"How do you think the Shads will cross the river?" asked Thomas.

     He was leaning against the wooden railing and looking down into the muddy water twenty feet below as the ferry rolled gently on the waves. The ferry was huge, as large as an ocean going ship and capable of carrying hundreds of passengers on its three decks, as well as huge quantities of livestock and cargo. Its topmost deck, which could be covered with a tarpaulin sheet in bad weather, contained rows of seats so that the passengers could rest their feet during the two day crossing, and the ferry's dozen strong crew made their way among them, offering food and drinks. Later, when night fell, the seats would be cleared away to be replaced with padded mattresses on which the passengers would spend the night. The ferry also contained a tavern and resteaurant, as well as a gift shop, which the questers had earlier visited with interest.

     The ferry followed a heavy bronze chain that lay across the river bed, anchored to huge stone posts that stood on each riverbank. The chain rose up out of the water and entered the ferry's lowermost deck through a large opening in the hull, where it wrapped around a series of huge cogwheels that were turned by a team of horses in the next deck up, slowly winching the ferry across. Behind them, the chain then sank back down into the muddy water, disappearing from sight before it was more than a couple of feet down.

     "I've got no idea," said Shaun. "That's their problem." It was quite a serious problem, as well. The Tew was eight miles wide at this point, and got wider as it flowed towards the sea.

     "They'll probably build a lot of rafts for themselves," said Petronax, smiling at the thought. "It should slow them down a bit."

     "Is this the river that you said flows very close to this ruined city of yours?" asked Shaun.

     "One of its tributaries does," replied the soldier. "If it flowed the other way, we could hire a boat and just drift all the way."

     "It still makes things easier, though," pointed out Thomas. "We can just follow the river there, going along the bank. We can't possibly get lost."

     "We could do it that way, but the problem is that it makes a couple of great wide loops to the east. We can save a great deal of time by going straight south, right through the forest. We still can't get lost, because any time we want the river, all we have to do is head east until we run across it."

     "Yes, but the forest is dangerous." protested the wizard. "Even more dangerous than the Overgreen Forest. We'd be a lot safer following the river. Better to arrive late than never."

     "The enemy will go due south through the forest, so we must as well. Speed must be our greatest consideration."

     Thomas began to reply, but Drake interrupted him. "We go south," he said. "We have no choice. We have to make as much speed as possible, no matter what the danger, or else there's no point in going at all. Petronax and I will be going south in any case, no matter what the rest of you decide."

     Thomas protested further, but the priest's threat to divide the party left no room for argument. "South it is then," he told the two Beltharans irritably. "And let's just hope that all the Gods in the world are with us."

☆☆☆

     It took them five days to cross the wide grasslands south of the river. During the evening of the first day, when they'd made camp for the night, Thomas made another attempt to cast the web spell that had failed him so comically on the night before their encounter with the plague priests, this time without wearing Lirenna's makeshift gloves. He intended to prove to the priest that it had been the gloves that had caused the spell to misfire, and not any fault in the spell itself. Then, perhaps, he would cease to interfere in matters of wizardry, about which he knew nothing, and leave them alone to gather new spells from whatever sources became available. He still thought frequently about the other spells in the sholog mage's spell chest, the ones that he'd only had a chance to glance at, particularly the stronger, mid level ones, and still felt a powerful resentment with the priest for taking them away from him. I'll show him, he thought as he glanced one last time at the page in his spellbook containing the web spell, making sure he'd got it absolutely right. I'll teach him to stick his nose in where it isn't wanted. What does he think I am, some bumbling externus? I'll show him what a Lexandrian wizard's capable of!

     Drake was busy cleaning and sharpening his great broadsword as the wizard crept into position behind him and pointed a small stick around which he'd wound a fresh cobweb. The priest heard the chanting of magic words, followed by a cry and a blistering oath, and looked around to see the wizard once again entangled in his own cobwebs, his face turning purple with fury, embarrassment and humiliation. Seeing that his hands were bare, he said "You can't blame the gloves this time. When are you going to learn?"

     "We'll see!" promised the wizard, still struggling vainly against his own webs. "You'll see, I promise. I just made a small mistake in pronunciation, that's all! I'll get it right! I just need more practice."

     "We'll see," said Drake, returning to his broadsword.

     When he tried again the next day, though, with the same result, he was finally forced to admit that the priest had been right all along, that it was the spell itself that was at fault. It had probably worked perfectly for the sholog mage, but a human's arms and hands were different from those of a sholog, differently jointed, less strong and more dextrous, and his vocal apparatus was different as well, so that a spell that depended on spoken words and hand movements had to be tailored to the anatomy of the person casting it.

