Saturn stumbled into the room that had once been a dormitory. Once, a line of cots had been lined along the curved outer wall, each one with a locker and a desk alongside, the only home the apprentice wizards would have known during the five years of their initial training. Now, though, the room was bare and empty. The only sign that the room had ever been occupied was the graffiti that had been carved into the floor and the interior walls. There was no graffiti on the outer wall, though. Neither were there any windows in it.

     He glanced over his shoulder. No sign of Seskip yet. He turned back to the outer wall and decided to make his own window. To his alarm, though, the disintegration spell failed to make any impact on it, except for a momentary purple glow that lingered over the bare stone. The characteristic sign of an Indestructibility spell.

     "You must remember," said a voice from behind him, "that this tower was raised during a time when wizards were not the most popular of people. The tower came under siege many times, and only the defensive spells imprinted on it by Lexandros himself saved it from destruction. Remarkable, isn't it, that they still work perfectly even after all this time."

     Every defensive rune and sigil sewn into Saturn's robes was fully activated as he turned to face Seskip Tonn. "Just walk away," he said, a warning tone in his voice. "This doesn't have to get nasty. You can just walk away."

     "Oh I think things have gone a little too far for that. You're trapped. If you want to leave, you'll have to go through me."

     "If necessary," said Saturn, his sngle eye narrowing to a slit. "Or you could just stand aside. You have no jurisdiction over me here. Outside the University, every wizard is free to pursue his own interests. Only rak transformation is forbidden, and you know that's not what I want to do."

     "But, my dear Saturn," said Seskip, his wide, lipless mouth widening even further in a gleeful grin. "We are in the University. The University of the past, but the University nevertheless."

     Saturn scowled. It was a fine legal point, one that would keep the department heads arguing for years.

     "How do you feel, my old friend?" Seskip continued. "A little weary after tackling my men? Is that a dark circle I see under your eye?"

     In reply, Saturn cast a vicious spell that tore violently at the Head Proctor's Globe of Invulnerability. Crackling tongues of force were deflected from it to strike the walls and ceiling and blocks of half melted stone fell around them. The floor itself began to crack and sag and Seskip leapt to the side before it could collapse under him. Saturn gave a cruel grin at the fear that now sat on the Head Proctor's face. Are you remembering the stories they tell about me? he wondered. Are you beginning to regret your foolish decision to follow me?

     Then a new wave of dizziness came over him, though, and he saw Seskip take new heart. He quickly cast another spell that threw the Head Proctor against the far wall like a rag doll, and a third that blew out the wall behind him, throwing him back out into the corridor. Saturn activated his Robes of Flying to hover above the floor as it collapsed beneath him, filling the air with dust and hiding his opponent from view, and Seskip took the opportunity to scurry back into the tower's inner core.

     Just run, thought Saturn, who was beginning to worry for the first time whether he was really capable of winning this duel. Run before we bring the whole tower down around us. The Head Proctor was cursed by a sense of duty, though, he knew. He wouldn't stop until one of them was dead or captured.

     He heard Seskip casting additional defensive spells, confirming that he intended to come at him again, and his growing fear turned to frustration and anger. Not just anger but fury. The familiar rage that came upon him whenever his sense of authority was challenged. "I will not tolerate interference from you!" he roared. "This is your last chance! Get out of here and leave me alone, or I'll make you curse the day you were born!"

     He saw the other man wavering and he smiled cruelly. Yes, that's right, he thought. Catching mischievous apprentices and incompetent junior wizards is one thing, but now you face a senior wizard in full battle fury. Run, you fool. Nobody will hold it against you if you go home empty handed. My fearsome reputation is known to all.

     Seskip actually backed away a step, but then Saturn wobbled on his feet and had to steady himself against the wall. He saw Seskip's face light up in delight and begin the casting of his most powerful attack spell.

     Seeing this, Saturn also launched a new attack, and both spells came to culmination at exactly the same time...

☆☆☆

     Matthew and Thomas stared in astonishment as an explosion tore the side out of the tower followed, a second later, by a boom that was heard all across the University grounds. Young apprentices jumped in their seats and stared out the windows, looking for the source of the noise. Teaching wizards ran out into the corridors, alert for anything that might threaten their pupils, and research wizards ran to check up on their experiments. Several proctors winced as their sensitised magic senses were assailed by a powerful shockwave of magic force, sending lances of pain through their heads, and then they ran to report the incident to their master.

