None of them slept well that night. It wasn't that they were scared or concerned about what lay ahead, except for Thomas and Lirenna who were very concerned. It was just that there was a strange feeling about the place. A feeling that something wasn't quite right, that kept nagging and needling at them and kept them staring wide eyed into the darkness, wondering what it was that they couldn't get out of their minds. They would drift off to sleep for a few minutes, only to wake up suddenly with all the hairs down the back of their necks bristling, certain that they'd heard something but unable to say precisely what. No wonder all the animals avoid the place, thought Shaun. This place is creepy.

When morning finally came, they were all red eyed and sleepy, as were the horses. Their mounts steadfastly refused to gallop that day, and whinnied and rolled their eyes as their riders struggled to coax them into continuing south. Finally, after exerting all their willpower on the poor beasts, they reluctantly agreed to head in the right direction, but only at a slow walk, and they kept looking back longingly over their shoulders, making it plain to their riders which way they would much rather be going. "Don't worry," said Drake. "If we can't make our horses go any faster, you can be sure that the Shads couldn't either, so we're not falling any further behind."

"If the stupid beasts would go faster, though, we'd be out of here sooner," said Lirenna.

"You try telling them that," suggested Jerry. "The shae folk are supposed to be good with horses. Tell you what, I could create the illusion of a grass fire behind them. That would make them move."

"Yes, I expect it would," agreed Lirenna. "The problem then would be to make them stop again."

"That's no problem," replied Jerry. "You could use a sleep spell on them."

The horses continued to get more and more frightened as they went deeper into the Ghost Ocean, until they began to get difficult to control. They were beginning to think that they might have to leave them behind, when Matthew had an idea. He suggested that they take off their holy rings of courage and give them to the horses to wear. The others shrugged and decided it was worth a try, so they tied their rings to the horses' bridles with lengths of hair from their manes, Jerry giving his ring to Petronax. Almost immediately the six horses calmed down and never again gave them any trouble. Drake's horse seemed calmed and reassured as well, as though inspired by the examples of the others, and also became docile and obedient. They congratulated Matthew on his brainwave, and he swelled with pride and preened himself about it for hours afterwards.

Without their rings, however, the six companions began to feel a little of what the horses had been feeling. Presumably, Drake and Petronax had been feeling it as well, but hadn't mentioned it, perhaps feeling that it was too trivial and insubstantial to comment on. There was a chill in the air, despite the bright sunshine and the warm breeze. A faintly unpleasant clammy feeling that made them want to shiver, as if to shake it off. It was nothing they could put their fingers on, no identifiable cause, but as time went on it became steadily stronger until they finally felt that they could talk about it without sounding silly.

"Can you smell salt?" asked Diana while they were stopped for lunch. They were all sitting close together in a circle, or else the tall grass, well over four feet tall, would have hidden them from each other's view.

"Yes, I think I can," replied Lirenna. "Maybe there's still some salt in the soil. After all, this whole area was underwater once."

"A long, long time ago," said Thomas. "All the salt would have been washed out of the ground ages ago by the rain. Also, if the ground was salty enough to smell, this grass wouldn't be able to grow here. You'd have salt loving plants like arrowbeet, couch grass and rynanthus, but there's no sign of any of those plants here."

"Then how do you explain the salty smell?" demanded Diana.

"I can't smell anything."

"I can," said Jerry. "It's quite noticeable, as if there's a huge pile of rotting seaweed somewhere. You must be able to smell it!"

"It's probably the first manifestation of the Ghost Ocean," said Drake. "As you said, this whole area was once underwater, and it's said that the land in some way 'remembers' being a sea bed. This is just the first of several sensory hallucinations suffered by those who come here, and some of us are more sensitive to it than others. We'll probably begin suffering auditory and visual hallucinations as well soon, but I'm confident we'll be able to handle it, knowing that it's not real."

"Yes, I think you must be right," said Thomas anxiously, and yet with a trace of excitement. "Yes, I think I can smell it a little now, like rotting fish. What I can't understand, though, is why this is the only part of the world where this happens. Huge areas of this continent were once under water. Almost the entire Endless Plains and the Great Flat were once covered by shallow seas, they rose above sea level at about the same time this area did, about two million years ago. How come they're not ghost oceans too? What makes this area different?"

"The Mage Wars?" asked Shaun. "Maybe two immortal wizards had a duel here. You said the fallout magic does things like this."

"Stories about the Ghost Ocean go back way before the Mage Wars," replied the wizard. "The very first human explorers told tales about it, so do the Shae Folk. Whatever caused this is older than humanity."

"Let's just get through it and out the other side as quickly as possible," said Matthew. "I'll leave the mysteries for someone else to solve."

