Later that same day, they came upon a group of skeletons.

There were five horses and four humans, the fifth horse having been laden with stores and provisions. In the absence of any large scavengers, the skeletons were still fully intact, the flesh having simply rotted away from their bones, fertilising the grass and making it grow tall and lush around them. Hallucinatory sea creatures poked around among the bones, and the head of a long eel like creature protruded from beneath the bulging saddle bags. Opening one, Shaun found it full of money, jewellery and credit notes, thousands of gold crowns worth, and he whistled with appreciation as he pulled it free of the grisly remains.

"They must have been outlaws," he said. "They robbed a rich merchant or something and fled in here, thinking the authorities would never dare to follow them."

"What killed them?" wondered Lirenna.

"Probably the same thing that'll kill us if we go any further," said Jerry. "I think we should go back."

"We can't," replied Petronax. "We can't let the Shads get the Orb."

"It won't do any good to get ourselves killed," pointed out Jerry. "If the Shads came through here, they're probably all dead as well by now."

"We don't know that, we must make sure. If there's any chance at all that they're still alive and ahead of us, then we must go on, for the sake of all civilization."

"He's right," said Drake. "It's our duty."

"All right, you two go on, get yourselves killed, but the rest of us are going back. We've done our part in this war, and we've got better things to do than die in this Gods forsaken place. Right?"

"No, Jerry," said Diana softly. "My Lady is leading me onwards, and I must go where She directs."

The others, one by one, also stated their intention to go on. Shaun, Matthew and Lirenna because they wouldn't let Diana face danger alone, and Thomas because of his driving curiosity, although he also cared for the cleric and would have followed her even if she'd stated an intention to go to Arnor itself, now that he had Caroli's assurance that his family was safe. Finding himself standing alone, therefore, the tiny nome began to grow angry.

"Listen, all of you!" he cried, his anger raising his squeaky voice to an even higher pitch. "I'm the expert on illusions. I know more about them than all the rest of you put together, and I'm telling you that they can kill! What do you think killed these poor wretches? Terminal guilt? If we go on, we're all going to die!"

The others stared at him in amazement. This was the first time that the tiny nome had ever tried to exert himself with the others, and the pudgy, three foot tall figure with his short, bristly beard, silver streaked brown hair and colourful clothes not quite hidden beneath his brown travelling cloak looked almost comical as he jumped up and down furiously in his saddle. None of them dared to so much as smile, though. To have done so would have mortally injured his pride and ended their friendship forever.

Instead, Diana looked at him solemnly. Serious and grave. "We appreciate your advice, but this is something that we just have to do," she said. "If you don't want to come with us, though, you can turn back and none of us will think any the less of you."

"Don't be silly!" replied Jerry, his fury turning to mere anger that she could think him capable of such a thing. "Of course I'm coming with you! If we're going to die, we'll all die together! Besides, you need me. Who else knows anything about illusions? I just want you to know what you're getting us all into, that's all. I want you to have some idea of the dangers that lie ahead."

"We all know the dangers," replied Diana, smiling in gratitude. "And I suspect that whatever dangers lie ahead of us in the Ghost Ocean are nothing compared to what we'll be facing when we finally catch up with the enemy. Compared with a hundred Shadowsoldiers and a possible dragon, a few illusions should be a breeze.

"I hope you're right," said Jerry, his face creased into a scowl of worry.

Diana suddenly frowned at the sight of what Shaun was doing. He had taken the four saddlebags from the skeletal horses and was tying one to his saddle, having given the other three to Matthew, Thomas and Lirenna. "Shaun!" she snapped angrily. "What do you think you're doing?"

Oh no, thought the fighter with an all too familiar sense of foreboding. Here we go again. "There's no point leaving all this stuff here," he said. "If we take it with us, we might find some poor people to give it to."

Diana scowled at him. "That money belongs to someone. It should be returned to them."

"I agree," replied Shaun, crossing his fingers behind his back. "But we can't do that by leaving it here. If we don't take it, it'll be here for ever, and that'll do it's owner no good at all, will it?"

"All right," said Diana, frowning doubtfully. "But we'll turn it in at the very first town we come to and get someone to take it back north. The crime can't have been committed too long ago, the leather's still in good condition, so it shouldn't be too difficult to find its true owner."

"And of course you'll find some way of making sure that your courier doesn't run off with the stuff himself," said Shaun acidly.

