They arrived back at the gravity sphere a few hours later and stopped for a while to get used to their own weight again. They felt weak and shaky for a while, the muscles in their legs having grown lazy during their time in near weightlessness, but there hadn’t been enough time for their muscles or bones to actually weaken and after a few minutes they were walking around as easily and effortlessly as they had before. Diana and Lirenna untied their hair again to let it hang loose, and then they moved on, slowly and cautiously, aware that they might come across city soldiers at any time.

     Andricus took the lead from that point on, leading them down tunnels and up near vertical shafts until they came to a place where they could hear the sounds of people moving, working and talking just above them.

     “Can I say something before we go any further?” said the young Konnen, pausing for a moment. “This tunnel leads to a trapdoor in the floor of my grandparent’s home. It’s been a family secret for generations. If Lord Basil or any other family member should find out about it, they’d all be rounded up and put to death for treason. It’s the law, you see. Only the Nobles can come and go from the city at will. The rest of us need their permission, and even then have to be escorted by soldiers. If his Lordship still had his Ring of ESP, I wouldn’t even risk it.”

     “He won’t find out from us,” replied Diana. “I swear it.”

     “How come he didn’t just read your minds while he still had his ring?” asked Shaun.

     Andricus smiled. “There are nearly a thousand people in Konnen sector,” he said. “He can’t read everyone’s mind. Couldn’t, I mean. I was the biggest danger. I knew the risk when I was conscripted, but to refuse to join up would have brought suspicion on all the family. I tried to keep as far away from Lord Basil as possible, but I made the mistake of arguing with my Captain over some trivial matter and I was punished by being put on dungeon guard duty. Being right under the mansion, there was a real danger that I might meet Lord Basil in person and that he might read my mind. That’s why I volunteered to join the party looking for you. I just wanted to get away from him.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, Rakkus misinterpreted it and thought I just wanted to be close to him. I didn’t dare correct his misapprehension in case I gave away my real motives, so I had to, er...”

     “But you didn’t actually...” asked Matthew hesitantly.

     “No, but I might have had to if I hadn’t been able to think of a way of getting out of it. It was my own stupid fault for getting myself in that position in the first place, and I couldn’t let the rest of my family pay for my mistake. I’d endure almost anything rather than that.”

     The others found themselves warming to him as he said this. They all had loved ones they’d make great sacrifices for, and so had great sympathy for his predicament. He’s not a bad guy for a Konnen, thought Thomas with a smile. I could even find myself liking him if I’m not careful.

     They finally came to the end of the upward sloping tunnel and saw the underside of a large ceramic bowl, about two feet square, set into the ceiling above them. “Let’s hope they’re in,” said Andricus. “Otherwise we could be here for some time.”

     He knocked on the bowl with his knuckles, a coded series of long and short knocks. Nothing happened and he tried again. After the third time, however, there was a reply, two knocks in quick succession followed after a pause by a third, and Andricus replied with a different series of knocks. There was then the sound of something large and heavy being moved aside and the bowl was lifted, revealing a rectangular opening in the ceiling above them. Light from glowing globes of marble in the room above spilled down into the dark and dingy tunnel.

     An elderly, grey haired face looked down at them. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

     “It’s me, Gramps,” called up the young Konnen. “Andricus.”

     “Andricus?” said the old man in surprise. “Come in, my boy, come in!”

     “I’ve brought some friends,” said Andricus, though. “They can be trusted. Can they come too?”

     “Friends?” said the old man, a note of doubt and fear entering his voice. “I suppose they’d better now that they know about us. Bring them all up.”

     Andricus pulled himself up into the old man’s home and then reached down to pull up the others. They were a little horrified to find that the bowl was nothing less than the toilet bowl and that the room they were entering was the smallest room. The bowl contained half an inch of pungent yellow urine which sloshed about as the old man lowered it back into place with shaky hands.

     “We never empty it completely,” he explained as he opened the door and led them out into the next room. “Keeps them from investigating it too closely. The soldiers search every apartment every couple of weeks, but search me if I know what they’re looking for.” He gave them all a cold, hard look with his one good eye. “Now then, why don’t one of you tell me who you are and what’s going on?”

     While the young Konnen related his story, the Tharians looked around at the room they were in. It was small and cramped, in marked contrast to the huge, magnificent but impersonal mansions in which the noble families lived. This tiny apartment had a warmth and cosiness that the mansions lacked, though, due no doubt to the fact that its occupants knew every square inch with the same intimacy and familiarity with which they knew their own bodies. There was just enough room for the two wooden armchairs, covered in cushions and blankets, to stand side by side, and a small table stood just in front of them, a half eaten sandwich on a round plate near one corner.

     The floor, walls and ceiling were bare, polished moonrock, veined and mottled in different shades of blue and grey as the proportion of rock to metal varied from place to place, but a large area of floor was covered by a rug, worn thin in the centre, and a number of paintings hung on the walls. Most of them were portraits, depicting people who bore a family resemblance to Andricus and the old man, but one was different. It was a landscape. A bizarre, fantastic landscape in which the towers of a beautiful crystal city reached towards a sky in which massive blocky clouds hung like huge boulders. Weirdly shaped animals with wings, horns and hooves walked with their human masters down a perfectly straight road past trees that looked like twenty foot high sprigs of parsley. It was entitled ‘The road to Trali’ and looked as though it was supposed to be a painting of a Tharian city from before the fall of Agglemon, painted by someone who’d never seen the surface of a planet and only had word of mouth descriptions of what it was like.

     “You shouldn’t have come back,” the old man, whose name was Hama, said when Andricus had finished speaking. “Not that I’m not glad to see you, you understand, but you’re an outlaw now. Those soldiers that got away will have gotten back by now, and they’ll be telling his Lordship all about what you did. Best if you go back and join the renegades.”

