A new world gradually took shape before the two wizards. A world that, at first glance, appeared very similar to their own. Lush green forests and vast stretches of open grassland were spread beneath a golden sun. Herds of wild animals whose names and natures were familiar to them roamed in herds so great that their end couldn't be seen and were hunted by predators with which the two wizards were also totally familiar. Were it not for a few minor details, the single sun, the tiny moon, the complete absence of comets in the sky, they might have been viewing a scene from any part of their world.

     "We see the beasts as familiar because the prisoner is familiar with them," pointed out Seskip. "What we are seeing is not what we would see if we were there in person."

     Saturn nodded in irritation. Did he think he was an apprentice casting this spell for the first time? He kept his annoyance under control, though, not wanting it to interfere with his concentration, and gave himself fully up to the images that were now flooding in.

     He knew this world as Haskar knew it, that being the male felisian's name. He knew that Veglia, his world, although steeped in life of all descriptions, was almost empty of sapient life. For generations beyond number, the few wandering tribes of his people had been widely scattered across the single giant continent. Meetings between them were rare, except when they came together for the annual mating festival.

     All over the planet were the ruins of an earlier civilisation, though. Crumbling, overgrown cities lost in the jungles. Mysterious shapes of stainless metal half buried in the ground. Great long roads almost lost beneath creeping soil and grass. The felisians paid them little attention, though, they having little impact on their everyday lives. They had no use for the crumbling artifacts, and had no memory of the people who had created them except for a handful of myths and legends that had surely been distorted out of all recognition by centuries of repetition by word of mouth.

     Life on Veglia in those days had been easy. The prey animals they hunted, either in human form with arrows and spears or in cat form with teeth and claws, were plentiful. The weather, except for the spring storms and the summer draught, was pleasant and the world contained no predators large enough to be a danger to them. Violence and conflict were all but unknown, both because of the infrequency with which neighbouring tribes strayed into the same area and because of the warnings of ancient, mythical heroes.

     The only snake in their garden was the high rate of miscarriage. Pregnancies were common enough, but were greeted not with joy but dread as the mother and her family waited for the tiny new life to die. Each day was an agony of anxiety, with the tribe breathing a collective sigh of relief as each day went by with the baby still alive, and only when it was finally born did the celebrations begin. Ancient legends told of tribes much larger than any existing now, and of each needing a defined territory to avoid conflict with neighbours, and the eldest and wisest, sitting a little way apart from the others, had whispered to each other that their race was slowly dying out.

     The majority of the felisians had known nothing of this, though, and for them life on Veglia had been a paradise of peace and plenty. They had no concept of wanting anything they didn't already have, and their afterlife was simply a continuation of what they were doing already in some higher plane. They hadn't given thanks to any gods for their lifestyle, because they hadn't been able to imagine living any other way. They simply took it for granted.

     All that changed when the Masters came out of the sky in their ships of gleaming steel. The felisians had stared in fearless amazement when the corpulent, hairless beings made their first appearance and had crowded forward in innocent curiosity, eager to make the acquaintance of the new arrivals.

     Their trust had been cruelly betrayed, though. The Masters hadn't been interested in making friends. They wanted to plunder the ruins of the ancient cities, and the native population made an ideal slave workforce. Every tribe they could find had been rounded up, therefore, and taught how to operate the mining and processing equipment they were supplied with, their education speeded up by the free use of painmakers and on the spot execution of troublemakers. The elderly hadn't been spared, nor the children. Any individual old enough to stand had been put to work, and if he couldn't work he had been killed.

     At first the felisians had been too surprised to protest much. They simply hadn't been able to believe what was happening to them. Gradually, however, as it dawned on them that this was for real, surprise had turned to anger and they had begun to resist in earnest, to no effect whatsoever. Giant mining machines had been turned against their creators, but only the Masters had known how to refuel them when they ground to a halt. Laser cutters had been aimed at the Masters, who simply cut their power. Felisians in the form of giant cats had hurled themselves at their tormentors, only to find that their tough, rubbery hides were proof against their teeth and claws.

     The Masters had ruthlessly cut down anyone who dared step out of line, seeming not to care if they butchered the entire felisian race, and indeed almost a quarter of the planet's population had been lost in this way. In the end, though, the felisians had been cowed. Their spirit had been broken and their last trace of hope extinguished. They had returned to work, meekly obeying every order they were given, but they'd continued to hate their oppressors with a burning passion and yearned to return to the paradise they had lost.

     An entire generation had grown up under the yoke of the Masters, until only the eldest remembered the old ways, but just as they'd been resigning themselves to an eternity of suffering and bondage relief had come from an unexpected direction. One day, gleaming silver ships once again returned to the sky, and the dwellings of the Masters had exploded in gouts of flame. Small flying machines pursued the Masters wherever they ran, cutting them down with lances of fire and attacking also any felisians they came across. Most of the slaves had hidden in the underground tunnels they had dug, though, and when, after two days of earth shaking violence, all had grown silent they'd peeped timidly out of their holes to find the skies empty and all the Masters dead. Joyfully, they'd run back into the open prairies, discarding their worktools and throwing off their work rags, thinking that their troubles were over.

