After a few minutes had passed, Resalintas returned to the maps on the table, wishing Skulnya were with him as he pondered battle tactics in preparation for the inevitable return of the Shadowarmies. An hour passed as he stared and thought and plotted, and other officers came and went from time to time, being careful not to disturb him as they also consulted maps and situation reports while, outside, Kronos rose above the western horizon and began to climb up into the sky. Some of the soldiers camped in the huge tent city looked up at it, but most of them ignored the small moon completely, having their minds firmly fixed on more practical matters.

     “Captain Resalintas?” said a voice.

     The priest looked up to see who was speaking to him, but the other occupants of the tent were engrossed in their own business and weren’t paying him any attention.

     “Captain Resalintas, can you hear me?”

     Resalintas realised that it was the farspeaking spell again, but now much louder and clearer, and he answered it by thinking in his own head. “Yes. Who is that?”

     “He answered it!” cried the voice in jubilation. “He heard me! We finally got through!”

     “Stop babbling and tell me who you are and what you want,” said the priest angrily, and the tone of triumph and joy in the farspoken voice was instantly replaced by nervousness and apprehension. Part of Resalintas instantly regretted having snapped at him, realising now that the speaker was a young man who’d been trying to get through for some time, but the rest of him was tired and worried about the state of the war and had no time for pleasantries. Besides, if they were so timid and lacking in self confidence that they could be cowed by a stern voice coming from thousands of miles away, they had no business dabbling in magic.

     “Er, you probably don’t remember me,” said the voice hesitantly. “My name is Thomas Gown. I’m a wizard, and I’m one of the group you sent into the Underworld to find the priest with the Sword of Retribution.”

     “I remember,” said Resalintas, his eyes widening in surprise. “I thought you were dead. Where are you?”

     “Well, er,” said Thomas, an embarrassed tone entering his voice. “You’re not going to believe this, but we’re inside Kronos. The smallest moon.”

     “What?” exclaimed the priest out loud in indignant disbelief, making the other officers in the tent look up in surprise. He left the tent and walked out into the open, so he could talk in privacy. “What kind of nonsense is this?”

     “It’s true, Sir,” protested the wizard, and the pleading tone of fear in his voice told the priest that he was telling the truth, or at least believed that he was. “We’re in a city built by the Agglemonians, so they could live up here until civilization rose again down there.”

     “Extraordinary,” said Resalintas thoughtfully.

     “We got up here by means of an old Agglemonian teleportation network, but the thing is, we can’t get down again, so we were hoping that you or someone could come up here and, er, sort of, get us down again. Please.”

     “You have my sympathy,” said the old priest, “but there’s nothing I can do at the moment. You’ll just have to sit tight up there until we’re less busy. Rescuing half a dozen youngsters who took it upon themselves to go exploring when there’s a war to be won is very low on my list of priorities at the moment.”

     Thomas bristled with anger, forgetting, for the moment, who he was talking to. “We didn’t go exploring!” he snapped. “We were forced up here to escape from a tribe of saveges. And in all due modesty, rescuing us should be high on your list of priorities. We’ve found something up here that you might find very interesting. Very useful in the war.”

     Resalintas was instantly interested. The Agglemonians were renowned for their use of powerful magical weapons, left over from the Mage Wars, and he was quite willing to believe that the Agglemonian refugees had possessed one. “Don’t say any more,” he said therefore. “There are ways of eavesdropping on farspoken messages, and the enemy could be listening to us at this very moment. Keep talking. I’ll trace your signal and teleport up to you.”

     “What should I say?” asked the wizard nervously. “Er, one, two, three, four. Mary had a dragonet, its scales were grey as steel, and everyone that Mary met it gobbled as a meal.”

     The old priest rolled his eyes to heaven and prayed for the ability to trace the message back to its source. A stream of holy power flowed through him, pouring upwards into the sky, and a second later an image of the speaker took shape in his mind. He recognised him instantly from the time in Fort Battleaxe when he’d sent him and his five friends on their mission to the Underworld, and he wasn’t surprised to see the others gathered around him, listening intently to his every word. He was wearing a jeweled coronet on his head, and he surmised that this was the item generating the farspeaking spell.

     They were in a long corridor that appeared to have been carved out of the living rock. There were doors in the walls on either side and he could see people behind the wizard, in the distance. Closer by, though, was a small group of other people. An old man who looked as though he was trying very hard to be a leader but wasn’t quite sure how. A young girl with a silver caroli flower hanging on a chain around her neck. An older woman who might have been her mother and a couple of middle aged men. He didn’t pay them any attention, however, but simply fixed the scene firmly in his mind, spoke a word and teleported up to join them.

     The Kronosians leapt back in alarm as the fearsome priest appeared amongst them, surrounded by an almost physical aura of holiness and power that was completely unknown in a society that had been without priests for three hundred years. The woman shrieked in fear, gathering the girl protectively in her arms, and Tomsk’s two sons leapt in front of their father, their hands going to the hilt of their swords even though their most primitive instincts told them that they stood as much chance against this man as a rabbit against a tiger. The Tharians sighed in relief and gratitude, though, and Thomas removed the coronet from his head, rubbing his temples wearily. Such prolonged use of the magical item had begun to give him a headache.

