Saturn beckoned to a wizard in the front row, who stood up and handed him a large, clear crystal before sitting again. "This memory crystal contains the images that we have been able to obtain so far. "

     He spoke a few words and an image sprang into life in the centre of the room. An image of the vast ship, similar to an ocean going vessel but differing in strange ways. The image was ten feet long, but even so the portholes in its sides and the human figures strolling around on its open deck were tiny, giving a stunning idea of the size of the alien vessel. Its hull was smooth and ivory white, bearing symbols in an unknown language, and the structures and fittings adorning the decks were painted in gleaming gold and silver giving it a regal, imperious look as if it had been meant to carry royalty. It was a ship clearly designed for one purpose and one purpose only; to impress upon all those who saw it the power and importance of those carried aboard her. Its creators had gone to an enormous effort to impress someone, but if it had been the people of the planet Tharia they'd been guilty of a serious case of overkill.

     There was one incongruous aspect to the ship, though. Masts bearing sails filled with wind reached out sideways from the hull like the spread wings of a bird and sailors in smart uniforms scrambled in the rigging like monkeys in a tree. It was the unmistakable characteristic of a flying ship, a ship designed to fly through the sky, but such ships on Tharia could not fly above the breathable layers of the planet's atmosphere.

     Lirenna leaned across to whisper in Thomas’s ear. “There's no air in space. Right?”

     “Right,” replied her husband in a whisper.

     “So how could a ship like that fly between worlds?”

     “Maybe it only used the sails when it was close to the ground,” Thomas replied. “Maybe they had another means of propelling the ship when it was in space.”

     “The throne?” said Lirenna, but Saturn was glaring at them and she fell silent.

     "We have been using translation spells to try to make sense of the symbols on the hull," said Saturn, "but without success, indicating that they are either purely decorative, with no meaning at all, or that their language is too alien for the spell to cope with. Work is going on with more powerful versions of the spell, but we ought to face up to the possibility that we may never know what meaning, if any, they have. Major Valeron Hort will now tell you what we have been able to deduce about this ship."

     The wizard stepped back and allowed the Beltharan soldier to replace him. He wasted no time with preliminaries but got straight to the point.

     "The first thing we notice," he barked, gesturing at the image with a long white stick, "is the complete absence of anything we can immediately identify as a weapon. That does not necessarily mean anything, of course, as their weapons may be completely alien to us and therefore impossible for us to identify, and it is also possible that they deliberately hid their weapons in order to deceive us. They may have wanted to fool anyone they met into thinking that they came with good intentions. If that interpretation is correct then it is encouraging, as it implies that they did not know who they were going to meet. In other words, they may know no more about us than we know about them." He paused to clear his throat. "It has been suggested that they truly did not have any weapons, that the absence of visible weaponry is not a deception but actuality. I do not believe it. Nobody goes into the unknown without the means to defend themselves. They had weapons, you can depend upon that."

     He looked up at the circles of seated wizards, searching the expressions on their faces to see that they agreed with him on this point. Satisfied, he continued. "Second, the sheer size of this vessel gives us an idea of the size and power of the civilisation that produced it. If we compare it with the largest flying ship ever manufactured by humanity on our world..."

     He gestured to Saturn, who responded by speaking more words into the memory crystal, and a moment later the alien ship was accompanied by a smaller vessel. About half as long, bristling with heavy catapults and powerful ballistae and surrounded by dozens of nebulous, billowing sails held in place by a tangled web of rigging.

     "This is an Imperial Cloud Destroyer,” said the Major. “The largest and most powerful flying ship ever built by the Agglemonian Empire. Even that mighty civilisation only ever produced a dozen such ships. Fortunately, magical protection and repair allowed them to last for centuries. Even they were a mere fraction of the size of this alien vessel, however, and they lacked the ability to leave the atmosphere and cross interplanetary space, as this ship must have been able to do. Clearly, the alien civilisation must be far superior in their achievements than even the Agglemonians, and we all know how far superior the Agglemonians were to us. The Agglemonians were the pinnacle of human civilisation on this world, and yet even they could not produce anything to rival this awesome vessel."

     A disturbed hubbub of worried conversation had begun to break out among the audience, especially among the mundanes. Most of what had been said up until now had gone completely over their heads, had been totally incomprehensible to them, but this comparison between alien and Agglemonian was something they could understand and it terrified them. Rather than being annoyed by the interruption, though, Major Hort seemed pleased. It meant they'd been paying attention and understood what he'd been saying.

     Edward Parsley was standing, though, and raising his hand. "You keep saying that the ship could cross the airless gulfs of space," he said, "but it has sails! Why would a ship of space have sails? Surely this is nothing more than an ordinary flying ship, even if an enormously large one, that was thrown out of its planet's atmosphere by some cataclysm. Cast into an environment for which it was never designed. If so, then any fear of an invasion is groundless."

