It took another two days for the Konnen General to get a pair of uniforms adapted to fit them, and then they were ready to go. They used the airlocks in Hewlak sector, guarded by Hewlak soldiers, but since House Hewlak had long been an ally of House Konnen Sejanus’s authority was respected there just as much as in his own sector and they were allowed through without question.

     “This is a secret mission,” the General warned the guards on duty, “So you will say nothing of this to anyone, not even your commanding officers. I hope you understand.” The soldiers trembled under his gaze and assured him that they did.

     A few minutes later they were through the airlock and in the dead park cavern beyond. Not the same park cavern they’d passed through on their first arrival in the moon city but the one next to it, turned at right angles to it so that the four park caverns formed an almost continuous ring separating the outer residential ring of the city from the inner ‘town hall’ area.

     Shaun had forgotten how eerie it was to walk through vacuum, in total silence except for those sounds generated inside his own body and surrounded by the tortured, mutilated corpses of those unfortunates who’d been in the cavern at the time of the great disaster, so he was relieved when they arrived at the row of airlocks on the other side and passed through into breathable air again. Shaun went straight to the room in which they’d first found the necklaces but, as they’d expected, the cabinet was empty.

     “He came and took the rest,” said Matthew in disappointment. “Oh well, we had to try.”

     They then went to the huge ore storage room, climbed the long staircase and entered the old observatory on the surface of the tiny moon.

     “Hard to believe that this was the very first occupied structure on Kronos,” mused Shaun to himself. “It was here before the city, before the moon trogs, even before the mines. This place must be well over a thousand years old.”

     “Do you think it’s safe?” asked Matthew nervously. “It’s not going to suddenly develop an air leak or something, is it?”

     “It’s been here this long,” replied Shaun. “I expect it’s got a few good years left in it yet. Come on.”

     He led the way over to the teleportation chamber. He tugged the door, just in case the locking spells had faded again during the interval, but the door was still solidly shut. He shrugged and took out the key. “Now then, what did Tom say? Dammit, this should be him here, doing this. What do I know about magical artefacts?”

     “The wizard is far too puny and skinny to pass as a soldier,” replied the General. “If we'd gotten our hands on him while still a child we would have exercised him, drilled him. Put some muscle on his bones. Now though…”

     “Yeah,” said the woodsman. “So, what did he say? Touch it to the very centre of the door and press.”

     He did so, but nothing happened. He tried again with the same result and his heart began to sink; a sick, nauseating sensation. He tapped it against the door again and again with steadily greater force, each time accomplishing nothing more than a dull thud, then stopped to stare at Matthew, his eyes wide with fear. He'd done something wrong! Maybe he’d ruined it, trapped them all up there forever! It should have been Thomas…

     “Try it the other way around,” suggested Sejanus.

     Shaun stared at him with new hope and chagrin at his own stupidity, but also with new anxiety. If he tried it the other way round and it still didn't work…

     The key sank effortlessly into the metal surface of the door until only the jewel encrusted end was still visible. “It works!” he cried in joy. “It is the key!” He turned it ninety degrees clockwise and the jewels were briefly lit by an inner glow, the magical equivalent, they assumed, to the click of tumblers moving in an ordinary lock. Shaun then removed the key, leaving a firm, unblemished surface on the door where it had been, and pulled at the handle with a trembling hand. The door opened easily.

     “We’ve done it!” cried the soldier jubilantly. “We’re free!” He hugged Matthew joyously and then gave a guilty start when he realised what he was doing. “Er, sorry, I, er...”

     Matthew laughed, grabbed him and hugged him back. “We’re free!” he agreed. “We can go home any time we like! Come on, let’s go tell the others.”

     “Not yet,” replied Shaun however. “Let’s make sure it still works first.”

     He entered the teleportation cubicle, followed by Matthew and Sejanus, and closed the door. Shaun then opened the other door in the cubicle’s opposite wall.

     No-one was ever so glad as Shaun and Matthew by what they saw as they stepped out of the tiny cubicle. They were back in Grand Central, somewhere deep under the surface of Tharia, and the two soldiers laughed and sang for joy, hugging each other and slapping each other on the back for several minutes while the Konnen General looked on in bemused aloofness. “This is the place that Lord Basil keeps going on about?” he said. “It looks just like Kronosia.”

     “This is just the hub of the teleportation network,” Matthew explained. “You go through one on those other doors and you end up somewhere else on Tharia, except that most of them don’t work anymore. We only need one, though.”

     “Which is the one Angus and Douglas were going out through?” asked Shaun. “It’s been so long I’ve forgotten.”

     “Down that way,” replied Matthew. “Seventh door on the left. Shall we look and see if they got out?”

     It was easy to spot the right cubicle because there was a pile of loose rock and soil piled outside it. The rock that had once blocked the tunnel. They passed eagerly through the teleportation cubicle and found a flight of stairs leading upwards on the other side. There was a gleam of sunlight coming from the top, and a gust of warm air that blew past them as they climbed.

