One park cavern had survived the great disaster, the one adjacent to Fenring sector, but most of the plants that had originally been growing there had died, either from age or neglect. The only ones that grew there now were the hardy ones that could self pollinate and seed themselves over many generations, without any assistance from the human occupants who, over the past three hundred years, had only occasionally produced an individual with any interest in horticulture.

     The skeletons of four dead trees stood near the centre, venerated and preserved like ancient religious artifacts, but even so most of their smaller branches had long since broken off, leaving just the trunks and larger branches looking like the withered hands of corpses that had died in agony. The only living plants were grass, dandelions, clover and other turf weeds, growing wild and untended across the entire floor of the cavern, and a huge, unkempt tangle of bramble that filled the entire south western corner. Hundreds of people filled the cavern, though. Families enjoying picnics in trampled down patches of grass while laughing children played nearby. They had no idea what the cavern had once looked like, what a well tended garden was supposed to look like. To them, this was the great outdoors and they loved it.

     Silverby looked around as he crossed it as nonchalantly as possible, accompanied by Shaun and Matthew who were also dressed in Hewlak guard uniforms. This had been Traldian territory before the war, and the Hewlak soldier had never been here before. “It’s like one of the caverns outside the city,” he mused as several people glared at them with undisguised hostility, “but with gravity, and there’s only plants on the ground. Nothing on the walls or ceiling. It’s been nearly fifty years since anyone from our side of the city’s been here. Is this what the fallen world is like?”

    “Erm, after a fashion,” said Matthew. “You’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

     Silverby nodded and bent down to brush the straggly knee high grass with his fingers. “It’s dry,” he said. “The caverns are always damp. How do they live without water?”

     “Maybe it rains sometimes,” suggested Shaun, looking up at the glowing ceiling. “There could be pipes up there, dropping water sometimes. Maybe these people know.”

     “We’ll ask them some other time,” said Silverby. “Let’s not get distracted from our purpose.”

     The others nodded, and then fell silent as a group of half a dozen young men passed them by, one of them holding a leather football. Matthew watched them enviously as they headed towards a part of the cavern largely unoccupied at the moment and spread out to kick the ball between them. He clearly wished he could join in, but the Fenrisians would be unlikely to welcome guards wearing the uniforms of their conquerors and Shaun ushered them to greater speed, wanting them to get out of there as quickly as possible.

     The problem was to get into Laxu sector without anyone seeing them. The airlocks from Hewlak and Fenring sector could not be used without them being seen, and they couldn’t think of any plausible reason for wanting to enter the dead sector other than to obtain a Pantry. Anyone who saw them using one of those airlocks would know immediately what they were up to and the game would be over. Fortunately there was another entrance, reached by means of a short corridor between Laxu sector and the park caverns, and since there were no residences in that part of the city they had a much better chance of being able to use it unseen. If, by some chance, there were people loitering there, they would use their authority as guards to move them on.

     They reached the airlocks at the southern end of the cavern and found them standing open and unguarded. They hurried through and breathed sighs of relief to find themselves alone in an empty corridor. Following a map drawn on a piece of scrap paper, Shaun then led them to the airlocks into Laxu sector and, pausing only to remove their Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing from their pockets and hang them around their necks, they went through.

     Corpses lay everywhere, just as in the park caverns, and there was a great crush of them against the other side of the airlock that they had to push their way through before they could pass. Sejanus knew where the Pantrys were and had given them precise directions, so they picked their way along the corridor, gently easing the occasional corpse out of the way, until they came to the Laxu forecourt where the large metal cabinet stood against the wall of bare moonrock.

     This was the Laxu Pantry set aside for the use of the commoners, and the first thing they noticed as they approached it was how open and accessible it was, with nothing to stop anyone from taking as much food as they wanted. The wizards had been in charge back then. All the wizards from the eight Noble houses acting together to form the Council of Wizards which had ruled the moon city and arbitrated all disputes between the Nobles.

     Nearly all the wizards had been in the city’s ‘town centre’ area when the disaster had struck, though, with the Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing locked in an impregnable, magically strengthened wall cabinet whose key, as well as the key to the teleportation chamber, was out of reach in the outer residential ring. The wizards had committed suicide rather than suffer a slow death from starvation, and without them the squabbles between the Noble Houses had escalated into total warfare. Most of the adult men among the commoners had been turned into soldiers and the Pantrys had been seized and taken to places where they could be better guarded, since when food had been in short supply and used as a form of currency.

