“I’m worried about Lenny,” said Thomas anxiously.

     He looked over at where the demi shae was sitting apart from the others, seemingly barely aware that they were still in the room with her. She was sitting on the edge of a luxuriously padded armchair, her chin in her hands, staring absently at a spot on the opposite wall, something she’d been doing more and more frequently just lately.

     Her eyes had lost much of their customary gleam and sparkle. Her normally clear, almost translucent skin was dull and lifeless and her long dark hair, normally so soft, silky and full of lustre, was now hanging limply around her face, reminding the others disturbingly of a shroud. She no longer combed it as regularly as she used to, prompting Diana to insist that she comb it for her, to which the demi shae agreed half heartedly, not seeming to care one way or the other. She’d even once told the others that she was considering cutting it to shoulder length, to make it easier to handle, and that was when Thomas really knew that something was wrong. Although her dark hair betrayed the human blood flowing through her veins, it had nevertheless always been her pride and joy and she’d never cut it, not even when, as a little girl, it had hung down to her ankles.

     The really telling thing, however, was the change in her manner, her personality. She hardly ever laughed any more. She would occasionally manage a weak smile at most, and it had been ages since she’d pulled one of her famous pranks on Jerry.

     “Look at her,” continued Thomas, speaking softly so she wouldn’t hear him. “She’s looking worse now than ever. She’s getting worse every day.”

     “I’ve noticed it too,” agreed Diana. “Is that what you warned us about? A reaction to being kept underground for so long?”

     “I think so,” agreed Thomas. “First the Underworld, then here. No sight of the sky. No sun, no stars. No wind or rain. It’s only because of her human heritage that she’s coping so well. A pureblooded shae girl would have been climbing the walls by now.”

     “What can we do for her?” asked Jerry quietly, knowing better than the others the acuteness of shayen hearing.

     “Get her back home, as quickly as possible,” replied Thomas. “In the meantime, cheer her up. Make her laugh. Brighten her up as much as possible. It probably won’t cure her, but it might slow the process down a little. Perhaps give her months instead of weeks.”

     “Months instead of weeks before what?” asked Jerry apprehensively.

     Thomas sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair. “I think she’ll just keep getting worse. Eventually she might just fade away.”

     “I wish I could do something,” said Diana, “but this isn’t the kind of sickness I can cure.” She put her hand on Thomas’s and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I think this is the kind of healing that only you can do.” The young wizard nodded sadly.

     “Come on,” continued the cleric, standing up and pulling Jerry to his feet. “Let’s leave them alone. It’ll be our turn later, but for now I think it’d be best to just go off and leave them alone for a while.”

     Jerry nodded in agreement. “We’ll be looking around the city. You never know, we might notice something we missed before.”

     Thomas nodded in reply and they left the room, looking back just once before they passed out of sight.

     Thomas waited a few moments, staring at the demi shae, thinking about what he might do and say that would do any good. Then he went over to sit on the chair next to her, pulling it up right alongside her so that their knees touched. He sat there for a while, examining the side of her face, and he noticed for the first time that some lines were beginning to form around her eyes. The first blemish he'd ever seen on her perfect face. He stared at them for several moments, feeling his guts twisting up with helpless fear, but after a minute or two she finally seemed to realise she was being stared at and turned her head to look at him.

     He grinned at her, and she found herself unable to prevent herself from smiling back. That simple act made her look a lot better, and the lines around her eyes became much less noticeable.

     “You looked miles away,” he said, not knowing quite what to say but deciding that it didn’t really matter. The important thing was to get her talking, about anything. “What were you thinking about?”

     “Oh, just, home, you know,” she replied, looking ahead again. “Just things.”

     “We’ll get home again,” said Thomas. “You know that, don’t you?”

     “I try to believe it,” replied the demi shae.

     “You don’t need to try!” said Thomas emphatically. “You can’t help believing it. After everything we’ve been through. The Maze of Samnos, the arachnaurs. The siege of Fort Battleaxe. The Underworld... Do you really think it’s our destiny to end our days here, held captive by some copperpiece dictator?”

     “No such thing as destiny,” replied Lirenna however, and she looked back at the wall, falling silent again.

     Thomas suppressed his disappointment and changed tack. “Do you know who he reminds me of?” he asked in a cheerful voice.

     “Who?”

     “Lord Basil.” She winced at the mention of his name.

     “Stinky Stallamad!” said Thomas in the grand and triumphant tone of someone who’d finally figured out the answer to a particularly difficult problem.

     Lirenna stared at him in astonishment as if he’d gone mad. “What?” she said.

     “Stinky Stallamad,” repeated Thomas. “You know, Fallodin Stallamad, fifth year alchemy master? That’s who Lord Basil reminds me of.”

     He stared back at her, praying silently that she would respond to his attempt at humour. Lirenna broke eye contact after a moment and looked blank as her almost photographic shayen memory went to work, calling up an image of the Lexandrian alchemist. Slowly she began to smile, and Thomas’s heart leapt for joy.

