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The Rings - Part 1

   Saturn arrived back aboard the Ship of Space in a tearing hurry and almost ran up the stairs and along the corridors in his haste to get back to the bridge. Matthew paused briefly in his work as the wizard puffed past, staring after him curiously. "Where's the fire?" he wondered to his companions.

     Ihvon wiped a paint stained arm across his brow, leaving a grey smudge there. Like the others, he'd stripped down to his underclothes to protect his uniform and was now stained up to the elbows on either arm, with smudges all over the rest of his taut, muscular body from scratching and wiping away sweat. And they'd still only done one corridor! How long would it take them to paint the whole drassing ship?

     "He seemed in a hurry to get somewhere," he muttered, standing straight and arching his back to ease the cramp out of his joints. "What the drass is going on around here?"

     "I wish I knew," Matthew sighed wearily. "I don't even know if we've left Kronos yet. Tom'll let us know as soon as he's free to get away. I'll sit on his chest until he talks."

     His companions gasped in alarm. "That's a wizard you're talking about!" the navy man said, staring in horror. "They don't like it if you don't show respect."

     "Tom?" said Matthew, grinning with amusement. "Let me tell you something, Tom's one of the finest men I've ever met. He's not like other wizards." He had no idea how true his words were.

☆☆☆

     Saturn took a moment to pause and compose himself before stepping onto the bridge. Time was short, it was true, but he had to maintain a proper decorum before the rest of the bridge crew. The soldiers didn't count, of course. They weren't important enough for their opinion of him to matter. Once he'd controlled his breathing, therefore, he pushed open the door and strode in as regally as a King.

     Ignoring the surprised glances of the others for the time being, he sat in the command chair, picked up the Helm of Farsensing and placed it on his head. He closed his eyes in silent concentration for a few moments, then cursed under his breath. He took it off and handed it to Timothy. "Wear this at all times," he commanded. "If you spot anything leaving Tharia and heading out into space, inform me immediately. You understand?"

     "Yes," said the puzzled cleric, placing the helm on his head. "What's going on?"

     "The saboteurs came to our world in a Ship of Space, like ours. We captured two of them but the rest eluded us. They may already have escaped out into empty space, but if they're still in the area I want them found and caught."

     "We can only see a small volume of nearby space with that helm," pointed out the moon trog, staring at the wizard thoughtfully, "and the planet Tharia blocks our view of what's behind. Unless they happen to come in our direction..."

     "But they would come in our direction, if the ring is the transdimensional portal they came through," cried Thomas in excitement. "We're sitting right on top of it. They'll have to come to us."

     "What's that?" demanded Saturn in surprise. "We've arrived at the ring? How's that? You've discovered how to navigate the ship?"

     "Yes, it's simple once you know the rules," replied the younger wizard smugly.

     He started to explain but Saturn shut him up impatiently. "You've had the ring under observation all this time?" He indicated the image that was still showing in the scrying mirror.

     "Ever since you left," confirmed Thomas. "We've seen nothing at all moving out there. Either in the mirror or the Helm of Farsensing."

     "Then we've got them, if that really is how they got here. However, the prisoner said his companions had already fled, so they should have been here long since."

     "Maybe they also have Helms of Farsensing," suggested Thomas. "In fact, they'd have to have them, for the same reason we have one. They may have seen our ship drifting out here and decided to lay low for a while."

     "Or maybe we're wrong and that ring has nothing to do with them," muttered Saturn, sucking through his teeth thoughtfully. "They came through a portal from another universe, but I couldn't get a clear idea whether the portal was natural or artificial. The hole in the centre of that thing is only eight feet across. I suppose their ship may have been small enough to slip through. Long and thin, perhaps." He stared at the ring for a few moments longer, then came to a decision. "Let's go have a look at it."

     He strode out of the room, seeming not to care whether anyone came with him or not. Thomas and Rin Wellin unlocked Prup Chull's wheelchair from its floor fastenings and then the three of them followed the elder wizard, leaving only Timothy on the bridge, still wearing the Helm of Farsensing and concentrating on nearby space.

