"How do you open the door?" asked Thomas ten minutes later.

     He was standing in the empty hanger deck, between the two empty cradles that would each soon be occupied by a scout ship of the same design as the Hummingbird. The large, rectangular bulk of the teleportation cubicle stood at one side of the chamber, its door closed in case anyone from Kronos wanted to come visit, and Thomas had the sudden nightmare image of a man stepping out into hard vacuum. He hurried over and opened the door. Like leaving an old style phone off the hook, this now prevented the cubicle from being used and he breathed a sigh of relief as he imagined the tragedy he might have just averted.

     "There's a locking clip on the winch handle, on the left," replied Tana Antallan. "Undo the clip, then turn the handle. The door will slowly open outwards."

     "Right," said Thomas, searching the bare metal wall until he found it. The handle was folded in half and neatly tucked away in a niche in the wall and he had to unfold it and fit a locking pin in the elbow joint to hold it rigid. Then he removed a clip he found in the handle's axle, allowing it to be turned. It was stiff at first, and he had to use all his strength to get it going, but once it was started it was easier and he soon began to hear the hiss of escaping air as the door began to open.

     A few moments later there was a hurricane in the hanger and Thomas had to cling hold of the handle to avoid being swept away. The worst of it was soon over, though, and a couple of minutes later he was able to carry on winching, lowering the door downwards until, if the ship were landed on a planet, it would form a ramp leading down to the ground. Thomas didn't need to lower it all the way, though, but left it sloping upwards at an angle of about twenty degrees. A large rectangle of sky was revealed to him as he stepped away from the winch, and the two-toned grey disc of the largest moon stared in at him as if wondering what he was doing.

     Saturn, meanwhile, had been moving the ship into the correct position to accept the ring, and as the ship slowly turned Thomas saw it come into sight. It was now motionless and lying on its side. A brilliant rectangle of reflected sunlight with two darker grey wings stretching away on either side, fading away into blackness. As it came directly in front of the door Thomas shouted the command for the ship to stop turning, stopping the disc dead in its tracks. "Okay," breathed Thomas in breathless excitement. "Now take us forward. Very, very slowly."

     Gradually, the edge of the ring began to grow in front of him. It took nearly a quarter of an hour for the ring to reach the door, not a bit too slow for the young wizard who remembered the mass of the large artifact, and it gave him plenty of time to order tiny adjustments to the ship's position as he saw that they were a little off course. Finally, though, the ring began to nose its way in through the door, to the heart stopping thrill of the young wizard, and the moment it did so it began to feel the hanger's spell-generated gravity. The forward edge of the ring began to dip even as its momentum continued to carry it forward until the middle of the ring touched the upward sloping edge of the door.

     Tana's voice came over the farspeaking link. "Saturn says to remind you not to touch it," the shae said. "It'll either be burning hot or freezing cold, we’re not sure which, and the Necklace may not protect you from it."

     "Understood," replied the wizard, backing away from it. "It's half in now and sliding down the door. The forward edge is touching down on the metal rails of the cradles. With any luck, there'll be little enough friction that it'll settle flat all by itself, If it gets stuck, though, we may not be able to close the door."

     "I do not anticipate any such problem," the shae replied. "Something as heavy as that would settle at the lowest possible level even without the rails."

     He was right. Even now the ring was moving faster as it came more and more under the influence of the hanger's gravity, and the last moment came suddenly, with the heavy artifact dropping into place with a thud that shook the whole ship. Thomas's heart leapt into his throat as he stumbled away from it, surprised and frightened by the sudden movement, but then it was sitting astride the two cradles as prettily as if it had been placed there by hand. It was as perfect a result as he could have wished for.

     "It's done," he told Tana. "The ring is sitting on the rails. There's no sign of damage that I can see. The rails don't seem to be buckled and the deck below seems to be taking the weight well."

     "Close the door and repressurise," ordered the shae. "Then we can all have a look."

     Ten minutes later the door was closed and sealed and the hanger was full of air again. Thomas shivered as he opened the airtight doors to let the others in. All of a sudden it was as cold as a graveyard in there! The ring was covered by a thin layer of frost as they gathered around it. The thing must be as cold as the breath of a snow shae!

     "As I suspected," said Saturn, nodding sagely to himself. "We knew that the surface of Kronos is icy cold, which is why the new Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing also protect against extremes of heat and cold. For the time being, until it warms up, Thomas is the only one who can safely touch it."

     "Just now you warned me not to," said the younger wizard in confusion.

     "You were alone then. Now you have a cleric of Caroli on hand to heal you instantly if the Necklace proves to be less protection than we expected. Touch the object. Just the briefest contact."

     Thomas gave the older wizard a worried glance, then reached tentatively out and quickly brushed the backs of his fingers against the frosty surface of the stone. Feeling nothing, he turned his hand around and touched it with the soft pads of his fingertips. The ice crystals felt like sand as they were crushed by his touch. There was no sensation of cold at all.

     "Good," said Saturn, coming forward. "Now give me the Necklace."

     Thomas handed it over, feeling faintly resentful at being used as a guinea pig, and Saturn began scrubbing away the frost covering the strange hieroglyphics. He began muttering the words of a spell, presumably a translation spell of some kind. Maybe even one of those that Thomas himself had memorised although there was no way to tell for certain until it came to its conclusion. The words and hand gestures of a spell were different for every wizard who learned it, which was why an Intellectus spell had to be cast by a wizard wishing to read another wizard's spellbook. The Intellectus spell itself was the only one that was the same for everyone. It had to be, as it was the very first spell learned by every apprentice.

