The Count was on the edge of despair. Colonel Frost was going to kill him and it was just a matter of time. What's more the time could not be far off now. For the last quarter of an hour he had been engaged in a life and death struggle with Winter's senior officer and he was losing. The conflict following a depressingly repetitive pattern. First the Count would unleash a blast from his Dragon gun. This was the only weapon which seemed to have any effect at all on the Colonel and that effect was only to stop him in his tracks for a few moments whilst he bent his energy into defence. Once the burst of flame died down, the Colonel would shake his head and fire another blast of cold which the Count would have to fend off with his shield. He'd been lucky so far. He'd managed to prevent the Colonel from inflicting the sort of direct hit that had killed A'lekim but he was weakening much faster then the Colonel  The Colonel seemed to draw strength from the arctic conditions which emanated from the Temple whereas he felt each refrigerated attack with increasing keenness. They'd circled round and round the Temple precincts with the Count anxious to prevent the Colonel from getting close enough for a killing touch. Soon he wouldn’t be quick enough to get his shield in the way of one of the Colonel's blasts and then he would surely perish in the same way as his musician. He would stand here as an icy warning to future generations who might dare to resist the power of Winter. When the Autumn Country had long been covered in snow and the Proton King stalked the land, the young princes and maidens of the Winter palaces would throw snow balls at him and laugh:  the fearful statue fate of all who were foolish enough to fight toe to toe with their great champion, Colonel Jack Frost.

He couldn’t imagine what he could do to change the balance of power in this awful one sided duel. But wait! What was that? The Count blinked.

"Behind you. Something. What is it?"

He was unable to prevent himself from uttering the terror struck words because whatever it was that had come up the Sandy Gate road was truly terrible. It was a vast vegetable demon with stringy tentacles, deep festering eyes and a gelatinous body. It loomed over Jack Frost getting closer by the second, slithering on its gross belly into the Temple precincts.

"Really Count," said the Colonel with a mock yawn. "I expected better of you than that. Of course there isn’t anything behind me! Do you think this is some sort of pantomime?"

That was when the Swamp Thing struck. It had climbed all this way out of its natural element into deep winter winds but the climb had been worth it. At first it seemed to the Swamp Thing that its way would be bared by wards against its kind. But the wards had been feeble and they had blown away allowing for its inexorable advance. The Swamp Thing knew its ancient enemy. It reached out three tendrils to seize him and draw him into its ghastly embrace. Jack Frost turned and struggled. Then for the first time he knew real fear and he screamed. The Swamp Thing was remorseless. In the heart of its belly were the chemicals that make ice impure and lower its melting point - the salts that prevent ice from forming and the exothermic reactions that let biology fight physics. The Swamp Thing squeezed hard to suck the life from Jack Frost. The Swamp Thing couldn’t think but if it could have thought it would have thought something like this.

You're on my territory now, Jack Frost and I call the tune here! Prepare to die!

The Count watched for a few moments in horrified fascination as one of the Autumn Country's most unpleasant residents made short work of his enemy. Then he turned and made his way cautiously towards the Temple.  

"Count Arcturus!"

"Nice to see you again Cerylia. And you Pendramon."

The Count smiled warmly at his two former guests. He felt weary but happy.

Cerylia beamed. They were saved! The sight of Kark's demise had been horrible to behold. She would not have wished his fate on anyone. For his own part, Peter too was greatly shaken by the way in which the Autumn Country had taken the Agent apart - almost literally and piece by piece in the most gruesome way imaginable. He had been quite unable to prevent himself from retching although he had had no food for so long that the motion served only to make his stomach convulse and yield a few thin streaks of bile. It took five minutes for Kark to die and in the end neither Peter nor Cerylia could bare to look. They both turned away from the sight until a blessed silence had returned. Now the floor of the temple held only whitening bones. The spirits may have been merciless and terrible but they were tidy it seemed. Strangely there was no hint of blood left anywhere. The blood was their payment.

