Fun fact.

When Beocca had mentioned 'wildfires' earlier, I had thought he had meant the woodlands going up in flames. But the more I'd thought about it, especially after seeing the landscape around the village, the more that didn't make sense.

Quite apart from the soggy weather – if you're British, I don't need to explain, and if you're not, it's hard to put into appropriate words the draining grey, dreariness of living on this island – there simply wasn't anything around that looked especially flammable.

A few hurried minutes of conversation with the blacksmith clarified what he meant, and thus, Plan B was born.

It turned out, the people in the village were used to seeing columns of smoke in the sky because, in the surrounding area, there were little pockets of gas under the ground that regularly, and with minimal prompting, went boom.

Apparently, throwing around Drnwyn's flames provided just the sort of encouragement the area on the outskirts of the village needed to become excitable.

I'm not sure how comfortable I am with this.

I watched the last of the running, screaming figures in front of me and couldn't help but agree.

Killing people one-on-one, I don't have a problem with.

"I'd noticed."

But at least they have a chance. I mean, not much of one because I'm fucking awesome. But it's still theoretically a possibility. Those guys …

We watched silently as the last of those caught up in the explosion smoked and died.

Merlin used to do things like this. In the bad old days.

I nodded. "He showed me a vision of him taking out three whole armies. It was pretty grim."

Rhyddrech was terrified of him, you know? Merlin. Said people were never meant to have such power. Wouldn't have anything to do with him.

The smoke was clearing now, and the full extent of the devastation was revealed. Of the bulk of the army, there was pretty much nothing left. A crater about the size of a football pitch stood in its place, tastefully decorated by various odd and sods of human remains. Those that had been at the edge of conflagration had fared a little better. In that, rather than be summarily exploded into pieces, they had been afforded the opportunity to be flash-fried.

I wasn't convinced many of them were genuinely grateful for that.

"These were bad guys, Drynwyn. The things Beocca said they'd done to the people in the other villages .."

Some of them, for sure. Maybe even most. But we've just wiped out a bunch of people whose only actual crime was being conscripted into an army. I don't know. Not sure I'm feeling too heroic right now.

"There will be a battle in five, six hundred years. It'll be over religion: most of them are, really, when it comes down to it. A city will be asked to hand over all the people living there who are the wrong religion. They'll, being decent humans, flatly refuse. One of the commanders, a delightful wet-wipe called Arnauld Amalric, will order the army to "kill them all. God will recognise his own.' I don't know what made me think of that."

I stared at the space in which the army had stood. I wasn't feeling too heroic, either. Mind you, I don't think I ever had done so before, so there wasn't that much comparative data available. I was pretty familiar with shame, though, so my current mood was like putting on a comfy old jacket.

Which god?

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"Sorry?"

Which god will recognise his own? That sounds like some seriously vengeful Odin shit.

"Ah. You might not have Him in these parts yet. He'll be pretty big in this part of the world."

God of War, I guess?

"Funnily enough, peace and love."

Fucking hell.

"I know, right?"

*

The people inside the smithy took the extermination of the soldiers coming to rape and murder them pretty well. I mean, from their point of view, one moment, the fat lady was giving the final chorus some serious welly, and now she was back at home shouting at her agent for the lack of a gig. They were wholly on board with the smoking wreckage now on their doorstep if it was a choice between them or the army.

I was finding the party atmosphere a bit harder to stomach. Sǣþrȳð even smiled at me, which freaked me out even more. It didn't help that they seemed determined to ascribe the victory to my control of unearthly powers rather than introductory chemistry.

"It is true what they say about Wizards. You are truly all-powerful."

"I appreciate the props, but honestly, you could have done it yourself. All you needed to do was fashion a strong enough ignition mechanism, and the whole thing would have gone up spectaculatly without me." Beocca stared back at me like a dog that had been shown a card trick. The awkward silence drew out before he grinned and clapped me on the back, knocking the wind out of me. "And humble too! Truly, you are one of the great Mages of the realm!"

I stopped trying to argue after that. If I wasn't careful, they'd decide I was a nice person, and there was only so much I could face keep pulling the wool over the eyes of these good people.

I say 'good' people as if they weren't all currently scrabbling through the crater, extricating anything lootable they could get their grubby little hands on. There was something of an unhealthy disregard for the sanctity of dead bodies being displayed. But, as the one who had made the mountain of corpses, perhaps I shouldn't be throwing stones through the massive glass windows of my hypocrisy.

Sǣþrȳð brought me a glass of something that screamed moonshine, and I gulped it down gratefully—anything to get the taste of death out of my mouth.

"You don't like what you did."

I looked at her appraisingly. "What, no 'all hail the mighty spellcaster?' I'm horrified."

"We were going to die, and now we're not. None of us care how you achieved that. We're just extremely grateful. Follow me." She held out her hand for me to take, and gave me a look I thought I had copyrighted after five vodka cokes.

I felt myself blush, and I hesitated. "Look, not that I'm not flattered, but there's no need …"

The stare I received in return suggested my gaydar remained wholly and irredeemably broken. "You wanted to know why we wouldn't leave. I'm going to show you."

Somewhat chagrined, I followed her back to the smithy.

"My family have lived in these parts for generations, and this forge has been here for all that time."

"Okay …"

Sǣþrȳð bent to pull a chest filled with metal offcuts away from the wall. Behind it was a hole that led down some stone steps deep into the ground. With some difficulty, she squeezed herself through the gap and indicated for me to follow. Call me a bluff old traditionalist, but I was not excited to pursue a strange woman into a mysterious cave: I'd seen the film Descent at an impressionable age.

"I'm fine with a verbal explanation. This doesn't need to be a whole show and tell performance."

"For a wizard, you are very skittish. Is not exploring the unknown supposed to be your thing?"

"I'm more from the 'what you don't know can't hurt you' school of thought."

Sǣþrȳð had vanished down the hole, and the peer pressure was fairly insistent for me to follow. And whether it was fags, booze or jumping down foreboding pits in the ground, I was a sucker for it.

The steps went down quite some way, and torches recessed in the wall lit as I walked towards them and flicked off once they were behind me. I could be wrong, but my carefully honed senses suggested some magical shenanigans may be taking place here.

Watching my step, I dipped into my artist's studio to ensure everything was topped up if needed. My Qi was cycling happily around, the benefit of my Dragon-cleansed channels being obvious now as the purple paint positively sluiced around. A pretty decent squirt was going into my armour now, too, which I'd have to experiment with later.

I was dragged back into the real world by walking into the back of Sǣþrȳð.

She glared at me and then pulled me to her side.

"Here. You can see now, wizard. This is why we couldn't leave."

For a moment, I didn't see anything; it was just a long tunnel that vanished into the blackness beyond the torches. But then my eyes adjusted, and I realised the walls were alive with tiny, brown-green creatures.

Each was no bigger than my hand, and they were mining the tunnel. Like full-on hi-ho shit. Most had little pickaxes in their hands, while others were running about with wheelbarrows, transporting the debris away.

If they noticed us, they didn't react. But then, there were thousands of them, and they probably could take us if they needed to. We've all seen Gulliver's Travels.

"Do you know who these are, wizard?" Sǣþrȳð's expression was hard to read.

I went to shake my head, then stopped. I actually did. A memory from twenty years past sprung, fully formed, from my brain. "Knockers. They're fucking Knockers, aren't they?"