He was awoken by Jane shaking his shoulder.

Randall jerked awake and stared around, momentarily unsure where he was and what he was doing. His body was aching where he'd been lying on the hard, round turnips and one of his legs was numb from where it had been dangling over the side of the cart and the sharp corner of the wood had trapped a nerve. He rubbed some life back into it and groaned as the full horror of his situation came back to him. "I was hoping it had all been a dream," he muttered unhappily.

"Never mind that," said Jane excitedly. "Look! We're here!"

There was a city ahead of them, he saw, or at least what had been considered a city in medieval times. It lay inside a strong looking stone wall. Three times the height of a man, with a crenelated top behind which men in metal armour were staring out over the surrounding countryside. A row of arrowslits ten feet below the top testified to the existence of a corridor inside, presumably containing more defenders, and there were square towers at intervals of fifty metres or so. The nearest one, to the left as they approached, had a team of workmen repairing damage to the top, hoisting huge blocks of stone with thick ropes and pulleys and fitting them carefully into place. There was more damage elsewhere, Randall saw, although not as serious. The sort of damage that might be caused by catapults.

"Gods gobblers!" said Ronald in surprise. "The orcs've been! They mest still be around, we might have passed right by 'em! God! I wouldn't have dared come if I'd known!" He stared at his son as if grief stricken by the danger he'd put him in.

"It's okay, Pa," the boy replied. "We're safe, and we'll soon be inside the walls. Besides, looks like they've been at that for a couple days already. The battle was probably over before we left home."

"The orcs could still be around, an Daisy an the other kids are still out there! They don't know!"

"The farm's twenty miles away...'

"Twenty miles to the north! The orcs must have passed right by 'em, an they might be taking the same route back as the way they came!"

"We didn't pass any orcs on the way. Calm down, Pa. Either they went by another route or they're still around somewhere. Probably raiding Saltmarsh or Southby."

The farmer continued to fret, though, and the hibernators could see him wanting to turn the cart around and head back home as fast as it would carry him. Gradually, though, the sense of his son's words filtered through to his agonised brain. Either the orcs had already reached their farm ahead of them, in which he would arrive too late to help, or the orcs had gone another way. Either way, racing home was pointless. Better to get inside the city walls as quickly as possible, to get his son to safety. Then worry about returning home tomorrow, after he'd delivered his goods.

The fields beside them on the road were churned up, they saw, as if great crowds of people had been milling about for several days. Randall found himself reminded of the aftermath of a music festival. The tall ears of corn had been trampled flat, except for a few clumps that had miraculously escaped, and about thirty metres away was the smashed and burned remains of some kind of large, wooden structure. From his memories of old medieval action movies, Randall recognised it as a seige tower.

There was a crowd of crows gathered a few metres away from it, hopping around and cawing angrily at each other. Occasionally one would leap into the air to fly a short distance away before landing and walking back again. "They're eating something," said Emily, leaning forward to see better. "I think it's a human corpse."

"Nay," said Ronald, though. "More like an orc. If it were a man it would've been gathered up by now for the funeral mound."

"Funeral mound?" said Jane uneasily.

"Like them," said the farmer, pointing away to the right. They looked and saw a row of small, conical hills covered with grass, each with a tall stone standing on top. "Whenever the orcs attack and there's a battle," the farmer continued, "they gathered up all the brave defenders who died and build a mound over them, so they'll be remembered. The orcs are just burned and the ashes scattered. That's what'll happen to that fellow the crows are eating, when they get around to him."

Randall was still staring at the corpse, though, trying to make out details through the black mass of birds covering it. "I want to go have a look at it," he said. "Could you stop the cart a moment?"

"One look at an orc is enough for most people," the farmer replied, "but if that's what you want..."

He pulled on the reins and the horse came to a halt, flicking its ears idly. Randall dropped carefully to the ground and walked to the side of the road, where he slipped carefully down the thirty centimetretre slope to the corn field. Behind him, he heard the others following. "Thanks for the lift," he heard Jane saying to the farmer. "You've been very kind to us."

"We were coming this way anyway so nay worries. Mek sure ye'z inside the city before sundown, though. Thet's when they close the gates."

Randall glanced off to the west and saw that the sun was still a couple of hours above the horizon. Plenty of time for a quick look at this creature the farmer called an orc. Randall suspected that it was nothing more than a human bandit, demonised by the people they preyed on until they'd been turned into fantastical creatures in the popular imagination. In some ancient cultures, he remembered reading somewhere, their warriors had carved scars into their faces to terrify their enemies. That was probably the sort of thing that was going on here.

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As they trudged through the soft, muddy field towards it, though, he began to have doubts. The corpse was very large, he saw. He could see the corpse's feet at one end and what he assumed was the top of its head at the other where it was momentarily visible between flapping black wings, and there was a lot of distance between the two. He'd rarely seen a human that tall! It's just a tall man, he told himself. Nothing to freak yourself out about.

Then they got their first clear look at the creature, though, as the crows scattered at their approach, cawing angrily, and the first thing they noticed was the shape of the skull. The crows had pretty much stripped all the flesh from it, but their hearts froze and gasps escaped from their lips as they saw how the jaws extended forward, like those of a wolf. Long carnivorous teeth grinned up at them as they timidly crept closer, and those parts of its hide that still remained were covered with shaggy black fur. "What in the name of God..." began Jane, her eyes wide with shock and fear.

