As the saboteur began to run again, another wizard's spell raised a wall of stone directly in his path, ten feet high, with the ends curving back to enclose him. The saboteur never even slowed, though. Instead he jumped as he reached the foot of the wall, pulling himself over in a single fluid motion and dropping from sight on the other side.

     The wall was now a barrier between the saboteur and his pursuers, and the startled wizards hurried to its edges to get past it, all except Lirenna who jumped up onto the wall like a cat and then perched on it with all the grace and poise of a trained gymnast. Thomas’s heart leapt into his throat as he imagined the saboteur directly below, reaching up to pull her down, but the demi shae was peering into the distance, shading her eyes with a pale, slender hand. "That way!" she cried, pointing. "He's heading for Fool's Hope Pass!"

     There were several mountain passes leading away from Lexandria valley, but they all came to dead ends, surrounded by jagged mountain ridges on all sides. Theoretically a skilled mountaineer could scale those ridges, but then he would find himself in a howling nightmare of snow and hurricane force winds with hundreds of miles between him and the verdant forests beyond. There was no way that any man could either approach or leave the valley overland, and if the saboteur entered the pass he would only be trapping himself with no hope of escape. Several wizards gave cries of triumph and delight, but others remained quiet, remembering how easily he'd escaped before. It seemed hard to believe that he'd be captured so easily now.

     A wizard appeared in the air, having borrowed some Robes of Levitation from the artifact storerooms, and an eagle flew alongside him with a purpose and intelligence that identified it as a transformed wizard. By the time Thomas reached the end of the wall and got a view of the slopes beyond, the two flying wizards were a hundred yards away and circling a spot on the ground hidden from Thomas’s view by a great boulder that had rolled down the mountain some years earlier. The other wizards, about a dozen of them, were spreading out to surround the spot and Thomas relaxed, puffing to regain his breath. They'd caught him. There was no way he could escape now. The saboteur still had some fight left in him, though, and the wizards were reluctant to go in and apprehend him just yet. Instead, they tried reasoning with him, and the sound of their calm, reasonable voices was carried by the fresh, gusty breeze to where Thomas and Lirenna stood, waiting to see what would happen next.

     "Are you all right?" asked Lirenna anxiously, fussing over Thomas’s bruised cheek and split lip. "Whatever possessed you to try to take him yourself?"

     "I had to try," said Thomas quietly. "How could I have faced Pondar otherwise?"

     "So you got yourself all beaten up just to please him?" demanded the demi shae angrily. "He could have killed you! You're a wizard, you're supposed to be intelligent! Taking on a man twice your size when you know your magic won't work on him! You saw the wizards chasing him were casting spells! You saw they weren't having any effect!"

     "I slowed him down," replied the wizard defensively. "Without me, he might have had time to undress in the trees and vanish, just like all the other times. Pondar's got to see the part I played in catching him."

     "You're obsessed with that man! What makes you so anxious to please him?"

     "He's a senior wizard! Just think what he could teach me if he decided to take me on as his special assistant. If he thinks I'm..."

     Thomas was interrupted by a cry that went up from the crowd up ahead, and they looked up to see the wizards running forward. They glanced at each other in alarm and ran forward to join them, to find the saboteur lying on the ground surrounded by anxious wizards, one of whom was taking his pulse. He looked up when Thomas and Lirenna arrived, his face pale with shock. "He swallowed something before we could stop him," he gasped. "I think he's dead."

☆☆☆

     "His name's Clava Kos," said the Head Proctor, looking down at the naked body laid out on the cold slab. "He's a mason and a stonewright, one of the contract workers brought in to do the repairs to the enchantment building.”

     "We'll have to tighten up security," replied the Director. "Vet the contract workers more closely. How did he pass the mind reading test?"

     For answer, the Head Proctor held up an Amulet of Mind Protection, one of those that had been worn by the clay men during the Fourth Shadowwar. Although the clay man threat had largely been ended, there were still a number of such amulets in circulation and it would be a long time yet before the University laid its hands on all of them.

     "He was also carrying this," added the Head Proctor, holding up a second amulet. "A Talisman of Anti-Magic. One of the diviners was using it. He said it went missing two days ago. He says he was going to report it missing but…” He shrugged his dismay at the man's negligence.

     “But he knew he'd be in trouble and was hoping to find it himself first,” sad the Director. “He thought he might have simply mislaid it and that it might turn up.”

     “There is no excuse! His actions put the lives of real wizards in peril!”

