Karog muttered to himself under his breath as he squinted along the range finder, measuring the apparent diameter of Kronos. "If we continue on this course and at this speed," he said, "we will pass in front of Kronos in five minutes and thirty seconds."

     "So we're still on course?" gasped Gunther in relief.

     "Yes," confirmed the trog. "However, at that point we will be only one hundred and seventy miles above the surface of Kronos, and since Kronos is moving at three and a half miles a second, that means we will only be fifty seconds from smashing into it, or rather having it smash into us. Only thirty seconds from the moment we enter teleportation range. You will have that long to deactivate the levitation spells and teleport us in."

     "Perhaps I can change course a little, so that we arrive a little above or below Kronos," mused Gunther thoughtfully. "It would take a very delicate adjustment, though. Overdo it and we'll miss, never passing close enough to teleport." He agonised over it for almost a full minute. "I'll leave it," he decided at last. "I can do it. Fifty seconds is plenty of time."

     "You understand that that's only an approximation," warned Karog, though. "It's based on the diameter of Kronos, which is known only approximately." Gunther nodded that he understood.

     Kronos continued to grow, but its motion against the background stars slowed and Gunther felt the tension in his neck ease a little. He reduced the strength of the levitation spells, leaving them with just enough strength to counteract the pull of Tharia's gravity, although Kronos’s feeble gravity was probably a greater factor now, if there was enough time for it to have any perceptible effect on their motion. Their forward momentum continued to carry them forward, and Karog carried out further measurements with the range finder, fine tuning the calculations he'd made earlier. "Bang on," he said at last with a smile. "You've now got fifty seconds."

     Gunther now only had to wait a few more seconds for the tiny moon to move into teleportation range and, counting under his breath, he took the opportunity to examine its surface. From the surface of Tharia Kronos looked like a tiny sphere, a smaller version of the two larger moons, but now that they were close enough to see it properly the wizard was surprised to see how lumpy and knobbly it was. From this vantage point, seeing the tiny moon from the side, an angle from which it was never visible from the ground, they could see that it was roughly egg shaped, with the bulge pointing towards Tharia, but there were other bulges and depressions in its surface, some of them a quarter the size of the whole moon, their shape made dramatically visible by the shadows and highlights the slanting sunlight made on its surface.

     One depression was brighter than the others, and lay at the centre of a radiating pattern of lines; straight in places, wavy and branching in others. Fissures, thought Gunther in astonishment. Great cracks in the structure of Kronos. That crater must be where the comet hit, the comet that caused the great disaster. He saw that one of the fissures ran to the tiny moon's north pole, the location of the city of Kronosia. Maybe it was the very same fissure that had destroyed half the city and left the Agglemonian refugees marooned for two hundred years.

     The hemisphere of the tiny moon facing away from Tharia was darker than the side facing the planet, he saw. So dark that it was hard to see it against the darkness of space, as if it had been covered by a layer of soot. He puzzled over this for a moment before realising that it was the moon trog light funnels. Billions of them, covering the entire hemisphere. Capturing the sunlight and taking it inside where it was used to light their tunnels and power their industry. He gaped in astonishment as the size of the accomplishment came home to him for the first time. The sheer magnitude of what they had done. They're scared of us? he thought in amazement. It's we who should be afraid of them! If they could capture all that sunlight and direct it down to a target on Tharia… He thought of a small boy using a lens to burn a hole in a piece of wood and shuddered.

     “Gunther!” warned Karog. “You paying attention?”

     Gunther nodded numbly and jerked his attention back to the task at hand. How many of those fifty seconds were still left?

     Kronos continued to hold his attention, though. It had an almost hypnotic hold on him that refused to let him go. The details he was seeing as they drew closer enabled him to put its size into perspective, making him perceive the tiny moon in a completely new way. Tiny? he thought incredulously. It's immense! Kronos loomed ahead of them now. A colossus of rock, unimaginably vast. Twenty five miles across! Twenty five miles! That is a big lump of rock! thought the wizard in awe, and it's coming at us at twelve thousand miles an hour!

     His attention was caught by something on the far side of Kronos, the side facing away from Tharia. Something small and sparkly, shining brilliantly in the light of the yellow sun. Except that it couldn't really be small. They were still over a hundred miles above the surface of Kronos (thirty five, thirty four, thirty three he counted silently), so it must be huge to be seen at this distance. It was a moon trog farm dome, he realised. One of the thousand yard wide hemispherical greenhouses within which they grew all their food, and now that he knew what to look for he realised that he could see dozens of them, all on the side of Kronos facing away from Tharia. Sparkling in the darkness like diamonds in a coal mine.

