“Matt’s been a long time,” said Diana, frowning with worry. “Do you think he’s all right?”

     “Mmm?” said Thomas distractedly, his attention still riveted on the papers he was reading.

     “I’m sure he is,” replied Shaun reassuringly. “It’s just taking longer than he thought it would, that’s all. That’s a difficult task he’s set himself.”

     “Maybe we should check up on him,” suggested the cleric.

     “He specifically asked not to be disturbed,” pointed out the fighter.

     “We don’t have to disturb him, just have a peek through the door,” said Diana. “Come on, it won’t take a minute.”

     “All right,” said Shaun, standing up and stretching his legs, glad for any excuse to get out of the room. His attempt to get some sleep had failed. It wouldn’t have been so bad if there’d been nothing to do but the lenses of farseeing had been preying on his mind, driving him almost frantic with frustration as he longed to go back to them. He cast a resentful glance at Lirenna as he and the cleric left the room. Okay, so she doesn’t like looking down on all that war and suffering, he thought, but what gives her the right to forbid anyone else from using them? Is she afraid of me seeing something I shouldn’t or something?

     It came to him suddenly, the answer popping into his head as though it had been there all along, just waiting for the right moment to reveal itself. Of course, Haven! The hidden kingdom! Oh Lenny, don’t you trust us? Do you really think we’d betray your homeland?

     During the few seconds it took them to walk from the astronomical storeroom to the entrance hall, the same thoughts that had gone through Lirenna’s mind went through Shaun’s; that the Agglemonians must have known all about Haven but had kept it secret for some reason. Then they reached the room where they’d left Matthew, and suddenly all thought of the hidden kingdom was swept from his mind as they saw the previously locked door standing open and the passage leading away into the darkness.

     “Oh no!” cried Diana in sudden fear. “He hasn’t gone through by himself?”

     “The idiot!” agreed Shaun, running up to the door and looking through. “What in the name of Hell does he think he’s doing?” He went through the door, squinting to see in the near darkness, and called out as loudly as he could. “Matt! Matt!”

     “All right, I’m here,” replied Matthew, reappearing through the other door on the other side of the room. “Keep your hair on.”

     “Matthew!” cried Diana in relief. “What in the world possessed you? After everything we’ve gone through, all the dangers we’ve met, you should know better than to go running off by yourself!”

     “We left you alone because we trusted you not to do anything stupid,” agreed Shaun.

     “Yes, yes, all right,” said Matthew dismissively. “but wait ‘till you see what’s down there! It’s incredible!”

     “What’s all the shouting about?” asked Jerry, appearing in the doorway behind them. “Hey, great, you got the door open.”

     “No problem,” replied Matthew, grinning with delight.

     Despite his original annoyance, Shaun found himself glad for his brother. Having wizards and a cleric for travelling companions, and with Shaun having a magic sword, Matthew had been just ‘the second soldier’ ever since the six of then had first joined up. Now, though, he had had a chance to display a talent that none of the others had and would finally be feeling that he belonged as a member of this extraordinary group of individuals.

     “Where does it go?” asked the tiny nome, looking through the opening in fascination.

     “You won’t believe it! It's incredible!"

     The young soldier told his tale in a breathless hurry, starting at the beginning and telling everything in chronological order as Shaun told him to, the older brother knowing that he would simply babble it out incoherently otherwise. Half way through, Thomas came to join them, hearing the conversation and curious to know what was going on. The others filled him in on what he'd missed.

     Matthew said nothing about the necklaces he’d found, or the one he’d brought back with him, and gave his motive for going in alone as simple curiosity, an explanation that the others accepted readily. When he’d finished, the others sat around in stunned silence. They’d expected the locked door to lead through into one or two more rooms, a corridor at most, maybe another wing of the installation, but the size of the complex Matthew had described went far beyond what they’d believed possible.

     “People!” exclaimed Thomas in disbelief. “There are people down there? Actually living here?”

     “I saw them with my own eyes,” confirmed Matthew. “Agglemonians.”

     “Agglemonians!” repeated Lirenna, “But how?”

     “They must have been cut off when the Empire fell,” speculated Matthew. “Stranded up here, just as we are.”

     “No, that doesn’t make sense,” replied Thomas. “The fall of the Empire wasn’t a sudden event. It took centuries. They would have seen the end coming and gone back home before it got too bad. Also, what they were doing up here in the first place.”

     “Perhaps they’re descended from the miners,” mused Shaun. “You say you saw an iron mine down there, Matt?”

     “Yes, that must be it,” said Matthew, but he sounded doubtful. “Still doesn’t explain why they didn’t go home, though.”

     “If it had been me, I wouldn’t have gone home,” said Lirenna. “Not if everything down there was falling apart into anarchy. I would have gone as far away from home as possible. A little island or something far away from all the trouble. Just stayed there while I waited for it to blow over.”

     “Your little island would have to have been a long way away,” said Thomas with a grin. “The Empire covered the whole continent and the rest of the world has monsters, hostile humanoid tribes... You’d have had to take a whole army with you to survive. The only really safe places would have been... Oh Gods! Of course!"