     Saturn took a couple of steps forward to address the junior wizard. "We have conclusive proof that this ship was a ship of space, and you will be shown that proof in good time. In the meantime, let us allow the Major to continue his analysis."

     Major Hort nodded his thanks to the wizard and Edward sat, looking confused.

     "Thirdly," continued the Major, returning to the centre of the room and using the stick to indicate the alien ship's deck, "we can see several members of the ship's crew here, and we can see that, although they belong to no race we are familiar with here on Tharia, they are nevertheless essentially human. Another example of the Gods' apparent fondness for the basic humanoid form. We can further see, from differences in their styles of clothing, insignia of rank and status, etc, that they represent two distinct populations, possibly meaning that two nations had collaborated to build and man the ship.

     "Of greater immediate interest to us is the fact that they are walking about on an open deck, with no apparent protection from the hard vacuum of space, which would kill an unprotected human being. Also, they have gravity, more or less equal to that which we have here on the surface of Tharia. We can see, from the background, that they were in space when these images were created. We assume, therefore, that both gravity and atmosphere were provided magically, either by wizards or magical artifacts on the ship, and that it was the sudden and catastrophic loss of their atmosphere and gravity that led to the destruction of their vessel. This is a subject to which we will be returning in a little while.

     "Finally we come to the ship's means of propulsion. All flying ships ever manufactured on Tharia, whether made by humans, the shae folk or the storm giants, rely on sails to catch the wind, just like ordinary ocean going ships. This ship is no exception. We know that there is no air, and therefore no wind, in the empty spaces between worlds, but this ship seems to have had the ability to generate its own wind. A gale that blows in any desired direction and accompanies the ship on its voyage. This would clearly require a very powerful source of magic, and this is where we come to the talented individual we mentioned earlier. The man whose ability to sense the alien magic enabled us to obtain images of the object whose fiery passage through the atmosphere turned it into the original magical meteorite."

     Thomas glowed with pride, somewhat muted by the fact that very few people knew that he was the 'talented individual'. Tassley spotted some subtle change in his manner from her seat across the room, though, and stared at him with dawning realisation.

     The soldier stepped back to allow Saturn to come forward again. This was a wizard's business, not a soldier's. Saturn spoke some more words into the memory crystal and the image of the alien ship vanished to be replaced by the throne chamber; the image that Thomas had called up out of the magical meteorite with his casting of the identify spell. The wizards in the room leaned forward with sudden interest, recognising the fabulous throne as a magical artifact of tremendous power, but the mundanes saw only the gold and silver. The precious metals and the exquisite workmanship that overlaid the throne's iron core. Very few of them understood that the bullion value of a magical artifact was the very least important part of its worth, even if it was enough to buy a city, as this one seemed to be.

     "The man you are looking at," said Saturn, "is, we are fairly certain, their equivalent to a wizard. Very likely one of the most senior wizards on the ship. The throne he is sitting on is a powerful magical artifact; without doubt the intended source of the ship's motive force while in our universe. It is likely that the wizard activates the throne simply by sitting on it, and that his thoughts are translated by the throne's magic into changes in the speed and direction of the winds driving the ship. Our examination of the traces of magic remaining in the meteorite, which is all that now remains of the throne's iron core, supports this theory, although you understand that it's hard to be sure when we cannot sense the magical traces directly. It is also possible that the throne generated the ship's gravity and atmosphere, although this is, at the moment, pure speculation."

     The image of the throne vanished to be replaced by the alien ship again, and the two speakers went into a huddle, speaking in low voices. A buzz of conversation broke out in the audience as everyone talked to their neighbours about what they'd heard so far; the wizards frightened and excited, the mundanes puzzled and confused. A career in cookery or carpentry had done nothing to prepare them for this, and most of them had virtually no idea what it was all about. More lectures would have to be given later on to explain the things they didn't understand.

     Then Saturn turned to face the audience again and tapped his staff loudly on the tiled floor to get their attention. "You have now heard everything we know about the alien ship except one thing; how it was destroyed. Amazingly, we were able to obtain images of the actual moments of the ship's destruction from the non-magical meteorites, formed from some of the ship's fittings which survived the passage through Tharia's atmosphere, and we will show them to you now, with a warning that some of the images may be upsetting to those of you of a fragile disposition. If any of you would rather not see these images, you should close your eyes for a couple of minutes."

     He paused, to give those who wanted to the chance to take him up on his offer, but every eye in the room remained open. "Very well," he said, nodding. "What we think happened was a sudden and disastrous loss of the ship's gravity and protection from vacuum, cause unknown."

     He spoke some more words into the memory crystal and suddenly the image of the alien ship came to life, transformed from a still photograph into a moving picture.