The way Thomas’s mind worked was like this. His eyes would see things, his ears would hear things, and the facts thus gathered would pile up in a disorganised jumble in his head with new facts being added as they came along until they reached a kind of critical mass. When that happened, they would all suddenly sort themselves together in their proper way, like all the pieces of a jigsaw suddenly flying together to make the picture, and the truth would appear before him in all its magnificent glory leaving him stunned with surprise. That was what was happening now, and the wizard sank back into the old chair, making it creak alarmingly as it accepted weight for the first time in nearly a thousand years.

     “Tom?” asked Lirenna in concern, seeing him staring ahead like a man in a trance, his mouth hanging slackly open. “Tom, what’s wrong?” There was still no reply, and she looked over at Diana in alarm. “Di, I think there’s something wrong with Tom.”

     The cleric hurried over and stared into the wizard’s face, waving a hand in front of his eyes. Thomas came out of it with a sudden jolt, a look of alarm and wonder on his face as if he’d looked up to see all the Gods on their thrones staring down at him. “It’s the world!” he cried, grabbing Diana by the shoulders and pulling her down until he was shouting into her face. “It’s Tharia! It’s the world!”

     “Calm down, Tom!” interrupted Shaun, helping the cleric break his manic grip. “What in the name of hell are you talking about?”

     “That! Out there!” cried Thomas, pointing to the blue and white dome outside the window. “It’s Tharia, the world!”

     “He’s delirious,” said Matthew fearfully. “The lens must have been booby trapped. Poison or something.”

     “No, wait a minute,” said Jerry with dawning realisation as he, too, looked out the window at the huge dome, only half visible over the horizon. “He could be right, all the facts fit.”

     He glanced over at Lirenna, who stared back in renewed wonder. “The world itself,” she said softly, looking at it. “No wonder it’s so beautiful.”

     It was relatively easy for the three wizards to accept the fact that they were no longer on Tharia but looking at it from the surface of another, much smaller world. During their five years of education at Lexandria University, they’d grown quite accustomed to the concept of the plurality of worlds, and indeed the plurality of universes.

     The Winterwells, on the other hand, despite their travels and adventures all over the continent and all the strange and wonderful things they’d seen, were still basically medieval farmers at heart, for whom the world was the whole of creation and for whom the stars, planets, moons and comets were merely things that moved in the sky. The idea of being beyond the world, of being on a completely different world, was a totally alien concept to them, even to Diana who was quite happy to accept the fact that the Gods she worshipped lived in a completely different plane of existence. They stared at each other in bafflement, therefore, as the three wizards stared, awestruck, at Tharia, now and again sharing a glance with each other as if to reassure themselves that it was real, that they weren’t dreaming.

     “I don’t understand,” said Shaun after a moment, when it became apparent that they weren’t going to elaborate on their extraordinary claim. “What exactly are you saying?”

     “What we’re saying,” explained Thomas patiently, “is that that dome over there, that we’ve all been admiring so much, is nothing less than the planet Tharia itself.”

     “So where are we now?” asked Matthew in bewilderment.

     “On one of the moons, I should think,” replied the wizard. “Which one would you say, Jerry?”

     “Well,” mused the tiny nome, stroking his short silver beard thoughtfully, “I can see Selona over there, so this must be either Lara or Kronos. My guess would be Kronos, since the colour of the rocks out there matches the reddish brown it appears in the sky, whereas Lara has a more bluish tinge.”

     “Me too,” agreed Lirenna.

     “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” interrupted Shaun again. “Are you saying that we’re on Kronos? The moon Kronos?”

     “Yes!” replied all three wizards in unison, impatient with his difficulty in grasping what was, to them, a very simple idea.

     “That’s crazy!” protested the soldier. “I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous!” He stared out the window at the dome, only half of which was lit as Kronos sped across the terminator, the dividing line between day and night. In another hour Tharia would be a crescent, and an hour after that it would momentarily vanish from sight altogether as they passed directly over its night side.