     “You know, there is a resemblance,” she said, looking back at him. “Take away the beard and the eyepatch.”

     “You had him too, then?” asked Thomas. “I wondered whether your class had a different alchemist.”

     “No, we had him all right,” she replied. “He was a character, wasn’t he? We used to call him Stallobad, the mad alchemist from Hell.”

     Thomas laughed out loud. “He had that really strange voice, didn't he?" He tried to imitate him, speaking with a deep, throaty growl. "Apprentice Gown, the main alchemy laboratory is not to be referred to as the stinks lab.”

     Now it was Lirenna’s turn to laugh out loud, to Thomas’s delight and joy, and as they talked, swapping anecdotes about their lives at the University during which they’d never met, the demi shae seemed to slowly come back to life, her more than human beauty creeping back as the crushing depression that had had her in its grip slowly lost its hold on her.

     It wouldn’t last, Thomas knew. As soon as they stopped talking the depression would start coming back, and would continue getting worse as more days and weeks passed. All he and the others could do was slow it down, buy time during which they would search for a complete cure. Wide open spaces. Life and nature all around her. That was what she needed, and where was she going to find that up on Kronos, in the underground tunnels and caverns of a tiny airless moon?

     We have to find a way to get her home! the wizard knew. We will find a way, he swore to himself. They would find a way or die trying!

     When Jerry and Diana returned a few hours later they took over the job of keeping her cheered up, although after a while of this she began to suffer from cheerfulness fatigue and slipped back into her previous condition. Thomas wasn’t too disappointed, though. The fact that the demi shae was still capable of being cheered up showed that her condition wasn’t as serious as he’d feared. They still had time to think and plan. He began to turn over a few tentative possibilities in his mind, but was interrupted when Jerry and Diana beckoned for him to follow them out of the room.

     “What is it?” he asked when they were in the other bedchamber and the connecting door closed. He didn’t like leaving Lirenna alone, not with creatures like Lokus around, but he knew the others felt the same, which meant that this had to be something important.

     “Jerry and I were talking while we were out and about,” said Diana, a strange look in her dark eyes.

     She and the tiny nome glanced at each other, and Thomas saw that he also had a strange expression on his face. This was a mood he’d never seen them in before in all the time they’d known each other, and he felt butterflies begin to flutter in his stomach. “About what?” he asked warily.

     “How many times have we been down to the dungeons to see Shaun and Matt?” asked Jerry.

     “Once a day, twice if we could persuade the guards to let us,” replied Thomas. “We must have been down there twenty times so far.”

     Jerry nodded. “And in all those cells, all those dozens of empty cells, how many enemy prisoners have we seen?”

     Thomas’s heart went as cold as ice and his guts twisted up into a tight ball in the pit of his stomach. “What are you saying?” he demanded.

     “Between the three of us, you, me and Lenny, we’ve taken dozens of Traldian prisoners,” said the tiny nome. “Where are they all?”

     “I imagine that each of the eight mansions has its own dungeon,” said Thomas, not noticing the tone of desperation that had crept into his voice. "They're in the dungeons of another mansion."

     Diana was shaking her head sadly, though. “How many cells does the Konnen mansion have?" she asked. "Multiply it by five and it's still not enough. Come on Tom, you know what’s really going on. We all do. We’ve just been denying it to ourselves. I also thought Lord Basil would keep his word, I convinced myself of it, but just lately I’ve been having bad dreams. My Lady was trying to show me the truth.”

     Thomas shook his head, his subconscious mind still desperately trying to keep a lid on it.

     Diana reached out and touched his arm. “You know it, Tom,” she repeated softly and kindly. “You know it. Admit it to yourself.”

     Thomas shook his head again, but then he sighed as if the constricting coils of a great serpent that had had him in its suffocating grip were suddenly released. Part of him recognised it as the cleric’s holy power at work in him. He nodded. “You’re right,” he said at last, and felt a terrible weight of guilt and shame filling him. “They’re dead, aren’t they?”

     “Almost certainly,” replied Jerry. “They may have kept a few alive for interrogation, the ones who knew something, but the rest...” He let his voice trail away.

     “They died because of us,” said Thomas, unable to look them in the eyes. “And they weren’t even our enemies.” A thought struck him and he looked up. “Does Lenny know?” he asked.

     “I’m sure she does, on some level,” replied Diana. “I think it’s another reason she’s so depressed.”

     “What are we going to do?” asked Thomas, his voice becoming a little panicky. “We can’t go back to the war now, but if we refuse to fight...”

     “They’ll kill Shaun and Matt,” Jerry finished for him.

