They were now in an area of the city from which all the civilians had fled, leaving it entirely to the military, and the three wizards saw doorways standing open, the homes beyond having been converted into barracks, mess rooms, infirmaries and ‘pleasure houses’. Thomas wasn’t surprised to see that each home, consisting of three or four small rooms, was only about the same size as their bedchamber back at the Konnen mansion. The city had evidently been designed by the noble families themselves who simply didn’t think that their servants and their families needed more room than that.

     The wizard was shocked. Most of the world’s people thought of the Agglemonians as having been good, decent people who hadn’t so much conquered the rest of the continent as seduced them into wanting to join the Empire so that they could share the benefits and high standard of living that the Agglemonians themselves enjoyed. The Agglemonians he’d always imagined would never have built a city like this, so shockingly divided into masters and servants, but then he remembered that Kronosia had been built in the last days of the Empire when everything had been falling apart. It had been this polarisation into classes that had hastened, if not actually caused, the fall.

     The empty, doorless airlocks separating Rautha segment from Leto segment, almost hidden behind a barricade of wooden doors, furniture and large, heavy ornaments, all skillfully tied together with thick rope, were in view ahead of them when the Captain called a halt and waited for a more senior officer to come out and meet them. The officer appeared a few moments later, emerging from a home that, from the brief glimpse they got as the door was open, had been converted into a command post. He wore a very impressive uniform of slennhide and leather covered with gold braid and the longhorn cattle emblem of the Agglemonian Empire above his breast pocket. His hair was short and curly, brown but greying around the temples, and his eyes were bright and intelligent, while at the same time hard and cruel. An orderly followed behind him, carrying a helmet in his hand.

     The Captain stood stiffly at attention as he stopped before him. “Red platoon returning from R and R and reporting for duty, Sir!” he said.

     The other officer merely nodded in reply, and then moved down the lines of men, giving them a cursory, glancing ‘inspection’. His interest quickened when he came to the three wizards, though, and all the other soldiers froze as rigid as statues as if sheer willpower would keep the officer’s attention from falling on them.

     He examined them closely for a few moments, his attention lingering longest on Jerry and Lirenna as if fascinated by their physical differences from humans. “So you’re the wizards,” he said at last in a neutral voice. “My name is General Sejanus, and you’ll be taking your orders from me. What are your names?”

     They identified themselves, each of them adding a respectful ‘Sir’ when they’d finished speaking.

     Sejanus nodded in satisfaction. “Good,” he said. “Wait for me in my command post.” He indicated the doorway from which he’d just emerged.

     The three wizards made their way over to it while the General issued orders to the soldiers behind them. The largest room in the command post contained two bored looking clerks in military uniform sitting behind desks on which a couple of neat piles of paper lay; situation reports by the look of them. A chart on the wall behind them contained a list of about twenty five platoons, all named after colours, along with figures giving various statistics. The total number of men in each platoon, the number currently fit to fight. The number of wounded, their operational status and, if operational, the positions at which they were deployed. The clerk sitting directly beneath it, whose job it was, presumably, to keep it constantly up to date, seemed to be half asleep and Thomas gathered that the war was going rather slowly at the moment.

     Thomas’s attention was instantly riveted to the room’s other wall, though, when he saw a map of the entire city hung on it. It was octagonal, as they’d guessed, with each side having a huge mansion belonging to one of the original eight noble families. The eightfold symmetry only went in as far as the four giant park caverns, however, and the centre of the city had fourfold symmetry with four large corridor streets leading away from the large circular room in the city’s exact centre where they'd found the huge, glowing sphere. The large room containing the mineshaft and the piles of unrefined ore was also shown and Thomas was able to trace the path they’d taken to the central room, the park cavern and Konnen segment.

