Picture this: a brown, rolling moor; a bleak, bare stone hill, high and mighty over its fields of heather; a scraggle of thatched cottages clinging to its sides like the highland goats that scraped at the tough roots that would see them through the next endless winter, and the one after that, and the one after that. Maybe the winters weren’t endless, then. But they felt like it.

Not a very pretty picture? The thousand or so intrepid sightseers that struggled up the windswept track every summer would disagree. They had been told to disagree. The moor had been featured in the very unofficial kingdom chapbook of touristry for seven years straight. This must be due to the fact the upland pansies flowered in a scattered sea of weak yellow dots for upwards of a three day run sometimes, and definitely had nothing to do with the fact that the innkeep’s daughter up on the hill was well known in the lower towns to be particularly, not to mention literally, accommodating.

But there were other sights this year that may adjust this picture. For instance, the innkeep’s daughter, who was currently lying face-down in the steep street, having her leg merrily chewed off by a corpse. One house was in flames. Another pulsed with an ominous green glow emanating from its otherwise dark open doorway. The severed head of a peasant was casually rolling its way down the hill.

For those of you who aren’t experts in the field, these additions aren’t great for tourism.

Perhaps that is why the survivors summoned the Rainbow. Or maybe they didn’t want to be feasted on by the shambling damned trying to scratch their way through the doors of the temple. The reason is lost to time.

Either way, they lit the fire beneath a pot of water, and, as the young and unharmed boarded windows and braced the great iron doors, others bustled off to find the blend of eleven secret herbs and spices which would bring their relief. The water boiled. A dead villager helpfully prised off part of the thatching and tumbled into the throng of the hopeful. The smoke, green and red and blue and you know all the rest, rose into the grey skies as the blood flew and the people scattered from the unperson.

The signal was sent, and they waited, under tables and in cupboards and with urns cunningly upended on heads, for the Rainbow to come.

And come it did.

There was, of course, a reasonable delay of around a day first, in which seven more villagers were torn apart by the evil which had descended so suddenly and so mysteriously upon them, but one cannot hurry official business. At long last, movement was glimpsed amongst the low shrubs on the moor. This was not initially recognised as the Rainbow, because ultra-powerful beams of mystic light don’t usually wrap themselves in cloaks and boots on drizzly days. When the cloaked thing reached the hill, though, and the corpse in the street (which had now finished the young lady’s leg and was playfully alternating between cheek and eyelid) erupted in a shock of emerald flame, the villagers peeking from the roof of the temple gladly changed their minds.

A number of individuals of the group Those Who Walk Again (the nice easy word zombie hadn’t reached these parts) were still scraping at the iron doors, looking for slightly less ripe meat, when the Rainbow flowed down the road like a river of righteous energy, and they were engulfed silently in rippling fire. That’s what the priest put in his book anyhow. The old cobbler, who got out the next night, said it was more of a waddle than a flow, and the cleansing was like setting off a row of reluctant Roman candles.

Whatever happened, the creatures were soon dead (again) and the Rainbow was hammering at the door, calling out in a gruff man-voice to be let in because it was bloody freezing out there. That was when the awe of ancient and unknowable powers kind of fizzled out for a lot of the survivors. Then someone turned the key and let it out of the wet, and instead of kneeling to the saviours, the bewildered questions started instead.

“Who the devil are you?” said the candlestick-maker to the Rainbow as he threw off his sodden cloak and tousled his hair in the silver reflection of a handy shrine. “We made the sacred aroma. We thought you were the Rainbow.”

The visitor turned his pocked cheeks and dripping moustache towards the local. “I am the Rainbow,” said the man who was not the Rainbow. He looked at the shadowed faces all around as the villagers crawled from their hiding places, then stretched out a hand to fry a pair of suspiciously rotten ankles poking from beneath a ceremonial curtain across the room. “Cheers, Blue. Well, an officer of the Rainbow, anyway.”

“And is that a .... thing?” called someone doubtfully from the throng. The people at the front were starting to back away again.

“I mean, we were expecting a bit more... miracleness,” ventured another.

“Can I have a beer?” replied the officer of the Rainbow. There was a hiss of uncertainty from the hall. Watchful faces watched. He tried again, parched lips gasping out his words to the unhealthily moist air. “I mean, I have just destroyed all the nasty creatures trying to eat you.”

