder, or at least from behind the memory of his left shoulder.

The delivery man turned, and looked, and saw. At first he couldn't find the words, couldn't find anything, and then the habits of a working lifetime took over and he said, "Message for you, sir."

FOR ME?

"Yes, sir." He wished he still had a throat. He could have swal­lowed, if he still had a throat. "No package, I'm afraid, Mister … uh, sir. It's a message."

DELIVER IT, THEN.

"It's this, sir. Ahem. Come and See."

FINALLY. There was a grin on its face, but then, given the face, there couldn't have been anything else.

THANK YOU, it continued. I MUST COMMEND YOUR DE­VOTION TO DUTY.

"Sir?" The late delivery man was falling through a gray mist, and all he could see were two spots of blue, that might have been eyes, and might been distant stars.

DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death, JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.

The delivery man had a brief moment to wonder whether his new companion was making a joke, and to decide that he wasn't; and then there was nothing.

– – -

Red sky in the morning. It was going to rain.

Yes.

– – -

Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell stood back with his head on one side. "Right, then," he said. "Ye're all ready. Hae ye' got it all?"

"Yes, sir."

"Pendulum o' discovery?"

"Pendulum of discovery, yes." "Thumbscrew?"

Newt swallowed, and patted a pocket. "Thumbscrew," he said.

"Firelighters?"

"I really think, Sergeant, that‑"

"Firelighters?"

"Firelighters," said Newt sadly. "And matches."

[28]

"Bell, book, and candle?"

Newt patted another pocket. It contained a paper bag inside which was a small bell, of the sort that maddens budgerigars, a pink candle of the birthday cake persuasion, and a tiny book called Prayers for Little Hands. Shadwell had impressed upon him that, although witches were the pri­mary target, a good Witchfinder should never pass up the chance to do a quick exorcism, and should have his field kit with him at all times.

"Bell, book, and candle," said Newt.

"Pin?"

"Pin."

"Good lad. Never forget yer pin. It's the bayonet in yer artillery o' light."

Shadwell stood back. Newt noticed with amazement that the old man's eyes had misted over.

"I wish I was goin' with ye," he said. "O' course, this won't be anything, but it'd be good to get out and about again. It's a tryin' life, ye ken, all this lyin' in the wet bracken spying on their devilish dancin'. It gets into yer bones somethin' cruel."

He straightened up, and saluted.

"Off ye go, then, Private Pulsifer. May the armies o' glorification march wi' ye."

After Newt had driven off Shadwell thought of something, some­thing that he'd never had the chance to do before. What he needed now was a pin. Not a military issue pin, witches, for the use of. Just an ordinary pin, such as you might stick in a map.

The map was on the wall. It was old. It didn't show Milton Keynes. It didn't show Harlow. It barely showed Manchester and Birmingham. It had been the army's HQ map for three hundred years. There were a few pins in it still, mainly in Yorkshire and Lancashire and a few in Essex, but they were almost rusted through. Elsewhere, mere brown stubs indicated the distant mission of along‑ago witchfinder.

Shadwell finally found a pin among the debris in an ashtray. He breathed on it, polished it to a shine, squinted at the map until he located Tadfield, and triumphantly rammed the pin home.

It gleamed.

Shadwell took a step backward, and saluted again. There were tears in his eyes.

Then he did a smart about turn and saluted the display cabinet. It was old and battered and the glass was broken but in a way it was the WA. It contained the Regimental silver (the Interbattalion Golf Trophy, not competed for, alas, in seventy years); it contained the patent muzzle‑load­ing Thundergun of Witchfinder‑Colonel Ye‑Shall‑Not‑Eat‑Any‑Living­Thing‑With‑The‑Blood‑ Neither‑Shall‑Ye‑Use‑Enchantment‑ Nor‑Ob­serve‑Times Dalrymple; it contained a display of what were apparently walnuts but were in reality a collection of shrunken headhunter heads donated by Witchfinder CSM Horace "Get them afore they Get You" Narker, who'd travelled widely in foreign parts; it contained memories.

Shadwell blew his nose, noisily, on his sleeve.

Then he opened a tin of condensed milk for breakfast.

– – -

If the armies of glorification had tried to march with Newt, bits of them would have dropped off. This is because, apart from Newt and Shad­well, they had been dead for quite a long time.

It was a mistake to think of Shadwell (Newt never found out if he had a first name) as a lone nut.

It was just that all the others were dead, in most cases for several hundred years. Once the Army had been as big as it currently appeared in Shadwell's creatively edited bookkeeping. Newt had been surprised to find that the Witchfinder Army had antecedents as long and almost as bloody as its more mundane counterpart.