The figures were massive. Their torsos were hugely bulky, and their fists were like pincers. Their eyes flashed red in the uncanny gloom.

Their breathing sounded like punctured bellows: long, wet, fluttering sounds.

‘Turns out my hunch was right,’ said the Doctor, though he didn’t sound at all pleased to be vindicated.

‘What are they?’ asked Amy.

‘They’re unguidely!’ Samewell cried.

‘Get down!’ the Doctor ordered.

‘What are they?’ Amy asked again instead of getting down.

‘Oh, get down!’

‘What are they?’ Amy repeated.

‘They’re Ice Warriors,’ said the Doctor.

Chapter

8

Certain Poor Shepherds

in Fields as They Lay

Amy looked at him blankly. ‘Should I know what that means?’ she asked.

‘No!’ exclaimed the Doctor. ‘But the basic principles of “Get down!” ought to be pretty clear, even to you!’

The four of them dropped down low in the snow.

The towering green warriors had come to a halt about ten metres away, forming a semicircle. Stationary, they were entirely immobile, like statues. Snow actually settled on their sculpted shoulders and ridged craniums.

One of them slowly raised its right arm from beside its hip. There was some kind of pipe attached to the upper wrist. It pointed it at them.

The creature… the Ice Warrior… said something.

Amy could see taut, reptilian lips move under the rim of the intimidating visor. She couldn’t distinguish any words. It sounded like air escaping under high pressure from an inner tube.

‘Keep down!’ said the Doctor. He was frantically fiddling with his sonic screwdriver.

The Ice Warrior fired its weapon. It made one of the most unpleasant sounds Amy had ever heard, and she’d heard quite a few that featured in the Universal Top Twenty. It was a throbbing sound that she could feel in her internal organs, a pulse that brutalised the air. The blast caused a vortex in the pattern of the falling snow, whizzing flakes in a sudden horizontal spiral. A stout tree directly behind the four of them shivered and shed collected snow as the energy struck its trunk. Bark cracked and shattered. Steam wafted from the traumatised wood.

‘Guide’s sake!’ Samewell yelped.

‘It was just a warning shot!’ the Doctor told them.

‘They want us alive.’

As if hoping to corroborate the Doctor’s statement, the Ice Warrior spoke again. This time, Amy could identify a stretched and mangled word in the fierce pneumatic hiss.

‘Sssssurrenderrr…’

The Doctor sprang up to face the towering aliens.

‘Not today, thank you!’ he cried.

‘Doctor!’ Amy cried.

The Ice Warrior aimed at the Doctor and fired, but the Doctor had already activated his screwdriver. The warbling sound of the device seemed to strangle and cut short the ugly noise of the weapon.

The Ice Warrior hesitated, confused. It tried its weapon again, and this time it didn’t make a sound at all. The Doctor kept his bleating screwdriver aimed at the giants. The Ice Warrior hissed a curt order, and the others of its kind took aim. They all fired.

None of the weapon tubes made a noise.

‘Time to run!’ the Doctor cried. ‘Run away! Very fast!’

The others got up, hesitantly.

‘Come on!’ the Doctor yelled, still brandishing the warbling screwdriver at the Ice Warriors. ‘The screwdriver’s generating sound waves with the opposite polarity to the output of their weapons, cancelling the noise - oh, just run, please! It won’t work much longer!’

They all started to run.

‘The other way, Samewell!’ Amy ordered.

Samewell turned and started to run with them instead of towards the Ice Warriors. Shock had rather robbed him of his wits. Arabel gathered up her long skirts to run more easily. The four of them dashed through the snow between the looming trees, the Doctor bringing up the rear, directing the output of his screwdriver behind him.

The Ice Warriors immediately started to pursue them, striding out across the snow.

‘We’re leaving them behind!’ Amy yelled, looking back.

‘Yes,’ agreed the Doctor, ‘but they won’t get tired!’

His screwdriver suddenly went quiet and the claspers retracted and shut. The Doctor shook it and tapped it against his palm as he ran.

That’s all well be getting out of it for a while!’ he shouted. ‘Keep running, and don’t let them get a clear shot!’

Behind them, they heard a tube weapon pulse. A slender tree a few metres to Amy’s left exploded midtrunk and the top half sheared away. Amy squealed, ducked, and then leapt over the fallen section as it collapsed in her path.

‘Down here! This way!’ the Doctor urged. Two or three more unpleasant pulses thumped out behind them. Another tree fractured. The top of a snowdrift behind Samewell went up like an explosion in an cotton wool factory.

Ahead of them, the trees were thinning out. They had reached the edge of Would Be and the start of the open grazing land beyond, the region Samewell had called Moreland.

No trees meant no cover. If they carried on, they would be sitting ducks.

‘I went out this morning to put flowers on my dad’s grave,’ Vesta Flurrish told Rory quietly. They had turned the solamp up slightly. Apart from her voice, the only sounds were the cycle of the turbines underneath them, and the tick of ice-heavy flakes hitting the roof and wall of the shed. It was snowing hard outside.

‘I meant to be back before Guide’s Bell, of course,’

said Vesta. ‘But it is a long way up to the memory yard in this weather. The yard is in Would Be. Do you know it?’

‘I’m not from around here,’ said Rory.

She nodded. ‘Well, I was there, and I was just leaving, and then I saw the star move.’

‘A star?’

‘Yes.’

‘Moving?’

‘Yes. A moving star. It went by in the sky. Beautiful it was. Like a sign.’ Her face fell as she thought about it. ‘Like an omen. That’s what they say. Bel saw it.’

‘Bel?’

‘My sister, Arabel. Other Morphans have seen it too.

All this winter long. A star of ill omen, moving as it pleases. They say it presages the bad things that have been happening. The cold. The killing.’

‘The killing?’ asked Rory.

‘Of livestock. Have you seen the moving stars from your plantnation?’

‘No.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I followed it for a while to see what it would do. I followed it further into Would Be, and that’s when I came upon the tracks in the snow.

The giant tracks. They scared me a lot. I didn’t know what to make of them. I prayed that Guide might protect me, and I ran. And then…’

‘Then?’ Rory asked.

‘I sort of ran straight into it there in the wood.’

‘ It?’

‘That’s right.’

‘With the red eyes?’

‘As Guide is my witness,’ said Vesta.

‘It’s certainly a scary thing to meet’ Rory agreed.

‘I was sore afraid,’ Vesta nodded. ‘It snatched at me, but I ran. I ran and ran and ran.’

‘Did it shoot at you?’ asked Rory.

‘Shoot?’

‘With a gun?’

‘No. I didn’t know it had a gun. We do not have guns in the plantnation. They are things that fire pellets, aren’t they?’

‘Sort of,’ Rory replied. ‘It shot at me.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Actually, the funny thing is, it didn’t. I met these men who must’ve been looking for you, and because they didn’t know me, like you didn’t, they thought I was pretty suss.’

‘They thought you were what?’

‘Dodgy… um… they wanted to know who I was and what I was doing. Then it came along, and there was a terrible fight. It shot at some of the men. It had this horrible… sound gun. It was like it was firing sound. I can’t explain it better. I think it hurt some of them. I think it might have killed some of them.’

‘Oh save us all!’ said Vesta. ‘It killed people from Beside?’