     Prup, Rin and Thomas arrived at airlock two, the one nearest the ring, to find that Saturn had gone through without waiting for them. They had to wait for the airlock to fill with air again before they could follow, and while they were waiting Thomas opened a wall cabinet and took out three Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing, handing one to each of his companions and wearing the third himself. By the time he'd done that, the small red flag between the two sheets of thick glass of the door's window had sunk out of sight, indicating that there was now air pressure on the door's other side. He spun the wheel, pulled the door open and then helped the moon trog clamber up onto his shoulder before stepping through.

     There was just enough room in the tiny airlock for the three of them, and Rin Wellin apologised profusely as his shoulder jostled against Thomas's arm while trying to squeeze himself as tightly as possible against the wall. "There's two things to remember before we go out there," the wizard explained. "The first is that there's no gravity, so never let go of the railing. If you drift away, you've got no way of getting back. If any of us gets into trouble, someone will have to risk their lives coming after him on the end of a rope."

     The shae said he understood, but Thomas was suddenly remembering the giant fruit full of compressed air that had featured in his dream. Could they knock together something like that? He'd have to talk about it to Saturn some time.

     "Secondly," he continued, "we won't be able to talk out there. There's no sound in vacuum, I've no idea why. If you have something to say, you'll have to get it across with hand signals or something."

     "It sounds like a strange place," the shae replied, looking a little worried. Probably wondering whether this was such a good idea after all, the wizard thought. "As strange an any alien dimension."

     "Yes, and it starts only a hundred miles above the head of a man standing on the surface of Tharia," agreed Thomas with a grin. "A couple of days riding on a good horse. It's a strange thought that, for real weirdness, we don't have to look very far from our own world. Are you ready?"

     "I am ready, my good friend," replied the shae, and Prup concurred from his seat on Thomas's shoulders. Thomas nodded, therefore, and turned the small wheel to let the air out. The airlock was suddenly full of the hissing of escaping air, getting steadily quieter over the course of a couple of minutes. Thomas concentrated on the soft sound of breathing coming from a couple of feet above and behind his head, and when he could no longer hear it he turned the big wheel in the outer door.

     Thomas grabbed one of the handholds set in the outer hull around the door as he pulled himself out. As he left the airlock he felt his weight leaving him and he floated upwards until his body was level with the deck, his legs waving like a flag. With an effort he forced himself vertical again, Prup Chull still clinging grimly to his neck, and he managed to hook a foot under one of the footholds set in the deck, just in time to grab Rin Wellin's hand as he came spinning out of the airlock. The shae's cold, sweaty hand clung to his in a painful grip while he clung with the other to a hull handhold.

     A look of near panic distorted his face, a startling contrast to the radiant serenity normally to be found there, and then he turned green as a sudden attack of nausea swept over him. Thomas never found out what inner reserves of courage the shae drew upon in that moment, but suddenly he was looking much better, once more in control of himself, and he gave Thomas's hand a final squeeze of gratitude before letting go and holding onto the ballista. Then he looked around, and his eyes widened in wonder at what he saw.

     They were in a small alcove, about three yards wide and a yard deep, which gave enough room for the two man ballista crew to load and aim the giant crossbow, should the ship ever be threatened while standing on a planetary surface. They were a few yards below the ship's 'equator', so that the wafer cladding tiled hull curved out above them, and the walls of the alcove reached out to either side, so that their view of the stars was limited, as if through a large window. What Rin Wellin saw caused his jaw to drop, though, and his eyes widened until Thomas thought they were going to pop right out of his head. The shae climbed eagerly over the ballista, being careful always to be holding on with at least one hand, until he reached the railing, giving him an unobstructed view of the sky.

     The stars shone with a brilliance and glory never seen from the bottom of Tharia's dusty, moisture laden atmosphere. More stars than the awestruck shae had ever dreamed could exist. So many that it seemed impossible they could all fit in one sky. Stars shining with all the colours of the spectrum from a warm, ruddy red to golden yellow to cold blue to a hard, actinic white. Most of them were tiny and faint like a scattering of powdered diamond while others were big and bright, forming the familiar constellations they'd known from childhood. Stars in all directions, except off to the left where there was nothing but darkness. The hole in the sky where, according to mythology, Bhoth the demon dragon had swept the stars from the sky with a sweep of his mighty wings.

