He turned a wheel on the side of the frame, turning the lens ever so slowly so that his point of view moved gently westwards, away from the Shadow and towards Tatria. The devastated Ilandian countryside, hidden from view in places by thick clouds of smoke from burning towns and villages, sped by before his eyes until he came to an area where the beautiful gardens and well tended farmlands were more or less untouched by the invaders. A part of Ilandia far enough away from the eastern border that the enemy hadn’t been able to reach it so long as Fort Battleaxe stood, and only now that the great fortress city had fallen was it coming under the bootheel of the invaders. It would suffer now, though, and Lirenna expected that everyone who’d been living in that area had already fled further west, ahead of the tide of evil.

     Continuing to look further west, the soldier suddenly snatched his hand away from the control wheel as if it had burned him and gasped out loud at what he saw. The others, looking over his shoulders, were also shocked and horrified as, right there in front of them, in the polished glass lens, they saw a huge army moving through fields and hedgerows. Thousands of humans, shologs, goblins, hobgoblins, buglins, ogres and representatives of at least a dozen other humanoid races. Creatures of all shapes and sizes, different skin colours, degrees of hairiness and weaponry, but all wearing the same uniform; the bone armour and skull helmets of the Shadowarmies. Here and there among them they saw the massive form of a giant, or the sinuous form of a demidrake, and right at the head of the immense column were the highest ranking officers, mainly humans judging from their height and build, with horns sprouting from their helmets and with other decorations and insignia on their uniforms to denote their rank.

     The General himself, Lirenna assumed that the person in overall command would be a General, was out of sight inside a magnificently decorated silk and leather cabin perched on the back of a zombie dragon whose wings, folded along its side, were in tatters and whose rotting flesh was torn in places to reveal the bones beneath.

     “We never saw that in Fort Battleaxe,” whispered Shaun to himself. “They must have had reinforcements from the Shadow.”

     The column of Shadowsoldiers was fifty men abreast. It paid no attention to the roads, which were too narrow for such a huge army, but cut a straight path through fields, towns and woodlands headed by a vanguard of a hundred zombie ogres who tore down fences, hedges and walls, clearing the way for those behind. The main column was so long that by the time he’d scanned the lens from one end to the other he’d long since lost count of how many companies and regiments it contained. As near as he could estimate, it had to contain at least fifty thousand soldiers, though, and possibly many more, but even that was dwarfed by the two other columns that marched on either side of it.

     Both columns of zombies were longer than the column of living soldiers between them, extending ahead of and behind it by a considerable distance, and they were wider as well with the undead soldiers marching up to a hundred abreast through the clean and innocent Ilandian countryside. Their controllers marched alongside them, one zombherd for every hundred zombies, and Shaun estimated that their numbers alone must be as great as the entire armies of some city states.

     “Fort Battleaxe must have fallen, then,” said Jerry mournfully. “They wouldn’t be marching on otherwise.”

     “But they had the Orb!” wailed Lirenna. “It was supposed to make them impregnable!”

     “Supposed to,” muttered the tiny nome.

     “Was it all a waste of time, then?” said the demi shae, almost in tears. “All the trouble we went to to get it! The shae folk could have taken that Orb. They gave it up so that we could have it, and it didn’t do any good at all!”

     “We don’t know that,” replied Diana reassuringly, putting an arm around the demi shae’s shoulders. “The city probably lasted longer than it otherwise would have, giving the rest of Ilandia time to prepare their defences. Think of the lives that may be saved because of that.”

     Lirenna nodded gratefully and wiped tears from her eyes. Shaun turned the lens away from the army, since the sight of it was so distressing to the demi shae, and to him as well for that matter, and soon the lens was filled with the image of Tatria; Ilandia's capital city. The sight of the large city, packed full of grim, determined soldiers and bustling with activity, was immensely reassuring, reminding them that the enemy still had an awful lot to do before they could claim victory. The defenders looked confident and hopeful, but Lirenna wondered if they had any idea at all of the size of the army marching towards them.

     “Tom’s parents are in there somewhere,” said Jerry, “unless they’ve already moved further west.”

     Lirenna nodded and thought of her own parents in the valley of Haven, somewhere in the Copper Mountains. Had Haven been swallowed up by the Shadow? Possibly not, since the pseudopod of Shadow that had engulfed Fort Battleaxe seemed to be fairly narrow and could easily have bypassed the valley kingdom. She longed to search it out with one of the lenses, but if she did that then both she and the others would see exactly where it was and the secret of its location would be no secret any longer. She knew she could trust her friends not to give away its location voluntarily, but there was always the risk that one of them might have his mind read or be enchanted.