     Resalintas looked around the small group of people curiously, and Tomsk gestured to his sons to move aside so he could step forward. He felt that, as the most likely candidate to be the city’s next leader, it was up to him to greet the newcomer and make him feel welcome.

     “Most honoured sir,” he said therefore, “May I be the first to, er, to...”

     His voice dried up in his throat, though, as the formidable priest, taking off his helmet and tucking it under his arm, turned to look at him. The kronosian cleared his throat uncomfortably and shrank back again.

     Resalintas turned back to Thomas. “All right,” he snapped impatiently. “What have you found?”

     The wizard told the priest about the old observatory, up on the surface of Kronos, and about the Lenses of Farseeing they contained. The old priest’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, but there was something in them that encouraged the young wizard. The merest hint of interest and, perhaps, even excitement, as Thomas described their ability to look down on Tharia and spy on the enemy without any danger of being detected.

     “I want to see them,” said Resalintas as soon as he’d finished speaking. “Take me to them.”

     “You’ll need to wear one of these,” said Thomas, offering him a Necklace of Vacuum Breathing. “Part of the way between here and there is deadly unless you’re wearing it.”

     Resalintas put it on without comment, and Shaun and Thomas put on the other two. “And while we’re walking,” the old priest continued, “I want you to tell me how in the name of hell you came to be up here.”

     Tomsk made one last attempt to play the part of head of state, offering to lead the way to the airlocks, and the priest graciously allowed him to take the lead, although his manner made it perfectly clear that he was merely humouring the old man. He examined the airlocks curiously when they arrived, ignoring the crowds of curious onlookers who were beginning to gather around, and demanded to know their purpose and means of operation. Shaun, who had only a vague idea himself, did his best to explain as he operated the doors, and then they were in the park cavern, where the priest’s steel grey eyes took in the scene of chaos and destruction without the slightest change of expression.

     When they reached the other side of the park cavern and were back in a pressurised area, Thomas gave the old priest a brief summary of their ill fated and ultimately pointless mission. He didn’t go into great detail, as he knew they’d all have to undergo an interminable and exhausting debriefing when they returned to Ilandia in which every tiniest, most trivial detail would be wrung out of them over and over again. He skipped over most of their journey along the banks of the underground river, used just a few brief sentences to describe their time in the Underworld itself, and then told how they’d come to Kronos itself after escaping from the Kimmats by the very narrowest margin.

     He spent a little longer telling what had happened to them in Kronos, how they’d been captured by the Konnens, forced into their service, escaped into the caverns, met the moon trogs, returned to Kronosia, triggered a revolution and then discovered that they were unable to return to Tharia as they’d planned. As he spoke, Resalintas gave no outward sign that he was listening, his gaze wandering around the rooms and corridors of the moon city as they passed through them, but Thomas knew better than to ask if he had his attention. He didn’t doubt that the old priest was taking in his every word, which he was, his occasional nod or frown being much too slight for either the wizard or the soldier to notice.

     “We thought we’d be stranded up here for the rest of our lives,” Thomas was saying as they climbed up the long spiral staircase to the observatory, “but then I remembered Patroclus taking the key into the caverns to keep it out of Konnen hands. It suddenly occurred to me that he would have to have had some means of knowing when it was safe to return, and I remembered the jeweled coronet that he’d also had on his person when we found him.”

     “It should have been perfectly obvious what it was the moment you saw it,” said Resalintas, speaking for the first time since leaving the moon city.

     Thomas wilted a little under the criticism and nodded his reluctant agreement. “We had a lot of other things on our minds,” he said, and then wilted even more as the old priest glared at him. The one thing Resalintas hated more than anything else were excuses.

     Then they were in the observatory, and a moment later they had walked the length of the corridor to arrive at the observation room itself. The two young men kept a close eye on the old priest’s face as he got his first glimpse of the beautiful blue and white globe of Tharia, but to their disappointment his expression barely flickered. Had he been alone it would probably have been different, but all priests of Samnos are trained not to display any emotion in front of subordinates and Resalintas, who agreed with this principle completely, took it to extremes that a block of wood would have envied. Although his heart was filled with wonder, therefore, not a trace of it showed on his face and the two younger men were left staring at each other in astonishment, wondering what it would take to impress him.

     The priest then went to the first Lens of Farseeing, the one that the Tharians had used when they’d first arrived on Kronos and the one that Lord Basil and Drusus had used when they’d gained access to the centre of the city. He sat in the badly rotted chair, ignoring the discomfort, bent over the lens and spent the next few minutes staring intently at the highly magnified image of Tharia as Thomas showed him how to use the controls. After a while he found Bula Pass and spent some time looking down on Fort Dirk and the army camped outside it. Then he scanned the surrounding countryside looking for units of the Shadowarmy that might be lurking around out there. He failed to find any, but he was nevertheless unable to keep a perfectly straight face as he stood again.

     “These devices were created and installed by the Agglemonians,” he said, “and the people of the city below are descendants of those people. These lenses therefore rightfully belong to them.”