     “Look,” explained Jerry patiently. “You know that the moons are worlds in their own right, right? Smaller than Tharia, but worlds nonetheless. Right?” The two soldiers and the cleric stared blankly back at him. “Well, just take my word for it, okay?" the nome continued. "Well, suppose you could fly up to one of the moons and that you then looked back down at the world. What do you think it would look like?”

     Diana looked at the dome, afraid to speak in case it sounded stupid. “Like that?” she ventured hesitantly.

     “Right! Look, the blue is the oceans, the brown is the continents and those swirly white things are clouds, seen from above.”

     “I’ve never seen any clouds like that,” said Matthew sceptically, looking at the spiral formation of a huge hurricane system near the equator.

     “That’s because it’s too big to see all at once when you’re on the ground,” replied the tiny nome, impatience creeping back into his voice despite his every effort to stay cool. “Look, those lenses prove it. They’re not scrying devices after all. They’re like spyglasses, they simply magnify whatever they’re pointed at, except that whereas a spyglass can only magnify about ten times, these things can magnify thousands of times. Look, you were looking through them just now, and you all agreed that it was Tharia you were looking at.”

     Gradually, ever so slowly, the concept began to seep into their medieval brains and their eyes widened in wonder as they at last began to understand. “You’re saying that that’s Tharia itself?” said Shaun slowly. “The whole world? Everything we’ve ever seen, every place we’re ever been to? Ilandia, Kenestra, Mala, Pargonn, Fengalla Forest, the Red Mountains? All of it over there, on that dome? The whole world?”

     “Yep,” said Jerry with relief, feeling that he was almost home after a long and difficult journey. “Quite something, isn’t it?”

     Matthew laughed out loud, more out of nervousness than humour. “Jerry, you are the master of understatement,” he exclaimed. “Why, it’s almost like being among the Gods, being able to look down on the whole world...” His voice trailed off in awe, and the three Winterwells stared in rapture at the planet Tharia, completely lost for words and unable to tear their eyes away from the spectacle.

     “I wonder why they built their observation post here?” mused Thomas, also looking at Tharia. “From here, you can only see half the planet. If they’d built it further in that direction, they’d have been able to see the whole planet in the sky.”

     “Amafryka is mostly in the northern hemisphere,” suggested Lirenna, “and it’s the only inhabited continent, so I suppose they just weren’t interested in the southern hemisphere. They wanted the northern hemisphere as close to the horizon as possible, for ease of observation, and didn’t care that this put the southern hemisphere out of sight.”

     “That’s a bit short sighted, though, isn’t it?” said Jerry. “I mean, there might have been people on the southern continent one day.”

     Lirenna shrugged. “Maybe they knew something about the southern continent that we don’t,” she suggested.

     “How big is Kronos?” Jerry asked Thomas.

     “About twenty five miles across, I think,” replied the human wizard. “It orbits about ten thousand miles above the ground and takes eight hours to go around once.”

     “No, that can’t be right,” protested Lirenna. “That would make three orbits a day, but Kronos only rises and sets twice a day.”

     “Yes, that’s right,” agreed Thomas. “Kronos makes three orbits a day, but in that same time the world makes one revolution on its axis, so that...”

     “Oh yes!” exclaimed the demi shae, slapping her forehead angrily. “Of course, I should have seen that myself.”

     “The trogs have got to see this,” said Shaun, grinning like an idiot. “They’d never forgive us if we didn’t show them. Someone ought to go back and get them.”

     “We ought to check up on them anyway,” agreed Diana. “See how they’re getting on, make sure they’re not in any trouble.”

     The others gave a sudden guilty start. They’d completely forgotten about Angus and Douglas, risking their lives digging up through loose, treacherous rock, and Matthew had a sudden vision of the two of them lying trapped under a rockfall, slowly dying while their friends stood around admiring the view. “I’ll go,” he said, and dashed out of the room back to the teleportation cubicle.

