Thomas tried to imaginedm how proud his parents would be to see him. Our son, the wizard! Wizard! The very word had a power all its own. His father was a cobbler, a hard working man who barely managed to scrape together a living for his family at the very bottom of the social stratum, but soon he would be the father of a wizard! How would that affect him, his status in the town? Thomas found he had absolutely no idea, but it had to be good, had to be an improvement on his lot so far. He tried to imagine what they were doing now, what they were thinking now. Did they know he was coming? He'd written to his parents as often as he could find the time, but the letters he received in return always came in clumps of a up to a dozen every six months or so, the mail service following a tortuous path back and forth across the continent between all the wizards, a small number, who could be bothered to participate, so it was possible that his parents' news of him was months out of date.

     He made the mistake of voicing his thoughts to the others, only remembering too late that Jerry was an orphan. "Oh Jerry, I'm so sorry!" he cried in anguish. "You know I didn't mean..." The nome merely laughed, however, reminding him that he had no memory of his parents. "You can't miss what you've never known. Don't worry about it."

     On the fourth day they passed the Ghost Ocean, a land bridge connecting the northern and southern halves of the continent, between the Western Sea and Great Lake Megra. Once, the lake had been continuous with the sea, but as the long ages passed the sea bed had been pushed up by slow but irresistible geological forces. The new land, however, seemed, in some strange way to ‘remember' being underwater. The area was shunned by everyone in this part of the world, although no-one could say for sure why, or even whether, it was dangerous. The three wizards bypassed it, just to be on the safe side, and made camp just north of it on the fringes of the Endless Plains.

     On the fifth day, they flew over the Overgreen Forest, a nearly continuous stretch of dense woodland that reached over a thousand miles from the shores of the Western Sea along the Copper Mountains as far north as the Beltharan province of Callinia, where it changed to coniferous woodland. This was the final stretch of their journey. Ilandia lay just on the other side of it, and they expected to be there later that day.

     "Some people say there are dragons in that forest," said Thomas, to pass the time.

     "Really?" said Jerry. "Let's hope they don't see us. They might be curious at the sight of a flying carpet, and decide to investigate."

     "I think we're too high to be seen from the ground," said Thomas, hopefully.

     "Look!" said Lirenna suddenly, pointing off to their left. "What's that?"

     Jerry and Thomas gave a start, expecting to see a huge forest dragon swooping down on them. To their relief, however, they saw only a small flock of rainbow coloured birds, each about the size of a pigeon. "Just birds," said Thomas. "Nothing to worry about."

     "They're coming straight towards us," said Lirenna, a trace of concern in her voice.

     She was right, he saw. The birds, about twenty of them, were flapping madly to keep up with the speeding carpet, and getting closer. There was a kind of purposefulness about them that made him nervous. They seemed vaguely familiar as well. Hadn't Rogin devoted an entire lesson to a kind of bird like that, about a year ago? He strained to remember.

     Suddenly, it came to him. "Oh my Gods!" he cried. "They're bane birds! Carpet! Fly faster! Faster!"

     The carpet leapt ahead, but it was too late. The birds were all about them, landing on the carpet, clinging on under it with their claws, hanging from the tassels, hopping from place to place, and all of them sticking their needlelike beaks into it like bees sucking honey. "Get rid of them! Quick!" cried Thomas. Comprehension suddenly dawned on the others and they swung wildly at them, trying to scare them off or hit them with whatever weapon came to hand. Thomas took off his leather jacket and swung about with it, hitting one, more by blind luck than anything else, but it simply came to rest again a few feet away and continued to feast. Lirenna tied a heavy bone comb to the end of a silk scarf and swung it around her head, failing to hit any birds but hitting Jerry on the head, who was busy trying to dislodge one that had landed on his backpack.

     The carpet slowed and began to lose height as the frenetically feeding birds drained the magic out of it. Bane birds have an appetite for anything magical and will take seemingly suicidal risks to get it. They were one of the greatest nuisances and frustrations there was to wizards all across the continent. A single bird, gaining entry to the heavily guarded storeroom where a wizard kept all his artifacts and equipment, could drain the magic from all of them within a few hours, destroying years of hard work and sacrifice. No-one knew why, however. They didn't need magic. Deprived of it, they could live perfectly normal lives, feeding on small airborne insects, mating and nesting just like any other bird. One theory was that they had been created by a mad wizard to take revenge on his fellows for some terrible injustice they had done him. None of this mattered to the three graduates, though. All they knew was that they were hundreds of feet up in the air, and that their only means of keeping them there was being destroyed.

     To avoid the frantically flailing wizards, most of the birds clung to the underside of the carpet, where they couldn't reach, and sucked away to their heart's content. Thomas leaned dangerously far over the side in a vain attempt to reach them, making the carpet tip up and veer to the right and making the others cling in rigid terror to its edges to prevent themselves falling off. "Stop that! Stop that!" screamed Jerry as a tassel he had been hanging onto came off in his hand and he had to grab hold of Lirenna's leg to stay on.

     Thomas sat up again to try and straighten the carpet, but it overcorrected and swung the other way, almost throwing him off. "We've got to do something!" he shouted. "We've gotta get rid of them!" As if to emphasise his words, the carpet fell at an even steeper angle and began to spiral downwards.

     "If you can keep us steady for about a minute, I might be able to do something," said Jerry, fumbling about in his backpack for something. The others did so, trying to ignore the sounds of guzzling birds as they leaned against the way that they were spiralling. Gradually the carpet straightened up and flew steady again, although it continued to lose height. "How's that?" asked Lirenna.