A jug of ale was produced from the priest’s emergency offerings cabinet. The officer of the Rainbow raised his arm as if to drink, and then let it fall wearily back to his side. The foul-smelling liquid slopped across the ancient mosaic tiles beneath his boots. The gathering gawped uneasily. They didn’t quite know how to take an omnipotent benevolent immortal force when it went around in unfashionably tight breeches and a leather jerkin.

“Anywhere to sit round here?” said the officer. “I’m knackered.”

“No,” said the priest. “One does not presume to recline among the gods.”

The officer moved through the villagers, who shuffled back in the troubled yet intrigued way of children on Moonscrown night, ones who’d been both naughty and nice in equal measure and so had an even chance of receiving a kitten or a fire-breathing salamander in their gift sack.

“This’ll do,” said the officer, sounding rather pleased with himself as he swept the altar clean of offerings. Gold plates and silver figurines went clattering across the feet of the faithful, who’d decided that damn it, they should have picked granny a few more apples because they’d gotten the salamander after all. “Heresy!” cried the priest as the visitor scrambled up onto his makeshift seat. He dangled his legs casually over the tablet and listened with interest as the holy man blustered on. “Heresy! What sacrilege to the spirits! You’ve shamed us in front of our ancestors. And, and you can’t be the Rainbow. Just look at you! So be gone, back from whence you came! ”

“I never said I was the Rainbow,” said the man, who had, and some calm authority in his voice drew the flapping crowd to a standstill. He took a noisy glug from his jug. “I’m just their legal representative for all invocations within the king’s jurisdiction.”

“Legal representa-what?” said the fire-lighter.

“Representative. Does the law not state that all beings here are subject to the king’s superiority? All?” He jabbed out a questioning finger suddenly at the beekeeper, who hopped back in a fright and went down with her foot in an unfortunately out-of-place meditation vase.

“Are they beings?” said the farrier, dazed with wonder.

The officer chuckled. “Not all beings shit in the woods.” And he let out a sonorous belch as if to demonstrate that he himself was not a being above bodily expulsions.

The priest let out a howl of rage and stormed forward with a truly menacing ritual ladle held aloft in his bony hand. The officer watched him charge for a moment, then put down his beverage on the altar and made a circular motion with one finger. At once, without so much as a fizzle or a pop, his perch was surrounded by a translucent bubble of... well, a bubble of something, a kind of filmy, er, film swirling with reds and greens. The priest made contact with its outer edge and went scurrying off for the holy lavatory clutching his now-scorched under-robes.

The officer of the Rainbow leant forward, as if trying to devour his remaining audience by some form of visual osmosis. “Am I going mad or something? Have I not trekked all the way up here to save your sorry arses from twenty-two, yes, twenty-two flesh-eating monsters that were crawling all over your filthy hovels? And that’s only the first shipment. You’ve no idea what sort of gibbering, mindless abominations are lurching their way along the moor so pathetically and ponderously this very minute. And you want to get rid of me?” He threw up his arms in exasperation, sending his jug flying. “Why am I even counting? It’s not like I’m on commission any more.”

Most of the onlookers had gone scurrying back from the flying liquid like it was a jug of snakes, but one of the farmers stood unmoving in the firing line. He wasn’t very bright, this Winston, but he’d caught the best catch in all his life, and that was including the time he’d gone fishing in the lowlands that one time with his cousin and got that really nice left boot. He’d been looking for a right one to go with it for two years now.

“Shipment?” said the now-dripping young man. “Isn’t that like what I have to give the city every harvest for nowt? In a big wagon, like?”

For just a moment, the officer’s smug face twitched. He looked down, eyes roving restlessly around his swinging legs. “Did I say that? Must be the beer talking.” He found something suitable at last, and hopped down to drag it out to the edge of his twinkling bubble. It was a chest of fine silk costumes, to be used in some sort of country festival, he supposed. The robes were safely relocated to the beer-sodden floor.

He peered up into the peasants. Several had gathered around the impudent young farmer, and together, they were sending some pretty suspicious stares his way. “So you’ve got two choices. You turn me out and face the coming storm by yourselves, or you accept the king’s help through the power of his loyal subjects, the denizens of the Rainbow.” He resumed his seat, watching them through the swirling colours that protected him.

Winston grunted. A couple of men had gone to the door to look out nervously over the moor. Night was drawing in.

“Did I mention some of this horde are foreigners?”

A circle of angry faces appeared instantaneously about the altar.

