"That's an awful lot of Saxons."

Although the plan had been to travel in the shadow of the invasion for as long as possible, that only really worked if they were, you know, actually moving. For whatever reason, their progress through Cornwall appeared to have completely stalled. As the sun went down on the third day after the conflagration at Isca, I found myself perched on a hill looking down on a veritable ants' nest of blue spearmen.

Now, I'd never been any good at estimating numbers. Not the way you'd see in a movie where a scout would take one glance at an approaching force and go: "thirteen hundred, two hundred and eight men. Six women, one with a limp. They've had beans for lunch."

Nevertheless, to my inexpert eye, their numbers looked to be anything between Merry-Hill-on-the-Saturday-morning-before-Christmas and Villa-Park-for-a-midweek-European-game.

Basically, there were loads.

Throw me the fuck down there, I've got this.

I wasn't sure I was absolutely delighted that Drynwyn was back on speaking terms with Team Morgan. Merlin said they'd had a chat, and he had helped it to have a 'come to Jesus' moment. Apparently, I'd be having much less trouble with it moving forward.

I can't say I'd noticed much difference.

"I think we'll keep that in reserve as Plan B, if you don't mind, mate. But you stay poised and ready in case we need to do something genocidally suicidal. You are absolutely our go-to guy there. Any thoughts, Big M?"

We are witnessing the plight of every invasion since the beginning of time, my dear. Everyone always thinks it is how the battles turn out that decides the direction of wars. More often than not, though, it is just good old-fashioned logistics.

"They've run out of loo roll, you think?"

Something like that. They have achieved their primary goal and now have all sorts of hierarchical niceties to arrange. Human nature is what it is, and there needs to be a pecking order established. They will certainly not be in any shape to get moving in the near future until all of that is resolved. A little blood will need to flow to lubricate the wheels.

"So, what do we do?"

I know we discussed following them, but this is too good an opportunity to miss. We should probably take the opportunity to slip past them.

"What about their wizards? You were worried they'd be able to sense me if we tried to get past them before?"

I know. But something seems to have happened to them. I can sense them, and there are some of significant power there, but they are all ... subdued. The fluency of their cycles appear to be disturbed; they are not efficiently gathering Qi as before. I wonder if the reverberations as to what they committed at Isca have been substantial.

"When you say shit like 'I can sense them', what actually do you mean? Is that something I should be trying to do?"

There was a pause. "Sorry, is anything wrong?"

Quite the opposite, my dear. That was a perfectly valid question, and I'm just calibrating my mental processes to accept the possibility you occasionally demonstrate such insight.

"I sense you're still not over me ruining your big finish to that elemental speech, are you?"

I don't know what you mean.

If we've all quite finished holding each other's dicks and singing cumbaya, can we get on with the attack?

Once again, I was left with the impression that Drynwyn had seen some shit with his last owner that he was yet to process fully. "We're not going to attack right now, Drynwyn. We're going to plan for a super-secret spy mission where we have to be very, very quiet."

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The sword sighed its derision. We seem to be doing far too many super-secret silent spy missions in the last few days. They don't seem quite right. Rhyddrech Hael never did super secret spy missions.

Which may be the reason he is no longer with us, of course.

He's dead because he decided to take on a fucking dragon without back-up. Don't patronise me.

That was not my intention, Drynywyn, I apologise.

I never thought I'd feel a touch left out listening to my talking sword and my ghost mentor merrily bonding. It's certainly a vibe.

"Sorry to interrupt, Big M, but you were about to share some doubtlessly crucial cultivator knowledge? How are you sensing all those wizards?"

It's not that difficult, my dear. If you think that each of us is constantly cycling our Qi, that process creates ripples that echo out through existence. Nothing hugely noticeable, of course - it's not like any of us are foolish enough as to allow a visual manifestation of our power to leak outwards.

"No," I thought back to my meeting with the head-removing Saxon cultivator, "that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it?"

Indeed. Well, I will describe it in a way that makes sense to me, and you will need to substitute your own metaphor for looking at cultivation. So, if you think of your Qi as a still pond, all other cultivators are ripples on its surface. With sufficient effort, I can locate those ripples and, with practice, can sense things about what caused them.

I mentally substituted a 'white canvas' for Merlin's water imagery and immediately noticed little paint dots popping up upon it. I thought that was it, but then I found if I concentrated on them, I was able to get a fairly decent sense of the wizard they corresponded to.

Nothing too invasive; I mean, I didn't get full-on character sheets or anything actually useful like that, but it was enough that I felt I could tell them apart from each other.

Panic suddenly struck me. "Can anyone do this?" I was alarmed at the idea of the internal radar of several hundred wizards suddenly pinging away and zeroing in on the enemy cultivator who thought they were hidden atop a hill.

In theory, yes. But they would need someone who has mastered the technique to show them how to do it. I do not think these wizards have had that lesson. Indeed, from the sense of the auras, they do not seem to have undertaken a traditional apprenticeship at all.

I quickly mapped the sense I had of my wizard-radar against what I could see of the Saxon army beneath me. From what I could tell, the cultivators all seemed to be grouped to the very edge of the force, which, as a tactic, felt pretty odd.

They're scared of them.

"How do you mean?"

Drynywn was silent for a moment, and I didn't think it would answer. It's hard to explain. For those who are non-cultivators, it is difficult to spend time around those who have the power to change the world. Think of it from their point of view. They have spent their whole lives training and practising to be good at war. For many of them, they have risen high on the strength of their arm and their skill with a blade. There is significant honour in our culture of being known to be the pinnacle of your craft. Then, one day, you stand the shield wall against a cultivator, and it makes everything you are, or will ever be, redundant. It shakes the very core of a man. It makes friendships between the two difficult. It made Rhyddrech Hael very lonely indeed.

That was the longest speech I'd ever heard from the sword that didn't have a 'fuck' in it. I awkwardly reached behind me and touched its hilt in what I thought was a comforting manner.

Did you just fucking pat me?

Or maybe not.

I was trying to formulate a response when I noticed that two dots on the far left of my canvas, ones that were already well away from the rest of the small cultivator grouping, started to move away from the Saxon camp quickly. I looked up to try to see what that movement looked like in the real world, and it seemed like two of them must be running into the woods just below us.

"Deserters, do you think?"

I doubt it. There would be no friendly welcome for Saxon cultivators in the villages around here. And they're too far from the border to think they can safely slip back on their own. Even then, though, I think the fear of the locals would pale into insignificance compared to what would happen should they be captured by their fellows. Saxons take cowardice personally.

"Well, something is making them run."

I watched the paint dots move on my canvas for a moment, trying to figure out what these wizards were up to. Then, they abruptly stopped, and a few seconds later, one of the dots vanished.

"I'm going to take a punt that doesn't mean anything good?"

Well, not for that individual cultivator, but, on the other hand, that might be some of the best news we've had for quite some while.

"What? Why?"

Because someone out there has found the wherewithal to kidnap a pair of Saxon wizards and the giant swinging balls to go ahead and fucking end one. That makes them very much my sort of people

Worryingly, I found myself agreeing.