"What the hell is it?" said Loach. He seemed more fascinated than afraid, although he had his kitchen knife in his hand and was gripping it tightly. He was holding it out in front of him as if afraid that the creature might come back to life and attack them.

"Tough son of a bitch," said Emily, pointing to the five arrow stumps protruding from its chest. Randall guessed that the creature had been wearing some kind of armour and that the arrows had been broken while it was being stripped off.

"If its anatomy is anything like ours," Emily continued, "one of those arrows went through its stomach and that one pierced its lung, and it still took five to kill it."

"The other arrows might have hit it after it was dead," said Jane.

"No," said the older woman. "Look at the angle. All five arrows hit it while it was still standing."

"A volley, then," said Loach. "All five hit it at the same time."

"Possibly," Emily conceded, but she didn't look convinced. She knelt down beside it and picked up one of its hands. She stared at the ends of its fingers. "Look at this," she said.

"What?" said Loach. The fingers seemed human and ordinary, although quite thick and strong looking. Then he stared. "No fingernails," he said.

"Yeah, but look at this." She squeezed the tip of the finger and a long, sharp claw appeared from the tip. She relaxed her grip and the claw slid back out of sight. "Retractable claws," she said. "Like a cat. They look long enough to make good weapons. I reckon they could tear a man's throat out, but when retracted the hands are as good at gripping and holding tools as a human."

"What the hell is it?" asked Jane. "Where did it come from?"

"Part cat, part wolf, part human," said Loach. "Probably created in a lab. Some kind of genetically engineered super soldier..."

"That eats its victims?" said Jane in disbelief.

"It would make it independent from supply lines. Supply lines are a weak point for an invading army, but if your soldiers can eat enemy soldiers..."

"No, I don't believe it! What kind of people would create such a thing?"

"If a thousand years really have passed, who knows what kind of regimes have risen and fallen in the interim? Maybe something that makes the Nazis look like boy scouts. They created these things, they were defeated by their enemies but a few of their creations escaped and have been breeding in the wild ever since, surviving the only way they know how."

"If you created something like this," said Emily, "would you really want them to be able to breed on their own?"

"It would make them independent of hi-tech bio labs. That kind of dependency makes you vulnerable. They'd be able to go on breeding and multiplying long after the regime that created them had fallen. Maybe they're conditioned to promote the ideology of their creators."

Randall thought that was a ridiculous idea. The people who had created them would want to be able to control them, he thought. They wouldn't want to risk their own creations turning on them. "Any way to tell if they had a functional reproductive system?" he asked.

"Well, this one appears to be female," said Emily. "Give me your knife." She held out her hand. Loach stared reluctantly at her, then handed it across.

Emily tested the edge with her thumb. "Not exactly a scalpel," she said, "but it should do." She put the tip to its ragged, torn abdomen and slashed downwards.

Jane turned away in disgust and retreated a few steps, to see a pair of soldiers in metal armour walking towards them. "Mest people tek their teeth," said one of them. "What're yez after?"

"Just indulging my curiosity," said Emily without looking up. She pushed tubes and organs aside to see deeper inside the corpse. "I don't see any reproductive organs," she said. "No womb, no fallopian tubes... No, there they are, but very reduced. I'd say not functional. Maybe this is a juvenile. Maybe the reproductive organs grow to full size and functionality when it reaches sexual maturity."

"What's she saying?" asked one of the soldiers."

Randall ignored him. "It can't be a child!" he said. "Look at the size of it!"

"They may reach physical maturity before they reach sexual maturity," the eco warrior replied, standing and handing the knife back to Loach. He stared at the gore on the blade, then bent to wipe it on what remained of the orc's fur.

"Surely, a warrior creature would want to reach sexual maturity as quickly as possible," he said as he rose again. "They'd want to breed as fast as possible, to replace individuals lost in battle."

"Nothing about this creature makes sense," replied Emily. "It can't be natural. It's almost as if..."

"As if it's an artificial creature," said Randall, more to himself than to her. "Something that was designed on a computer and that rolled off a production line, like combat units."

"A biological combat unit would have cybernetic components, surely," said Loach, though. "Night vision, weapons, communications... Maybe they have head phones, like us."

"We'd need a bone saw to find out," said Emily, "and for all we know maybe they do have night vision, like a cat. Maybe even better."

Loach turned to the soldiers. "What weapons do they carry?" he asked.

"The usual," he replied. "The kind they usually carry. Get out the way now. We've got to get this thing to the bonfire."

He went to take the orc's shoulders, the other took his feet, and together they carried it back to the road where there was a cart waiting. Several other orc corpses were already piled on it, they saw, crows swarming all over them.

"That creature makes no sense," said Loach. "It's like a fantasy creature created for a movie."

"Something that would fit in a medieval fantasy world," agreed Emily. "Could this whole place be some kind of holiday park? Where rich people come to pretend to be medieval heroes fighting monsters and saving damsels in distress from dragons?"

"It doesn't feel like a holiday camp," said Jane. She shuddered, and not just from the cold. "It feels real."

"If it was a holiday park, I think there'd be more things going on," said Loach. "More action and adventure going on all around us. I agree with the young lady. This place feels real."

"Let's get inside the city and find this priest," said Emily. "Maybe we'll learn more from him."

Loach nodded, and the four of them began to trudge back to the road.