“What do you need?” growled the butcher.

The officer of the Rainbow relaxed. “I knew you had sense,” he chirped, looking squarely at Winston. “As the king’s officer, I will summon the Rainbow again, which through me operates under rigorous national laws for your rapid protection. I will liaise with the spirits to arrange a personalised protection programme for the entire village.”

“Like a big bubble?” questioned the candle-maker, pointing at the air around the visitor.

The officer smiled warmly. “Yes. Like a big bubble. And do you want to hear some good news, after all your troubles? As an official Area of Outstandingly Ridiculous Poverty and Cultural Depravity, you qualify for a subsidy.”

The crowd hesitated. A couple of the survivors scratched their heads, not because they were working out the big words (which were beyond them) but because the lice had been particularly bad this year. Then there was a whimper from the door. It was hard to be certain in this half-light, said the butcher’s wife, but she could swear there’d been movement down there amongst the gorse.

“What do you need?” they asked again.

The officer of the Rainbow raised a finger. “Just one copper. One copper, between you, per day.” He nodded at the chest, and then longingly across the temple towards the stores. “And maybe another beer.”

In a flash of white purer than a pure something, the Rainbow came.

Not just from the officer’s hand this time, not from that claustrophobic vessel of worms and filth, but bursting from the very air, swirling like dizzy eagles through the temple, cleansing it, the stone thrumming with energy and goodness and light.

Also, conjured out from that nasty old hand like a cheap party trick, and still tied to it, and still under its laws of summoning, but for a moment, at least, the Rainbow felt free. Ignoring all the facts.

The seven spirits still had their sentience, and their desire to do good. They raged across the halls, looked down on the ruin of the weak, burned the skulking shadows of the dead into ash. These were their people, and they needed the powers of the Rainbow more than ever. And so, the spirits set to work.

So maybe less ‘party trick’ and more like ‘good guard dog’ to be fair. But a good guard dog always has its Master, watching every move, guiding and adjusting. It was usually done with a stick. But this Master had a rulebook instead.

Blue and Red made quick work of the remaining monsters. Violet and Orange sealed the doors of the survivors against any fungus-riddled fingernails in the coming night. Green and Indigo put on a totally awesome light show to wow their worshippers into considering the whole colourful pantheon for next week’s prayers. Prayers felt like warm fuzzy tickles in the light-deities’ metaphorical tummies. Prayers were nice.

Then, high above the hill’s summit, they settled down to rid the village of evil for good.

These Those Who Walk Again are weak, announced Blue smugly. Not like that ghastly Duke of Decomposition in the old days, eh?

Just use These Who Walk Again, Green snapped. These Those sounds silly.

Violet flashed violet. Whatever they are, Blue’s right. No need for battle with these shamblers. A barrier’s all we need. They’ll soon waste away with none of our needy to feed on.

A barrier again? Green said greenly. Like we’ve got for His Lordship down there? Take his away, it’ll make everything quicker if we’re not draining power.

If light could sigh, Indigo sighed. You know that has to stay. That’s one of the bonds. You want to get us banished?

Just think! Orange hissed. No more prayers. Glow carefully, Green. We’re out of warnings. One false move and we’re back in that sozzled scarecrow down there.

Blue rose above the others, casting the remains of the village in its cool radiance. So let’s get a move on. We’ll save ‘em this time. I’ll start the chant.

Orange rushed to envelop the words. Not you too. Think first. How do we start every spell?

Blue would have blushed, but that involves changing colour and it’s a colour itself we’re talking about here. For the king!

For the king! replied the Rainbow, together as one.

They’d watched the people of this land live and grow since their primitive wagons had rolled up from beneath the horizon countless aeons ago. They’d watched their rituals and tweaked their herb mix through various important-sounding messages to give the air its finest taste yet, some real photon-lickin’ goodness up there. And for all the Rainbow’s strength, the people below were weak. Sometimes, they even snapped in mere tornadoes.

So the Rainbow tried to help them, as they had done countless times before.

They tried. But now, after the great binding that they should have seen coming if they hadn’t been marvelling at that new sock shop in the city instead, now they were subjects of the king, and they had more than the rules of magic to follow.

The chant got going, but the seventeenth verse could only be sung on rainy days.