"You don’t mind if I sit down for a minute do you?" the Count said. He was swaying on his feet, weak and incredibly tired. He walked over to the black altar and perched on the edge, still smiling.

"You have to shut the Christmas Passage!" Peter urged. "The Proton King is on his way and he could be here at any moment!"

The Count frowned and tried to get up but staggered and fell back on the altar with an oddly surprised look on his face. Tarragon emerged from behind him, a bloody dagger in his hand. He came to stand in front of the Count and plunged it into his heart, three times in quick succession.

"No one is going to shut the Christmas Passage," Tarragon said. "The Proton King is coming to sort this Realm out once and for all and when he's finished there'll be no more of these vile spirits, no more Halloween nightmares and no more gnomes!"

He shook visibly but he was clearly determined.

Peter and Cerylia stared in open mouthed horror as the Count subsided into death.

It wasn't going to happen. It wasn't! Not after all they'd been through! It was so desperately unfair! Peter wanted to scream in frustration but instead he yanked hard at the chain still holding him to the wall. It snapped loudly.

He grabbed Wilkinson and ran towards an open mouthed Tarragon who suddenly picked up his robes and fled in the direction of the Christmas Passage. Peter followed him, lost for a moment to reason.

On the other side of the Christmas passage something dark and dreadful was moving through the Advent Cave. The Proton King was coming. Warned by Eryndra and Sunanon, he was making haste to shore up his beleaguered forces. He couldn’t know that they had been all but defeated and if he had known it would have made no difference.

Tarragon tumbled into the cave and nearly bumped right into him. There was a moment of confusion and then the Proton King was stepping over the body of his former ally. Something very wrong had happened to his expeditionary force into Autumn and he meant to find out for himself exactly what it was. In person.

On the threshold of the Christmas Passage, Peter saw all this as if through a darkened window. He was paralysed.

"Shut the Passage!" Cerylia shouted. "Take the Wedge Token out of the Gate! Hurry up Pendramon. Please!"

It all seemed to take place in slow motion. The Proton King was walking grimly towards him with a hypnotic power of will that was quite capable of transcending the Barriers. It gripped Peter hard even from a different Realm. There was a moment of contact with the Gate. Something ancient and deadly was crossing the Barrier. A Barrier it was never meant to breach. Something so alien it made the Halloween horde seem positively friendly.

Peter shook his head violently and grabbed the Wedge Token. It was so cold it burnt his hand but he pulled hard and tore it away from the Gate. The white light around the frame flickered and died. There was a sigh as of a myriad solitary atoms wailing in quantum chorus or the soundless screaming of energy shattering into a vacuum and he fainted clean away.

When Peter regained consciousness he found himself propped up against the Temple wall again, next to Cerylia and in the same position that they'd been dumped when Kark and the ice warriors had imprisoned them. For a horrible confused moment he thought that his last few waking moments might all have been a dream. He reached up to feel for the collar round his neck, in a brief instant of panic. It was gone!

Cerylia hugged him. The hateful iron collar was gone from around her neck too.

"It's over", she said. "It's really, really over!"

Then she kissed him. He couldn’t believe it. He blinked and smiled.

"Whose that?"

Peter was staring in wonder at the tiny figure of a gnome standing next to a swan of the purest white.

"My name is R'eskyl'ah'in," said the gnome gravely. "And this is Cloud of Truth. I am here to thank you for your part in saving the Autumn Country."

The gnome was scarred and his face was thin and gaunt. It had a mysterious, almost sacred quality. It was the quality of one who has seen much suffering and has transcended it. For such a figure, size means nothing. Peter knew now why the gnomes considered R'eskyl'ah'in to be a prophet. He was almost a saint.

"I found the keys to your chains amongst these bones," he said, indicating Kark's skeleton. "He had your cross-passage token too. You are free now. Free to go."

Free to go! Peter had only been a prisoner for a day and a night and yet it felt like forever.

"W.. what happened?" he said, as though he needed to have his own part explained to him again.