     He was the first human to see them from the outside, and as he contemplated this astonishing fact he came to a true realisation of what a mighty race of engineers the moon trogs really were. He'd heard that the Agglemonians had built the first dozen or so farm domes, using magic wielded by their finest wizards, but the moon trogs had built the rest themselves, using only their own hands, standard engineering principles and the raw materials they found around them. And without magical protection from the deadly vacuum, all the work had to be done in bulky suits that trapped a layer of breathable air around their bodies. It was an accomplishment to stagger the imagination and Gunther found himself breathlessly in awe of what the tiny, fragile creatures had done. They're right, he realised. Kronos rightfully belongs to them. Humans don't belong here. He began to have regrets about his mission, which would re-establish contact between Kronos and Tharia, but then he remembered the hundreds of humans trapped in Kronosia. They had to be rescued. The mission had to succeed for their sake.

     "Twenty six, twenty five, twenty four..." Gunther counted, still staring in fascination at the smallest moon as it drifted off to their right. They wouldn't hit it square on if he allowed them to impact on the surface, he saw. They would impact near the tip of the bulge pointing towards Tharia. He focused his attention on that spot, trying to imagine how big a crater they would make. "Twenty three, twenty two, twenty one, twenty." Okay, if Karog's sums were right, they were now close enough to teleport, plus a little bit closer to give them a safe margin for error. He deactivated the levitation spells, but left the teleportation spell a few seconds longer, just in case. The trog had said that he couldn't be absolutely sure of his figures, and if they were still too far out...

     The surface of Kronos was a desolation of jumbled boulders, of stark, sunlit brilliance and impenetrable shadow. It was the deadest, most lifeless place he'd ever seen, more desolate even than the dusty desert in the centre of the Endless Plains where the centre of the Shadow had stood. At least there a few straggly grasses and weeds were bravely trying to re-colonise the waste, but on Kronos... How can anything possibly live here? he thought in wonder. Even beneath the surface! This is no place for us. No place for humans. The sooner we do what we came to do and get out of here, the better. "Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen..." They were close enough. It was time to teleport.

     He brought the words of the spell to his mind, but before he could speak them his eye was caught by something perched on the very tip of the bulge. The glint of light reflected from something shiny. He marveled at it for a moment, but then he grew puzzled as he wondered what it was. Only three things shone like that. Water, glass and metal, and none of those things was supposed to exist on the smallest moon. He strained his eyes in an attempt to make out details, but it was dozens of miles away and it had the look of something only a few dozens of yards across. Only visible because it was so bright.

     What could it be? Some kind of crystal formation? But crystals only formed in water. Ice? Ice had been found on Kronos by those adventurous enough to go exploring on the surface, but only in areas of permanent shadow. The thing he was seeing had to be in full sunlight, where the rocks were too hot to touch without magical protection. It had to be either glass or metal, and that meant it had to be some kind of artificial structure. A building, or cluster of buildings? A ship of space? But whose? Who had built it?

     He strained his eyes to see it better, to try to discern some detail that would answer his questions, but it was rapidly slipping below the horizon as the tiny moon sped towards them. He was so perplexed by the puzzle that he failed to feel Karog's hand on his shoulder, shaking him urgently; failed to hear the frantic voice yelling in his ear, and it wasn't until he felt the stinging pain of a soft, flabby hand slapping his face that he remembered their situation.

     "Teleport, man!" cried the trog frantically. "Quick, you fool! We're about to hit!"

     Gunther stared at him in shock, then looked at the immense, onrushing mass of Kronos, now growing visibly second by second. The little voice in his head was continuing to count, even though he'd forgotten to listen to it, and he felt a surge of panic as he realised it was down to single figures. Seven, six, five... He screwed his eyes up tight and almost screamed the words.

     Kronos vanished, and suddenly there was blue sky overhead and a pair of startled sparrows swerving wildly to avoid the obstacle that had suddenly appeared in their path. There were trees around them. Young trees less than ten years old, and behind them the bare skeletons of larger trees; their dead branches twisted and bent as if they'd been hit by a hurricane. For a moment he thought they were back on Tharia, that they'd somehow crossed the ten thousand mile distance despite the interference, but then he saw that the blue sky was only a magical illusion and that above it was a ceiling made of solid rock. They'd made it! They were inside one of the huge park caverns of the city of Kronosia.

     They unbuckled themselves, opened the hatch and stepped out onto the top of the teleportation cubicle, safely delivered to the moon city. Around them they saw a small crowd of astonished people gathering close, staring in delighted disbelief.

     "Are you from Tharia?" called out a young woman hopefully. "Have you come to rescue us?"

     "That's right," replied Gunther, wondering how he was going to get down to the ground. "This is a teleportation cubicle, to replace that one that was destroyed. We've re-established the link to Tharia." I hope, he thought as wild cheering broke out in the cavern.

     He reactivated the Coronet of Farspeaking. "We're here," he told Saturn, and was surprised to find that he was breathless with exhaustion, as if he'd just run a mile. "We're in Kronosia."

     "Good," replied Saturn, as if he'd just claimed to have finished his homework, an hour late. "I'm coming right up. Do nothing until I arrive."