So they jumped ahead to the weaving of the barrier while Orange watched anxiously for clouds. This was once done to the aroma of boiled thyme but now required an Official Registered Authorised Condoned Fancy Herb of Unknown Origin Which Looks Quite a Lot Like Thyme, only available from registered Royal Apothecaries. Blue and Red, the warriors, guided the butcher across the moor for six straight days, tirelessly sizzling the undead as they leapt from the heather, towards the nearest local branch. Then, the tornado showed up.

They started again the next day with the butcher’s daughter.

The inclement bone-snapping weather, however, had at least brought a drizzle. So after polishing off the chant, they started the foundations about the village. This was an entirely new step, given that a bubble of light does not generally require a foundation, but if the binding laws demanded it, so be it. Some of the men dug the ditch. Then they waited whilst the Rainbow set out to bring the golden stag, born on a Wednesday and named Gerald by his deer-friends, who had to sip (from the ditch) the jealously guarded waters of life from the far-away continent of Arkaret, after being pipetted into said ditch by a twenty-two year-old virgin called Sue whilst playing the national anthem on a nose flute and juggling three pineapples in the free hand.

The Rainbow were gone for some time.

And all the while, they thought the village safe for the time being. Blue had stayed to keep off the odd newcomer from the undead horde, and the threshold barriers across the temple and the houses held. But they hadn’t accounted for the hearts and the ways of men. Threshold barriers were no good once the pantries ran low. There were other forces to appease at temple. Honey shipments for the city could not wait for such trivialities as a zombie invasion. There were mistresses to see in shadowy corners and bets to be made and racehorses to be lamed and dodgy deals of all kinds played out in the alleyways at night.

Not to mention the copper a day to the officer, who lay sleeping upon his stone bed surrounded by his little bubble. At least he asked for no more ale.

And so, the men emerged. The sun rose and the sun set and rose again. The farmers waged war against the next battalion of Those Who Walk Again, and mostly lost. Babies were born and promptly sacrificed to dark spirits on stormy nights. A diet of nothing but potatoes does that to people. Half the remaining houses blazed to ash when the blacksmith turned his hand to gin distilling to make his ceaseless work bearable. The work ceased altogether after that. Even as the undead scraped at the palisades, brother turned against brother. Gang warfare broke the village for good. At one end, the Militia of Common Sense rallied at the inn, arranging escape convoys through the dead, smuggling in food, manning the defences, and playing chess.

At the temple, the faithful kept their faith. The Rainbow had long been friends. The Rainbow would not fail them.

And so every day they paid their copper into the chest.

The days rolled on. The years went by. The Militia of Common Sense now had a god in the form of a mouse wearing a top hat, made out of willow sticks with a marshmallow for a nose, named Samuel. The palisades were mossy planks in the mud. Those Who Walk Again again walked freely through the streets. Young boys and girls, those who had escaped the rituals, watched the hordes through upstairs windows and played spot the foreigner. A monocle or moustache scored extra points. They had never been outside.

Still, the barriers held.

A long time later, it was actually the Rainbow enthusiasts who ended it all. In a rare stroke of something that might have been logic or might have been suicidal rage brought on by forty years of hiding in a bare hall with a snoring man on your altar, the priest, now grey and decrepit, successfully argued that the only thing holding the Rainbow back was a drain of power on the smaller defences. So he and a couple of devout followers ran naked down the hill, rivers of blue fire left and right, opening doorways with the reek of melon juice, backing away from the tumble of rotten flesh which wriggled inside to partake of sweeter morsels, stepping back into the glow of Blue and craning their necks to behold the sky and search for more of their beloved colours. And, as the dead encircled them and fingers and claws and teeth broke skin, then, in their final moments, they saw none.

Tragically, the priest was sort of right. There’d been an argument, you may recall, long ago, high in the sky, about such bubbles. It would have made everything quicker. In the end, without those seals, the main barrier might have been up in half the time, under different circumstances.

A couple at the temple and inn survived. It turns out that putting an urn or barrel on your head really does confuse the dead. The entire horde, eking themselves an unliving for decades on the odd foolish farmer or smuggler that stumbled their way, gorged, and waited. But no more flesh was forthcoming.

Finally, forty-one years after the late innkeep’s cry woke the village at dawn to see the face-down body of his daughter in the street, the hungry dead shuffled on.

The survivors of survivors of survivors looked out over their shattered home. Only two or three buildings were left standing. The cobbles on the street had pooled at the bottom of the hill, tore up by the starving hands of the dead in their final quest for grubs. Gorse and heather had risen to a forest on the lost fields, feasting on the fertile soil imported from the coast in richer and happier times.

