Three weeks later, the Brigadier was riding at the head of a column of soldiers and dignitaries from a dozen countries making their way towards the nearest area of Radiant territory. On one side of him was Thomas Shanks, the scientist, who looked as though he was still not quite comfortable in outdoor travelling clothes or, for that matter, with being outdoors at all.

     The Brigadier thought that he had the look of an indoor man. A man used to the warmth and comfort of a controlled environment and for whom a cold breeze or a light shower would be discomforting enough to ruin his whole day. Even now, in what the Brigadier thought was a warm, sunny day, Shanks had his collar turned up and the top button of his thick, heavy coat fastened, and the Brigadier had to control his face to keep a smile of amusement from appearing there. He had insisted on coming, though. If mankind was finally about to confront the Radiants and hold them to account for their crimes, then the Hetin folk absolutely had to be represented as well.

     In contrast, Mason Pettiwell, the Kelvon diplomat riding on his other side, was having a much happier time of it. He was a large man with a ferocious shock of red hair and a wide handlebar moustache, and he was one of those people who would happily chat to anyone nearby about anything that crossed his mind. The Brigadier had taken an instant dislike to him, but was diplomatic enough to try to hide his feelings. He wished he would ride further back with the other dignitaries, where be wouldn't have to suffer his grating personality, but as the representative of the Empire Pettiwell seemed to think that he was, in fact, the leader of the mission and that his place was at its head. He seemed to think that he was being gracious in allowing the other two men to ride alongside him.

     The other dignitaries from smaller countries were behind them, each one accompanied by an assistant and a servant, and behind them was a wagon, drawn by four horses, containing a functioning arc oscillator. The hissing and bubbling of its water cooling system was clearly audible above the creaking of wood, the tramping of nearly two hundred iron shod hooves and a couple of low voiced conversations between the men of his military escort. Two other wagons further back carried enough spare parts to build two complete new machines and enough chemicals and acids to keep the batteries supplying electricity for several days, and even if the batteries ran out, the machine could be powered, if necessary, by a hand crank operated by two men.

     They were travelling through Wilterland, on almost the same route the Brigadier had followed while on their way to find a cure for the Princess, and as they went the Brigadier kept noticing landmarks he recognised from the first time. That was the river where they'd stopped to fill their water bottles and into which Spencer had ‘accidentally’ knocked Harper, to the great amusement of everyone except the Brigadier himself. There was the spot where they'd made camp for the night the day after a snake had panicked Cowley’s horse and made it throw him off. As they rode past, he saw a circle of stones where someone had made a camp fire and was almost certain that it had been them. Yes, there was the tree he'd slept under. The one that had dropped a dead branch on his legs in the small hours of the morning.

     He allowed himself the smallest of smiles. The mood had been so different back then. Then, they had been angry at what had been done to their beloved Princess and full of anxiety as to whether their one desperate hope of saving her would succeed. Every word they spoke, every smallest action or gesture, had revealed the powerful emotions seething just beneath. Even he, the Brigadier, had been fearful and anxious, even though he'd taken great care not to let the men know. Malone had guessed, perhaps, but he'd said nothing to anyone. He had always been good at keeping the Brigadier's secrets, and the Brigadier missed him terribly. He’d been offered another batman to replace him, but he had turned the offer down. It would have been unfair on the young man to make him try to fill shoes that nobody else could fill.

     Now, though, the mood was one of grim determination. A determination to punish the creatures they now knew had ultimately been behind the attack on the Princess. To make the Radiants aware of how serious a mistake they had made. The banter among the men would have sounded light hearted to the casual listener, but underneath it was a cold fury as every man among them remembered the lives that had been lost because of the Raidants’ actions. Friends and brothers blown up by artillery fire, or torn apart by the tentacles of a Radiant or, worse, thrown back to their animal forms; everything that made them who they were ripped from them and cast away with casual, contemptuous indifference. The Radiants had treated humans like animals, and now a reckoning would be made.

     “Are you sure that machine of yours is working?” asked Pettiwell, looking past the Brigadier to see the man riding on his other side. “How do we know it’s still producing these emanations that you claim are so unbearable to the Radiants?”

     “If it’s not, I suspect we’ll soon know about it,” replied the scientist, trying to pull the collar tighter around his throat. “We must be well inside their territory by now. How much further is it to their city, Brigadier?”

     “We should get there some time today, tomorrow morning at the latest, if we keep up our present pace,” replied the Brigadier. “If they’re going to try something, it'll be soon.”