"If he does, it'll be on his soul, not ours." replied the cleric firmly.

"We ought to keep a bit of it, as a sort of finder's fee," said Thomas. "We might need it. Remember when we had to buy a boat a few months ago? Where would we be now if we hadn't had a bit of money on us? We'd still be stuck on Greenwing Island, that's where, still trying to find some way of getting to the, er, the, er..." He stopped, the mental block placed in his mind by the Emerald Oracle preventing him from talking about it in front of Drake and Petronax. "Well, we'd still be stuck there, wouldn't we?" he finished lamely.

"Yes, that's right," agreed Shaun. "On a quest like this, you never know when you might need a bit of money. It can't be wrong to use it in a good cause."

"It is amoral to keep what does not belong to us," said Drake. "However, you do have a point, and I think that we should hold onto it for the time being, for the reason you have given. However, absolutely none of it will be spent unless absolutely necessary, and when our quest is over, all of it that we have left will be returned to its rightful owner." He turned to Diana. "Is that acceptable to you, sister?"

Diana smiled. "There's no need to call me 'sister'. We're not being formal here. Yes, that's perfectly acceptable, but we shouldn't let my thieving brothers carry it, or half of it will mysteriously disappear within the week. I think you should carry it."

Shaun and Matthew protested loudly, but Diana was adamant and so, with great indignation and reluctance, the saddlebags were handed over to the priest, who laid them across the saddle in front of him and lashed them in place with a length of rope. "Our own sister," grumbled Matthew unhappily. "Who would have thought that our own sister would do this to us."

"Don't act all hard done by with me," warned Diana sternly, but with a gleam in her eye. "Don't think I've forgotten what happened back in Vantarestin. I know all about you, Matthew Winterwell. I know exactly what's going on in your thieving, villainous mind, and I'm going to be keeping a very close eye on you. You too, Shaun."

Finally, before leaving the gruesome scene, Diana and Drake said prayers over the bodies. Thieves and outlaws they might have been, possibly murderers too, but they were still human and deserved a decent moment of respect. Then, when they were finished, they saddled up and continued south.

☆☆☆

As they went deeper into the Ghost Ocean, the solidity and realism of the illusions increased, as did Jerry's anxiety. He pressed Lirenna to take them to the front of the group, between Drake and Petronax, and he watched the hallucinatory sea creatures pass by with an apprehensive scowl. Those fools think that illusions are just harmless tricks, he thought, used by circus showmen and stage magicians to impress their audiences. Not one of them realises how dangerous they can be. Not even Tom, who ought to know better, all the reading and studying he does. Even finding those bodies back there hasn't convinced them. Well, they'll learn. I just hope it won't be too late when they do.

As the hallucinations grew steadily more real and solid, it became more and more difficult to see the reality beneath. The waving blades of grass had become long, thin strands of seaweed, slowly waving and undulating in the warm ocean currents, and the two real suns were becoming ever more difficult to see. Once, they vanished altogether, and it took all the tiny illusionist's concentration, staring at where he knew them to be, to make them come back again. It was only then that he realised that he might have seriously damaged his eyesight by staring at the yellow sun for so long. Just because he couldn't see it didn't make it any less real. He laughed at himself humourlessly. After all the warnings I gave them, he thought, it would be ironic if I were the first person to be injured by the illusion.

Instead, the first person to be hurt turned out to be Matthew. They were trotting along at a steady pace, the horses ignoring the illusion completely (Thomas would later advance the theory that their animal brains lacked the sophistication to see the hallucinations, and were capable only of sensing a vague wrongness about the place, which the rings took care of), when the young fighter gave a yelp and snatched his left hand to his chest, where he rubbed it gently with his other hand and examined it for injury. The others jumped in alarm, those with swords reaching for them instinctively and the wizards summoning the words of defensive spells to the forefronts of their minds. When they saw that there was no visible danger threatening, however, they relaxed and looked at Matthew accusingly. "What happened?" asked Shaun.

"It bit me!" said Matthew, still examining his hand and surprised to find nothing wrong with it.

"What bit you?"

"That fish thing there, the one with the big teeth." He indicated an ugly, nasty looking creature, about the size of a barracuda, that swam alongside him, examining him with its four dark, glassy eyes as if wondering whether to risk another bite.