     The spell had changed several times since he'd copied it into his spellbook, but the Magister had no way of knowing that it was now being used by a human. The specifications for the race of the caster were, no doubt, incorporated somewhere in the hand movements or the spoken words, and an older wizard might have been able to adapt it for human use, but Thomas was nowhere near that level of ability yet. He reluctantly bowed to the inevitable, therefore, and as soon as the webs dried up and crumbled away, he carefully cut out the page of his spellbook containing the web spell and burned it on the camp fire.

     Drake put an approving hand on his shoulder as flashes and sparks of released magic leapt from the burning page. "Wisdom is the gift of the Gods," he said, "and They rejoice at the sight of it growing and flourishing in the hearts of mortals. Don't worry, there are plenty of Lexandrian wizards in Fort Battleaxe, and when you get back there, they'll be only too glad to teach you new spells. Good ones, approved and passed by the University. They might even be able to teach you a proper web spell."

     Thomas nodded glumly, and the priest went over to the other two wizards. "Do I guess rightly that you also have spells taken from that sholog's spellbox? If so, you would be wise to follow Tom's example and remove them. Spells are a wizard's stock in trade, you must be able to have absolute confidence in them. A misfire can kill not only you, but the people around you as well."

     "He's right," agreed Thomas. "Do as he says."

     Jerry and Lirenna looked at each other, shrugged in resignation, and cut out the sholog spells from their spellbooks, burning them on the campfire next to the shrivelled remains of Thomas’s. Drake watched them in satisfaction. Wizards tended to be arrogant, prideful people, so confident in their own power, so certain of their superiority that they were almost incapable of ever admitting they'd made a mistake, but these three were different. A wizard capable of accepting guidance and admitting when he was wrong might escape the most common cause of death among their profession, a backfiring spell, and live to be that rarest of all creatures, a wise, old wizard. I think they might make it, thought the priest as he watched them consoling each other. I really think they might make it.

     It was in the early morning of the sixth day that they saw the first trees of Fengalla Forest ahead of them. The first trees were relatively small and modest looking, covered in large, dark leaves the size of dinner plates down to within ten feet of the ground, below which they were plucked off by the long necked savannah goats that roamed the grasslands. Behind them, however, stood an ominous looking wall of dark, olive green that rose over two hundred feet from the ground, and those were just the smaller, peripheral trees that formed the boundary between forest and grasslands. Further in, they knew, the trees commonly reached heights of well over five hundred feet.

     "Well, here we are," said Shaun. "Take a good look at the sky, everyone. It'll be quite a while before we see it again."

     "If we ever do," added Thomas. “I guess we have to set the horses loose now.”

     They'd talked about this, and Drake had explained all the reasons why they couldn't take horses into Fengalla forest. Petronax had protested at first, saying that they would need them for the return journey, but even he could see the sense of it. They had removed their saddles and saddlebags, therefore, and turned the horses loose to roam.

     “You cannot be serious!” cried Diana when she saw Shaun and Matthew picking up the saddlebags containing the stolen loot they’d found on the edge of the Ghost Ocean. “They're too heavy! Leave them here!”

     “They're not heavy,” said Shaun, though. “Right?” he asked Matthew. His younger brother agreed, even though he was visibly straining under its weight already.

     “They'll slow us down!” the cleric insisted. “We need to move fast.” She turned to Petronax. “Right?” she asked. The man who’d continually urged them on to greater speed would surely side with her.

     To her surprise, though, the Beltharan agreed with her brothers. “The Orb is too large to carry,” he said. “We're going to need a cart to carry it on, We’ll probably have to buy one, and there's no telling what other expenses we might accrue along the way. We'll probably need to buy more horses at some point. Also, it's a long way back to Ilandia, and everyone we meet along the way will want to take the Orb from us. We'll need to keep people from finding out what we're carrying, probably by  bribing people. We can split the loot among the eight of us. We'll be able to carry it easily.”

     Shaun and Matthew were delighted, and the men immediately began sharing out gold and silver among the six of them. The two woodsman, Drake and Petronax carried the original saddlebags, but they now weighed only a fraction of what they had. Diana gave them a glare of disbelief as they then continued on towards the forest, and Lirenna gave her a sympathetic smile as they left the saddles behind them on the grass and walked on.