     “An earthquake, you mean,” said Pettiwell, stroking his moustache thoughtfully. “Or a hurricane, to throw the wagon containing your wonderful machine far over the horizon, leaving us all helpless and defenceless...”

     “The soldiers are all armed with incendiary ammunition now,” pointed out the scientist. “Even without the arc oscillator, we're well able to defend ourselves.”

     “Against a tornado? Or a stampeding herd of wild oxen? The old stories say they can control animals too, and we've passed several sizeable herds on our way here.”

     “I'm hoping that they want to talk as much as we do,” said Shanks. “Yes, they could kill us if they really wanted to, but stampeding herds of animals can't get through our city walls, and the arc oscillators are hidden in basements, well shielded from the fury of even the fiercest tornado. They can't visit our cities any more unless they come to some sort of agreement with us.”

    Pettiwell grunted. “How do these things work anyway? What are these strange emanations that the Radiants cannot stand?”

     The scientist could only shrug his shoulders in bafflement. “We're calling it radio, after the devices the Hetin folk used to deter the creatures, but we have no idea whether the two are, in fact, the same thing. The apparatus definitely radiates something, though. We’ve seen it in our laboratories. When I was building the second device, just after the Radiant attack on Marboll, I noticed that there was a spark appearing between the graphite contacts of the second machine before I connected it to a battery. A small spark. Much smaller than the one in the first machine, but there nonetheless. I think that it’s the spark, the current creating it alternating in direction a hundred times a second, that produces the radio effect, and that it somehow induces a spark in the second machine. I suspect that it does something similar in the brains of Radiants and adopted humans, and that that's what they find so painful. Imagine if someone jabbed a pair of electrodes into your head and ran a current across your skull.”

     “So why doesn't it have the same effect on us?”

     “I suspect that it’s because they communicate by telepathy. Maybe their telepathy works by radio. The arc oscillator, then, would be like a bright light that dazzles a sighted man but has no effect on a blind man.”

     The Brigadier said nothing during this conversation, but something the scientist said had him thinking. If one arc oscillator could detect the emanations of another, then perhaps they could be used to send messages, wirelessly, across great distances. A wireless telegraph! Communication between a commander and distant units of his armies that couldn't be severed by cutting a wire. What was more, the commander could send messages simultaneously to many different lieutenants, co-ordinating their actions, and any of them could send messages to all the others at the same time appraising them of a change of circumstances. Of course, the enemy could also intercept these messages if they also built a radio machine, but a series of code words could ensure that they wouldn’t understand the meaning of what was being said. He would have to talk to the scientist, when he could get him alone sometime, and see if such a thing was possible, and if it was, over what kind of range messages could be sent.

     The scientist was clearly in a good mood, despite being outdoors, as anyone listening to his conversation would have been able to tell. Not only was he about to strike back against the creatures that had destroyed the civilisation of his ancestors, but King Leothan had promised the Hetin folk a secret homeland within the borders of Helberion, in gratitude for the man's help in saving the Kingdom. The Brigadier remembered the man's look of astonished disbelief as Leothan had pointed to a spot on a map spread out on a table in the briefing room.

     “That, there, is the village of Sutton's Field,” he'd said. “It’s one of the towns hit by the Radiants on their way to Marboll. Everyone in it was cursed back to their animal forms. The place is now completely empty, but everything is right there, waiting for people to move in. There are crops in the fields waiting to be harvested. Herds of cattle and sheep. Schools and hospitals waiting to be used. So long as you can find a couple of hundred of your people willing to go there, you can have a village occupied only by your own kind where you can live openly, without fear of non-Hetins discovering you.”

     “That would be wonderful,” Shanks had said doubtfully. “But people would still visit the town occasionally. We’d still have to keep our children out of sight at all times in case some casual visitor saw them.”

     “Would that matter?” The Brigadier had asked. “You could have a radio machine of your own, a supply of incendiary ammunition. You wouldn’t have to fear the Radiants any more.”

    ”It's not just the Radiants we're afraid of,” the scientist had replied. “How would normal humans react when they found out about us? People tend to hate and fear anything that's different. I know that the people of this kingdom are better than most, they follow the splendid example you and your ancestors have set, Your Majesty, but in the end they’re still people and there are so terribly few of us. We have to remain hidden! Your offer is kind and generous, your Majesty, but I don't see how it could work.”