     The farspeaking link fell silent, but Gunther had no intention of staying where he was, like a fairy on a birthday cake. He called down to the crowd for them to stack up a pile of chairs so that he and Karog could climb down.

     Five minutes later he and the trog were back on solid ground again, hugging each other in relief while the rapidly growing crowd pressed in close around them; shaking their hands, slapping them on their backs and giving them passionate kisses, even the trog, who was trying to replace his head coverings. More and more people poured in as the word spread, until Gunther thought the entire human population of Kronos must be crowded inside the park cavern, working themselves up into an ever greater frenzy of relief and excitement, and just when the wizard thought things couldn't get any louder the door of the teleportation chamber opened, Saturn emerged, and the crowd really went wild.

                  To be continued.

C

oming soon, the saga of The Last Perfect Days continues.

The Flight of the Hummingbird

     Lexandria University becomes the hub of a gigantic research project in an attempt to find a way to counter the new threat facing the planet Tharia, but spies and saboteurs are everywhere and one of their key men, responsible for one of the most important elements of the Rossem Project, dies with his work uncompleted. Without his contribution the project will fail, but to complete his work an expedition must go all the way to the dreaded Southern Continent, from which few people have ever returned...

The Rings of Salammis

     The immortal wizards were the most powerful humans ever to walk the planet Tharia, but the wars between them devastated the planet. The whole world breathed a sigh of relief when the last of them was killed, but one of the most powerful of them created a pair of atifacts of awesome power in an attempt to cheat death, and if he succeeds there will be no-one in the world able to stand against him...

Tak

     Thomas Gown has become an important part of the Rossem Project and his contribution may be vital to its eventual success, but he has also become a pawn in a desperate struggle between ancient powers who care nothing for the civilisation Thomas has sworn to protect. He gradually learns that his importance to them has roots reaching back to a peasant boy whose parents scratched out a living on the very edges of civilisation three thousand years ago...

The Worlds of the Sheaf

     The Rossem Project is close to success, and will allow a hand picked expedition to explore other worlds, searching for the threat that faces the planet Tharia, but as they begin their mission they discover that there are many other threats out there, and that the one they originally feared may be the very least of them...

The Gem Lords

     Thomas Gown’s connection to a group of powerful wizards who lived thousands of years ago is finally revealed, and he learns that he may be able to save his world and his civilisation, along with others beyond number, from a threat that will manifest itself in the far distant future. The only way he can do this, though, is by accepting a destiny that has been chosen for him by ancient, implacable powers centuries ago which would mean leaving his home, his wife and his child forever...

Have you read the preceding volumes of The Legend of The Blue Wizard? The saga of The Fourth Shadowwar.

The Sceptre of Samnos

      At the end of the Third Shadowwar, the forces of evil were defeated so thoroughly, so completely, that no-one thought they would ever threaten civilisation again, but they were wrong. Terribly, disastrously wrong

Defenders of the Faith

     War is coming, and the Beltharan Empire has only a few weeks to prepare for the greatest crisis in its history. Frenzied preparations are made, amongst which is an expedition to a lost and forgotten fortress to recover an ancient artifact, the creation of one of the mightiest wizards in history and possessing power beyond imagination. The fate of the world may depend on it, but the spies of the enemy are everywhere and the expedition may already have been betrayed…

The Sword of Retribution

     Once again the armies of darkness are sweeping across the world and this time there may be no stopping them. Only by standing together can the heroes of civilization hope to prevail, but at this hour of their greatest trial the mightiest of their number is absent, fighting a less important war in the World Below, unaware of the deadly peril facing all mankind. He must be recalled to stand beside his brothers in arms, but to reach him a small group of volunteers must cross some of the deadliest terrain on or under the world, facing dangers beyond their ability to imagine…

The Fallen World

     Lost and alone, disheartened by failure and wanting only to go home, Thomas Gown and his companions face the darkest hour of their lives when they stumble across a remnant of the once mighty Agglemonian Empire. There they make a stunning discovery that could mean the salvation of the world if only they can get word to the desperate, embattled armies of civilization, but instead they face a lifetime of crippling servitude, hopeless prisoners of the insane tyrant, Lord Basil Konnen…

The Caverns of Kronos

     Thomas Gown and his companions have escaped from captivity, but only by fleeing deeper into the unknown, to face new dangers. They are carrying a secret that could save the world, though, and they have a duty to take it to those who can make use of it, but to do that they must return to the city of Kronosia, to go back among those from whom they have only just escaped…

The Scrolls of Skava

     The fate of the world hangs in the balance. Belthar faces imminent defeat, and if the empire falls there will be nothing left to oppose the armies of darkness. One hope remains, one last all or nothing gamble, but for it to succeed the heroes of civilization have to find a way to team up with their bitterest enemies. Creatures every bit as evil as the Bone Prince but whose existence is also threatened by the undead hordes. Side by side, they must march together into the very heart of the Shadow…