"You were extremely fortunate," R'eskyl'ah'in said. "Fate has indeed favoured you and us as well. When you pulled the Wedge Token out of the gate the Proton King was half way between the Realms. You have destroyed him. Forever. And that is something which many Great Powers have tried and failed to achieve over more millennia than anyone can count with certainty."

"H.. how?"

"The Proton King was split in two when you shut the Gate. Half of his mind was still in the Christmas Passage and half was in the Autumn Country. He could not survive the severing of his consciousness in such a brutal manner. I don’t think you realise exactly how lucky that was. Obviously, if you had shut the gate a moment later he would have been through and you would have been dead. But it would not have been much better if you had shut the gate a little earlier, either. The Proton King does not need gateways to travel between Realms. He would have made his own way here without the Christmas Passage and once again, you would have been killed. You were saved by the only thing that could save you. The Proton King was lazy and he took the easy way here. You acted at the prefect and only instant to vanquish him."

"Oh"

For a second there didn’t seem anything else to say. But of course there was. Plenty.

"What about the Autumn Country now?" Peter asked at last. "What's going to happen to it, now that Count Arcturus is dead?"

"The Laws of Form are reverting to type," said R'eskyl'ah'in. "With the Wedge Token removed, Winter's incursion is over. Can't you feel it? It is getting warmer now."

It was getting warmer. The air felt decidedly milder and already some of the thick icy deposits were starting to melt on the stonework of the Temple around them.

"We have our problems still. Most of them are concerned with the Halloween horde. Now that they have tasted freedom it will be hard to bring them back into line again. But I have been in contact with the Owner. He was distracted by some of the Proton King's diversionary tactics but now he realises how he was fooled and he is anxious to make amends. He has delegated the administration of the Realm to me and he will be helping me to return conditions here to normal. I fear that for many stanzas the Autumn Country will be a very dangerous place in which to live. But we gnomes are used to this sort of danger from our neighbours. We will get by."

Cerylia turned sober again as she looked across the Temple to where the Count's cooling body lay on the black altar.

"The price was too high," she said simply. "All those men and gnomes dead. Harry and A'lekim and the Count. The Count was a good man."

"The Count was a wise man and a foolish man," R'eskyl'ah'in offered by way of an epitaph.

"Too often he trusted his foolishness and rejected his wisdom. But he loved the Autumn Country and he gave his life for it. It was his loyalty to this Realm and above all to his people that made him good. That is what matters in the end.

"He must lie here overnight. In the morning we will bury him with full honours and we will respect his kin folk."

"It doesn’t seem enough," Cerylia said. She was still distressed and listless.

"Look!" Peter said. They turned to stare.

Something strange was happening to the black altar where the Count's dying blood had anointed it. Something strange and wonderful. The Broken Gate was waking. The toll of human blood had been paid and now it was searching through the Barriers for an open switch Gate like itself. And then it found it.

Through the archway above the altar came a vision of a green world :  a grassy hill in bright sunshine where white and yellow flowers blew under a soft wind. Tall beech trees with lime bright buds were bursting into leaf and a chattering brook ran down the hill towards their point of view. At that moment it felt like the most lovely sight that Peter had ever seen, for there was nothing of Autumn about it, only renewal, new life and promise. Peter suddenly realised that he was profoundly sick of Autumn, sick of the days of eternal slow decay and the long mellow smoke of burning fires, sick of the hopeful death of seeds and fruit and sick of the painted shawls of withered leaves that cloaked the ancient trees.  More than anything, he wanted to leave this Realm. More than anything he wanted the morning light of youth and hope.

"The sacrifice was too great," Cerylia muttered again.

"But what is an altar, if not a place for sacrifice?" R'eskyl'ah'in asked simply. "It is appropriate that the Count opened this gate.

"There are entries and exists that can only be achieved by sacrifice. Each of us must know when to sacrifice for the greater good. Sometimes we must sacrifice a luxury or an attitude or a habit which gives us pleasure. And very occasionally we must sacrifice a person. The Count did not know that this was to be the meaning of his death but I know and I am telling you now. The Count opened this Gate for you. You should walk through it. Do not waste the opportunity for it will not come again."