"Matt," said Shaun with exaggerated patience. "It can't bite you. It's just an illusion."

"It bit me, I tell you!" insisted Matthew. "Look!" He held out his hand, and then pulled it back again in embarrassment. "Well, you can't actually see it, but it bit me all the same."

"I think he's telling the truth," said Drake. "Look at the fish for a moment. Do you notice anything different about them?"

They looked, but at first they didn't see it. They were amazingly realistic. So real looking that the questers felt almost as though they could reach out and touch them, even though they knew they were only illusions. Then, suddenly, with a shock so great that he actually cried out loud, Thomas saw what it was. Earlier, the sea creatures had swum right through horses and riders as though they didn't exist, which they didn't from the fish creatures' point of view. The seascape had been merely a scene from the past, which the travellers had been able to pass through as easily as they could block the image from a projector. Now, though, the sea creatures were swimming around them, deliberately avoiding them, as if the eight of them had actually been transported two million years into the past and were really walking along the bottom of a shallow continental sea.

"They can see us!" he exclaimed in complete astonishment. "The fish can see us!"

"Yes" said Drake. "And if they can see us, they can bite us."

"Wait a minute," interrupted Shaun. "Are you telling us that we could actually be eaten by a bunch of imaginary sharks?"

"Not actually eaten, but if an illusory shark were to turn up and attack us, and if the illusion were strong enough, we might really believe that we were being eaten, and that belief would kill us. I now believe that that is how those outlaws died." He turned to the tiny nome, who had a grave expression on his face, completely different from the cheerful smile he usually wore. "Jerry, you were right. We were wrong not to listen to you before, but we're listening now. How do you fight this kind of illusion?"

"The way to defeat an illusion is not to believe in it," said Jerry. "Illusions are harmless in themselves, except for the very most powerful which are semi-real, but they can seem so real that the body reacts as though they were real. In the University, one of our teachers tied us up with imaginary rope, to demonstrate their power. It was totally realistic. I couldn't move, the rope hurt where it bit into my skin, everything, but it wasn't real. The only thing preventing us from just walking away was our utter belief that we couldn't. If a loop had been wrapped around our necks, we would have suffocated. It'll be years, perhaps decades, before I can create illusions that good, if I ever can."

"So all we've got to do is remember that this seascape isn't real and we'll be all right?" asked Drake.

Jerry laughed. "Basically, yes, but it's harder than you make it sound. It's no good just knowing intellectually that it's not real, you've got to be absolutely certain of it, right down to the very core of your being. The slightest trace of doubt and you've had it."

"Do you think we can do it?"

"Anyone can do it, but it's very difficult. Bear in mind that these hallucinations are going to continue to get more realistic the further in we go. If you want my honest opinion, I think we'd be fools to go any further, and that we've tempted fate already by coming as far as we have."

"Very well then, I don't think we should risk it. We'll forget about going right through the middle of this place and curve around the outside. That may mean we'll be falling further behind the enemy, but I don't think it will. I think they'll also be forced to detour. What do the rest of you think?"

The others also agreed to the detour, all except Petronax who fretted at any delay in their pursuit of the Shadowsoldiers. "I don't believe that anyone can be killed by something that doesn't exist," he said. "Even if these illusions are dangerous to people taken in by them, none of us is stupid and we won't have any difficulty guarding our minds against them, and if the enemy is detouring around the heart of this place, this is our big chance to catch up with them." In the end, however, after some heated argument with Jerry and Drake, he gave in and agreed to the detour, and so the eight of them turned east.

Jerry still wasn't completely happy, though. The memory of the four dead outlaws kept coming back to him, and he kept wondering how the eight of them had gotten this far with, so far, very little trouble, while the outlaws had been killed. He thought at first that the outlaws had simply been more susceptible to the hallucinations, but that explanation just didn't feel right, so he dismissed it. The only other explanation was that the hallucination had been stronger then, and had since weakened a little, allowing the later arrivals to penetrate a little further before it got them. If the illusions varied in strength, however, then it could just as easily get stronger again, at any time, perhaps very suddenly. He mentioned it to the others, and they moved a little further north just in case, to where the illusory fish were just vague, blurry shapes. As Drake pointed out, though, they would have to risk going deeper into the Ghost Ocean eventually, when they reached the swamps that ran along the coast and were forced to turn south again, and if the hallucination did suddenly get stronger then that was just too bad.