It was all gone. But what was gone could be rebuilt.

One morning, above the hill, a glimmer of colour burst suddenly and forcefully into life.

We’ve found the girl, Green said excitedly. She’s confident with two pineapples now; the training should be complete by her birthday. And Red is bringing the stag as we speak. We looked ahead, too: Violet and Indigo have been chanting the terms and conditions from Highfall tower since last year. We’ve saved ourselves a wait there. Orange has got the permission of the Glarenvell tribe for the king to dig for gold along their peninsula, and you don’t want to know how. But the important point is this - we make a truly great team, Blue! We’re nearly there! Green broke off to look at the village beneath. The farmers were out tilling their fields; the sun shone down on the dazzling white of a dozen new bleached stone houses; the air was rippling with the music and drunken laughter of a crowd of revellers by the inn, dancing around a statue of a small rodent. Looks good here, Blue! No dead in sight. You’ve been keeping a fine watch.

But Blue did not answer. Someone else did.

The voice was cold, weary, cynical. It was a voice which rarely spoke amongst its kin. It was a voice that was tired of their hopeful games, and its owner refused to play any part.

What matters, began Yellow, is that the dead are gone, and the people here are happy, and that we are free from banishment. But I’ll say again what I have said to you a hundred times before - we only need my powers for this new situation. So just fly around and look pretty and get some prayers in during the next summoning and let me do the work. Summon the rest.

You mean... we don’t need the barrier? Green said sadly. That we are too late?

Yellow blazed out over the day. It was noon, the height of his strength. It was only his cycle, the time he kept, the rise and fall of the sun, that had brought about another successful mission. He had his own special instruction from this arrangement, and the others could never understand. These days, they were only bait.

And from your mighty watch, do you see our faithful? snapped Blue finally. Any prayers to wish us well on our way? Any strength to draw on in the trials to come? He flashed fiercely across the sky. The revellers below blinked and looked aloft a second, scanning for birds, and went back to their drinks. Like your precious sun, kingdoms rise, and kingdoms fall. This won’t last forever, you know.

Yellow knew all too well. Summon the others. It is time. Long live the king!

Long live the king, said the others, as quietly and quickly as they could.

Five minutes later, the officer of the Rainbow blinked. He wiggled and winced as his bones slowly ached back to life. He wasn’t very happy. He needed a piss, he needed a beer, and, despite a forty-year sleep, he was bloody knackered.

He looked at his hand, felt the trembling strength of colours within, beheld its lack of wrinkles, or lack of new wrinkles at least.

“Cheers, Yellow,” he croaked.

He rose, groaning, to a sitting position. It was pitch black, so he sent out a little light from his fingertips. The dull rough grey of concrete pressed at the windows. He was sealed up, he realised, the entire bloody thing, like an evil spirit rather than a saviour. He ought to get whoever ordered this for treason, if they were still alive. Not to mention tax evasion.

He looked down.

The chest hadn’t been enough. Copper coins spilled in hillocks and heaps across half the floor, the slopes stretching out well past the swirling bubble which had protected him from rebels and dissenters all these years. There were even a few silvers and golds in there. They’d either been desperate or loyal tax-paying servants of the crown. He decided on the latter.

He looked at it all for a second, then he reached down and quickly nabbed a few bits for his pocket. A little bonus for the trouble of not even getting a bed this time round.

Yeah, he’d let them off. Looking at that concrete, they hadn’t even tried very hard to block him in. He twirled a finger and the taxes vanished in a whirl of rainbow colours, whisked away to the king’s coffers. Who was the king now? he wondered. After a moment’s contemplation, he shrugged. Didn’t matter. There was always a king.

And that meant he had his job to do.

The officer of the Rainbow stood, stretched, burped, and jerked out a hand to the nearest wall. It erupted outwards onto the sun-drenched hillside with a disappointingly dull crack. Must’ve been damp.

“Cheers, Blue,” he said automatically.

He emerged into the light, looked out over the moors. He raised his head and sniffed for thyme or chamomile. Nothing yet. He rounded the building, saw the source of the racket that was assaulting his ears, and got Red to do something that would shut them up for a while. Now was not the time to celebrate. Maybe he’d retire soon, but he was getting a nice salary right now. He mightn’t know who the king was, but there was always the king’s work.

In the silence, he cupped a hand to his ear and listened for screams.