     “You mean...” said Jerry tentatively, looking around at the others to see if they were thinking the same thing. “You mean they came up here and deliberately cut themselves off, to avoid the fall of the Empire?”

     “Why not?” said Thomas. “Think about it. The observatory was already here, the mine was already here. All the problems of living up here would already have been solved. Imagine you're the head of a rich family faced with the prospect of a howling mob invading your home, stealing or destroying all your possessions and stringing you and your whole family up from the nearest tree. You’d have wanted to get out, wouldn’t you?”

     “But how could they survive up here?” protested Lirenna. “What would they eat? The miners and the observers could live on food sent up from Tharia via the teleportation cubicle, but the refugees couldn’t have done that. Having to keep coming back to Tharia for food would have defeated the whole object of coming up here.”

     “Besides which we know for a fact that we’re the first people to use the teleportation cubicle for centuries,” added Diana, “which proves that they’re somehow producing their own food.”

     “Incredible!” said Thomas, staring dreamily off into the distance. “Just think of it. If they haven’t been up here to the observatory since they first came here, if they haven’t been using the lenses, then they’ve had no way of knowing what’s been going on back on Tharia. They must think that the world’s still in anarchy, still totally devoid of civilization.”

     “But why wouldn’t they have come up here?” asked Matthew. “Surely they must have been curious about what was going on back home.”

     “They probably were at first,” mused Thomas. “The first few generations, the children and grandchildren of the original refugees, probably came up here quite regularly. After a while, though, there wouldn't have been anyone left alive who’d ever set foot on Tharia. They would think of this as their home. Tharia would probably have come to be just a distant legend to them. They may even have forgotten the observatory even existed.

     “But they must have known that civilization would rise again,” pointed out Lirenna, “and besides, it was never that bad. It was only the human nations that were affected by the fall of Agglemon. The shae and trog nations just carried on as though nothing had happened. Even among the human nations, Belthar was already beginning to grow even as Agglemon was falling, and Fu Nang had never been part of the Empire to begin with.”

     “They probably shared the annoying human habit of assuming that a world without human civilization is a world without civilization,” said Jerry with a sharp look at Thomas. “Pretty ironic when you consider that, of the four so called ‘civilized’ races, it’s humans who are the most warlike and whose civilizations are the most unstable.”

     “Yeah, all right,” said Thomas with a sheepish grin. “Sorry.”

     “Why don’t we just go and ask them?” suggested Diana.

     “Not right away,” replied Shaun. “I’d like to have a good look around at the deserted areas first, learn as much as possible without alerting them to our presence. Once they know we’re here, it might be much more difficult to move around freely.”

     “Good idea,” agreed Thomas, standing up. “Let's go?”

     They tried the door of the teleportation chamber as they went, in case the locking spells had faded again since they’d last tried to open it, but it was still held fast and easily resisted every effort by the men to open it. It now looked as though it would take days, at least, for the spells to fade again unless they found the key.

     “Hey, I’ve just thought of something!” piped up Jerry suddenly. “We all assumed that this door was locked by the people manning the observatory when they left, but now that we know that there are people living up here, doesn’t it seem more likely that...”

     “That they locked the door from this side, to stop anyone coming up and discovering them!” interrupted Thomas in excitement, “In which case the key would still be up here somewhere.”

     Everyone cheered up immediately as they realised what he was saying. “Yes, of course!” said Lirenna in delight. “The refugees must have the key! But will they be willing to open the door for us? I mean, if they wanted their presence here to be a secret, they’re not going to want us going home and telling everyone about them, are they?”

     “Are you kidding?” said Thomas. “They’ll be delighted to see us! They came up here to avoid the fall of Agglemon, right? Well then, the only reason they’re still here is that they don’t know that civilization, I mean human civilization, has risen again, but we’re living proof that it has and as soon as they see us they’ll be flocking to go home. All we’ll have to do is follow them.”

     “That may have been true once,” said Shaun, “and let’s hope that it’s still true, but remember what you said a couple of minutes ago. The people up here now are the descendants of the original refugees. They’ve never seen Tharia, never set foot on it. This is the only home they’ve ever known. They may want to stay up here, where they feel safe. They may go to great lengths to see that their presence up here remains a secret, including locking us all up in a dungeon.”

     “Maybe the key’ll be somewhere in the deserted area,” suggested Matthew, “in which case we can grab it and get out without them ever knowing we were here.”

     “Possibly,” agreed Thomas, “if we knew what it looked like.”

     “What do you mean?” asked the young soldier in sudden doubt.

     “A magical key can look like anything, and can be made of anything,” replied the wizard. “The only requirement is that it be of a sufficiently high quality of workmanship to be able to hold a magic spell. If we’re lucky it’ll be clearly labelled as the key, but if it’s not, we might walk right past it without knowing it.”

     “What’s more,” added Lirenna, “most magical keys require a secret word of command to be spoken to make them work, and that word’s very unlikely to have been written down.”

