The Radio Tower
Information travels faster than bullets.
Recorded history
The Scavengers understood earlier than anyone that scrapyards, markets, radios and rumours were weapons, and that whoever held the tower held the second half of every engagement before it started.
They were right, and being right did not save them. Information is only leverage while there is more than one party willing to pay for it, and the consolidation of trade under Iron Haven removed the market for it at the same time as it removed the market for everything else.
Strategic assessment
The Radio Tower is the only holding that produces nothing you can carry.
Forces short of ammunition or bodies routinely trade it away for a site that pays in either, and the archive's assessment is that this is usually a mistake made confidently. Intelligence does not win an engagement. It determines which engagements are fought at all, which over the length of a campaign is the more consequential of the two.
That assessment stands as written and is now largely academic, for the reason below.
Up at the Relay
The fifth piece in Songs for the Long Repair is about a relay, and about whoever it was whose job was to answer it.
It names no place. Several songs in that collection predate the war and the archive cannot date this one, so the mast in it may have stood anywhere and may have come down long before this one went up. What can be said is that the surveyed region holds one structure answering the description, and that people in the hills make the connection without appearing to think about it.
The archive records the identification as local rather than established, and would not have raised it at all except that the song is the only account it holds of the building being worked. There is nothing else on file describing anybody sitting in the tower doing the thing it was built for.
If it is this tower, the site holds two records of itself: one from a time when somebody answered what came in, and one from now. The archive has nothing covering the ground between them. It notes only that in the song the relay is always answered.
Under the Hound
The tower is held. Not by a faction, and not contested.
The Cŵn, the bounty hunter of the slate hills, has claimed the mast and lives in it. The hills have a name for the building that nobody appears to have issued and everybody uses: Tŵr Tywyll yr Artaith, the dark tower of the torment. A name in that much circulation usually postdates a considerable number of incidents.
What is done inside is not documented, and the archive has been unable to document it. People are taken up there. Some come back and will not describe it; some do not come back. The account of that belongs with the man rather than with the building, and is filed there.
Two things about the site itself can be established. The first is that nobody has tried to take it back. A holding that changed hands repeatedly through the war has now sat with a single occupant, unchallenged, and no party the archive has asked will give a reason. The second is that the ground around it is treated as a boundary rather than as an approach, which is not a thing that was ever true of it before.
Whether the mast still works, whether anyone is listening on it, and whether the man in the building has the least interest in what it was built for are all beyond what the archive can establish from outside. It has not gone up to look.
Archive notes
- Yields intelligence; produces nothing that can be carried or spent.
- Historically Scavenger ground.
- Frequently conceded early by forces that later reconstruct why they lost.
- Possibly the relay of Up at the Relay, the fifth song in Songs for the Long Repair. The song names no place and cannot be dated; the identification is made locally and the archive has not been able to confirm it.
- Held by the Cŵn and occupied as a residence. Called Tŵr Tywyll yr Artaith in the surrounding hills.
- Uncontested since he took it. No party has attempted to recover it and none will say why.
- Whether the mast still transmits is not established. The archive has not approached the site.