For the next few days, for those who weren't too shocked to speak, there was only one topic of conversation. The awesome alien ship. The Rossem Ship as it came to be known, and its implications for the people of Tharia.

     The matter was discussed from one side of the valley to the other, from the apprentices' dormitories to the research laboratories. From the village of the mundanes to the campsite of the Beltharan soldiers. From the retirement mansions dotted around on the high ridges surrounding the valley, where old wizards lived out their final days in as much peace and comfort as a lifetime of accumulated wealth would allow, to the High Tribunal itself; the half dozen or so most powerful members of the University faculty who met from time to time to discuss matters beyond the comprehension of their juniors. There was no escape from it, least of all for Thomas Gown, who was in constant demand by the senior wizards to help them investigate the magical meteorite that had started the whole business.

     The day after the extraordinary conference in which Saturn had laid all his cards on the table for the whole valley to see, Thomas returned to Lirenna in the dwelling tree with a heavy heart and a troubled expression on his face. Lirenna saw it the moment he walked in, knew something was wrong and demanded to know what it was. Thomas was reluctant to talk at first, knowing how his wife would take it, but Lirenna pinned him up against the wall and wouldn't let him go until he told her.

     "It's the ship they're building up on Kronos," he said, unable to meet her eyes. "You know they're looking for wizards to be among her crew."

     Lirenna's eyes went wide with shock and alarm, then narrowed with determination and anger. "No!" she declared firmly. "Absolutely not! You're not going with them! I won't let you!"

     "I've got to," said Thomas sadly. He tried to take her hand but she snatched it away angrily. "It's because I can sense the magic in the meteorite. I'm the only wizard in the valley who can do that, maybe the only wizard in the world. Derry may be able to one day, if he inherits it from me, but that'll be at least ten years from now, maybe longer. Until then, I'm the only one, and as they'll be going to a place where they use this strange kind of magic, they'll need someone along who can sense it."

     "They've got spells and artifacts that can do that!"

     "It's not the same as magic sense. Think about it. When was the last time you cast a Reveal spell? You use your magic sense now, now that it's developed enough in you, because it's more sensitive, more accurate. It's the same with me. All the spells and artifacts in the world can't do as much as one wizard able to use his magic sense."

     "Well they'll just have to do without you," cried Lirenna, tears in her eyes, "because you're not going! You're not leaving me, I won't let you! We've done enough for the world! All the things we did back in the war! The Sceptre of Samnos! The Orb, the observatory! The Scrolls of Skava! You've done enough!"

     "I have to," repeated Thomas, firmly and calmly. "I've been thinking about it for hours, ever since they told me, and I keep coming to the same answer. This thing could be a threat to the whole world, the world Derry is going to grow up in. The world you're going to be living in for at least another couple of hundred years. If there's something I can do to make the world safer for you and Derry then I have to do it. Do you understand?"

     She stared at him for a long time, then gave a reluctant nod. He reached for her hand, but instead she moved into his arms and they hugged each other hard, each of them thinking of the last time they'd been separated by their duties, when they'd been assigned to different wolf packs for the search for the Scrolls of Skava. Neither of them had known if they would ever see each other again, but they had agreed to the separation anyway, knowing that it would be worth it if it helped to put an end to the war and save the world.

     When they'd finally met again, with the whole world celebrating its salvation, they had tearfully sworn that they would never be separated again, and it was a vow they had kept for the past twenty years, but they should have known that there are some oaths that cannot be kept and should never be sworn. At last we weren't mad enough in our love for each other to swear in the name of the Gods, thought Thomas grimly. If we had, then we really would be in a pickle now.

     "Don't worry, I won't be packing my bags anytime soon," said Thomas soothingly. "The ship was still months away from completion even before all these delays caused by the sabotage incidents, and when it comes the mission probably won't be more than a few weeks long. Who knows, we might discover a dead world covered by the ruins of an extinct civilization and so prove that the threat doesn't exist. Derry will graduate with honours and we'll return to Haven to live happily ever after."

     "Promise me," mumbled Lirenna into his shoulder. "Promise me that's the way it will be."

     Thomas sighed unhappily and hugged her harder. "You know I can't do that. All we can do is pray to the Gods and do the best we can."

     The demi shae nodded her head, and he felt the dampness of her tears on his shirt.

     Lirenna didn't wallow in fear and worry, though. She wasn't the type. Instead, she threw herself into her work on the farm, carefully looking after animals so dangerous and powerfully magical that they were kept in pens impregnated with antimagic. She spent several hours a day working with Kama on the details of the play, repeatedly rewriting the script and filling out the personalities of the principal characters, and she filled the dwelling tree with as many colourful flowers as she could find, each flower a living, rooted plant in a pot since all shae folk hate cut flowers. And when she found a tiny, ginger kitten sniffing around in the kitchen she picked it up to give it a tearful hug and a saucer of milk.