     "By the Gods!" breathed Matthew as blocks of magically strengthened stone rained down around the base of the tower, sinking up to half their thicknesses in the peaty soil that lay beneath. One block rolled down the low hill on which the tower stood, smashing through the low brick wall that surrounded the Lydian Garden and ending up in the ornamental pond that lay within.

     Contract workers and junior wizards stared up at the gaping hole that had been opened in the side of the tower. Cracks propagated through the stonework, and the upper half of the tower teetered on the brink of collapse. A ginger headed junior wizard took charge and began shouting at people to pull back to a safe distance, running in to bodily pull away those who could only stand and stare. Another large block of stone fell, and then there came the spine chilling rumbling groan of rock rubbing slowly against rock. That was enough to snap the hypnotised onlookers out of their paralysis and started a stampede of mundanes and wizards alike running for the safety of nearby buildings.

     "Where's Bakklin?" cried Matthew, starting out from the cover of the vineyards.

     Thomas grabbed his arm to stop him. "He's safe!" he hissed into his ear. "He's a sensible lad. He'll be running for cover like everyone else."

     Matthew stared at the fatally weakened tower anxiously, but then nodded and relaxed. He'd only be endangering himself by running in, and Thomas was right. Bakklin was quite capable of looking after himself. Thomas, though, was looking at the entrance to the tower, where Seskip had left Zanda to block Saturn's retreat. Even as he watched, the proctor stumbled out into the daylight, pausing a moment to look back at the tower before running for all he was worth. But what of the other proctors, and what of Saturn himself?

     Then a group of new figures appeared on the scene. Agglemonian proctors. Dressed in the archaic garb of the era, and at their head was one dressed even more splendidly, his robes trimmed with gold. The Head Proctor. Seeing Zanda running from the tower, he dispatched a pair of his men to take him into custody, and then the rest spread out to surround the tower at a safe distance, raising wands and staves ready to cast binding spells the moment the duelists showed themselves.

     Thomas stared in growing horror. He was pretty certain Seskip had never intended anything like this to happen. Every instinct screamed at him to grab Matthew and Stone and teleport back to the ship, but they couldn't leave without Bakklin. He cursed violently and scanned the fields and gardens around the tower for any sign of the able seaman, while above him dust and small fragments of rubble continued to fall in a steady stream from the blasted hole and the tower continued to sing its rumbling death song...

☆☆☆

     Consciousness returned slowly to Seskip Tonn, along with a dull thudding in the side of his head. He was lying on his back, on a stone floor littered with rubble, and his robes were dusted with a layer of fine particles that still filled the air. He gingerly put his hand to the side of his head, felt the stickiness of blood on his bald scalp. He tested his limbs one at a time and, finding that they still seemed to work after a fashion, he climbed unsteadily back to his feet.

     He didn't recognise the room he was in, but there was a hole in the ceiling above him. He must have fallen through to the floor below. A faint stirring of wind blew the dust around, and it was a moment or two before the implications of this came home to him. The outer wall must have been breached. But that was magically strengthened stone! Gods, what had happened?

     He remembered he and Saturn casting spells at each other, both spells reaching their climaxes simultaneously. The two spells must have interfered with each other, mingling and mutating to produce something ten times as powerful. It was a miracle he was still alive! But what about Saturn? He had to find out. He stared up at the hole in the ceiling, thinking about a levitation spell, but the pain in his head made it impossible to concentrate on spellcasting. He cursed and staggered out of the room, making his way to the stairwell.

     He had to stop to rest a couple of times as the bare stone corridors seemed to spin around him, and as he laboured his way up the stairs he clung as closely as possible to the wall, not wanting to risk falling down the central shaft. As he reached the landing of the floor above, though, he was frozen in place by a groaning, grinding sound that reminded him of an earthquake he'd been in several years before. The stairs under his feet shuddered and a small hail of tiny flakes of stone fell from somewhere above. The tower's unstable, he thought anxiously. It could collapse at any moment. He couldn't leave without learning Saturn's fate, though. If he was dead, he had to see his body with his own eyes.

     "Master!" a voice called out. He recognised the voice of Landar Bewt. Saturn's paralysis spell must have worn off. "Master, we have to get out of here!"

     You leave," snapped Seskip. "I have business to conclude. Take Poldark with you."

     "Master, he's been turned to stone! I can't carry him!"