     “It may even have been forgotten,” agreed Jerry, “known only to the original refugees and not passed on to their descendants.”

     “Oh terrific!” said Shaun gloomily. “So we may have to make contact with them whether we like it or not, so that they can lend us the key and tell us what the command word is, assuming they’re willing to let us go back to Tharia at all.”

     “That’s about it,” agreed Thomas.

     “Oh well,” sighed the soldier, “let’s at least go have a look. You never know, we may find it hanging on a hook somewhere, clearly labelled ‘key’ and with the command word written underneath. Stranger things have happened.”

     On that optimistic note, they went through the other door, through the room with the shaft that had presumably been used to winch ingots of iron up from the refineries below, and down the spiral staircase to the mine itself.

     "This explains so much," said Thomas as they went. "Iron is so rare down on Tharia. It was all used up by the other civilisations that existed before humanity, but suddenly the Agglemonians had all the iron they needed and were selling it all across the world, making tons of money. No-one could figure out where they were getting it from. Now we know."

     "But why come looking for it up here?” asked Diana. “How did they know there was iron up here? It seems a rather strange place to look for it.”

     “I doubt that they came here looking for iron,” speculated Thomas. “More likely they just stumbled over it while they were building the observatory. Since the observatory needed a teleportation terminal anyway, I suppose somebody just happened to have the bright idea of using it to carry back iron as well."

     "Even here, though, it's a long way down,” said Matthew. “That shaft goes a lot deeper than the big cave I discovered. It goes way, way down.”

     “Yes, but depth doesn’t mean as much up here,” replied Thomas, “because of the low gravity.”

     “The what?” asked Matthew in puzzlement.

     “Gravity,” explained the wizard. “It’s what makes things fall when you drop them. It’s stronger on big worlds like Tharia than it is on a little moon like this, so it’s much easier to haul tons of iron ore up a deep shaft up here than it is on Tharia. It’ll make things easier for us as well, because it means that all our stuff’ll be much...” He broke off, frowning in sudden confusion, and then started shrugging his backpack around on his shoulders as if testing its weight.

     “Much what?” asked the young soldier.

     “Lighter,” said Thomas, now deeply confused. “Or at least it should be. Does your backpack feel any lighter?”

     Matthew hefted it experimentally. “No, it feels the same way it always did.”

     “Mine too,” agreed Shaun.

     The others confirmed that everything they were carrying weighed the same as it always had, leaving the three wizards totally perplexed. “I must be getting slow,” muttered Thomas unhappily. “Why’d it take so long for me to notice? I should have noticed the moment we realised we were on Kronos.”

     “The refugees must have had a wizard with them who cast a spell or something to make everything weigh normal,” suggested Diana. “They wanted to make everything feel as normal as possible.”

     “That’s silly,” said Matthew. “It would be really nice if everything weighed less. Why would they deliberately change it?”

     “Don’t forget that they intended to go home one day,” replied Shaun. “I expect they didn’t want to become so used to the conditions up here that they wouldn’t be able to readjust when they went home. How much lighter would things up here be, Tom?”

     The wizard grew red with embarrassment. “Er, I don’t know,” he said sheepishly. “I used to know, I read all about gravity in one of the books back at the University, but I’ve, er, forgotten.”

     “I think I read that book as well,” said Lirenna. “Didn’t it say something about the air around planets and moons with low gravity as well?”

     “Did it?” said Thomas. “What?”

     “I don’t know,” replied the demi shae. “I was just flicking through it, and my eye happened to catch this heading, I didn’t stop to read it.”

     “I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Shaun reassuringly. “We’ve all been up here for nearly a whole day now and nothing’s happened to us yet.”

     The others relaxed and they thought no more about it, for the time being at least. It never occurred to any of them to make the connection with the windows of the observatory, all of which were made of extra thick glass and none of which were designed to open.

     A few minutes later, they reached the bottom of the spiral staircase, and stared around in wonder at the huge cavern and the heaps of unrefined ore piled up in the corners. “That’s the door I went through last time,” said Matthew, pointing in the direction they’d decided to call south (north, they’d decided, would be the direction they’d been facing when they’d stepped off the last step of the staircase. In fact, since they were almost exactly on Kronos’s north pole, all directions were south).

     “Let’s go through that other one, then,” said Shaun, pointing to the door in the west wall. “There’s no point in us covering the same ground twice.”

     The others agreed, so they headed in that direction.

     The corridor was exactly as Matthew had described the other one. Neat and professional in appearance. The kind of corridor along which councilors and magistrates might stroll while discussing aspects of the meeting they’d just left and making arrangements for a working lunch. Matt’s right, thought Shaun as he cast his eyes over the dust covered tiles and plaster. No way is this the corridor that originally ran away from that mine. It’s been poshed up and turned into a workplace for people who’ve never been down a mine in their lives. It’s strange, though. Apart from the obvious neglect, I can’t see any reason why they couldn’t move back in any time they wanted. Why did they abandon this place?

     He continued to ponder the question as they walked, but nothing came to him and after a few moments longer he put the mystery out of his mind.