     “Look at the map,” the King had replied, tapping it with his finger. “Sutton’s field is located in a closed valley, surrounded by hills through which no road passes. It is a dead end. No-one goes there who doesn’t live there, or who has contacts with someone living there. No merchants would need to go there. You could travel to other towns to buy and sell. You could be trained to do your own building and repairs, et cetera, so that no tradesmen would ever need to go there. I can make sure that those people who do occasionally have to go there, doctors, detectives et cetera, already know about you and are sworn to secrecy. I can find trustworthy people. People I know won't betray you. There is room in the valley for the town to grow as your population grows. A quite sizeable city might stand there one day, occupied entirely by Hetin folk. By the time the world at large finds out about you, there will, hopefully, be enough of you that you can stand up to the occasional bigot.”

     “There's the occasional bigot, and then there's official discrimination. You are a just and fair King, Majesty, and Princess Ardria will be a great Queen, but we must give thought to who will be ruling the Kingdom a hundred years from now, two hundred years from now. Once the general public knows about us, there will be no way to hide. They only have to make us remove our clothes and our anatomical differences will be there for all to see. They could hunt us to extinction.”

     “I suspect you are heading for extinction already,” the King had replied softly. “Am I right?”

     “Even we don't know what our numbers are, but I suspect you are right. We may only have another few generations.”

     “So you have nothing to lose, right?”

     The King had smiled at him, and Shanks hadn't been able to keep from smiling back “I'll pass on your offer to my contacts,” the scientist had said. “They'll pass it onto their contacts and so on until most of the Hetin folk know. Then it’s just a matter of seeing how many of them like the offer. I can tell you that nobody will be going to Sutton’s Field unless they know that a great many others are going as well. It may be a year before we know for sure.”

     “Then I'll make sure you get that year. I'll have the whole valley placed off limits. Some cover story about the place being contaminated by a chemical leak. There's a chemical plant a few miles away that was hit by the Carrowmen during the war, isn't that right, Brigadier?”

     “I believe so, Majesty. The Applefrost plant. It uses some quite nasty chemicals, I believe. The story should hold up.”

     “Excellent! We'll keep the place empty for you, Mister Shanks, until your people decide whether they want to move there. If they don't, I quite understand. Centuries of hiding isn't a habit that can be shrugged off overnight. You people can go on living the way they have been, and we’ll all hope for the best for them.”

     The scientist had looked for a moment as though he might be overcome with emotion. “Your Majesty, I can't tell you how grateful I am for this extraordinary offer. If my people don't accept it, then I believe they will have shown themselves to be unfit to survive. Unworthy to share this world with you and your people. I refuse to believe that all our spirit and courage has been drained from us by the Radiants, that he have become a species of rabbits, only capable of hiding. I'll make them take up your offer if I have to drag them there by the ears!”

     A rare smile touched the corners of the Brigadier’s mouth as he remembered the King's expression of amusement at the mental image thus formed. He realised that Pettiwell and the scientist were still talking to each other, but that he'd lost track of the conversation as he'd indulged in the reverie. “It's only a matter of time before they come crawling back,” the diplomat was saying. “If they think they can survive as independent countries, they’re out of their minds.”

     “I imagine you're hoping that they come crawling back,” Shanks replied, with some amusement, the Brigadier thought. “After all, if two provinces can break away from the Empire and flourish as independent countries, other provinces might get the same idea. Before long, there might be a cluster of small, new countries where the Empire used to be.”

     “Leaving Greater Helberion as the largest, most powerful human nation in the world. I imagine that would be very much to your liking, but I’m afraid I must disabuse you of the notion, Mister Shanks. The benefits of being part of the Empire are far too great to be lightly thrown away. Listania and Ukrann broke away because of the machinations of Radiant agents, stirring up discontent. Now that those agents have been discovered and removed, the west will soon see the error of their ways and sue for membership once more...”

     “Quiet,” the Brigadier suddenly said, staring ahead. “Someone in our path.”

     The others looked, shading their eyes with their hands, and saw a tiny dark speck on the horizon, almost lost in the shimmering heat haze. “Those Above, Brigadier!” said Pettiwell in surprise. “You must have the eyes of a hawk!”

     “Not at all. I was just paying attention.”

     Pettiwell and Shanks shared an amused glance at the mild rebuke, then returned their gaze to the man standing there, clearly waiting for them, while the Brigadier rode back to alert their escort.