“So,” said Matthew a little later when they’d all had time to digest the momentous decision they’d made. “How are we going to overthrow the Konnens? Lenny can’t enchant the entire Konnen army.”

     “If I enchanted Lord Basil himself...” began Lirenna.

     Thomas shook his head. “Wouldn’t work,” he said. “The entire Konnen family knows the value of the moon trogs as a slave workforce. If Lord Basil suggested leaving them alone and abandoning Kronos they’d depose him and put someone else in charge and we’d have gotten nowhere. You can’t enchant the entire Konnen family. No, I’m afraid that enchantments won’t solve this particular problem for us. We’ll have to find another way.”

     “Such as what?” asked Shaun, but the wizard could only shake his head in bafflement. Organising a rebellion was not something he had any experience with and, for once, he was completely lost for ideas.

     A baffled silence fell as they strained their brains trying to find an answer. Minutes went by without anyone offering a solution and Diana began to despair, fearing that nothing they could do would save the friendly, gentle moon trogs from an eternity of grinding slavery. Then, just as they were about to give up, though, Jerry snapped his fingers and jumped to his feet. “The Pantrys!” He exclaimed.

     “What about them?” asked Shaun.

     “The Pantrys are the secret of the Konnens’ power,” explained the tiny nome excitedly. “They control the population by giving or withholding food and water, but if the commoners had their own independent source of food...”

     “You’re suggesting that we try to capture a Pantry?” said the soldier doubtfully. “I don’t think it would work. The Konnens would search the whole city until they got it back and a Pantry's a hell of a lot bigger to hide than we are. The smallest of them are six feet high and three feet wide. You can’t just stick it down a secret tunnel. They’d find it soon enough and then ruthlessly punish everyone involved in its theft.”

     “Not if they didn’t know we had it,” replied Jerry. “The Konnens don’t control every Pantry in the city, only those in the pressurised part of the residential ring. There are at least two more Pantrys in Laxu segment, the segment of the residential ring that’s in vacuum.”

     Excitement spread among the other Tharians, growing as they realised the merit of the idea. “They might not work anymore,” pointed out Lirenna. “About half the Pantrys have failed down through the centuries.”

     “We won’t know until we look,” replied Diana. “If just one of them works we’d be in with a chance, and Laxu segment may be one of the ones with three Pantrys.”

     “We’ll ask Tomsk,” said Shaun. “He’ll know.”

     “We’ll have to take them somewhere where people can get to them without having to go through vacuum,” said Lirenna. “I don’t know what vacuum would do to food, but I don’t think I’d fancy eating it.”

     “Perhaps we can take them down into the old mines somewhere,” suggested Matthew. “Or down into one of the secret tunnels.”

     “First things first,” said Shaun. “Let’s see if they still work first.”

     The others nodded, and they began to make plans for their venture into the dead sector.

☆☆☆

     Drusus hurried down the corridor, anxious to have the Necklace back in its hiding place before his father realised it was missing. He knew he’d be punished severely if he was caught, the Necklaces being the most valuable items in all Kronos and the most carefully guarded with the outlaws still at large, but he had to have another look at Tharia. He’d been able to think of nothing else since his father had shown it to him. To a young boy who’d spent his entire life cooped up in a small city of only a few thousand inhabitants, the idea of an entire planet with millions of people, with hundreds of vast, sprawling cities, of countries, continents, islands, forests, rivers and myriads of diverse cultures and peoples… it was a lure simply too powerful to resisted.

     He was out of breath by the time he reached the top of the staircase, but after a short pause to rest he broke into a run again, panting and gasping was he rushed through the entrance room, down the corridor and into the observation room. There, he dropped into the worn, centuries old chair, giving a little cry of pain as the hard, metal frame dug painfully into his body.

     He leaned forward and peered eagerly into the lens, this time finding the Great Flat, one of the largest areas of open grassland in the planet. He swept the point of view back and forth, at first seeing nothing but the occasional windswept tree or the conical depression of a prairie reacher, but then he gasped in awe as he came across a vast cloud of dust, and following it to its head he saw what was causing it.

    It was a vast herd of wagon bison, only the outermost of which were visible through the huge clouds of dust thrown up by their passage. Ahead of them trundled the mobile homes of the wagon folk, each wagon being the size of a house with wheels larger than a man was tall. Each wagon was drawn by up to a dozen bison and had flat roofs that had been made into gardens with chairs, benches and potted plants. Brown skinned children were sitting and lying there, some playing instruments, others sitting in a circle around an adult who was seemingly teaching them.

     Around the wagons, some of the menfolk were riding bareback on their prairie horses, a large breed bred for endurance rather than speed, while others just walked, seemingly quite happy on their feet for mile after mile. Drusus counted thousands of wagons spread across hundreds of square miles. It was the equivalent of an entire city on the move, following the herds of bison on their two thousand mile migration from one side of the Great Flat to the other. He saw one wagon, three times the size of the others, with a low platform in the centre on which a normal size wagon was being built.

     At the head of the vast, mobile mass of wagons was another large one bedecked with banners and pennants. It had a swimming pool on its roof, Drusus saw, beside which scantily clad women were reclining lazily, and he wondered whether that was the home of the Lord of the wagon folk. There was a man standing to one side, he saw. Clearly a guard armed with a long, curving scimitar. Was he there to protect the women, he wondered, or keep them from escaping?

     He stared at the mobile civilization for hour after hour, utterly fascinated, wishing he could see inside the wagons, hear what they were saying. Eventually, though, the worry of discovery became too much and, with a groan of frustration, he climbed reluctantly out of the seat and headed back the way he’d come, his head full of visions of his father in a rage and reaching for a leather strap. He would return, though, and the next time he’d stay longer. He wasn’t afraid of Lord Basil, and nobody was going to stop him doing what he wanted to do.