     She assumed that it had wandered away from its mother, since it looked rather too young to be out on its own, and she expected it to wander off again as soon as it had satisfied its curiosity, but instead it seemed perfectly happy to stay where it was, which was why it was still there, curled up on Thomas’s chair, fast asleep, when Thomas returned from another head splitting session casting spells on the magical meteorite. He staggered in, his head throbbing and pounding, and headed for the chair, intending to collapse into it and stay there for the rest of the evening, but Lirenna gave a cry of alarm, dashed over and yanked him sideways at the last minute, nearly pulling him off his feet. "Careful!" she cried anxiously. "You nearly sat on the cat!"

     "Cat?" said Thomas groggily. He struggled to focus his eyes, and saw a tiny ball of ginger fur curled up peacefully on the cushion, in the middle of the depression made by his bottom. "Lenny, there's a cat on my chair!"

     "I know, he just wandered in. I didn't have the heart to throw him out. The door's open, he can leave any time he wants to."

     Thomas picked up the cat, flopped into the chair and carefully placed the cat on his lap. The cat barely stirred, merely purring contentedly and digging its claws into his legs before settling back to sleep. He stroked it absent mindedly, marveling at the softness of its fur. "He probably belongs to someone. He'll wander off when he gets hungry." A moment later he was asleep, and the cat snuggled even closer into the pit of his lap while Lirenna watched with a smile on her pale, delicate face.

     The cat was still there the next morning, though, still sleeping contentedly on Thomas’s chair, and when it woke up it began curling around Lirenna's ankles, purring loudly and staring up at her with its huge, green eyes.

     "I think he's hungry," said the demi shae with a smile. "I think we've got some rabbit left over somewhere..."

     "Don't feed it!" warned Thomas. "We'll never get rid of it!"

     Lirenna scowled at him. "A little rabbit won't hurt. Look at him, he's hungry." She continued to search through the cupboards until she found the remains of the previous day's meal and began pulling bits of meat off.

     "Lenny," said Thomas reasonably, putting a hand on her arm. "You can't keep a pet, not here. Cats were brought here for a reason, for wizards wanting to summon a familiar. If we allow ourselves to become attached to him..."

     "I'm just giving him something to eat," said the demi shae firmly. "He'll wander off when he's ready to." She placed the meat on a saucer which she put on the floor, where the cat sniffed at it suspiciously.

     Thomas shrugged. "Okay," he said. "Just don't be surprised if you come here one day and find him gone. One day a wizard is going to want a familiar. He'll cast the spell and tiddles here will suddenly have an overpowering desire to find a new master. Are you ready for that?"

     "I am," replied Lirenna stiffly. "And until that day comes he can stay here as long as he wants to. How do we know his mother wasn't summoned to be a familiar, leaving her kittens to fend for themselves?"

     She bent down to stroke the cat, and the cat arched its back under her pale, slender hand. Thomas grinned despite himself, shook his head and wandered off to study his spellbook.

     They called the cat Roitala, the shae word for little prince , and in just a few days Thomas was as attached to him as Lirenna was. Indeed, the cat seemed to prefer Thomas’s company to hers, much to the demi shae's indignation, but as Thomas pointed out one day as the cat snuggled comfortably into his lap, digging its razor sharp claws into his legs, you don't choose a cat. The cat chooses you. And this cat had evidently chosen Thomas, even though it had been Lirenna who'd taken it in and given it its first meal. That wasn't to say that it spurned the demi shae completely, though, and when it crept into their bedroom early some mornings and wriggled under the blankets, it was always Lirenna's stomach it chose to sit on, purring loudly as it rubbed its chin against her breasts and private hair, an activity that caused Thomas no end of amusement as he politely inquired whether he had cause to be jealous.

     Other times the cat would sit on the narrow table that Thomas had managed to squeeze into the living room and which now served as a miniature laboratory, being crowded with bottles and curiously shaped glassware along with scrolls and little bowls of strangely coloured powders. The first time Thomas had caught the cat on this table he'd flown into a fit of panic, expecting powders and delicate glassware to be scattered in all directions, but Roitala turned out to be remarkably nimble, able to slip between small items of equipment without disturbing them in the slightest.

     It became the cat's favourite place to sit, and so Thomas bowed to the inevitable and cleared a small space for it, laying a table cloth on the bare wood to make it more comfortable. The cat would sit there day after day, watching him with its bright green eyes as if studying him, as if he were an interesting specimen that the cat had been sent to investigate, while Lirenna would scowl in annoyance and grumble about how dumb animals should show proper gratitude to their benefactors.

     "There's no accounting for the actions of cats," Thomas would point out. "They're a law unto themselves," but the demi shae seemed unmoved by this wisdom and only grumbled more while her husband stroked the cat fondly and laughed in amusement.