     Diana nodded. “The time has come to make the decision we chickened out of earlier,” she said. “We can’t put it off any longer. Either we abandon our principles, throw in our lot with the Konnens, swear genuine allegiance to them and serve them all our days, or we go down gloriously in a final gesture on behalf of truth, justice and morality. I need hardly tell you what my decision will be, but I have no right to make your decision for you.”

     Silence fell. None of them dared to say anything, as if they were afraid of what might come out of their mouths before they could stop it. They averted their eyes, staring at the walls, each of them afraid of what they might see written on the others' faces. The terrible silence went on and on, getting deeper and darker with every second that passed, until Thomas suddenly looked up, a new energy shining in his eyes. “Maybe there’s another way,” he said.

     “What?” asked Jerry hopefully.

     “We could escape.”

     “We can’t!” protested the tiny nome. “We still haven’t found the key to the teleportation chamber, and there’s no other way back!”

     “That’s not what I meant,” replied Thomas. “We can go down, into the caverns.”

     Jerry stared in disbelief. “The caverns?”

     “The old mines,” added Thomas. “The whole moon’s honeycombed with them. There’re people living down there, renegades from this place, and we’ve heard rumours of a race of people called moon trogs. If they can survive down there, then so can we.”

     “But what would that do to Lenny?” asked Diana doubtfully. “In her present condition, the last thing she needs is to go deeper underground.”

     Thomas’s face was grey with worry. “I know,” he said, “but she’ll die even faster if we stay here. She’ll never join the Konnens. You know that.”

     “Nor will I,” added Jerry. “That’s all of us then. We escape or die together.”

     “Don’t worry,” said Thomas. “We’ll find some way of getting her home. We’ll all get home. Maybe the moon trogs’ll help us.”

     “If they’re friendly,” agreed Jerry.

     “They’d better be,” added Diana, “because if they’re not, I doubt we’ll last long down there. The renegades may have learned how to survive, but they’ve had three hundred years to figure it out. I doubt we’ll last long without help.”

     “But we’re agreed we have to try?” asked Thomas. Diana nodded.

     They went back into the first bedchamber and explained their decision to Lirenna, not saying anything about the fate of the Traldian prisoners. If she hadn’t figured it out for herself yet, they decided that it was better for her not to know.

     She agreed immediately that the caverns were their only chance. “We’ll need to steal our spellbooks back,” she said. “I’ll have to enchant a guard to do it. This time we don’t give him an amulet, though. We have to take the risk of Lord Basil reading his mind.”

     “Agreed,” said Thomas. “It would be nice if we could steal back all the stuff they took from us, especially the glowbottles. We’ll probably need light down there.”

     Diana shook her head, though. “Six backpacks is too much for one man to carry,” she said. “We don’t really need anything more than your spellbooks and the clothes we’re standing up in. We travel light. Okay?”

     “Shaun and Matt’ll need a couple of swords,” pointed out Jerry. “We may have to fight our way past the guards.” Diana nodded reluctantly.

     “Okay,” said Thomas. “Stealing swords and spellbooks is phase one of our master plan. Phase two is freeing Shaun and Matt. That should be easy. We simply get the same enchanted guard to let them out. We’ve always been able to do that, as soon as we had somewhere to run to. That takes us to phase three, escaping into the caverns. Unfortunately, though, we still have no idea how to get there. Does anyone have any ideas?”

     “We can ask the guard we enchant,” said Jerry. “He might know.”

     “And if he doesn't? Duncan didn’t know. We asked him, remember?”

     “That tunnel leading to Shaun and Matt’s cells,” said Lirenna. “It doesn’t stop there, it goes on further. I wonder where it leads.”

     “Nowhere,” replied Thomas. “It’s not guarded, so it can’t go anywhere. It must come to a dead end.”

     “I’m not so sure,” said Jerry however. “What’s the point of a tunnel that goes nowhere? It must have gone somewhere once, or no-one would ever have bothered to dig it. Of course, it may have been blocked or sealed up since.”

     “There must be another way,” insisted Lirenna. “The Konnens have occasional contact with the renegades, so there have to be ways into the caverns. So where are they?”

     No matter how hard they thought, though, none of them could think of any other candidate for a possible escape route. They simply hadn’t seen any other doors or passageways that might lead out of the city.

     “Okay,” said Thomas at last. “Then it's the tunnel from the cells, or nothing. I say we take it, and if it comes to a dead end we simply stand and fight until we’re all dead. What do you say?”

     He looked at Lirenna, who looked back at him, and a moment later he found that they were holding hands. They must have done it without thinking. She nodded fiercely and squeezed his hand. “Just promise me one thing,” she begged, facing him and looking him straight in the eyes. “Don’t let them take me alive.”

     They talked for a few minutes longer, but didn’t have time for too much more discussion. They were due back at the battlefront in just a couple of hours, and when they didn’t turn up the alarm would go out. They had that long to escape.

     “Does anyone have anything else to add?” asked Thomas therefore, but no-one spoke up. “Okay then, let’s go find a guard.”