     Every so often, though, over the next few years, great flashes had lit up the sky, like lightning storms out among the stars, and sometimes a silver ship fell out of the sky, exploding where it hit the ground and throwing up clouds of flaming debris to form a wide crater. Once, a silver ship managed to make a soft landing and an injured Master had staggered away from the wreckage. The tribe that found him had assailed him mercilessly with rocks and arrows until the life had left his unbelievably tough body.

     Just as the bad days of the occupation were beginning to fade from their collective memories, though, the skies had filled with ships for the third time. The Masters were back, to resume their plundering of Veglia.

     This time, the bondage of the felisians had lasted for two generations, and when it ended, in the same way that the first occupation had ended, only a handful of the eldest had been able to remember the old skills that had allowed them to live in freedom. Once again the skies were occasionally lit with violence, and the felisians had taken this as a sign that the masters would come a third time, that their freedom was only a pause to let them recover their breaths. In this, they were correct, and it was only ten short years before the silver ships came again.

     This had been the pattern of life on Veglia for the next two centuries, and the once lush planet had begun to suffer as the forests were torn down to uncover the ancient cities and the air and water became increasingly polluted. Vast areas of the continent became barren wastelands of chemicals and discarded machinery, and all growing things became twisted and stunted, even in the archipelagos of the world ocean.

     The felisians were never able to overthrow the Masters themselves. They had to wait for the periodic return of their mysterious enemies for a brief respite from bondage; sometimes for just a few years, once for half a century. Gradually, though, they had begun to understand the machines of their masters. How to maintain and repair them, how to use them as the Masters did, and after the corpulent, hairless beasts had been driven away by their enemies for the sixth time some of the felisians had chosen to remain in the ruined processing factories, among the machines that had become more familiar to them than their native grasslands. Why struggle to relearn the skills of our ancestors, they'd argued, when we will be free for only a few years? Better to learn the ways and the machines of our enemies, so we'll be better able to fight them when they return.

     As it turned out, though, the Masters never had returned. They had been driven far away from Veglia by their enemies, and in later years the felisians discovered the ruins of factories and wrecked equipment on many nearby worlds. At the time, though, they'd feared that their oppressors could return at any time, and so they'd devoted all their efforts to preparing for that dreadful day. After many years of tireless effort, some of the silver ships wrecked on their world were brought back to spaceworthy condition and they were sent off to try to discover where the Masters were now and what they were doing.

     It had been one of these cobbled together spaceships that had stumbled across the transdimensional rift that connected a group of several hundred universes known collectively as the Sheaf...

     Saturn shook his head in annoyance. Something was disturbing his concentration. Some sound. No, a voice. Someone calling his name. Scowling irritably, he allowed the link with the felisian to weaken a little, enough for him to become aware of the real world once again.

     "Morkov!" Seskip was calling urgently. "Morkov! He's waking up! Morkov!"

     The nerve of him, Saturn thought, to use my last name as if I were junior to him! Who does he think he is? His hand still lay gently on the felisian's head, though, and that head was now moving a little, as if its owner were gradually regaining consciousness. Saturn jumped hurriedly back to his feet and backed away a step or two, suddenly aware that, even with his hands manacled, the prisoner was easily capable of killing him with a solid head butt.

     The mental link was unraveling, but Saturn got a glimpse of a few of the prisoner’s thoughts as his awareness slowly returned. His name was Haskar and he was the leader of the six felisians currently on Tharia… Then the link snapped completely and Saturn cursed the fact that the ESP spell fugged his mind a little, making it impossible for him to cast it again until he'd slept and rested. He thought briefly about sending for a Helm of Telepathy but quickly dismissed the idea. There'd be plenty of time for that. Besides, he'd wanted a chance to talk to the prisoners first. Now it looked as if he was going to get it.

     The felisian stared stupidly at him, then his eyes cleared as consciousness returned fully. He turned his head to look at his companion, still in her self imposed trance, then leaned over to whisper in her ear. "Lees, wake up. You can wake up now. Lees, come back to me."

     He had to repeat the message several times before she began to react, stirring slowly as if coming out of a deep sleep. A few moments later they were both fully awake, the man regarding the wizard boldly and fearlessly, the woman looking scared and uncertain.

     Saturn let them regard him for several minutes, to make sure they were both fully aware of their situation, before he spoke to them. "I'm glad you've decided to be sensible. A full deep mind scan has been known to have unpleasant consequences and we have no wish to harm you."

     "We knew we could hide nothing from your mind probing spells," replied Haskar calmly, speaking as if to a friend at a party. "We only wanted to buy enough time for our comrades to escape. By now they are safely back aboard their ship and on their way back to Veglia."