     At the top, the flight of steps opened out in the middle of a vast plain of empty grasslands. A trickle of loose, dry soil broke away and fell down the stairs as the three men climbed out, and then Sejanus stared around in astonishment. He stared at the distant horizon, turning in a slow circle to see it all, then looked up into the deep blue sky. He looked up at the yellow sun, shading his eyes with his hand.

     “The stories are true,” he whispered to himself. “I never really believed them. The fallen world…”

     “There must have been a city here, back in Agglemonian times,” mused Shaun, searching around in the grass. “Ah, yes. Look.”

     He showed the others where some pieces of shaped stone were lying, half buried, in the ground. He dug around with the point of his sword and unearthed some tiles and broken glass. “All that’s left of a city after three hundred years,” he said.

     “Why is my hair moving?” asked Sejanus, his eyes wide with alarm as a hand flew to his head.

     “That’s wind,” said Shaun, laughing. “The air moves around, you see. Sometimes it’s strong enough to blow you off your feet. Then there's rain, snow, rainbows… I guess you've never seen a rainbow, have you?”

     “Look!” said Matthew, and the urgency of his words made the others look around sharply. “People!”

     He pointed off to the north, where they saw what looked to be a small tribe of nomads driving a herd of cattle, just barely visible on the horizon through the dry, dusty air.

     “We'd better get out of sight,” said Shaun. “Just in case they're not friendly.”

     Matthew agreed, but Sejanus was reluctant to leave the dry savannah and kept staring around at the vast emptiness all around. The two woodsman had to almost physically carry him back to the stairway and back down into the darkness. “So big!” he said, pausing once to take a last look around. “How can there be so much space?”

     “Very soon, you can have the rest of your life to admire it,” promised Shaun. “You and all the other occupants of Kronosia.”

     He raised his head one last time to get a look at the tribesmen. It was hard to tell from this distance, but he thought that some of the figures were women. Olive skinned and slender and, he thought, wearing nothing but strips of cloth around their waists. He stared at them, straining his eyes to see better, until he heard Matthew calling his name. “Did they see us?” he said.

     “No,” replied Shaun. “They're still just walking along in the same direction. None of them are looking this way.” He took a last look at the women while wishing for a spyglass, then decided not to risk chancing his luck any more. He climbed down the stairs to where the others were waiting.

     “Tharia!” said Sejanus as they carefully descended the narrow, dusty stairs. He sounded like a man having a religious conversion. “The fallen world! Risen again!”

     “And that was just one small part of it,” said Matthew. “Wait till you see the rest. Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s show him the lenses!”

     “I've seen them,” said the General, though. ”Lord Basil took me to them shortly after you were first captured, but it’s one thing to see it through a lens. Quite another to feel my hair moving and feel heat on my face.”

     Once they were back on Kronos they went to the Lenses of Farseeing anyway, though, the brothers hoping to get a clue as to how the war was going. As luck would have it, the tiny moon was above the continent of Amafryka at the time and it took just a few minutes to find a battle. A combined army of trogs and humans were battling a division of the Shadowarmies composed mainly of shologs and goblins with the support of a unit of trolls.

     The General stared in fascination. This was his first glimpse of a war fought in the open, on several square miles of firm, flat grassland. It was totally different from street and tunnel fighting which was the only kind of warfare the Konnen General had ever known and the sight of it, together with the sheer size of the armies involved, left him awed and breathless. Each of the armies was larger than the entire population of Kronosia; men, women and children combined. And then there was the bestial, inhuman appearance of the humanoids; hideous and terrifying to the Kronosian for whom all the other humanoid races were nothing more than myths and legends.

     “They’re real,” he whispered to himself in horrified disbelief. “They really exist.”

     They watched the battle for a little while, their blood quickening as they saw that the humans and the trogs seemed to be getting the upper hand. Something about the tactics of the Shadowsoldiers made Shaun suspicious, though, and he turned the wheel to shift the point of view a couple of miles behind the Beltharans. Matthew gasped in horror as they saw a third army approaching the battlefield; five thousand more shologs uniformed in bone armour and skull helmets. They were creeping stealthily up on the Beltharans, spreading out to either side in the classic crescent moon formation with the ‘horns’ cutting off their escape to north and south.

     “They’ll be slaughtered!” cried Matthew in anguish. “We’ve got to do something!”

     “They’re ten thousand miles away,” pointed out Shaun sadly. “There’s nothing we can do. One day, though, when this place is manned with Beltharans, they’ll be able to keep watch on battles all over the world and warn them of things like that with farspeaking spells or something. That kind of surprise ambush will be a thing of the past, and hopefully there’ll still be time to turn the tide of the war. For now, though, there’s nothing we can do.”

     He pulled Matthew away from the lens, and the three of them made their way back down to the city.