     "That's as good as it's going to get," shouted Thomas "For the Gods' sake, whatever you're going to do, do it fast!"

     Jerry had found a small lump of wax in his backpack, the material component for a minor illusion spell. He crumbled it in his fingers while slowly and precisely intoning the magic words. The pieces of wax flared and vanished as they fell like the embers of a dying fire, and as the tiny nome closed his eyes in concentration the air was filled with the scream of a diving eagle. The bane birds, hearing their greatest natural enemy, took flight and circled around the carpet in puzzlement, looking for the source of the noise. The cries came again, closer and louder this time, and the birds scattered in panic. Within seconds there was no sign of them.

     With the weight of the birds gone the carpet leveled off a little, but it was still losing height. They were now only yards above the treetops, close enough that they could almost have reached over and snatched at the uppermost leaves. With the loss in altitude had come a substantial increase in speed, though, and a crash here would undoubtedly have been fatal.

     "We've got to lose weight," said Thomas as they continued to slope gently downwards. "Throw away everything we don't need." He set the example by swinging his backpack down off his shoulders, opening it, and throwing away all the things he decided he could do without. Away went his changes of clothing, his bedroll, his school notes, a couple of expensive leather bound textbooks that he'd copied from the library at his own expense, all his remaining food and a few other bits and pieces he'd gathered over the past few years. The others did the same, and they watched as it all fell down to the forest below, gone forever. "Damn it, I liked that bedroll," moaned Jerry, as he saw it crash into the upper branches of a tall ceenar. "Looks like we'll be sleeping rough tonight."

     "If we're still alive," said Lirenna. "We're still going down."

     "There must be something else we can get rid of," said Thomas. The only thing left in his backpack was his spellbook, though, wrapped in leather and oilskin to protect it from the weather. He tucked it into his jacket and threw the backpack away. Jerry did the same, and finally the carpet levelled off and flew straight again. Thomas gallantly strapped Lirenna's backpack onto his own back, after placing his own spellbook in it for safety. After a moment's thought, Jerry handed him his own spellbook as well, and it went with the others.

     "Crisis over," said Thomas, breathing a sigh of relief.

     "We're going the wrong way, though," said Lirenna. "We're going straight north. Can you make us go west?"

     "Yeah, right. Carpet, go west. West."

     Nothing happened, though. The carpet continued to go due north, past Ilandia and towards the sparsely populated wilderness separating it from the neighbouring province of Callinia. Off to their left they found they could see the peaks of the Copper Mountains, just visible on the horizon and hazy with distance, and to their right they thought they could see a cut off in the sea of trees which, if it was real and not just a trick of their eyes, marked the edge of the forest and the beginnings of the Endless Plains, an area of grassland even greater than the Great Flat and containing at its centre the Shadow. A land of unimaginable evil which had three times in the past century tried to swallow the neighbouring empires of Fu-Nang and Belthar, of which both Callinia and Ilandia were provinces.

     "Why aren't we turning?" asked Jerry. "We're going the wrong way."

     "I know," said Thomas. "It must have been those damned birds. It still flies, just about, but it won't turn." He tried again, with no better luck, and tried every command he could think of, but none of them had any effect. "Looks like we'll just have to see where this damned thing's taking us," he said at last.

     They travelled north for the rest of the day, travelling hundreds of miles further than they had intended, into lands unknown to any of them. Empty wilderness. It could have been worse, though, as Lirenna pointed out. They could have been travelling east, instead of north, towards the very heart of the Shadow. The others agreed that they had a lot to be thankful for. Then, as evening was drawing near, they saw a large lake coming into view ahead of them, a line of sparkling reflected sunlight stretching across the horizon.

     "This is it," said Thomas. "This could be the only chance we get to get off this thing."

     "What do you mean?" asked Jerry nervously, his tone of voice suggesting that he knew very well what he meant.

     "We've got to try to land in that lake. It might be the only chance we get before this thing carries us all the way to the north pole and we freeze to death."

     "He's right," said Lirenna. "We've got to go for it."

     "But how?" asked Jerry. "We already know this thing doesn't obey commands."

     "We'll have to take drastic measures," said Thomas, taking his penknife out of a pocket and opening it up.

     "What? You're mad! We'll all be killed!"

     "It's the only chance we'll get  For all we know, this thing could run out of zip and crash at any time, somewhere hard. We've got to take this chance to land somewhere soft."

     Jerry stared at the lake, growing nearer and wider ahead of them, and finally nodded. "All right," he said. "I just hate water, that's all."

     "So do I, when it's coming at us at the speed of a diving falcon," said Thomas. He began to cut a few of the threads holding the carpet together.

     "No, you don't understand," said Jerry. "I can't swim."

     They stared at him for a moment. Then Lirenna said, "Hold onto me tight. Don't let go."

     The carpet began to come apart under Thomas's knife, with blue electric flashes of released magic. It shuddered, then began to dive as they reached the edge of the lake. He cut a few more threads, so that it's angle of descent was enough to bring them down before they reached the far shore, but shallow enough that the impact might not be lethal. Jerry closed his eyes, but the others watched, hypnotised with horror, as the surface grew closer and closer beneath them. At the last minute Thomas lost his nerve and screamed for the carpet to pull up, but it was too late. They hit, and all three of them were instantly stunned by the impact. The carpet and the unconscious bodies of the three wizards skipped the surface like pebbles, landing again about fifty yards further on, and this time they sank like rocks.