     “That’s what they said,” replied Andricus, indicating the Tharians, standing shoulder to shoulder along the wall. “But they say they’re from Tharia and that they want to go back there, and I want to go with them.”

     “Tharia!” exclaimed the old man, his eyes flicking to the picture. “But surely...”

     “Civilization has risen again,” said Shaun. “There are cities and kingdoms down there again.”

     “Cities?” said Hama. He pointed to the painting. “Like that?”

     “Well, no,” admitted Shaun with a smile. “Not exactly like that, but cities all the same, with hundreds of thousands of people living in them.”

     The old man was dubious at first, and clearly thought that his grandson had fallen in with a gang of madmen, but the Tharians were now getting used to explaining it to the inhabitants of the smallest moon and soon convinced him that they were telling the truth. They were helped by the fact that rumours of the wizards’ deeds had filtered around the city, despite attempts by the soldiers to keep it secret, and it had also proven impossible to stop people talking about the cleric who, apparently, possessed the ability to heal people on the edge of death and return them to full health simply by the laying on of hands.

     Speculation as to the nature of these newcomers had been, and still was, rife, and so, after some initial difficulties, Hama found himself tending to believe them and his eyes widened with wonder as he contemplated it. A whole world, vast beyond comprehension to an inhabitant of the small, cramped moon city. Risen from the ruins into which it had fallen and once again teeming with life, culture and civilisation.

     Then his eyes darkened with anger. “And the Nobles knew all along! They tried to keep it from us!”

     “Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely a bad thing,” said Thomas defensively. The others looked at him strangely. “I mean,” continued the wizard, “With no way of getting back to Tharia, you’d only have been torturing yourselves thinking of it. You might all have gone mad with frustration.”

     “But we know now,” said Hama.

     “Yes, but now we’ve got a way of getting back.” Hopefully, he thought to himself. Hopefully it really is the key we’ve got. If it’s not...

     “That’s right!” agreed Jerry enthusiastically. “All we’ve got to do is steal back our Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing and we’re as good as home. We’ll leave the door unlocked behind us, so anyone who wants to can follow us.”

     At that moment Lilly, Andricus’s grandmother, came back from collecting their weekly food rations from the nearest Pantry (The Tharians were shocked to see how little it was) and they had to go through it all over again for her benefit. Her reaction was just the same as his, and for a while afterwards the two oldsters just kept asking question after question about life on Tharia, as if every answer made it a little bit more real to them. Occasionally Lilly would retreat from the subject, as if afraid that thinking about it too much would blow her mind, and she would fall back defensively into her ordinary day to day activities; dusting, cleaning and offering their guests food and drink which they politely declined, seeing the meagre rations they had to live on.

     Thomas suspected that they still didn’t quite believe them even after all they'd said, and that it would be a long, slow process before they fully accepted it, but privately he was rather glad of that. If it turned out that what they thought was the key wasn’t, in fact, anything of the kind, and that they were all still stranded on Kronos, it wouldn’t be too difficult to convince them that they’d only been joking and that Tharia was still an uninhabitable wasteland. They’d need to believe that in order to keep their sanity.

     “I’m afraid you can’t stay here,” said Hama. “This is Konnen sector. If you so much as stick your faces out that door, chances are you’ll be seen by a soldier and recognised. You’d have a much better chance in Hewlak sector, right next to the dead sector. There’re lots of empty homes there, and most of the soldiers will never have seen you. So long as you’re careful, you’d be able to come and go as you please.”

     “How do we get there?” asked Shaun.

     “Well, you can’t just walk, that’s for sure. You’d be spotted before you got to the nearest airlock.” He paused for a moment, as if wondering how far the Tharians could be trusted, but then he reached a decision. “There’s a whole network of tunnels running under the city. The Nobles know about some of them and use them to get around without being seen, but there are others they know nothing about. I know of a tunnel that goes to Hewlak sector, to the home of a friend of mine. He and his family can be trusted, and they’ll do anything they can to help you. They have more reason than anyone to hate the Konnens.”

     “Ham?” said his wife fearfully. “Are you sure we can trust them? They worked for Lord Basil before. They might go back to him.” She glanced nervously at the Tharians, as if expecting them to strike her down for daring to speak her mind.

     Diana went over to her and took her hand. “We worked for him for a while, it’s true,” she said softly, “but only because my brothers were being held hostage. We escaped as soon as we could, and I swear in the name of Caroli, the Goddess I worship, that we will never work for him again.”

     Lilly nodded, reassured. Even in Kronosia, where the Gods had been all but forgotten for centuries, they still understood the power of an oath made in Their name.

     “Gramp,” said Andricus, “If we do find the way back to Tharia, will you come with us?”

     The two oldsters glanced at each other and slowly shook their heads. “No, son,” said Hama. “We’re too old now to go on long journeys. We’ll just end our days together here. It may be small and cramped, and it may be hard under the Konnens, but it’s home to us. I think we’ll just stay here.”

     It was the answer Thomas had been expecting, and he suspected that they weren’t the only ones to feel that way. Once the teleportation chamber was open, thousands of Kronosians would probably flood through, keen to visit the world of their ancestors, but thousands more would probably remain. What was more, once the existence of the moon city became known on Tharia, many Tharians would probably want to go up and live there. With the Lifegiver to provide for all their needs and a pleasant environment free from harsh weather and adverse climatic conditions, Kronosia could be a paradise once the Nobles were replaced by a decent government and the damage caused by the great disaster and the House wars repaired. The moon trogs were right to be alarmed.