     The Director almost smiled at the Head Proctor's undisguised contempt for diviners. Crystal gazers and fortune tellers, not to be compared with conjurers and alterers. People who used real magic. “You must share some the blame for that, my friend,” he said. “You have a fearsome reputation. He was afraid to report the talisman missing. If you were a little more approachable…”

     Seskip snorted his disdain for the idea. “Let us return to the real issue,” he said. "Obviously he's more than just a common stonemason. Not only would a common stonemason not have the ability to do what he's done, he wouldn't have had the motive. I wonder who or what he really was."

     "I can't tell you what he was," said the third man, the mortician, who'd been standing a little way apart and keeping silent until now. He moved closer now, and the Director backed away with a scowl of distaste as the bitter reek of embalming fluid engulfed him. "But I can tell you what he was not. He wasn't human."

     The other two stared at him, then looked back at the corpse on the slab. "Go on," prompted the Director flatly.

     "His human appearance is entirely external, but a spell to turn the skin transparent tells a different story. His digestive system is adapted for an entirely carnivorous diet. His bones and musculature allow for a much greater strength and agility than any human. His brain has some features I've never seen before, and I've got no idea how he ever managed to produce anything like human speech from his huge, deformed voicebox. He has eyes adapted for night vision and barbs on his penis. I'd guess that his species are shock ovulators."

     "What's that?" asked the Head Proctor in bafflement.

     "A trick used by some animals to avoid wasting unwanted eggs. Human females produce an egg once a month, whether there's any sperm waiting to fertilise it or not. Very wasteful. But some female animals only produce an egg in response to the pain of sexual penetration, caused by sharp barbs on the penis." He peeled back the dead man's foreskin to show them, and both the other men winced involuntarily at the sight that met them beneath it.

     "So this person wouldn't have been having a sexual relationship with a human woman," mused the Director.

     "I would imagine not," agreed the mortician with a crooked smile. "It would be rather painful for the poor girl. On the other hand, though, a female of his kind might well need the pain, as part of the pleasure. A female of his kind, having sex with a human male lacking penis barbs, might literally not feel it. It would probably do nothing for her at all."

     "Look into it," the Director told the Head Proctor. "If he's had a sex life, I want to know about it. I want to know with whom and how much she enjoyed it. Pull in anyone he so much as looked at, and her husbands and lovers as well. I want to know if there are any more like him in the valley." The Head Proctor nodded and left.

     The Director also left, after one final glance at the dead saboteur. For the saboteur to have killed himself rather than allow himself to be taken alive said a great deal about him, he thought. He wouldn't have made the ultimate sacrifice unless it was to protect others, and he wouldn't have done it unless he had a strong ideological reason for committing acts of sabotage in the first place. Ideology meant either self defence or an aggressively religious motive. Could he have been a priest of some kind? Was that how he managed to keep escaping, by invoking the powers of a God? But then why hadn't he done so when he'd been cornered on the mountainslope? Maybe the manner of his escape would have told the wizards too much about himself and his kind.

     One other thought came to him. The suggestion (he couldn't remember who had made it) that the acts of sabotage were being committed by the same people who had built the huge alien ship. Would another huge ship turn up any time now to demand the return of their agent and threatening terrible retribution if any harm had come to him? Unlikely, he eventually decided. A civilisation capable of building a ship like that wouldn't need to resort to the creeping around kind of tactics that the saboteur had used. They could have sent another ship and just taken them over. So, what other possibilities did that leave?

     One possibility was that the ship building civilisation had collapsed, as the Agglemonians had, and that the saboteur came from a degenerate society, no longer capable of the mighty feats of their ancestors. Another possibility was that that ship building civilisation still existed, perhaps mightier than ever, and that the saboteur came from a completely different civilisation. A much punier society that lived in fear of Tharian dominance. They would also have had to come from across space, though, rather than from another dimension (unless the transdimensional portal through which he came lay across space) or they would have had no reason to want to sabotage a ship of space. Either way, it was obviously more important than ever that the ship of space be completed as quickly as possible, so that they could see what was out there. If they were threatened by a mighty spacefaring civilisation, they had to know about it as soon as possible so that they could decide what action, if any, they could take.

     At least the work ought to go faster now, now that the most active member of the sabotage ring is dead, he thought in satisfaction. There may be more of them, the saboteur must have been defending someone when he killed himself, but the others were probably just supporting him. Helping him get in and out, hiding him, etc. Now that he's dead, we should be able to get back on schedule fairly quickly. Yes, the Gods be praised. All of our problems are now, hopefully, well and truly over.