     Large areas of the city were shaded in grey and Thomas guessed that those were the dead areas, the areas in vacuum. The map was incorrect in that respect, though, because the entire centre of the city had been shaded in. Thomas guessed that the central areas of the city had been protected from vacuum by the airlocks but had been cut off from the rest of the city by rooms and corridors in vacuum all around them. The giant park caverns were clearly to blame since they stood in a ring almost shoulder to shoulder around the central area. Thomas imagined the huge fissure they’d seen running through two, perhaps three of them, cutting the central area off on three sides and therefore requiring only one small air leak on the remaining fourth side to cut it off altogether. Badly designed, he thought, shaking his head sadly. They should have gotten a proper architect to design this place.

     The wizards were interested to see that one of the eight segments of the city’s outer, residential ring was also in vacuum, including the mansion labelled as having belonged to a noble family called Laxu.

     “That must be where that huge fissure entered the city,” said Jerry, tracing its presumed path through Laxu segment and then through the park caverns. “It must have originated from somewhere south of here.”

     Thomas nodded, reflecting on the fact that, with huge areas in vacuum and the entire central area cut off, less than half the city was still accessible to its inhabitants, a horseshoe of seven residential segments, and that one more air leak anywhere would be the end of everyone. Without knowing what had caused the huge fissure it was impossible to know whether or not it could happen again, but they had to consider the possibility and, since the first one had evidently been several decades before, it could well be that a repeat performance was well overdue...

     At that moment Sejanus entered the room and, with just a glance at the map to see what they’d been looking at, told them to enter the next room. This room contained two chairs and a simple desk on which a few papers were scattered, partially obscuring a heavily stained blotting pad. On the edge of the desk stood a half filled inkwell and a gold tipped fountain pen alongside a few sheets of plain white paper. It was obviously the General's private office, but Sejanus didn't seem bothered that the questers might be able to read any of the reports that lay openly before them. Thomas supposed that, in such a tightly limited battleground, with only a few streets and tunnels on which battle could take place, there was little scope for clever tactics or devious ambushes. Neither side had any military secrets that the other might want to steal.

     Sejanus moved behind the table to take his seat, from which he studied the Tharians carefully for several moments; watching their faces, noting their every twitch and shuffle as they stood before him as if he could read their souls from the tiny, involuntary movements of their bodies. Then he subjected them to two hours of ruthless and intensive questioning. The General wanted to know exactly how much magical power they had and what spells they could cast. How long the effects lasted and what material components were required.

      The wizards answered most of the questions truthfully, but they very carefully made no mention of Lirenna's ability to cast enchantments on people; her ability to make people fall instantly in love with her and want to please her. That was the spell on which all their hopes rested and they could only pray that Lord Basil hadn't already learned of it from reading their minds. They were hopeful that this might be the case, as mind reading spells could only reveal what a person was actually thinking about at that moment, so that unless one of them had actually been thinking about the enchantment spell while the nobleman was reading his or her mind, they should have gotten away with it. Certainly none of the guards seemed to have been warned about this ability of the demi shae or she wouldn't have been able to enchant Duncan.

     Sejanus grilled them on every instance in which they’d used their spells to defeat their enemies during their adventures so far; their quests for the Sceptre of Samnos and the Orb of Proofing and their futile bid to recover the Sword of Retribution. The three wizards were struck by the fact that, not only did the soldier have no difficulty in accepting that they were from Tharia, but he seemed to know a great deal about what was going on down there, including the Fourth Shadowwar.

     Sejanus read the expressions on their faces and gave a thin smile. “Yes, my young friends," he said. "A few of us are not quite as ignorant as the rest. We have our ways of gathering information, you see.”

     “A scrying mirror,” said Thomas, his eyes wide with surprise. “You have a scrying mirror.”

     “Quite so,” confirmed the General. “However, it does not suit our purposes to share the truth with the general population yet. Not yet. As far as most of them are concerned, Tharia it still populated only by beasts and barbarians and that’s just what we want them to go on thinking. Do you understand?”

     “Yes, Sir,” replied Thomas. “But what do we say if someone asks us where we come from?”

     “Tell them you were renegades from outside the city, caught by a routine patrol,” said the General. “They’ve been inbreeding for centuries, so freaks like your two friends here are quite common among them.”

     “Freaks!” shouted Jerry in outrage. "I'll have you know I am considered a very good looking member of my race!"