     It was strange to see the large metal cabinet standing unguarded, out in the open, therefore, full of food that had long since spoiled and disintegrated. Shaun’s spirits fell at the sight of the shriveled, desiccated meat and the crumbly, powderlike grains of wheat and corn that had spilled out onto the floor when the sacks in which they'd been stored had disintegrated. But then, he reasoned, this food’s been untouched for over fifty years. Maybe the Pantry still has the power to produce new, fresh food. He stepped up to the Pantry, therefore, pulled the door all the way open and took out the shriveled husk of an apple, grimacing in disgust as it crumbled to dust in his hands.

     Nothing happened, and he took out more food, then more, until the Pantry was completely empty, and still the cabinet remained inert. Shaun’s heart sank. The Pantry was dead. Its magics had failed sometime over the past half century, but there was still the other one to try. The one in the Laxu mansion itself. He pointed at the huge, magnificent palace doors, therefore, and the others nodded, following him towards them.

     The doors were partly closed, the guards having tried to shut them to save themselves as the residential area was lost to vacuum, but the huge doors couldn’t be closed quickly enough and the guards were still there, slumped against them. The three visitors stepped carefully over them while trying not to look down.

     All eight mansions were set out along broadly similar lines, with the same rooms in more or less the same places, and Silverby took them towards where the kitchens were in the Hewlak mansion. Sure enough, the Laxu kitchens were in the same place, but to get there they had to pass through several doors and Shaun remembered Duncan telling them that these doors were airtight. They were much smaller than the main forecourt doors. They could have been closed fast enough to keep the air in, but then the survivor would have been trapped, with air kept fresh by the Lifegiver but with no food or water…

     He remembered their time trapped in the decompressing teleportation chamber up from the Underworld. That had just been for a few hours; the chamber had let them out before they’d come to harm. Anyone trapped here, in Laxu sector… He remembered that every individual residence of the common people had an airtight door. How many hundreds of people had been trapped? He shut out the thought and concentrated on the job at hand, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep from thinking about the tragedy of the Laxu commoners from time to time for the rest of his life.

     The Gods were merciful that day, though, and they encountered no closed doors during their journey through the Laxu mansion. The door into the kitchen itself was also mercifully open, and Shaun wondered what would have happened if the cooks had managed to seal themselves in when the disaster struck. They would have had the Pantry to supply them with food and water. They might have been able to survive for years, but they would have been alone, with no prospect of rescue, ever. How long before the madness of loneliness set in? How long before they’d have been driven insane by nothing more than the sheer absence of human company? The Gods were merciful, the soldier thought, that they’d been granted a quick death by decompression.

     They found the Pantry, and this time, when Matthew removed a shriveled fruit, there was a brief shimmering of rainbow colours and another apple appeared to replace it; mouthwateringly crisp and succulent and ripened to a shiny red finish with a single leaf still clinging to the stalk. Shaun and Matthew cried out in delight, forgetting that they couldn’t make any sound in the vacuum, but then the apple exploded, showering them with pulp, each little fragment shriveling and emitting clouds of vapour as all the moisture they contained boiled away in the vacuum.

     The three men were aghast with horror, thinking that the Pantry’s magic had gone horribly wrong during its long centuries of neglect, but Silverby closed its door and made handsigns for the others to pick it up. What the Hell, thought Shaun with a mental shrug. Maybe the wizards can do something with it. It wasn’t heavy, despite its size, but it was awkward and it took a great deal of hefting, turning and shuffling to get it out the door and down the corridor.

     They left it beside the airlock while they went to the two other locations where Sejanus had told them there might be Pantrys. The first location contained nothing, but they had more luck in the other. A Pantry in a similar condition to the first, producing food that immediately exploded and boiled into desiccation. It was also the smallest of the three, and therefore the easiest to carry. They picked it up, therefore, wrestling it around corners and through narrow doors, and carried it back to the corridor leading to the park caverns, intending to come back for the other one later.