to be pointed at and argued over incessantly by teams of bespectacled analysts. They weren’t all jossers, either. A good number of them were waist-height minutians, just like the Tinker, and no doubt, Ned guessed, refugees from the ill-fated city of Gearnish, now under the control of Barbarossa’s ghastly machine-mind, the Central Intelligence.
Ned gawped in wonder at a man clicking a device on his belt that made him turn invisible and visible again, with varying results. At one point his head disappeared while the rest of him stayed visible; at another he appeared to be floating off the ground with no legs. His dad, meanwhile, was mesmerised by an aged minutian who was talking to a flea. He wore a large trumpet-ended device on his ear, while the flea responded by hopping up and down on a minuscule sensor at its feet.
Everything had the touch of the Tinker to it, but the Tinker himself was nowhere to be seen.
“Where is he?” asked Ned’s mum, who, unlike her two “boys”, found the gadgets on display extraordinarily dull.
A contained explosion in a room off to the far corner was to be her clue. The closer they got, the less josser and more “Tinker” their surroundings became – reams of paper and blueprints stuck to the walls, shelves weighed down to breaking point, and a trail of spinning, whirring and bubbling devices on every single surface. Through a door they came to a great sprawling mess and at its centre was the genius who had made it.
“Well, bless my toolbox, if it isn’t the Armstrongs!”
“Hello, Tinks. Nice little set-up,” started Ned’s dad.
“Oh, indeed, Mr Armstrong, indeed. You never told me the jossers had such fantastic tech!”
“They’re a clever bunch, once you get used to them,” grinned Ned’s dad.
A now teary-eyed Tinker proceeded to shake Ned’s hand heartily and then gave his mum a rather elegant bow.
“The Armstrongs together – and here in our little home from home! You wait till the others hear about this. On second thoughts, I think I’ll tell them.”
Mr Fox patiently raised his eyes to the ceiling as the Tinker spoke into a watch on his wrist.
“Channel Alpha-niner, this is the big boff, over!” The little scientist was beaming now, though Ned sensed it had more to do with his watch than their arrival. “This thing is brilliant – so much quicker than a wind-modulator!”
“Big boff, over, this is the Beard. Can you please stop using this channel, Tinks. It’s for mission-only comms and Scraggs is fed up with being asked to bring you biscuits – OVER.”
Ned’s ears pricked excitedly. “The Beard” had to be Abigail, surely – the wonderful bearded lady of the old Circus of Marvels troupe. And if she was there, then her lump of a troll husband, Rocky, couldn’t be far away. How he’d missed them!
“This is a channel-wide announcement, over. That means you too, Tusky. The Arm—”
Before he could get to “strongs”, Benissimo clamped a hand over his mouth and brought down the full weight of a moustachioed twitch.
“Later, Tinks! They need to be brought up to speed.”
“Ah, right you are, boss.” Undeterred, the little man broke into another enthusiastic grin. “We’ll be wanting to fire up ‘Big Brother’ then.”
“Yes, gnome. Now get on with it.”
“‘Blinking Incredible Gateway’, or ‘BIG’ brother (named it myself, as it happens), was devised to replace the Twelve’s ticker network that Barba stole.” Tinks was relishing the chance to show off to Ned and his dad, and pressed a button on his desk. A large monitor came down from the ceiling. “Live satellite feeds courtesy of Mr Fox here, and more than a hundred Farseers keep round-the-clock surveillance on just about everything. They’re neurologically, metaphysically and outright magically connected, through a network that spans the globe. We use ‘satter-light’ and the ‘interweb’ – josser tech, you know – to send and receive the data. It really is clever stuff. In some ways it’s an even better system, though I do miss the—”
“Hell’s teeth, Tinks! Just show them Russia, would you?”
A second later and they were greeted by a satellite image of Siberia in Russia, which was when Mr Fox took over.
“Our eyes in the sky monitor everything, and had been doing so for a good while before the Tinker’s ‘Hidden’ enhancements. We immediately noticed a sharp spike in activity around the same time your tickers went missing. Though of course back then we didn’t know what it was. The truth is …” At this Mr Fox paused, clearly uncomfortable with what he was about to admit. “Well, the truth is, back then we didn’t really know anything.”
A few button presses later and they saw countless orange lines leading to Siberia with a web of dots at its centre that covered hundreds of miles.
“The Darklings – they’re converging in the Siberian reserve,” breathed Ned’s mum.
“Indeed, ma’am. But why? You have other reserves – in the Americas, Asia and as far off as Australia – so why here? Why this one place?”
At the centre of the map, deep in the Siberian forest, was a large circular spot in black.
“This one area, large as it is, is also completely impenetrable to both our cameras and your Farseers. Apparently the tickers that Barbarossa has obtained not only keep a watchful eye but also scramble our signals. Benissimo and I – well, all of us – believe that that is where the creature is gathering himself. We have you and Ned to thank for that.”
“Excuse me?” said Ned’s dad defensively.
“You hurt the Darkening King, Terry, you and your son – when you broke Barba’s machine,” rumbled Benissimo.
Ned had dared to believe, in all their months of searching, that the Darkening King was wounded, that in some way when they’d set it free they’d also managed to hurt it. If Benissimo and Mr Fox were right, maybe there was still a chance, still a way to undo what Ned and his dad had put into motion.
“If what we believe to be the case is true,” continued Mr Fox, “Barbarossa won’t need an army when the creature rises. And yet huge quantities of metal and machinery have been flooding into the area from Gearnish. A great part of those consignments has been the ticker soldiers we’ve heard reports of. Which means that we will be facing not one army but two.”
Mr