☆☆☆

     Work on the ship of space continued, each team of wizards working on a different aspect of the magic that would power it while the Beltharans continued their regimen of grueling training, a few more of them being eliminated by the selection committee every week, whittling down those who still had a chance of being amongst the ship's crew. The acts of sabotage continued, some minor, causing only a few days delay, others setting the project back by weeks or months. Now and then someone would catch a glimpse of the saboteur, the same man that Thomas had seen, but somehow he defied their every effort to catch him and he continued to be able to slip into their most carefully guarded areas, despite a doubling and then a tripling of security and a bounty offered for information leading to his capture.

     Conflicting theories about his motives and origins continued to spread, each one gathering its own folklore and a loyal band of believers. He was the lone survivor of the wrecked alien ship, or perhaps a scout sent to investigate its loss, doing his best to delay the development of the Tharians’ own ship until a massive invasion fleet arrived. He was a renegade wizard, driven insane by a backfiring spell and driven to random acts of violence by tittering, whispering voices in his head. He was a Shadowwizard, one of the last of his kind, preparing the way for the rebirth of the Shadow and the coming of the Shadowlord. Speculation was fueled by the knowledge that, when the truth finally came out, it would certainly be stranger than anything that had yet been imagined.

     Despite the acts of sabotage, though, progress continued to be made and a tentative target of fourteen months was set for the ship's completion, although many people considered that to be overly optimistic. Unexpected problems would crop up with tedious regularity, problems whose nature could not possibly have been predicted and which had the wizards tearing their hair out as they racked their brains for ways to solve them. Most of them were indeed solved, but one problem in particular was so serious, so basic and fundamental, that for a while it seemed as though the whole project would have to be scrapped. That was the problem of the skydeath.

     A group of wizards had rigged up a small metal box with an airtight door, inside which they would place a few small lab animals; rats and mice for the most part. The box would then be levitated high up into the sky, above the breathable level of the atmosphere, to see what effects, if any, the space environment would have on them. They didn't expect the animals to suffer any harm, so long as they brought them down again before their air ran out because, after all, people had been living on Kronos for over a thousand years without coming to any real harm, if you ignored the easily preventable condition of floatfever. And yet, time after time, when the box was opened, the animals would be found to be dead, killed by something similar to a death spell.

     Occasionally an animal would be found alive, only to die a few days later from a distressingly horrible illness in which its hair fell out in clumps and it bled from all its orifices. Only a few species of insects seemed to be immune to this inexplicably deadly influence, and it seemed certain that humanoids of all races would be equally vulnerable to it. If that proved to be the case, then any attempt by Tharians to cross the gulf of space by passing through it (rather than, for instance, teleporting) was doomed to failure.

     Panic and despair began to set in. If this problem could not be solved, then they might as well abandon all work on the project here and now and so prevent any more wasted effort. The problem of the skydeath was given top priority, and a team of the brightest, most gifted wizards in the valley was put together to tackle it. Since the skydeath seemed to be similar to a deathspell, their first idea was to tackle it in the same way, by shielding the metal box with spells of protection. Spells so powerful that a man so protected could have walked into the Circle of Raks and invited them to do their worst. All this protection did absolutely nothing to protect the rats and mice, though, which continued to die just as before.

     One thing that was found to offer some protection, however, was a thick shielding of lead around the entire container, which provided a level of protection proportional to its thickness. When an amulet of fresh air was placed in the container with the rats, though, theoretically allowing them to live until their food ran out, it was found that the lead was only providing partial protection. The rats still died if left up there for more than a week, and the mission of the ship of space would almost certainly have to last for many months. Based upon their experiments with the rats, it would take so much lead to provide complete protection that the ship of space would be too heavy to lift from any reasonably sized planet. Another answer would have to be found.

     The partial protection afforded by the lead did allow them to make a startling discovery, though. The strength of the deadly influence, whatever it was, varied with altitude. It was strongest at an altitude of about five hundred miles, but then declined sharply so that, at an altitude of about a thousand miles, the lab animals could survive indefinitely without any apparent ill effects. Above that, the deadly influence appeared again, although not as strong as before, before dropping away to another safe haven. The second safe haven was wider than the first and above it the deadly influence was as powerful as ever, but above that it dropped away to an intermediate level which remained more or less the same no matter how far above the surface of Tharia one went. It was as though the skydeath was spread evenly through space except near the planet Tharia, where it was separated out into concentric shells of double danger and safe havens. It was pure luck that Kronos, the smallest moon, orbited Tharia within the second, wider safe haven, and it was this that allowed the moon trogs to build their farm domes on the surface of their tiny world.

     No known magic was any good at protecting the rats from the skydeath, but the fact that lead did do some good gave the research wizards a starting point and they began to work on a protection spell that would imitate a ten foot shell of solid lead. The clerics of Caroli also found to their dismay that the Lady of Healing failed to respond to their impassioned prayers when they begged Her to heal a case of skydeath, and they embarked upon a long series of prayers and meditations to discover the reason for this. In the meantime the senior wizards decided to continue work on the ship of space, on the optimistic assumption that the problem would eventually be overcome.