“They were trigged quite some time ago, I imagine,” he said. “I doubt if the Big Coffin Hunters did it all themselves, but they no doubt oversaw it... first the fitting of the new wheels to replace the old rotten rubber ones, then the filling. They used the oxen to line them up here, at the base of the hill, because it was convenient. As it’s convenient to let the extra horses run free out on the Drop. Then, when we came, it seemed prudent to take the precaution of covering these up. Stupid babies we might be, but perhaps smart enough to wonder about twenty-eight loaded oil-carts with new wheels. So they came out here and covered them.”

“Jonas, Reynolds, and Depape.”

“Aye.”

“But why?” She took him by the arm and asked her question again. “What are they for?”

“For Farson,” Roland said with a calm he didn’t feel. “For the Good Man. The Affiliation knows he’s found a number of war-machines; they come either from the Old People or from some other where. Yet the Affiliation fears them not, because they don’t work. They’re silent. Some feel Farson has gone mad to put his trust in such broken things, but...”

“But mayhap they’re not broken. Mayhap they only need this stuff. And mayhap Farson knows it.”

Roland nodded.

She touched the side of one of the tankers. Her fingers came away oily. She rubbed the tips together, smelled them, then bent and picked up a swatch of grass to wipe her hands. “This doesn’t work in our machines. It’s been tried. It clogs them.”

Roland nodded again. “My fa—my folk in the Inner Crescent know that as well. And count on it. But if Farson has gone to this trouble—and split aside a troop of men to come and get these tankers, as we have word he has done—he either knows a way to thin it to usefulness, or he thinks he does. If he’s able to lure the forces of the Affiliation into a battle in some close location where rapid retreat is impossible, and if he can use machine-weapons like the ones that go on treads, he could win more than a battle. He could slaughter ten thousand horse-mounted fighting men and win the war.”

“But surely yer fathers know this...?”

Roland shook his head in frustration. How much their fathers knew was one question. What they made of what they knew was another. What forces drove them—necessity, fear, the fantastic pride which had also been handed down, father to son, along the line of Arthur Eld—was yet a third. He could only tell her his clearest surmise.

“I think they daren’t wait much longer to strike Farson a mortal blow. If they do, the Affiliation will simply rot out from the inside. And if that happens, a good deal of Mid-World will go with it.”