     “Yes,” said Shaun, “which is why we thought it important to remain in the city long enough to help the common people overthrow the Konnens. They now owe us a debt of gratitude and they say they’ll let you use the lenses. That's why we didn't return to Tharia the moment we were first able to. It wasn't because we were afraid to return to the war. It was because of these…”

     “Be silent,” said the elderly priest. “You acted correctly. If charges are brought against you, I will speak in your defence.”

     Shaun and Thomas both sagged as a huge weight of anxiety slipped from them. They wouldn't hang! They wouldn't be executed for desertion! They grinned at each other, both of them feeling dizzy and light headed with relief.

     “These devices could indeed be useful to us,” the elderly priest said in the same flat, emotionless voice he always used. “You were right to bring them to my attention. Your part in this is now over, however. I will contact a wizard and have you teleported back to Belthar. Go back to your friends and wait there.”

     He then paid them no further attention and began praying for the priestly equivalent of a Farspeaking spell. Shaun and Thomas glanced at each other, sharing a look of triumph and amusement, and then left the room.

☆☆☆

     “Well?” demanded Lirenna when they arrived back at Clarissa’s apartment. A large crowd had gathered in the forecourt as word spread that another Tharian had arrived in the city, and the two young men had had to force their way through them, avoiding clutching fingers and demands to know what in hell was going on.

     “We’re going home!” cried Thomas, hugging her and swinging her around in delight. “This time we’re definitely going home!”

    The demi shae squealed with delight, and Diana hugged Shaun with joy.

     “And we're not going to be executed,” The woodsman added. “He said we did the right thing.”

     “The observatory will be swarming with people before long,” added Thomas, “and a wizard’s coming to teleport us home.”

     Tomsk looked unhappy, though. “When they come here, they’re going to want to know who they’re dealing with,” he said. “Looks like the time’s finally come to make my move, make them accept me as ruler of the city. There’s a crowd outside. Might as well take advantage of it.”

     “Do you want our help?” asked Diana.

     “No, thank you,” replied the old man. “Can’t risk them thinking I’m a puppet ruler under the thumb of a Tharian power. There’ll be enough of them thinking that as it is. No, I’ve got to make them accept me on my own merit, show them that I’m my own man.” He turned to Clarissa. “I’d welcome your support, though. To show them I’ve got the backing of the Gods.”

     “You’ve got it,” replied the girl enthusiastically, and they went out together. The Tharians followed them, but were careful to keep out of the way as the old man and the young girl began to speak to the crowd.

     Things went well at first, with the crowd listening intently to what they had to say, but after a few minutes arguments began to break out as other people put forward their own nominations for the post of new ruler of the city. At one point there were half a dozen contenders for the post, but most of them fell silent as one voice rose above the others and established himself as the focus for all those opposed to Tomsk. It was an angry young man called Donald Ramer, the same young man who’d spoken out during the confrontation with the soldiers during the revolution. The one who’d called for the massacre of all those who’d upheld the rule of the Nobles for half a century.

     The Tharians could see that massacre still taking place if he won power for himself, as could Clarissa, and she argued loudly and passionately on Tomsk’s behalf, telling the crowd that it was he the Gods favoured and that great wealth and prosperity would result under his rule. The crowd was moved by her support, but many of them kept glancing nervously at the Tharians, as if wondering who would really be ruling the city if Tomsk won.

     “Come on,” said Diana softly, urging the others back into Clarissa’s apartment, out of sight. “We’re not helping him by being here. Let’s get back inside.”

     They didn’t see what happened, therefore, when the wizard Makenzi, wearing Resalintas’s Necklace of Vacuum Breathing, stepped out of the airlock and headed for the sound of all the arguments. The crowd fell silent as he approached, and the wizard cast his emerald green eyes over them, looking for anyone who seemed to be in a position of authority. “Who’s in charge here?” he asked.

     “That's what we're trying to decide,” said Tomsk. “How may we help you?”

     “You see?” cried Donald triumphantly. “You see how he toadies up to them? We’ve got Tharians crawling out of the woodwork, treating our city as if they own it already, and he welcomes them with open arms! He would turn us into a mere Tharian outpost! He would turn us all into slaves again when we have so recently gained our freedom!”

     “I only want to know where the other Tharians are,” said the wizard, looking rather embarrassed. “I’ve come to take them home.”

     “They’re in there,” said Tomsk, indicating Clarissa’s apartment, and the wizard thanked him as he entered.

     “My friends,” continued Tomsk, speaking to the crowd again. “After three hundred years, our city is once more in contact with Tharia. Like it or not, we are going to have to deal with them. The only question is, do we deal with them as friends or as enemies? What do you say?”

     The wizard missed the crowd’s response as he closed the door behind him and saw the Tharians springing to their feet in surprise. “Ready to go home?” he asked as he took the necklace off and laid it carefully on the table.

     “You bet!” replied Jerry enthusiastically.

     “Okay, everyone in a circle, holding hands.”

     They formed a circle in the centre of the room, and Thomas found himself holding hands with Lirenna on one side and Makenzi on the other. The wizard then spoke a word, there was a pop and a flash of light, and the room was empty.