And with that, the little gnome bowed low to them and left them alone.

For a while they sat in silence.

"What about Sunanon?" Peter ventured at last. "He is still alive on the other side of the Barriers. He's in the Christmas Passage. Are you going to carry on chasing him?"

"Eryndra's welcome to him," Cerylia said sadly.

Peter was pleased to hear it.

"I did love him, though!" she added fiercely. Then she corrected herself. "No. It's more honest to say that I still love him, the treacherous, disloyal, double-dealing, stupid sod! I don't want to but I do. I'm going to have to work hard at not loving him - bring my heart to its senses.

"But I don't suppose you understand that, do you? What do you know about love?"

She slumped again, tired and uncaring against the wall.

"Not a lot," Peter admitted simply, oddly wounded, but making a joke of it. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. She'd spoken the simple truth as she saw it. And that was what hurt.

"I favour computers."

Now wasn't the time to argue. Cerylia had started to cry.

On the whole, and with many reservations, Peter actually did like computers. Or at any rate he appreciated them. They only did what they were told. If you couldn't understand a computer it was always your own fault and sooner or later it would usually yield to patient analysis. Except for Client Access, of course, 'the exception that proved the rule', he'd once liked to joke about his 'favourite' piece of software.

Emotions, on the other hand, were so irreducibly biological, and that was the problem with them, Peter thought. They were as messy as milk. You could stow a plastic carton away in the fridge of your heart but you couldn’t keep it safely forever. It hadn't got the static reliability of a computer program locked into the magnetic physics of a disk drive. No matter how cold the fridge, if you left milk untouched it would inevitably turn sour, like unemployed emotions, all gone to waste.

If the truth were told, Peter was something of an expert on spoilt milk. He knew all the stages well; the slight acrid odour that was the first hint of decay; the faint buttery streaks of impurity which soon followed in the thinning whiteness; and the two and three day states of coagulation leading to that full blown separation into thin yellow whey and thick sticky curds that marked a good week's intensive biochemistry after the sell by date. Finally, of course, there was the 'Oh my God, what's that!' stage; the really bad point when a carton had got right to the back of the fridge and a month or more had passed without attention. When things got as nasty as that, you couldn't just pour the milk away down the sink - oh no! It was a solid, repulsive and unmistakably organic mess. The plastic bottle would be distorted by the outward pressure of bacterial gasses. Just opening the top, felt like handling an unexploded bomb - positively scary! The only remedy was to blast hot water into the carton, excavate the entire mess and take the time to perform a proper cleansing job; like a minor operation with generous doses of antiseptic, lemon scented, washing up liquid and repeated injections of hot water.

Peter had seen too much milk solidify. And now that he thought of it, he'd stored too many unused emotions in the fridge of his heart. And sooner or later, it always ended up in the same way. The unused emotions curdled, went bad and went to waste. And eventually the fridge just had to be cleared out. And those emotions that couldn’t be poured down the sink had to be forcibly purged - the horrible, pulpy and organic things that they were. And it wasn't a pleasant job but it had to be done, to empty the heart of its useless clutter and sterilise the white interior. And that was what happened when you foolishly had too much milk to make proper use of, he thought. Because when you live on your own you don’t use much milk, and one must be practical about such things…

But even so… Even so, he still kept putting milk in the fridge and hoping he'd use it up. And Peter thought all these things and more as he listened to Cerylia cry. But he didn't know what to say and when the sobbing ended he settled for taking her hand and leading her to the Broken Gate. And in that moment the silence was best. And that was enough for both of them.

So Peter Kirkland and the woman who in that place and time was known simply as Cerylia (though she had many names in other places and at other times) came to the Broken Gate where the toll had been paid and the passage was open. They stepped cautiously and reverently onto the black altar and over the quiet body of the dead Count.

And they passed out of the Autumn Country, and began their long journey to Earth.

DMFW - 13/02/2000