     The others returned to staring at Tharia, which they could easily have looked at for hours on end. The terminator crept slowly across the globe, turning the sunlit portion into the top half of a crescent as if some monstrous moon squatted, awesome and beautiful, on the horizon. For the first time they noticed that the dark side of the planet wasn’t completely dark. It was faintly illuminated by the light of Derro, the red sun, and to a lesser extent by several bright comets and the moons so that, as the bright, sunlit crescent got smaller and thinner, their eyes, adapting to the darkness, began to see the faint outlines of continents and clouds, looking like streaks of fresh blood running from a mortal wound.

     Lirenna shuddered. “Derro makes the world look so ugly!” she said, turning away from it. “How can that be when it looks so beautiful in the light of the yellow sun?”

     “What are those round things?” asked Diana suddenly.

     “What round things?” asked Shaun.

     “Look, on the day side of the world but close to the edge of the darkness,” said the cleric, pointing.

     They all looked, and after a minute or so they saw what she meant. Near the terminator, the part of the world that was currently in the last hour before nightfall, where the light of the yellow sun fell at a shallow angle, it illuminated a round, ringlike structure that looked a little like the scar left behind after an attack of wart fever, a scar that had to be at least fifty miles across. A couple of thousand miles further north was another one, smaller but more distinctive, and a third could just be made out in the dark side itself where a few stray beams of sunlight somehow made it across to illuminate the tall peaks of the mountains that fringed it.

     “Hey!” laughed Jerry. “The world’s got acne!”

     “What are they?” asked Shaun curiously.

     Thomas had no idea, so he went back to the lens for a better look. Unfortunately, though, so great was the lens’ magnification that he could only see a very small part of their overall nature. He could tell, though, that they seemed to have a circle of high, hilly ground, becoming mountainous in places, surrounding a shallow, bowl shaped depression. He looked back up at Tharia, and wished for an ordinary low magnification telescope.

     “They look a bit like the craters of the moons,” said Diana thoughtfully. “Could they be the same sort of thing, do you think?”

     “Craters?” said Shaun in surprise, still having difficulty with the concept of both Tharia and the moons being worlds, essentially the same except for size.

     “I suppose they could be,” replied Thomas. “I’ve never heard of craters on Tharia before, except volcanic craters of course, but no way do volcanic craters get to be fifty miles across.” He was wrong about that, though, as the inhabitants of the Red Mountains could have told him.

     “What caused the craters on the moons?” asked Jerry.

     “Nobody knows,” replied Thomas, “except...”

     “Yes?” prompted Shaun. “Except what?”

     “This is going to sound silly,” warned the wizard, looking a little embarrassed.

     “No law against sounding silly,” said the soldier. “Spill it.”

     “All right,” said Thomas. “Well, back in the University, when I was a second year student, one of the wizards performed a little demonstration. His name was Tollara and what he did was, he filled a bowl with chalk dust, covered it with a layer of soot and dropped a stone into it from the top of a ladder. The chalk dust splashed out over the soot making a crater with a raised rim, just like the craters on the moon, and he said that that may have been how the craters were formed.”

     “I saw that demonstration as well,” said Jerry. “It left the whole room filled with great clouds of chalk dust.”

     “Tom,” said Shaun with great patience, “are you seriously suggesting...”

     “Yes, yes I know,” said Thomas hurriedly. “It would take a stone ten miles across to make a crater that size. I told you it was silly.” He looked around the room for Lirenna, dreading to see a smirk of amusement on her face, and his guts tightened with alarm when he failed to see her. “Where’s Lenny?” he asked.

     The demi shae was no longer in the room, and the wizard looked anxiously out into the corridor to see where she’d gone. To his relief, she was hurrying back from the other end of the corridor, the end they hadn’t explored yet, and was brimming over with excitement, grinning all over her face. “I didn’t like looking at the ugly dark side of the world,” she babbled, “so I decided to go and do a little exploring...”

     “All by yourself?” cried Thomas. “Are you crazy? Who knows what...”

     “Shut up, let me finish!” she exclaimed, flapping her hands in his face. “I found a room, not empty, filled with all kinds of stuff! Come and see!” She grabbed him by the arm and almost pulled him off his feet as she led him down to the very end of the corridor.