     Smudges of colour graced the sky here and there. Nebulae, looking like the rainbow patterns of oil on water, and straight ahead of him he saw, very faint, a nebula that formed a perfect ring, three times the diameter of the largest moon. Green on the inside, a gentle orange around the outside. The sky held other surprises as well. Fully a dozen comets, most of them nothing more than fuzzy stars. Only a couple of them large enough to be noticeable from the ground. Off to his right he saw a cloudy spiral shape. Bright and starlike in the centre, wispy around the edges, and running diagonally across the sky, cutting it in half, was a patchy belt of fuzzy white, as if one of the Gods had run a giant blackboard eraser across the sky.

     Rin Wellin stared in awestruck rapture, unable to believe that such beauty could exist. "By the great horned mother," he breathed, making no sound except in his own ears, transmitted through the bones of his skull. "No wonder my people revere the stars..."

     Thomas closed the airlock door and smiled to himself as he watched the shae, lost to the world in his adoration of the starry spectacle. There was no point in even trying to gain his attention, he saw. He'd completely forgotten their original reason for coming out here. Leave him then, the wizard thought in amusement as he felt Prup Chull letting go of him and swinging gracefully from one handhold to the next. We can fill him in later on what we find. Making his way carefully to the railing, therefore, he began to make his way around the curve of the ship, following the walkway that went all the way around, passing four airlocks set in small alcoves behind four ballistae, spaced to cover the ship from all horizontal directions.

     He only had to go a short way to find Saturn, though. He was floating a little way above the walkway, holding onto the railing with one gnarled, bony hand and staring at the slowly spinning disk in fascination. It was about thirty yards away, spinning gently around the hole in its centre. Its surface, that looked as if it had once been polished to a mirror finish, now looked as though it had been scoured by a sand blaster, and here and there were small craters where larger micrometeorites had hit. Runes in an ancient language were still visible around the outside, though, although they were too far away to be read.

     Thomas concentrated on the hole in the centre of the ring. If this really was a ring of teleportation, then the stars visible through the hole should belong to a different sky. A far away sky. There was no sign of that, though. In fact, as the disc and the ship orbited the planet below, the stars drifted past behind it and he was able to see the same stars outside the disc and then, a few moments later, through the hole in the centre. Maybe it had been a ring of teleportation once, but it clearly was not now. He sighed in disappointment, then felt new excitement as he wondered whether it had some other purpose.

     He started to ask Saturn what he made of it, and was momentarily surprised when the other wizard ignored him completely before remembering the absence of sound out here. He felt frustration as he tried and failed to think up a way of talking to Saturn in sign language. The concepts he wanted to communicate were too subtle and abstract. Telepathy would work, of course, but he hadn't yet made any attempt to learn telepathy spells. Eavesdropping on other people's thoughts wasn't something that had any real appeal to him anyway. He would have to rely on Saturn casting the spell on him.

     The elder wizard was still studying the ring in intent fascination, though, and Thomas was reluctant to break his train of thought. What are we doing out here? he suddenly wondered. We can't talk. We can hardly move without the risk of losing our grip and drifting away, lost and helpless, and we're in constant danger of sudden death if the necklaces should fail. If we were back on the bridge we'd be able to study the ring in the scrying mirror in perfect comfort and safety, and we'd be able to talk about it as well. What are we seeing here that we couldn't see perfectly well back on the bridge?

     He already knew the answer to that, though. Here, with nothing between it and them but thirty yards of empty space, he was able to get a sense, a feeling, that you couldn't get from a scrying mirror. A sense of antiquity. A feeling that it had once been the focus of tremendous power. A sense of history, of being at the centre of great events. What he didn't sense was any trace of magical energy. Even at this distance he ought to have been able to sense any magical aura surrounding the artifact, but no matter how hard he concentrated there was nothing. Either it had never been magical, or it had lost its magical charge a long, long time ago.