     "Leave him then. Take yourself away." He dismissed the junior proctor from his mind and staggered away down the corridor.

     He discovered that he'd fallen through two floors, not one. Above him he could see three levels of the tower through the gaping holes where the ceilings had been, and a wide expanse of open sky showed where the outer wall had been blasted away. Cracks ran through the remaining stone, between the individual blocks of the tower's construction, and one particularly long horizontal crack widened and narrowed as the topmost half of the tower swayed in the wind, each movement accompanied by the spine jarring groan of stone sliding against stone. Piles of rubble lay on what remained of the floor and Seskip scrabbled up the highest pile to reach the floor above.

     The corridor in which those last two spells had been cast had been totally destroyed. Nothing remained but empty space on all sides and some of the remaining stonework had a blasted, half melted look as if they'd been subjected to intense heat. He looked down at the protective runes sewn into his robes. They had to be the reason he'd survived, and Saturn's runes were even more numerous and powerful. He looked around. There was no sign of Saturn anywhere. Either he was trapped under tons of fallen stone or... He looked at the vast hole in the outer wall. Or he'd flown away. Seskip must have been stunned for several moments. Plenty of time for Saturn to make his escape. He cursed violently.

     The tower groaned longer and louder than before and he realised he was running out of time. If he were caught in the tower's collapse there would be no-one to bring Saturn to justice. He turned and ran back to the stairwell, therefore, and flew down the stairs as fast as his frail legs and his spinning head would allow. On the way he passed the petrified form of Tol Poldark and paused long enough to shrink him to the size of a boy's toy soldier before tucking him in a pouch and running on. Good proctors were hard to come by, and back home there were spells to restore him to life. Above him came the crashing sounds of falling rock and blocks of stone began to fall down the central stairwell. Then he began to run again, desperate to get out of the tower before it was too late.

☆☆☆

     Outside, Matthew and Thomas, staring in fascination, flinched in horror when the tower collapsed at last. The bottom couple of floors above the breach explode outwards as they finally gave way under the intolerable strain, and then the top half of the tower began to lean outwards like a falling tree. The magical hardening of the outer wall preserved the structural integrity of the falling building until it hit the ground, whereupon it shattered in a cloud of dust and flying fragments of stone.

     The dust rose and enveloped the remaining levels of the tower until only the jagged and ruined stump remained in view, from which fragments of stone continued to fall. A low rumbling told the stunned onlookers that the destruction was continuing inside. Hundreds of tons of stone falling through floor after floor until all that remained was a hollow shell like a great chimney, its bottom half choked full of rubble. Gradually, however, the noise died away to silence and a light breeze began to blow away the dust, revealing a scene of utter destruction.

     The entrance to the tower and its ground floor were buried by rubble, and a long tongue of rubble stretched away to one side, down the slope of the hill towards the necromancy building, although only a handful of boulders had rolled that far, knocking holes in the wall where they'd hit. It was later learned that no-one in the building had been hurt. The garden of meditation had been totally destroyed, though, the ivory pavilions and the moon pool having been directly under the falling tower. The evacuation warning had come none too soon. Matthew and Thomas stared in slack jawed horror. How had this happened? And what had happened to Seskip and Saturn?

     Some of the surrounding proctors began to edge cautiously forwards, but the Agglemonian head proctor called them back. "There could be more rock falling," Thomas heard him say. "No-one goes in until it's been made safe."

     He turned to Zanda and Landar Bewt, whom they'd caught running out just before the collapse. The two proctors from the future had been bound with wizard holding spells and were staring at each other in terror.

     "In the meantime," the Agglemonian head proctor continued, "we've got these two. They should tell an interesting tale. Narcus, take them to the magic proof cells. The rest of you, keep the tower under observation. There may still be someone alive in there. If he tries to get out, arrest him." He then followed Narcus as he led the two captives away.

     A crowd was gathering as wizards, apprentices and contract workers emerged from the various buildings to stare in fascination at the scene of devastation, and Matthew and Thomas moved cautiously out into the open in case their attempts to hide brought suspicion on themselves. They allowed themselves to become part of the crowd, although being careful to remain out of earshot of the nearest other person. Stone joined them a moment later, and Matthew was relieved to see Bakklin milling about on the other side of the field. He came running over, and Matthew relaxed as his command was safely reunited.

     "Well," he said, "what do we do now?"

     Thomas stared back helplessly. "I haven't got the slightest idea," he admitted.