The visual hallucinations began later that same day. They were trotting along at a steady pace, wondering if they would get as far as a low range of hills they could see ahead of them before nightfall, when Drake noticed a kind of shimmering all around him, as if there was something interfering with his vision. It was a little like a heat haze, except slower and lazier, and anyway it wasn't nearly hot enough for that. In summer, perhaps, but not in the last month of winter, and certainly not on a dull, cloudy day with a light breeze blowing.

He mentioned it to the others, and Shaun admitted that he was seeing it as well. "I thought it was just my eyes playing tricks on me," he said. "I only got a little sleep last night, and I'm pretty tired. If you can see it as well, though, then it must be real."

"You know what it reminds me of?" said Matthew. "It's like the patterns light makes on the bottom of a bath when it's full of water."

"Yes, that's right!" exclaimed Lirenna. "It is. I used to go swimming in a lake in Haven, and it's just like the patterns made on the lake bottom by sunlight passing through the waves overhead. How strange."

They could all see it now. It was a dappled pattern of light and shade that played across the eight travellers, their horses and the grass, as if they were riding across the bottom of a shallow lake and, looking up, they could see the ghostly images of choppy waves about twenty feet above them. Through it, the image of the yellow sun was broken up into dozens of dancing fragments, and yet they could also see the two suns normally as well, now drawing close together in the sky and shining steadily and serenely down at them as they had all their lives. The two images, one real, the other hallucinatory, were superimposed on each other, and by concentrating they found that they could choose which one to see and which to ignore.

"This is astounding!" exclaimed Thomas, his fear now completely overwhelmed by awe and wonder. "I've never experienced anything like this! It's as if we were actually on the bottom of a shallow sea."

"Is this it?" asked Shaun, sounding a little disappointed. "Is this all there is to the Ghost Ocean? What was all the fuss about?"

"Isn't this enough for you?" asked Thomas in annoyance. "What more do you want, dancing girls?"

"Don't forget that we're still on the edge of the Ghost Ocean," cautioned Drake. "At this rate, it'll take us about two weeks to reach Kenestra. Who knows what we'll find nearer the centre of this place?"

"Perhaps we could take a wider route and avoid the centre," suggested Diana. "What do you think?"

"That would take us close to the marshes, and we might stray in by accident," pointed out Drake. "I've been through a swamp, and I can tell you that they're good places to stay away from. Besides, I'd rather take the straight route and get out of here all the sooner."

After some discussion, they decided to keep on going straight south. After all, no matter what happened, they knew it would only be a hallucination, so all they had to do was ignore it. Thomas and Lirenna were happier about the idea now, and were even looking forward to it with some excitement, but Jerry was beginning to frown with worry. Being an illusionist, he knew better than any of the others just how powerful some illusions could be, and how hard it could be to disbelieve them. Some illusions could even kill. He spent a while wondering whether to tell them, but eventually decided against it. The safer they believed they were, the safer they actually were. Warning them would only increase the danger, so he kept silent as they rode their horses through the ghostly, phantasmal landscape.

☆☆☆

The next day, the hallucination assumed a new dimension. Vague, shadowy shapes flitted silently around them, unidentifiable at first, but gradually resolving themselves into strange sea creatures, like fish but with various differences. Instead of having scales, their skins were soft and smooth, like the skins of amphibians. They had four eyes each, and all their fins were in the wrong places. They were ghostly and transparent at first, but soon became so solid and real looking that Thomas had to reach out his hand and try to touch them to reassure himself that they were still only illusions. His hand went right through them, and the creatures swam on, ignoring him completely, not even knowing he was there.

Suddenly, they were surrounded by them, hundreds of sea creatures in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some swimming in huge shoals, their fins and skins glittering in rainbow colours in the diffuse sunlight as they darted this way and that, others larger and solitary, cruising slowly among the waving blades of grass that now looked more like strands of seaweed. Tiny, shelled creatures with lots of legs and eyes on stalks scuttled around underfoot, some apparently trampled by the horses hooves yet emerging completely unscathed when the hoof lifted again, and the occasional jet of mud and silt from holes in the ground informed them that marine worms lived there, filtering minute scraps of food from the sediment in which they lived. And yet, among all the hallucinatory sea creatures they saw, there was not one they recognised. Not a single herring or shark or dogfish, not a single crab, lobster, starfish, sea urchin or whelk. Everything was strange and unfamiliar, as though they were seeing the seas of an alien world.

"I don't understand it," muttered Thomas. "According to Boswell of Bluevale, these images come from only two or three million years in the past, a mere heartbeat compared to the age of the world Evolution doesn't work that quickly. There ought to be a few creatures we could recognise. Oh , of course! The war!"