     Thomas had to shake him to shut him up, but his thoughts were buzzing with excitement and he had to fight hard to stop it from showing on his face. Renegades from outside the city! So it was possible to live outside Kronosia, and some people were actually doing so. The mines! he realised in excitement. The old Agglemonian mines dug before the city was built. The Agglemonians were mining this moon for a thousand years before the Empire fell. The whole moon must be honeycombed with tunnels and caverns. A bunch of renegades could easily hide down there forever without Lord Basil’s soldiers finding them, and if they can survive down there, so can we. We’ve got somewhere to run to, assuming we can free Shaun and Matt.

     The only problem with that, though, he realised, was that fleeing Kronosia would take them even further from the teleportation cubicle, the only way back to Tharia. If they entered the caverns of Kronos, they really would be marooned up here for the rest of their lives.

     As soon as the tiny nome had calmed down, Thomas released him and Sejanus took them back out into the corridor-street. More soldiers had arrived, and there were now almost a hundred men gathered by the airlocks, standing silent so as not to alert the Traldians to their presence. Clearly, a major battle was about to begin, and even if the Konnens kept their promise to take prisoners and treat them well, there was no way that many deaths could be avoided in the fighting, deaths for which the three wizards would be responsible. But they must fight battles now and then anyway, Thomas told himself. Even if we weren't here, there would have been a battle sooner or later in which people would have been killed. It's not our fault if these people insist on slaughtering each other.

     “Here are your orders,” said Sejanus. “We will lower that barricade, and you will cast your shield spell to protect yourselves from their arrows. Then, you will go through the airlock and put as many of the enemy to sleep as possible with your sleep spells. When you run out of magic, pull back and we’ll take over. With a bit of luck we’ll be able to establish a bridgehead on the other side of the airlock and then we’ll be able to push them back one step at a time all the way to Leto forecourt. Any problems with that?” The expression on his face said that there’d better not be.

     “The prisoners will be well treated?” asked Lirenna.

     “Oh yes,” replied the General with a strange smile. “I’d be very surprised if any of them ever complain.”

     “All right,” said Thomas in resignation. “If we’ve got to do it, we might as well get on with it. Seems to me that the best way to get out of this war is to win it.”

     “Quite right!” said Sejanus in delight. He called for an aide. “As quietly as possible, open the barricade,” he told him.

     The aide hurried off to convey the order to the soldiers manning the barricade, who began to quietly untie the ropes and strings holding it together. Soon, a wide hole had been opened in it, uncovering one of the three airlocks, and the three wizards peered cautiously through, seeing another barricade at its other end.

     Sejanus handed Thomas a knife. “Cut your way through with this while your friends keep you covered," he said. "Now get going.”

     Thomas nodded and, after glancing at Jerry and Lirenna, he cast his shield spell. A disc of faintly shimmering air sprang into existence in front of him, moving before him as he edged quietly forward, and the demi shae and the tiny nome followed behind. All seemed quiet on the other side of the airlock, but Thomas saw a couple of enemy soldiers walking complacently down the corridor-street and froze until they were out of sight. Other soldiers were stationed all along the barricade, but they were chatting and laughing amongst themselves and not paying any attention to the airlocks. Thomas assumed that, since nothing had happened for the past few days, weeks or however long it had been since the last push, the enemy felt that there was very little chance of anything happening anytime soon. It would only take one of them to look around and see the three wizards, though, and all hell would break loose.

     Thomas reached the enemy barricade and pressed himself up against a large wardrobe, hoping that its bulk would hide him from sight. Behind him Jerry and Lirenna crouched down and reached into their pouches for the handfuls of sand necessary for their sleep spells. Thomas examined the wardrobe and saw that it was held in place by a single length of thick rope wound about it several times. It also looped around several neighbouring items including half a dozen chairs, a grandfather clock, an upturned table and a hatstand. Cut that rope, and that entire section of the barricade would collapse.

     He sighed with resignation, reached forward with the knife and, very slowly and carefully, he began to saw at it.