A bright red dot appeared in the centre of the green square that was Rampart Hold. Four more dots, all of them together, appeared right beside the Hold, and two on what had got to be the gather-ground – the space between Rampart Hold and the Span.
I traced them with my finger, guessing each in turn.
“This is you, Challenger,” I said. “And these… the firethrower, the database and the bolt gun. Because we’re all gathered in the one place. And these two are the Half-Ax guns. But what’s the dot inside the Hold?”
“That’s actually two signals overlaid on each other. One is the clock radio you brought up from the Underhold and repaired. The other is not inside the Hold but above it. It’s the mast. What I’m detecting are places where electricity flows within circuits, with enough power to affect local magnetic fields. That means functioning tech. Waked tech, as you call it, or tech that’s set on standby. Entirely inert systems won’t show here. So. We have proof of concept.”
“Is this as far as you can go?” Jemiu asked. “I thought we were doing this to get a warning of what was coming. We can see all this with our own eyes.”
Fer glared at Jemiu, and even Catrin seemed surprised at her speaking up. Challenger’s voice didn’t change. “I was merely establishing a baseline. I’m going to expand the field now. That means there’ll be less detail in the centre, but you can still use the green circle as a reference point. The green circle is Mythen Rood.”
The circle got smaller and smaller, though it never moved from the middle of the magic mirror. For a long while it was alone. Then a red dot came into the top edge of the mirror – and a few seconds later three more in the bottom right-hand corner.
“The field is retaining strength and coherence into middle ranges. These are functional devices I’ve found in Mythen Rood’s immediate vicinity. Approximate distances are five miles for the device to the west of you, six and a half for the cluster in the south-east.
“The western one would be Todmort,” Catrin said at once. “The other is most likely Greetlan.”
“I never even heard of Greetlan,” Fer said, like this had got to be someone’s fault.
“Yeah, you did, Fer. You just forgot. We stopped trading with them back when Grandma Bliss was alive. I thought them whelmed long since.”
“Perhaps they are,” Challenger said. “As I said, the mast is sensitive to electromagnetic fields of a sufficient strength to register on my sensors. Entirely inactive devices will not register, but dormant ones will if they are still drawing power.”
My mind raced on a little. “Could we maybe find more tech like you, Challenger? Abandoned in the forest and waiting to be found?”
“I don’t think we’ve got time to go digging for buried treasure,” Catrin said. “Okay, you’re seeing out six miles or more. Can you stretch it a little further and see Half-Ax?”
“Yes.”
“Do it, Challenger,”
The green circle that was Mythen Rood shrunk a little more. To the east of us, a great number of red dots all sprung up at once – on the very edge of the screen at first, but moving inwards quickly as what Challenger called his field searched further and further away. But the dots were not where I expected them to be. I thought Half-Ax would be on fire with red – all its tech gathered in one great store, like our Underhold, but ten or twenty times as big and all awake.
Instead there was a kind of rash of dots sprawled out in a wavering, uncertain line from the right-hand side of the mirror towards the middle. Towards us.
“What are we seeing?” Fer asked.
Challenger didn’t feel any need to answer her. I would have asked him my own self, but the truth of it hit me all at once. Then when I tried to speak, I found my throat was tight. Catrin spoke up before I could frame a word. “We’re seeing the Peacemaker’s army. On the move.”
“They’re coming here,” I said. My heart bumped against the inside of my ribs and a sick sourness climbed up into my mouth.
“It seems likely,” Challenger said.
It was a thing we knew would happen, so it should not have been so big a surprise. But it was one thing to know it and another thing again to see it happening.
Catrin wasn’t shook though. She was still thinking through what it meant. She counted on her fingers. “At Calder ford, there was ten of them, and they had two tech weapons between them. At our ambush in the forest, they was maybe fifteen or twenty, and they had four. Challenger, what’s the count here?”
“I count one hundred and two separate fields.”
“So maybe four or five hundred fighters.”
“There can’t be that many,” Fer said. “They’d of left nobody home but cats and dogs.”
“Maybe it’s less then,” Catrin said. “But we better make our plans on more.”
“There is something else,” Challenger said. “Something I’m at a loss to understand. But I think you need to be aware of it.”
All four of us swapped glances. What else could there be that mattered in the face of this? Catrin got to her feet. “We better save anything else,” she said, “until we’ve told this in the Count and Seal.”
“You will want to discuss this other thing too. It may be part of your war. It seems unlikely to be a coincidence.”
“Show us then,” I told him. “Please.”
The picture in the magic mirror shifted again, the red dots all drawing closer together as Challenger flung his field out further still, way past Half-Ax. More bright dots flashed here and there, but small and far apart. Villages that still hoarded a few pieces of tech, the same way we did, as their last defence against the world outside their gates.
Then my gaze was pulled from the furthest east to the furthest west. In the bottom left-hand corner of the mirror, as far away again from the centre as Half-Ax was, another cluster of lights was now showing. They were brighter than the Half-Ax lights, and closer together – just as much tech, or maybe even more, but gathered more tightly until they all seemed like one big red jewel shining against the darkness.
“What in the dead god’s name is that?” Catrin said. Her voice was a growl.
“I have no way of telling,” Challenger said. “But it’s moving.”
We didn’t bother to ask which way.
55
The dismay in the Count and Seal was considerable, but Catrin rode it down.
“There’s no point in sitting there and asking what will become of us,” she said, speaking loud over the din of voices. “We all knew this day would come, and we’ve done what we could to make ready for it. Now let’s face it like what we are – women and men of Mythen Rood. Not like frightened children that piss themselves at a shadow in the corner or a creak in the night.”
“This is a fuck sight more than that!” someone shouted.
“It isn’t though.” Catrin had wanted that answer and waited on it. “For not one damn thing has happened. Half-Ax is coming, yes. But they’re miles away still, and we’ve had weeks of clear skies. They’ll be crawling, not running. And the force from the west? Well, that could be anything. Friends or foes: we can’t know until we’ve seen them.”