     He was passing the door to the teleportation chamber, though, when he paused. The idea that he could just step through that door into another world thousands of miles away was incredible to him, too fantastic to be true, and even though he knew the door was locked he couldn’t resist giving it a little tug before he returned to the mansion. To his astonishment, though, the door opened, and he stared in surprise at the interior of the small metal room, hardly able to believe it had happened.

     He hesitated, unsure what to do. He wanted to go in, lured by his curiosity and sense of adventure, but he was afraid of what lay beyond. Kronosian mythology was full of monsters and hideous beasts inhabiting the fallen world, and he didn’t want to find himself suddenly in the midst of a whole crowd of them. And then there was his father, who might be discovering his theft of the Necklace at that very moment. In the end, though, his curiosity won and he cautiously entered, ignoring the spring loaded door as it closed behind him. With all the excitement and adventure there was supposed to be down there, how could he possibly resist?

     The sight that greeted him on the other side of the door was a terrible disappointment, therefore. Just a long corridor lined with doors on either side, no different from the underground moon city he’d known all his life. Obviously he wasn’t on Tharia. This was just another part of Kronosia, but why would his father lie to him? He wandered down the corridor, deep in thought, glancing briefly at each door as he passed it. One door had a pile of rock and soil piled in front of it, he saw. He paused for a moment to examine it, then moved on.

     He noticed that each door had words written on the frame in some kind of glittery crayon. Most of them said ‘dead end’ or ‘rockfall’, but when he went back to the door he’d come in through he saw that it had ‘dead air’ written above it.

     He eventually came to a dead end and returned in disappointment to his starting point. He almost went back through the door he'd come in by, but he couldn't get rid of the conviction that there had to be more to this place. Something worth discovering. He went the other way down the corridor, therefore. He glanced at all the ‘dead end’s and ‘rockfall’s as he passed them by, before coming upon a door with the word ‘island’ written above it. Curious, he opened the door, seeing another small metal room with a door in its far wall. He went in, let the first door close behind him and opened the second door.

     This time he stood frozen in shock and astonishment at what he saw. On the other side of the door was a vast open space filled with jungle. It was alive with animal noises and brilliantly lit by golden sunlight filtering through the leafy canopy above him. He stepped gingerly out, and his bare feet sank into the soft, organic soil, prickly with the sharp edges of half decomposed leaves. A brightly coloured jungle bird flapped into the air a few feet away, screeching an alarm call, and he jumped in momentary terror, his heart missing a beat as the strange alien creature flew off to the safety of a higher branch.

     He wandered awestruck through the jungle, fascinated by the flowering orchids and bromeliads clinging to the mossy treetrunks and having no idea of the danger all around him, of the dozens of pairs of eyes that followed his every move. Predators weighing up the tenderness of his youthful flesh against the almost forgotten danger of attacking a human. This island had been uninhabited for a long time, long enough that most of the wild animals had lost their fear of man, but to Drusus this was nothing more than an exciting adventure, and the idea that his life might be in danger never occurred to him.

     He wandered across the island in a dream of wonder, staring at every new sight. A hummingbird sipping nectar from a large, trumpet shaped flower. A trickle of sticky sap flowing down the trunk of a rubber tree that had trapped a dragonfly and was slowly engulfing it. A large snail that left a trail of glistening slime as it made its way, eye stalks waving, up the side of a half ruined wall; all that remained of a city building.

     Then he came to a small clearing and got his first glimpse of the sky. He craned his head back, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. There was nothing above his head! He could see up and up and up... Far above there was something fluffy and white, stunning him with a sense of size and distance, and between him and it was a flock of tiny black specks flying in formation.

     He carried on walking and came to a pool of sparkling clear water fed by a small gurgling stream. There were silvery shapes swimming in it, reminding him of the fish he had for dinner every so often, except that these were alive! He cried aloud with delight. All these years, and he'd had no idea that he was eating what had once been living creatures.

     With a cry of joy he stripped off his clothes and joined them. He splashed around happily for a few minutes, delighting at the feel of the cold water against his bare skin and wishing his manservant could be there to share the experience with him (He had no friends his own age. Lord Basil never let him mix with commoners). He failed to see the lean, muscular shape creeping stealthily up to the water’s edge, staring at him greedily through slitted red eyes. It edged into the water, but then a cappalok, a kind of jungle goat, stepped into the clearing and the predator went chasing after that instead, its instincts telling it to go after prey that it knew was defenceless and good to eat rather than an unknown animal with unknown defences. Drusus never knew how close his escape had been.

     Then he remembered his father again, who might even now be wondering where he was, and he waded back to where he’d left his clothes. He didn’t get dressed yet, wanting to let the air dry his body first, so he simply picked up his robes and Necklace and headed back to the teleportation cubicle.

     As he walked he came across more marvels but, like his father, he had a practical mind and the political possibilities of what he'd found concerned him far more than the wonders of nature. He was the only one who knew that the door to the teleportation chamber was open (or so he thought), and there had to be a way to use that knowledge to his advantage.

     Knowledge was power, his father had taught him that, and this was the most powerful piece of knowledge he’d ever had. He’d have to think about it long and hard, figure out the best way to make use of this opportunity. If he played his cards right his dear father’s days as patriarch of House Konnen might be numbered.

     Lord Drusus Konnen, he thought eagerly, and a broad grin of greed and ambition spread across his face as he hurried back to the teleportation cubicle.