Looking up, he realised a Zeppelin hung over the castle like a mammoth balloon, floating in thin atmosphere above the operational ceiling of any heavier-than-air machine. Only real monsters lived in those altitudes, where the cold froze blood in veins and made woolly flight suits into crackling ice chain-mail.
Allard signalled withdrawal. The shape-shifters were landing on their tower, retreating within stone walls.
Winthrop had been cheated of his kill. Perhaps the Red Baron was truly dead. Allard's kill. Angered beyond thought, Winthrop approached the Schloss Adler. A shape-shifter on the landing platform was shrugging his flying shape, bending to wriggle into the castle.
Winthrop fired a burst to get range. He heard his shots whine off stone. Half-way between human shape and bat form, the flier turned, attention caught by the fire, pointed ears swivelling. Winthrop's next burst caught him in the chest, bearing him backwards against the castle wall. Scarlet gouts blurted through thinning fur. A perfect heart-shot.
A seventh score. One that counted. One of the monsters.
No, it would not count officially. Winthrop, the killing urge briefly satisfied, realised he had gone against Allard's orders to withdraw. His victory would never be confirmed. Besides, what he had done was strafe a foe on the ground, not meet him in the air. The pitch was not level.
Still, the kill counted in his system. One of the monsters was gone.
It had been only seconds. He slid easily back into formation, behind and above Allard.
There were others. Brandberg, Lockwood, Knight, Lacey.
They sped away. There was still archie but it was ineffectually distant. The shape-shifters were out of the air. The airship was too high to bring guns to bear.
Fourteen had approached the castle. Five were returning.
Winthrop had seen Dandridge and Rutledge killed and known Severin would lose his match. Now, he realised he had for a half- instant glimpsed one of the shape-shifters with a human rag in his mouth, shaking his head as blood-trails whipped. That had been another of the pilots.
The rest had been killed without his even noticing. Nine men exchanged for two monsters. The dog-fight couldn't have lasted more than two or three minutes.
The five Camels flew away from the rising sun. Spreading dawn fell heavily on Winthrop, like a blanket, sapping his energy, cooling his blood. They crossed the lines.
39
Up at the Front
"Your bus is wheezing a bit, miss,' said Colonel Wynne-Candy, 'I'll have my driver look it over.'
Kate, not attuned to the eccentricities of internal combustion, thanked the officer, whose staff car was mired at the side of the road. He had pulled over to let her ambulance past and suffered the consequences of gallantry.
There had been near-continuous bombardment all day. The enemy had brought up big guns and were hammering the Allied trenches. It would be heads down in the lines.
She looked up at a slate sky empty of all but cloud. To the east, the gloom was reddened by fire.
'A boy in the air?'
The round-faced colonel, cheerfully retained from the Boer war, was not the jolly fool he seemed. Kate shivered as she tried to shrug. She could usually put ideas into words, but was too involved in the business with Edwin to explain it easily.
The lad'll be a lot safer with Richthofen down.'
The Red Baron?'
'Word over the blower this morning. Not official yet. Boche won't admit a thing but our ears in Hunland have picked up a whisper. It seems Allied mastery of the air has been reasserted.'
Kate wondered if Edwin was disappointed. He had shaped himself into a weapon so he could go after the creature who had nearly killed him. Or maybe he had succeeded? No, he had not bested the Red Baron. In her blood, she would have known.
'Almost a pity, ain't it?' Wynne-Candy mused. 'The war will seem a spot less colourful. Richthofen gave our fellows something to shoot for.'
Something to shout at, she thought.
A projectile whizzed into the mud a couple of hundred yards away and burst. Kate and Wynne-Candy cringed in a light patter of wet dirt.
'That's an overshot', the Colonel said. 'No harm to anyone.'
A smoking crater marked the site of the shell-burst. There were more of them dotted about behind the lines than usual.
'Enough misses like that and our supply lines will be jiggered.'
'You have a point, miss.'
Wynne-Candy's driver, a muddy Cockney, reported on the ambulance, grumbling in the colonel's ear.
'I say, that's not on.'
Wynne-Candy was shocked.
'I'm sorry to have to tell you, miss, but some unsportin' type seems to have taken a pot shot at you.'
The driver put his finger into a hole in the bonnet.
'Probably an accident. Any proper German officer who found one of his men sniping at an ambulance would have the bounder shot.'
The driver told her the engine was unharmed. With a good clean, the ambulance would run smooth as silk.
'Not easy, keeping things clean in this country,' Wynne-Candy said, looking about the plain of mud. 'Now, miss, be on your way. Boys are waiting at the front for a sight of you.'
With a khaki coat three sizes too big, a nest of hair plastered with mud spatters and a bad case of the distractions, she suspected she would not pass for an angel.
She bade the colonel farewell and got back into the ambulance. When the army bought these vehicles, the assumption was that drivers would be six-foot-tall men. It had then been inconceivable that all those who fit the description would be required for the front and the position would have to be filled by a tiny vampire woman. She sat on three pillows and leaned forward to reach the steering wheel, which seemed a yard across. Wooden blocks tied to the foot-pedals brought them within range of her short legs.
Every part of the ambulance rattled. Through the smeared windscreen, she looked at the sky. Even with the Red Baron gone, there were monsters up there. She sensed the tug of Edwin like a toothache. What he had taken from her would take months to recover. She felt she was half a person, fading into ghostliness.
Like a proper Victorian, she was throwing herself into duty. If it had been possible, she'd have picked up a rifle and fought the war. Genevieve, in her long life, had sometimes passed for a boy and served as a soldier: with Joan against the English, with Drake against the Spanish, with Buonaparte in Russia. Genevieve, of course, had done everything. Without meaning it, she went through life making other women feel inadequate. By 'other women', Kate meant herself.
In 1918, though she was stronger than most living men, the best Kate could do was drive an ambulance. The next war would be fought by men and women, vampire and warm. If she survived, Kate might be in that one. And the next. And the next.
Richthofen dead. She should follow the story. It would be news.
The road sank into the ground, banks rising to either side. She entered the maze of trenches. Corrugated iron grumbled under the weight of the ambulance. The main road was only just wide enough. Every time she made this trip, the route was different, as old avenues were blocked and new ones blasted.
Another shell exploded, out of her sight, but quite near. Clods pattered on the tin roof of the cabin. It was just earth, not shrapnel.
She was still a reporter, despite setbacks. She would try to learn more about the Bloody Red Baron. There were always the Musketeers of Maranique: Bertie, Algy and Ginger. They would talk to her. They were so good-natured they'd probably sent Christmas cards to the Kaiser during the truce of'14.
She could not go much further in the ambulance. There was a station where the wounded were gathered, laid out on stretchers. Casualties had been light recently. The Germans were preparing their offensive. That would be a military hurricane. Rear positions were deserted as every man and gun the Allies had in France was put into the front. It occurred to her today's heavy bombardment was to soften up the Allies. The offensive - Kaiserschlacht, they called it - was very close.