     Saturn, still apparently unaware of the younger wizard beside him, reached a hand up to his eyepatch and moved it up onto his forehead. From this angle, Thomas could just see the empty eyesocket beneath and the glittering red jewel that sat there. The demon-bought gem that Thomas had first seen aboard the Hummingbird and that gave the elder wizard the ability to see things hidden from most men, but at what terrible cost? What awful price had the demon demanded for the hideous red jewel, and what desperate need had prompted the old wizard to pay it? One day, when he'd had a chance to gather his courage, he would ask him, although he didn't expect to receive an answer. For now, therefore, he just wondered what Saturn was seeing with the infernal eye, and whether information received from such a dubious source could really be relied upon.

     Saturn evidently saw nothing with his jeweled eye, though, for the disappointment was clear to see in the set of his shoulders as he replaced the eyepatch. He turned, and seemed momentarily startled so see Thomas floating close behind him, but he passed it off and pointed back towards the airlock. Thomas nodded and looked about for Prup Chull, finding him floating like a balloon above the railing, holding onto it with one foot-hand. Thomas tapped him on the leg to get his attention, pointed at the airlock and gestured for the moon trog to climb back onto his shoulders. Prup nodded and did so, and the three of them swam back to the outer door, picking up Rin Wellin as they went. They had to go through two at a time, as there was no room in the tiny cubicle for all four of them, and Thomas and Prup followed Saturn and Rin Wellin, emerging a few moments later to find the wizard and the shae in deep conversation.

     "I already suspected that our first guess was wrong," Saturn was saying as Thomas helped Prup Chull back into his wheelchair. "Our interrogation of the prisoners revealed that they very likely came to our universe through a natural transdimensional rift, in a Ship of Space not unlike our own. That ring out there is nothing to do with them. It's a lifeless relic, bereft of whatever powers it may once have had."

     "And what powers would they have been, my friend?" asked the shae.

     "We'll know when we get it back to Kronos," replied the wizard, strolling back to the bridge and leaving the others to keep up with him. "Once we get it in a pressurised cavern we'll be able to study it properly. Find out who made it, where it came from. Whether it has anything to do with the Rossem Ship."

     "Er..." began Thomas nervously, hurrying to catch up with his elder. "Take it back to Kronos? How? You can't just tie a line to it and tow it. It'll smash into us when we slow down, maybe rupture the hull. Things are different here. The rules we've lived with all our lives don't apply."

     "I am aware of that," replied Saturn with a scowl of annoyance. "We will teleport it back."

     "Teleport it? Can you do that? It must weigh tons!"

     "I can do it with your help. Your strength will make it possible. I must make preparations first, though. We will cast the spell at dawn tomorrow, Lexandria time. You will spend the time in your cabin, resting. I expect to see you at airlock two when I arrive there tomorrow."

     "Yes, Master," replied Thomas with a shudder of apprehension. The Transfusion spell, that must be what he was talking about, where one wizard drew power from another to do something he couldn’t do alone. He had never experienced the spell, but he knew that it was very draining on the donor, leaving him as weak as a baby for two or three days afterwards. Very rarely, it had more serious consequences. Permanent disability. Loss of muscular co-ordination. Speech impediment, impairment of sight or hearing. Saturn evidently didn't worry himself with Thomas's well being, though.
     For a moment, Thomas considered objecting, but only for a moment. If he refused to take part in the spell, his days as one of Saturn's assistants would be over. Pondar Walton might take him back. Young wizards were rare in the valley after all. They were eagerly sought after by the senior wizards, but Thomas thought it more likely that his days as an assistant would be over and that was a thought that couldn't be borne.

     He hungered after magical expertise like a man who hadn't eaten in a week, and during his months in the close company of first Pondar, then Saturn, he'd learned more than he had in all the years he'd spent in the Valley of Haven. The thought of having to return to Haven when Derry graduated already pained him more than he would ever let Lirenna know, and he intended to spend as much time as possible until then in the company of senior wizards, watching and learning. He would submit to the transfusion spell, therefore, and accept the risk, as would any other junior wizard. He was trembling with fear, though, as he made his way back to his cabin, and it was a very long time before he was able to get any sleep.

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