     Thomas's guess was confirmed when Saturn bent over the strange symbols, obviously trying to read them. He cursed under his breath. "No information content at all," he muttered in disgust. "Just decoration, or perhaps the runes of a defensive spell that failed centuries ago. No clues as to who... Ah! What's this?"

     He bent eagerly over a pair of symbols he'd spotted a little further around the curve of the ring, rudely shoving Timothy out of the way to get closer to them. He scrubbed a layer of frost from them, then froze in shocked recognition. Thomas tensed up, expecting some dreadful revelation, but then the elder wizard laughed, straightening up and backing away.

     "See that?" he said, pointing at the symbols he'd found. "Take a look. See what you make of them."

     Thomas stepped up to look, and was surprised to see that, unlike all the other hieroglyphics, which were just meaningless shapes to him, these two symbols were recognisable, although he had no idea what they meant here, in this context. One was a bayta, the second letter of the old Garonian alphabet. A language that had been used only by scholars and historians for the past two thousand years.

     The other symbol was the highly stylised image of a hermit crab, its claws outstretched to threaten anything that might approach it in the spiny, coiled shell that was its home. Thomas stared at the symbol in fascination. Not only was he familiar with hermit crabs, from his natural history studies in his apprentice days, but it seemed to him that this particular image was familiar as well. The design nagged insistently at him, but concentrate as he might the memory would not come.

     "I've seen this before," he said, looking up, and was rewarded with a nod from his superior. "It's the symbol of a wizard, a Lexandrian wizard, but I can't remember which one."

     "Salammis," Saturn said, coming forward again. "Salammis the Hermit. One of the immortal wizards. One of the first, in fact. He lived in the northern provinces, around the lakes of the river Ua. Always kept very much to himself, shunned contact with other wizards. Didn't even have servants. All the work was done by magical creations. He lived for almost five hundred years, then one day vanished without trace. It was assumed that one of the other immortal wizards got him."

     "That was during the Mage Wars?" asked Thomas. Saturn nodded.

     "What about the bayta? What does that mean?"

     "The rings, like teleportation cubicles today, were always made in pairs. This one's twin, wherever it is, if indeed it still exists, will also have a bayta marked on it. Somewhere, presumably, there is an alba pair; his first creations. Makes sense that he'd start at the beginning of the alphabet and work his way through it."

     "You say he vanished during the Mage Wars," said Prup Chull. "Might he perhaps have gone through the ring to another world? To avoid being a victim of the Mage Wars?

     "The same thought had occurred to me," agreed the wizard. "Being the lover of solitude that he was, he would then have destroyed the ring at his end, to prevent anyone following him through, and that would have caused this ring to lose its magical charge at the same time."

     "I think I understand," said Timothy, nodding. "It's impossible for only one of a pair to be working. Either they both work or they both fail."

     "It's like a piece of string," agreed Thomas. "It has to have two ends. You can't have a piece of string with just one end."

     "So it is in no way involved with the sabotage incidents. These felisians," said Rin Wellin, looking relieved.

     "No involvement whatsoever," agreed Saturn. "This is nothing but a historical curiosity. I do not begrudge the time we took investigating it, though. We eliminated a disturbing possibility and gained valuable insights into the handling of this ship. All in all, I am well pleased."

     "What about the globe?" asked Thomas eagerly. "Are we going to investigate that as well, while we're out here? It's just big enough for a ring like this one to fit inside it. Perhaps one of the alba rings."

     "It has to be connected with this ring in some way," agreed Timothy. "It can't be a coincidence that they're spaced so symmetrically, on either side of Kronos."

     "Very well," agreed Saturn good humouredly. "When we return, I may as well be able to give a full report. The rest of you return to the bridge and take the ship to the globe. Let me know when we arrive. I will be here, examining the artifact."

☆☆☆

     Their route back to the bridge took them past the corridor in which the soldiers were working, and the wizard was able to stop and pass a few words with them.

     "So that's what it's all about!" cried Matthew in surprise. "We thought we were about to sail into a full scale battle with a Rossemian ship! And then we felt that great thud..."

     "That was just the ring, settling into position," explained Thomas, "and now we're off to investigate the globe. Just another dusty old relic I imagine, but what if there's something still active in there? A functioning artifact of an immortal wizard! Just think of the discoveries we could make!"

     "Dangerous?" asked the soldier warily.

     "Don't worry, Saturn won't take any chances with the ship," said the wizard with a humourless laugh. "He may risk my life, send me in first to look for booby traps or something, but he won't risk the ship while he's aboard it. He has far too much respect for his own life. You'll be perfectly safe. I gotta go now, I'm supposed to be on the bridge."

     He made to move away, but Matthew grabbed his arm with a paint stained hand, making Ihvon and Borlin gasp with shock. A soldier manhandling a wizard! Surely their Wing Leader would be turned to stone for his impudence!

     "Wait a minute," said Matthew. "What about Bobby? Has he been found yet? Is he still alive?"

     "He's fine," replied Thomas, looking at the smear of paint on his wrist and rubbing it off on his trousers. It just smeared, though, making it look twice as bad. Borlin and Ihvon shrank back in horror and prayed for Matthew's soul.

     "They found him being held captive by the felisians," Thomas continued. "it was them who hired the clay man. The felisians seem to be pacifistic. They don't like to kill, luckily for us. You'll get him back as soon as he's recovered from his ordeal. See you later." He trotted off down the corridor.

     "Sorry about..." Matthew held up a paint smeared hand apologetically but Thomas just gave a gesture of dismissal before disappearing around a corner, leaving Ihvon and Borlin staring at their leader in stupefied wonder.