     Suddenly, though, another terrible thought occurred to her. Haven was thousands of years old and had existed while the Agglemonians had been looking down on the world through these very lenses! The Agglemonians must have known all about Haven, everything! There was absolutely no way they couldn’t have known, not if they’d been using the lenses for a thousand years. It must be marked on Agglemonian maps, mentioned in Agglemonian books, there in black and white for everyone to see! By all the Gods, who in all the world doesn’t know about it? she thought in near panic.

     With great effort she forced herself to calm down. Despite everything, Haven was still somehow secret; its location, its very existence, still known to very few people outside the secret valley. The people using the lenses, and their superiors, must have known of Haven, but somehow the information hadn’t leaked out. They’d kept it to themselves, which made sense when you thought about it. Knowing the location of the hidden kingdom would have given them an enormous hold over the Havenites, and they might have planned to use it one day, to ruthlessly exploit the Havenites perhaps or to blackmail them. But a secret is only valuable so long as it remains a secret and so they’d made sure that none of their lens operators revealed it and in the end the Empire had fallen before they could take advantage of it. Or perhaps I’m badly misjudging them, the demi shae then thought. Maybe they kept our secret out of pure altruism. After all, the Empire was mainly a good institution, by human standards, for most of its history. It was only at the end that it began to go bad. Either way, though, my people have got to be warned, because so long as these lenses exist Haven is in grave peril.

     “Lenny, are you all right?” asked Diana in concern.

     “What’s wrong?” asked Shaun, looking around.

     “I don’t know, but just now she went as white as a sheet. I thought she was going to faint!”

     “I’m all right,” said the demi shae, trying to look calm. “It was just the thought of that huge army marching on Tatria, that’s all, and the fact that it’s just a tiny part of the Shadowarmy as a whole. Let’s get out of here, I hate these things! I hate being able to look down on the whole world as if we were Gods, being able to see all the pain and suffering and not being able to do anything about it. Please, I don’t want to stay here.”

     “You don’t have to,” muttered Shaun distractedly, still looking at Tatria through the lens. “Go and find Tom in that library place.”

     “Please!” begged Lirenna. “I don’t want to go alone.”

     “It’s all right,” said Diana soothingly. “I’ll go with you.”

     The demi shae stared pleadingly at the soldier and the tiny nome, both still sitting in front of the lens and looking back at her in annoyance. “Oh all right,” said Shaun at last with a sigh. “We’ll all go.”

     Lirenna gave him a look of infinite gratitude as they stood, and together they left the observation room, heading for the astronomical storeroom.

     Thomas looked up in surprise as they entered. “Hi,” he said, putting down a sheaf of papers. “What’s going on?”

     “We got fed up looking through those lenses,” replied Diana. “There’s nothing but warfare and suffering everywhere you look. It gets rather depressing after a while.”

     Thomas nodded absent mindedly, looked back down at his papers, and was soon a million miles away again as he pored over the notes written by a sage who’d lived eight hundred years before. Lirenna had to smile as she looked at him, her own anxieties forgotten for the time being. The wizard couldn’t be happier, having unlimited access to such a treasure trove of knowledge. This was his idea of paradise, the achievement in life of the bliss and contentment that most people only hoped for in the afterlife, and she suspected that, if only they had an endless supply of food and water, he wouldn’t mind being marooned up here on Kronos for the rest of his life.

     The others all found books or papers to read as well in order to pass the time, although their enthusiasm for astronomy was nowhere near as great as Thomas’s. The soldier, in particular, was visibly fed up within five minutes and Lirenna felt a great weight of guilt as she imagined him growing resentful of her. He longed to return to the lenses to continue watching the progress of the war. It was clear to see in the way he shifted impatiently from foot to foot, repeatedly glancing up at her from the dusty sheets he was holding in his hands.

     After just a couple of minutes he put the sheets down and Lirenna tensed up as she expected him to leave the room. Instead, though, he sat on the floor, his back against an ironwood filing cabinet and, after one last look up at the demi-shae, he closed his eyes and tried to take a nap. Lirenna smiled gratefully, feeling a great wash of love for the woodsman, and she went to sit next to him, her shoulder against his. Not so I'll feel it if he gets up, she told herself. Just so I can lean against him and get more comfortable.

     After a few minutes more Jerry and Diana also made themselves comfortable and took a nap, leaving Thomas as the only one still awake and reading as they waited for Matthew to finish making the key.