"What war?" asked Petronax.

"When we were in the shrine of the Sceptre of Samnos, the caretaker of the shrine, a priest called Estinas, was telling us about some of the races that've inhabited the world in the past, who also worshipped Samnos and used the Sceptre to fight evil." Drake looked up with keen interest and guided his horse closer to the young wizard to listen.

"Apparently," continued Thomas, "there was one race in particular that lived around three to two million years ago, a race of octopus-like creatures that inhabited the warm, coastal seas around Amafryka and the Western Continent. They fought a war with another race of beings that came from the abyssal ocean depths, miles below the surface. A war so terrible that almost all life in the world was wiped out. That must have been when all these creatures we can see now were wiped out, and the ones we're familiar with took over. It must have happened on land, as well. I wish there was some way of seeing what the land life of two million years ago was like."

"Fascinating," said Drake. "I wonder whether that war had anything to do with the creation of the Ghost Ocean. After all, we must be seeing things as they were just before they were destroyed, just like a real ghost."

"It's certainly possible," mused Thomas. "After all, look at all the crazy things that were created accidentally during the Mage Wars. It was probably the same after the war two million years ago, only much worse. Just imagine, unbelievably powerful magical weapons and spells leaving a dense field of magical fallout wherever they were used, the fallout becoming so dense in places that spontaneous spellcasting took place. The whole world in chaos. Bizarre, unpredictable things happening all the time and no peace or sanity anywhere. Some of those effects must have lasted hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, and the Ghost Ocean may be just the last and longest lived of them. Something really colossal must have happened here to create an effect that lasted this long. I wonder what it was."

He stopped talking, and they lapsed into a sombre silence, each of them thinking of a mighty civilization destroyed. A world torn by war, thrown into a chaos and anarchy so great that, even two million years later, it had only recently managed to heal itself.

"Hey, where's the red sun?" exclaimed Matthew suddenly, thankfully destroying the solemn mood they had fallen into. They looked up and saw that, although the real red sun was still there, glaring away the colour of fresh blood perfectly normally, its hallucinatory counterpart was nowhere to be seen. In fact, they suddenly realised, they had never seen an illusory counterpart to the red sun at all. At this time of year, it should have been about thirty or forty degrees away from the yellow sun, as the real red sun was, but although the illusory yellow sun was right where it should have been, its red companion was missing completely.

"This hallucinatory landscape, er seascape, must be in its early winter or late summer," said Thomas. "The red sun's just below the horizon, that's all. We'll see it rise sometime tonight."

"Yes, that must be it," replied Matthew sheepishly. "I don't remember seeing it last night, though."

"Well, you just missed it, that's all. It'll be there tonight, you'll see."

It wasn't, though. The illusory red sun failed to show up at all, even though the young woodsman stayed awake long into the night to see it. It wasn't just hidden behind a cloud bank, he knew, because he could see the stars clearly, even though they rippled and swam through the intervening waves and twenty feet of water. If it was there, he should have seen it, but although he sat up until nearly midnight waiting for it, it never showed. He stared in puzzlement up at a particularly bright blue star, wondering what had happened to it.

The next morning, when Thomas woke up and he told him about it, he was equally confused. "There's only one possible explanation," said the young wizard. "The red sun is a comparatively recent addition to our world's sky, having only made its first appearance less than three million years ago. That probably means that it won't remain long, either, probably no more than another few million years. We are fortunate to live in the brief portion of our world's history during which it has two suns."

"I noticed something else as well," added Lirenna. "There are no illusory comets. They must also be a recent arrival. I wonder if the two are connected."

"Probably," said Thomas. "One probably caused the other, although whether the red sun caused the comets or the comets caused the red sun I couldn't say." His insatiable curiosity was fully aroused now, and he almost glowed with excitement. "By the Gods!" he exclaimed. "How could I possibly have been afraid to come here? Just think, we're getting a chance to see how this part of the world was two million years ago! Just think what we could learn here! The University ought to have a permanent team here to study the place!"

"Yes, they should have," said Drake gravely. "But they don't. Why not? And why do people avoid this place? So far we've seen nothing frightening. Quite the opposite, in fact. This place should be the ultimate tourist attraction. People ought to be flocking here from all over the continent to see this place for themselves, but they're not. Instead, they avoid this place as though it were the gateway to the Pit itself. Why?"

"We should have asked the people back in Sparril," said Shaun.

"Maybe it's just superstition," suggested Petronax. "You shouldn't underestimate the power of the fear of the unknown."

"That wouldn't be enough by itself," said Drake. "There has to be something more, something we haven't seen yet."

"Maybe," said Shaun, "but what?"

"I don't know," replied the priest, "but I've a feeling we're going to find out soon enough."